By Melissa Walsh

The secret sauce of good fiction, as food for the soul, is didactic, curious prose sprinkled with generous pinches of empathy. Claire Luchette cooked up a soul's delight in her debut novel Agatha of Little Neon.

Yearning for Community
Agatha, a young sister (not "a nun"), narrates. She's a young woman growing self-awareness about her identity and troubled past as she serves a small community of recovering alcohol and drug addicts in a halfway house known as Little Neon. She serves with three other young sisters, whom Agatha presents to the reader from behind a veil of private pain and an emerging sense of identity that could prove inconsistent with her sisters', and the church's, religious values. This sense of herself comes into focus when she serves as a math teacher at a girls parochial high school, in addition to her service at Little Neon. She manages both roles without training in social services or education. Empathy and dedication to study and prayer seem to qualify her well as an impactful servant leader. She is mindful to pray for others; when she prays for herself, it is for understanding and loving others better. 

The story is less about religion than about how dedication to loving others grows wisdom and about the strength required for profound kindness. Agatha values a practice of treating each person as valuable, as a unique human being designed for purpose. Perhaps, for her, this is the most direct approach toward achieving sacred community.

Myth of Comfortable Holy Community
Agatha's approach is inconsistent with the conventional American dream. We know that many, or most, Americans are conditioned to laud the success of the individual, measured in dedication to one's work, paying one's bills, spending time with one's family. This American breed of individuals fence themselves into what they mark as “mine” and worship what’s locked up there — apart from holistic society, or segregated from parts of society they perceive as dangerous or in conflict with their ideal for American society. They seek to remove themselves from random bad luck by pulling their weight. To those who struggle, they say, "Just pull yourself up." In doing so, they generate what is noted by analysts and journalists as “marginalized groups,” or "broken families, or "at-risk youth," or "the homeless," or "displaced families," or "underserved communities." Their approach to community breaks it, because it is selfish, self-serving.

Those who worship the American myth of the comfortable life with a happy ending are those who marginalize the marginalized, fossilizing conditions for people labeled as such for generations. They would like to put the marginalized in a box to dwell outside the white picket fence, where they are to remain until they are no longer viewed as unsafe or unholy. They flee with their families and churches from aging neighborhoods to new havens, leaving behind empty shells of schools and churches for a neglected, broken community left behind. They seek walls to safeguard their homes, schools, and churches as sacrosanct. They determine that strangers behind these walls are unsafe and treat them that way, citing the Second Amendment.

By Melissa Walsh

I'm an extreme centrist. This doesn't mean that I am necessarily “moderate” on all issues or ever “on the fence.” I'm not apolitical or apathetic (as anyone who knows me will tell you). I strive to center my political propositions in preserving inalienable rights of individuals while remaining true to the duty of protecting the common good, as prescribed in the U.S. Constitution.

Politics aside, how I aim to treat others is grounded in my belief in and understanding of moral law. To know moral law, I follow C.S. Lewis’ test in checking moral beliefs: they must be accountable to reason, and reason must be accountable to science.

'Cognitive Dissonance'
What moves us off from centrism is what Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris identify as "cognitive dissonance" in a July 12, 2020 article in The Atlantic — "the motivational mechanism that underlies the reluctance to admit mistakes or accept scientific findings — even when those findings can save our lives." They present this phenomenon in the context of how wearing a mask during a pandemic became politicized. Cognitive dissonance, I would add, is the refusal to dissent from unconstitutional practices or unreasoned or immoral statements and activities driven by prevailing forces, or voices, in a political party, church, or other faction we belong to. It explains why "good" Germans tolerated Nazism and why anti-fascist freedom fighters accepted Stalinism. These shifts to the extreme right or the extreme left, we know well from history, are dangerous, which is why I periodically tweet #makeamericareadhistoryagain. Those who simply read history again, sans identity-politics denial, are bound to have an aha moment about how grave American unrest is today.

