Roberta Grimes

Love Above Politics

Posted by Roberta Grimes • September 20, 2025 • 10 Comments
Human Nature, Understanding Reality

Now I’ve been happy lately, Thinkin’ about the good things to come,
And I believe it could be, Something good has begun.
Oh, I’ve been smilin’ lately, Dreaming about the world as one!
And I believe it could be, Someday it’s going to come.

 ‘Cause out on the edge of darkness, There rides a peace train.
Oh, peace train take this country! Come take me home again.
Now I’ve been smiling lately, Thinkin’ about the good things to come!
And I believe it could be, Something good has begun.

 Oh, peace train soundin’ louder, Glide on the peace train!
Ooh-ah, ee-ah, ooh-ah, Come on the peace train.
Yes, peace train holy roller, Everyone jump on the peace train!
Ooh-ah, ee-ah, ooh-ah, Come on the peace train.
– Cat Stevens, also known as Yusuf Islam, from “Peace Train” (1971).

My dear Thomas and I never discuss politics with you here, and nor will this be a post about taking any sort of political position. But all of us live in this material world; and so inevitably, our spiritual lives are affected by the fact that we must live in these often very political nations. And there are times when things happen around us which have such profound, and also such manifestly troubling spiritual implications for us that we are going to have to deal with in some fashion, if onlyso we can put them to rest in our minds. If we believe them to be unmentionable among us, or if we foolishly argue about these stupid political issues that we cannot possibly affect, then we only will lower our spiritual vibrations, completely unnecessarily. And we might thereby retard our personal spiritual growth. One such potentially troubling event happened in the American State of Utah on this past September 10^th. I was going to say nothing about it here, but it has become surprising clear in only a couple of weeks that the assassination of Charlie Kirk, who was the head of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), might possibly become one of those few events that cleave American history with a clarifying fire. He was not especially well known, and he was only thirty-one years old; but the internet spreads news everywhere now, and instantaneously. From the moment that bullet hit Charlie Kirk’s neck, it oddly seems that American history, and therefore all of human history, may have been set upon a new track altogether.     

To find the last previous event that felt a lot the way this one does to me now – so awful, and at the same time so transformative – I’ve got to go back in my mind just over sixty years. Our high school was overcrowded, and therefore we were running on morning and afternoon shifts. My sister and I had just arrived home from school, and we were making our lunch when the phone rang. Our father was calling to tell us to turn on the TV, because the president had just been shot. Every American who was alive and aware in November of 1963 can still recall the events of that week, as if they had happened just yesterday. And I am thinking now that, while history never repeats itself, surprisingly often, it will rhyme. Now another young and charismatic politician with a beautiful wife and two very young children, who similarly believed that he was trying to bring wonderful new ideas to a young generation of Americans who were born in a new and hopeful century, has been assassinated for his efforts and for his ideas. And this recent assassination, too, seems to me to have very strangely happened, just as it happened during that last historical moment in time, just at the nexus in history when America has reached another socialist/communist bridge too far. But, see if you agree.

I am so apolitical at this point that I try not even to prefer either political party.  My parents were Republicans; but then, so are the parents of the killer in this second major assassination, when clearly his political views as he has expressed them, post-arrest, by the time that he was pulling that trigger were about as far left as one can get. And my parents were Republicans because all their friends were also Republicans; and this was in Massachusetts, mind you! When Massachusetts is one of the few American states where being a Republican always has been an exercise in electoral futility. But I think I leaned more toward Democratic ideas when I was young, to the extent that I had a preference. I was charmed by Jack Kennedy and his beautiful family, and I thought the Democratic presidents seemed to care more about regular people than did Eisenhower, Nixon, or any other president until Reagan. But I think I always have been simply apolitical. I always have given little thought to anything that I have lacked the power to change.

 Researching this article took Thomas and me a surprising amount of time! For one thing, most of the major news sources were of no use at all. They seemed to know almost nothing about who Charlie Kirk even had been, and they had no clue about why young Americans were going what seemed to be so insane over his having been so abruptly murdered. But there were other news sources online that seemed to be following this story closely. I subscribed to a few of them; and then the deeper I went, the more I wanted also to go higher and broader, since I began to see a century-sized story here that I thought was more interesting than was even such an important murder. It occurred to me as I was reading these sources that my parents’ old white-shoe Republican party really had effectively died out back somewhere around the 1960s. That was when the Republicans were no longer able to get working majorities in the U.S. House and Senate. But then along came two Democratic-turned-Republican presidential candidates, who decided to pick up and use that nearly-dead Republican husk as their political zombie-suit – please follow along with me here – because by 1980, the takeover of the American Democratic party by far-left international socialism/communism was just effectively beginning on the American west coast.     

