Friday Good News

As of today, about 40% of the nation approves President Trump’s performance. I saw two women on TV at a Trump rally say, “There’s God, then there’s Jesus, then there’s Trump.”

Many of the other 60% are inclined to see Trump’s reputation as having been tarnished, in part because of bragging about sexually assaulting women, and then trashing every woman who accuses himself or any Republican of sexual misbehavior;
or praising the American Nazis;
or hiring white supremacists as advisors and following their advice;
or not seeing anything wrong with separating children from their parents;
or verbally attacking most of our allies while praising (and believing) Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un;
or constantly telling the nation that any criticism of him or his policies or his people is “fake news” in a clear attempt to stifle the free press;
or asking that black athletes lose their jobs permanently if they try to engage in protesting wrongs;
or asking why protests were allowed at events surrounding the Kavanaugh hearings despite what our Constitution guarantees;
or trashing John McCain and all prisoners of war;
or reacting to every accusation by accusing the accusers of heinous crimes;
or taking personal credit for everything good that happens and refusing to take any responsibility for anything else;
or trying to make every federal employee, including the head of the FBI and the Attorney General, put loyalty to him above all else;
or averaging just under 5 false or misleading statements per day in his first 100 days, which rate has steadily risen until it stands at approximately 16 per day since the beginning of June;
among other things.

OK, but other than that, some say that in order to have a civil discourse in this country, those of us who do not condone those behaviors need to keep an open mind and find things we like about him, so we can open a dialogue.

I can’t go that far, but I can offer a positive spin on some of his behaviors. We could say some of his lies are not exactly non-factual by reinterpreting them as prescient prophecies which he can effectuate himself. (He won’t read this, so I don’t need to explain any big words.)

Consider how on the mark he has been as a prophet who speaks not in parables or aphorisms, but in apparent “falsehoods” that mask the truth to come.

He said he was going to drain the swamp. Now no one would argue that there are not parts of the federal government swamp that need to be drained. Some claim he was lying because the incompetence and personal dishonesty of most of his appointees has added critters to the swamp unlike what we have ever seen before. But consider this — many of those critters are being or have been “drained” because they are quitting or being fired in record numbers. There is more draining going on and at a faster pace than ever, thanks to adding greatly to the denizens of the muck.

He said numerous times he would stop the US from being laughed at by other nations. To do that he had to start the actual laughter, which he did in his UN address that drew outright laughter for his blatant lies and even drew smiles from the Germans, which is the equivalent of the Irish blowing Guinness out their noses while guffawing. Now he can stop that laughter every single time he doesn’t appear at international gatherings. Self-fulfilling prophecy!

However, some of his “not-lies but prophecies” concern me. He said he will stop all illegal immigration into this country. He said he will fix crime in this country. He said he will fix health care and retirement so that no one will ever complain about them again. Worst of all, he said he is a stable genius who is the smartest man in the world.

If my theory is right and these are not as much whoppers as predictions that he can make happen, how could those things become literally true? Only by starting a nuclear war that will destroy all the earth’s population more intelligent than he is. That hasn’t happened, but he may have the power to do it.

Well, I guess that wasn’t a great defense of Trump, and it certainly wasn’t Friday Good News. Sorry. There’s nothing we can do about it — wait — midterm elections will determine whether he gets the go-ahead for his dire prophecies or some small check on his Putinish ambitions.

I am a man who can admit my many biases. I freely confess they have caused me to criticize our President frequently, especially my bias against policies that are immoral. (What? His policy is to take children away from their parents? And his Attorney General quoted the Bible to show God approves of it? And then the President claimed the Democrats passed a law that made him do it? Then he showed that was false by signing an order to stop the separations, but refused to do anything about the 2300 children already separated? But his majority party in the House and Senate still won’t take action?)

Still, nobody likes a whiner, and so, you may ask, when am I going to do something positive in relation to our President? Soon, I answer. I will offer to be supportive of him for one week. I’ll buy an ad on Fox and Friends and say this:

“Mr. President, hire me as your foreign policy advisor for a week! That’s just a little shorter than the average staff time in the White House. For a week I will ignore my conscience (it won’t mind — it’s used to being ignored) and propose a bold project you will love bigly.

“If humiliating Canada is the goal because they are our closest ally, then I say build a gigantic wall along our entire northern border. Make it 100 feet high, since they’ve got long ladders. No, make it 30,000 feet high, since they have small planes.

