There’s a process in twelve step recovery programs of making amends for harms we have caused others.
It’s designed to help us repair our relationship with others and with ourselves.
We do this by owning our part in whatever resentments we carry around as we take a thorough moral inventory of ourselves.
We do this because any business that doesn’t regularly take an honest inventory of it’s salable and unsalable goods can never really have an honest accounting of it’s actual value.
Remove grandiosity and dishonesty from the equation so we can better know ourselves and build honest self-esteem on solid ground.
We do this so we can hold our heads up high once again.
It’s based on humility and an honest desire to own our mistakes.
Often involving financial restitution, ask anyone who has thoroughly been through the process and they will tell you that its money well spent.
If this works on individuals, it stands to reason it would work on a country as well.
Our national character in this moment could use a thorough moral inventory and an honest desire to make right harms done.
We’ve been through a traumatic experience during the Trump years - and his legacy is still very much in effect in our body politic.
The patient is still bleeding as it were - the un-sober, unethical and abusive aspects of his presidency will linger for generations - unless we do the hard work on ourselves as a nation that is necessary to make a full recovery.
The root of any addiction or character defect is generally self-centered fear.
When that state of mind warps our natural instincts for survival it turns into what we witnessed with Donald Trump.
A man who was willing to constantly call on our darker angels to appease and cover for his own deep insecurity, inferiority and resentments.
Trump was a textbook example of what we refer to in recovery as the ‘isms’.
As we reflect on the powerful legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this weekend we would do well to ponder our own moral inventory as a nation.
We are once again in tumultuous times when it comes to race and systematic inequality.
One of our two main political parties goes out of its way to strip voting rights, educational opportunities and healthcare from Black Americans; while continuing to prop up a system designed to limit their opportunities economically and a justice system that punishes them disproportionally.
Agonizingly often, we witness the meting out of grotesque brutality by un-elected ‘officers of the law’ on American streets.
We see the sickening videos over and over again where police officers become judge, jury and executioner - and sometimes do it with a look of entitled impunity believing that they themselves are above the law.
Just this weekend another video - this time the tasing death of Keenan Anderson at the hands of the LAPD.
They killed an unarmed 31 year-old teacher who was asking for help at the scene of a traffic accident.
Another abhorrent and shameful death of a young black man at the hands of law enforcement.
Something that has become all to common in the United States of America.
The fact that Mr. Anderson’s cousin was one of the founders of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement makes it doubly heart-wrenching and caustic.
We should all be sick of bearing witness to obvious racial targeting by the police and demanding systemic change.
While many of us are in fact asking for that change to occur (see Summer 2020) the GOP is still feeding the sort of toxic rhetoric designed to manipulate people to hate their fellow citizens.
They do it with dog whistles and by hiding behind flags and badges and institutions. By constantly projecting the image and iconography that proclaims that they are in fact the ‘good guys’.
‘Make America Great Again’ was not too subtle in broadcasting what exactly that phrase meant.
The disdain and fear of ‘the other’ and the desire to dole out punishment to those that step out of line was a constant theme at Trump rallies - and was always met by cheers from the crowds looking to slake their thirst for blood.
Americans in the last century would bring sack lunches to lynchings after church on Sunday: Moms showing their kids what ‘southern justice’ looked like and that the murder of innocent human beings as public spectacle was somehow in line with still being a Christian.
Its insanity and evil anyway you look at it yet there it is in the faces and the rhetoric of the modern white supremacist movement in American today.
‘America First’ & MAGA/CPAC/GOP are all courting the same ignorance as a Klu Klux Klan Grand Wizard in the last century.
It’s also no secret that Donald Trump’s father was arrested at a KKK rally in NYC in 1927 and I have personally heard the Donald use the ’n-word’ on the ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ set.
He also clearly discriminated against black contestants when choosing his ‘winners’.
MAGA was an attempt to make white Americans nostalgic for a time that was pre-MLK’s ‘March on Washington’.
A time when racial inequality was on full display in every aspect of American life.
‘Separate but Equal’ enshrined into the law the worst instincts of human kind.
At the time of the infamously racist SCOTUS decision in ‘Plessy vs Ferguson’ of 1896 was the equivalent of the sort of white supremacist dogma we hear today - and wasn’t fully challenged in American jurisprudence until ‘Brown vs. Board’ of Education in 1954.
MAGA & the modern GOP are referring back to a pre-civil rights era in our national life.
They are doing it because it allows white men and women to exert their control and the exploitation of others in the hopes that it becomes firmly ingrained in every aspect of society until it becomes accepted, once again, as ‘that’s just the way it is…’.
Normalizing racism is the mission statement of MAGA.
I was watching the excellent Ken Burn’s ‘The U.S and the Holocaust’ the other night and was startled to hear the words of Charles Lindbergh in his address to the American people on behalf of ‘America First’.
The famous pilot was imploring USA to not take a side against Nazi Germany on behalf of preserving the white European race.
His antisemitism and racism were startling but I found in Lindbergh’s words more than an echo of Jim Jordan and the GOP, the constant trolling on the House floor and demands to defund military support for Ukraine to appease Putin and Russian aggression.
Many in the GOP make the same ‘American First’ claims as Lindbergh once did, aiming their isolationist rhetoric meant to demean a democratic ally under attack by an authoritarian aggressor while saying we should instead ‘protect our border’.
They mock the suffering of innocent people while bending their followers minds towards thinking of themselves as the real victims.
Which is obviously the loudest dog whistle of the modern political era and an echo of the Lindbergh era ‘America First’ propaganda that Jewish refugees would come and take away American jobs at the advent of World War Two.
Charles Lindbergh was obviously a total racist, one of the many such we are taught to revere in America’s classrooms.
The same reductionist historical narrative the GOP is fighting so hard to protect and perpetuate now.
I had heard of Charles Lindbergh long before I had heard of the ‘Tuskegee Airmen’ even though President Roosevelt apparently went to his grave believing Charles Lindbergh was a full-fledged Nazi agent. They left that part out in the classrooms of my youth.
Perhaps a clear-eyed view of American history along the lines of the moral inventory I described earlier is in order.
Only with the honest disinfectant of sunlight can real truth be seen.
As we pause this weekend to remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the tremendous gifts his life and teachings were to the soul of this nation, we should all recommit to the hard work of self-examination, and selfless service.
Bending the arc of the moral universe even further toward justice and equal opportunity for all people so we can one day become that shining city on the hill that great men dream about.
Noel, I'll buy your book when you write it.
I truly enjoy your writing - as a friend of Bill W - i find the 12 steps to be a fantastic guide to living and growing in balance in the midst of all the social/political madness -