News with Nuance: Nov. 11, 2022

A special post-midterm Election Edition ...

Welcome to News with Nuance. My plan for this post is, every Friday, I will break down some of the week’s top news stories and put them into context, with special attention to the impact of these stories where I live: Middle America; and also an analysis of these stories with historical, political, and spiritual context. This is the kind of work that breaking news journalists often simply don’t have time to do — and I’m hoping it supplies the needed nuance and context that’s often missing from our news cycle, humanizing the people and places behind the headlines.

This week is a special post-midterm election edition of News with Nuance, where I’ll share my take on the results (so far) of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections …

As I write this newsletter, we still don’t yet know the results of the U.S. midterm elections, awaiting Senate races in Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, which is going to a runoff; as well as governor’s races in Arizona and Nevada and several House races spread across the country. By the time you read this newsletter, you might know those results. But regardless of the final vote totals - I think this past week in America (and in the world) has been an important one. As one of my Church Council members - a proud and wise farmer who has lived his life in the rural Midwest - said on Wednesday night, “Everyone has had enough.”

We’ve had enough of the political ads. Enough of the anger, hatred, and conspiracy theories and fear-mongering. Regardless of the final election results, again, this doesn’t bode as a mandate for Democratic policies, necessarily. It doesn’t mean Republicans are totally ready to repudiate Trump and Trumpism, either. But it’s a step away from the brink. It’s a notice that Americans really value the cooperation and hard work that has gone into creating a nation that has tried to become more equal, and more free, albeit very imperfectly.

I kind of like watching how President Joe Biden keeps getting counted out, and then keeps on coming back. I was among those who thought after the first few Democratic Presidential debates that there was no way Biden could - or should - become the nominee. But then a Black minister’s son and former high school teacher, James Clyburn, (D-S.C.), put his endorsement behind Biden. The rest is history.

Not many American politicians still have that ineffable characteristic of “gravitas,” or a depth of character that breeds respect even from those who disagree with them. The few still living Civil Rights leaders are among that group for me. Gravitas often attaches itself to people who have lived through terrible trauma and hardship, and somehow they’ve endured. With the tragic deaths of his wife and daughter, and later his son, Beau, Biden is among that group. Of course he was ambitious politically, but there was a part of him that the ambition couldn’t quite touch, because it was tempered by the knowledge of terrible loss and grief, and the somehow endurance of love.

I don’t know what will or should happen in the 2024 Presidential Election. I don’t know really what will even happen with Congress this year. And I don’t at all view Biden as a saint. But what I will say is that I think he is a man who is somewhat aware of his flaws. That’s why he keeps going to Mass, even in an American Catholic Church whose prominent bishops and public figures have repudiated his leadership and even suggested denying him communion. For Biden, and I think this is due to his personal experience of tragic loss, religion is about so much more than this world. He’d never carry a Bible as a prop, because he needed that Bible and the truth within to simply keep on living.

I watched early Wednesday morning as Senator-Elect John Fetterman (D-Pa.) took the stage after major news networks projected he’d win the election against Republican candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz. Fetterman, who suffered a stroke earlier this year, stood on stage in silence, smiling alternately, and almost looked a little dumbfounded. Maybe some people will say his hesitation was related to his stroke. But as I watched it, and as I’ve watched it replayed again in these past few days, I think instead it was simply a really human moment. Fetterman has been that rare Everyman candidate who actually got the nomination and won a race to the U.S. Senate. I saw a Tweet that said Fetterman’s appearance was like if a union was a person, and I keep thinking about that and laughing a little, because it’s pretty apt. And it’s been a long time in America that laborers have been given their due. A long time since we’ve been adulating tech billionaires and so-called moguls and wunderkinds who claimed to start businesses out of their garages but in truth usually turned out to have inherited a great deal of money from their parents.