Loving Your Neighbor Isn't Supposed to be Easy. That's Why it's Called Love.
Some post July 4th thoughts on organizing and America
“Passing it back and forth like the fifth of July…” -Hard Working Americans
On February 11th, 1937, sit-down strikers at Flint, Michigan’s Chevy-in-the-Hole factory complex emerged victorious from their battle with management for union recognition. Their walk out of the plant into the cold winter for the first time in months marked the birth of the UAW and a turning point in the American labor movement. Flint was the first domino, and as the news spread across the auto industry the UAW rapidly expanded in the months and years to come. Workers across the country in industries from textiles to agriculture to mining were inspired by the epic battle and renewed their own efforts at unionization, in many cases facing brutal and deadly repression. In the following three decades union density rose ever higher in this country and the middle class grew with it, allowing Americans of all backgrounds access to a quality of life never dreamed of by previous generations. The fishing and hunting cabins that dot the back roads in my Northern Michigan neck of the woods were primarily built and purchased by union members from plants downstate, maybe along with a small aluminum fishing boat or a sunfish sailboat or a motorcycle. The humble but high quality brick homes that crowd the neighborhoods of Detroit as well as it’s inner ring suburbs like Royal Oak, Warren, Trenton, Southfield are a testament to the breadth of this type of existence and a monument to the successes of the workers who risked their life to win a union. It is no exaggeration to say that the victory of the Flint sit-down strikers marked the beginning stages of the birth of the strongest middle class the world has ever known.
When those workers at Chevy-in-the-Hole heard they had won, they knew their exit from the plant would be greeted by their families, friends, and also the press. They knew it would be a symbolic moment. These were mostly young men, but they had a sense of their place in history. They knew they would be photographed and written about. And so, to lead them out they chose Roscoe Van Zandt, who worked in the foundry, one of the a very few black workers at the plant at the time. In interviews later the strike leaders expressed their hopes that this would be a symbol of the multiracial working class unionism that they planned to foster and grow. Roscoe led his fellow workers out of the plants gates to cheers. And what was he holding as they processed? What else would you hold to mark an important moment in American history. The American flag.
Roscoe Van Zandt waves the American flag as he exits Chevy in the Hole with his fellow GM workers after winning recognition of the UAW.
On Thursday July 3rd I had just wrapped up a zoom meeting and was putting a swimsuit and towel in my backpack, getting ready to head out. My wife and kids were already with my parents at the lake. Every year my entire extended family comes up here, to Northern Michigan, where I live and where I grew up, for the fourth, usually for the full week. It’s a lot of chaos but also a lot of fun. Aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins all trying to figure out how to start a pontoon boat or just how many burgers we need. So I was wrapping up my day and preparing to meet up with everyone when I got a text from a pastor I worked pretty closely with for a brief time before he moved to another state:
“Earlier this year you wrote a newsletter about your disdain for the word resist. I thought it was so good I shared it with several friends. But I have lost all hope of bipartisanship. Cruelty is the currency and violence is the vocabulary”
I was in a rush and didn’t respond, at least not for several hours, but obviously I knew what he was talking about. Congress had just passed the bill. The bad one. The bill that would strip healthcare from millions of Americans, drastically cut food programs for poor Americans and do countless other anti-American, anti-human things. Likely kill thousands. All to fund historic tax cuts for the richest people on earth and increased military spending. America first my ass.
I put it out of my mind and had a great evening swimming and grilling with my family, and as my sons ran around screaming and laughing with their second cousins it was pretty hard to be in a bad mood. But that pastors text kept eating at me. Because here’s the thing. I have never believed in bipartisanship! In fact, in my lifetime, the things that there have been bipartisan consensus on in the halls have congress have been the most evil things! The war in Iraq, bailing out wall street instead of regular Americans, black box funding for military contractors, hundreds of millions worth of arms shipments to Israel, decades of pointless war in Afghanistan, CIA assassinations of democratically elected leaders in Central and South America. These are the most evil things our government has done in modern history. And all have had broad support from both “sides” of the aisle. So no, I don’t believe in “bipartisanship” either. I think when you hear that word you should run for the hills.
And I didn’t know how that pastor could get me so wrong. Especially because I’ve had many long conversations with him. But what I suspect is that our insane media environment has blurred a very important line for many people, and I think we need to make an effort to redraw it with a thick, permanent marker: the line between the bloodthirsty freaks in Congress and regular every day Americans.
