The Republican National Convention

Posted on August 25, 2020

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The world is a mighty, vast, complicated, and often frightening, place. As the world shrinks in size, we are confronted more and more with a knowledge that there are people who don’t look like us, talk like us, or act like us who, nevertheless, have a great impact on our own lives.

Technology has made it so. Technology has taken the planet and squeezed the air out of it. It has reduced it to the size of a laptop screen. It may give us entertainment options we never had before, or make our lives more comfortable. But the price we pay is loss of a world we can understand and one that moves faster than we are capable of ever catching up with.

The current world seeks to give those who have been voiceless a voice. Like the notion of a global economy, it seeks a global humanity, one in which all humans have equal power. For countless inhabitants of this country, the shrinking world and the spector of a world run by technology and equal rights is terrifying. If the world doesn’t look like us and if technology doesn’t act like us, then who are we? When the world we grew up in is no longer recognizable to us, where to we belong?

Humans, when confronted with a threat to life, reduce our lives to the smallest possible space. We surround ourselves only with what we know. or we look to someone who is deemed more powerful, to tell us that he or she stands between us and the fears that keep us awake at night. We are children, either pulling the covers up over our heads in the darkness or yelling out to Mommy or Daddy to save us.

Many of us exhibit the adult version of pulling the covers up over our heads. We reduce our world to only what we have complete control over. We distrust anything we don’t understand: science, vaccines, immigrants, unhappy African Americans or gays. We stock up on guns to fight off the maurauders who are waiting at the gates. We take comfort in a parent figure who promises to protect us from the forces that would do us harm. We choose the person who tells us that we are pure, that we are smart, that we are of value, that if we trust him, he will protect us from the Boogeyman who would invade our bedrooms at night.

We listen to the stories about this parent figure. He is a liar. He is a cheat. He is a womanizer. He is corrupt. He cares only for the rich and not for us. We don’t care. It is not relevant to our lives. We care only that he keeps the Boogeyman at bay. We care only that he keeps reminding us that he will make the world a place we can, once again, understand and control.

Many of us have gathered, both in person, and virtually, at the Republican National Convention. We are reminded each day of the Boogeyman and told it is real. We have names for him: the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi. Obama. Immigrants. Black Lives Matter. Gun control. The Boogeyman wants one thing: to take away our sense of ourselves. To make us doubt who we are.

Each convention day, we are told that the Boogeyman is alive and well and headed our way. Each convention day, we are reminded that the Parent is the only one powerful enough to protect us. The price is a small one. Our vote. Our loyalty. Our faith. We give it gladly. We wear caps and tee shirts. We wave flags. It is our cross, our alliegance to a higher power. If there were a church of the Parent, we would worship there.

There are those who continue to tell us terrible things about the Parent. They don’t understand why we don’t care. That is because they don’t understand us. We are faithful to the Parent and we will survive because of the Parent.

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Posted in: politicians, politics