Gratitude is a choice
From The Dallas Morning News
President Donald Trump’s first year in office has been more consequential than many of his detractors have understood. It’s important to acknowledge that, whether one admires his presidency or not.
It’s true that Trump has had an unusually blank slate when it comes to legislation. His early stumbles and the chaos within the White House have slowed his agenda and help explain his historically low approval ratings.
But Trump has kept promises in three key areas. His success there helps explain why so few Republican politicians who aren’t headed for the exits have clashed openly with him. They are hoping to keep quiet and let his administration advance certain long-held conservative goals.
That calculus was on full display late last month, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke outside of the White House while standing next to the president.
“The single-most significant thing this President has done to change America is the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court,” McConnell said. “But it’s not just the Supreme Court. There are a lot of vacancies at both the circuit court and district court level.”
Already, Trump has sought to fill 18 vacancies on the nation’s influential Court of Appeals. The Senate, where a simple majority suffices to confirm a judicial pick, has already approved eight judges. That’s more than any president in his first year since Richard Nixon.
Like Gorsuch, these eight judges have been extremely conservative, comparatively young and strongly credentialed. A few of the judges not yet confirmed are unusually unprepared. And sadly, among the 18, all but four are men and only two are not white.
Despite our concerns in some of these areas, it’s impossible to conclude Trump hasn’t kept his word to voters that he’d waste no time in reshaping the court with younger and more emphatically conservative judges.
Trump also promised to scale back the nation’s regulatory regime. Many call these regulations job-killers, and we have called for a better balance in some areas. Others have called them a needed defense of the nation’s water, air and workplace safety.
But Trump promised they’d be scaled back, and so far he’s made significant progress in seeing that they are, especially at the EPA, and at the Labor and Interior departments.
How enduring these changes will be is another matter, however. Trump’s efforts have come through edicts and executive orders, rather than through legislation. That leaves them open to revision or outright reversal by whomever is elected to serve as president next.
Trump has kept much of his promise on immigration, too. He hasn’t built a wall, but he has made America less hospitable for immigrants who are in the United States illegally. And he continues to narrow the grounds many immigrants and refugees have relied on in the past to come here legally.
Trump has kept his word on these efforts, whether we like it or not. Not recognizing that makes it easy to under-estimate his allure. Refusing to acknowledge it is a mistake for Republicans and Democrats alike. From the Miami Herald
Senate Leader Mitch McConnell is right — Roy Moore should quit the race for the U.S. Senate. Moore is the Alabama candidate who has been credibly accused by several women of sexual misconduct. So far, five women have said that when they were young teenagers, and Moore was a full-grown adult in his 30s, he pursued them aggressively, sometimes violently, and unsolicited.
Beverly Young Nelson accused Moore of sexually assaulting her when she was 16, the most damning allegation against him so far. Moore remains unbowed. He denies the allegations, blaming political enemies and, it goes without saying, the media.
Fellow Republicans — who have tolerated and excused all manner of bad behavior as long as the miscreants were on their side of the aisle — are apoplectic this time, and looking for an out.
As with the allegations tumbling out of the film industry, where powerful men who sexually harass or assault young women is an open secret, sooooo many people say that they knew Moore, once a district attorney, then a controversial chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, had a taste for underage girls. There were rumors, but little challenge.
Moore has not been charged with anything, much less been found guilty. But he refuses to responsibly address what seems a well-known pattern of conduct. He has no place in the U.S. Capitol (more on that later). It has yet to be confirmed that in the 1980s, Moore was banned from a local mall because he repeatedly tried to pick up teenage girls.
Still, police officers, local attorneys and mall employees from that time seemed aware that he was persona non grata.
Moore has ardent defenders — people of faith, people seeking political advantage, people who consider a girl of 14 a consenting adult.
It is no wonder that girls of that age are shamed and intimidated into silence.
Fake news, sadly, is giving Moore cover. As reported — and debunked — by Politifact, one website features the provocative headline: “Second Roy Moore Accuser works for Michelle Obama right now.” This is “pants on fire” nonsense.
And while McConnell is standing up for Moore’s accusers — “I believe the women, yes” — he can’t ignore what’s happening in his own back yard.
According to two former legislative staffers writing in the Washington Post, “Capitol Hill has a problem.” Men — lawmakers — behaving badly toward the women who work for them is a bipartisan curse, they say.
“Capitol Hill is still a man’s world. Female staff, and even female members, often shrug off inappropriate behavior to avoid being labeled troublemakers,” write Kristin Nicholson and Travis Moore. Also, “Staffers who do decide to pursue a complaint face an opaque and burdensome process,” one, they say, that discourages coming forward.
