Some like to say we’re living in a simulation. Virtual reality. I think we’re living in a bad reboot. Someone hired all the wrong writers, with all the worst motives. The good writers — the ones who reflect the human experience, the best in us, the ones who make us realize who we are and why we exist — those writers have been fired. The ones who remain are telling the stories the greedy and careless want us to hear. I think we need to take our stories back.

Early episodes of our current bad reboot were first aired in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was shot in the same spot as the shooting over the weekend at the White House Correspondents dinner. The man who shot Reagan wanted to impress Jodie Foster. When you do a quick google search, it’s easy to find that Jodie Foster is not easily impressed.

Also in 1980, three nuns and a lay worker were abducted and murdered by a U.S. backed militia in El Salvador. President Reagan’s administration blamed the women for their own murder, saying they were activists, and “perhaps they ran a roadblock”. Does this sound like familiar?

It’s a story baked into my DNA, as a child of liberal Catholicism. I am, what some might call, a cultural Catholic; someone who knows the words to all the prayers from the Catholic mass by heart (Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women … it’s some good writing, easy to memorize ) and whose values were crafted in large part by the teaching that faith is evidenced by good works.

You always want to champion the good works, right? Right?

I had a conversation with my sister recently about how we have both found ourselves defending people we don’t even like that much (Taylor Swift, for one). I also don’t care if Lindy West is polyamorous and hope she’s happy. And I don’t believe in god, or that Jesus was anyone’s savior — but that doesn’t mean I’m not offended by JD Vance’s conversion to Catholicism. It’s a crime against what I’ve seen Catholicism be, and what it could be again.

The book is always better than the movie or the TV show, right?

But no one’s actually read the book.

25 years after four women were raped and murdered, we — the United States — sent hundreds of people to a prison in El Salvador from which most people aren’t expected to get out. We sent them there without a trial.

Liberation can be a heady word. Liberation theology, the need for engagement in fighting unjust structures rather than personal salvation — is I’m sure, hated by JD Vance. Often attributed to the famous Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was murdered while leading a mass where he denounced the violence and encouraged soldiers to denounce illegal orders — liberation theology was not his motivation.

Romero was a conservative, originally. He was a very traditional man until he became friends with a Jesuit priest name Rutilio Grande. Grande was an advocate for the farmworkers of El Salvador, saying that they were looking at the soil when they should look at the sky to see whose shoe was on their necks. He was assassinated by a U.S. funded Salvadorian militia in 1977, and Romero held a mass in his village until midnight on the night that he died, and stayed up until the morning listening to their stories.

The history of El Salvador is just one part of what offends me when J.D. Vance says he’s a Catholic. People like Rutilio Grande informed the Catholic school I went to, where each month the teachers handed out peacemaker awards to students, where we all participated in service work, and where everyone was treated as an equal. We were from all backgrounds. Our school’s PE teacher was wheelchair bound. Our school’s janitor was a Vietnamese immigrant whose child was in my class. At one Christmas pageant, Jesus was the infant child of our Haitian school secretary, Mary was played by the daughter of lesbian parents, and Joseph was played by Mary’s real life mixed race boyfriend.

I don’t want to defend the Catholic Church. There’s plenty to say about them that’s negative — I know it all. And yet my values were formed by those people, devout Catholics, all of them.

Audre Lord said we can’t dismantle the master’s tools with the master’s house. But what if he’s not the master?

It’s time to take back the good. It’s time to take back the narrative. It doesn’t matter if those nuns, or Alex Pretti, or Renee Good were activists. It’s ok to be an activist. It’s a good thing to be an activist. If I believe anything about Jesus Christ, it is that he was an activist. This misreading of history reminded me of a passage in Nickel and Dimed, on (not) Getting By in America, the book by Barbara Ehrenreich from 2001 that is still, insanely relevant. Here she writes about a tent revival she attended in Portland, Maine:

“It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage,” Ehrenreich wrote,“But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.”

True narratives that reflect the human experience are always popular when they are allowed on television. We watch the bad reboots when they are taking up all of the space in the room. I am sure Kathy Bates is good in Matlock, but we need our real stories to stand up and be told, so that we can get out this reboot and into something real.

xoxo

P.S.:

If you want to learn more about Rutilio Grande, he’s an interesting figure who dealt with mental health issues and found care in his order, under the care for the whole person principle. I am glad I read about him, you might be too.