Tag Archives: Facebook

Am I doing enough about Donald Trump?

The Mission, , , , ,

My title is the question we all need to ask, whether we want to or not. I’m sure you have better things to do with July than fuss about the public servant who serves himself (as in,  you might be trying to survive what he’s already done). But we need to work together to get out of this mess before even worse things happen. Just the implementation of the huge bill the Congress just passed is going to do a lot of damage.

I’ve been trying to make “doing something about Trump” part of my life. For the most part, I like to leave government to God. But I keep getting the impression that the love of Jesus would lead him right into the middle of this mess.

Maybe I’ll post this again next week, too.
  • So I went to the John Lewis event on July 17 — I did not stay for the whole thing, but I added my presence and took a good picture (above).
  • I stopped being neutral with people about what I think about the destruction of the U.S. government and the economic consequences – housing crisis, healthcare gut, climate ignorance, gulag creation and military insanity are all high on my list.
  • I studied sociopaths and wrote that Trump qualifies.
  • I signed up to hear about the We Are America March from Philly to Washington DC Sep 6-19.

Facebook is certainly not enough

And yes, I posted the following on Facebook the other day (even though I’m not sure how anyone sees anything on Facebook, especially if they are under 45):

We need to keep up lest we just go along with Trump’s perverse playbook (like Congress does):

This morning, President Donald J. Trump told Republican members of Congress that his popularity is rising and that talk about the Epstein files is a distraction from what he insists is the real story: that former president Barack Obama cheated in the 2016 election. Trump insisted the cameramen cut their cameras when he made that accusation, although there was no break in the recording. He told the congressmembers: “[Y]ou should mention that every time they give you a question that’s not appropriate, just say, ‘Oh, by the way, Obama cheated on the election.’” — HC Richardson et al

I don’t think posting things, even by the brilliant Heather Cox Richardson, is enough. Even though Trump’s approval ratings are at 37% (thus he says they are soaring), we need an even greater tsunami of protest to wash away this scourge before more people die — and I mean that literally. Trump’s administration gutted the HIV/AIDS program which was the best thing Bush ever did. They put a 50% tariff on Lesotho and denim factories are already shutting down in one of the poorest places on earth (where they make Trump t-shirts for his own company). They destroyed USAID and are destroying FEMA. They are complicit in starving the Gazans. The spending bill will knock millions off already-unaffordable health insurance. They are wrecking the already-paltry Medicaid. It goes on and on, and the shoes are just beginning to drop. Most of them are scheduled for after the midterm elections.

Arguing seems to go nowhere

I would like to win the argument we are all having, if we are not numbed out. But if you look at the “dialogue” my Facebook post generated, that seems unlikely.

Here’s how it went after I shared the quote from Richardson:

Church friend:  And the walls came tumblin’ down
I would love to see this scumbag brought down by his own perverse and despicable behaviors

Childhood friend: Everything comes to light.
There’s a Bible scripture to that effect. I know the gist of the Bible but I cannot quote verses!?

Cali church member: Then the main stream media needs to come clean and admit they were lying to the American people for everything they said during the first term and here’s the tape https://x.com/highway_30/status/1948374675873993074?s=46

Church friend: I believe holding Trump accountable is a crucial primary step.
Additionally, Main Stream Media needs to stop succumbing to Trump’s moronic, baseless lawsuits and focus on reporting factual truth.
Regards Trumpy’s First Term, let’s talk about the Insurrection and start with naming Trump as its Leading Orchestrator and Traitor.
Let’s also hold him accountable in factual statements about Covid and his complete and utter mishandling of the devastating and horrific pandemic. Because of his lies and ineptness, 1.2 million Americans died needlessly. As he fed the American People false information about preventative measures & vaccines.
Regards your comment about Main Stream Media needing ‘to come clean and admit they were lying to the American people for everything they said during the first term’ … personally, I believe we received more accurate information about the damage from Trump’s first term than you are alluding to in your comment. Further, let’s look at Fox News and the Republicans who very literally are complicit in enabling Trump to promote his false rhetoric to the American People.
So, rather than putting the target solely on Main Stream Media, whose constantly being falsely attacked by Trump, barred from Press Conferences (which is cowardly, at best) and whose reporting is continually attacked by frivolous, baseless lawsuits, let’s place it where it truly belongs.
Let’s place responsibility accurately on: SCOTUS, for enabling a convicted felon to run for the office of president; Republicans, especially those in office, who deny the truth & facts about Trump; Tabloid ‘news’ organizations like Fox who blatantly report lies as truth.
If you want to talk about accountability than start with truth, honesty and legitimate facts.

Cali church member: so let the media slide in their false accusations? False accusations that the peddled every day of the 1st term and during the Biden administration? Oh yeah and about COVID. He went with Fauci’s plan to “flatten the curve” and allow the state governors to make their own decisions. Before I go any further did you agree with the rollout of vaccines?

