The Salvation Army is praying for President Donald Trump.
It isn’t working.
“God is slow to answer sometimes,” explained Cheryl, who works in the Happy Valley, Ore., office of The Salvation Army.
I usually send a check to The Salvation Army during the holiday season. On the back of the return form there is a box that says, “Please pray for …” and a space to write in a request.
Normally I leave that part blank. It’s hard to believe there is an all-powerful deity watching over us, answering prayers. More likely, planet Earth is cable TV for the gods. What a selection of entertainment we provide. Anything a god or goddess could possibly want we have – especially tragedy and farce.
But with the American news media so consumed with hatred directed at Trump, a man who wasn’t supposed to ever be president, I wondered if anyone had sought prayers for him – especially here in Portland, Ore., where hatred towards Trump runs deep and where “Love Wins” signs are ubiquitous in store windows and neighborhoods.
So I called The Salvation Army and asked Cheryl if anybody in the Portland metro area had asked The Salvation Army to pray for Trump.
She lowered her voice and said slowly, as if bracing for a bad reaction, “Yes. … All the time.”
I laughed to let her know it was OK.
The requested prayers go to the Women’s Department, which parcels them out to retired Salvation Army officers who do the praying. During the holidays the organization receives a lot of requests for prayers, Cheryl said. Trump, the country, political leadership in general and disaster victims are common prayer requests.
Trump is probably the closest thing to an outright atheist we’ve ever had in the White House. Most politicians at the national level have learned to at least fake it. When they’re caught being cynical, they apologize.
Remember when then-candidate Barack Obama was overheard complaining about bitter Americans who “cling to guns or religion?”
Nobody will ever accuse Trump of clinging to religion. When he invokes God, Trump sounds like Alec Baldwin impersonating Trump. If he were still a Democrat, Trump’s apparent disdain of religion might be praised for bringing evolution to the presidency.
Many Americans want their leaders to believe in God, even if those leaders do so in a calculated, self-serving way.
When she was running for president, Hillary Clinton received daily devotionals from Rev. Bill Shillady, a United Methodist minister, who later collected them in a book, “Strong for a Moment Like This.”
In her own book, “What Happened,” Clinton recalled that on the Friday after losing the election to Trump, Shillady sent her a commentary by Pastor Matt Deuel, which included a passage about the meaning of Good Friday that Clinton said she found really moving:
“For the disciples and Christ’s followers in the first century, Good Friday represented the day that everything fell apart. All was lost. And even though Jesus told his followers that three days later the temple would be restored … they betrayed, denied, mourned, fled, and hid. They did just about everything but feel good about Friday and their circumstances.
“You are experiencing a Friday. But Sunday is coming! Death will be shattered. Hope will be restored. But first, we must live through the darkness and seeming hopelessness of Friday.”
Clinton used that passage to help rediscover gratitude – or so she said in her memoir. Since then, she and the Democratic Party, with the complicity of much of the major news media, have joined in the political lynching of a man they hate and have portrayed as the equivalent of Adolf Hitler.
It now has escalated out of their control. Racial and ethnic tribes seize on every purported incident of a “hate crime” to underscore the Hitler-Trump connection. A recent example of how absurd it is becoming was a 40-day jail sentence given to an Oregon State University student who placed racist bumper stickers on the cars of social justice activists. Had the student stolen one of these cars, he might have faced no punishment given the state’s weak enforcement of auto thefts.
As Shelby Steele noted three months ago in the Wall Street Journal, even before Trump’s election, hatred was emerging as a way for the American left to assert its moral superiority.
“At the Women’s March in Washington the weekend after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the pop star Madonna said, ‘I have thought an awful lot of blowing up the White House.’ … For many on the left a hateful anti-Americanism has become a self-congratulatory lifestyle,” Steele wrote, pointing out a recent quote — “America was never that great” — by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Steele continued: “For radical groups like Black Lives Matter, hatred of America is a theme of identity, a display of racial pride. For other leftists, hate is a license. Conservative speakers can be shouted down, even assaulted, on university campuses. Republican officials can be harassed in restaurants, in the street, in front of their homes. Certain leaders of the left—Rep. Maxine Waters comes to mind—are self-appointed practitioners of hate, urging their followers to think of hatred as power itself.”
Steele traces the history of this hatred to the 1960s, when America seized on slavery and segregation as profound moral failings.
“It imposed a new moral imperative: America would have to show itself redeemed of these immoralities in order to stand as a legitimate democracy. The genius of the left in the ’60s was simply to perceive the new moral imperative, and then to identify itself with it. … This is how the left put itself in charge of America’s moral legitimacy. The left, not the right—not conservatism—would set the terms of this legitimacy and deliver America from shame to decency.”
Too often this hatred goes unquestioned in the media. It’s repeated and amplified. Are reporters afraid to challenge hatred by the left for fear they will appear sympathetic to Trump? They shouldn’t be. It’s not his fault he won the presidency; he didn’t expect to. He’s in over his head now but will be gone in a few years.