We are witnesses in real-time, in living history, to the dangers of identity-based politics, or populism, in the United States. This populism is not driven by a true identity with being American, but with belonging to a special faction of Americans, a sloppy ideology that narrowly divides Americans by identifying each citizen by race or religion or income level or education, etc. In 2016, I forewarned against the ugly events we're witnessing today (and hoped to be proven wrong), as I listened to the statements (and read the tweets) from the hyperbolic fear-based canon of Donald Trump, the regurgitation of hate speech, which was devoured by his base. Trumpian populism initially attacked Latin Americans and Middle Easterners (and continues to). Then it launched an attack on the press (even turning "media" into a singular word to describe a monolith rather than a plural word to describe voices accountable to verification in a free press). It purged centrist judges. It gave legitimacy to the unreasonable, formerly concealed inhumane biases among a base that takes pride in being poorly educated, anti-science, pro-conspiracy theory, so-called “pro-life,” pro-gun, Evangelical, and pro-white power. Five years ago, who in this nation could have conceived of crowds of American citizens proudly waving Confederate flags, Nazi crosses, and AR-15s in public spaces while professing to be Christians and patriots.

It took some time — too long — for centrists with a microphone or many Twitter followers, including Never-Trump Republicans, to grow a backbone and vigorously stand up to this asinine and nefarious take-over of the GOP. Thanks to The Lincoln Project, they've found a forum and gained momentum. Those to the far left were way ahead of these moderate, or reasonable, Republicans, reacting fiercely, courageously even, but also unrefined, many of these activists too young to have cultivated the wisdom that comes with decades of adulting. And Democrat POTUS candidates were unable to achieve commonality on critical issues, most notably on healthcare, and ended up with essentially an incumbent as the 2020 POTUS candidate. I consider Joe Biden a centrist, but what will he do to stop the bleeding? My hope rests in his skill in gathering a great team of thinkers and doers, including those who can see and understand how to meet the economic needs of Trump's base.

Reagan Democrats and Me
I grew up in the land of the (over-analyzed and under-heard) Reagan Democrats in the near-east suburbs of Detroit among the first wave of gen-Xers (our older siblings were baby-boomers) raised by autoworkers. Many of my peers entered one of the last classes of automotive skilled-trades apprentices and moved onto a long career of turning a wrench for good pay and benefits, thanks to the UAW. They have recently retired or are about to retire with pensions, the last Motor City generation to reap the promise of retirement after more than three decades of working in a blue-collar shirt with a Big Three branding. They voted for Trump in 2016.

Why would they support a whiney narcissistic blue-blood like Trump? Mainly because he’s the alternative to Democrat candidates who have been talking over them and past them for decades. They feel seen by Trump. They feel unseen by the Democratic Party. The truth is that they remain unseen by both parties. They’re misunderstood. They’re undervalued. Trump strategists, including the Breitbart and FoxNews ilk, seized this void, and these Reagan Democrat heirs were sucked into believing the hype, the fear-mongering, the need to build a wall, the need to make America great again.

My Eastside Detroiter, Reagan Democrat instincts were radically altered and sharpened while earning my degree in International Studies. (I was the first in my family to earn a bachelor’s degree.) During and after college, I lived briefly in different European cities. I spent a semester in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, in 1988. (I also had spent two weeks in Sarajevo in the summer of 1987 and travelled there a few times while living in Vienna, Austria, in 1989.) In 2016, this pre-war Yugoslav experience gave me foreknowledge of the decline our nation would sustain if this sleazy real estate mogul and populist with no government experience were elected. On social media and during cocktail-party conversation, I could not be silent in 2016. I sensed a calling to warn against the fear-mongering and hateful scapegoating of the other spewing from Trump’s campaign. So I posted and stated my observations that Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-muslim rhetoric struck me as gravely similar to the hate speech, dressed as ethno-religious nationalism, I heard among Serbs and Croats in former Yugoslavia.

A handful of hearers of my warnings agreed that Trump was bad news, but said, “Well, that (ethno-religious violence) can't happen here.” I responded, "If the economy fails, the violence will follow."

Several others revealed themselves to be Trump supporters and broke ties with me, or I broke ties with them due to their posts and statements that I viewed as ignorant and hateful.

​In 2020, it IS happening here. Our American union grows more fragile.

Smrt fašizmu... ('death to fascism')
I saw 2016, 2017, and 2018 from the perspective of my young-adult self in 1987, 1988, and 1989. I saw 2019 from the frustration and pain of watching footage from Sarajevo in 1992. I grieved before the images and tragic accounts of families separated at the U.S. southern border and of immigrants rounded up at their homes, schools, or places of business for incarceration and deportation — many of them my neighbors here in Detroit who have lived in this nation for decades after leaving their middle eastern homelands.

