David Williams's Blog, page 7

Praying for Your Neighbor

When Dad's congestive heart failure was in its later stages, it was hard for him to get around.  Standing and walking were exhausting.  Moving from the house to the car was difficult, even with oxygen running 24/7.  
We adapted, though, and one of our adaptations was getting him a motorized wheelchair.  It was a zippy little thing, and while Dad never was entirely great at steering it about, it gave him a sense of agency.  On a beautiful day, I'd get him out of the house and into the chair, shifting oxygen from the ever-thrumming in-house O2 concentrator to the tank that mounted neatly on the back of the chair.  Then we'd putter off down the sidewalk, Dad under his own steam, me walking alongside for technical support...and just to talk.  I could have pushed him in a regular chair, but there was something pleasant, in a father and son sort of way, about being side by side.
Dad loved loved loved to talk, and that was particularly true as we'd encounter his neighbors.  An extrovert by nature, he missed the back and forth of banter as senescence and illness narrowed the world around him, so those walks invariably involved saying hello to someone.
One neighbor in particular would often be out, and she and Dad would shoot the breeze for a while.  She was always warm, always kind, and graciously and genuinely engaged with him.  She and her family were all conservative Catholics, folks of a traditional and earthy pleasantness.
In every election, they'd have signage for the most right wing Republican.  The Trump signs went up early, and stayed up late.  But though my Republican Dad loathed Trump as a betrayer of all that was noble and good about America at her height, that never even faintly came into play.  She was welcoming and genuine, he was happy to be welcomed, they'd banter and she'd laugh at his puns, and that was that.  She'd often say that she'd pray for him as we departed, and Dad would thank her for the kindness.
Dad's been gone for a while now.  
Last week, after I ran weekly errands for Mom and took her out to lunch, she asked that I bring her by that same neighbor's house.  She had written a get well letter for the neighbor's brother, a fellow birder and companion on many of her birding trips, who was recently diagnosed with leukemia and isn't doing well at all.
So we stopped at the neighbors' house on our way to get pho at a favorite little Vietnamese place.
I got out of the car, walked to the door, knocked, and after handing over the letter, Mom's neighbor came out to talk with Mom about how he was doing.  They talked for a little while, and Mom offered up supportive words of comfort and concern.  Prayers were requested, and Mom...whose prayer group at her very very progressive church meets every Sunday...promised to offer up prayers for healing and strength.
At lunch, over steaming bowls of delicious noodle soup, she and I talked at length about how disturbed we both are at the crass and cruel direction Trump is taking America, how the national purpose she and Dad both served and cared for is being systematically replaced with venality, bullying, and greed.
Still and all, prayers and care went to that neighbor and her family.  Of course they did.  The commitment to show grace to the person right in front of you remains bedrock, no matter what. 
"And who is my neighbor?" asked the expert in the law.
The answer is right there in front of us.  Always, always, right there in front of us.

Good Neighbor, Bad Neighbor

I'd talked to him a couple of times, as I walked the dog down the street.

He lives in a house formerly occupied by a family we knew as acquaintances, the sort of neighbors you talk with, and whose kids were just a little older than our own. They were pleasant folk, chatty and Catholic and easygoing.

But the kids grew up, and the mom got sick, and then he was there, apparently living in the house alone.

On the day the U-Haul deposited him and his stuff, we chatted for a bit. He's a late middle aged white man, short, wiry, with a closely trimmed white beard and mustache to match his short neatly trimmed hair. Now and again, he'd be in the yard, and we'd share a word about the weather, as neighbors do.

But something recently has changed.

As I approached his driveway with the pup on a recent snowy day, he was getting ready to reverse out of his driveway in his old Ford.

He rolled down his window. "Something something hurry up," he said, his words muffled from inside the car. His voice was incongruously harsh and raised. As our every prior conversation had been basically pleasant, I took it as a joke. I smiled and waved, and scampered forward to get out of his way.

