Putting this picture up is as uncharacteristic as my putting up Pinochet's photo but the late Jesse Helmes was really one of the first pols against whom I would fulminate greatly. My nascent concientisation (Pablo Freire) is linked to that man's strength in the US Congress.
In May 1984 I was sent to Nicaragua as part of a local ecumenical peace group (not Witnesses for Peace but along the same idea) sponsored by the then Episcopal chaplain at Rutgers University. My parents were livid (a cover for their fear?). If you remember back to that era, the world had just found out that the US had been mining the Nicaraguan harbours. Also, the House of Representatives was voting on whether or not to keep funding the Contras.
We went down and met with a Maryknoll sister, a bunch of community organisers, a women's sewing cooperative, some Episcopalian leaders, and even Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan Franciscan, opposition leader (in the Sandinista party) and then minister of culture. It was my first time in Central America, in a country that still hadn't been cleaned up from the 1976 earthquake, where downtown Managua had no street signs, a broke-down cathedral, and a war.
The last day of our trip, I grabbed up all the newspapers to see the Nicaraguan reports of the vote in the House of Reps in which Tip O'Neil, speaker, called the contras paid rapists and thieves (or words to that effect). Some thought it was great; others not.
So then along comes Jesse, with his obdurate disdain for foreign policy, his gag order on anything related to abortion or contraception, his support of the contras and basically being a major impediment to what I was coming to embrace, the progressive side of things. He became for me the man against whom to agitate.
Well, there will always be Jesse Helmes out there, ¿no? Maybe their focus has changed from foreign policy to internal affairs but they will always be there. The Jesse Helmes of the world will say likewise of people who think the opposite of them.
And e're it shall be.
5 comments:
A bigoted, self-righteous... Oh well, he's dead now and God's worry. But lots like him remain. Enough to make me ask God to deliver me from the "Christians". ay yi yi.
What an interesting perspective you bring to this Caminante.
I just found his hateful anger so hard to even hear, it was like a force unto itself.
Perhaps there is something to purgatory. I am not sure that anyone ends up in hell and I have a sense of a purgatory as passage, not in the old RC devotional way. No something else indeed - like when we are confronted with a powerful truth.
Maybe in passing Jesse spends some time agog, in purgatory- reflecting on the great love of God for one and all. And then how he Jesse not only squandered love, but built hate.
This is not to get him off the hook, it is just what has kept coming to me in my prayers, as I lean into what comes close to feeling like hate.
And then disliking that feeling, but knowing my prayer may lead me to something I need to encounter.
Believe me, I could have used a lot stronger invective. But given that invective is all what we seem to read these days (and perhaps part of what shut down Jake's place), I try to hold that aside and be a bit more dispassionate. Sometimes that distancing serves me well; sometimes it comes off as namby-pamby thinking. I had a visceral reaction against Helmes and there are still folks out there that provoke the same but I try to keep that largely to myself.
Oh if we did not have visceral reactions we would not be human.
I pray about things like this all the time... How do I reconcile my feelings and how I try to live my faith?
I hope I don't sound like I was softpedaling on Helms- but it came to me in prayer.
And what brought me to that prayer was not pretty.
In this, I'm with FranIAm ... Folks like Helms make me believe there has to be a Purgatory. ... And I, too, am censoring myself, Caminante.
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