Cali church member: https://x.com/kevinnbass/status/1839635641019081160?s=46

Church friend: Clearly you have chosen to buy into the completely false rhetoric that Trump & those who choose to deny medical facts and scientific reality. While you are certainly entitled to your opinion, when leaders indulge in this dangerous & false information, innocent people get hurt. Such as recommending ingesting bleach or Ivermectin. Reality is that real people, who were foolish enough to buy into those lies were seriously hurt.
Of course I agree with Vaccines, as any rational person should. Those vaccines were in process, 12 years prior to the pandemic. They were studied, tested and reviewed, fortunately. So when Covid hit, they were able to adjust & adapt the vaccines to utilize in fighting Covid.
The proof is in the reality that Covid was reigned in, here and throughout the world.
Vaccines have been used for decades safely and with tremendous efficacy. Like the Polio, Measles, Small Pox vaccines and many, many other vaccines.
Do me a favor and don’t bore me with your BS commentary any further, as they are taken straight from moron Trumps playbook, who is a serial liar, conman and has zero clue about these matters. Anyone that is willing to listen to him, and, worse, believe him, as far as I’m concerned, only shows how unwilling they are to deal in reality, facts and truth.
So, we shall part conversational company here, as I am unwilling to participate in this idiotic nonsense any further.
Buh bye

Former neighbor: They need an independent council for Obama if he or anyone on his team or is found guilty they need to suffer capital punishment. That is clearly a crime against humanity

High school friend: everything Barack Obama claimed was true. Russia interfered in the 2016 election and the court found that to be true but it did not affect the vote in any substantial way. That was the courts finding , let’s keep it real bro

Former neighbor: Cite the court case. please. Not some link to a news article. You could easily be lying.

High school friend: they need an independent council on the Epstein files because Donald Trump’s name was mentioned several times and no one has seen it.

Former neighbor: absolutely agree. the problem I see, is don’t you think Obama/Biden would have released that information during the election?

Church friend: Get a grip. There is no foundation in reality to the accusations against Obama for God’s sake! It is pure deflection against the Epstein scenario.
If ANYONE should be looked into regards cheating to become President it is Trump. And in that context I’m all for Capital Punishment for that sexual predator!

Former neighbor: And yet you make that statement without knowledge or even seeing the documents. Like I said appoint an independent council. They did it with trump and and independent council rule there was nothing.
The larger issue is how did we end up with people like you who make statement with no basis. Public Education at it’s finest.

Church friend: When? When was the independent council appointed regards Trump cheating in either election? Musk alluded to him cheating recently. Know why, cause he’s the one who helped him.
What possible reason would Obama have had for cheating in 2016? He wasn’t even running for election brainiac! What an asinine accusation.
Further, regards Epstein, not only is there basis, there are endless individuals stating Trump’s disgusting involvement, not to mention pictures and written comments from dumbass himself.
To your point: ‘how did we end up with people like YOU who make statements with no basis’

Dignity

Thanks to you if you got through my Facebook friends talking to each other. Some of them were dismissive. I think a few comments are a bit delusional. But they all represent some concentration, and they bothered to get engaged. I appreciated the responses. And I actually care about these people. If I met them at a party, I would talk to them. I have seen most of them in the past decade and one high school friend who resurfaced would be fun to catch up with. They matter.

Why in the world would we let someone like Trump make us argue? If he were your boss, you’d look for another job. If he were your uncle, you’d probably skip Thanksgiving. If he were your friend he would not be for long, since you see what he does to his friends (like Epstein). Manipulating us with lies and causing enough trouble for others in order to protect his personal power is what he has mastered.

When you read the comments to my Facebook post, you probably don’t see the beauty in each respondent. You don’t know them. We all know social media does not represent real persons, just a snippet of verbiage or snapshot of a moment. I have the benefit of knowing how each of these people care for others or are brilliant in their own way, I know a bit about their struggles and successes, their losses and graces. Most of them have faith.

Yet the Trump effect warps their dignity. Whatever distorted politics we are sorting out, we at least need to say a tidal wave of “NO!s” to dismissing our friends and hating our enemies. That may not be enough to stop the tyrants, but it will mean we have something left when they have passed through the social digestive system — which can’t be soon enough for me.

*******

Today is J.S. Bach Day! Somewhat respected is life and strangely dishonored after his death. His genius was later rediscovered along with the deep faith it served. Get to know him better at The Transhistorical Body.  

We are the media

Building community, Film/TV, Leadership, , , , ,

The other day at our pastor’s meeting we were talking about communication and all the different ways we try to hold together and influence the world as a network of cells and congregations in Christ. We are pretty good at holding together and influencing the world, but it is difficult.

