Walking with Sophie, my Goldendoodle, the half-mile from my house to our town square on July 4th, I looked in the dawn’s early light to see how many of those broad stripes and bright stars were so gallantly streaming. I counted 24. Twelve hung on one house alone. Even MAGA is depressed.
I waved to a neighbor whose house flew no flag. He sat on his front porch, scribbling notes as he listened to a lecture on his smartphone. It was something about how Earth’s atmosphere will soon turn toxic. Not too soon, though. In a million years. But soon enough that my neighbor should buy the product the speaker was promoting to protect him.
I was listening to Sarah Longwell’s Focus Group podcast. She and Heather Cox Richardson discussed a snippet of a Jon Ossoff speech that they both found inspiring:
“Just think,” Senator Ossoff said, “250 years on, what the founders would see if they visited us today... They would see that slavery had been abolished. They would see that Americans without land, then women, and then the descendants of slaves had secured voting rights….”
I’m a fan of Jon Ossoff. He hoped I would be inspired by his observation, but I wasn’t.
Why? Because if the founders returned and saw all this, they would be appalled.
Why? Because they could have done all of these things themselves, but they didn’t.
They could have freed their slaves, but they didn’t.
They could have abolished slavery, but they didn’t.
They could have granted Americans without land the right to vote, but they didn’t.
They could have granted women the right to vote, but they didn’t.
They could have granted Black people the right to vote, but they didn’t.
It wasn’t that they never heard of abolition or women’s suffrage—both were active debates in 1776; it was that they rejected abolition and women’s suffrage. They thought they were bad ideas. Most Americans like them at the time agreed with them, and millions still do.
“Which is why we don’t have anything to do with politics,” one Jehovah’s Witness explained as Sophie and I reached the town square and began our favorite Shabbat pastime: chatting up Jehovah’s Witnesses at the farmer’s market. “Politics is divisive. We don’t vote. We don’t celebrate the 4th of July or anything like that.”
“What about religion?” I asked. “Religion is just as divisive as politics.”
“Which is why we share the truth.”
I can’t argue with that, but Pastor Fornicator can and does.
On the other side of the square is Pastor Fornicator. That isn’t his real name; I call him that because he calls people at the farmer’s market fornicators. The fact that God called us to be fruitful fornicators in the Book of Genesis doesn’t faze him. Anyway, while the Jehovah’s Witnesses, as opposed to Jehovah himself, who seems quite bipolar in the Bible, are unwaveringly friendly and welcoming, Pastor Fornicator is always angry and venomous, yet, in his own way, no less convinced that he, too, is preaching the truth.
I also believe in truth. I even dare to call it Truth, Sanatan Dharma in Sanskrit: Eternal Truth. In Hebrew, this Truth is En od milvado: “there is nothing but That” (Deuteronomy 4:35), where That is Ehyeh, the infinite nondual I AM, manifesting all reality. Awakening as Ehyeh, you naturally live by Hillel’s Golden Rule: “What is hateful to you, do not do to another” (Shabbat 31a). Awakening and living the Rule are your highest calling.
I’ve shared this Truth with a number of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but they don’t see it. Pastor Fornicator never stops yelling long enough to anyone to speak with him at all.
As far as I’m concerned, this is the self-evident Truth the founders didn’t know then and few Americans—indeed, few humans—know today. Because we don’t, Trump reigns, the Earth’s atmosphere is already turning toxic, and there is nothing we can buy—not even a politician—that can stop either.
Happy 4th.
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