How do we let our lives speak?
Dolly Parton was a sterling example of someone who acts on her own principles and values. In her many tributes we are reminded of how she came from nothing, but was gifted with talent, drive and loving parents. As noted in “Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics” (co-author Robert Oermann), instead of bitterness and selfishness, “she displayed an unstinting generosity of spirit” and “her commitment, born of deep religious convictions and an immense heart, to seeing the humanity in all people.” “You have to accept everything and everybody.” We know of her Imagination Library that has given millions of books to children, of her donation to Vanderbilt to help find a COVID vaccine, then “taking a dose of her own medicine.” Of her support for the LGBTQ community. She said that she was “everybody’s mother.” Reminiscent of George Fox, she walked cheerfully over the earth answering to that of God in everyone.
Not so Donald Trump. Parton’s passing has brought home the fact that Trump, born with the proverbial silver spoon, simply does not measure up. He knows it and he can’t stand it, insisting, “she really liked me,” and posting a fake image of him and Parton arm in arm, a desperate attempt to capitalize upon and bask in borrowed glory. Unlike Parton’s commitment to seeing the value and potential in others, Trump and his administration/handlers, in the name of their conservative “Christian” convictions, seek to divide, demean and dehumanize, to peddle fear and hatred, showing a true poverty of spirit.
That is how Trump has chosen to let his life speak.
There are those who say that Parton hated Trump. I don’t think so. Hatred wasn’t in her. But I would suggest that she was sorely disappointed that Trump, a man who has been handed so much for so long, keeps coming up so small.