Two days passed, and the next time I walked by his house, he charged out of his front door. "HEY! GET YOUR DOG OFF OF MY LAWN!" he shouted, voice fully raised and snarling. My dog wasn't relieving itself. Just walking next to me, sniffing occasionally. We hadn't stopped, and I was on the sidewalk.

I replied, no anger in my voice. "Sure thing!" I drew the pup in closer, and moved on. My dog didn't even notice. But it was, as being randomly yelled at generally is, somewhat disturbing.

Why the anger? There's a whole bunch of ambient, inchoate anger, in which he may have steeped himself. So many of us do, nowadays. It makes us angry at everything.

Or perhaps he has watched my dog relieve itself in his front yard, and even though I always clean up, that has been interpreted as a personal affront to his territory.

Or perhaps he is suddenly unemployed, as so many others are. Or perhaps social isolation has left him simmering too long in his own juices.

Or perhaps, as he lives right near the former home of a paranoid delusional French expatriate who recently passed away, there's a local tear in the spacetime continuum from whence an infernal and demoniacal plane pours malevolence into that part of the neighborhood. This seems the least likely answer.

Whatever the reason, there's been a category shift. He is no longer what I would describe as a "good neighbor." He is now solidly labeled as a "bad neighbor."

And I find myself wondering: what are the Christian responsibilities towards a bad neighbor? The one who does not show care or kindness. The paranoiac. The bully. The one with the raised voice who shimmers with indiscriminate rage, and controls his world by lashing out.

It's a timely question.

Particularly if you're Canadian.

O Hideous for Oily Skies

One of the most agonizing things about America's recent election was the near complete absence of any meaningful discussion about the primary existential crisis that confronts us. 

Which, um, isn't drag shows.  Nor is it where we go potty or whether some people insist on occasionally frustratingly nonstandard pronouns.

The issue is climate.  It's the primary threat to our well-being as a people, a threat that only grows deeper every day we choose to ignore it.  As I argued in my book OUR ANGRY EDEN, it's not a far-off threat, confined to an imaginary future. It's right now.

We've reached the point in the crisis where towns and cities are being devastated.  Remember Boone?  Remember Asheville?  Los Angeles, right now, is still smoldering.  One flutter of a butterfly's wings, and the city of Tampa Bay might not exist this year.

But still, it wasn't talked about, because as far as the "republican" party is concerned, it's all imaginary, and gets in the way of the wealthy getting wealthier.  So distractions must be manufactured.  Look!  Queer people are strange!  And brown people!  So scary!

At the same time, poll-obsessed Democratic apparatchiks were fretting about votes in Pennsylvania.  That's coal country!  Can't risk speaking the truth about something that threatens all of us, because then we'll lose those necessary electoral votes!

Well.  How'd that work out?

It was an act of malicious and willful falsehood, magnified by shortsighted cowardice.  The Mammonists were allowed to define the terms of the exchange, and when you let an opponent choose their ground, you lose. 

And so now, we're back to drill, baby, drill.  

But that phrase has taken on a different connotation since it was first uttered during the election of 2008, back when some folks still fretted about the coming of peak oil.  This isn't the 1970s or 1980s.  We're no longer looking at an America that has a perilously limited supply of projected crude oil reserves.

It is, now, the precise opposite.  Our drilling is horizontal, or to facilitate hydraulic fracturing.  We have a perilously large supply of projected shale oil reserves, the largest in the world.  Two point one seven trillion barrels are estimated, which places the United States in a position to continue to burn fossil fuels at an unabated rate for the next century or so.  We are fossil fuel self-sufficient, through all of our lifetimes.  And there's money to be made, so very much money to be made. 

It is, of course, a Faustian bargain, as are all sacrifices made to the Golden Calf.

The teratons of carbon released from American reserves alone will be sufficient to raise global temperatures by three to five degrees, which would in turn raise ocean levels enough to drown New Orleans and Miami and most American coastal cities.  The current climate-change induced mass extinction event will be accelerated, as the living creatures who share our ecosystem struggle to adapt.  Agriculture will also struggle, and may collapse elsewhere.  

