Everyone ‘knows’ Hillary is a liar. Everyone ‘knows’ that she is cold-blooded, ambitious, cunning, and interested only in advancing herself and her family in wealth and power at the expense of her country. There is actually quite a long story, stretching across decades, regarding how we all came to ‘know’ this. That’s a revealing discussion in its own right. But my discussion is on the Hillary Clinton no one knows, or no one seems to know, despite the fact that an abundance of information is freely available on the web to those who give a sufficient damn about the state of our nation to take an hour or so of time and find some nonpartisan sources. Those who make such an effort will find a powerful and convincing counter-narrative to the calculating monster created by the extreme right and, sadly and astonishingly, increasingly adopted by those on the extreme left.
My take on the real Hillary Clinton is as a warm-hearted, passionate defender of and advocate for those cast to the margins of society, whose ‘theology of ministry’ recognizes that one must be willing to trade some amount of personal, moral, purity to get something done in this fallen world, and whose introverted (as compared to her husband) personality comes across as guarded and reserved and whose sometimes self-defeating defensiveness shows the scars she’s received through more than a quarter century of vicious attacks on her character suffered at the hands of political enemies advocating for the rich and powerful while she has continued, nonetheless, to persevere in her work.
This Hillary Clinton has earned my vote as well as my full (though not blind) support over any other candidate on either side of the partisan divide let alone the dangerously unqualified and unstable candidate that Republicans, incredibly, have nominated as their standard-bearer and continue to at least nominally support while distancing themselves from damn near everything that comes out of his mouth.
To understand a person - any person - it is helpful to know the factors that forged their character and their worldview.
Hillary’s father was born in Scranton, son of a coal-miner. Her mother was born in Chicago and was the daughter of a City of Chicago firefighter. She grew up through the public school system of the Chicago suburbs, participated in Girl Scouts, extracurricular activities such as sports and student government and - through a high school history teacher - became familiar with Goldwater’s “Conscience of a Conservative.” Her family is categorized as conservative in Wikipedia and she had some involvement in the 1960 election, supporting Nixon over Kennedy and, in 1964, volunteering in Goldwater’s campaign.
From her mother and from the Methodist church of her youth she became aware of and committed to issues of social justice. Her youth minister, a graduate of Drew Theological School [Full disclosure: I received an M.Div. from the same school some 15 - 20 years later.] During her high school years her youth minister introduced her to the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr. Both of those theologian / pastors held - each in their own way - to a theological position called “Christian Realism.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a member of the Confessing Church in Hitler’s Germany. A near-pacifist, Bonhoeffer was executed for his participation, along with others in his family, in the plot to kill Hitler.
Reinhold Niebuhr, whose Serenity Prayer is a staple of Alcoholics Anonymous, argued for radical Christian engagement in a fallen world even at the expense of getting one’s ethical hands dirty. He believed that there were times when coercive power and violence were called for and that Jesus’ Beatitudes were counsels of perfection: aspirational as compared to a realistic program for Christian life in the world.
As he once said, there is a difference between being “a fool for Christ” and “a plain damn fool.”
Somewhere along the way, in high school or college, Hillary Clinton encountered Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” She wrote a college paper on Alinsky but she might have been introduced to his ideas by her youth pastor. Again, some twenty or so years later, I first encountered Alinsky as one of the required texts at Drew Theological School for a course on the social ministry of the Church. Maybe he took the same course. :-)
Saul Alinsky, from a secular perspective, took the same hard-nosed, gritty, realistic approach to getting things done in the world. He thought it necessary to get one’s hands dirty - but no dirtier than necessary. And the necessity is determined by context.
In the following arresting passage, which I remembered some three decades after reading it, Alinsky refuses to blackmail a corporate adversary after the corporation had just tried (unsuccessfully) to blackmail him.
[Afterwards] one of the corporation's minor executives came to see me. It turned out that he was a secret sympathizer with our side. Pointing to his briefcase, he said: "In there is plenty of proof that so and so [a leader of the opposition] prefers boys to girls." I said, "Thanks, but forget it. I don't fight that way. I don't want to see it. Goodbye." He protested, "But they just tried to hang you on that girl." I replied, "The fact that they fight that way doesn't mean I have to do it. To me, dragging a person's private life into this muck is loathsome and nauseous."
He left.
So far, so noble; but, if I had been convinced that the only way we could win was to use it, then without any reservations I would have used it. What was my alternative? To draw myself up into righteous "moral" indignation saying, "I would rather lose than corrupt my principles," and then go home with my ethical hymen intact? The fact that 40,000 poor would lose their war against hopelessness and despair was just too tragic. That their condition would even be worsened by the vindictiveness of the corporation was also terrible and unfortunate, but that's life. After all, one has to remember means and ends. It's true that I might have trouble getting to sleep because it takes time to tuck those big, angelic, moral wings under the covers. To me that would be utter immorality.
Rules for Radicals, pp. 34
Hillary Clinton is been seven years older than myself and I was brought up in similar suburban middle-class and public school environment.
