This piece will be running as an op/ed in my very red — Republican, conservative, religious — congressional district in Virginia (VA-06).
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I expect that we’d nearly all agree that love feels better than hatred. And it is widely understood that those who forgive benefit greatly from letting go of their angry desire for revenge.
Yet in the world we live in, we can see that the desire for revenge is a powerful force. (It is an exceptional set of parents that, like a couple whose daughter was murdered in South Africa a couple of decades ago, will travel to tell the court that they do not want their daughter’s murderers to be put to death.)
From the fact that the path of hatred and vindictiveness is the less happy path, we know there must be something broken within people for them to choose that path. Something must be wrong when people choose what feels worse for them.
And at the same time, that path makes a more broken world.
Humankind’s spiritual teachers have indicated what path we should take.
Jesus said “Love thine enemies” and, if wronged, “Turn the other cheek.” Buddha taught, “Let anger by non-anger be overcome.” Gandhi expressed how this basic insight connects with making our world more whole, by saying, “An eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth would lead to a world of the blind and toothless.”These statements all point to the need for us humans to get to that whole place where we can stop the transmission of “a pattern of brokenness.” It is the web of such transmission, I have proposed elsewhere, that constitutes what might be called “a force of evil” at work in our world.
Brokenness begets brokenness. But those who are most spiritually whole have told us of how to break the pattern of brokenness: forgive, be governed by love and not hate, and thereby help the human world grow more whole.
It is the most whole among us who can best pull that off, but there’s a whole human spectrum when it comes to things like the impulse to get revenge.
And then there are those at the other end of the human spectrum. We have lately been “privileged” to see a display of how fully a person might become possessed by the need to avenge every slight. It is one of the extraordinary characteristics of this most extraordinary – even unthinkable – President of the United States.
In the insistence on striking back, we’ve seen no President of the United States remotely like Donald Trump. All Presidents get criticized. But all before Trump have accepted that as part of the job description, with the role of the President to be to stick to his job and leave the rest of society to discuss the job he’s doing, and find plenty of fault.
But Donald Trump has invested an enormous amount of time and energy at striking back at his enemies.
Some of these enemies – like those investigating him for crimes – he had a practical reason for striking back: he wanted to defeat the ability of the forces of law to make him pay for his misconduct.
But in many other cases, Trump has attacked critics in a way altogether unprecedented in an American President. We’ve not seen this kind of presidential attacks on critics in the Press (his unprecedented attack on the media in general, and on specific newspapers (America’s two leading papers), on newspaper owners (Jeff Bezos), and on specific people on TV (the guy on CNN). And striking back at celebrities who criticize him, like Meryl Streep.
Avenging slights that any president should let pass; continually dealing with “enemies” without even decent regard for them, let alone love; never turning the other cheek, even for what all Presidents have understood goes with the job; and rather than overcoming anger coming at him, always inflaming anger in any situation— like in such matters as dealing with the refugees who come to our border, or how to regard NFL players kneeling to protest what videos had lately shown about how police deal all-too-often with black people; like wielding lies against those he perceives as his enemies to make those who follow him feel hatred and contempt for those he wishes to defeat.If Jesus, the Buddha, and Gandhi express the possibilities of making the human world more whole, Donald Trump is the epitome of brokenness in his fixation on revenge. And his having the powers of the presidency has served to increase the power of hatred in our world.
Increasing the power of hatred-- mot least by fostering of even greater division, distrust, and animosity between two sides of the American electorate – the pro- and anti-Trump sides – bandying about images of possible civil war if Congress should remove him for his crimes.
As great as is the challenge we face to safeguard the nation from what this President might do with his powers, is yet another longer-term challenge: to move the American body politic so that the current “sides” in America deal with each other more in the spirit that Jesus and Buddha and Gandhi taught, and less in the spirit of hatred and revenge that animates Donald Trump.