This is in response to the naive feel good article put out by Desiring God on MLK Day last week:
http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/is-dr-king-coming-to-dinner
There is a difference between making a space at the table for dinner versus long term belonging. I am adopted, I know how this feels. Your physical space at the table and food on your plate are entirely different from actually belonging. The process of belonging is long and hard and endeavors to make an irrevocable change. There is a back and forth between the family creating a role and the newcomer becoming the person that fills that role. You have to be truly wanted AND needed in a particular way, and then want to become that person. This is what we are ethnically attempting as a nation, which is a far larger task then simply having someone over to dinner. A rough analogy I would give is that hosting the Olympics are like having people over to dinner, while immigration and ethnic assimilation are like adoption. Behind poster child adoptions there is a whole spectrum of disappointment. Many adoptions today start something like slavery did, taking in a child for the monetary benefits. I wonder if blacks visiting Africa feel the way I do visiting my biological family, that despite the repellant dysfunction there is a magnetic attraction of a sense of belonging.
I was adopted as a young boy in the fourth grade by an older couple with empty nest syndrome. Despite my biological families issues, I was adored as both a firstborn only child and at the same time the youngest to my two cousins, as we were all being raised by our grandparents. To them, I was the golden boy. In my adopted family, I was a middle child between their adult children in their mid 30's and two babies they just adopted. Something like the young energetic dog my adopted parents just got and now despise, I was meant to add meaning to their life but I ended up just getting in the way, and they were stuck with me. There was a space for me at the table, but I stood out like an extra sore thumb that didn't belong. My stomach was filled at night (although they did limit my eating rather strictly) but I went to bed feeling very empty. We know how to say the right things at church and in public to give the appearance of a strong family, but to this day our bonds are very weak.
I see this now in Florida with the Hispanic population. Immigrants are allowed to come and space made for them with good intentions, but no purpose. Gratitude quickly shifts to attitude as many ambitious & enterprising people took hold of the many programs and opportunities available to them and quickly bettered themselves. White flight from South Florida, especially Miami, tells the story. People aren't satisfied with just having a spot at the table. I certainly wasn't, and could only focus on gratitude for so long. My attempts at self actualization within the family always failed, because I didn't truly belong or have a role that they needed or wanted me to play. The more I strived to be a good son, an excellent student, and successful young man, the more my adopted family pushed me away. I was taking up too much space. The opposite is happening with Hispanics, there is nowhere to push them away, so instead the whites are leaving. They didn't "belong" in Miami, so they took it for themselves, with their culture and their language. It's only natural.
Saturday, January 21, 2017
Monday, January 16, 2017
"The Alt-Right is..." answer to prayers?
I grew up in the Church. I sat youth group where they tried their best to convince us to not walk away after we went to college... and everyone still did. The temptations of the world have always been great, I suppose, but recent years have been a complete meltdown and falling away of the youth. Since the Left Behind books came out, the older generation has been half holding out for Christ to come back and half kneeling and praying on their Rapture rugs for a revival in the culture, in particular for the youth to come home. Now I attempt a brief, partial channeling of what that has looked like for the collective leading up to the current year...
Now the typically white, Evangelical pew filling congregant is con(cuck)servative. Their political awareness is informed by Fox News at best, CNN and the rest of legacy media at worst, and they are adamantly against abortion and gay marriage, although not too vigorously as to not come across as unloving or hateful. Their son is a basement dwelling atheist and their daughter is a liberal activist sleeping with every Chad, Dick, and Harry. Mom and Dad still love their son and daughter and pray for them every night, as well as the United States and Israel. They bubble in Republican down the ballot and the rest according to their local church voter guide, which may or may not have endorsed Donald Trump. Either way, he's president elect now! These are strange times.
Unbeknownst to them, their son agrees as well. He has been raised his whole life told that he is privileged beyond belief and should maybe even feel a little guilty about that, but here he sits in the basement, a NEET with no girlfriend and not much to show for the white privilege he supposedly has. It's embarrassing, even shameful. Nevertheless, he seeks to improve himself. He reads self improvement blogs and follows people who have made a success of themselves. He is naturally drawn to successful white men, who point out the many factors and variables that are actually stacked against white males. As the red pills kick in and the scales fall off his eyes and he sees the world for what it is, he also sees himself for who he is and is reinvigorated with pride in his white identity. His morale towards life is revived and he believes he can fulfill his role as a man, and the vision starts to come. A successful, thriving livelihood with a wife and children come into the picture, and it is very exciting!
OH! Mom and Dad will be so happy to see how I've turned over a new leaf, he thinks! Then he hesitates...
His revelation will seem painfully obvious to them on the surface and they will want to know exactly what changed, the details of the new paradigm that so inspires their son. He realizes all they know of the Alt Right are a few moments on the nightly news about a KKK member named David Duke and a White Supremacist named Richard Spencer. Dad has been fairly aloof towards his weird ideas and him in general for the past 20 years or so, but he sure as hell won't tolerate a neo-Nazi for a son!
