Dissatisfied Satisfaction

How to we get to love after all this hate?

“We can fix this country if we could get away from the fringes and we could literally come together and lead, but politics is in such a weird time right now…”

Recently my Governor, Kevin Stitt, spoke at a National Governor’s Association conference, an Association he chairs, and he was quoted saying the blurb above, along with a lot of other assertions about the divisive nature of our democracy right now. While this is a welcome statement at this time of political atrophy due to the inability to listen and compromise, his declarations are a challenge for those of us who live in the state he governs for we have watched him govern from the fringes for his entire 8-year term. In fact, he has said nothing remotely like this until the past few months where he has, in a phase common to term limits or retirement, found what feels like an entirely new voice.

And that’s the dilemma.

There is a song that is being taught all across Minnesota, a song that was recently sung by over 1,000 people outside a Marriott hotel where ICE agents were lodged. It goes like this:

It’s OK to change your mind

show us your courage

leave this behind

It’s OK to change your mind

and you can join us

join us anytime

It is a song encouraging defections from the grip of MAGA, an infection that has taken over an entire political party and many other beside it. I want to be clear on my position. I believe the MAGA movement to be an immoral one, rooted in the lie that is Christian Nationalism, which is NOT Christian in its ethics or methods, and the lie of white supremacy, which produces much of the anxiety that it proposes to resolve with control and authority. And I believe that ICE are the foot soldiers of this immoral movement.

This is not where we are getting to, but where we already are, right now. The streets of the Twin Cities are only the most glaring sign of this, it is present in the strategies of this administration in foreign policy, economics, legal assumptions and virtually all else. The point is fear to generate “emergencies” and therefore increased “need” for power grabs. The point is testing allegiance and willingness to comply. The point is cruelty as a strategy for submission.

It is all of the awfulness that we are feeling right now, the anxiety that seeps into all our lives, some much more viscerally than others. It is what has us feeling so angry all the time.

But here’s what I also believe and want to be clear about. Authoritarianism is brittle. It is fragile. It requires constant attention and energy to maintain. People of all kinds are recognizing this and are seeing the massive gaps it has in credibility, effectiveness and morality. And they are giving less and less of their compliance as they see, long term, what the tactic of division, hatred and “othering” is doing to our social fabric. They are becoming aware of the cost to their own souls for the strategy of othering.

This is happening, of course, much too slowly and on far too small a scale for my liking, and the Governor’s comments are a fine example of my dissatisfied satisfaction. I want to scream, “where have you been?” I want to point out, in no uncertain terms, that he ran on the very divisive platforms that have endorsed, employed and maintained what he now calls “weird.” I want to ignore him, to just roll my eyes and call him a fool.

I am decidedly aware of how we run campaigns in this “reddest of red states,” our most likely-to-win candidate always trying to compete in the “who can be farthest right” race, often saying the most outlandish things while privately regretting that they have to do that. Which, by the way, makes that FAR more frustrating and soul crushing. It is a self-perpetuating machine, both responding to and causing apathy at the voter’s booth and leaving a small percentage of people who actually engage the system to make all of the decisions. It could change, but we won’t change it. And even those who try have a hard time getting past the temptation of disparagement politics.

This is all why, in my clearest moments, I know that I am resisting more than this administration. When this President is out of office — which WILL happen — this fragmented social fabric will still be with us. Our deep need for healthy dialogue will still be there. Our apathy and fractured institutions will be all around us. And yet, in conversation after conversation — some I have had, many being reported to me — there is something at work. Turns out there are FAR more people than we initially thought who don’t like this direction. They don’t like being told to fear things they don’t actually fear, or not trust their own eyes when they know what it is that they are seeing. They don’t like being told they are racist, to be sure, but also don’t like seeing obvious racism (that’s a dichotomy for another post in the future). They may not be willing to go into the deep end of the inclusion pool, but they’re troubled by the bitterness and anger they are instructed to cling to as if it were a loyalty test, especially as it comes to people who are parts of their own family.

This exists out there, we just don’t hear it as much because polarization motivates all our media, from our papers to our phones to our streaming services. And the question that is starting to haunt me is, how do we get away from this era of division and animosity, even when we say we’re ready to do that?

Be honest with yourself. Haven’t you held that same animosity towards the “other side,” whomever that is? Don’t you see “them” as the enemy? And can you muster in your own heart the willingness to engage with the hardest commandment from Jesus, which isn’t “love your neighbor,” as hard as even that can be, but is really, “love your enemy, too?”

I recently signed onto a letter thanking Governor Stitt for speaking out on this immoral immigration crackdown and it was a challenge for me. Because I wanted a footnote that read, “thank you for this sudden awareness, but why have you endorsed this for so long?” I want to believe the things that my Governor says, but I see the things he does and they don’t match. I can deeply appreciate a public statement that says we need a “reset” on immigration tactics in this nation, but that is harder to swallow when the only law enforcement agency he has any say over, the State Highway Patrol, he has ordered to be in full cooperation with the very immigration enforcement he says needs to be reset!

And yet I feel the weight of that song, sung on the icy streets of downtown Minneapolis not so very long ago. I want to feel like I am on a different path that I am asking people to join. I want to say that they can change their mind and I will welcome them, anytime. I’m not sure that I am there, but it is where I want to be, for I’m not in a rebellion seeking to violently overthrow, but a resistance that doesn’t want to become the very thing it resists. And believe me, it is easier to try and hate hate than it is to try and love it.

This is why this very moment is such an important time for my faithfulness to take root. I need the reminders of what it is that I am working towards, of the kind of world that I seek to create. Because I can’t build a world of inclusion and love by marking people as forever suspect or by reserving love for only those who I deem to have earned it.

Building the beloved community is so hard because we first have to build it in our own hearts.