“A Strange Patriotism”

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I have been spending less time of social media lately and more time reading and reflecting.

This doesn’t mean that I am not paying attention to what is going on in our country and the world. In fact I am, except that I am not wasting my energy on trolls.

One of my big concerns of late has been the murder of the American based Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a team of Saudi agents sent by the Saudi government. Now I have never put such antics beyond the Saudis, but to see an American President and his Secretary of State callously sweep it under the rug was beyond disheartening, it was disgusting and repugnant. To think that the Trump administration would choose to align itself with the House of Saud in the Muslim Sunni-Shi’a conflict that will likely end up in a war that can only harm the United States is mind numbing.

Such a war would end up costing the Middle East hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives, and that war would most certainly claim thousands of American lives, even if the United States was victorious. But if victory meant the strengthening of the authoritarian Trump regime and the suppression of Constitutional rights and the trampling of the proposition of the Declaration that “all men are created equal…” then I wonder if it were better that the United States suffer a humiliating defeat by allying itself with a regime that was most likely complicit in the 9-11-2001 attacks and that has either aided or looked the other way when radical Sunni terrorist organizations headed by Saudis have attacked the United States and killed thousands of Americans.

Of course American Presidents of both political parties have looked the other way when it comes to the Saudis for decades, but none have been so in the pocket of the Saudis as the Trump administration. The events of the past few days have shown that there is no amount of sandal licking that this President will not do in order to keep Saudi money flowing into his properties, even if that sandal licking harms American interests, national security, and more importantly drags the ideals of the United States through the sewer of the President’s personal need for adulation and profit.

Sadly, I have come to believe that the President’s actions which prostitute the United States to a one of the most repressive and inhuman regimes on the planet are of themselves treasonous.

As I read the words of Frau Andreas-Friedrich at the Museum to the German Resistance in Berlin I was struck by their honesty, and that was before the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the Trump administration’s inability to be honest with the American people and the world.

If somehow asking those questions means that I am not a loyal American then I wonder just what a loyal American is.

Until tomorrow,

Peace

Padre Steve+