Found this response to Joe Biden being tied up in the back of truck

"I’ve used the n-word exactly once in my life. Well, technically, twice. I learned it, of all places, in kindergarten at Hope Valley Elementary School in Durham, NC when I five year-old. A kid named Lee, ironically, said to a group of us upon being released for recess, “The last one to the backstop is an n-word,” which sounded terrible so I ran as fast I could in that direction so as not to become one.

Thinking it was a game, I thought it would be fun and funny, both, to play it at the dinner table, only this time with my sister and parents as participants.
“Last one to clean their plates is an n-word,” I blurted out, which immediately turned and tilted my parents’ less-than-amused faces my way.

“Um, what did you just say?” my Catholic mother asked.
Dumb enough to think she didn’t hear me, I repeated myself, doing my best to parrot my pea-brained friend, Lee.

“Yeah, well, we don’t use that word here. In fact we don’t use that word anywhere.”

“Anywhere, ever, boy,” added my not-religious-but-above-all-do-no-harm-doctor-in-residency father in his sternest voice. “You understand me?”
And thank God them, right?


Fast forward to Holy Saturday when my youngest comes home from his track meet and shows Ceci and me this photo.
“That’s Joe Biden!” he said, pointing and laughing.
Living in a neighborhood where a couple yahoos drive like Jehu with ginormous hybrid American/Confederate flags mounted to the beds of their trucks, I have to say that the decal didn’t shock me.

It was my son’s pointing and laughing that did.
Surely, we have done better as parents than this, I thought to myself.

Suffice it say, we didn’t find it funny.

The decal, though, did become concerning the next day, Easter, when it was reposted by the Former President, which to me goes beyond plausible deniability.
Reposting, as it is for all of us, is condoning an idea.
Just like my parents not saying anything about my invoking the n-word, to say nothing to Shan wouldn’t be laughing, true, but it would be tantamount to tacitly agreeing with Shan and his friends that it was harmless.
Or my parents agreeing with Lee and whoever taught him that the n-word was okay so long as no one got lynched.
Which, of course, is anything but okay.
Not only is adorning your truck with such an image or reposting it willfully cruel and potentially dangerous, the tolerance of it weakens America and, worse, deadens the soul.

So since the former President has invoked the Bible again and presently is drawing direct, messianic comparisons, I say we go with that thesis and skip the obvious Jesus response to Peter when Peter drew his sword and cut off the High Priest, Malchus’s ear, saying “Put your sword into its sheath,” directly commanding him—as McCain once did to a crazy haired elderly woman who insisted that Barack Obama was an Arab—to stand down and not go there, lest Peter face similar threats and equally awful fates.
No, let’s go even farther back in Scripture…

…To the dead center of the Bible, to the book of Proverbs…
Which rhetorically asks…

“Who has gone up to heaven
and come down?
Who has gathered the wind in the hollow of his hands?
Who has wrapped up the waters in
His cloak?
Who has established all the ends
Of the earth?
What is his name, and the name of
his son?
Tell me if you know!”
We certainly know who it is not.
It is not Biden and it is not Trump.
And you better believe my son now knows that the idea of binding someone and putting a bullet in their head is neither funny, okay, nor remotely from above.
As for everyone else, you better believe I’ll be voting in the next Presidential election as I always have…by writing in my parents’ names, more affectionately known as Mom and Dad!"