Stand Up
“Stand up, Bradley,” my mother used to say to me. I slouched, my head hung forward. I was a “lazy breather,” inhaling through my mouth. At age 8, I felt timid, afraid.
Finally, at age 80, I’m standing up. When I think of it, I tighten my lower belly, pull back my shoulders, and try to walk symmetrically. Such a posture change helped rescue my hips from being replaced, and I feel more confident. Thanks, Mom! You helped me grow up and stand up.
Not that I am easily confident. External forces – the collapse of my UU ministry, the lack of interest in this website (even from family and colleagues), the steady imposition of blatant fascism in America aided by the reemergence of religious zealotry – daunt my efforts. I’m standing, but on shaky ground.
For fifty years, I used to stand up in the pulpit. I tried to give my best, to speak my truth and offer inspiration. Public speaking takes daring and skill. Most people dread and avoid it. I took it seriously, sometimes humorously, speaking intelligently, kindly, and frankly, even as I also tried to avoid pretension.
I also tried to avoid my tension, but towards the final sermons, I had pain in my knees. I would say what I saw and thought, trying to promote truth, beauty, and goodness in my way. For fifty years, in dozens of settings and hundreds of occasions, I stood, sometimes with joy, sometimes painfully.
“Always a seer is a sayer,” said Emerson. Often, sayers are unwelcome. Some praised my sermons; some didn’t. Now, I’m unimportant, unnoticed, and disgruntled. Unsupported and unpaid, I still blather forth. I still see; I say, my way.
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I’ve been reviewing the Salem Witch trials. What a sad and anguishing story. My hatred of arrogant religious people deepens. The madness of the Crusades and the Inquisition in the Old World eventually reached the New World. It isn’t reliably gone now. Such types are rife in our heritage and looming in our present. So, I see and say.
I see the demise of civility, intelligence, and national ideals in my America with sadness and anger. I see the same old stupid arrogance in religious zealots that once murdered my great, great-grandmother. What the hell is America becoming, and why are the worst people in charge?
We aren’t immune to mass stupidity allied with the force of law. I’m wary of Trump and the Republicans accusing their detractors of being anti-Christian even as they push their perverted form of it. They aren’t as blatantly superstitious, hypocritical, and cruel as was the case in Salem Village in 1692, but the power of group self-righteousness coupled with vindictive punishment persists, and it could grow. Witness the rush to prisons lately.
Witness the application of religious law in those church-run trials: confessing to being a witch and agreeing to testify against others as witches got you off. They murdered Grandma Martha for refusing to say she was a witch. They tortured her children to get evidence against her. They tied them “heel to neck,” feet tied to the neck from behind, until blood came out of their noses. (It is also called hogtying.) Even a four-year-old child was imprisoned along with all the others in a small, dank cell underground in the middle of winter. Prisoners had to pay for their own food and chains, and the sheriff confiscated their families’ assets if they couldn’t pay.
It wasn’t church and state, it was church as state. It was an early Christian nation.
What gets me is the old ploy of claiming God’s blessing and authority for such devilish ends. Fancy idealized words like “… humbly to betake ourselves to the Blood of the Everlasting Covenant,” and “lead us into the paths of Righteousness, for his own Name’s Sake.”*
Such sanctimony disgusts me. The long and short of it was legal self-righteous religious sadism.
Words like Covenant trigger me, me being “out” of it, allegedly. My stumble over them is trivial compared to Salem’s horrid past and our possible future. History is replete with tremendous tragedies. Piously accusing others of being witches, devils, goops, or terrorists, when coupled with law and weaponry, usually doesn’t work out well. How we regard and treat each other reverberates. Such trends in so-called law and order are not usually good signs.
Consider the plight of the 18-year-old hippy protester Manuel Paez Teran (who went by Tortuguita). His knee-jerk execution was quickly avoided in the media. He was protesting the destruction of a section of forest near Atlanta that was due to become the so-called Cop City. He had his hands in the air when he was shot by a group of police somewhere between 18 and 52 times. Though accused of shooting at the police, no gunshot residue was found on his hands. I wonder, did the policeman who fired the 18th shot (or was it the 52nd?) do so in self-defense?
