Thoughts Upon An Emergent Occasion

(My title being a nod to the poetry and prose of a British guy who has been pushing up daisies for the last 400 years or so...)

When I shop for groceries, I sometimes pass a couple of the many homeless encampments that have sprung up in my city between 2017 and now.  This year, at each of these encampments, there has been a tent whose owner attached an American flag so that the flag has been flying over the tent.  That has struck me over the last few months.  

I don't think that most homeless people anymore are homeless because of drugs or laziness.  But I do tend to think that many members of the "dominant culture" in the United States who believed the promise made by a certain man who promised to "Make America Great Again!"  are now getting a rude awakening.  Yet they still believe in their dream and the man who hypnotized them.

I was reminded of flag-waving this evening by a man I saw on I-205 in Clackamas County, an elderly man standing in the emergency lane of the freeway next to one of those sorts of large trucks which many men like him try to substitute for actual manliness nowadays.  The man was wearing sunglasses and a cowboy hat and staring resolutely at the oncoming traffic while waving a big sign that said "TRUMP - PENCE.  KEEP AMERICA GREAT."  As I passed him, I wondered at his definition of "greatness."  What I've seen over the last ten months or so doesn't look very great to me - unless you count a pandemic in which the United States has been for several months the world leader in infections and deaths, a pandemic which continues to hobble and hollow out the American economy, a nation which contains homicidal and corrupt police, a nation whose refusal to acknowledge climate science led to horrific wildfires and air on the West Coast that was so foul that for several days there were carbon monoxide and particulate smoke warnings from the Canadian border down to Southern California, a nation which has been slammed repeatedly by hurricanes.  Certainly the dominant culture and the people now in power are capable of making great big messes and of committing great evils.

And I was thinking of the foundations of American "greatness" this evening when, during my regular Bible reading, I was reading 1 Timothy 1.  In the version I read, in verse 10, among the people whose sins Paul condemns are those who are referred to as "kidnappers."  But I looked up the original Greek and discovered that the correct term is actually "slave dealers."  So a key part of the foundation of American greatness is something that is actually condemned by the Good Book which many American patriots claim to believe.  Now the foundation is beginning to crack, the poorer members of the "dominant culture" are finding that the bill is coming due for them, and the alpha wolves whom they tried to imitate are starting to chew on them.  I hypothesize that over the next year or so, much of the "greatness" to which Americans have become accustomed will evaporate.  How many of us will be able to take it in stride?