Shenandoah, revisited...

My sister Karen and I used to go to the PTA sponsored Summer Film Series at the Fox Theater in downtown Riverside back in the early 70's. Our mother would drop us off every Tuesday afternoon, and afterward we'd wait for her to pick us up. While protected from the hot California sun underneath the awning of Shook's Shade Shop, around the corner from the grand old theater, we'd go over the movie we'd just seen again and again, as we wondered if the roller shade in the shop window had possibly been there since the Spanish-American War. HA . Those were the days... 

One 70's summer week, we saw Jimmy Stewart, and Doug McClure, and Katharine Ross, and a (pre-Dukes of Hazzard "Uncle Jessie") Denver Pyle in the gloriously filmed and wonderfully heartfelt "Shenandoah", a Civil war-era film. This screen shot shows the featured Virginia family seated around the table. Not but a few frames later in the film a bitter argument breaks out amongst the family members. Stewart, as the patriarch, insists that none of his sons will fight in this war unless it affects the family. 

Events unfold, family members die as casualties, and in the final frames of the film, most of the chairs remain unfilled.

We girls were so sad to see that empty table. Tears welled up in our pre-teen eyes, in the dark rows of the Fox Theater, and we told our mom all about it on the way home from Shook's Shade Shop. 

A similar occurrence has developed amongst the "family of Americans" during this long and ridiculously hateful political season. The left paints the right as hysterical conspiracy theorists and the right paints the left as commie-pinkos, to coin a phrase from the past. The family divides in the film as in the actual Civil War, brother against brother, and so has our country. 

Friends ditch friends over ideological differences. And not just ditch, but stab through the heart.

Family members stop talking to each other, even on common ground, because one can't stand a certain candidate whom the other respects, and so all other conversation becomes stilted and obligatory, if any ensues.

People try and play the race card, even when people of the same race as a candidate oppose him politically. 

Religion comes into play -- " which is worse, Muslim or Mormon?" -- when neither are inherently bad to begin with. 

This family, this nation, this America is divided. I offered up a 40 Days of Prayer posting on Facebook during the last few weeks, focusing on finding truth, dignity, integrity, civility. All things which  I myself certainly need to work on, and which I see a deplorable lack of across the nation. Campaign signs are destroyed, vehicles keyed and damaged, candidates openly mocked -- DURING DEBATES. 

Perhaps this all began during the Kennedy campaign, when whispers that 'that Catholic will take over the country with the Pope' circulated viciously. 

Perhaps this all began with Nixon and his botched attempt to lie under oath. At least he had the dignity to resign and go away...

Perhaps this all began with Reagan and the Nuclear Arms Race, scaring the bejeebies out of all of us on a daily basis. 

Perhaps the deplorable lack of civility began with Clinton, whose quite admirable successes as President are forever tarnished by his degradation of the Oval Office to a publicly discussed den of sex, deceit, and lawsuits, along with the dubious and dire distinction of a trail of bodies who could have been witnesses in the lawsuits, to boot. 

Regardless of where or how it started, this election season split this country asunder, like lightning through a hundred-year-old oak that no one ever expected to fall. 

There are empty seats at the table. 

No matter who garners the votes on Tuesday, those seats will remain unfilled. Our nation is divided. 

One nation, under God, no longer indivisible, due to the current political climate. we are no longer "under God". IF we believe in Him, we tell Him how it should go, or we dismiss the thought of a God, or worse, we claim to be Christians but instead choose politics as our god, shunning family and friends who do not share our political thoughts. 

 No matter who garners the votes next Tuesday, we have become a nation at war -- the war of hostility and incivility and hatred. Over politics... we claim, but truly it's the lack of decency and morality that has led us to this place. We are at war, not only with terror, but with each other, in the pews, in the workplace, on the news, in social media. Brother against brother. 

As the Anderson family does in the above photograph, before they are forever disbanded, let us pray.