Woof! It’s exhausting! Maybe writing about it will help.
In the Spring of the year 2025, JJ finds himself in a rare and peculiar situation: I am 62 years old; a born U.S. citizen who is a third generation descendant from Italian immigrants; a person who grew up in the 1970s in the Northeast where I came to know people with vastly diverse opinions and to appreciate them as persons (and sometimes friends) even if we had ardent disagreements about important issues. I am a man of advanced education and wide connections that include Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans (some of whom live here on various kinds of work visas, and who have serious concerns about their future in this country). I myself am a former expat, living in Italy 1993-1994 and gaining much perspective on my own homeland as seen by others. I am a husband, father, and grandfather who cares about the future of my country and the world, who hopes his grandchildren can grow up in a society that is both decent and generous.
I am also a physically and mentally disabled person for the past 17 years who has sometimes lived “on the edge” of a frightening health condition, and a beneficiary during that time of Social Security Disability and Medicare for myself and my five children as they were growing up. I am a teacher by profession married for nearly 30 years to another teacher – my dear wife who is singularly dedicated, who works harder and cares more deeply for her students than anyone realizes. Between the two of us, we have barely managed to scrounge up enough income to run our idiosyncratic, funny, book-cluttered, small and (in the old days) crowded but cozy and — on the whole — happy home. I don’t mean to sound irresponsible or pietistic when I say, “We trust in God” to be provided with and sustained by what matters most for our common life. And God has been good and generous to us.
Both of us regard education as a vocation, a calling to serve others by sharing the gifts we have been given (which means that I continue my involvement in this service in whatever ways I can within the limitations of my condition). Some of you have read my 2010 book Never Give Up, or you've read at least part of my ongoing (over a decade) monthly column in Magnificat on conversion stories. It costs me more energy than you can imagine to write that two-page column every month. I also have ongoing “study-projects” on China and East Asia, on the significance of technological advances in media, and on the life and work of Luigi Giussani.
Above all, I am a follower of Jesus Christ in His Catholic Church. I belong to Jesus, the Redeemer of all human beings and all creation, the One who answers my cry from the depths of what I often feel to be the disaster of my own life, my abysmal failure in everything, and most importantly my sins. I am a sinner. I try to listen to the voice of Jesus through the living reality of His Church, which makes it possible to encounter Him in today’s world and in my own daily life. I travel through this life together with a particular friendship that I have been entrusted to by Christ and that lives fully from within the Church: from Word and Sacrament and a confident following of the teaching and pastoral guidance of the Pope and the bishops in communion with him. "Following" is not an abdication of my own reason and freedom. Quite the contrary, for here I find Jesus speaking to our reason enlightened by faith, stirring up the gifts of the Holy Spirit who gives us a new way of seeing reality; Jesus making gentle but convincing appeals to our freedom. Those who are called to be “shepherds” in the Church have their flaws (sometimes terrible flaws), but they pass on something greater than themselves – they witness to the One who was crucified and is risen, to the tradition that sustains His saving presence through history and demonstrates that He is the answer to our times as well. Everyone is seeking Him (whether they know it or not). We seek Him in our silence, our words, and our actions. Concern for the common good of our globally interconnected world – especially for the poor and those who suffer injustices and oppression – is for us a work of Christian love (agape, caritas), a “work of mercy.”
Belonging to Jesus Christ in the Church has sustained in me a fascination for the whole scope of human existence, a rich intellectual life focused on reality as well as a particular tenderness toward the struggles and problems of human persons. I still restlessly search for the human face in all its expressions, because these are the faces of my brothers and sisters, the face of Jesus. This is the deep-down joy of my sometimes difficult life — a joy deeper than the stormy winds of illness and pain, or of psychological and emotional states that afflict me.
That being said, I am a bit depressed these days. I find myself disoriented by the wildness that has been unleashed in my native country. Of course, I know that as Christians we are “strangers and sojourners” in this world (see 1 Peter 2:11), who seek our ultimate fulfillment beyond this present life, though not “disconnected” from the significance of the goodness we encounter and engage on earth. I do “love my country” (perhaps more than I realized), but how do I “fit in” to its peculiar and presently bizarre drama? What am I called to offer, here and now? How can I say anything (or even remain silent) without being misunderstood?The fact that I am burdened with a sense of “patriotic disenfranchisement” is not a new problem. I have grown up in a world that is undergoing earthquakes of change. Meanwhile, rich nations (including my own) endeavor as never before to organize and govern themselves as if God does not exist, as if the mystery of being created persons called by the Infinite One to a transcendent destiny is irrelevant to our common life. Even if we make loud references to God (or to “Jesus”) in our politics, we are speaking largely empty words about a “God” whom we have “tamed” to the exigencies of our own agenda. We can easily place this “God,” this “Jesus” that we have reinvented in our own minds, on the edges of the altars we have raised up to our other “gods” — money, power, self-assertion, “success,” self-indulgence, envy. A God who demands justice is irrelevant to our criteria for “justice,” which means that the God who is merciful — who loves us, forgives us, saves us — has also been exiled from our public life and our understanding of the foundations of human dignity.
