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!

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. 

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 some daring beyond 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.  

——-

My hatred of arrogant religious people is peaking.  I’ve been reviewing the Salem Witch trials.  The madness of the Crusades and the Inquisition in the Old World came to the New World then.  It isn’t reliably gone now.  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 who once murdered my great, great-grandmother.  What the hell is America becoming, and why are the worst people in charge? 

I’m wary of Trump and the Republicans accusing their detractors of being anti-Christian even as they push their form of it.  Attacking with defensiveness is a winning tactic.  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 to vindictive punishment persists – and could grow.  We aren’t immune to mass stupidity coupled with the force of law.  Witness the rush to prisons.

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. 

What gets me is the old ploy of claiming God’s blessing and authority for devilish ends.  Fancy idealized words like, “… humbly to betake our selves to the Blood of the Everlasting Covenant,” and “lead us into the paths of Righteousness, for his own Names Sake,” disgust me.  The long and short of it was self-righteous religious sadism.*

Words like covenant trigger me.  My stumble over them is trivial compared to this horrid past and our possible future, especially religiously-influenced trends in so-called law and order. 

Consider the plight of the 18-year-old hippy protester Manuel Paez Teran (who went by Tortuguita).  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.  He was protesting the destruction of a section of forest near Atlanta due to become the so-called Cop City.  I wonder, did the policeman who fired the 18^th shot (or was it the 52^nd?) 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 still remain 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 (on the basis of looks and tattoos) as they are bowed and ushered into the 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 prisons in Florida, Alabama, and Indiana are being built at a cost of about one billion dollars each. 

Consider how President Trump publishes a “joke” image of himself as the fictitious Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, only 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 changing the Department of Defense to the Department of War. 

Consider that Baptists are concerned that Christian nationalism is eroding the protections of the separation of church and state.  Asserting that “We have to bring back religion in America, bring it back stronger than ever before,” Trump created the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.  “We’re defending our rights and restoring our identity as a nation under God, “[W]e will protect the Judeo-Christian principles of our founding.”  Restoring and protecting like in Salem?

Like in Gaza, where U.S. policy and weapons have aided Netanyahu’s Israel 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 in order to “defend ourselves” are too preposterous to contemplate or parrot.  Netanyahu’s and Trump’s smirking about creating high-end resorts there epitomize the much-vaulted, though often bloody, Judeo-Christian Heritage. Gaza is the disgusting shadow of that 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 3^rd most powerful person in the world, takes credit for helping to get six conservative Catholics of the nine justices on our Supreme Court.  The court that overturned Roe v Wade sanctioned Trump to invade cities and do whatever he wants as the 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 secular country. 

—–

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 in my mind telling Donald Trump respectfully but intently, “You’re just a temporary president; I’m a 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,” and is also similar to cite (meaning “city”).  In Old French in the 13^th century, it emerged citesein or citezein, similar to dienizen, meaning “one within.”  This influenced the English in the 14th Century, returning them to citizens, expanding from dwellers in a city to a nation. 

The word nation brings this home for me because of Thomas Paine’s distinction between a government and a nation.  For him, a nation is the people themselves and how they’re living.  Citizens of a nation form and steer a government.

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.”  All humanity is us.  We’re in this together.  Thomas Paine wrote, “My country is the World. My religion is to do good.” Me, too.

(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 “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 and powerfully than my mere five-dollar donation can. 

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. 

Many of those now pulling warped handles are utterly arrogant.

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, Pride was the foundation and worst. But pride didn’t mean being glad about oneself; it meant arrogance, putting oneself over others, and at their expense. Some tried to be so humble as to disappear, not to be proud. They fell for the sin of misunderstanding what is really good and how to live up to oneself. Phony humility impedes authenticity and participation in a healthy society.

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.

Smith’s other idea that 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 participate in 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, I currently fly our national flag upside down, an international symbol of distress.  I bemoan what is happening to our people, nation, and environment.  Some of the worst of our past is rousing up, 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?  Threatening war on Iran for its potential development of a nuclear weapon, while not mentioning the hundreds Israel houses? 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, wear a shiny cross as if jewelry, 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 show and honor life as it is on this lovely blueball planet. It would affirm a higher reality and allegiance above all those other flags.

It says, “I and mine, we of this place here have the right to live well here.”

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, and confirming that others are at their center, I affirm a transnational live-and-let-live ethic. 

It is as Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, “The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.” 

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.   

End

—–

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 tyed 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.

**This idea sprouts from the founder of the discipline History of Religions (who happened to have his office on the 3^rd 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.  Extended and made personal, it is the “one within.”  Ideally, we get to be that wherever we are, whoever we are.***

***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. 

_________________________________

Additional Ending

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 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, avatars, letting them try to outdo each other with outlandish accusations and ideas. I’ll give Charlie credit for that. I’ll also mock his supposed “dialogue” with others. It was more of 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 whether he was a sacrificial lamb, a martyr used to boost participation in his Turning Point organization. Republicans were worried that the public had turned against them and they were due to lose bigly in the midterms. Israel was worried its critical treatment of their war in Gaza would draw off younger voters, also critical of that. As a martyr, Turning Point would attract many would-be recruits. 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. The facts of which “side” is committing and threatening violence were lost in riled accusations.

Consider what Adam Kinzinger, a Republican who, like Liz Cheney, dared to criticise 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 man 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 joked about the assassin possibly being a Trump supporter, prompting ABC to suspend Kimmel rather than face regulatory pressure.”

No jokes allowed, or intelligent argumentation. Huge corporate powers, playing with billions, are cowed, hiding behind bland nothingisms. Our humorists, current Court Jesters like Steven Colbert and John Oliver, were the only talking heads to bring news to us along with the jokes.

Freedom of speech is owned. “Persons” (meaning corporations in the Supreme Court’s view) have unlimited power to secretly blast their views into our political processes. They have gigantic loudspeakers blasting out their slick, selfish views, overpowering the speech of ordinary people. 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 criticise him.

The Salem Witch Trials lasted only a few months. A few teenage girls put on shows of being possessed by witches. Nineteen were quickly murdered. Hundreds languished in cold jails. Their Puritan Church blessed their accusations and hurried to murder the accused. Superstitious beliefs became the force of law. That is what can happen when there is no separation of church and state.

ICE, the federal government’s most significant 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.

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?