For many Americans, the soonest that joy can return to Mudville is Jan 20, 2029. But even that is not guaranteed. Why? It is because of who we are as a nation. And who we are as a nation is that we preferred Donald Trump to a non-felon candidate. We preferred a grifter to a former District Attorney. We preferred a person whose judgement is seriously impaired by the combination of narcissism and authoritarianism to a person who appears to be more normal than her opponent. And we preferred a person who stokes racist fears to a mixed race person. What are we to do?
We could choose to depend on others to solve the problem of who we are. For example, we could depend on future elections to change who we are. Or we could look to change who we are by our own actions. That is we could go out and talk with others about who we are and who we should become. Or we could do both.
But before going out and changing who we are by talking with others, we should take note of one of my favorite Martin Luther King quotes. It comes from his speech against the Vietnam War (click here to access the speech):
'The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.'
We should take note of that statement because it tells us about a necessary prerequisite to successfully talking with others. That necessary prerequisite is having the absence of arrogance in ourselves. For, according to King, it is arrogance that leads us to believe that we have everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them.
If arrogance is so bad, why are we drawn to it? Of course, we are not always drawn to those who are arrogant. But to earn the privilege to feel that one can be arrogant provides one with a sense of significance. Unfortunately, that significance is built on delusions of grandeur, the belief that one is superior to others. Such a belief goes against the teachings of the New Testament.
And not only does is a belief sinful, we see the horrible effects that such arrogance has produced: the election of Donald Trump for example. For many of his followers have fallen prey to a powerful tractor beam from certain conservative news sources. And those followers have told the world that they have nothing to learn from those news sources outside of their Death Star bubble of Truth. And so those followers believed lies about Climate Change, the pandemic, the presence of systemic racism in our nation, about the 2020 election, and about those who were still incarcerated due to their participation in the January 6th Insurrection.
Our job is to somehow disable that tractor beam, to pop all bubbles, so that they could be enabled to be objective when they are reading various, including their own news sources. However, there is a catch here. If we insist that Trump followers and his other voters must admit that they have something to learn from us, we must return the favor lest we embrace the arrogance that they have so passionately embraced.
A problem that we must consider is that there is an implied teaching in conservative Christian circles that unless one sees the world with a Christian worldview, that one is disconnected to the truth and thus cannot truly understand the world. And what that teaching promotes is what mentioned in the quote from King. It is an attitude among many of my fellow religiously conservative Christians that says that others need to listen to us while we don't need to listen to them. And that is what I mean by warning us about returning the favor to the Trump followers and many of his other supporters.
We, who oppose Trump, can't afford to talk with Trump supporters with the attitude that we have everything to teach and nothing to learn from them. They too have insights despite their faulty sources. And our sources and logic have flaws too. No one person, group of people, ideology, ism or any other group are omniscient. We need each other to learn all that we can.
And so our task is simple but difficult. It is to help Trump followers and supporters to realize that they need to learn from others too. And the prerequisite to that learning is to listen. If we want Trump followers and supporters to listen and learn from us, we must model that behavior. And if we want the nation to avoid repeating the mistake of electing a person like Trump, then we have to interact with as many Trump followers and supporters as we can. After all, Trump was elected because of who we are as a people.
