Beck Rally
Aug. 29th, 2010 12:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fabrisseI'm sure it surprises no one that I didn't attend. What's more amazing is that I didn't hear it. At all. Now, I'm much closer to the Capitol end of the Mall, but a group of the size being claimed, close to half a million, is large enough that I should hear ambient noise -- if only the rhubarb of the crowd. I could certainly hear the events near the Washington Monument on July 4, which had far fewer people, even with my windows closed and the air conditioning on.
I was mostly gone yesterday, of course, but the event started at 10 a.m. and I didn't leave town until 12:30.
Later, on my way home, I saw people in the T-shirts, mostly shouting at bus drivers and behaving like they didn't comprehend public transportation. They all looked broken somehow.
That's the thing I think most critics of the Beck followers don't get. These are frightened people. In just over a generation, their world has changed. It's not primarily white anymore; women may be the bosses of men. Cities have taken over from the countryside. The promise of the world being an economically better place for the next generation has demonstrably failed. They don't understand their children's ideas or -- based on the fact that many of them looked to be a generation older than I am -- their grandchildren's lifestyles.
Many of them are uneducated. But based on my cousins, who are high school graduates or less, they are not stupid. They don't have what my dad calls the credential of the college degree -- he always presented it to me that a degree just tells prospective employers that you've been taught how to do research and think logically -- and, in many cases, they have trusted the town doctor, the town lawyer, and their pastor to explain the world to them.
But the town doctor is now a hospital 50 miles away or a small clinic nearby because it's the only one that takes Medicare. If they're lucky, they'll see their primary care physician, who is not the person they were seeing a decade ago, but most days it's a nurse practitioner (and they've had great experiences with them, overall) and a recommendation for a refill of their current prescriptions.
The town lawyer, maybe they'll see him once or twice in their lifetimes. Wills are the primary business and perhaps a house purchase or transferring a title from one generation to the next.
The person we should worry about losing, as liberals, is the local pastor. My grandfather was a Baptist minister. He, unlike many of his generation who "got the call," attended and graduated from Seminary. I have a recording on a cassette tape of his last sermon. He addressed the story of Zacchaeus explaining the Jewish tradition of reparation and how Zacchaeus' vow exceeded the amount he would have been required to pay by a rabbinical court.
Today, the megachurches worry me less than the Foursquare-type churches. These have pastors, but the sermons come from a central source. I attended a Catholic school for my middle school years. The Vatican Council had changed the Mass from Latin to the vernacular and many of the older generation lamented it because before "You could walk into any parish in the world and be part of the congregation."* In an increasingly transient US population, the comfort of knowing that anywhere you are the service will be the same, right down to the sermon, is huge.
It doesn't allow the pastor to be the interpreter of the world for his/her parish though. People like my grandfather could take a complex idea and explain it simply -- it's one of the appeals of Beck's damned chalkboard -- then relate it to the scriptures. But where grandfather would relate Zacchaeus' recognition of his own sin to the individual responsibility to make amends to those we have wronged, the centralized church organizations are homogenizing the message. One way to do so is to take the stories everyone knows -- Noah and the Ark, Samson pulling down the temple -- and ignore the more obscure ones like Zacchaeus. These stories are often apocalyptic, because we remember the action scenes.
Since I'm still seeing the Elders -- and broadening their horizons -- I have, at least one Sunday a month, been attending the local Ward. Glenn Beck was in the congregation last week, and everyone was thrilled about it. (I will say, most of the slightly subversive members of the Ward were absent last week. *G*)
What really struck me last week, though, was how ignorant some of these young men who are sent out to preach the Doctrines of the LDS church are. They had never read 1 Corinthians 13, a key text for most Christians, nor were they aware that King James had not personally translated (at least they knew it was a translation) the Bible.
I know that I and many of my friends are agnostic or atheist. These distinctions between sects or between the pastoral approaches probably already seem anti-intellectual or even silly. However, I believe we can't win the fight if we don't understand the people who are frightened by the world around them.
My cousin Ed is 82. He was in the Marines for two years and came back to the Eastern Shore with an honorable discharge to settle into a life that was hard, but happy in his family. He loves my Dad like a brother. He still asks Dad about what's going on in the world and uses my father and his respect for Dad's education to help him decide how to vote -- and you better believe that Ed votes.
A dill pickle is a "Jew Pickle" and nothing will ever change that for him. His new (about six years) doctor is Indian. In Ed's words, "He's a skinny little thing -- don't eat much but grass and rice and a little bit of fish once in awhile." His doctor came to the Eastern Shore as an immigrant, but, in spite of the characterization, Ed respects him because the man listened to him, listened to Nettie (Ed's mother, the real grandmother in my life, and still going strong at 103 next birthday -- she votes, too), and figured out how to make them feel better. Ed will never win any diplomacy contests, but he listens to people he respects and asks them questions so that he can learn more about the world. His doctor, like my father, gets his respect both by virtue of his education and for having listened.
Those of us who want to see the world change from a place of increasing orthodoxy and conservatism based on fear need to win the respect of the Ed's of this world. He'll listen to us, if we take the time to listen to his fears.
* Except France. Under Napoleon, France received a concession from the Vatican for the Mass to be said in French. Once Napoleon was no longer in power, many, though not all, parishes reverted to Latin. There's a good reason why the Mass in French has a bit more stateliness than the Mass in English.
I was mostly gone yesterday, of course, but the event started at 10 a.m. and I didn't leave town until 12:30.