Consider also the prison at Guantanamo, where Ridah Bin Saleh al-Yazidi was held for nearly 23 years without ever being charged. Fifteen are still there in 2025! Presidents Obama and Biden attempted to close it but were stymied. President Trump has signed an order to keep it open indefinitely.
Consider the shaved heads on prisoners accused of being terrorists (based on looks and tattoos) as they are bowed and ushered into the lucrative CECOT mega prison (Terrorism Confinement Center) in El Salvador. Only one-fourth of these people have committed crimes other than hiding without their papers. New state-level jails in Florida, Alabama, and Indiana are being built at about a billion dollars each.
Consider how President Trump publishes a “joke” image of himself as the fictitious Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in the movie “Apocalypse Now.” Instead of saying the despicable, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” the Trump-like character inserts the word “chipocalypse” as he threatens to send troops to Chicago. It’s part of his intimidation campaign, along with his referring to the Department of Defense as the Department of War.
Much like “preventative detention,” President Trump assumes “protective power” to allow him to bypass the Posse Comitatus Act (which prohibits the use of federal troops to enforce local laws). directing local National Guard and federal ICE military masked and armed agents wherever he claims rampant crime needs such “peacekeeping,” no matter the edgy reactions likely to ensue.
Consider the quick knee-jerk reaction to the ugly assassination of Charlie Kirk, blaming it on “the left” and claiming “we’re” under attack, even before knowing who did it or why. Then the blame shifted to anyone criticising their new martyr, even those using Kirk’s own words. No Metal of Freedom, no flags at half staff for state representative Melissa Hortman, killed in her home by a man dressed as a cop. Her killer shot and killed other Democrats that night, and he had a long list of similar liberals to go after. Her patriotism is an ignorable thing; amplifying Kirk’s is an unavoidable thing.
Consider that even Baptists are concerned that Christian nationalism is eroding the protections of the separation of church and state. Trump created the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, asserting that “We have to bring back religion in America, bring it back stronger than ever before… We’re defending our rights and restoring our identity as a nation under God,” he sanctimoniously asserted.
Restoring – like in Salem?
Like in Gaza, where U.S. policy and weapons have aided Israel’s Netanyahu to kill thirty times more innocents than were killed by Hamas? Does magnifying that initial wrong by thirty make it better? Claims of bringing down whole hospitals and other buildings in Gaza to “defend ourselves” are too preposterous to contemplate. Netanyahu’s and Trump’s smirking about creating high-end resorts there epitomize the much-vaulted, though often bloody, Judeo-Christian Heritage.
Consider finally the decades-long successful effort by the Federalist Society and other right-wing organizations to install extremely conservative Catholics in the Supreme Court. Leonard Leo (considered the 3rd most powerful person in the world) takes credit for helping to get six Catholics of the nine justices on our Supreme Court. This court overturned Roe v Wade and has sanctioned Trump to invade cities and do whatever he wants as president.
You can tell how sincere Trump is about religion and the Bible by how he held it upside down at a forced photo op, but then wouldn’t place his hand on it when being sworn in. Religion is a prop, as phony as the Botox in the lips of evermore ladies in his administration. That he was propelled to power by conservative Christians makes me wary and resentful of religious zealots in our former civil and secular country.
It is assumed we should be “people of faith.” Okay, but faith in what? Faith in ourselves as citizens in a self-run republic, home of ever more diverse and splendorous diversity, equity, and inclusion?
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Alone, and without recognition or reward, I try to stand up anyway. Who am I to stand, speak, and write? A citizen of my country and this world.
I imagine telling Donald Trump respectfully but intently, “You’re just a temporary president; I’m a lifelong citizen!” He might glower, but I’d be the hero.
We don’t need king-like presidents; we need citizens.
The word citizen originated in Latin civis, meaning citizen, but also similar to cité (meaning city). In Old French in the 13th century, it emerged citesein or citezein, similar to dienizen, meaning “one within.” This influenced the English in the 14th Century, expanded from dwellers in a city to those in a nation.
The word nation brings this home for me because Thomas Paine, a core Founding Father, distinguished between a government and a nation. For him, a nation is the people themselves and how they’re living. Citizens of a nation form a government. Government serves the nation.