None of this is good.  Those are the known knowns.

But with Mammon as our Lord and Savior, why would we care?

Because there's money to be made right now, so very much money to be made.

With Hearts Hardened

As I prepped my sermon this last week, I encountered a dark harmony in scripture that hadn't ever surfaced for me before.  This happens with surprising frequency, 'cause even though I have preached over a thousand sermons in my twenty plus years in ministry, my encounter with the Word is new every week.
It's a sacred book of books that goes back over two millennia in written form.  It stretches back at least another thousand years (or more) if we consider the now-lost manuscripts upon which it is based, and the oral traditions go back further still.   Put that into encounter with this moment, and you have nearly endless opportunities for interpretive newness.  The Word lives and breathes.
The connection that popped this week was rooted in the book of Isaiah, in the story of Isaiah's call.  Isaiah's prophetic witness was to the wealthy and the powerful of his people, back in a time when the rich were fat and self-satisfied.  They were completely convinced that their power was a marker of God's blessing.  Isaiah's message to them for the first thirty nine chapters of his prophetic book is relentlessly harsh, as he again and again calls them to account for oppressing the poor and failing to do justice.  The story of how he came to be a prophet is recounted in chapter 6, and it contains a peculiar curse.
Tell the people, God says, that they will not see, hear, comprehend, or understand.  Nothing you say will change their minds, and they will be destroyed.  So God's message, through Isaiah the prophet, is that the people have lost their ability to choose justice and grace.  There's no way out of the trap they've set for themselves, and things 'bout to get real.
I've read this call passage many times before, but this last week for the first time, I realized it reminded me of another difficult passage: the hardening of Pharaoh's heart.   In the Exodus story, Pharaoh refuses to yield to Moses' call to set his people free, even in the face of rising diseases and tempests and fires.  Why wouldn't he relent?  His heart, we hear in Torah, has been hardened by God.  He can't course correct.  He can't repent.  He is no longer free to choose to escape his fate, as the wrath of God deepens against him.
Given the necessity of repentance for the Gospel, this story seems to set a boundary around grace that has always troubled my pastoral heart.  Surely, surely there is not a point when our selfish and self-destructive choices cannot be undone, when we can't be forgiven, when the fires of God's anger cannot be stopped by God's love.  
Yet there are such times.  God will allow us to harden our hearts, to close our ears, to shut our eyes, and to be destroyed.  Because we are always free to choose to believe our own lies, to choose selfishly, to choose dominance and Mammon over grace and justice.
It's the terrible price of our liberty.
  

Hating the Samaritan

One of my congregants brought my attention to a statement yesterday by Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and CEO of Samaritan's Purse.  

Samaritan's Purse, if you don't know it, is an evangelical relief organization, one that does tremendous work to bring lifegiving support to places of crisis in the world.  They're competently run and remarkably bold in stepping into areas of crisis to provide food, medicine, and emergency support.  I have friends who have witnessed first hand the good work they're doing, particularly in Sudan and Haiti.

Workers for relief agencies work side-by-side in desperate conditions, even as they may come from different national and ideological backgrounds.  Those workers face violence, desperation, and privation, all to ensure the hungry are fed, the thirsty have water, and those wrenched from their homes by war or natural disaster are cared for.  

It's heroic work, and every effort counts.

Which makes Graham's statement about USAID utterly incomprehensible.  USAID was founded during the Cold War to use American soft power to push back against Soviet propaganda.  Like the Marshall Plan, the goal was to win the hearts and minds of the world by showing that we as a nation were noble, honorable, and generous.  It provides relief in precisely the areas where Samaritan's Purse operates.  And yet Franklin Graham said the following about it yesterday:

"USAID, under the control of the Democratic left, has been pushing LGBTQ, transgender, and other godless agendas to the world in the name of the United States of America. We the taxpayers have been paying for this to the tune of billions of dollars. Thank you Elon Musk for exposing this—and now President Donald J. Trump is bringing it to an end. I encourage the State Department to continue providing life-saving aid like food and medicine."