Later, on my way home, I saw people in the T-shirts, mostly shouting at bus drivers and behaving like they didn't comprehend public transportation. They all looked broken somehow.
That's the thing I think most critics of the Beck followers don't get. These are frightened people. In just over a generation, their world has changed. It's not primarily white anymore; women may be the bosses of men. Cities have taken over from the countryside. The promise of the world being an economically better place for the next generation has demonstrably failed. They don't understand their children's ideas or -- based on the fact that many of them looked to be a generation older than I am -- their grandchildren's lifestyles.
Many of them are uneducated. But based on my cousins, who are high school graduates or less, they are not stupid. They don't have what my dad calls the credential of the college degree -- he always presented it to me that a degree just tells prospective employers that you've been taught how to do research and think logically -- and, in many cases, they have trusted the town doctor, the town lawyer, and their pastor to explain the world to them.
But the town doctor is now a hospital 50 miles away or a small clinic nearby because it's the only one that takes Medicare. If they're lucky, they'll see their primary care physician, who is not the person they were seeing a decade ago, but most days it's a nurse practitioner (and they've had great experiences with them, overall) and a recommendation for a refill of their current prescriptions.
The town lawyer, maybe they'll see him once or twice in their lifetimes. Wills are the primary business and perhaps a house purchase or transferring a title from one generation to the next.
The person we should worry about losing, as liberals, is the local pastor. My grandfather was a Baptist minister. He, unlike many of his generation who "got the call," attended and graduated from Seminary. I have a recording on a cassette tape of his last sermon. He addressed the story of Zacchaeus explaining the Jewish tradition of reparation and how Zacchaeus' vow exceeded the amount he would have been required to pay by a rabbinical court.
Today, the megachurches worry me less than the Foursquare-type churches. These have pastors, but the sermons come from a central source. I attended a Catholic school for my middle school years. The Vatican Council had changed the Mass from Latin to the vernacular and many of the older generation lamented it because before "You could walk into any parish in the world and be part of the congregation."* In an increasingly transient US population, the comfort of knowing that anywhere you are the service will be the same, right down to the sermon, is huge.
It doesn't allow the pastor to be the interpreter of the world for his/her parish though. People like my grandfather could take a complex idea and explain it simply -- it's one of the appeals of Beck's damned chalkboard -- then relate it to the scriptures. But where grandfather would relate Zacchaeus' recognition of his own sin to the individual responsibility to make amends to those we have wronged, the centralized church organizations are homogenizing the message. One way to do so is to take the stories everyone knows -- Noah and the Ark, Samson pulling down the temple -- and ignore the more obscure ones like Zacchaeus. These stories are often apocalyptic, because we remember the action scenes.
Since I'm still seeing the Elders -- and broadening their horizons -- I have, at least one Sunday a month, been attending the local Ward. Glenn Beck was in the congregation last week, and everyone was thrilled about it. (I will say, most of the slightly subversive members of the Ward were absent last week. *G*)
What really struck me last week, though, was how ignorant some of these young men who are sent out to preach the Doctrines of the LDS church are. They had never read 1 Corinthians 13, a key text for most Christians, nor were they aware that King James had not personally translated (at least they knew it was a translation) the Bible.
I know that I and many of my friends are agnostic or atheist. These distinctions between sects or between the pastoral approaches probably already seem anti-intellectual or even silly. However, I believe we can't win the fight if we don't understand the people who are frightened by the world around them.
My cousin Ed is 82. He was in the Marines for two years and came back to the Eastern Shore with an honorable discharge to settle into a life that was hard, but happy in his family. He loves my Dad like a brother. He still asks Dad about what's going on in the world and uses my father and his respect for Dad's education to help him decide how to vote -- and you better believe that Ed votes.
A dill pickle is a "Jew Pickle" and nothing will ever change that for him. His new (about six years) doctor is Indian. In Ed's words, "He's a skinny little thing -- don't eat much but grass and rice and a little bit of fish once in awhile." His doctor came to the Eastern Shore as an immigrant, but, in spite of the characterization, Ed respects him because the man listened to him, listened to Nettie (Ed's mother, the real grandmother in my life, and still going strong at 103 next birthday -- she votes, too), and figured out how to make them feel better. Ed will never win any diplomacy contests, but he listens to people he respects and asks them questions so that he can learn more about the world. His doctor, like my father, gets his respect both by virtue of his education and for having listened.
Those of us who want to see the world change from a place of increasing orthodoxy and conservatism based on fear need to win the respect of the Ed's of this world. He'll listen to us, if we take the time to listen to his fears.
* Except France. Under Napoleon, France received a concession from the Vatican for the Mass to be said in French. Once Napoleon was no longer in power, many, though not all, parishes reverted to Latin. There's a good reason why the Mass in French has a bit more stateliness than the Mass in English.
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-30 10:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-30 11:06 pm (UTC)You made me think (as I often do anyway) of people who are close to me, whom I love a great deal, who spout things that seem to me both repulsive and way too weird or dumb for these folks to take seriously. Siometimes, replying is impractical: passions may be too high, or I may not know enough about the particular thing in question to be sure I can refute them with grace and clarity. When I do respond, I try to acknowledge what I think they've got right, to point to the sources of what I take for facts and admit when I don't know something, and remain true to my principles in the discussion. More than once, I've found that somebody I thought was several chasms away from me politically was actually close to me in important ways.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-01 08:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-01 08:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-01 09:53 pm (UTC)