“Allow US vigilante committees to patrol the wall, asking everyone who fits the Canadian racial stereotype (white, wearing a parka) to say, ‘The mouse ran out of the house,’ and arresting anyone who says ‘moose,’ ‘oot,’ and/or ‘hoose,’ or ends a sentence with ‘eh?’ The vigilante groups will be allowed to use abusive invective (that’s calling them bad names, sir), because the Canucks will try to disarm them with politeness.

“Every morning, sir, you can tweet some new insult about Trudeau, with me feeding you imaginative ones like ‘Your mother wears combat boots,’ or ‘You’re so dumb you think Manual Labor is a Mexican immigrant. He’s the president of Mexico and he hates you too.’

“You can order the arrest of any Canadian hockey, basketball, soccer, or baseball teams if they try to cross the border. Then you allow your favorite American teams (the ones with the fewest black players) to draft the best Canadians and pay them minimum wage. Lower actually, because they are immigrants.

“You can find everyone named Trudeau living in the US and humiliate them by forcing them to wear a big ‘T’ around their neck — wait, that could stand for Trump. Scratch that one.

“You can announce that you have patented the song ‘O Canada’ and will charge them an exorbitant remuneration to sing it. (That’s very big fees, sir.)

“You can announce an automatic pardon for anyone who tries to catapult garbage over the huuuge wall.

“You can decree that any American can be arrested for being polite, because it shows they are probably Canadian spies trying to steal our recipe for Canadian bacon.

“It would NOT work to announce that Canadian children will be taken from their parents, because they are mostly white.

“This wall will also prevent any Americans from leaving who are trying to flee to Canada because of the situation in our nation. Let them suffer like the rest of us.

“Then that sad, sad little man, what’s-his-name Trudeau, will come crawling to beg you to reinstate the trade agreement on whatever terms you allow. You will say, ‘Too late, sucker! Unlike my pal, Kim Jong Young, you have no beaches we want.’

“What do you think? Wouldn’t one week’s employment be worth it to have a Make America Grate on Canada policy for a week? Everybody I know would call you a stable genius for it.

“Call me so we can negotiate a suitable salary. I’ve heard about your negotiating skills and I and my investment advisor look forward to it.”

I am hopeful for our nation for the first time in a very long time.

Pat and I were among many hundreds who just attended a March for Our Lives rally organized by young students in Helena. It was one of the more than 800 that took place today across our country after the example of high school students from Parkland, Florida.

The rally was fun, with colorful signs like these:
“Protect the Born Children”
“PTA Not the NRA”
“Arms are for Hugs”
“I Have the Right to Live, no Matter what the NRA Says”
“If a Child Hits Another Child with a Stick, We don’t Blame the Stick, But we take it Away”
and our favorite: “Grab ’em by the Ballots.”

The young people (many of them eighth graders!) who spoke were breathtakingly articulate. They knew their facts. They made it clear they come from homes with hunters, and that they support the second amendment. However, they demanded: (1) gun education and safety programs for adults as well as young people, including requirements to lock up all guns so children cannot get their hands on them; (2) Universal background checks. “It shouldn’t take me less time to buy a gun than to buy a car”; (3) No military assault weapons for civilians. Their only purpose is to kill large numbers of people in a short time; and (4) People who have been convicted of domestic violence, or who have documented mental problems, or who are on a “no fly” list should not have a gun of any sort.

I didn’t realize how depressed I have been about the downward spiral of our nation under a mentally ill president, a majority party that lacks both a conscience and backbone, and a minority party with leaders who are resistant to new ideas, even when the old ones aren’t working anymore. I have been so down I haven’t even been able to write a Friday Good News, a self-indulgent blog for a few friends with the sole purpose of me not completely losing my sense of humor.

I once again have hope for our nation because of these spectacular young people, though I know it won’t happen all at once. Our nation has gone through a rebirth because of youth once before — in the 60s and 70s because of resistance to the Viet Nam War. The reason then was the same as now — young people fearing for their lives and not being willing to take it any more.

We might be living at the dawn of a rebirth of our nation, if we are willing to follow the lead of our youth. Our nation and our world will be better if we do.

It probably won’t come in time for me to recover my sense of humor, but as one of the great philosophers said, “If you try to tell a joke and no one gets it, at least no one is laughing at you.” I think it was Plato. Or Sarah Palin.

I was rummaging through some old boxes yesterday and ran across a page of sayings and stories jotted down for future use by our father, the late Rev. George Harper.

Like every good comedian-theologian, I’m sure he used each in exactly the right time and place. You can figure whether any of these work for you.