Today, in 2020, with more than 140,000 American lives lost to the pandemic, which the Trump administration denied and did little to contain, I'm weighted down by the overwhelming sorrow of so many souls who lived and then died so suddenly that we can't even list all of their names on the newspaper obituary pages. Now the Trump administration seeks to control that information — the data on those who remain to be infected by the COVID-19 virus, an invisible non-partisan enemy that Trump seeks to will away with despotism and whose effects he wishes to conceal from scientists.

Concurrently with the federal government's coup and dismissal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Trump unleashed paramilitary troops wearing unnamed military swag and egressing from unmarked vans to arrest citizens in Portland, Oregon, at will, without charge, and without regard for the U.S. Constitution or moral law. As in Sarajevo in 1992, a city known for youth, art, progressiveness, energy, and hope, Portland is being attacked from the outside by irregulars sporting camo and clutching ammo.

And if that wasn’t enough to bring a tear to your eye, the news broke that John Lewis died.

'Get in good trouble'

It’s time for extreme centrists in this nation to exert the same courage John Lewis did, to move past fear and cognitive dissonance and hold tight to our nation’s founding principles, to "get in good trouble," as he defined it. To do that, we must vote Trump out. We also must support the non-partisan pro-Constitution advocacy of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is good centrism that insists on pursuing common sense, reason, and care for one another as we stand against the identity politics that are obstructing the cause of America.

“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense in January 1776. “Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected, and in the Event of which, their Affections are interested. The laying of a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of Party Censure, is”

Trump’s America is unAmerican. Make America Great Again today is the Make Germany Great Again of 80 years ago and the Make Croatia Great Again and Make Serbia Great Again of 30 years ago.

Looking forward from the past and today's ugly present, the inclusive, universal call to action ought to be what Thomas Paine urged, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” For after all, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
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As Americans, we are obligated to strive for a more perfect union. The key word here is “union.” American extreme centrists must remain steadfast to the cause of America by knowing and revering the U.S. Constitution. They must boldly reference it as the premier primary source to defeat the defective opining by those with ulterior political motives rooted in power and greed (in Trump’s case, power and greed plus narcissism).
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​And as citizens of the world, we must live in harmony with a moral law that does not divide our shared humanity or scorn science.
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#AmericaOrTrump

​​​© 2020 Melissa Walsh

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By Melissa Walsh

From my yard where I’m caring for sprouting perennials, I hear the great lake at the end of my street, beckoning me. My dog and I walk to it. We hear it shouting and watch it spitting, reminding us of its power. My dog wants to jump in. I say, “Stay. Leave it.”

The lake is still too cold. I hold onto hope that the sun’s spring strength will warm it soon. We will swim again.

We walk through our still neighborhood like ghosts. The neighborhood “Eye Spy” scavenger hunt theme this week is holidays. We walk past a jack-o-lantern, a grinch, and several easter bunnies.

Occasionally, a neighbor ghost emerges with a friendly, distant greeting, usually directed at my dog, who is renowned in our neighborhood for his athleticism. In summer, neighbors watch his outstanding jumps into the lake to catch a jettisoned stick. They marvel at his endurance as he swims back to shore over the great lake’s waves.​

We will emerge from this pandemic changed in character, like the perennial buds in my yard, but each with a new color as we rise from an environment fertilized with loss and forbearance. Each person’s new color can become an iridescence in a post-pandemic landscape if living in light and receiving water.

Without dismissing real fear and grief, our time in isolation, if we are fortunate to stay healthy, is a remarkable opportunity for self-improvement. It is precious time in the sacred space of solitude — a place of prayerful reflection and listening to what we have always yearned to hear from nature and beyond. It is a place for processing and healing, a battleground where one spins strategies for confronting and defeating inner demons of anxiety, anger, and despair. It is where we set a path in our mind for moving alone into each new day. We nestle with our pets before books and television. We discipline our body with a workout and reward it with a leisurely walk and a good meal.

We seek ways to make company with our own mind. Some dabble in pandemic conspiracy rumors. Others complain on social media about forced solitude. But the strong show gratitude for each new breath and find #StayHome ways to make living more mindful and better.

Those quarantined with family, roommates, or partners find themselves on this battlefield of aloneness with others. No matter what our Stay Home circumstances are, we have this time to chase curiosity and grow knowledge. We can hone skills by practicing our chosen crafts. We can nourish our bodies with exercise and clean eating. We can cultivate richer relationships with family members, and deepen our appreciation for genuine friendship.
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My Stay Home company includes my youngest son, my boyfriend, and my cat and dog. I would love to play chess with my son or boyfriend, a former past time from my youth I haven’t enjoyed in decades. Neither my son nor my boyfriend has ever played chess. With the Stay Home order extended yesterday in Michigan until May 1, this might change.