And, attending seminary, I encountered a very similar theological context. I was a renegade Anglican, but you could not swing a dead cat at Drew Theological School without hitting any number of “Hillary Clinton types.”
So I can relate to her at THAT level of commonality.
There is nothing strange or extreme in Hillary’s character formation. There’s no fundamental difference between her experiences growing up and my own - except that, unlike myself, she was considerably more focused and achievement-oriented.
Hillary Clinton is the mainstream Christian church professional do-gooder par excellence, and easily recognizable as such to myself and most of my classmates at seminary and friends within the Christian church.
So, for those looking to see commies under the bed or a sinister bent towards conspiracy or an enslaving desire for vast wealth and power, all I can say regarding Hillary’s youth and young adulthood is, “Nothing to see here, folks, move along, move along.”
NEXT: Hillary Clinton: Engaging the Powers
RESOURCES
Hugh E. Rodham
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_E._Rodham
Dorothy Howell Rodham
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Howell_Rodham
Tony Rodham
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Rodham
Clinton family / Rodham family (Wikipedia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_family#Rodham_family
Christian Realism (Scot McKnight, Patheos)
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2014/11/14/christian-realism/
One man in particular had a strong influence on her young faith: Donald Jones, who came to Park Ridge as the new youth minister when Clinton was a high school freshman. A Drew University Seminary graduate, Jones’s own theology had the imprint of theological heavyweights like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr, and he made it his mission to give the youth a strong and broad theological training. He created a “University of Life” for his youth-group students and introduced Clinton and her peers to the great works of T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings, Dostoyevsky and Picasso. Faith, he argued, must be lived out in social justice and human rights. Jones ensured that students connected these ideas to life in their own communities, arranging exchanges with youth groups at black and Hispanic churches in Chicago’s inner city so that his students became aware of life beyond Park Ridge. Most important, he introduced Clinton to Martin Luther King Jr. when he came to Chicago in 1962. “Until then, I had been dimly aware of the social revolution occurring in our country,” Clinton recalled in her memoir Living History, “but Dr. King’s words illuminated the struggle taking place and challenged our indifference.”
Hillary Clinton: Anchored by Faith (Time)
http://time.com/2927925/hillary-clintons-religion/
Clinton’s own commitment to an activist faith was solidified under the tutelage of the Rev. Don Jones, a dashing youth minister who arrived in Park Ridge in the fall of 1961. In a 2014 speech to a gathering of United Methodist Women, Clinton recalled how Jones “went out of his way to open our eyes to injustice in the wider world” beyond their “sheltered, middle-class, all white community.” He brought his young charges to hear Martin Luther King, Jr., and to visit Black and Hispanic young people in inner-city Chicago churches. And he introduced the precocious teenager to the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich. “Bonhoeffer stressed that the role of a Christian was a moral one of total engagement in the world,” Clinton later recollected inLiving History, while “Niebuhr struck a persuasive balance between a clear-eyed realism about human nature and an unrelenting passion for justice and social reform.” Tillich wrote of sin and grace existing in constant interplay, and he articulated a “crisis of meaning,” themes Clinton would return to at critical moments in her life.
Can Hillary Clinton’s Faith Help Her Lead a Fractured Nation? (Religion & Politics)
http://religionandpolitics.org/2016/07/25/can-clintons-faith-help-her-lead-a-fractured-nation/
In a 2007 interview, Obama explained to David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, what he learns from Niebuhr.
He called Niebuhr his "favorite philosopher," Brooks wrote.
"I take away," Brooks quoted Obama as saying, "the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief that we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away ... the sense that we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naive idealism to bitter realism."
Obama's efforts to balance idealism with realism can be seen in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway, in December, other scholars say.
Obama, a student of the civil rights movement, declared that he was a "living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence." Yet force is necessary at times, he said.
How Obama's favorite theologian shaped his first year in office
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/02/05/Obama.theologian/
As an example, after organizing FIGHT (an acronym for Freedom, Independence [subsequently Integration], God, Honor, Today) in Rochester, New York,[15] Alinsky once threatened to stage a "fart in" to disrupt the sensibilities of the city's establishment at a Rochester Philharmonic concert. FIGHT members were to consume large quantities of baked beans after which, according to author Nicholas von Hoffman, "FIGHT's increasingly gaseous music-loving members would tie themselves to the concert hall where they would sit expelling gaseous vapors with such noisy velocity as to compete with the woodwinds." Satisfied with his threat yielding action, Alinsky later threatened a "piss in" at Chicago O'Hare Airport. Alinsky planned to arrange for large numbers of well-dressed African Americans to occupy the urinals and toilets at O'Hare for as long as it took to bring the city to the bargaining table. According to Alinsky, once again the threat alone was sufficient to produce results.[16] In Rules for Radicals, he notes that this tactic fell under two of his rules: Rule #3: Wherever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy; and Rule #4: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
Saul Alinsky (Wikipedia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Alinsky
Full text of "Rules for Radicals"
https://archive.org/stream/RulesForRadicals/RulesForRadicals_djvu.txt
Rules for Radicals (Wikipedia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals
1 comment:
Good and helpful
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