In the middle of an elaborate dialogue about how we can best communicate, we had a little “Pentecost.” It centered on Facebook. We started talking about what Facebook makes us do to talk to people: how it restricts us, how it commodifies us, and how it tries to use us to make money. We asked, “Why are we doing this? What monster are we paying to communicate? What rules are we learning for relating?”

Be the media

Someone said, “Why don’t we just desert it and stop using the medium and focus on being the medium? We already have a great communication system. It is called living in community. Let’s focus on being the media, not on conforming to some other rubric. Let’s be face to face, not Facebook.” It was like a little fire burned through us. I heard Peter preaching “Be saved from this wicked and perverse generation!” in Acts 2. I have been building the Facebook pyramid for a long time. Increasingly, it tells me to produce bricks without straw. Why would I willingly do this with all the people I love best?

So I am going into the wilderness without Facebook all through the summer at least. Maybe I will be led to escape from all the other social media, as well. I won’t be Instagrammed any more or pinned, tumbled or tweeted, perhaps. I started saying good bye to my 1600+ friends on Facebook the other day. I could tell that I might be doing the right thing because it was hard to disentangle myself from that “everyday affair.” For one thing, it is not like I don’t use Facebook for good things, influence people for good, represent Jesus there or keep up with all sorts of loved ones.

But for another thing, in just one decade (surprisingly, the same decade in which Circle Thrift has been thriving) Facebook has conformed me to a brand new way to think of “friends,” to say happy birthday, to announce important things in my life and to present myself to the world. It has been fun and beneficial in some ways. But has it been right and are the results what I really want? I’m not so sure. The fact that it is hard to extract myself, makes me wonder. “Has the social media got so many of my friends locked in that I won’t even know anything about them unless Facebook mediates our communication?” That one question is enough to make me want to flee back to being a person again and not just an image or message mediated by a faceless machine. I think I want my face back.

Yesterday we celebrated how God honors us by including us in his spiritual reality and investing himself in ours. I am the vessel God chose to fill with his content. When the Holy Spirit came upon the gathered believers, God made his preferred media plain; it is people. God’s face can be seen in Jesus followers and in the acts of the body of Christ. Every time that reality gets undercut by locking it in a book, even the Good Book, especially Facebook, I think something goes missing. We lose the significance of God becoming incarnate in Jesus and undermine the reality that the Holy Spirit is continuing to incarnate Jesus in each and all of us.

So for the summer, for sure, I want to get rid of as much internet communication as seems reasonable and have a face-to-face season. The more I think about it, the more important it seems. I began wondering what “face-to-face” really meant, and I realized more about how conformed we have become to machines. If you are twenty, you’ve spent ten years with Facebook. Mark Zuckerburg may have influenced you more than Jesus when it comes to making relationships. The other day some therapists who were part of my research were lamenting that they often run into children texting their parents from their bedroom! One teen said, ”I don’t talk to my parents about my grades; they can check it all on line.” You probably have your own anecdotes, like all the times you want to say something to someone on the bus and you have to get them to stop looking at their screen or to take out their ear phones in order to do it.

Human communication

We may not be able to change the way the world works. It often caves in on itself anyway, so we don’t always need to figure that out. But as far as we are concerned as the body of Christ gathered as Circle of Hope, we should perfect the amazing, human communication system we already have, not conform to the monsters that eat our time and don’t produce truth and love. I am talking about perfecting the face-to-face network we have in our cells and public meetings, and all the other ways we connect in our neighborhoods and teams. Why shouldn’t I rely on you to speak the truth in love? Why would I “go over your head,” so to speak, and rely on some faceless machine to broadcast what the Spirit is offering through me? Why would I reduce your importance to a “like” icon or a comment?

Why shouldn’t I be saved from this perverse generation?! So I am going off social media so I can be social media. I am not interesting in damning all use of whatever “social media” is, or in adjudicating what being off it might mean as if I were trying to create some postmodern holiness code. Not me! I just want to reinforce our own communication system rather than spending the hours doing all the work it takes to use the machines that try to get in the middle of it and wheedle their way into being indispensable until they can steer me where they want and steer my riches into their coffers. What do you think? (Don’t tell me on my wall).

Will the new Amtrak mural fit with your aesthetic?

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Do “gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people” (whatever that might mean)? And what does Jesus think and feel about that? Let’s mentalize about it.

The other day one of our pastors, Jonny Rashid, posted an interesting article on Facebook about which I have been thinking ever since. It was a potpourri of commentary on changing Eastern cities in reaction to the new mural Amtrak and the National Endowment of the Arts have commissioned Philadelphia’s famous Mural Arts program to oversee. They want to do something to beautify a bit of the ride from 30th St. Station to the usually-deserted North Philadelphia station. Sarah Kendzior labeled the whole project an example of The Peril of Hipster Economics and Aljazeera printed her thoughts. Her criticism was in direct response to a Wall Street Journal article called Fighting Urban Blight with Art by Jessica Dawson.amtrak

Your aesthetic

Among the many colorful and true things in Kendzior’s article was this incendiary gem: “Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.” She did not define the term aesthetics, which was probably a good idea, since people are having trouble doing that. The term generally refers to the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty. What she really meant to say, probably, was that “hipsters tend to see people in relation to their aesthetic.”

