Troll-y Problem

 The early days of the second Trump administration are as muddled as they are fast moving, and much of the reporting is being done by people who have strong feelings about the matter and thus a tendency to run with what's "too good to check" even if they're not consciously shading the truth.

That said, there are a few things which are clear and are in keeping with what we've known about the inner Trump set for quite some time. And one of those is that a number of notable characters on the Trump train are attached to a very online sort of argumentation.

The approach is: If they accuse us of being horrible in some particular way, we'll troll them by making jokes about whatever it is they accuse us of.

The problem is, this means that when the left invariably calls everyone on the right a racist, this type of discourse results in folks on the right tossing around racist terms or symbols to be "ironic" and make fun of the left

Or as we saw this week, after the left beclowned itself by insisting that they'd caught Elon Musk making a Nazi salute when giving a speech, Steve Bannon decided to intentionally throw a half hearted Nazi salute while giving a speech at CPAC just to show...  what exactly?

The thing is, throwing Nazi salutes or posting racist memes is just plain wrong. It doesn't matter if the point is to be "ironic" or mock the other side. It's something you shouldn't be doing regardless of the reason.

I understand how we got here.

For one thing, when the GOP nominated centrist Republicans like George W Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, the left called all of them Nazis and racists.

For another, the left used its cultural power to play stupid games where it declared things offensive simply in order to go after conservatives. For instance, when Justice Amy Coney Barrett used the term "sexual preference" to refer to...  groups that define themselves by what sort of person they are sexually attracted to, not only did the media (which had happily used the term in the past) suddenly announce it was offensive, but several dictionary websites re-wrote their definitions of the phrase in real time to define it as pejorative.

And finally, there is the problem that for decades the elite class of the GOP has been significantly to the left of the base, particularly on cultural issues.  So when it came to things ranging from abortion and gay marriage to trans issues, in a lot of cases the professional Republicans who would actually work in congressional offices and the White House actually agreed with the left rather than the right.  And so when the GOP got in power, they never really did much to roll back social liberalism.

And then along came Donald Trump, who has all the rhetorical courtesy of a Sherman Tank, and unlike previous GOP nominees, he won.

Nothing empowers like victory, and so the people who had been pursuing the "let's be loud jerks to rub the left's nose in how wrong they are" approach looked like they were right.

I am not expert on what is politically expedient or popular, but I do know this: being a loud jerk is not a virtue, whether on the right or the left.  Doing things that are wrong isn't somehow better because you're making a point in the process, or owning the other side, or showing them how it feels to be on the receiving end.

I am very grateful that this administration has done basic sane things like acknowledged that there are only two genders and that boys should not be competing on girls sports teams.  But I would feel even more enthusiastic if this work was being done without all the bozo behavior that's come with it. After all, we want people to understand that our views are right, not that they're some form of madness imposed by bozos.

Parenting as the Crossroads of Lives

The early impression of parenthood is that it is comprised of always being on duty to keep small humans alive, fed, and moderately clean. As the kids get a bit older, transportation duties are added to this.

And to be fair, there is an awful lot of this.

But as the older kids move into adulthood, I think a deeper sense of what parenthood it comes into view.

A typical evening lately might range from taking one or two younger kids to activities, cooking and serving a dinner for 7-10, trying to get the youngest two kids engaged in something other than begging for screentime, hearing about the activities or workday of teens, getting those kids not yet old enough to put themselves to bed to head upstairs at a reasonable time, discussing some financial or personal issue with one of the adult kids, and Mom and Dad trying to somehow get a little time together as a couple.

When the kids were younger, everything moved more as one family machine: get everyone up, make sure everyone eats breakfast, have everyone do schoolwork, take everyone to activities.

The younger end of our distribution is more spread out: 7, 11, 14, 16 -- all different stages of life and development -- and among the adults, despite the closer spacing there is working-before-college, college, and post-college.  

