America's Dysfunctional Family Reality TV Show: Father Knows Worst

With the events in Charlottesville and the responses to it, I have been pondering, meditating, on the question of how to be in this America.  As a human, I am so sad and scared at the violence and the anger these events have engendered.  As a minister, sometimes I am just sitting with it and letting people have their experience.

I continue to have this nagging suspicion that on the spiritual level, Donald Trump was sent to heal us and to unify us.  That by being precisely the president that we don't want, he is causing us to find out who we are and to heal.

It strikes me that right now America is like a reality tv show with huge worldwide ratings about a family with a dysfunctional rage-aholic father. This crazy guy, who no one would ever want for a dad, really is our dad.  We could wish he is our step dad.  We could wish for him to leave.  But he is our real dad and he shows no signs of leaving.  Mom (who I guess in this scenario is the Republican Party/Congress/Cabinet) is unhappy and too scared to leave. She knows she made a poor choice of a partner.  She knows that he is tyrannizing her and the kids.  She knows that this will not end well.  But she is being held hostage by his rage, his power, and his clan (sic).

Some of the kids are really really clear that Dad is out of control and has to go.  Some of them try to pacify him and hope that he will not hit them or Mom.  He invariably hits them anyway.  He blames all the victims.  Nothing is ever his fault.   It is always the kids' fault or Mom's fault.  Or someone else's fault.  Some kids, the ones that are emulating him the most, sometimes hurt the other kids.  And then Dad blames the kids that got hurt as much or more as the ones who hurt them.  And then those kids feel abandoned and bewildered.  Mom apologizes for him and tries to get him to stop, and sometimes Dad apologizes and says something nice sounding for a minute, but then the next day, he's screaming again and saying terrible things.  And Mom is looking the other way again.

I remember one time I visited the family of a friend of mine who had grown up with a mean, violent Dad, who was long dead, but the scars and legacy remained. The night before my visit, her younger brother had gotten angry and had picked her up and thrown her against a wall.  She was a grown woman.  I knew her family fairly well by that time.  I called them all together in their living room and headed over.  I said, "last night one of you picked your older sister up and threw her against a wall.   And today you are all pretending nothing happened."   I said, "you know that's not normal, right? You know that's not what a healthy family does?"  They said nothing.  Heads hanging.  Shame-faced.  On some level, to the extent they talk, they admit that no one has ever called them on this.  No one has ever pointed out the obvious.  They have hidden it.

It occurs to me that what's playing out in the media and on the world stage today is the great airing of all America's sick not-so-secrets.  For generations, some of the kids have been hurting each other and much nicer seeming Dads have been letting it happen.  But because this version is public, and this Dad is really mean and really obvious about it, this time everyone is seeing how it has been.  This version, this epic, reality TV show in which we're playing the children is shining a bright spotlight on America's residual tolerance of racism, anti-semitism, sexism, violence and nationalism.

I know from counseling many people who grew up in families like this that it can take a generations to recover from this kind of upbringing; it can breed more dysfunction and pain and bullying. But some people can grow up in families like this and thrive and survive anyway.  They can come to see the experience of their childhood without judgment.  They can come to an understanding that even Dad, the raging, egotistical, self-centered, mean, violent Dad who terrorized them, was doing the best he could because he was a sick man whom others allowed to be that way.  And that somehow that experience shaped those who were raised in it and made them determined to be good parents, good people, kind and loving and giving people.  And to be grateful for everything that they have, and for life itself.

So my prayer is that we, the children of America, can come together in this crisis.  That we can help Mom to see that she can leave Dad and it will be safe.  That even if Mom cannot leave Dad, we can leave both Mom and Dad and make ourselves safe; that ultimately we can come together to make sure that all the kids, or at least the grandkids are safe; that this is can become a family in which we can speak out; we can say our truth; we do not have to hide who we are anymore.  We do not have to pretend anymore that Dad is not the way he is. We do not have to pretend that his behavior is okay. We do not have to pretend that it is okay to hurt each other.  That we can raise ultimately ourselves and parent ourselves and learn to forgive, to release judgment, to love all the kids in the family, no matter how much pain they are in and no matter how much they hurt us.  And we can, as so many adult children of dysfunctional families have, choose new role models, new parents who are capable of loving us as we are, no matter what.