Lamentations

no more sad songs

One of the greatest influences on my life has been the life and work of the late Harry Chapin.

In one of Chapin’s songs he sings,

Stop singing these sad songs
Just tell me ‘bout the good times
I have heard that cold hard truth so many time before
Stop singing these sad songs
Just tell me ‘bout the good times, baby
‘Cause I don’t want to hear them old heart breaking sad songs anymore

It’s a lyric that any of the minor prophets could have written. It’s a lyric I have been feeling every time I have started to write something over the last few weeks and I’ve convinced myself not to write over and over again because nobody’s got time for my sad songs.

Even when I click on the latest episode of podcasts I like to follow or I scroll down to a TikTok creator I appreciate, I feel the impulse to scroll past them as soon as I hear the sad song they are singing. Those Jewish prophets who always make me feel at home and with whom my soul resonates are not a place I feel like I can turn to in these days in which it feels like the hits just keep coming and the debt keeps growing and the troubles keep multiplying.

Earlier this week I started a new post that was going to be a positive list of some of my favorite things. I was making an honest attempt to bring some levity and beauty into the world. But the longer I wrote the more I felt like I was simply fiddling while Rome burned or I felt like that little character in the meme drinking his coffee at the kitchen table while the house was burning down around him as he eternally says, “It’s fine.”

So I stopped writing again.

Quite a while ago there was a report out of the U.K. from the British Bible Society about a “quiet revival” that said large numbers of young people were coming back to the Church. Everyone was very excited about it. Sadly, it turns out it was a misrepresentation of data. There really was and is no “quiet revival” among young adults or otherwise. Christianity Today reported that the claim was officially withdrawn by the BBS and that data actually indicates a continued decline in overall religious adherence in the U.K.

We are desperate for some good news and cursed are those who debunk the reports of good things happening.

Recently a TV pastor claimed to have been briefed, along with a number of other evangelical pastors, by a federal government official about news about to break about UFOs, extraterrestrial contact and Christianity. A bunch of other pastors used social media to indicate that they were included in that meeting too. A few pastors, who I appreciate, used social media to mockingly share they were not included in that meeting and were now questioning their ministry as well as their lives. And then the original pastor who made the claim confessed he’d made up the details about the UFOs and extraterrestrial life and…basically he lied and confessed to lying without saying he lied.

Nothing to see here. Carry on. Go about your business.

The Supreme Court just ruled that state governments are within their constitutional right to gerrymander as long as they gerrymander along political lines and not racial lines. And somehow that makes sense to people. States quickly went to work gerrymandering, even suspending voting already underway, and making changes along “political lines” that have already promised to disenfranchise voters of color. Somehow this a positive constitutional move, we are being told, because creating safeguards guaranteeing racial representation was the real racism and the danger to our democracy. Memphis, with a population that is 64% black, has been divided into three unnatural districts to provide the GOP with complete control over the state.

Nothing to see here. Jim who? Carry on. Go about your business as usual.

I’m not a fan of any party in government gerrymandering and drawing unnatural boundaries to control votes. But when the Supreme Court assures us that there’s no racism in the United States you have to ask more than a few questions about competency, and the danger of powerful, wealthy people losing touch with the reality most of us are living in. It is imperative for a fair and just society to provide representation for minorities, which means representation that looks like them, shares their story, feels their pain and knows what brings them joy.

Meanwhile, while other countries around the world are responding to the Epstein files and the powerful people implicated in abuse, exploitation, and human trafficking in those files, we carry on here, hurrying to get to the next news cycle, insisting there is nothing and no one to see or prosecute here. The damage this is doing to victims and survivors in and outside of these files is immeasurable. The President of the United States reportedly complained to then Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene that his “friends will get hurt” by exposing the abusers connected to the Epstein files.

Nothing to see here. Old news. Carry on. Let’s get on to new news.

Since the last time I posted we’ve learned from the Federal Government that the first 60 days of the Iran war (which apparently isn’t a war at all) has cost at least $25 billion dollars with some estimates the real cost has been somewhere around $70 billion dollars. But we can’t fund healthcare or social assistance programs or USAID making the world a safer place. The war that is not a war that was supposed to be well over by now, according to the President and his Secretary of Defense who clearly did not know what they were talking about, continues to incur billions of dollars in operating costs without a reasonable resolution in sight. As I write this, it seems that the best outcome may turn out to be that Iran will agree to plan that will essentially be the same plan agreed to under Obama that Trump previously derisively described as a lousy deal and tore up, removing the restriction on uranium enrichment that led us to where we are today.

Thanks Joe Biden.

But there’s nothing to see here. Everything is great. The only problem is with me and that I apparently don’t have a single happy song in my repertoire.

Let me get back to you.