Carrie Underwood at the Inauguration
Yep! She’s going to sing at the inauguration. Every time we have an inauguration somebody is complaining about who is showing up to perform. When a Democratic president is being inaugurated, the Republicans go unfollow those musicians. Now that a particularly divisive Republican president is being inaugurated, Carrie Underwood is getting her fair share of pushback and unfollows for wanting to perform at an inauguration.
So, let’s step back for a minute. Can we really be mad at a performer for wanting to be part of a presidential inauguration, politics aside? Of course not! Who wouldn’t want to add that to their resume?
Why does it become political? Because we assume that if you’re performing at the inauguration, you’re doing so because you voted for that person. Do we know who she voted for? No, I don’t believe she posted that anywhere or said it. We don’t actually know her politics, so why are we assuming anything?
Regardless of who is being inaugurated, that ceremony is a moment of historical significance that is remembered for years to come. It is not something that Americans take lightly. Being asked to be a part of such an event would be an honour for any performer.
What things like this do is highlight the division in our society. We are no longer able to separate the performer from the politics of the person being inaugurated. We are unable to see the ceremony for what it is – an historically significant, apolitical event. It happens regardless of political affiliation. We are no longer able to step back. We are so immersed in politics that we lost all ability to think rationally.
Carrie Underwood is taking an absurd amount of heat for her choice all because people no longer see politics as just politics. We now associate politics with morality, religion, and value as a human being. Anybody that is on the wrong side of that is suddenly a worthless human being and is no longer deserving of basic human respect. If you’ve ever wondered why society is fractured – that’s your answer.
It is time to step our political discourse way back so that we can put politics back into the box it belongs in. In the grand scheme of things, politics should take up a very small amount of space in our daily lives. Suddenly it has become not only extremely important to many people, but also a determiner of worth and value as a human being. Our perspective is incredibly warped right now. Morality has taken over politics meaning that politics is no longer simply about budgets and programs, it is about individual human beliefs and ideals that have no place in political discourse.
This has been increasing in intensity over the years and is only getting worse. For as long as morality stays in politics, the division will only increase. We will not gain agreement in moral arguments. We can gain agreement about how to spend money, but not when we tie money to morality. Money is a complicated conversation by itself, when morality is added in, the conversation becomes personal and impossible.
We are in a dangerous place in our society and it is not because of political policies. It is because of morality. Morality has become a dangerous political weapon that people use to vilify each other.
Morality is meant to be a personal belief system that helps the individual figure out what they believe is right and wrong for them. It is not meant to be projected outward. It is not meant to be agreed upon by anybody else. It is definitely not meant to be in politics, nor is it meant for you to judge another person by.
I’ve posted previous blogs talking about how the Democrats use individual, secular morality as their argument and the Republicans tend to use religious morality as their argument. One side telling the other that they should not be pushing their morality on others is hypocritical at best.
We’re arguing moral beliefs using harsh judgments, respect, dignity, freedom, politics, and laws as the tools to defend our beliefs. We’re trying to build a society around a single set of agreed upon moral beliefs. If the goal was to marginalize whole groups of people, it worked! If the goal was to offend large groups of people, it worked! If the goal was to piss a whole bunch of people off, it worked! If the goal was to bring groups of people together, you failed miserably and you need to start again without using morality as your organizing system.
Part of my healing journey has been to question pretty much everything, and not in that conspiracy theorist kind of way, but in a way that allowed me to question what made sense for me. Are these ideas helpful or harmful? If I play along with these rules, how will I feel? Does believing these ideas work for me? Am I happy with them?
The answer I came to with most human constructs and beliefs was that they weren’t particularly helpful because most of the time they make people defend themselves from the things that they want.
We’re trying to create a peaceful society but we’re caught in never-ending moral arguments and it’s making us defend ourselves from the things that we want. Why? Because we’re unable to just leave each other alone. We’re unable to just let things be as they are.
If you want peace, then stop fighting. You end up defending yourself from the thing that you want because you keep prioritizing the fight. You’re more worried about defending yourself than you are about peace. How do I know that? Because when I suggest you just stop fighting, you get mad. You don’t like that and then you tell me why you can’t stop fighting. You just defend the problem. You don’t want peace you want agreement. Those are different things. The problem is that you can’t have agreement. You can however, have peace – it’s as simple as dropping the argument. If peace was truly the priority, the argument would be dropped and you would stop defending yourself from the thing that you want.
Carrie Underwood is performing at the inauguration. It doesn’t make her a bad person. It makes her a performer at the inauguration. The only thing that made her a bad person was your judgment of her- which reflects far more on you than it does on her.
Love to all.
Della