The last post was an excerpt from a piece my great friend Robert sent to me. If you haven’t read it, you might want to. It’s called “Hating Hillary: Getting to the bottom of a cultural trend that has seeped into the church.”
I've been struggling with the severe adverse reactions I've been experiencing each time I get a dose of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
BUT, they say correlation does not equal causation and I am aware of the possibility that the headaches, dizziness, nausea, dry mouth, clenched fists, throbbing temple-veins, gritted teeth, labored breathing, and non-specific rage I exhibit whenever the Clinton is administered might very well not be symptoms that are actually brought about by the active ingredients in the Clinton itself any more than a Post Traumatic Stress Disordered freakout is caused by the rude customer service rep or the contemptuous civil servant. The person on the other end of the altercation may activate the rage and frustration and feelings of powerlessness, but they didn't create them, so the reaction often seems to be (and is) way out of proportion with the actual events as they are unfolding.
For example: I am, let's say, 10 years old and my step-father mocks, belittles and abuses me on a regular basis and no adult seems willing to intervene on my behalf. It is unfair, but there is little I can do about it, so I go to school and suck it up as best I can, knowing at the very least, that school is a place where things are more fair than home. So far, so good.
Then at lunch an older kid, a bully from a grade or two ahead of mine, cuts in front of me in the lunch line. I seethe. I tell the adult lunch-monitor, appealing for justice. I am dismissed, ignored, denied the fair play that has allowed me to keep my anger in check. So, I go back to the line, and one thing leads to another, the bully tells me to piss off, shoving me as a warning to shut up and accept the passive ruling of the kids around us who would rather swallow the injustice and eat a bit later than stand up against this kind of behavior and risk reprisals. After I am pushed, in what is, I must admit, a fairly gentle manner, I flip out and react in a way that can best be described as "non-proportional." Perhaps I grab the fabric of the bully's shirt and throw him out of line, or I take a running start and tackle him or, perhaps, I pick up a hard plastic chair with metal legs and I threaten to throw it at him... Or, maybe I just begin to verbally assault him at the top of my lungs, screaming every curse word I have learned in my young life, pouring out what seems like a thirty-year old reservoir of rage, tearing down his family for generations in either direction, threatening bodily harm of the type which we all know I am entirely incapable of inflicting, realizing I am beginning to shriek as the tears literally pour from my eyes and noticing that there is now an ever-widening circle forming around me as I become a sort of reverse emotional whirlpool and the line compresses itself away from me on both sides and in the few seconds before I am hustled away to the office of some poor, lunchless administrator, I realize that nobody in that vast cafetorium would agree that the sky is blue if I were the one to suggest it. When I am finally escorted from the lunch area, it almost comes as a relief, considering my lack of an exit strategy, my inability to end the sketch.
Hillary isn’t the bully. She isn’t even the negligent lunchroom monitor. She might be one of the other kids on the lunch line, I don’t know. I’m not exactly sure where or if she fits into that tale at all. (But I’m pretty sure the recent Republican administrations are the stepfather who has been abusing us for years…) The point (yes, please…what is this point of which you speak?) seems to be that for me, as I suspect it is for many of us, Hillary Clinton and her campaign, to varying degrees, somehow have morphed into symbols of all injustice, timidity, sad compromise, petty nastiness, duplicity, and even evil. This is neither helpful nor accurate and I think, for me, the first step towards defusing this misguided rage is the attempt to remember that, contrary to some of the evidence (real and ridiculous), Hillary is neither a monster nor a witch; she is a human being. And if she is a human being who, like her campaign and her surrogates and many of her supporters, seems to be in a perpetual defensive crouch, I need to take responsibility for my part in that. How to do that…I’ve not yet figured out.
Or maybe Hillary is just that close relative with whom you have a history of fights and reconciliations and each time you find yourselves in a new dispute, you have to deal with the baggage you have accumulated over years of only temporarily resolved conflict. Perhaps, you tell yourself each time you feel a disagreement a-brewin’, this will be the fight that makes her finally see the fundamental flaw in her philosophy and you will finally, finally, be able to bury the hatchet and move forward with a newfound sense of camaraderie and cooperation. Then she opens her mouth and you are buried up to your neck in steamer trunks and you respond by vomiting out a roomful of backpacks and duffel bags and, once again, you find yourselves drowning in a sea of baggage.
This post is FAR too long and if you have read this far, I would like to marry you.