Is this true?

The first sentence has some truth to it, as do most well spun falsehoods.  A tiny fraction of the USAID budget has been used to support organizations that assert that Queer folks are human beings with rights.    But the second sentence does not follow from the first, and what it implies is false.  Yes, the USAID budget is in the billions, but those billions are spent on economic development, humanitarian assistance, and health initiatives.

Because faith-based initiatives are a major part of American identity, much of that money goes to support the efforts of Christian relief efforts.  The largest single recipient of USAID funding, at over $4 billion dollars, is Catholic Relief Services.  World Vision and Lutheran World Relief and the Presbyterian Church in East Africa have also been significant USAID partners, with total annual giving to Christian organizations in the billions of dollars.  USAID also buys billions of dollars of food for emergency relief from American farmers. 

Franklin Graham knows this.  He knows this because his own organization received $90,000,000 from USAID over the last four years.  Ninety million dollars.  Samaritan's Purse alone receives ten times as much USAID funding as all of the grants supporting Queer folk combined.  Watch this far right propaganda video listing every "offensive" grant they could find, and add up the amounts.  It's not even close.

Again, this is not meant to in any way denigrate Samaritan's Purse, which does excellent work.  They're worthy of support.  But Franklin Graham should know better.  I think, on some level, he does know better.  But when you've bent the knee to Powers and Principalities, and made your witness subordinate to a decadent worldly authority, you must parrot the lies that they tell.  And that dissonance makes you angrier and angrier, as you shout down the voice of grace in your own heart.

Perhaps the greatest irony in all of this is that Graham seems to have completely forgotten the point of an obscure story Jesus told.  Maybe you've heard of it?  The one about the Samaritan?  

That parable was about how we approach those who we consider our enemies, yet through the fruits of their actions show themselves to be our neighbors.  Samaritans were hated by Judeans, considered unfaithful and idolatrous and traitors to the faith.  Yet it was the good work of a Samaritan that Jesus honored, as a way of telling us who we are to love as much as we love ourselves. 

It's straight up, right there, front and center.  But Lord have mercy, we mortals are so good at missing the point.

Stewardship in a Time of Collapse

As it so happened, the Sunday immediately following the election was a Sunday I was preaching on stewardship.

Meaning, I was talking dollars and cents, and what lies ahead on that front for my little congregation. Poolesville Presbyterian is a church in a company town.  Meaning, it's a town with one major employer, upon which the edifice of the entire economy rests.

That "company town" isn't Poolesville itself, which is a good-hearted little Mayberry-esque place in the heart of an exurban agricultural reserve.  The company town is the entire region, and the heart of the regional economy is the Federal government.   The ten-fold growth in the population of Poolesville since 1960?  That's an artifact of the post-WW2 growth of the Federal government.  There's still growth. As I pulled into town today for my office hours, I saw they'd finally broken ground on a new development, one that's been in the works for years.  New homes, starting in the low $800s!  Because we've been fat and happy here, for quite a while.

Folks who work for the Fed are everywhere, as are contractors and subcons and the various businesses that have sprung up to support and sustain the government.  Every plumber, grocer, electrician and general contractor in the area derives their business from that income.  As does every restaurant, every private school, and the tax base for the regional governments.  

When I asked those gathered, "on what employer does the entire regional economy rely," there was a nodding Quaker-esque consensus.  Every single soul knew the answer to that question.

This was my sermon illustration, when talking about the future financial health of our church on the Sunday after the election.

Meaning, while I wasn't bellowing, (I am Presbyterian, after all) it was a five-alarm-fire air-raid-klaxon Nostromo-self-destruct-activated sort of sermon.  I didn't need to shout.  Not being fools or idiots, we know what that means.

The fat part of the probability distribution curve points to hardship in the region.  If these next four years track the way this administration wants them to track, we're not talking 2006 downturn hardship.  We're talking Flint, Michigan levels of hardship.  

