Constant, Overwhelming Darkness. And No One Seems to Care

I woke up to another horrifying headline in the news. These days its more surprising when there isn't a tragic new breaking story.

The news is full of mass murders, children in cages, government corruption, and a revolving series of targets being bullied for the other side's political gain.

I walk around sad and angry, too, constantly. The skies look completely black but somehow even more darkness is looming. It's hard not to fixate on how hopeless things look, and to find a sliver of hope in all the debris of our broken world.

MS plays tricks with your brain, leaving many people depressed even when things are going great. When it feels like you're constantly at war with forces trying to oppress you, the depression becomes overwhelming.

The most personal for me was the disabled reporter. 

"That reporter and I are disagreement," the President said, in so many words, "and obviously I'm right, because … just look at him." It seemed scandalous statement, but Trump's loyalists didn't care. After all, they weren't disabled. 

As an attorney with a progressive disease that causes me to stumble around sometimes, my entire future livelihood depends on people rejecting that argument. Instead, people elected the person who made it President.   

Then he proposed a budget that eliminated funding for research to cure unsolved diseases. Then he got rid of the individual mandate, allowing healthy people to go without insurance, thereby raising prices for the people who can't be without it. Then a couple red states filed a lawsuit asking a court to allow insurance companies to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, and instead of defending the lawsuit, the administration said, "yes, please do." Jesus said that whatever we do the least of those is society, we do unto him, but most of the people who claim to follow him are unmoved. 

But why limit one's bullying to just the disabled? The President keeps moving from one powerless group to another to oppress. Disabled veterans aren't war heroes, he said. All Mexicans are rapists, and all Muslims are terrorists. All immigrants are gang members, and gang members are animals. Those who dared to speak out for racial equality in Charlottesville were equally to blame for their murders as the white supremacists who killed them. 

The people who aren't Mexican, former prisoners of war, Muslim, or victims of white supremacy are unmoved, because they aren't personally affected. Any maybe complaining would get in the way of their taxes going down a few dollars for people more fortunate than me, whose taxes got hammered.  

Now, it's the children under attack, which the administration justified on the theory that its ok to punish kid for their parents' crimes, and might even result in fewer illegal immigrants. This logic has a couple of flaws, the most obvious being that it isn't actually a crime to come to America and claim political asylum, and that we aren't usually in the habit of punishing people for the crimes of their relatives. If I go out and drive drunk, the police aren't putting my Aunt Margret in lockdown overnight until I sober up. 

The immigration debate as a whole is more complicated than this post can explore, but one thing definite is that our immigration laws allow for people to show up at our border from other nations and seek political asylum if they have a creditable fear of persecution in their home country. Sometimes asylum is granted, and sometimes it isn't, but it isn't illegal to come here and ask. Families seeking political asylum used to be either be set free on supervised release until their hearing or housed together at an immigration facility while they awaited their hearing to see if they qualified.

Then the administration starting arresting everyone, without allowing anyone bail. The immigration centers are now full from the abundance of arrests, so people legally seeking political asylum have been placed in federal prisons.

The law has long been that children cannot be housed in federal prisons, so this has meant that families are separated when the parents seeking asylum are sent to one. The immigration centers housing unaccompanied minors are overflowing from all the recent arrests, and using makeshift cages to hold people. I can't solve the immigration debate in this space, but it shouldn't we at least be able to agree that the children of people legally seeking asylum shouldn't be taken away and locked in cages for their parents "crime" of following the law?

A court has ordered parents and children to be reunited, but apparently no one was bothering to keep tabs on which kids in immigration centers belong to which parents, so there's a mad scramble on how to comply with the judge's directive. In the name of law and order, we have a system of disorganization and chaos. And as the Melania Trump's jacket taunted, they just don't care.

Whatever happened to that retort that "All Lives Matter?"

Religious minorities are being targeted too.

I didn't think a religious ban could happen in a country that claimed to have freedom of religion, but the Supreme Court disagreed. Four of the nine members said it violated the constitution. But the other Supreme Court justices hinted that while Trump's travel ban sure might seem like a pretext for religious discrimination, it wasn't really their place to do anything about it, what with separation of powers and all.  I've never wanted to burn my membership to highest court more.  

America can now limit access to the country based on one's religious preference. A lot of people are fine with that because it only currently serves to limit people from another religion and countries they find scary, not thinking about the ugly precedent being set. When a future administration bans Jesus fish on the back of cars, and cites a pre-textual reason that national security depends on doing so (say, because of a need to preserving precious metals), those who supported this ban will have themselves to blame. 

Meanwhile, scandal and chaos loom on every corner. Heads of government agencies use thousands of government dollars for personal pleasure routinely. The head of the EPA has his staff running his personal errands and working for his wife's private business on government time.

Trump alienates our allies and cozies up to dictators. High ranking government officials keep getting caught lying about their contacts with a Russian government who tried to influence our election. The President's campaign had a meeting asking for their help to win the election. The campaign denied that the meeting happened, until it was proven otherwise, and now its only defense was that the meeting wasn't all that productive.

No one seems to care.

I pray that God will save us from our worst impulses, and the church attempts to reassure us that God is in control. But God was in control during the Holocaust too, and look how that turned out.

It seems that God's control includes giving us free will to do awful things to each other, if we won't listen to God's instructions to love each other instead.

I can't think about how dark and hopeless things look too often, or I start to go crazy. I know things have looked hopeless before in human history, probably even more so than now. We aren't actively at war, people of different races can eat at the same restaurant, and flowers still grow. Things could be worse, and they might still get there.

I wish I could wake up tomorrow to a world where I didn't feel under attack from every side, but I can't do much to control that right now. I've heard it said that in times like these we need to create more beauty in the world to balance out the ugliness, to give more time and money to charities, and be more conscious of how we can help others overcome whatever struggles they face. That's probably good advice, but it doesn't seem enough.

We can vote for change, and for a system where no matter one's politics, we don't accept the notion of scoring political points by treating political opponents as sub-human, but there's no election anytime soon. We can speak out for the idea that fairness, basic human decency, and integrity is not subject to waiver as long as our preferred political party is in power.  We can pray that God allows us to find our better selves, and delivers us from our worst. We can try to be nice to people, in the hopes that we don't get in the way of their openness to change. We can convey that treating people better than animals and having sensible restrictions within our immigration policies are not mutually exclusive.

But still, none of these things seem like enough. And maybe it's for good reason. None of them feel like enough because we need to do them all,, as soon as possible, and as often as we can.

Then maybe, just maybe, then, we can introduce a little bit of light to help us fight the darkness.