The left’s hatred will find a new target.
Forget praying for Trump. Pray the news media stop promoting the tribalism and racism that feed this hatred.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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What you’re writing about will get worse in 2019, at least in Oregon. We’re in the grip of a progressive fantasy led by Democratic women.I’m sorry to say that. There are many Democrats I like. They don’t run the show. I heard a report on the radio about the first woman governor. The point of the story seemed to be that nobody remembered her name. Hell, most people can’tremember the names of male governors. We have more important problems then placing people in identity boxes.
I clicked on the link to your Heathens in the Grotto. Damn. Talk about forgetting. I’d forgotten that poor woman Farkhunda Malikzada. That’s a story no one should forget. The video is beyond words.
Don’t feel bad. I also forgot about the religious mob who beat that young woman to death. Although I linked to that previous essay, I didn’t reread it. I’m glad The New York Times has kept the video up. If that had been a Christian mob that killed her, we wouldn’t have been allowed to forget her name.
I just learned this week that the U.S. had its first black governor in Louisiana in the 1890’s — Nathan Toomer. Not too shabby for a nation of racists.
Recently there has been a seemingly coordinated barrage of white racists doing their thing for cell phone cameras across this broad and abounding land.
Oregon seems contentedly festooned with them. In fact so effective has it been that a couple of the black women I work with have remarked their concern. As Nathan Bedford Forrest once said, “The way to whip an enemy is to git ’em skeered, and then keep the skeer on ’em..”
Well, that seems to be the left’s playbook. No one has asked after my body camera film and I’ve got at least a dozen anti-white race rants of great and ugly vehemence.
I don’t watch the news anymore but I heard this story about a white racist shooting a black girl. It got a lot of traction and then it came out the mom was trying to make off from a dope deal without paying. And, she had acquaintance with the shooter who was, of course, black.
Now the media is trying to soften the reality? Do I have that right?
Or, do I have this correct? A newly elected Muslim congresswoman who is black told her 5 year old that they were going to impeach the motherfucker?
Just why the intelligentsia wants a new civil war I do not know. But, nobody is going to like its arrival.
I’m a 63 year old quiet guy. But, if they really want it, I’ll go full gotterdammerung. I don’t have children and I do have an increasing loathing of these fear mongering haters.
The barrage of cell phone videos seems to be fueled by media publicity and legal settlements. If there’s easy money to be made, people get interested.
It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the “social justice” organizations like the ACLU, etc. are providing speakers or information to groups on how to set up scenarios that can lead to bad publicity and a payday.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much for persons of color with cell phone videos to work the media. Don’t wait for the mainstream media to ask for your body camera film, Larry. You could offer it, but you’re the wrong skin color, and they will hold you to a different standard.
Just like they quickly backtracked on the killing of Jazmine Barnes. It was explosive news when her death was cast as a white-on-black hate crime. When it became black-on-black, the media dialed it down. The New York Times even offered a sidebar on how trauma can make eyewitness testimony unreliable.
“(W)hy the intelligentsia wants a new civil war I do not know.” Probably because they don’t realize they will have to pay a price. They think their political enemies will pay.
Last night I went to a meeting at Unite Oregon, a “nonprofit” organization in North Portland that was the scene for Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum and members of her special Task Force on Hate Crimes. Almost a hundred people showed up. Rosenblum, wearing her usual prim and phony smile, said she was there to listen.
Most of the stories were from recent immigrants, many of them women wearing head coverings, who had stories about storekeepers, coworkers, etc. who verbally insulted them. A couple of stories were disturbing, including one about a Hmong family who had repeated vandalism done to their mailbox and had their dog poisoned.
There are already laws against defacing mailboxes and animal abuse. Yet this was cast as a hate crime. Under federal law, someone who vandalizes a mailbox can be fined up to $250,000, or imprisoned for up to three years. Of course, you have to first make an arrest, then get a conviction. But progressives in the Democratic Party — like Rosenblum — are pushing to reduce felony prosecutions so they can reduce prison populations.
When a white, ex-military man spoke about being attacked by antifa protesters, the audience clearly grew restless. A little later, a staff member from Unite Oregon essentially said that the show was not for him.
Perhaps Unite Oregon should change its name to Divide Oregon. Kayse Jama, the executive director, is a refugee from Somalia. He has made himself right at home in Oregon. His organization has the usual list of progressive demands and wants.
Jama might pause to consider where he would be were it not for a group of white men and women who fled England and later established a country that so many people of all skin colors want to relocate to.
Had Jama stayed in Somalia, he would likely have starved to death or been killed by a warlord. A black warlord.
Where is it all going to end? America is a wealthy nation, but it is going bankrupt. If we end up with Chinese owners, they probably won’t have listening sessions at Unite Oregon.
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