“Keeping Politics in Perspective”

Rev. Dr. James Kubal-Komoto

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh

Raleigh, North Carolina

Sunday, January 14, 2023, at 10 a.m.

I have served as a Unitarian Universalist minister through six presidential elections.  This current one will be my seventh. This is what I know. In any year in which there is a presidential election, things in Unitarian Universalist congregations get weird.

Before an election, people are more anxious. More people are more depressed. There is more congregational conflict. I have learned never to ask a congregation to have any kind of a big event in the month or so before an election because people will be too pre-occupied. I’ve learned never to ask a congregation to make any kind of big decision in the month or so before an election because members will project their feeling about the election onto the decision.

“I’m against this building expansion. I will not support any activity that involves building a wall.”

The results of any election can impact attendance and even membership in profound ways. The two largest bumps in attendance and membership most Unitarian Universalist congregations ever saw were in the weeks following 9/11 and the weeks following the 2016 presidential election. “The Trump Bump” people called it.

I always hate planning for the Sunday after a presidential election. “What should we have for special music?” my music director asked me one year. “You’ve got to prepare two pieces and we’ll use one of them,” I said. “Which pieces?” she asked. “‘Happy Days are Here Again’ or ‘O Canada.’”

Are Unitarian Universalists special in this way?

Yes and no. According to an American Psychological Association survey, about 68 percent of all adults found the 2020 presidential election a significant source of stress in their lives. According to the National Institute of Health, rates of depression and anxiety increased steadily week by week leading up to the 2020 election, reaching levels higher than those reached during the early days of the COVID-19 Pandemic, and then declined after the election.

But we Unitarian Universalists are bigger news consumers than most other Americans. We Unitarian Universalists are more politically engaged than most other Americans. Our politics are a bigger part of our identities than most other Americans.

If you have any doubt about this at all, walk through the parking lot some Sunday morning, count the number of bumper stickers related to a political or social issue and compare that to the number of bumper stickers related to sports.

So, my strong suspicion is that Unitarian Universalists are even more affected by presidential politics than most other people.

This is why I’ve already shared two messages somewhat related to this. In December, I shared a message about staying spiritually grounded, and last week, I shared a message about having faith. This morning is my third time to address this topic in some way. I’m going to address it even more directly this morning, and then lay off it for a while so I can talk about others things on Sunday mornings.

My title this morning is “Keeping Politics in Perspective,” and this morning I want to offer seven tips for how to do that this year.

Here we go.

Tip #1. Consume less news.

Here’s a simple fact. The more news you consume, the less likely you are to be happy. The more news you consume, the more likely you are to be unhappy. I have shared with you before how I took a break from social media as well as regular news consumption last summer and how I was happier as a result of this. Numerous studies back this up as well.

Most news is necessarily negative. Nobody wants to read about another 75-degree day in Hawaii. Devastating wildfires in Maui, though, are another story. Why?

Our brains are wired to respond to the negative, the dangerous, the sensational, and even the titillating. This neural circuitry probably helped keep our ancestors alive for hundreds of thousands of years. But the news industry knows how our brains respond to negativity just as well as the food industry knows how our bodies respond to sugar, salt, and fat, and even reputable news organizations package their products accordingly.

Everybody wants more eyeballs, and during the 296 24-hour-news cycles between now and November 5, news organizations are going to do everything they can to keep us hooked on their product and desperate for our next fix.

Should we allow ourselves to be hooked? Am I suggesting we all stick our heads in the sand like ostriches? To unplug and tune out? No, part of being a responsible citizen in this country means staying informed about the world around us.

On the other hand, I want to suggest there should be a balance between the amount of news we consume about any issue or how much we are willing or able to do something about that issue in our lives. I’ve tried to come up with a clever way to say this, but the best I’ve been able to come up with is that there should be a balance between “our news consumption” and our “civic function.”

This means most of us should consume more news about local and state issues than national and international issues because they more directly affect us and because we have a better chance of doing something about them ourselves.

But I wonder whether we do this…Raise your hand if you are aware that the Iowa Republican caucuses are happening tomorrow night. Okay…now raise your hand is you know when the next Raleigh City Council meeting is. (It’s on Tuesday.)

Here’s another question for you. How many of you already have a pretty good idea how you are going to vote in the November presidential election? If that’s the case, how much sense does it make for you to continue to consume vast amounts of news about that election between now and Election Day?

After all, there are so many other things we could be doing. Did you know that while consuming news makes us unhappier, reading novels reliably makes us kinder?

