Heard last Sunday, describing the USA's current presidential administration:
"These are simply not serious people."
Our visit to Berkeley Friends Church last Sunday included several intense conversations after the meeting for worship, on all sorts of subjects. That's when the "serious people" comment came up.
It made me think: what do we mean by "serious people"?
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| Serious: Octavia Spencer on playing God in The Shack. |
About fifteen years ago, our Moscow Friends Meeting needed a new place for our weekly worship gatherings. Misha Roshchin and I were the clerks of the meeting, and we scouted out several possible locations. As we approached one of them, we had been having a light-hearted conversation, but then Misha reminded me that we were shortly to meet the head of the organization whose space we were hoping to use for our events. Time to quit the banter: "She needs to see us as serious people." ("Солидные люди....") By the time we entered her office, I think we were paragons of dignity, or close to it.
My working definition of "serious people," which I'm very eager for your help in refining, would include these features:
- people who approach life, work, and relationships thoughtfully, with a sense of purpose, responsibility, and depth
- their humor is disarming and perspective-setting, sometimes a bit self-deprecating, but never insulting or demeaning
- they clearly want to bless their communities rather than serve themselves or a narrow segment of those communities
- they are ready to advocate for and commit to their promises, and have the competence to make those promises believable
- they are known for their trustworthiness, their refusal to "feign certainty" (see "Dea Cox and the 'people strategy'") and their willingness to acknowledge mistakes.
In the context of leadership, whether local or national, we need serious people, to build in seasons of growth, to provide and demonstrate stability when things are shaky, to anchor us in crisis ... and to lead with candor and transparency at all times.
Does this mean the rest of us can coast? Not at all. It is up to us, the people, to retain the ability to spot and choose serious people for positions of responsibility, to expose lack of seriousness, and to demand reform or replacement. But is that happening?
I fear that many of us have long since figured out that "these are not serious people," that it is apparently useless to apply the old standards of seriousness to them, and we are therefore not sufficiently shocked when those people keep behaving incompetently at best, with industrial-scale cruelty at worst, and with utter disdain for elementary ethics most of the time. Barack Obama frequently points out how much trouble he would have been in if he'd done anything at all as president to politicize the Justice Department, for example, but now we have already become accustomed to the daily wreckage that unserious people are doing to our government.
In today's atmosphere, it's not surprising when some Trump administration critics mimic that lack of seriousness, expressing their understandable dissent with insults, exaggerations, premature conclusions, rude caricatures, classism, and intellectual laziness. It's a time of crisis; we need to lead ourselves with the same degree of seriousness that we demand from leaders.
Note: By "not sufficiently shocked," I do NOT mean flipping over into stupid forms of outrage, however self-gratifying that might be. Biblical realism should already have prepared us that outrages will happen, but when they do, they must be confronted.
In checking to see whether "serious people" was an adequate translation for the phrase Misha used in Moscow ("Солидные люди...."), I enjoyed revisiting a couple of other translation posts I've made in the past: "kind"; "normal"; untranslatable words." For more fun along these lines, read Adrian Wanner's The Bilingual Muse: Self-Translation among Russian Poets, especially his chapter on Vladimir Nabokov, starting at paper page 112, PDF page 123.
The Atlantic's Adam Serwer: "Do not be cynical about Jesse Jackson: He was never the caricature his critics wanted him to be."
Jesse Jackson was one of the great preachers of our times, eloquent in text and voice. I had the great pleasure of hearing him in person fifty years ago at the Arch Street Meetinghouse in Philadelphia, at an evening session of the Bicentennial Conference on Religious Liberty, where I was serving on the nonviolent security team for the conference. There's one line I'll never forget: "Racism won't kill us because cynicism got us first." That might have been the moment that my commitment to resist cynicism began, which has been a theme of mine ever since. As a Gospel preacher, a political motivator, an organizer, a serious person in every way, Rev. Jackson was a memorable force for good.
NBC in Chicago remembers Jesse Jackson.
William Barber on Jesse Jackson: Prophet of America's Possibility.
Henry Farrell's brief theory of very serious people.
Right Sharing workshop on "The Power of Enough": March 14, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Tigard Friends Church. Informational poster here—please post and spread the word!
A recently unearthed and restored Freddie King performance from France in 1975 will soon be published, according to Guitar World. In the meantime, another of his performances in France:
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