We are not doing too much fighting about the philosophy of aesthetics these days, since it was a very modern invention of German philosophers and we are pretty much post-modern, or heading there. But we are talking a lot about the ideas and feelings that characterize and guide artistic movements — their aesthetic. Everything has a design aesthetic (Apple being notorious for this). But since in consumer capitalism people are also commodities it becomes logical to decide what your personal aesthetic is, the “look” that fits your “brand.” “Hipsters” (do we still call people hipsters?) have their own sense of what is aesthetically pleasing. Even more, they, as individuals, have their own aesthetic. They have a “look” they are constrained to present. That’s the part of all of this that interests me. In this sense, we are all becoming hipsters and have our own personal aesthetic.

ted mack agtWe should not be surprised that the great grandchildren of people who appeared on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour have multiplied into a society in which everyone can sing, dance and feel obligated to present themselves as a work of art, because America’s got talent! Everyone has a sense of how to present themselves according to their own aesthetic. We have TV shows devoted to our living rooms and wardrobes and the image-driven social media into which we are locked demands a certain art of self-definition. Critics will tell you if what you have done is “overworked” or over-designed because we are supposed to look like we don’t really fret over how we look! We are so generally narcissistic, as a society, that it might be possible, as Kendzior accuses, for people to see other people as elements, or not, of their aesthetic. Ethics may be in the process of quickly being reduced to aesthetics.

Facebookization

Is the new mural just more Disneyfication of the landscape? The Inquirer said, “Soon…droves of art-hungry tourists may be making” a “pilgrimage” to North Philly to see the strange experiment. Like the surreal Disney World carved out of the uninhabitable central Florida, a bit of unreality is creeping into North Philly. Like facades on Mainstreet USA, the artists can mask the reality of poverty and injustice behind their aesthetically-satisfying mural. Masking reality is the Disney specialty. Will the natives of North Philly dance for the tourists when they come to visit like “cast members” (that’s Disney employees are called) do in Florida? Will new North Philly trinkets be invented to sell as a memento of a tourist’s visit to the foreign country through which they have been speeding all these years?

Or is the new mural just a logical expression of the Facebookization of persons? Can we really even talk about differing communities talking to one another now (like Amtrak talking to North Philly), since relating is reduced to images connecting virtually so often? Everyone is required by the omnipresent social media engines to present themselves with some kind of aesthetic choice. How I decide to present my image is important, since most of our communication is reduced to images. Our lives tend to be captions to pictures, titles to images that represent our interests and accomplishments. We are reduced to gravatars and icons. We no longer even have to have someone take our picture; we’ve been reduced to selfies. Is it any surprise that so-called hipsters would be more interested in a neighborhood’s aesthetic than with the people in it? How it photographs is important to them.

The mural gives people still interested in ethics a perfect example of the insanity of how money is spent in Philly. $300,000 will be spent on a temporary mural while behind it people will keep scraping by and starving. It is an ethical nightmare — a Disney choice by Facebooked numbskulls, it would appear. But don’t blame it on the so-called hipsters, as if they actually clamoured for this mural or have some amazing influence on Amtrak! If anything, blame the one-percent who are decorating their infrastructure according to the aesthetic of conspicuous consumption. Hipsters ride the Megabus, not Amtrak! The hipsters are serving the one percent in their restaurants and trying to get a gig on the latest version of Ted Mack! The hipsters I know are much more likely to be a good neighbor than Amtrak. Like the people who claim North Philly as their native land, they are likely to be reduced to finding a rare, affordable place to live, not merely decorate.

Hard to stay conscious

I think it is important for Jesus-followers to argue the philosophies and unconscious actions that dominate our days. What Christians bring to the process is a demand for reconciliation: with God and with others. Then we can get somewhere with justice.

Commenting on Jonny’s post, Marquita said: “The mural being made has a greater benefit to the city in hiding what should be its shameful failure to adequately provide jobs and educational for its citizens.” So true.

Nick said: “Reconciliation is a process, and there’s room in the process for some redistribution to go along with the love. Now, how do we get the so-called ‘job creators’ to even join the process?” Great thought.

Great question! I am a pretty optimistic guy and I think God is with me when I prophecy to the powers that be. But unbelievers are shameless and greedy (and plenty of believers are too!). My hope remains in the message of reconciliation delivered by authentic people of God acting in an alternative community. Otherwise Disney, Facebook and their inevitable successors are the future. There is another future already present in Christ; we know Him.