See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.” Malachi 4:5-6
The point I want to make is that both generations hold answers to what we are facing, and the coming together on these issues in the way that families and generations were always meant to function is what will be the answer to prayer. The autistic, NEET, white male younger generation are redpilling and waking up to what their parents have been enduring their whole lives, and the impacts are evident. The tradition and religion their parents offered were too sterilized and impotent to life giving and they intuitively moved away from it. As much as I want to honor the older generation and reconcile with them, before we can do that they need to acknowledge this because the mess we are in happened on their watch. Nevertheless, Jesus Christ is still the Rock of Ages and His Word still has the answers to today, even if the psyop against the Boomers prevented them from fully making use of it. I want to speak to the Alt Right movement, with all your memes, vulgarity, trolling, antics, even alleged racism, that you have the trappings of the revival that Evangelicals have been praying for, and this movement is currently being birthed. The Boomer generation has been so neutralized to inaction as to emphasize the sovereignty of God to the point of complacency. A birthing process, even spiritual, is messy and requires attending to. Midwives/nurses, and a doctor, and the father standing beside. And then the child needs to be raised. I pray the older generation will be shaken out of their characteristic slumber and stupor that has resulted in abandonment and neglect, and see this movement for what it is. God spoke to many prayerful hearts regarding this nation that He would not forsake it, but He works in mysterious ways. How many times did the older generation tell us this pat answer from a place of bewilderment? For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, I proclaim that this time it is tangibly true!
Amen.
Now the typically white, Evangelical pew filling congregant is con(cuck)servative. Their political awareness is informed by Fox News at best, CNN and the rest of legacy media at worst, and they are adamantly against abortion and gay marriage, although not too vigorously as to not come across as unloving or hateful. Their son is a basement dwelling atheist and their daughter is a liberal activist sleeping with every Chad, Dick, and Harry. Mom and Dad still love their son and daughter and pray for them every night, as well as the United States and Israel. They bubble in Republican down the ballot and the rest according to their local church voter guide, which may or may not have endorsed Donald Trump. Either way, he's president elect now! These are strange times.
Unbeknownst to them, their son agrees as well. He has been raised his whole life told that he is privileged beyond belief and should maybe even feel a little guilty about that, but here he sits in the basement, a NEET with no girlfriend and not much to show for the white privilege he supposedly has. It's embarrassing, even shameful. Nevertheless, he seeks to improve himself. He reads self improvement blogs and follows people who have made a success of themselves. He is naturally drawn to successful white men, who point out the many factors and variables that are actually stacked against white males. As the red pills kick in and the scales fall off his eyes and he sees the world for what it is, he also sees himself for who he is and is reinvigorated with pride in his white identity. His morale towards life is revived and he believes he can fulfill his role as a man, and the vision starts to come. A successful, thriving livelihood with a wife and children come into the picture, and it is very exciting!
OH! Mom and Dad will be so happy to see how I've turned over a new leaf, he thinks! Then he hesitates...
His revelation will seem painfully obvious to them on the surface and they will want to know exactly what changed, the details of the new paradigm that so inspires their son. He realizes all they know of the Alt Right are a few moments on the nightly news about a KKK member named David Duke and a White Supremacist named Richard Spencer. Dad has been fairly aloof towards his weird ideas and him in general for the past 20 years or so, but he sure as hell won't tolerate a neo-Nazi for a son!
See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.” Malachi 4:5-6
The point I want to make is that both generations hold answers to what we are facing, and the coming together on these issues in the way that families and generations were always meant to function is what will be the answer to prayer. The autistic, NEET, white male younger generation are redpilling and waking up to what their parents have been enduring their whole lives, and the impacts are evident. The tradition and religion their parents offered were too sterilized and impotent to life giving and they intuitively moved away from it. As much as I want to honor the older generation and reconcile with them, before we can do that they need to acknowledge this because the mess we are in happened on their watch. Nevertheless, Jesus Christ is still the Rock of Ages and His Word still has the answers to today, even if the psyop against the Boomers prevented them from fully making use of it. I want to speak to the Alt Right movement, with all your memes, vulgarity, trolling, antics, even alleged racism, that you have the trappings of the revival that Evangelicals have been praying for, and this movement is currently being birthed. The Boomer generation has been so neutralized to inaction as to emphasize the sovereignty of God to the point of complacency. A birthing process, even spiritual, is messy and requires attending to. Midwives/nurses, and a doctor, and the father standing beside. And then the child needs to be raised. I pray the older generation will be shaken out of their characteristic slumber and stupor that has resulted in abandonment and neglect, and see this movement for what it is. God spoke to many prayerful hearts regarding this nation that He would not forsake it, but He works in mysterious ways. How many times did the older generation tell us this pat answer from a place of bewilderment? For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, I proclaim that this time it is tangibly true!
Amen.
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