Wednesday night, I fell asleep crying on my boyfriend’s chest for a woman I knew who lost her life to COVID-19. She died suffering and alone. I knew her as an extroverted “people person.” For her lovely gregariousness, she had been designated our office greeter, a role she excelled in. What were my last words to her? I wondered. Surely, her last words to me had been kind. Hers were always kind words.​

With many others, we also mourn the death of John Prine, the singer/songwriter who taught fans how to be “unlonely.” My boyfriend had tickets for us to see Prine’s upcoming Louisville performance May 22. The cancellation email arrived Thursday.

“During our next road trip, let’s listen only to John Prine songs,” I said.

Of course, there are no trips planned, but we’re keeping the faith that there will be. We sense a new urgency in experiencing more of the world.

I think about my three grown sons whom I haven’t seen in several weeks. I want them to fear the spread of this disease enough to stay home but not to live in fear. My wish is that they’ll be unlonely — that they’ll discover authors and musicians as remote friends, that they’ll spend hours each day immersed in a hobby, and that they’ll learn with the rest of us what we value most in our human relationships. During this time of isolation, I want each to invite his mind to be his friend and to appreciate each new breath.

​​© 2020 Melissa Walsh

By Melissa Walsh

​Following an event for a young political candidate, I commented to a news colleague, “How about these millennials? Impressive.”

“Yeah, our generation really dropped the ball,” she responded. She’s an older gen-Xer like me, born close to that arbitrary Baby Boomer cutoff.

Will this generation “undragon” us, I wondered, peeling away the dragon scales covering our nation’s founding enlightenment aims of civil liberties and justice? Was a major tear, ripping into America’s heart of power, the 2018 March for Our Lives movement, this generation of youth’s response to the killing of 17 students at the hands of a gunman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.? In 2019, did teen activist Greta Thunberg remove a layer of scales that were apathetic to the threat of climate change? Will we remove national scales of indifference to catastrophes abroad while quarantined by the 2020 Coronavirus landing in our neighborhoods?

The notion of being undragoned was a metaphor employed by C.S. Lewis in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, from the The Chronicles of Narnia.

The story’s principle character is a greedy, lazy boy named Eustace, who lands in Narnia. Seeking to avoid the joyful, unselfish Narnian community and its work, Eustace sneaks off to an old dragon’s den for repose. When he falls asleep “on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he has become a dragon himself.”

Dragons are selfish monsters that feed off the flesh of other dragons, animals and humans. When Eustace finds he’s a dragon, at first he’s pleased with new power to enact revenge against those he dislikes. But soon Eustace experiences the loneliness of being a monster.

A lion sees Eustace crying and summons him to a well. The lion tells him to undress and get into the water. Wearing no clothing, Eustace attempts to remove the ugly dragon scales covering him. Multiple times, he peels away a layer of scales, only to reveal another deeper layer. Finally, the lion says, “Let me undress you.”

The lion tears away the layers with his claws. The first tear is the most painful, ripping right into Eustace’s heart. When the scales are removed, Eustace climbs into the water. It hurts, but he is undragoned and sees his true identify as a boy.
Lewis’ story is about personal, spiritual reform. The transition from self-love to loving others is the process an individual undergoes in realizing his or her best self, Lewis believed. He called undragoning the “radical surgery” of allowing virtue to free us into our true selves; it is painful, necessitating risk, vulnerability and faith in goodness.

The virtue for undragoning America into its best self is civil reform, articulated in our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Events cause us to examine the first two amendments in the Bill of Rights. We see high school students applying the First Amendment to bring clarity of how the Second Amendment ought to be interpreted. We see those interpreting the right to “a well-regulated militia” and “to keep and bear arms” as the right of civilians to purchase weapons designed for combat. We see some with this view attacking speech of the students.

We see political actors accusing the media of politicizing the Coronavirus pandemic with so-called scare tactics as reporters share verifiable data on the spread of the virus. We see fearful consumers hoarding toilet paper, sanitizer, cleaning wipes, bottled water, canned goods, and Coca Cola. Only those with disposable income can afford this hoarding. Meanwhile, those living paycheck to paycheck face empty shelves.

We are dragoned.

Our nation’s founders would urge us to allow civic virtue to peel away the layers of America’s self-aggrandizement-at-all-costs dragoning. They would call on a reawakening of the civil liberties on which this nation was built — what made America great.

