I told you a little about my background. I was the 2nd son of 6 boys in a fundamentalist, Christian nationalist church. We feared hippies, people of color, people with long hair and people who voted McGovern over Nixon.
We called them communists.
I remember one particular Sunday. My father took all of us out to dinner after church. He was told that it was OK to go out to dinner because the Jews and the athiests could work on the Sabbath.
(To be fair to my father, he lived long enough to outgrow a lot of these ideas and became a far better man as he learned and grew. I wish the rest of the GOP did)
We were four boys and one baby sitting at the table in our Sunday best. We learned from quick and vicious discipline to fear the belt so we were “good”.
There was a woman in her 70s that passed by our table and smiled at my mother and father. She said to them, “It is so nice to see a family clothed and in their right minds.” For some reason that stuck with me. Kids retain weird things.
It is a reference to a gospel story about Jesus casting demons out of a man and hurling those demons into a herd of swine. The townspeople found the man “clothed and in his right mind”.
As I grew older and started to see my hometown for what it was, I understood things a little deeper.
First, the children were terrified of church. One toddler I remember would scream at the sight of the building.
Second, everyone was in a competition for whose kids could be “clothed and in their right minds” the best.
The external “Sunday best” was taught to all of us as the way to honor God. You wouldn’t stand before a king in shorts and a t-shirt, would you? But the reality was that the Sunday best was a way to separate those who belonged from those who didn’t. The sinners, the wayward, the poor, the homeless, the hungry – were not welcomed and they all knew that they weren’t welcome. The easiest way to separate the saint from the sinner was by the Sunday best unspoken rule. The outsiders knew it. I would invite friends to church and they would say, “I don’t have anything to wear.” I told them that it didn’t matter. But it did, and they knew it did.
Third, and now I am at my long-winded purpose. The woman in the restaurant had no idea what we endured. She didn’t see the abuse, the neglect, the pain.
Everyone I knew, including my parents, were abused or neglected at home. They had no concept of love. They never learned it from their parents who never learned it from theirs. It was generational trauma.
Every adult I knew growing up was beaten, neglected, starved, molested and verbally abused when they were children and they carried those scars.
Every home I knew had the outward veneer of “clothed and in their right minds” and were falling apart. One man I know from my childhood church would be frequently beaten until he bled.
Everyone knew it. Everyone shook their heads sadly. Everyone said, “Through much tribulation we enter the kingdom of heaven.”
When Stephen Miller speaks of the “leftist radical” hating beauty, he isn’t speaking about dignity, rose gardens, clean water, historical buildings, beautiful music…he is speaking of the outward veneer of “clothed and in their right minds”.
With a big enough stick to beat wives and kids with, you can certainly put on that show. It makes small men like Miller feel like they are somehow more righteous than others.
In fact, he actually said it outloud – “They are envious of our moral superiority”.
Mr. Miller, I lived that morality. You can shove it. No more. I will fight with every fiber of my being to protect human beings from your vicious hatred.
We’ve unclothed your righteous rags, and they have proven to be worthless and filthy. Slither back under that rock. The light has found you out.
Sam Powell for Senate 