There'll be a mad scramble to make it work.  Then bankruptcies. Then worthless and unsellable homes left to rot by owners who can no longer afford their Mariana-trench-underwater mortgages.  Banks, collapsing.  Local government coffers gutted.  Strip malls and businesses and office towers looking like sets from The Last of Us, only without quite so many zombies.  

Fun times.

As a church that cares for those who are food insecure, it means more hungry and anxious people...at the same time many of us suddenly find our livelihoods torn out from under us.  This is a probable future for my flock, and for every other congregation in the region.  It is easy to talk of stewardship when you are fat and happy.  But the seven fat years, as in the dream Joseph interpreted for Pharaoh, may well be over. 

The heart of the sermon was this: our obligation to those who hunger isn't diminished, simply because the cost of discipleship will soon be proportionally far higher.  Our duty to be a beacon of hope and grace can't be furloughed, or put on leave, or let go.  We must do as we are able, and we must interpret our ability through the lenses of our actual need.  Our "daily bread," so to speak.

If we are disciples, no matter what happens, in good times or ill, our commitment to the Way remains the same.  

Fear not, little flock.

Immovable Object, Irresistible Force

Though it's been a while since I wrote and found publishers for my two books on the subject, the concept of multiversality remains a significant part of my theology.  It's a cosmology that has explanatory power, that's startlingly compatible with Christian faith, and that...as a scientific proposition...is peskily burdened by inherent unprovability.  
Well, that, and the propensity of corporate media conglomerates to use the idea as a way to squeeze an tedious infinity of narratives out of a single intellectual property.  As manifested by our crass capitalist culture, multiverse storytelling just kinda feels like a flowery tessellation in the ever deepening rot of American moral decay.  I'm lookin' at you, Deadpool.  But then, that's pretty much everything around us these days, and hardly fair to a perfectly lovely way of understanding both the nature of being and the Divine self-expression.
Anyhoo, when I woke yesterday, I came out of dreaming thinking about immovable objects and irresistible forces.
There's a child's challenge to the existence of God, one that I remember from boyhood.  "If God is all powerful, can God create a rock so heavy that God can't lift it?"  Oooh, gotcha, says the newly minted middle-school atheist.  Because, you know, then God isn't powerful enough to lift it, or, like, there are, like, limits, you know, which means, like, he also isn't powerful, right?  Checkmate, dude!
This is just a variant on the "what happens if an irresistible force meets an immovable object" thought exercise, of course, and you can smack it aside as an abstraction, one that is inherently unanswerable.
But that's no fun.
Because, sure, "irresistible force/immovable object" is a self-annihilating proposition.  The two concepts are, in relationship, unable to co-exist if set against one another.  Like, say, matter and antimatter.  In our spacetime, such a thing cannot be.  But in a multiverse, well, things are different.
Such a physics could be put into place within a pocket universe, but it would be inherently unstable, and destroy itself.  In a theistic Multiverse where God's creative self-expression is limitless, this could have been done in infinite variety, forever.  So, boom.
One could argue, easily, from intent.  In immovable object would only be created with immovability as its intent and purpose.  If God makes something that God cannot move, then the Divine intent would be immovability.  Moving an object made to be immovable would imply a dissonance in purpose and action, or imply an absence of knowledge about future intent.  Like, say, if the Creator made a universe where the physics was only space or forms of matter, but did not include time.  Such a universe would be unmovable, because without time, there could be no change, ergo, no "motion" would be possible.  It would be set like a diamond into being, beyond God's desire to change through the workings of force.
But why would God do such a thing?  I mean, why would a being of infinite power intentionally create something that it could not change through the application of said power?
You know, like the human will.