**You can tell if you are on the right track. It’s usually uphill.

**Those who can’t forget are worse off than those who can’t remember.

**It’s okay to drink like a fish, if you drink what a fish drinks.

**Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.

**The person who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the person who can ‘t read.

**At Penn State, four sophomores in a chemistry class were certain they were getting an A. The weekend before the final test, they partied all weekend and were so hungover they got up too late Monday for the test. They explained to the professor they were visiting friends back home and had a flat tire. The professor agreed to allow them to make up the test the next day. After studying hard that day and evening, the students showed up the next morning, only to have the professor put them in four different rooms to take the final. There were two pages on the test. The first page was a fairly simple chemistry problem, with a note at the bottom that it was worth 5% of the grade. On page 2, which was labeled “95% of the grade,” was only one question. “Which tire?”

**Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass. It is about learning to dance in the rain.

**We can only live in the here and now. Always be of service here and now.

**No matter what may be your lot in life, build something on it.

**Life is like a taxicab. The meter keeps running whether we are going anywhere or not.

**A woman took her son aside after a basketball game and asked, “Son, do you know what a team is?” He nodded yes.
“Do you understand that you win or lose as a team, and not as an individual?” He nodded again.
“Do you know that when a foul is called, you should not argue or curse, and you must not call the referee a jerk?” Again a nod.
“And when they take you off the court so that some other boy gets a chance to play, do you know it is not good sportsmanship to call your coach a dumb bastard? Do you understand that?” The boy said, “Yes mom.”
“Good. Now go explain all of that to your father.”

**Life’s journey keeps opening ahead of us, even when we can’t see around the dogleg of the future. So keep moving.

**No matter how many friends you have, the number of folks at your funeral will always be determined by the weather.

**Play your best and then step off the field.

That’s the way to start out a new year — ready to laugh and not take ourselves too seriously, and looking to say the right thing at the right time and place.

Our Montana Logging and Ballet Company performed years ago at the 6000-member St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Indianapolis. I remember it because three of us stayed over until Sunday to hear Rev. Kent Millard, one of the great preachers of our denomination. His powerful sermon was on the miracle of thanks.

Kent (he insisted we call him that) said thanks is at the heart of good religion. He gave statistics about people who have an attitude of gratitude, and how they have fewer heart attacks, fewer divorces, live longer and many other positive correlations that I can’t remember. Maybe if I were more grateful my memory would be better. Kent summed up his sermon this way: “Gratefulness Brings Great Fullness.”

At Thanksgiving, our family has a tradition of having everyone tell at least one thing for which they are thankful. I won’t have time this year to mention all my list — Pat the love of my life, the wonderful children, grandchildren, family, great friends, and fifty more every-year items, following by other topics unique to this year.

I am thankful to have known and loved some political and spiritual giants who have passed away this year — Mignon Waterman, Bob Ream, Sue Bartlett, Dorothy Eck, and, just this week, Laurie Skillman. Laurie was not as famous or politically active as the first four, but was a spiritual person who belongs in their class as great and giving human beings. I am grateful to have known them all, even though I don’t live up to the role models they set.

I trust you, dear reader, will be making your own gratitude list and meditating on it. In addition to me and Pat starting on ours, I’m also thinking about being grateful for those who live lives of great fullness to show us how it is done. If I had to name the most grateful person I have ever known, it would be our mother. Dorothy Harper is 95, but never has a single day go by that she doesn’t express her thanks to God and family and friends for all her blessings.

She is blessed to live at Touchmark with its wonderful staff and space just right for her. She is blessed to live in Helena and go St. Paul’s United Methodist Church. She is blessed to have her four remaining children and their spouses living in Helena (she has reason to be grateful for that — we her children will very likely never have any of our children live in the same town with us because of the vocations they are pursuing.)

Mom just had lunch with us. Pat made a terrific fall casserole meal with blueberry buckle for dessert, so it was appropriate for Mom to be grateful for that. But she probably mentioned 10 or 15 times other things for which she was grateful or the reasons for her being so lucky.

Several staff members at Touchmark have said that others there always want to have our mother sit at their table at meals, because she is always so positive. Always. And that’s how it has always been. Our father, now deceased, was in the spotlight because he was a great preacher, a truly funny human being both as a speaker and an author, and a person who made a difference in people’s lives. There is a reason that the gym at Helena High is named “Harper Court.” Our mother stayed out of the limelight, even though she was the only one in the family who wrote professionally (radio scripts for national inspirational radio shows), and the only one in the family who won a national oratory contest in college, twice.

