Tag Archives: John Pavlovitz

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Latent cruelty

This has all been building up for a while, I know, but the last few weeks have seemed to be particularly offensive and painful to watch in America.

Reading John Pavlovitz’ latest blog post today seems to have crystalized in my mind a few things that have been bubbling around there for a while, too. He calls it The Trump Effect, and he lays out the development of it pretty clearly. It’s been remarked on before by others and I’ve certainly been thinking it since it began to surface during the T-thing’s administration, as racism and white supremacy began to be expressed in new and more open ways, violence increased and the quality of the national conversation began to decline daily. The slide away from truth and accuracy and decency in his daily rants had its effect.

There are lots of examples, and Pavlovitz relates some of the most egregious, but to me its in the essential failure of basic human compassion in the face of this raging pandemic that it is most clear.

How people can equate the simple discomfort and slight inconvenience of wearing a mask with putting other people–and other people’s children–at risk of serious, life-threatening disease has just been beyond me to understand. But seeing it as just another expression of the crass, stupid insensitivity to others that is at the heart of the Trump Effect helps me to understand it. It somehow makes these people feel empowered, self-righteous, justified in their own petty hatreds to be pretending that refusal to wear a mask or get vaccinated is somehow an exercise of their rights as an American.

So it’s not enough just to not do it, they have to proclaim their heroic stupidity and even harass others who are wearing masks and getting vaccinated. It’s so remiscinent of something…. what is it? Oh yeah. Nazi rallies. Book burnings. Klan rallies. Lynchings.

All these are of a piece. People venting their anger and fear and seeking justification in some kind of twisted version of “rightness.” Pavlovitz lays it clearly at the feet of Trump’s monstrous venom.

Though certainly not created then or by the man, for the first time in America’s history the latent ugliness in people was revealed and validated and celebrated by a sitting president—it was officially normalized. And what we’re experiencing now; this staggering, insensitive posturing in the face of so many people’s suffering, is the late-ripening fruit of something that has been set into the bedrock of half our nation. It is the malicious entitlement that MAGA was designed to nurture from the beginning.

JohnPavlovitz.com

If you’ve followed the rise of fascism in America over the past few decades, which has been documented by many including the guy on Orcinus, you know this strain of “americanism” has been festering under the surface, held in check by the sense of decency and fair play that is–at least I believe it is–a stronger, more truly American trait, but developing under cover of various rationalizations and facades. Trump’s legitimization of that strain is what has allowed the racism to swell along with all this other petty hatred. The whole development, of course, has been facilitated and exacerbated by the ease of vicious communication made possible by the internet and social media.

So now we are facing fascist America. Big Time. Trump’s America.

{Post script: My brother was one of the 599 people who died of of COVID in Florida yesterday, so this is all very personal to me. He was a victim of the anti-vax conspiracy theory wackos, didn’t get the shot, didn’t go to the hospital when he got sick. They kept him alive for weeks, but it ravaged him so that he eventually succumbed to a cardiac arrest.]

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Selfishness…

John Pavlovitz, a progressive Christian blogger whose critique of the recent Fascist (he doesn’t use that term, I don’t think) surge in the American political landscape aligns well with my own, has spoken out strongly in the past year about the pandemic and the poor response from his fellow Christians.

His blog is Stuff That Needs to be Said at johnpavlovitz.com, and the post today pretty much summarizes the problem with vaccine hesitancy/resistance as one of plain selfishness. Which thoroughly indicts Christians who buy into the whole fascist republican stance on all this for the hypocrites they are, professing as they do to follow a spiritual leader whose most powerful message was “Love one another as I have loved you.”

As a former mega-church youth minister who was fired for refusing to support racist policies, he is well-acquainted with the fundamentalist approach and has very thoroughly debunked all that. This post today clarifies much about how and why these pseudo-Christians think the vaccine is not something they need to do. He says, starkly:

Selfishness is America’s second deadly virus and it may be one we cannot overcome.

And he makes it clear that it’s pretty un-Christian at heart:

I wish there was a vaccine that could make these people give a damn about other human beings; that we could inoculate them against whatever toxic cocktail of ignorance, fear, arrogance, political tribalism, and bad religion that has rendered them resistant to the suffering of others.

I suppose this shouldn’t have been a surprise. I imagine their denials of the virus and their refusal to mask and their defiance of safeguards should have tipped me off, but still I did not expect this entrenched and strident refusal to help other people, especially the many who claim to follow a “love your neighbor” Jesus.

And the prognosis for the country is also quite stark:

Until love and mercy and kindness take hold in the hearts of these people, until they are burdened with the common good, that lack of empathy will be a sickness that will destroy us.

I hope that he’s not right. I hope that goodness and mercy will prevail. I hope at least that these people will eventually recognize that the cost/benefit ratio for taking the vaccine militates in favor of reasonable action instead of this self-absorbed, ignorant attitude that puts ones own comfort ahead of the life and health of a whole nation.