Ronald Reagan was our first Democrat-turned-Republican president. He frankly told us when he was running for president in 1980 that he was a longtime Democrat, and he said that he hadn’t left his party, but his party had left him by sliding too far to the left. So, Reagan picked up the Republican presidential mantle, since it was no longer in effective use by anyone else; and he very well governed at the start of the Eighties as a populist Democrat. After all, that was what he was! He chose as his running mate an old-style, white-shoe Republican in the person of George H.W. Bush. The two George Bushes, father and son, then governed after Reagan like the old-style Republican presidents that they were, and not as populists. But they did manage to get three terms because of the goodwill engendered for that second George Bush by his responsible handling of the 911 terrorist attacks.

Then came more Democrats, and fortunately Bill Clinton was shoehorned in between the Bushes, and he was in the classic Democratic populist mold. But he looks to me to have been the last Democratic president in the style of Roosevelt, Truman, and my personal favorite, John F. Kennedy. When Barack Obama followed that second George Bush in 2008, he was the first American president who was more in the big-government, socialist mold. And the too-far-leftward-for-the-American-middle-class drift of the Democratic party was then complete. From the viewpoint of an impartial scholar simply doing research and taking a long perspective of America’s presidential history, we had reached an interesting point as the 2016 election approached. Obama had no obvious successor at the end of his second term; and frankly, I think his more socialist ideas had already worn out their welcome with many older Americans, anyway. My parents’ Republican party was still in ideas-zombie-land, and the Democratic party was on its way toward becoming too pushy and top-heavy, and not what Americans wanted, either. Neither party had any new ideas, and nor were there any obvious rising political stars on either side.  

 So then, in June of 2015, down that golden escalator came Donald Trump. Like Reagan, Trump was a longtime, old-style populist Democrat. He always had wanted to run for president, and by then he was almost too old to do it. He chose a calculating, and kind of a brilliant way to do it; and in the process, he created a new Republican Party to fill that Republican zombie-suit that actually, for a while, may become unbeatable:

• First, he used the successful Ronald Reagan as his presidential model. Trump had switched to the Republican party some years earlier, so he could run as a Republican; and he has governed more as an old-style populist Democrat, just as Reagan had done forty-odd years before.
• Second, Trump used the internet well. It was a tool that neither JFK nor Reagan had possessed. He did narrow and targeted polling to find out what middle- and working-class Americans wanted, and what young men in particular wanted. And whatever eighty or more percent of his targeted groups preferred, those objectives alone became Donald Trump’s whole presidential platform.
• Third, he worked hard to convince his targeted constituency that he was their guy! Now, Donald Trump was born into wealth. He has always been a billionaire many times over, and he was never shy about showing off what he owned. But for his favored constituencies, he personally served McDonald’s hamburgers through the drive-through window, and he drove a garbage truck while he campaigned. For his beloved regular folks, he ran for president with gigantic populist revival rallies, especially in the swing states, where he danced and sang his patriotism; he wore, and he still wears, red hats with slogans; he loudly promised to do everything that they most wanted; and he frankly proclaimed his Christian faith. No old-style, white-shoe Republican would have done any of that!
• Fourth, every member of his cabinet is little more than half his age. And they all are bright, appealing, photogenic, and chosen with what I believe is an additional, broader purpose in mind.

I have come to think in recent days that Donald Trump may be attempting to build a gigantic, old-Democratic-style, populist party of all the people of every race and creed in these United States. He has named it the Republican Party, designed it as conservative-centrist, and claimed for it the broadly popular side of every issue that now exists. And he has filled its leadership with young and beautiful men and women who all are leaders that he has trained in his mold. Each can take a couple of terms as president after him, down through almost the end of this century. Of course, our history suggests that the American people seem to like to alternate their presidents between political parties. But I think this is what he has in mind!

