- Be the Light in the Dark of This Danger ‘til the Sun Comes Up - March 5, 2025
- Let’s Be Clear … Ignorance Is Not Bliss! - February 12, 2025
- Our National Days of Mourning - January 9, 2025
Can you say ‘coup de-tat’? How about just plain ‘coup’? And did you know there’s a difference?
Coup /ˈkuː/ is sometimes used as a shortened form of coup d’état /ˌkuːˌdeɪˈtɑː/ in English — but it also has a second meaning.
Coup d’état means a sudden, violent, and unlawful seizure of power from a government, attempted by a small group of people.
But in its second sense, coup means “an impressive victory or achievement that usually is difficult or unexpected” … a matter of interpretation. UhOh.
If you’ve ever taken a 6th Grade Civics Class, you know there is not a 4th branch of government in the United States of America. And yet … and yet … here we are, finding ourselves again at the intersection of Courage & Capitulation. Where (and how) we go forward is up to us.
Timothy Snyder, the renowned author of On Tyranny, in his February 5th Substack column “Thinking About…” said it this way:
Imagine if it had gone like this.
Ten Tesla cybertrucks, painted in camouflage colors with a giant X on each roof, drive noisily through Washington DC. Tires screech. Out jump a couple of dozen young men, dressed in red and black Devil’s Champion armored costumes. After giving Nazi salutes, they grab guns and run to one government departmental after another, calling out slogans like “all power to Supreme Leader Skibidi Hitler.”
Historically, that is what coups looked like. The center of power was a physical place. Occupying it, and driving out the people who held office, was to claim control. So if a cohort of armed men with odd symbols had stormed government buildings, Americans would have recognized that as a coup attempt.
And that sort of coup attempt would have failed.
Now imagine that, instead, the scene goes like this.
A couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives. Using technical jargon and vague references to orders from on high, they gain access to the basic computer systems of the federal government. Having done so, they proceed to grant their Supreme Leader access to information and the power to start and stop all government payments.
That coup is, in fact, happening. And if we do not recognize it for what it is, it could succeed. Read Snyder’s whole piece here.
Timothy Snyder is one of the Voices of Reason I admire and trust. along with Heather Cox Richardson, Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin, Joyce Vance, The Contrarian, Ali Velshi, Rachel Maddow and … your turn to name a few of yours.
If you go back to Snyder’s February 2nd newsletter titled “The Logic of Destruction,” you will see these words …
What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. Sometimes self-government just means elections. And sometimes it means recognizing the deeper dignity and meaning of what it means to be a people. That means speaking up, standing out, and protesting. We can only be free together.
The attempt by the oligarchs to destroy our government is illegal, unconstitutional, and more than a little mad. The people in charge, though, are very intelligent politically, and have a plan. I describe it not because it must succeed but because it must be described so that we can make it fail … If you voted Republican, and you care about your country, please act rather than rationalize. Unless you cast your ballot so that South African oligarchs could steal your data, your money, your country, and your future, make it known to your elected officials that you wanted something else. And get ready to protest with people with whom you otherwise disagree …
If we don’t start paying attention, we could end up here …. Let’s not!
With so much happening so fast these days, I’ve exchanged my “Food for Thought” plate for a deep bowl … and even that is overflowing. I could go on for pages, but I’m guessing you are as overloaded as I am, so, I’ve made just a few choices for today. I hope you find them helpful.
If you’ve been reading me for awhile, you know how much I admire Jess Piper who writes as a Rural Missourian and a retired teacher. In her January 31st post, “Doublespeak”, she addresses the slow death of the Department of Education, sharing glimpses of George Orwell’s 1984.
And speaking of books, now might be a good time to also read or re-read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (or rewatch the Hulu series). None of these, btw, are remotely close to ‘comfort food.’
Let’s take a moment to consider how we and our ideas of who we are might have changed over time. If we ask how we, as a country, got here today, we must also dare to ask how we, as individuals, got here … wherever here is for us today. What choices and decisions did we make based on, not only our heritage, but our own limited interpretations in a time gone by, and how many of those choices are we still acting on when clearly they no longer serve the person we’ve become.
This post by my Substack colleague known as The 26th Avenue Poet, prodded me gently to think back. Perhaps it will prod you too.
She says: It wasn’t exactly a meditation; it was one of those narrative personality quizzes that were popular back in the 1970s, where someone walks you through a story inviting you to steer the narrative with your choices, and it turns out at the end that each choice reveals something Very Profound about your character.
