Tag Archives: divided America

Red Flower Blossoms

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Several years ago, when Jack and I were still running our bookstore in Big Stone, the Asian restaurant a block away got robbed at gunpoint.

Red Flower Restaurant was the place everyone went when making supper was too much to manage. The “we didn’t plan on not planning” solution with cheap, filling, moderately healthy tasty food, served fast.

You don’t really pay attention to a fixture until it breaks. When Red Flower closed suddenly for a couple of days, word went around the town. A couple men entered the place, pointed a gun at the preschooler son of the owners, and told his mother the cashier that she would give them all the money on the premises, or they would shoot the kid.

This is not the Red Flower buffet

So they left with all the cash, and the family took a couple of days to recover. From one small business to another, recognizing also the difficulty of running a small business as immigrants in a small town (Jack got nasty notes from people from time to time about how he should “go back to Ireland and leave the jobs to the real Americans”) I did a thing.

I took a few sheets of paper taped together, wrote in red sharpie WE STAND WITH RED FLOWER across the top, and made a bunch of signature lines on the left and comment spaces on the right. Taped it to their window and left it there.

The thing filled with sweet signatures and comments within a day. “We love you!” “You are in our thoughts and prayers” “We couldn’t do without you” and “So glad you are okay” variants soon covered the paper and people had stuck a few more sheets up.

No one was nasty. That was more than a decade ago. People hold onto their own, right, be it community members or values? At the time, I never thought about what might have happened, had someone decided to be mean to the Red Flower family. Everyone was so sorry for what happened.

Now, would I repeat that? In this weird America where allegations of racism follow a certain political party to the point of stopping all conversation, where the ability to be friends with someone depends on whether they acknowledge the rights of your other friends, where virtue signaling has become a cutthroat competitive sport, would I do that again?

I don’t know. Herein lies the rub. People are still who they were, but some feel empowered and others repressed. Given a chance, given the same situation, would people still show sweetness?

I don’t know. Would I be afraid to try that again? Probably. Does that make me smarter, older, wiser, or part of the problem? I don’t know.

Are we still nice to each other, when push comes to gunpoint and people need reassurance? I don’t know. Does the fact that I would be afraid to do that now mean something?

Yeah, it does. But what does it mean?

I don’t know.

The Split

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Linda and I worked together in Los Angeles, helping street kids have a place to stay, feeding and chatting with homeless people, and generally being Christian between Santa Monica and Hollywood Boulevards.

We found each other online thirty years later and caught up; she’d married and had a daughter who plays the harp and presented her with grandchildren. I’d acquired a PhD, a husband, and a writing career. And our politics were oppositional; if she thought someone was a moral leader, I didn’t, and vice versa.

Participating together on a list of alumni from that ministry organization, Linda found other posters leaned heavily toward her point of view. While I’m sure Linda enjoyed the affirmation, she didn’t celebrate it or assert that majority creates morality. Instead, she and I discussed our thoughts—in front of people who kept interjecting attempted conversation-stoppers because our dialogue was “a waste of time.”

We started with the acceptance that we both wanted our lives to reflect God’s compassion, awesomeness, and desire to have personal relationships with every human on the planet—even them, where “them” equals anybody we mistrusted. If we both wanted the same thing, and both asked God every day to use us for that purpose, why we were on opposite sides of a political chasm where shouts from both sides included “evil,” “outside God’s will” and even “demonic” for the other team?

We came up with three plausible explanations:

  1. God doesn’t exist; we crafted God in our own image and use the concept to prop up our lifestyles. (Linda and I rejected this argument for many reasons I’m not going into here.)
  2. One of us is not praying hard enough, is deluded, or living in sin and can’t hear God (theology moment!) etc. (The list ran heavily to this, with me the delusional one.)
  3. All the good doesn’t rest on one side, despite what we may be thinking (or being told to think) these days. God is not endorsing a political party. Linda and I sorta agreed on this one, although she kept coming back to abortion, wondering, if a political party could be so out of God’s will in one area, could they be morally right in others? I thought the same about LGBTQ discrimination; denying others the right to exist remained ironically unexplored in both cases. Then we talked about Balaam’s donkey (if you don’t know, Google it and give yourself a fun story).

More and more, this is the awareness guiding when I pray and when I think—and those two things are sometimes indistinguishable, which might exacerbate what we’re talking about here. There is no political point of view that encompasses God’s will. God did not create political parties and does not expect everyone to come to The Truth of one political party. They are human arrangements, like the creation of time, that distract us from knowing God as God. I’m not saying don’t get involved in them, I’m saying that the first time you say “God endorses this party” as opposed to “this party’s position on issue X aligns with God’s will as stated in [Bible verse, and you better back it up with context]” you are getting led down a garden path that is more thorns than roses. Watch out for wolves, because guaranteed they are lurking in those unexplored woods to the side.

Linda and I still pray for each other.