Achieving community of harmonious peace, they might add, requires more than flatly following stipulations written into and amended to our constitution; it requires good acts and just policies, trumping any individual’s or group’s right to trample on the common good of protecting us from ourselves and to feed the dysfunction in our nation leading to murders of young people at Columbine High School, Virginian Tech, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Stoneman Douglas High School and on our city streets. And these days, sadly, voices of moral courage (and common sense) must check the greedy, who would prefer a robust economy over protecting the most vulnerable to succumbing to the Coronavirus pandemic.

As citizens in community, let’s examine how we treat our children and teens. How about our elderly? Do we blame the poor for the crises they face? What about the sick without health insurance? Do we really believe in rehabilitation for the imprisoned? Why do we allow unequal “justice” for the wealthy and the poor?

For those applying our First Amendment right of freely practicing a faith, isn’t there room for a Golden Rule-like force in politics? How about giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s? Or what about not pursuing dishonest gain, but being eager to serve?

The lyric in “Talk Talk” by Perfect Circle cries out: “You’re waiting on miracles. We’re bleeding out. Thoughts and prayers, adorable, like cake in a crisis. We’re bleeding out. While you deliberate, bodies accumulate.”

In his book “Generous Justice,” theologian Tim Keller said human community is only strong when individuals weave and reweave themselves into it, strengthening it — not only with sharing, understanding, mercy and love — but our souls, our unique ideas, experiences, talents. This is how shalom — or harmonious peace — is achieved. The individual knows his or her true north for discovering good purpose and weaves that good into society, engaging with others in their good purpose.
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Good purpose is not “safe,” but it is right and will make America civil again. Let’s undragon ourselves as individuals in community, liberating the soul of American politics from the bondage of pride, fear, greed, hate, and complacency.

​© 2020 Melissa Walsh

By Melissa Walsh
Four-year old Fenn Rosenthal conceived the 2020 smash single “Dinosaurs in Love.” The song went viral weeks ago after Fenn's dad, her piano accompanist, released her performance on Twitter. Fenn's vocal delivery is adorable and her song-writing meaningful. In an NPR interview, Fenn’s dad, explained how the lyrics express Fenn’s processing of love and loss following the death of her grandfather.

I picked up on something more abstract about love's truth from Fenn's song — that love’s presence (and reward) is peace and its absence disharmony. I recalled how philosopher Jean Varnier, who died last May, describes true love in his book Finding Peace.

​"Peace is the fruit of love,” Varnier writes, “a love that is also justice. But to grow in love requires work — hard work. And it can bring pain because it implies loss — loss of the certitudes, comforts, and hurts that shelter and define us.”

​The triteness in the way we celebrate Valentine’s Day today generally misses this truth. For many, it’s a have-to-buy-a-card holiday; for many others, it’s a litmus test of the health of a romantic relationship.

Though conflicting legends abound about who St. Valentine was, we know that the Roman festival of lovers, Lupercalia, was renamed St. Valentine’s Day by Pope Gelasius I in the late 5th century. Since the 14th century, St. Valentine’s Day has celebrated romantic love. The first Valentine’s Day greetings cards were produced during the late-18th century, according to Encyclopedia Brittanica.

​The namesake of this so-called “Hallmark holiday” was likely a church martyr. The kind of love he lived out might have been what C.S. Lewis describes in his book The Four Loves as “Divine Gift-love,” or unconditional love in action. This is the type of love the Greeks categorize as Agape. The word communicates the sacrificial and most vulnerable form of love. The other three words for love in the Greek lexicon are Storge - familial love; Philia, friend love; Eros, romantic love. Lewis believed that Agape is a reflection of God’s love, essentially a reflection of who God is — Love revealed, Love in motion.

Lewis argued that human love usually and naturally demands reciprocity, falling far short of Divine Gift-love, which living in a free-will cosmos, makes no such demand. The unconditional love a parent has for a child is the best way for the finite human mind to make sense of this Divine Gift-love, or Agape perfected. With unconditional love, we are not guaranteed love returned to us. We are vulnerable. Lewis warns, “There is no safe (love) investment.”

“Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken,” he writes. “If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully around hobbies and little luxuries; avoid entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.”

In that casket or coffin, Lewis explains, where the heart is safely locked away in a dark, motionless place, love dies. In other words, safe love is immobile and terminal. Vulnerable love is free and eternal.