So, when I assert, I am a “citizen of my country and this world,” I am expanding the “city” I’m in to all the Earth and all of us in this “nation” of a world. All humanity is us. We’re in this together. We all breathe from the same air. (More on a flag for this, in a bit.)
The minimum thing we do as citizens, the barely adequate, is to vote. The maximum is to also be fully and authentically ourselves, sharing our values, thoughts, and hopes with other sovereign citizens. Democracy isn’t “over there,” it’s “in here;” we each are the “one within” among others, citizens of our planet’s “nation.” Democracy isn’t achieved in just the clunky, divided outcomes, the clumped distortions, of red and blue; it is how well we live up to ourselves with each other.
But how well are we doing that? And should we expect those caught in the shotgun hairs of public service to fix with compromised mechanisms what we can’t? Arrogant authoritarian leadership seems to be producing a glitzy show, complete with glamor girls and TV stars, but it’s all blustered up, covered over, and staged. It’s made-up crises and scary military threats. It’s selfish billionaires funding elections thousands of times more easily than my mere five-dollar donation.
Daily, I delete scores of worthy appeals. Candidates and causes from around the country compete for my meager dollars. If I give to some, lots more come. It mushrooms, daily doses of dire need. Never do they seek advice beyond dollars. I can load up my excellent federal senators and local state representatives with more surveys, getting them to do what I know they’ll do anyway, but I can’t expect them to pull the smooth handles that work our government. They’re limited people, and there are no smooth handles.
Meanwhile, those pulling warped handles are utterly arrogant. Humility isn’t their way. Their view of government is arrogantly divisive. They campaigned on the slogan that “government is bad for us,” and now that they’re in, it is. We’re moving from Social Security to antisocial insecurity.
Here, I pause to remember what the Historian of Religion, Houston Smith, defined as humility. He told me humility should not be thought of as “I am lowly or unworthy,” but rather, “I am myself fully in such a way as to allow others to be themselves fully.” This is the sort of humility that sparks an enlivened democracy. It is neither passive nor arrogant. It is a “live-and-let-live” humility not estranged from daring or exuberance.
Another idea by Smith fits with this: how we partake of the Eternal, the Everlasting. Being in the everlasting is something we do while we’re alive. He pictures long flows below and above us. Below flows the cosmos, Earth, and Life. It comes before us and will last after us. Above is a similarly eternal culture, the world of words, identities, stories, and civilization. It too came before us and will last after. We participate in such eternities as we live. We’re built of them, take from them, and return to them in our ways. They go on, steered this way or that somewhat, but ultimately, on.
As a citizen of my city, state, country, and world, my current patriotic use of our national flag is to fly it upside down, an international symbol of a country in distress. I bemoan what is happening to our people, nation, and environment. Some of the worst of our past is roused up again, flapping the flag, presuming the cross, repeating the sins.
Masked, armed zealots dutifully obeying orders to militarize our cities and imprison whole classes and races of our neighbors? Firing thousands of decent workers and replacing them with ideologs and sycophants from a propaganda mill? Mocking our climate predicament and deliberately wrecking those technologies that would help rescue and remedy it? Supplying sanctions and weapons to murder Palestinians by the thousands? Changing “Defense” to “War” and waging it on places that vote Democratic?
I won’t salute the flag for that crap.
They can pretend to kiss it, sport it on their lapels, team it up with shiny crosses, but what they’re finally doing is to defile it.
If we can rescue our country from this coup (that started with the assassination of JFK), I’ll again love and salute our flag. It’ll fly, right-side-up, above the state flag, and that one will fly above our city flag.
And above them all, I’d fly a Center of the World Flag.**
The Center of the World flag would picture Earth from space, centered on where I live. There would be no countries marked, just the oceans, continents, and clouds. No UN. No NATO. No countries. It would affirm the higher reality and my allegiance above all those other flags.
Crucially, the other side of that flag would be centered on some place on the other side of the Earth where others live. By affirming that I live at the center of my world, my town at the center of its world, I affirm that others are at their center. I affirm a transnational live-and-let-live ethic.
Everyone is at their center, and we all live in the higher reality of Earth’s ecosystems. This isn’t against political divisions; it’s above them.