Rehoboam's Little Finger

In the ancient sacred narratives of scripture, there are many examples of leadership.  Some are stories of success, of triumph against the odds, of building and renewal and integrity.  
Others...aren't.  There are plenty of brutes and despots, incompetents and grifters, villains and bumblers.
One of the notable Biblical stories of failed leadership is that of Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, the king who broke the people of Israel in two.
Under Solomon, there were tensions between the northern tribes and the southern tribes, tensions that had been carefully managed.  But where Solomon used a balance of force and wisdom, his son lacked any and all capacity for diplomacy.  The leaders of the northern tribes came to him, and asked that some of the pressures of punitive laws, predatory taxation, and oppression be removed.   
The advisors who had served the Solomonic court told Rehoboam that he should show mercy, that he should be gracious, and thus earn the respect and loyalty of the north.
But Rehoboam was a fool, the spoiled child of wealth.  Instead of making peace, he listened to his own ego, and to his hangers-on and sycophants. "Double down," they said.  "Show them who's boss," they said.  
"Tell 'em your little finger is thicker than your father's loin."
That's "loins."  Ahem.
Anyhoo, that's exactly what Rehoboam did.  He doubled down.  He bullied and provoked and threatened.  The northern tribes, led by Jeroboam, son of Nabat, rose up in revolt, and the young nation fell to ruin.  
Rehoboam destroyed the Davidic reign, which would make him sort of an anti-messiah.   
As it so happens, Rehoboam's name means "the enlarged people" in Hebrew.  Or, equally...if more pointedly but fairly translated: "The People Made Great."  
I mean, it's all there in the Bible.  Straight up.  
Those who don't understand scripture are doomed to repeat it, eh?

The Moon and Morning Prayers

The morning was bright and sharply cold, the sky a deep rich blue.  

The pup set out across the driveway with me in tow, eager to go about his morning business, and I glanced upward at the moon, low in the waking dawn.  It was a sharp-edged crescent, enlarged by the illusion of the parallax effect, lovely in the sky.

We bustled up the street, he snuffling at the scent of earth, me perusing the beauty of the heavens.  I'm not sure when I became a person who liked rising at first light, but the loveliness of morning's first embrace is a peculiar side benefit of being in charge of a dog's morning potty break.  We walked up the hill, and I reflected on that crescent, so perfectly inscribed in the warming navy of the sky.  Such a moon would have meaning to billions of human beings, a marker of faith.  For me, it is simply beautiful, and a work of the Creator.  

Our eager boi sniffed and marked as we made our way up the street, then came to the stretch of sidewalk where he always goes.  Like clockwork, he did.  I cleaned up, and we turned to return home.

Halfway back, I saw movement in a driveway.  I wasn't quite clear what it was, not at first.  A form, crouched low on the ground at the end of the driveway of a neighbor.

The neighbors in question have a home decorated in Americana, flags and eagles and the like.  They drive Fords and Fords only, SUVs and a well equipped F-250 that sees use as a commuter car.  They own very very big dogs.  She's of the wave-and-say hi sort, and he's lean and bald and bearded.  At one point, for a brief while in 2020, that big ol' truck sported both an NRA and a Trump Punisher sticker, so, well, that's what that is.

I wondered, for an instant, if one of them might have fallen on a patch of ice, so I quickened my pace.  

As I approached, I realized two things.  First, that the person on the ground was not one of them.  It was a delivery man.  Deliveries are at all hours now, early in the morning, late into the night, so this was not a surprise.

Second, as I watched him rise, resettle his janamaz, and kneel upon that mat to again bow himself in prayer, that he was Muslim.

He remained deep in his morning prayer as I and the dog passed, and I left him in peace beneath the crescent moon and dawn.  By the time I had reached my house, and turned to look back up the street, he and his vehicle were gone.

My soul has been much reflecting on the nature and necessity of prayer lately, and this moment seemed...something.  

Particularly now.

On Failure and Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly

We are, apparently, about to enter into a time of rapid unscheduled disassembly.  The American people, in their infinite wisdom, have chosen to tear apart the social order that rose from the greatest generation and America's rise to power following the Second World War.  

It's time to try something new!  Let's break it all apart, and rebuild it!

So we're going to completely dismantle the regulatory structures of government.  The systems for weather reporting and prediction?  Sure, they ain't broke, but they aren't ideologically acceptable.  Turn 'em over to the private sector.  The systems that check that our food is safe?  They impede freedom, and so do the systems that require radioactive waste to be carefully disposed.  You're convinced that you can do better.  The social protections that were put in place after Americans last starved en masse, when the entire banking system collapsed a century ago?  Bah!  You can do better.