The primary source of the international push for socialism/communism that has taken a firm hold on the American west coast, and has been behind some of the worst leftist rioting in this country in recent years, is a loose organization called Antifa. It claims to be “anti-fascist”, but it seems really to be just against any organization that is not to the extreme political left.  Antifa is an older group – even I have been aware of them – but apparently, they had been causing disturbances at some of Charlie Kirk’s recent appearances. So now, the president has designated Antifa to be a major terrorist organization. If he means that, they may be as good as dead now in the United States.

Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA is soon to become gigantic! We could not even keep up as we did our research with the size to which this assassination situation has grown. Last Sunday was the first Sunday after it happened, and Charlie Kirk had, just before his death, proclaimed that he wanted his Christian faith to be what he would be most remembered for. So, oh my God, last Sunday people went back to church in droves, even for some after they had spent decades away, and all over the United States! This weekend looks to be even more full of tributes to Charlie, with reports, for example, of two sports stadia in Phoenix holding ceremonies at once, and more than a million in combined attendance there. 

Turning Point USA had chapters active at about nine hundred colleges two weeks ago, when Charlie Kirk was shot. But as of now, in just the past two weeks, they have received more than 54,000 applications from colleges and schools wanting to start their own TPUSA chapters!  And while some Democrats have tried to vilify Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination, generally calling him a racist, which he clearly was not; reports now suggest that quite a few Democrats have been switching to the Republican party, they say in disgust at what leaders of their former party were unfoundedly saying about Charlie Kirk. So, okay then. Just in the past few days, this whole thing has become even monumentally bigger than Thomas and I could have imagined it would become when he flagged it to me as something that we needed to write about! But, what have we learned, we who are concentrating on trying to grow spiritually enough to make this our last necessary earth-lifetime?

Well, one thing we have learned as we did this research is that in the United States at this point, both political parties are monumentally bollixed together. My parents’ old white-shoe Republican party of Eisenhower, and of “he governs best who governs least”, seems to have been taken over by the old-style centrist-populist Democrats when they needed a new home after the Democratic party was seized by the international socialists/communists in the late middle of the twentieth century. Those extreme leftists drifted this way after their old ideas had killed tens of millions of people worldwide by the middle of the twentieth century, and their collectivist ideas were flunking out all over Europe.  Actually, even socialism-lite never has done very well anywhere, has it? It’s really only our plain and perfect U.S.. Constitution that still works, my dear ones, after 250 years. Who knew?

But the most important thing that we have learned from your allowing Thomas and me to play a bit of hooky from our teaching role this week is just this: evil people will do evil things, and our only sensible response is love. We cannot fight evil with evil at all, because if we do that, we only redouble the evil, and we and the world gain nothing. Nothing!  So, no matter what happens, our only possible answer is love. Love, and yet more love. Jesus told us we must love the evildoer, and so we must do that! No matter our political party. No matter what! It doesn’t matter, because you and I cannot possibly have any effect on these earthly outcomes. So. hug your neighbor who thinks differently politically, and laugh together at those sillies who allow their spiritual lives to be polluted by nothing but stupid divisions over nothing. That old peace train in our frame-verse has been rolling for more than fifty years now, my ever so dearly beloved friends. If  all of us of both parties can come together with hearts full of love, which really is all that matters now, because frankly we have tried everything else, then perhaps that old hippie peace train still might after all take this whole country home again to the clean and simple, high-minded and Constitutional place where we began…. 

            Get your bags together, Come, bring your good friends, too!
Our cause is getting nearer, It soon will be with you.
And come and join the living, It’s not so far from you.
And it’s gettin’ nearer, Soon it will all be true!

 Oh, peace train soundin’ louder, Glide on the peace train!
Ooh-ah, ee-ah, ooh-ah, Come on the peace train, peace train.
Now I’ve been cryin’ lately, Thinkin’ about the world as it is.
Why must we go on hating? Why can’t we live in bliss?

 ‘Cause out on the edge of darkness, There rides a peace train.
Oh, peace train take this country! Come take me home again.
Oh, peace train soundin’ louder. Glide on the peace train!
Ooh-ah, ee-ah, ooh-ah Come on the peace train!
– Cat Stevens, also known as Yusuf Islam, from “Peace Train” (1971).

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)