Just as the founders of my beloved America stood up to their time, just as others stood up to theirs, as it grew to accommodate more inclusive diversity and equity, so do we citizens need to stand up to rescue what our government should be.
I would go beyond even this to assert we are and should be the live-and-let-live citizens of planet Earth. I stand in my way, and although I can feel alone, I’m not alone. Millions participated in various protests, from the Women’s March to the No Kings March. We citizens will not take the insults and assaults of a wannabe king imposing sick religion and warped laws to divide and conquer our nation.
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I paused for days, looking for a better way to end this essay. Then a long line of motorcycles, pickups, and cars paraded through my little town. Hundreds of loud, adamant supporters of the slain conservative firebrand, Charlie Kirk, showed how grieved, angry, and numerous they are.
Kirk was one of the few to broadcast his extreme views under his own name. Otherwise, most online authors and commenters hide behind phony names and avatars, letting them try to outdo each other with outlandish accusations and ideas. I’ll give Charlie credit for that. I’ll also critique his supposed “dialogue” with others. It was more a way to insult them while pumping up his cruel views. He didn’t deserve to be assassinated, no matter who was behind that.
Some wonder if he was a sacrificial lamb, a martyr used to pep up participation in his Turning Point Action organization. (Although Kirk claimed in a tweet that they had sent 80 buses to the January 6th inauguration in 2016, it was actually 7, carrying some 350 people. Charlie later deleted that tweet and distanced the riders from the insurrection.)
Republicans are worried that the public has turned against them and they are due to lose bigly in the 2024 midterms. As a martyr, many would rally to join Turning Point. Israel was also worried that criticism of its war on Gaza would draw off younger voters. All it took was confusion and accusation to direct their ire against “the left,” no matter how ill-fitting that was in this case and most cases of political violence. As Stephen Miller vowed violence, Elon Musk chimed in, “Fight or die is what it comes down to.” The facts of which “side” is committing and threatening violence were lost in riled accusations.
Consider what Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, who dared to criticize the across-the-board support for Trump and his MAGA/Project 25 agenda:
“Trump called Kirk a “martyr,” ordered flags lowered across the country, and dispatched Air Force Two — with Vice President J.D. Vance aboard — to transport Kirk’s casket from Utah to his hometown in Arizona. As Google searches for “civil war 2” spiked, Trump announced a federal investigation into people on “the Left,” and the national conversation was set ablaze by his powerful surrogates.
“The Left is the party of murder,” Elon Musk declared, adding, “If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is fight or die.” “We are at war,” said Steve Bannon. “Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us,” said Jesse Watters. “They sent a trained sniper to assassinate Charlie Kirk…” tweeted Laura Loomer — and millions listened.”
There were no flags flown at half staff for Representative Milissa Hortman, her husband, and their dog, all murdered by a rabid right-winger posing as a cop, a man who had a long list of other Democrats to target. No Medal of Freedom for her. No sympathy or alarm for the children killed as they prayed in church. Such patriots and innocents were mostly ignored. Trump’s patriotism is to pit one side of our society against the other. A mere third of the voting public is gaining total control.
Kinzinger went on:
“Reports surfaced that the White House considered revoking tax-exempt status for nonprofits that support speech the administration dislikes — compiling lists, naming organizations, and exploring punitive measures. Vice President Vance blamed an “incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism,” pointing to outlets and foundations as part of an imagined network…
“[Stephen] Miller vowed to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again… in Charlie’s name.” Congressman Clay Higgins urged using government power to punish critics — revoking licenses, blacklisting businesses, even stripping driver’s licenses.
“This is the language of intimidation. The evidence is thin; the intention is clear: to rile supporters and intimidate critics. FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened ABC’s broadcast license after Jimmy Kimmel mentioned the assassin possibly being a Trump supporter, prompting ABC to suspend Kimmel rather than face regulatory pressure.”
Freedom of speech is thus owned. “Persons” (meaning corporations in the Supreme Court’s view) have unlimited power to pump their views into our political processes secretly. They have gigantic loudspeakers blasting out their slick, selfish views, overpowering the speech of ordinary persons. Musk, perhaps the richest person in the world, accuses “the left” of being “the party of murder.” “Our choice is to fight or die,” he assumes from his circle of protection.
