A Serenity Prayer for Politics
American politics is . . . fraught at the moment.
I’ve never seen anything like politics in 2019. Excluding the months around the birth of my children, I’ve spent the thirty years of my adult life following politics, and I’ve spent two decades of my adult life actively engaged with Democratic Party politics. I can’t say that those decades have been calm and full of bi-partisan goodwill, but they weren’t anything like what we’re experiencing today. The challenge today isn’t old-fashioned inter-party fighting or the politics of personal destruction. Today we’re facing epic corruption in government and an electorate that can’t even agree on basic facts
It’s hard for a patriot to know what to do in the face of such challenges. It calls to mind the famous Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Reinhold Niebuhr had politics in mind when he wrote those words back in 1934, but I’m pretty sure that he wasn’t thinking about our current political morass. Whatever your religious belief, or your lack of religious belief, now more than ever we need to apply the words of Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer to our lives.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not a big fan of acceptance. That’s the very first line of the Serenity Prayer, yet that’s a stumbling block for me. I find it hard to accept injustice, even injustice that I know I cannot change. When I think of concentration camps for immigrant children, I have trouble going about my ordinary life. When I see international oligarchs wielding more power over American government than our own citizens, I get my back up. Rampant corruption that the Trump Administration doesn’t even bother to try to hide leaves me shaking with rage. I thought that America had moved past its darkest impulses, but we now have white supremacists welcomed into the national political discourse by the highest power in the land. Our leaders seem bloody minded in their determination to provoke an armed conflict in the Middle East, only this time without doing the hard work required to earn the support of our allies abroad. I know that I’m not alone in feeling like time spent eating and sleeping is time wasted. When there’s a war being fought over the soul of America, you feel unpatriotic every minute you’re not working to form a more perfect Union.
Yet, there’s only so much that a single person can do. That’s where the wisdom comes in.
I can’t force Senate Republicans to place country over party. I can’t convince House Democrats to elevate principle over political expediency. I can’t even convince Trump-partisans that the Mueller Report didn’t exonerate Donald Trump when it literally includes a statement declaring that the report “does not exonerate him” while detailing ten acts that probably constitute obstruction of justice for anyone who wasn’t president. I’m too poor to start my own dark money Super-PAC. I don’t have a column in a major newspaper, and I’m not on cable news. I can’t take on the big problems we face directly.
This is a moment where we all need the wisdom to know the difference between those things that we can change and those things that we cannot. My own influence is attenuated, but with sufficient wisdom I can maybe see the things that I can change and how to make that change happen. I can’t change the Senate Majority Leader’s view on American sovereignty, but I can change a cousin’s view of Democrats by showing him that some of us are down-home. I can help a neighbor register to vote. I may not have any space in the New York Times, but I can write on Medium. I can phone bank and knock doors for candidates I believe in. I can donate to worthy campaigns and causes. Individually these acts aren’t much, but I know that the small work I can do will be combined with the small work of others to make big change. Alone cannot elect a new U.S. Senator, but together we can elect many.
I pray that we all have the wisdom to know what we can change coupled with the courage to make the changes we can. If that prayer is answered, then we’ll put this nation on a better track.