Now that Dad is gone, we are realizing even more how powerful and how funny our mother is, and what a constant positive force she is in our lives, like a North Star, only warmer. Call her a North Sun. As she prayed over our meal this noon, she said, “Help us to be grateful for all our blessings and for the chance to do good for others.” Gratitude is contagious and only leads to good things in the lives of us and those around us. Our mother is contagious.

So who are your role models for living lives of service and gratitude? And what are you doing to become more like them? Have a grateful Thanksgiving.

Actual good non-fake news has been hard to come by in the Trump I-try-to believe-six-impossible-things-before-breakfast era. The election on Tuesday provided some good news to those of us on this side of the facts vs. alternative facts divide.

Democratic governors won in Virginia and New Jersey. In the Virginia race, the Republican ran a textbook Trumpian racist, xenophobic, and homophobic campaign, complete with negative tweets against the Democratic candidate from Trump himself in the last days. This time the voters weren’t fooled.

People of color won elections, including seven who were the first black Americans to become mayor in their cities in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Minnesota. Helena’s Wilmot Collins was the first black mayor elected in the state of Montana, but not the first in Helena. Helena elected a black mayor in 1873 while Montana was still a territory. We had the rare privilege in this Helena mayoral election of choosing which good candidate was better, rather than facing the evil of two lessers. Jim Smith has been a fine mayor for many years, and the victor, Wilmot, is a former refugee from Liberia, a Naval reserve member, and a child protection specialist with great ideas about how to make Helena even better.

Members of other ethnic minorities made gains in state and city elections across the country, including the first Sikh-American elected mayor of Hoboken, New Jersey. That campaign featured last-minute racist flyers with a picture of Ravinder Bhalla in his turban and the message “Don’t let terrorism take over our town.” The Hoboken folks chose not to let racism and xenophobia take over their town.

Women won a number of significant races, including the first black mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina; the first female mayor of the biggest city in New Hampshire — Manchester; the first Latina and Asian American women in the Virginia legislature; and the first lesbian woman mayor of Seattle. She wasn’t first female Seattle mayor — that happened in 1926 and hasn’t been repeated until now. A long drought, especially for Seattle.

Maine became the first state to expand Medicaid by ballot of the people. Medicaid is important not just for the poor, but, in the words the Kaiser Foundation, “Medicaid is the primary payer for long-term care…Medicare only covers limited post-acute care, and few people can afford private coverage.”

Kyle Waterman, the son of Helena’s Ron and Mignon Waterman, won a city council seat in Kalispell, Montana. Kyle is following in his mother’s giant political footsteps and will be a terrific city councilman for the city that has been the home of some of the most virulent and potentially violent homophobia and racism in the state.

The first openly transgender woman won a seat in the Virginia legislature by beating the right-wing legislator who called himself Virginia’s “chief homophobe.”

Given how rich white men have been running our country, I welcome any tiny signs of cracks in the billionaires’ control of our country.

Here is my question: is this apparent “good news” merely a hiccup, a tiny and insignificant detour in our nation’s slide toward authoritarianism?

Or is this the start of the pendulum swinging back toward honesty, cleaning up corruption, and fixing problems rather than causing them –in short, toward making America great again by making America good again.

We shall see. And we better be working our butts off for the good while we are waiting to see.

Our Montana Senator Steve Daines raised some hopes that he might be one of the Republican holdouts in the Senate on health care when he made public statements that he was concerned about the secret process for writing the Senate health bill (though it is possible that his real concern was excluding Republican Senators like himself from the closed negotiations).

More importantly, a statement from his office to the Bozeman Chronicle on July 9 indicated that, while he had no position on the bill yet, he would look for three things in the bill: “We need to reduce premiums and make health care more affordable for Montana families, take care of those with pre-existing conditions so that they have access to care, and save and protect Medicaid for who it was originally intended for: the most vulnerable in our society.”

Then, after meeting with President Trump, Sen. Daines announced he would support complete repeal of the Affordable Care Act without replacement. He didn’t state the obvious — rates for tens of millions of Americans would indeed go down because they will lose their insurance altogether. People with pre-existing conditions will once again be unable to get insurance except at exorbitant rates. And Medicaid will eventually disappear if Republicans remain in power.

