“Orders from Headquarters”: How You’re Allowed to Feel about Election 2016

As if it’s not hard enough to adjust to the new reality of subverted democracy, Russian intervention in our electoral process, a fundamentally broken human being about to take the reins, the onslaught of woefully unprepared and cynical courtesans he’s surrounding himself with, and the loss of precious time to deal with the very real threats bearing down on us, now we’re getting instructions on how we should feel about this disaster in the making.

Yesterday, for example, a Facebook friend posted an odd plea (yes, she actually begged) that everyone just calm down and count our blessings because at least we’re not living through the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. She even mentioned Woody Guthrie as a documentarian of those hard times, while blissfully ignoring his hard Left politics that regarded everyone’s well-being as a social imperative. She seems to believe that no Americans live in such desperate circumstances today. And when someone mentioned the people suffering in Aleppo, she made it clear that her concern stops at the border.

[Pause for a privilege check]

I was gobsmacked. Until an even worse post scrolled past to distract me. This post instructed everyone to pray for the new president because scripture obligates us to pray for the king.

King.

Divine right of kings.

You know, the stuff we left Europe over. The thing George Washington refused to become so that we could forge a new way of being and governing ourselves after throwing off the tyranny of a king.

I do not and will probably never understand blind obeisance to authority. I get that it lets you off the hook (“I thought it sounded like a bad idea, but he’s the boss”), but it is—to put it bluntly—un-American. We don’t have kings here. We were not born to be servile. We are active, culpable participants in every decision and action taken in our name. We don’t bow down before authority, especially when it comes in the form of a despicable person who has never in 70 years spent a single day serving anyone or anything but himself, a person who denigrates others in terms we would never sanction. A person who sees the rest of us as subjects and pawns. The candidate of Putin and Mammon.

Ain’t nobody got time to pray for that.

GK Chesterton said, “’My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’”

The same goes for presidents.

Enough faux “patriotism” that tells us to sit down and shut up. We are a nation born of dissent. Let’s act like it!