Someone sent me a meme last week shortly after the horrific events at the capitol. I received it later in the week too, but it was that first person’s reaction to the meme (and the meme itself), that really irked me.
It was essentially a conversation where one side yells, “The Republicans are to blame.”
Then the other side yells, “The Democrats are to blame.”
Then a third side yells, “No, we are all to blame because we let you fight each other instead of fighting for us” – or something to that effect.
I remember it made me mad. My first thought, to be honest, was to be irritated because only hours after an attempted coup in our country, social media had done what it does best – turned it into a game.
Then I showed it to my oldest and she said, without hesitation, “Dad, that’s what guilty people say when they want to share the blame.”
Out of the mouths of babes.
I have voted for people from both parties and I have never considered myself very political, apart from stealing yards signs when I collected them and could actually run without getting winded. But all this week I have been thinking about the events of that day. Maureen and I sat down with the children to talk about it. We watched coverage on television. We prayed together for our country. We avoided talk of who is to blame and we talked about ways we could be people of peace.
But I kept being bothered by that silly Internet post and Ace Number One’s reaction to it. Then I figured out why.
It was always going to end like this. It is hard to say that and not sound arrogant or haughty, or better than those who backed the man. But that is the reaction of so many young people with whom I’ve talked about it. So let’s think about this for a minute.
When you begin your campaign by insulting people from other countries and spewing racist nonsense, you attract people who buy into that.
When you yourself have a history of corruption and surround yourself with people who are corrupt, when you begin your term in office by substituting the truth with alternative facts, when you promise to care for the most vulnerable at the expense of the living, and when you reinstitute a policy that actively seek the death of other people, you can hardly be surprised when followers begin to copy you.
When you tell violent people to stand back and stand by, when you simply refuse to accept that which is fact, and when you were default reaction is to condemn other people by making fun of them, ridiculing their families, insulting them on social media, and bullying other people to acquiesce to your demands, how can anyone be surprised that we are here?
When you ignore science, when you downplay the greatest threat to humanity in decades, when you not only hide the truth from people but knowingly and willingly lie about what you know, you are not called a leader. You are called a despot.
When I was a child, my father told me a story about a small boy who went up a mountain and, even though the child was wrapped in a coat and a hat, the air around him was frigid and the boy was cold. A snake approached the boy and begged to be picked up and kept warm. The child refused, “If I picked you up, you will bite me.”
The snake begged again and again saying that he would not bite the boy if the boy would only pick him up and keep him warm and take him down the mountain with him.
Finally, the boy gave in. My father never told me whether the boy gave in because there was no other option or because the boy didn’t like the other options that he saw or if the boy was simply overcome by the sales pitch the snake put forth. But one thing was clear, the boy believed the lies.
When they got to the bottom of the mountain, the boy took the snake out of his coat and placed him on the ground. The snake recoiled and bit the boy. The boy was stunned.
“You promised. You promised. You said if I helped you, you would not bite me.”
The snake, slithering away into the darkness, finally told the truth.
“You knew what I was when you picked me up.”
The snake bites.
And we knew it all along.
