Excellent!!!!!

Thanks Mike! I appreciate the good words.

I’m a Portlander on the other side of the political spectrum. I saw your signs out around Sandy and given the federal government occupying and cracking down violently in our state/city, I wanted to see if I could get a deeper understanding of the rest of Oregon’s take on these events. Though they’re all corrupt, I do align more with democrats than republicans, but not because the democrats aren’t horrible. I believe the republican party has shifted so dramatically to the right over the past forty years that its core base in the southern elite is indistinguishable from the old British monarchy or a fascist dictatorship, where a few corporate elites control everything and subject the rest of the country to poverty. It’s effectively a return to slave the economy with a few landed gentry brutally enforcing their will on the rest of the country. And I feel like we’re seeing that with the protest crackdowns and the chemical weapons being used on civilians by the federal military right now in Oregon.

I’ve been struck reading through your blog by just how similar your concerns are to mine and the people I interact with here in what is most certainly a blindly liberal haven. People are pissed off, and the media, on both sides, is doing nothing but intensifying our divisions.

For us, black lives matter is a response to the simple fact that black people have been killed by police and thrown into prisons run by corporate elites for profit in numbers greater than anywhere else in the world, with impunity, and now the federal military is literally teargassing peaceful protesters along with the mayor of a major US city, despite the fact that it is clearly escalating tensions rather than quelling them. The president is an autocrat whose sole motivation seems to be protecting his own interests. Everything he ever says or does seems to be designed only to protect his own interests, and further comes from the hate and anger you’re speaking about here. What does Trump do that Jesus would like? Most importantly, we see an existential, apocalyptic and imminent threat in climate change and believe that drastic action needs to be taken right now to prevent unimaginable human misery, if not the extinction of our race as a whole, and a corporate elite that seems hell-bent on not only not rising to the challenge but on eliminating all environmental restrictions already in place.

Then from your side, you see the black lives matter protesters as radical Marxists yelling that all cops are bastards, that the USA is fundamentally evil, that all white people are racists, that you who are not in our elitist metropolitan bubble are all subhumans who need to put into your place. That we need to shove our secular culture down your throats, snatch all your guns, and wait for the older among you to die out so our demographics can take over and create the Marxist totalitarian government that we so crave.

There are definitely people on the left who think just that. On the other side there are people on the right waving swastika flags and chanting “Black lives don’t fucking matter” in Pennsylvania. The Fox news media shows you only these hateful Marxists, and the liberal media shows us these only these hateful neo-Nazis, and there’s not much crossover for the majority of us who are sinners all and thus sometimes fall into hateful thinking, but generally have souls that want to love and understand. Maybe those two extremists are beyond help. But I have family that voted for Trump, and I know that every single one of you is a being with thoughts and emotions that are as complex and valid as my own. The dominant culture right now is rage and polarization – it impacts you, me, and every single person we know. I have to believe that there is still room for the human compassion and universal love that Jesus called on us all to practice.

I’m so sad that our nation is so very divided, its citizens so angry with one another, and I can see that you feel the exact same thing. I also feel that the nation as it has been can no longer stand, that we are on the cusp of a rebirth, though it’s difficult to say what that will look like. I wish you joy, comfort, and strength as you continue to fight to choose love over hate in the extremely challenging days which are to come. If each of us can see past our differences in experience and find a way to choose love, there is still hope for a better future.