Meanderings, 7 December 2024

Good morning. We spent a few days in Portland this week. I was speaking to a group of church leaders.

Photo by Elena Kuchko on Unsplash

Thank you to the Shriners:

An inspiring scene unfolded at O'Hare International Airport on Monday as a massive crowd welcomed several children who were injured in Gaza.

The group of young Palestinian survivors was brought to the U.S. as part of the largest medical evacuation of kids from Gaza.

"Only a week and a half ago, they were in Gaza, now to a new country," said Tareq Hailat, of the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund, which organized the mission. "So aside from physical damage they have, they need medical treatment for, they also have cultural differences they have to be accustomed to as well as PTSD and mental help they need."

Eight children, each accompanied by a family member, arrived for lifesaving surgeries and medical equipment at Shriner's Hospitals in the U.S.

"This is a drop in the ocean," Hailat said. "There are thousands of children that need medical care and there needs to be a better system to allow us to take these children out."

Some have waited months - others for over a year.

Not in “droves,” mind you, but still… some are converting:

Ben Christenson was raised Anglican — church every Sunday, a religious school, and Christian camp every summer. But Christenson, 27 of Fairfax, Virginia, always found himself longing for a more traditional faith.

“The hard thing about growing up in my church is that there was a lot of change even in my lifetime,” he told The Post. “I realized that there really was no way to stop the change.”

He watched as traditions went by the wayside: The robed choir was swapped out for a worship band, lines were blurred on female ordination, and long-held stances on LGBT issues shifted.

“All of that stuff was basically fungible, which gave me a sense that the theological commitments are kind of fungible, too,” he said.

So Christenson began exploring other denominations in college and landed on perhaps the most traditional of all: Orthodox Christianity. In 2022, at the age of 25, he converted.

“It seems to me like the mainline denominations are hemorrhaging people,” he said. “If you still are serious about being a Christian now that there isn’t really as much social status tied up in it, and you want something that has some heft to it, there’s more of an awareness of Orthodoxy than there used to be.”

Ike, one-of-a-kind:

LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. — Singer-songwriter Ike Reilly has been praised by the New York Times and author Stephen King. He’s been compared to music legends like Bob Dylan. His live shows are legendary.

So why isn’t Libertyville’s philosophical Rock-n-Roller a household name?

The answer is that he is. In the only place that really matters to him: his hometown.

“I feel like I live in the world,” Reilly said. “But I sleep in Libertyville.”

Libertyville’s “laureate of the lyric” knows that home is where your mom is.

“I didn’t leave town here, my mother is here,” he said. “She’s 98. I see her every day. My grandkids live here. I see them. I also am not waiting for anything to happen.”

While he was not waiting, a remarkable life is what happened to the 62-year-old singer.

He’s the frontman of the acclaimed band, the Ike Reilly Assassination. Despite glowing reviews and passionate fans, he hasn’t found commercial success that matches the scale of his talent.

“You can’t really wait for people’s approval, you know? You only have this much time to do anything,” he said.

At work in his suburban studio, he tinkered on his guitar, writing a song called “At Least Another Day.”

The process of writing can be painstaking, but it can also be cleansing.

“I got into this because it was cathartic for me as a human being as a way to express myself,” he said. “I think everybody should have something like that where they’re free of other people telling you what to do.”

In a sense he’s talking about the freedom of finding his own voice. …

Reilly’s body of work is now the subject of a documentary film called “Don’t Turn your Back on Friday Night.”

Morello is one of the film’s producers.

Teachers, cell-phones, students, and teaching the perpetually distracted:

He was a high school biology teacher in Tucson, Ariz. and his students' near-constant smartphone use was taking a toll on his well-being. So when summer rolled around after his eleventh year in the classroom — he quit.

"I came to realize that the phone addiction that the students were struggling with was causing severe mental health problems for me, preventing me from being a good husband," Rutherford said.

Some states are trying to legislate against pervasive phone use in schools. Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana have statewide restrictions — and states like California, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio and Virginia have policies requiring districts or schools to create policies banning phones, according to findings from EducationWeek.

During the 2023-2024 academic year, Rutherford says his students were significantly more disengaged. He felt like he wasn't making a difference.

"Most of the people in the class, they've got their headphones in, they've got their phones on. They're not actually listening," Rutherford said.

He says that as a teacher with ADHD, he fed off the energy of his class.

"I'm really aware of whether someone's listening to me or paying attention to me." Rutherford said. "And this year," he told NPR at the end of the 2023-2024 school year, "I was just like, 'I can't…They're not interested in what I have to say.' And that, frankly, is the reason that I had to leave."

In addition to the phone use, students were not interacting with each other, sometimes writing in journal entries that they were anxious, depressed and lonely — which made them burrow further into their devices, Rutherford said.

Can Gibbon shed some light on our day?

When Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States on January 20, 2017, I wrote an essay for the London-based website openDemocracy: “The die is cast: Why Trump can’t help but try dictatorship.” He couldn’t help but try it not only because of his twisted character but also because of what has happened to the American people—because of what’s been done to us, sometimes brutally but often subtly and with our complicity, ever since the beginning of the republic.

The Founding Fathers anticipated our present travails with despairing clarity. When Benjamin Franklin rose to cast his vote for the Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787, he warned that “this Constitution with all its faults…can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”

Alexander Hamilton saw the enormity of the gamble. Even while campaigning for the new Constitution, he wrote in The Federalist Papers that “history seems to have destined Americans, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

“When the people give way,” warned John Adams, “their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour.”

“History does not more clearly point out any fact than this,” wrote founder Richard Henry Lee, “that nations which have lapsed from liberty, to a state of slavish subjection, have been brought to this unhappy condition, by gradual paces.” It could happen not with a bloody coup but with a smile and a friendly swagger, when the people had grown tired of self-government and could be jollied or scared into servitude.

The founders anticipated someone like Trump partly because they’d been reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was hot off the presses in the 1770s. We should read Gibbon now, too, paying close attention to his account of how the Roman republic slipped into tyranny when powerful men had seduced or intimidated its citizens so that they became a stampeding mob, hungry for bread and circuses.

Gibbon wrote that the overconfident Romans were slow to discover the introduction of “a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire,” under which Roman citizens “no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army.”

[If you want to read further in the essay…] Here it’s worth recalling Gibbon’s description of how Augustus became Rome’s first emperor by convincing a weakened citizenry that he was restoring their republic precisely as he was killing it:

Augustus was sensible that…the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom. A feeble senate and enervated people cheerfully acquiesced in the pleasing illusion, as long as it was supported by the virtue, or even by the prudence, of the successors of Augustus. It was a motive of self-preservation, not a principle of liberty.

Gibbon sketches the Romans’ varied motives for exchanging robust citizenship for servility. You may be able to locate some Americans, including many of Trump’s heartland supporters and maybe even yourself, in the following:

The provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the government of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants. The people of Rome, viewing, with a secret pleasure, [Augustus’s] humiliation of the aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows; and were supplied with both by the liberal hand of Augustus. The rich and polite Italians, who had almost universally embraced the philosophy of Epicurus, enjoyed the present blessings of ease and tranquility, and suffered not the pleasing dream to be interrupted by the memory of their old tumultuous freedom.

Especially chilling is Gibbon’s account of how Augustus “reformed” the Senate, blackmailing and brutalizing certain senators and so terrifying the rest that they passed prerogative after prerogative from the people and the Senate to him: “It was dangerous to trust the sincerity of Augustus; to seem to distrust it was still more dangerous…. [The] greatness of the Roman state, the corruption of manners, and the license of the soldiers, supplied new arguments to the advocates of monarchy.”