Of course plenty of regular Americans voted for those freaks. And that can be hard to forgive. Whichever side you’re on, half of us voted for the other guys (although, you gotta remember, most people don’t vote!). If you’re a Democrat, or a liberal, like that pastor, and like most of my family I was with, it can be hard to look around and see that 50 percent of your neighbors (more in my area) voted for the politicians that just worked so hard to pass this evil bill. But I think we should push ourselves a little bit harder to look a little bit deeper. I don’t think the average Trump voter was thinking they were voting to defund food stamps or cut Medicaid or gut the national park service. I don’t think most of them wanted to bomb Iran or increase arms shipments to Israel or Ukraine (Trump the peace maker. LOL!). I think most of them just wanted cheaper groceries, gas, and housing, like all of us. In fact I know that’s what most of them wanted, because I talk to them every day. They are my friends and neighbors, the people hugging me when I walk into church on Sunday morning. I talk to them about this stuff. Sure, some of them have pretty reactionary views on social issues. Some of them are straight up assholes! And many of these churches certainly feel more comfortable to me as a 6’6” white man than they would many others. But the average American still votes on kitchen table issues. I think most of them got conned. But being the victim of con is no reason to hate someone. We’ve all been victims of a con at some point.
Should regular Joes and Janes be judged based on the worst things the politicians they voted for do? I don’t believe so. If your a Democrat, should we judge you based on Obama calling in drone strikes on weddings? Or Clinton passing NAFTA? It’s a two party system. There are no good choices.
It’s human nature to see these horrific things happening though, and to look around at your friends and neighbors, and think “how could you enable this?”. I myself sent a text to a Trump voting friend the day we bombed Iran that read “the peace candidate! (laughing emoji)”. Seeing this stuff makes it hard to love your neighbor. It’s hard to love someone when they do things you don’t love, things you hate, things you think are wrong.
But that’s what love is. It’s not supposed to be easy. If you’re married, you’re not supposed to stop loving your spouse the first time they piss you off. If you did, it wouldn’t be love in the first place, you shouldn’t have gotten married. I don’t stop loving my son when he hits my other son. That would make me a psychopath. And of course, as a Christian, I believe we are called to follow the example of Christ himself, who loved humanity even when we failed over and over again to live into his preaching and teaching. Even when we killed him.
If you don’t love your neighbor even when he’s being an asshole, I’m sorry, but that’s not the love Jesus talked about. And the same goes for you conservatives. If you don’t love your neighbor, even when they come out as gay, or you don’t love your neighbor even when he sleeps in til noon and doesn’t look for a job hard enough, or you don’t love your neighbor even when they don’t speak English, I’m sorry, that’s not what Jesus talked about either. What do you think all that talk about “welcoming the alien” was about? Reptilians from zeta-reticuli?
We’ve been conditioned, over the past decade or so, to see these things in black and white, to paint with a broad brush. And conditioned pretty well, I fear. Our media has realized there is good money to be made in convincing us to hate our neighbors and they’ve doubled down on the strategy over and over. They’ve tricked us into erasing that line between the people in power and the ordinary people down the road, struggling with the same problems that we are, hoping and dreaming of the same things for themselves and their kids. This sort of strict us vs. them thinking has infected our local communities and made it much more difficult for us to see our shared self interest, or joint destinies. The fact that me and my neighbors, even at our most ruggedly individualistic, sink or swim together. We’ve got to fight back against that conditioning.
It’s also infected the way we think about the good old US of A. I’ve hit an age now wear I’ve seen patriotism go in and out of style among various groups. During the Obama years it was pretty hip to wear American flag apparel among the urban yuppy set. And now I see F150’s with Trump stickers flying down US 31 with full size American flags flying in their beds. At least it seems that way. But this is another oversimplification.
I remember at the height of the Black Lives Matter protest seeing some clip from MSNBC of a (white, of course) woman referring to the American flag as a “symbol of white supremacy”. This was in late June. And then the next day I took my kid to the park and there was a big extended African American family having a fourth of July barbecue. Probably 50 people, all black, all decked out in the red white and blue. Mini flags for everyone. Streamers on the gazebo.
It’s an inconvenient fact for the purveyors of oversimplified narratives that many of the most patriotic Americans are immigrants and people of color. My best friend is a Mexican guy, grew up a migrant worker picking asparagus all day in the hot sun at age 5. I’m close to his whole family and I’ve spent a lot of summers hanging out with them. his Dad, who has bad hearing and a thick accent is no ones picture of a “white supremacist”. He’s proud to be Mexican. But man does that guy LOVE the fourth of July. Fireworks and sparklers all month long for them. “Okie from Muskogee” playing on the boombox.