President Trump could have calmed down the upset at Kirk’s funeral. Instead, he blatantly said, “I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them.” He instead wants to jail those humorists and journalists who criticize him. This, though, he has supplied comedy gold for decades, said comedian Stephen Colbert. “I give this guy a little poke, and I enjoy it,” said Colbert, “and I love it that people enjoy it too.” So do I, brief relief from ominous trends.
Cancelling Kimmel was cancelling his audience. No jokes allowed, or intelligent argumentation. Huge corporate powers, playing with billions, are cowed by Trump’s threats, hiding behind bland nothingisms. Our humorists, current Court Jesters, were the only talking heads to bring news to us along with the jokes.
Fortunately, so many people threatened to drop their Disney and related subscriptions that they relented and hired Kimmel back.
The Salem Witch Trials lasted only a few months. A few teenage girls put on shows of being possessed by witches. Hundreds languished in cold jails. Nineteen were quickly murdered. Their Puritan Church believed their accusers and hurried to execute the accused. Superstitious beliefs became the force of law.
The force of law can be devilish, as we saw in Salem, in the Nazi death camps, and we’re seeing in Gaza. Sometimes, all it takes is accusing others.
ICE, the federal government’s largest police force, the ones using unmarked vehicles and masked agents to pull people out of their lives and put them in prisons, now advertises for new recruits, offering up to $50,000 to sign up. Over 100,000 have applied. Could ICE be directed to hound those who speak out against Trump’s fascist ways?
Do you see why it’s risky for me to stand up? Do you see why it’s important that I don’t do so alone?
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Footnotes
*Transcription — Salem Village Church Covenant (1689)
In order hereunto,
We resolve uprightly to study what is our duty, & to make it our grief, & reckon it our shame, whereinsoever we find our selves to come short in the discharge of it, & for pardon thereof to betake humbly to betake our selves to the Blood of the Everlasting Covenant.
And that we may keep this covenant, & all the branches of it inviolable for ever, being sensible that we can do nothing of our selves, We humbly implore the help & grace of our Mediator may be sufficient for us: Beseeching that whilst we are working out our own Salvation, with fear & trembling, He would graciously work in us both to will & to do. And that he being the Great Shepherd of our souls would lead us into the paths of Righteousness, for his own Names Sake. And at length receive us all into the Inheritance of the Saints in Light.
(Signed / followed by list of members; dated 24 November 1689)
Source: transcription of the Salem Village church records (Church Book), reproduced online by the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, University of Virginia.
Here is ChatGPT’s summary of the Covenant:
This covenant was the community’s declaration that it stood as a holy society, answerable to God for its purity and obedience.
Three years later, in the crisis of 1692, that same community justified the extraordinary measures taken against the accused by appealing to such covenantal obligations. The pledge to “work out salvation with fear and trembling” translated, in practice, into a readiness to purge suspected corruption by extreme means. John Proctor, writing from prison in July 1692, complained that his sons and others “were tied Neck and Heels till the blood gushed out at their noses,” and that such torments were inflicted until false confessions could be forced. What the covenant had described as a humble reliance on divine grace had become, in the frenzy of the trials, a justification for coercion and cruelty.
This juxtaposition—between the idealized language of covenant and the brutal reality of the trials—highlights a central tension in the Salem story. The very framework that Salem Village leaders had set forth as a godly charter for their life together became, under the pressure of fear and suspicion, the rationale for acts whose violence and injustice reverberate to this day.
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** This idea sprouts from the founder of the discipline History of Religions (who happened to have his office on the 3rd floor of my seminary), Mircea Eliade. Eliade noted how often people would consider themselves The People. Others were “over there” and “less.” In the center of their village, they’d plant a pole, the Center of the World.
I got to thinking, that’s typical and okay. We all live where we do with our people. It’s common. It happens all over and again and again. But where is the center of the surface of the Earth? It is anywhere. It is everywhere. Personal and extensive, it is the “one within” in everyone. Ideally, we get to be that wherever we are, whoever we are.***
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*** I got this existentialist image from my former Unitarian Universalism. Each of us is unitary, and that is universal. Everyone is the center of their universe of perception, identity, and story. Everyone is both worthy and free, “… endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Including jokes.
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