Jitterbugging for Jesus

Dr. David Dao and wife Teresa (a pediatrician) with one of their grandchildren. He is an American who fled Vietnam, only to be treated like some kind of violent criminal (which he’s not in any way) at the hands of authoritarian police.

I just want to get into holiness on this Maundy Thursday.

But being the lifelong news junkie I am, I have to say news is breaking out at such warped speed these days that I, no doubt like you, am suffering from “sensory overload.”

And as a news addict, former newspaper scribe (proud to say I was once “an enemy of the people”) and old geezer, I used to think I’d seen it all.

But the United Airlines assault story beats everything I’ve ever seen, at least until something even more sickening and bizarre makes the headlines.

Imagine sitting in your airplane seat one minute, minding your own business, and in the next minute having your face “rearranged” (to borrow a word United’s clueless CEO famously used) by American police authorities.

How these American authorities came to believe that it’s OK to bloody-up anybody seated in a plane, who has committed no crime, as if they were Nazi Brown Shirts, is a commentary in itself on our nation’s moral bankruptcy and unholy condition.

But so it goes in an America now overseen by a heavy-handed authoritarian president.

We’re seeing innocent people, like a former police chief and a couple of physicians in Houston (see that horror story here), being detained at airports or intimidated by people with guns and badges emboldened by the reckless rhetoric and attitude of a president who was going to transform from a reckless candidate into the most presidential president in history.

I’m still trying to get past the unbelievable treatment people received the first weekend that this president’s Muslim Ban went into effect, when elderly airline passengers were detained for hours on end and denied the medicines they take. (Some had arrived in fact to receive medical treatment at American hospitals.)

So I’m not altogether surprised to see an innocent, Vietnamese American get brutalized for doing the same thing your or I or most anybody else might very well have done: refusing to give up my seat on a plane after I’ve taken my seat.

I never dreamed I’d be so embarrassed and ashamed of my country, but I love my country too much not to keep speaking up and speaking out.

Truth is the only God and God is the only truth.

Remember the former American police chief who was detained and treated like a criminal because his name was mistakenly on a no-fly list? These horror stories are commonplace in this supposedly “Christian nation.”

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As an aside: I think White House press secretary has been piled on enough for his unbelievable gaffe comparing the use of Sarin gas on innocent people to Hitler’s “Holocaust Centers.” I could say more about the apology but I’m moving on.

However, in the last post here I used what I thought was a powerful meme I picked up on Facebook, unaware that it was created by my friend Keith Jenkins and just wanted to give him credit for that.

He wrote a book, God Explains it All, you can read right here, free.

Keith considers himself “Purveyor of All Things Literary & Theological.”

And how smart is he?

He studied British literature at Rice University (Houston’s “Harvard on the Bayou”) and theology at Duke University.

But then I, a 1968 graduate of Navasota High School in Navasota, Texas.

Navasota High School is “Harvard on the Brazos.” (See here — and also here.

This powerful meme was “a Keith Jenkins Original,” created by my friend and very smart guy Keith Jenkins.