Let the miracle of innovation and market-solutions do their job, we say.  We're entering into a period that will be defined by what I think we can fairly call the SpaceX strategy.  You try, and you fail.  You determine the reasons for that failure, and you try again.  And you fail. You do this over, and over, and over again.  Fail, eat, sleep, repeat, until you stop failing.  It's iterative and evolutionary, and under optimal circumstances, it works.
But there are some nontrivial caveats writ into the Terms of Use.
Here, the two key principles for constructive failure need to be brought to mind.
1) Failure must be a learning opportunity.
We have to be able to fail.  Failure is how we learn.  Failure is how we grow, and how we improve.  But to fail well, we have to be able to acknowledge that we have failed.  For rockets, this is pretty danged obvious.  Well, that didn't work!  Try again!
In my little church, we also try new things.  Sometimes, like our Community Garden or our Little Free Pantry or our livestreaming, they take off.  Getting to livestreaming involved a whole bunch of learning from failure. We showed forbearance and patience, and members with technical aptitude took over from the eager but less apt pastor (ahem), and we got there.  
But for governments, particularly ones that have an authoritarian bent or ideological blinders, this is waaaay harder. Like, say, the Clinton-era offshoring of American manufacturing.  Ain't no way you can persuade Rust Belt factory workers that this was a good thing.  No way in the world.  It was a catastrophe, and was always going to be a catastrophe.  It made the investment class richer, and royally reamed everyone else.  Or Reagan-era Keynesian economics, in which the assumption was that you could govern a great nation with fairy dust and unicorn farts.  That Voodoo never, ever worked, unless the plan was to cast shackles of forever-debt around this nation.  It created deficits that are unmanageable, and told the lie that government in a Republic can survive if its citizens contribute nothing.
Your choice, when something fails, is to 1) acknowledge the failure and the need for a course correction,  2) double down on the propaganda and the hype, or 3) blame someone else.
Politicians and pitchmen will almost always steer away from door number one.  Ideological information systems are for crap at recognizing their own shortcomings, or acknowledging when errors have been made.  Corporate hype machines are equally wretched, and authoritarians are the absolute worst.  You gonna be the one to tell Dear Leader that he was wrong?  Do svidanya, comrade!  
When your knee-jerk reaction is to double down when confronted with disconfirming information, you can't ever learn from your mistakes.  Like an overconfident cokehead driving a Hummer EV in a blizzard, you ignore the signs, and just get yourself deeper and deeper into trouble.
When your hype machine requires every failure to be trivial, you gloss things over with spin, and people who know no better see the pretty pretty sparkle rather than realizing something has gone very, very wrong.
And therein lies the second principle: decatastrophization.  
2) Decatastrophized Failure.
It's a big ol' made-up word.  But all it means is that you can fail without doing significant damage.  It is safe to fail.  This is key.  To fail and learn, you have to survive the failure.
This is easy if you're building rockets.  Oops, blew that one up!  Golly, looks like that one also exploded!  Tee hee!  No biggie.  
You just pour government dollars or investor money into the next one, and you keep at it until things finally start working.  Then, and only then, do you put human beings into your ships, because Kerbal Space Program levels of fail are less funny when the screaming astronauts are actually screaming astronauts.
But when you're responsible for disaster relief, and you try something wildly different?  When that doesn't work, what happens?  Or if you're responsible for ensuring that food isn't dangerous to eat, and you kinda sorta miss something?   Or if a new and unanticipated virus comes along, and you call it a hoax, politicize it, and then promote both resistance to basic hygiene and quack remedies...or destroy public health entirely?  These scenarios exact a significant, unrecoverable price, one measured in human lives.
People die.  People die by the thousands, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands.
Or, if you screw up the entire planetary ecology, billions. 
When a nation fails to recognize and grow from failure, that failure comes at an existential cost.