There are many on the left who will tell you that America is the greatest force for evil on the face of the earth today. I am one of them. I believe this is correct. What we are doing in Gaza (not to mention Yemen and Syria) right now is unconscionable to me. And there is little or nothing the average citizen can do to stop it, aside from refusing to pay taxes (which…maybe we should do). And our government, funded by our money, has committed unspeakable evil in almost every corner of the globe since becoming a super power. Domestically, it’s not much better. The wealthiest amass more and more leaving even the relatively lucky among us to fight for crumbs from the table. The poor are treated as subhuman when they are not pushed so far to the margins of society as to be completely forgotten. And corporations run rampant over our human rights, our basic needs; housing, food, clothing, are now unaffordable to over half of us.
And yet…
I still find myself agreeing with the right leaning people who believe in “American exceptionalism”. This country has done incredible things. We built the greatest middle class ever. We accomplished infrastructure and engineering feats that boggle the mind. But more importantly than that, we have an incredible and unique culture. Or, more precisely, we have hundreds, thousands, or incredible and unique cultures. Show up to the Bear Lake Days parade or Detroit Juneteenth celebration and you will see Americans from all walks of life, rich, poor, urban, rural, well educated, HS dropouts, young and old, people of all races and religion, celebrating together, dancing to incredible American music of all genres played by incredible talented American musicians, themselves from all walks of life. I often find myself loving this country, even though I know it’s a force for evil. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
As I sat outside behind of the bar in my town a couple weeks ago, watching a cover band of middle aged dads rip through White Stripes and Tom Petty Songs, watching my kids dance on the grass with other kids, kids who’s dads were in the band, kids who’s moms were doctors, or dads were dentists or moms worked at dollar general or dads were drywallers or anywhere in between, I was tempted to text my cousin Coleman, though of course I couldn’t. But I knew what he’d say if I did: “hell yea man! The American experiment rages on!” I think it does.
We would be wise to help make it a positive rage, a love filled rage. And at the risk of being a broken record; that starts locally. By talking to our neighbors. About our own practical issues in our own local communities. By having the courage to reject the black and white thinking that tells us we have nothing in common, the courage to step in to the world we can win together. What else are we gonna do? Give up on each other? As a Lutheran pastor once told me in exasperation “What? We’re just gonna leave each other to the wolves??”. Or sit around and hope that somehow, without communicating with them, everyone else will magically come to not only see the world exactly as we do, but work in a concerted way to enact those values? Without ever talking about it?
To win the country we deserve, to make this country what it says it is, what it still can be, we do not need to love anyone in congress. It would be wise to treat them like that manure fertilizer I smell in the spring and fall driving through farm land. Disgusting but helpful only to the extent it can be put to our uses. But we will need to love our neighbors, all of our neighbors, as if they have the love of Christ in them, which they do. And as if we have the love of Christ in us, which we do. Which allows us to love them even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. That’s the first step. Without it there are no others.
What’s the other option?
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Another fine piece. Thank you for pointing out the inevitable challenges in what constitutes true love.
Some day I’d like to engage with you (and others) on the subject of public service and electeds. Your views on DC/members of Congress are certainly, through one lens, understandable and justified. But I worked in state legislatures and on local, state, and federal policy for a quarter century and have a different perspective. Just as we need to love our neighbors even as we fundamentally disagree, we need to understand the forces driving public servants - elected and unelected - with better comprehension and understanding, for these usually flawed people, who are actually more « representative » fof their constituents than many want to contemplate, stand between us and far worse forms of governance. Even today there are good and principled people in these roles battling (often quietly) for the commonweal.
That’s for another day. For today, thank you for being both rigorous and thoughtful as we try to find a way out of the darkness in our benighted Republic.
It is perfectly reasonable to think, about someone with whom we disagree on substantive issues, that they are making a mistake (presumably they might think the same of us). Sometimes this may mean that they have been conned. Obviously this is preferable to thinking of each other as motivatedly selfish or vicious. But there is a point at which thinking someone has been the victim of a con artist -- one who of course *we* could see right through -- is another form of disdain. And at present, there is a narrative according to which half the country disdains the other half. We do well do combat this narrative as much as possible. Love is hard enough as it is.