Well.
Whether there was truth in it or not, there was imaginative power; it’s fifty years since somebody walked me through that meditation, and I still remember bits of it. This bit in particular.
GUIDED MEDITATION 2024
You come to a river, says the guide.
Is it wide or narrow, shallow or deep?
Wide, I say, and shallow. I did not say
what I say now, how teasingly the light
played on the chuckling water as it danced
across a bright mosaic bed of glossy stones.
On the bank of the river, says the guide,
you find a cup. Pick it up. What does it look like?
Plain white and smooth, I say. I did not say
what I say now, how there was not one cup
but two, one plain, one rich dark wood
carved everywhere with vines and crescent moons.
When you travel on, says the guide,
do you take the cup? And do you drink first from the river?
I forget what I said. I would not say,
now, if I did remember; I would not tell you
how bright the water tasted, which cup
traveled with me, whether I have it still.
And here we stand on the edge of a river, cups in hand. How will we choose to fill them? In her beautiful poem “On a Day When the World Has Its Way With Me”, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer nudges us with words like these: …now in this moment of clenched thoughts when we’d rather taste venom, we pour love into our cup and drink until once again it is only love that makes sense, only love that refills the cup.
In less than a month we have already seen repeated demonstrations of both absurdity and cruelty; the consequences of believing the promises of a convicted felon who has lied and cheated his way to a ripe old age. AND … even as we are told to not believe what our eyes have seen and our ears have heard, we are beginning to see and hear what can happen when voters recognize the possibility of a mistake and start to find their voices. You may already know this, but I’m going to tell you anyway. The U.S. Senate switchboard, accustomed to receiving an average of 40 calls per hour, is now trying to manage 1,600. “This isn’t what I voted for. You represent me. What are you going to do about it?” A phone call is a little thing, but it’s one of those little things that when it gets multiplied by 1,000 or 10,000 can make a difference. Do you have a few minutes to spare today? You may phone the United States Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121. A switchboard operator will connect you directly with the Senate office you request.
Remember awhile back when I quoted Dostoyevsky’s reminder that “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams”? This is a very small sample of what it looks like.
If you read my last column, you may remember the segment about how the Interfaith Movement for Immigration Justice and the National Association of Evangelicals were speaking out against mass deportations. This Sunday I was among those who gathered at the West Hills Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Portland to hear the Reverend Tracy Springberry speak about what it means to be a Christian National and how different that is from being a Christian.
This is not a time to be painting any group of people with the same broad brush. Whether you identify as an Atheist, Agnostic, or a Humanist, a Reformed, Reconstructionist, or Zionist Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Unitarian Universalist or Christian of any denomination, we are each and everyone of us Human. Way back in ’93 when the signing of the Oslo Accords happened, it was Sweden’s Tommy Olaffson who said “Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed. Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.” And it was Naomi Shihab Nye, in her poem, “Jerusalem”, who used those words as an epigraph.
But, back to Sunday, and a Reading of these words from the Rev Leslie Takahashi. Food for Thought Indeed!
They teach us to read in black and white.
Truth is this—the rest false.
You are whole—or broken.
Who you love is acceptable—or not.
Life tells its truth in many hues.
We are taught to think in either/or.
To believe the teachings of Jesus—OR Buddha.
To believe in human potential—OR a power beyond a single will.
I am broken OR I am powerful.
Life embraces multiple truths, speaks of both, and of and.
We are taught to see in absolutes.
Good versus evil.
Male versus female,
Old versus young,
Gay versus straight.
Let us see the fractions, the spectrum, the margins.
Let us open our hearts to the complexity of our worlds.
Let us make our lives sanctuaries, to nurture our many identities.
The day is coming when all will know
That the rainbow world is more gorgeous than monochrome,
That a river of identities can ebb and flow over the static, stubborn rocks in its course,
That the margins hold the center.
If you’d like to watch the service, you can do that here. If you’d like to see only the portion that includes Rev Tracy’s sermon, start at 39 minutes in, or if you just want to catch the sermon itself, start at 50.
So … until next time, let us raise our chosen cups to Valentine’s Day and Black History Month. Let us refill them with the only thing that makes sense and step forward wrapped in the same harsh and dreadful love that has guided the civil rights movement for decades. Let us do whatever is ours to do and not forget to sing and dance a little Everyday.
Blessings on Us All, Everywhere, Everyone,
Sulima