The result is that we find ourselves strangers to one another, searching desperately for our own “identities” without foundation, without guidance. No wonder we fail to hear the cries of the poor. When we marginalize God, we marginalize the poor, we ignore the most vulnerable among us. I agree with Mother Teresa who said [here I paraphrase], more than thirty years ago, “If we kill children in the wombs of their mothers, what is to stop me from killing you, or you from killing me.” Nevertheless, political parties that aspire to champion the “rights of the poor” refuse to attend to the poorest of the poor. On the contrary, they positively trample upon the human dignity of the mother and the unborn child in her womb — two persons who both have the need and the right to be loved and supported by those around them, by their families and communities and if necessary with the assistance of public resources. I am bewildered by these would-be idealists who try to cover up prenatal homicide by calling it a “fundamental human right”! How can I trust anything these parties say?
Many other problems in my own country are similarly steeped in a blind and deadly ignorance. I grew up in a time when “peace” was secured by the recognition of a common enemy (the Communist world) that was more deeply and evidently sunk in human degradation, but that in many ways was a strange mirror image of the so-called “free world,” enshrining in its ideology and brutally enacting political violence that we restrained among ourselves more by hypocrisy than rooted conviction. There was “peace” among the great powers while both sides waged proxy wars among the poorer nations, but above all because both sides built stockpiles of obscene nuclear weapons and mutually threatened to bomb the human race into extinction as a response to a first strike by the other. We were spared this total catastrophe by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, but the opportunity for a more genuine form of peace quickly became obscured by the ensuing aimless fragmentation that gave rise to new sources of violence. We learned nothing of our need for the wisdom of God and plunged more deeply into our own self-obsession — into new “extensions” of the power of our own narcissism by the amplification of media technology, into delusions of satisfaction that exhausted the human senses and imprisoned the human heart, into sexual chaos, the cheapening of life, greater exploitation of the natural world, ignorance of any kind of meaningful humanism, and — of course — greater deafness to the cries of the poor.
And we still stand under the horrific shadow of nuclear weapons, perhaps not to danger of extinction but still subject to the possibility of a war that might bring “fire and fury like the world has never known” (as the American President threatened in 1945 and accurately predicted of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — it is disconcerting to hear such threats repeated in more recent days).
I could reflect also on much that is good in human affairs, and I always prefer to seek out the good. Even if we have forgotten God, the fact remains that God has not forgotten us. The Mystery of God remains at work among us in unfathomable ways, bringing good out of evil, drawing us with love and mercy.
But right now, I’m depressed, and I might as well put my depression to good use. In these days, my depression is being “triggered” by events that should be called out, by further incoherence in our public life, by things that — notwithstanding my own complex neuropathological profile — are genuine sources of confusion and apprehension that cannot be ignored.
It’s not surprising that I find myself increasingly disoriented and disturbed by the recent actions of our new government. The problem in the United States today is not simply that our leadership is being aggressive and radical in its actions; it is also the way in which the leadership dictates forceful measures without any interest in building a reasonable level of credibility or respect for the “authority” it claims. On the contrary, it disregards the law and its courts, tramples on longstanding government precedents, threatens its opponents, and – in the name of ridding us of “terrorists” – unleashes an extrajudicial police force to arrest people without charges, without access to lawyers, without trial, without any accountability, and sends these people to a prison of cruel and unusual punishment run by a for-profit private company in El Salvador.
There is a lot of evidence — to say the least — that innocent people who came from Venezuela to the USA through a legal path of asylum-seeking established by the previous administration (and reneged on by the current regime) have been “disappeared.” We don’t know who they are, or how many they are, or what crimes the guilty may have committed. No doubt there are also (mostly) violent criminals among this deported group. There are many more violent criminals who are U.S. citizens. Violent crime is an awful and ever-expanding problem in our land. Scapegoating undocumented immigrants and hauling them off to lawless prison colonies in other countries is just compounding crime with more crime. When we respond to violence with violence, society only becomes more destructive. When respect for the dignity of the human person vanishes, no one can live in peace. “Safety” is an illusion when we allow violence to become the principle of our government, when we decide that some human persons among us ought to be stripped of their most basic human rights and treated like garbage, when we no longer care if the innocent suffer with the guilty and no one has recourse to any means of rectifying injustice.
Meanwhile, our current national leadership has discarded even the pretense of civility, descending into verbal warfare as a substitute for reasonable explanation. This regime openly insults neighboring nations and threatens to absorb them against their will. It seems intent on losing the trust of former allies and isolating our country from everyone except dictatorships and rogue states. Not surprisingly, the head of our current leadership — while demanding more power — never acknowledges any mistakes, never apologizes, rarely even attempts to explain the regime’s behavior in a reasonable way, and never takes responsibility for the negative consequences of anything that is done.I cannot see any long-term constructive good coming from this illegal, offensive, dangerous, and dishonorable behavior coming out of the Executive Branch of the U.S. government. But what does the "other party" have to offer? They pretend greater coherence and refinement of speech. They talk about “human rights,” but they have dug in their heels to insist upon the public promotion of “freedom” as individualistic anarchy that extends to the point of affirming a “right” to kill defenseless human persons.
I am not the only U.S. citizen who sees the current “duopoly” as an intractable problem. I have already given a detailed account of my own political decisions elsewhere [see HERE]. To be presented with a choice between “two evils” hardly constitutes a meaningful participation in the political process. In my opinion, we need different kinds of elections, but that is not the only thing — or even the most important thing — we need in politics today, much less in life.
Rather, I have a different kind of hope, which pertains to eternal life but also sheds light on this current life in ways that can be “sketched out.” I don’t have ready solutions to specific problems, but I see some part of the outline of a more human world that might emerge insofar as we open ourselves to the cultivation of wisdom and a new kind of loving attention to the Source of all wisdom. But I will save my reflections on that theme for another post.