Perhaps our Senator didn’t have time to think about how that conflicts with his own three-part test, after being wooed by the President. Let me help him out. Here is what he should have said:

“I am proud to be a Republican and I believe in my party’s basic principles. There is no doubt that the Affordable Care Act is flawed. I agreed with our president when he said the House bill was “mean,” and that he wanted a health care act that would cover everyone, reduce premiums and deductibles, protect people with pre-existing conditions, and provide no cuts to Medicare or Medicaid. However, The Senate health care bill did not do that, which is why I would have voted against it.

“When the new proposal came up to repeal Obamacare altogether WITH NO REPLACEMENT, I was flabbergasted. I am a Christian, and most of my Senate colleagues claim they are Christian. No honest person can possibly think that Jesus would support a plan to take away insurance from 18 million people by next year, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and 32 million more by 2026, thereby leaving them to face life-or-bankruptcy decisions if severe illness or accidents occur.

“I have been a loyal Republican, and I want to see us follow our President’s prophetic vision of what health care should be in this country. However, when my president and my party choose a blatantly un-Jesus-like course, I must stand up and resist, otherwise my faith counts for nothing. They will never get my vote until there is a bill to implement the President’s vision to reduce costs and deductibles, increase coverage, protect people with pre-existing conditions, and protect the people — especially the children and the elderly — who rely on Medicaid. As a Christian who takes his faith seriously, I can do no other.”

Yesterday my siblings and I discovered a Father’s Day sermon preached by our dad, Rev. George Harper, at our Helena St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in June of 1962. His sermon began:

Something woke me up that night in 1932. A little boy, nine years old, I lay on my bed and tried to focus on just what it was. I could hear somebody talking. Suddenly I realized that Daddy had come home. It was after bedtime, but he had been gone all day, just as he had been gone all day the day before, and the day before that. We didn’t have a car, and no money for street car fare to town and back, so Dad had been walking.

I knew without looking that his leg which carried shrapnel from World War I was swollen twice its normal size, and I sensed without listening really that his news to mother was the same as it had been every day…miles of walking, dozens of doors opened at offices and factories, the same search for a job everywhere, and the same answer at every place: “No, we have nothing new. Sorry, Mr. Harper, we’d like to help you, but you know how it is. Check with us again later. Maybe something will turn up.”

But tonight mother and dad weren’t just talking. They were praying. God heard their prayers, and so did a nine-year-old boy; a father and mother praying not just for their own family, but for the other parents and families who had lost their income in the great depression. With all our family troubles, deeper and more serious than I could understand at the time, a father knelt by his bed and prayed for his neighbors and their troubles. And that prayer became an indelible part of me.

In his sermon, our dad then described his recent trip from Helena to Pensacola, Florida to see his parents. His father was dying. Dad continued:

When the crash of 1929 and the following depression had brought its full effect to Birmingham, Alabama, an industrial center, Dad was in partnership with others in a Metal Products Company. Unable to pay their bills, the other partners took bankruptcy and so cleared their debts from their books, if not from their consciences. But dad refused to do it. He said that he would pay back his creditors if it took the rest of his life to earn the money. In 1946, when I graduated from seminary, he paid back the last of that money.

It worried him that he couldn’t give his children all he would like to have given us in the way of things and spending money. But how much more he gave us he will never know! Because one day after I was a minister, and already a father myself, it struck me that the greatest gift my father could have given me was the one he did give: he made it easy for me to understand what Jesus meant when he called God “our Father.”

In his sermon, dad went on to describe a conversation with a girl at a camp when she described her own selfish, cruel father and why God the Father could not mean anything good to her. Dad knew that insisting on certain metaphors, even ones used by Jesus, as the whole truth about God could be damaging.

As Dad aged, his love of learning and his listening to the powerful women in his life expanded his God metaphors to include God as mother. Because of our mother and father, none of us Harper children had any trouble making that transition. My wife Pat made a feminist out of me, but my parents’ theology laid the groundwork.

Dad’s understanding of God and Jesus continued to evolve, so that by the end of his life, his concept of God was closer to that of Paul Tillich’s “Ground of Being” though I think Dad thought of it more as the “Source of Love.” I like a phrase from a beloved seminary professor and process theologian, John Cobb: “the Call Forward.”

As he neared his own death, our father’s wisdom became simpler, but still mirrored Jesus: love God (how ever you understand that which is beyond us and calls us to the good) and love others as you love yourself. If Father’s Day conjures up images that help you do that, then have a Joyful Father’s Day. If not, let it go and follow the role models and beliefs that make you a more complete and loving and fulfilled person.