You could also listen to more music, go for more walks, or even take more naps! Or if you get really bored, sign up for Brit Box and you can watch hour after hour of dramas about people being brutally murdered in the English countryside, which will likely be better for you than overdosing on news about the upcoming election.

Or if you really are concerned about the outcome of this year’s election, volunteer for your preferred political party, as I will. Knock on doors. Register voters. If you are able, give money.

Have a talk with your young adult children or grandchildren and talk with them about the importance of voting even when candidates aren’t perfect, inspiring, or even completely aligned with our own views. Talk to them about the importance of down-ballot races. This is a milestone election in my household. Here in North Carolina my son will be able to vote in the primary even though he’s still 17 because he’ll be 18 by election day.

Or volunteer more in other ways – – in the local community or even here at UUFR.

The most effective antidote to anxiety and despair is always to simply do something. Anything. So consume less news. Worry less. Do more.

Tip #2. Remember what this country has been through and survived before.

 Whenever we are facing a personal crisis or a national crisis, one of the best things to do is not to go to “our happy place,” but reflect on the difficult times we have experienced and survived before.

 These days, however, from both from the political left and the political right, I hear so much about how politics used to be so much better as if there once existed a golden age in which Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil would join hands in the Rose Garden and dance around in circles signing “Kumbaya.”

 Yes, this country may be more politically polarized than any time since before the Civil War, but within living memory it has also survived a Great Depression and Great Recession, a World War, populist demagogues like Father Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace, the assassinations of the Kennedys and King, riotous mobs burning cities, Vietnam, Kent State, Watergate, 9/11 and more.

Previous times have been better and worse, but there never has been golden age of American politics. Stop pretending there ever was.

Tip #3. Don’t catastrophize.

Whether it’s because of a troubling MRI from a radiologist or because of the prognostications of political pundits, catastrophizing isn’t a good idea regarding our personal lives or our country’s shared life.

Both President Biden and former President Trump are now saying that the results of the November election could lead to the end of democracy in the United States. Frankly, I think that one of them has a much better case than the other.

 The results of this election will have serious consequences for millions of people in the United States and perhaps billion of people around the world, as all U.S. presidential elections do.

 Could one of those result be the end of democracy in the United States? Possibly, but I doubt it. I think. I think some form of political violence such as we saw on January 6, 2021, is more likely. For better or worse, I think the most likely outcome is further political paralysis from a dysfunctional, divided government for another election cycle or two until some new political consensus finally emerges.

 Why am I hesitant to scream that the sky is falling, even when there’s at least a possibility that it might? I fear that rhetoric that frames this election as an existential threat to democracy increases the likelihood of violence on both the right and the left.

I’m also trying to practice some intellectual humility because I know I’m not smart enough to predict what the results of the election will be.

I was recently talking to my mother, who was a young child during World War II, and she vividly remembers people in her small Louisiana town talking about it being “the End Times,” the end of days. The study of history has taught me that people who believed they were living at some great turning point in the history of the world rarely were, and those that were didn’t even notice it was happening.

Tip #4 Don’t demonize people with whom you disagree politically.

On Monday, this country will celebrate the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here’s one thing I hope we can remember about King. He did not demonize his opponents. He did not hesitate to speak openly about the evils of racism, poverty, and militarism. He did not hesitate to strongly criticize the actions of those who supported and advocated for such evils. He also did not hesitate to criticize those counseled moderation or sat on the sidelines.

But he also never demonized his opponents. He took to heart Jesus’s words to love even one’s enemies. He had empathy for them, and believed they even suffered too for the social evils they helped to create and support. In fact, he even believed in their humanity, in their capacity for goodness.

After all, non-violence doesn’t work as a philosophy if one doesn’t believe in the humanity, the capacity for goodness, of one’s opponents. Gandhi believed in the moral capacity of the British, and King believed in the moral capacity of not only hesitant Northern whites but even Southern segregationists.

 Sadly, today, not only those on the political right, but even those on the political left fail to follow in the examples of Jesus, Gandhi, and King.

In the mostly liberal circles within which I move, even here within the walls of this congregation, and especially on social media, I have heard people refer to those of differing political opinions as suffering from deficits of one kind or another – – either in intelligence or inherent morality.

It’s too easy to do these days, especially when too many of us live in bubbles of one kind or another so we don’t regularly interact with people with different political views and get to see them as complicated, nuanced individuals instead of as caricatures. I’m tired of hearing anybody who doesn’t agree with a particular political position or candidate mocked as brainwashed, racist, transphobic, authoritarian-loving hypocrite. 

