Bankruptcy Proceedings

        The emotional trauma delivered to the psyche of middle class main streamers by Donald Trump's election offers many real world lessons, but not free-of-charge. There is a price to be paid when bathroom ethics and locker room porno get more attention than the huge inequality gap or mass incarceration or fossil fuels gassing the planet.  The skewed priorities can be seen in the case of Bernie Sanders' campaign. He spoke clearly and often about exactly those issues and was cast aside on the theory of liberals and the Left that he couldn't be elected. It was a betrayal of biblical proportions to be precise and the price is that Donald Trump is President-elect.

         There were other betrayals, especially by Hillary Clinton, who spoke like a member of Netanyahu's cabinet with tones of disdain for the rights and afflictions of the Palestinians.   When the crisis of racial injustice in Police relations with the Black community came front and center in 2015 with the choke hold that killed Eric Garner on camera, and other instances---and thousands marched all over the country, and every night by the thousands in places like New York City for ten days---Hillary was silent. 

          The heart of the matter can be told in the old story about a first aid station set-up to save half-dead people found floating down a town's near-by river. The tale is that after extensive measures were taken by the town to rescue victims sighted every day floating down the river, someone thought to ask "Where are these bodies coming from?"  It serves as a Rosetta stone for translating  the meaning of the recent elections.  

          Where did this year-long havoc of expected coronation,  ribald oratory and vulgarity originate?  Please don't say with Trump. He didn't stage the primary's carnival of seventeen Republican candidates. Nor did he create Isis barbarism, nor the inordinate killing of Blacks by the Police, nor the central bankers foreclosing on the steel mills and machining industries in Youngstown and Detroit; nothing to do with the tech industry's export of millions of jobs to Asia. It's a much longer list actually. Much longer and that's the point. The problems and needs of this and many other nations lie much further upstream, in the practices of ancient theologies and our now dwindling modern democracies. 

        One of the needs is the hope that faith groups will critique the addiction to ridiculous ideas of divine exceptionalism, rampant from the USA to Israel. Another goal of faith should be to expose the popular addiction to the golden calf whose worshipers---the lower eighty percent of the nation---are more akin to the biblical downtrodden.   They elected Trump but underlying their vote is the dream of gold.  That dream needs lots of exposure and exegesis in the public space of the American democracy before it too is bankrupt.