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My friend Dale writes about not only his Kerry/Edwards yard signs being stolen, but his God is Not a Republican or a Democrat sign was taken, too.

I’m at 7-8 9 10 11 12 Kerry/Edwards signs stolen during this past month the past 6 weeks. Just flat-out made to vanish under cover of darkness. This phenomenon recapitulates for me an entire worldview’s unfortunate M.O.: trespass, steal, suppress dissent and all contradicting evidence. It’s a strange and unconvincing plan from people preaching “freedom” and “democracy,” I think.

Two things help me short to ground my occasionally flaring anger at practitioners of this M.O.: specifically, a boxful of K/E signs that allows me to replace the sign daily if necessary, and generally, (mis)remembering the adage “Anger is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” (Google reveals Malachy McCourt actually said “Resentment is like …” but that’s close enough to work.)

Beyond my obvious-but-ridiculously-hard choice not to take poison, my prayer asking how I’d best respond keeps returning an image of the prodigal father — that is, one extravagant with his love — who watches, watches, watches for his wayward son to repent and come home, and when he finally sees his son a long way off he runs out to embrace him.

Yikes, that’s a difficult example to follow. (Whether father or son.) But imagine the result — the homecoming — what a celebration that will be!

Dale’s sign, “God is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat,” refers to Sojourners’ ongoing petition to “take back our faith,” a stance I support as well. (Sojourners is “a Christian ministry whose mission is to proclaim and practice the biblical call to integrate spiritual renewal and social justice.”)

In his About.com article on this topic, Charles mentions the conviction —

A politics that privileges the powerful over the weak and the rich over the poor, and favors violence and the unilateral use of force over the use of diplomacy in the resolution of international problems, cannot be reconciled with biblical ethics.

That’s my inescapable conviction, too, one that arose in me during several years of seminary study:
I cannot reconcile prevailing U.S. political behavior with biblical ethics.

It’s not an exclusionary, “my way or the highway” kind of conviction — because I don’t know everything — but it’s nonetheless a fire-in-the-bones conviction in me that I understand as providing sufficient work-that-needs-doing to last me the rest of this lifetime.

For me and my house, then, this conviction is why I’m happy to support, work for, and vote for Kerry/Edwards and the Democratic worldview, however short of perfect it may be, and why I’m unable to ever, ever, ever support the Bush/Cheney worldview.

(“My house” tells me right away whenever she thinks otherwise. :-) )

half a day later:

And sometimes, like now, rage seems like a perfectly appropriate response, not to be shorted to ground. Meteor Blades reminds me:

In between my unfettered rage at the ideologues who lied us into the Iraq war and my cautious elation that we may elect someone who brings an end to that nightmare, I sometimes catch myself going numb. The statistics are numbing. Perhaps 25,000 people dead, most of them civilians. Perhaps 100,000 wounded, many of them maimed forever. …

Damn, bouncing between idealism, rage, and numbness is awkward. But part of human being, I think. Seasons turn: buds of spring burst to life, ease into fiery summer, wind down to autumn spent and brown, then cool down to icy winter, and back again. Likewise, our bodies run in cycles, ebbing and flowing throughout the day, the month, the years. Even scripture is cyclical, boldly wandering through the range of human emotions, unflinchingly touching on all extremes.

Life’s a rollercoaster all over, I think. Some of us loop-de-loop more than others, and some of us half fall out, but none of us bounces alone.

O Lord, just please deliver us from permanumb.

Something spiritual shifted today. [Wed, Sept. 22, 2004]

Pretty unmistakeable. A sea change, I think. Steph noticed it, too.

A weight lifted. A breeze of hope, incoming fresh air. I think it’s political.

As usual, I sense these things kind of like a barometer, then it takes me several days to concretely identify what happened. I’ll be back.

2004-09-30 update:
Today as I look at the assembly line of B/C yard signs in my neighborhood — even as someone steals my Kerry/Edwards sign, again and again — the breeze of hope seems faint at times. Is this America? And yet …

Last Sunday I walked in the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ) Walk-As-One fundraiser in downtown Memphis. Fascinating people and surroundings! I noticed with some relief that as you drive from affluent suburb to downtown, the B/C signs slowly give way to Kerry/Edwards signs. Once downtown, I didn’t see one B/C sign.

In the midst of the multicolored throng of smiling brothers and sisters walking with me, and especially as we passed the Lorraine Motel where MLK was killed, now the home of the National Civil Rights Museum, I recalled that the God of scripture, history, and my experience is primarily about community and justice, as conveyed in the prophet Micah’s summary (or its more familiar translation, if you prefer) —

He’s already made it plain how to live, what to do,
what God is looking for in men and women.
It’s quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbor,
be compassionate and loyal in your love,
And don’t take yourself too seriously—
take God seriously.

Compared with this, today’s prevailing political understanding of community and justice seems lacking to me — Denying free speech to neighbors as in my neighborhood and across the country? Denying rights to people who are different, even unto writing discrimination into the U.S. Constitution? Bearing false witness against others, of which the reason given for invading Iraq is a prime example? Killing men, women, and children with bombs (“collateral damage”) almost indiscriminately? Sending people into poverty while favoring the wealthy with tax cuts? Passing the curse of a crushing debt onto our children and grandchildren? Avoiding responsibility saying “it’s not my fault — he did it, she did it, they did it”? Ridiculing knowledge, thoughtfulness, and wisdom? Being adamantly unrepentant? I find behaviors like these completely opposed to Micah’s understanding of what God is looking for in us.

Yet even in the face of these destructive winds, I detect the breeze of hope. We will not succumb to this curse. The spiritual shift I felt last week is a critical mass of us clicking into awareness: We will no longer be captive to fear and deception. We will no longer tolerate lies, hate, and endless war masquerading as the will of God. As Martin puts it, we will “overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.”

I share Martin’s “abiding faith in America” and “audacious faith in the future of mankind.” With him I audaciously believe that “unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.” And I will work to my dying day to speak this word, to help bring about this reality.

If faith has taught me anything, it’s that the highway of retribution and violence we’re on leads to hell. We’re approaching the last exit before we hit desert. Let’s take it.

2004-10-03 update:
I’m not wild about Kerry’s saying “I will hunt down and kill the terrorists, wherever they are,” of course, but I assume that’s an essential criterion for the bloodthirsty vote. Why this unappealing stance doesn’t dissuade me is summed up by GussieFN in this succinct analogy praising competence:

Kerry and Bush have the same plan on the war
and Tiger Woods and I have the same plan on the golf course.
What’s the point, again?

Orcinus: David Neiwert: ‘One of the real keys to understanding our situation is realizing that conservatism and the “conservative movement” are in fact two entirely different things.’