I will admit that I struggle with this myself, sometimes asking myself, “How could any rational, caring, informed person possible support this or that particular candidate?”

The way I understand the political situation in this country is that the most important divide in this country is not a racial one or a geographic one but an educational one – – a divide between those with at least four-year college degrees and those without.

During the past 50 years, since the early 1970s, life has gotten mostly better for those with at least a four-year college degree, and it has gotten mostly harder for those with one. There has been an explosion of opportunities in professional and managerial careers for highly educated, geographically mobile individuals living in cities and suburbs. At the same time, there has been a decline in well-paying jobs in manufacturing, agriculture, and extractive industries such as oil and mining.

Is it any wonder that deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, suicide, and gun violence in this country are at an all-time high?

During the past 50 years, this country has also undergone a revolution in cultural values regarding sexuality, marriage, gender, race and ethnicity. We have become much more diverse. We have become much more secular.

So many of us have welcomed and celebrated these changes, as we rightly should, but these changes have also threatened the ways millions of others have made sense of their lives and their world. The beneficiaries of these changes have also provided convenient scapegoats for right-wing demagogues who want to offer easy explanations about why life is harder for some people than it used to be.

 When it comes to many of those whose political views are different from mine, the candidates they sometimes support turn my stomach. I believe they are profoundly mistaken about how they understand the cause of their problems. But I also know their problems, many caused by rising economic inequality and downward mobility, are real, and their pain is real, so I can understand their politics of grievance – – their feeling that they are being ignored and left behind as the world moves ahead so it might be better just to burn the whole thing down.

 When well-off progressives and liberals not only fail to show any empathy for these folks but also demonize them as insensitive, immoral clods, frankly, it feels like punching down.

 I refuse to give up on them, to believe they are irredeemable, or even deplorable. I don’t want to live in a country where I feel totally alienated from about half of the population. It is not good for our national politics. I know it’s not good for our own souls.

 I even live in hope that though we may likely never completely agree, we may someday find more common ground.

Tip #6 Be aware that some people may be affected by this election differently than you.

I was talking to a friend the other day. He is gay, an immigrant, and a person of color. He is talking about the possibility of leaving the country depending on the results of the fall election.  Part of me thinks he is being overdramatic, but I also understand that he may experience the next 10 months in a way that I won’t – – as more of a personal attack.

I am especially worried about the effect that the political rhetoric during the next 10 months will have on younger people seeking gender affirming care. They and their families are already being used unfairly as political pawns by people who truly do not care about their well-being.

My hope is that even if we are individually successful in maintaining some degree of equanimity during the next 10 months, we will be mindful of and caring for those who may experience these next 10 months very differently than we do because their right to exist at all will be a topic of political debate.

Tip #7 Remember that your own happiness has little to do with who wins in November.

There’s an old trope among therapists. There are only two kinds of people in the world – – those who are wound up a little too tight, and those who are wound up a little too loose.

When it comes to Unitarian Universalists and politics, I wish that most of us were wound up just a little looser.

Yes, as I said before, presidential elections are important. They have consequences for millions of people, even billions of people.

But sometimes during election years, I feel like too many of us become too narrowly focused. Instead of standing back and gazing at the panoramic wonder of our lives and the glory of all creation, we spend too much time staring at the world through the peephole of presidential politics.

We overestimate both the good and the harm politics can do. As the English writer Samuel Johnson once said, “How small, of all that human hearts endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” Let me repeat that. “How small, of all that human hearts endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.”

In the coming year, babies will be born, children will start kindergarten, and young adults will graduate from high school and start college. People will find jobs they love and quit jobs they hate. People will fall in and out of love. People will garden, play pickleball, paint pictures, and make pies. Friends and loved ones will die, and when they do, we will wish we had spent more time with them while they were alive and who will have won or lost in November will seem like a trivial matter.

What will most determine whether 2024 is a wonderful year for you or a rotten one? If you are like most other people and 2024 is like most years, it will be mostly a matter of three things: Your own attitude, your health, and the quality of your relationships with other people.

My friends, let us give politics their due. Let us recognize them as important, but not all important. Let us never give up on doing what we can to make this world in which we live more compassionate, more just, more peaceful, and more sustainable. Let us each play our part but also remember we have other roles to play on other stages and so many other songs to sing.

So may it be. Amen.