The result is that it is more than ever apparent that our duties as parents do not consist of moving around an amorphous blob of children.  Rather, we sit at the intersection of many lives.

Some need guidance and help in their fledgling adult lives.

Some are working through those last years of semi-dependence before becoming adults.

And some still have many years of growth ahead before they will be stepping off to lead their own lives.

But all of them are separate human lives, bound inextricably to ours through our shared family, yet by tethers which become longer and more flexible with time.  Eventually -- indeed, not so very far away -- they will begin to form their own families, even as they also remain part of ours.  

I'm tempted to make some sort of astronomical analogy, but although multi-star systems can have planets, they tend not to be stable.  Perhaps that's some indication of how each new family needs the distance to be self containing, even while remaining part of the larger system. After all, gravitational pull reduces according to the square of the distance.

But this sense of living at the crossroads of many different lives has been the dominant one in parenthood for the last year or two.

Ordo Amoris is not the point

Vice President JD Vance has been out using terminology from Catholic theology to defend the specific policies and tactics which the Trump administration has been adopting around immigration, and so there was a brief burst of discussion a couple days ago about the idea of the Ordo Amoris, the order of loves.

You can hear him speak here, but if like me you'd always rather read a transcript, here's the relevant bit:

But there's this old-school, and I think it's a very Christian concept, by the way, that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society. I think the profound difference that Donald Trump brings the leadership of this country is the simple concept, America first. It doesn't mean you hate anybody else. It means that you have leadership. And President Trump has been very clear about this that puts the interests of American citizens first. In the same way that the British Prime Minister should care about Brits and the French should care about the French, we have an American President who cares primarily about Americans, and that's a very welcome change.

This quickly resulted in a firestorm, with all sorts of people calling Vance out as not understanding Christianity.  He tweeted back at them:

Pretty quickly lots of people were lining up to argue about whether Christianity taught that you were supposed to love strangers more or family more.

The problem is: none of this is actually apropos of the actual things that inspired this argument.

I think just about anyone would agree that if a father failed to feed his own children, because he was sending all his money off to feed the poor somewhere else, he would be failing in his duties as a father.  

However, the fact that one has the most urgent duty to provide for one's own family and friends and community does not mean that it doesn't matter what attitude you take towards those further away, or what political policies you endorse in regards to their treatment.

It's also worth considering what exactly a nearby need is.  If there is someone who is originally from another country who is in want in your particular parish or town, isn't that person's need arguably more proximate to you than people in some other state?  The idea of "America first", taken in certain ways, could suggest that we have a closer tie with some unknown person on the other side of the continent who is an American citizen over someone we work with or live next door to who is not.

One thing Vance has become very adept at is turning a policy question into what sounds like a moral balance of absolutely.  He famously said as a senator that he didn't care about Ukrainians, and when asked why said it was because his duty was to the people of Ohio.

But of course, it's not a question whether we should care about Ukraine OR the people of our home state. One can easily care to some extent about both. And even if one cares more about local needs than international needs, that doesn't mean that one cannot do anything to help those abroad.

Following that example, total US aid to Ukraine over the three years of war has been $113 billion.  That's a lot, until you consider the US government spends $6.8 trillion annually.  Ukraine aid has constituted roughly 0.5% of federal spending over the last three years. 

Maybe there should be no Ukraine aid at all, maybe it's not a good cause or one the US should be involved in, but if so that needs to be discussed on its own terms.  It's not sufficient to say, "Local concerns are higher priority, therefore we can't spend a cent on this particular non-local thing."

Likewise with any number of other issues.

Pointing out that we're called by Jesus to love everyone does not end arguments about enacting some particular policy, and neither does pointing out that we have the greatest duty to those nearest to us and thus most dependent on our personal help. Those are both important principals to recall when making any decisions about policy, but the policies have to be evaluated and chosen based upon themselves and the necessary trade-offs which implementing them would require.