Congresswomen recently backed up claims of sexual harassment in comments before the House Administration Committee’s hearing to review the chamber’s sexual-misconduct policy. The gory details are too familiar: Sitting congressmen who grope young women, who expose their genitals to them — Why? Why? — and ask unwanted intrusive personal questions.
They want the House and Senate to adopt mandatory, in-person sexual-harassment prevention training for all members and staffers, and clarity on what are grounds for punishment or dismissal. If Moore is elected, and he shouldn’t be, the imperative to address this scourge will become even more urgent.
Iregret that I am not an optimistic person by nature. I could blame some of that on my Dad — a pretty pessimistic guy. I think, more realistically, that my way of being an achiever has been to be especially aware of the things “not quite right that need to be improved.” I suspect that many who consider ourselves progressive bear this attitude as a burden. We are so focused on issues that beg for attention and remedy that we may seem to radiate criticism and gloom. At least from the conservative side of the divide, we are often seen as negative and complainers.
With the holiday season in its early days, I am reminded that gratitude is a choice. It is as if the good things in life are seen by looking through a window. One may choose to focus on the window, fuss because the window is smudged, complain that it lets in cold air, and so on. Or one may choose to see through the window to all that is beyond. Today, I challenge myself and my readers to look through the window, not in apathy and denial about important issues, but to the choosing of gratitude. One can easily become soul-weary by the horrible events and the angry fear that have become the normal state of affairs. I propose gratitude as a response.
Neither Pollyanna nor Scrooge is a good role model for us through Thanksgiving and Christmas. To be grateful is to pay increased attention to those people and activities that make you glad and, at least for a while, less attention to those that drag you down. One way to do so is to adopt the Serenity Prayer that calls for acceptance of the things one cannot change, courage to change those that can be changed and wisdom to know the difference.
We know all too well that many carry heavy burdens of poverty, discrimination, loneliness, abuse, or assorted worries. We don’t want to be insensitive to those realities, yet we cannot change them. And there is an irony that is often discovered by those who go on mission trips or work with the disadvantaged — those very disadvantaged may be quite grateful, generous, and compassionate.
Gratitude is indeed more a matter of choice than of circumstance.
I will not abandon my efforts to think about and comment on the issues of faith and culture that seem to me to be destructive. I will, however, remind myself that growing up Baptist in Arkansas and being educated in various schools and locations have made me who I am and have opened doors for a very good life. I am dissatisfied with directions in both faith and culture, but I also celebrate both. I choose to be grateful.
I choose to be grateful for our constitutional government, as frustrating and dysfunctional as it is. Though the debates are too often venomous and self-serving, we transition power peacefully as few other countries in the world do. Though left and right cannot agree on how the Bill of Rights is to be best applied, they both agree that its purposes are irreplaceable to our way of life. Though a free press angers all of us some times, it constantly calls out politicians and power brokers who wish to be unseen and unchallenged. Though we cannot always separate fake news from the real, the free press presents us with unpleasant realities that are called fake by those who wish they were not true.
I choose to be grateful for faith communities despite their frequent failures to live up to their noble pronouncements. If I ever have a lover’s quarrel with an institution, it is with the church. I am deeply indebted to the message of a loving God that has been made real by loving people. I avoided many of the pitfalls of growing up because I was a serious Baptist boy. As an institution, I see the church losing influence and have no vision of how it might be replaced for all the good it does. At the same time, I am deeply saddened, constantly puzzled and often infuriated by the cruelty and exclusivity exhibited by some who claim the name of Christian. I choose to be grateful for those who, to the best of their ability, faithfully offer the love, acceptance, and compassion that Jesus modeled. And I choose to be grateful for those Christians who offer forgiveness for the fallen and welcome to the stranger.
I choose to be grateful for an incredible, complex, beautiful creation. If not a natural optimist, I am a natural romantic. I am truly delighted by the beauties of nature. The birds feeding off my deck and the Grand Tetons soaring above the prairie call me to identify with the Psalmist who sang to God “how excellent is your name in all the earth.” The human body is an amazingly complex organism that thrives or dies on countless chemical reactions, but is so much more than mere chemistry. One may argue evolution and creationism all you wish, I will stand in awe of creation and be grateful.
There simply is not enough space to elaborate on my gratitude for family and friends, for good health, for a meaningful career and for middle class affluence. I would begin to brag should I try. It must be enough and far too little at the same time to end my reflections on gratitude with these most personal and intimate blessings. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” REV. GARY BATCHELOR