Politics.

Actually, my politics are very simple.  

I am against cruelty, 

and I favor kindness.

That’s it.

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This is basically how I read the Sermon on the Mount.  Jesus lifts up those who renounce, or who are the victims of, violence.  When I say that the life of the world depends on people following Jesus, this is what I mean: people coming to curtail their own cruelty.  People cultivating kindness.    

In any relationship at any moment there is usually some power discrepancy.  When the one with power uses it against the one without, or with less, it easily becomes cruelty.  Indeed, any projection of personal power which harms another is cruelty.

There are cases where cruelty may be justified in terms of the greater good.  But it really has to be for a greater good and not just a satisfaction of my anger, greed, fear, or just plain sadism.  A surgeon has to be cruel in cutting out a tumor or removing an infected appendix.  It is certainly felt as cruel when an addict is deprived of narcotics, but it is to save their life.  Almost any kind of self-discipline may involve cruelty, as in “no pain, no gain.”  This is how we learn.  Parents also find themselves administering doses of cruelty — groundings, time-outs, restrictions, etc.   But these must always be for the child’s protection.  

The problem is when we extend this thinking and use it to justify the application of pain to another purely for our own benefit.  We call it consequences, or punishment, or deterrence.  We even call it justice.  But if it is merely to preserve and protect what we have — our status, our fear, our greed, our anger, our nostalgia, our desire — it is simply cruelty.  

I have been reading Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson.  It is the story of African Americans in this country, relegated to the lowest status in society, and the actions implemented by white people to keep them there.  I can only read a few pages at a time, the stories of lynchings and arbitrary exclusions and humiliations are so sickening to me that I have to stop.  Some haunt my consciousness for weeks.

In our current condition, humans are depraved and permeated with self-interest.  We are going to be cruel.  We are going to say and do cruel things to each other, especially in our closest relationships.  The key to this as to everything is repentance.  That is, replacing self-justifying thinking with remorse, sorrow, grief, humility, and asking for forgiveness.  Such an attitude is transforming.

If we were completely aware of the cruelties we have committed, directly and especially the atrocities done indirectly in our name that we refuse to know about, we would not stop crying in bitter guilt and grief.  Which is why we keep ourselves in denial about such things, or, when that fails, we build elaborate, smug, self-righteous rationalizations for them.

But for people claiming to be followers of Jesus Christ to look at, say, (as we saw the other day) the running down of Haitian refugees by armed men on horseback, with approval?  Seriously?  That is to have a heart so calcified as to make Pharaoh look like a sentimental sap.  It is to give Jesus the finger with a vindictive sneer, because Jesus is with the refugees. 

“Christians” used to have their pictures taken at lynchings and even proudly mail them as postcards to their friends.  That’s like having a selfie taken at Jesus’ crucifixion and bragging about getting rid of this troublemaker.

The Modern world, and the whole regime of Empire that has dominated civilization for millennia in various forms, is a massive, systemic application of extreme cruelty.  It requires over-the-top violence to be sustained because it is all about forcing the weak to serve the strong and exploiting the poor for the benefit of the rich.

The Jesus movement exploded into the world as a resistance and alternative to this cruelty.  Jesus had endured the worst Rome could apply to someone in its mania for control and order.  And he bounced back to life, a life beyond Rome’s grip.  That is the good news right there.  He defeats cruelty.  He shows that it doesn’t have to be this way.  Any world that demands the wall-to-wall infliction of cruelty to sustain itself is evil and false.  It will not last.  God calls us into communities of kindness and forgiveness, communities of truth and kindness.  God becomes human for the sake of reconciliation.

So as I look at the political landscape and make decisions about what I will support and participate in?  My main metric is cruelty.  I vote for the party and the candidate that is less cruel and more kind.  Are you for cutting off people’s health care, kicking hungry people off food stamps, keeping working peoples’ wages low, maintaining the high incarceration rate, funding war, protecting gun rights, excluding and oppressing Gay and transgendered people, making rich people richer, rejecting refugees and asylum seekers, separating immigrants’ families, banning Muslims, justifying police violence, feeding the climate crises and other environmental depredations, and generally using lies to stoke people’s fear and anger?  Are you against vaccines and refuse to wear a mask in a global pandemic?  Is your “freedom” more important than others’ life and health?  

These are all instances of cruelty.  They inflict suffering on others, apparently to enforce the nostalgia and placate the paranoia, of a few.  Some of this is just plain irrational vindictiveness.  You will not get my vote or anything but my sadness.      

I will go with kindness, thanks.  As much as I can.

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