The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

An American Mourning

As someone whose life’s work is words, I confess that I’m increasingly at a loss for them. And even in the moments when the words do come, they almost immediately feel obsolete. It’s become nearly impossible to wake up and comment on any specific human rights atrocity, any precise illegality, any single bastardization of the Christian faith, any individual act of Congressional malpractice. In the time it takes to assess one unprecedented act of governmental malfeasance, stop the spinning storm inside my head, and string together something resembling coherent thoughts, a half dozen infuriating, nauseating, heretofore nonexistent abominations will have already swallowed them up. This is, of course, by design, yet knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to navigate. There’s very little that comes with any surety these days. The only thing I am certain of as I watch and listen and walk through this season alongside my 342 million neighbors is that there is mourning in America. The grief is ever-present, sitting like a boulder on our chests, crushing our hearts and rendering our breathing shallow. A heavy dread hovers in the background of our nervous systems, leaving us continually ping-ponging between fight, flight, and freeze.We vacillate wildly from heartbreak to outrage to hopelessness, battered by manufactured crises, curated madness, and genuine emergencies. And that’s just the damage coming from above, from the repugnant legion of sociopaths and predators who’ve hijacked the very sacred halls that their treasonous foot soldiers desecrated on a January afternoon. In any other iteration of our nation, those helming it would at least have feigned decency, offered some ceremonial lip service of unity, and provided a modicum of care for its constituents. Those days feel like a lifetime ago. The entirety of a Presidential Cabinet and its gutless Congressional coconspirators have abandoned any allegiance to the Constitution, to morality, to the common good. They are professional parasites, voraciously sucking every bit of progress and promise from this flawed but beautiful beacon of Democracy that the world once aspired to emulate. Bearing this alone would all be difficult enough. It would be a Herculean task to endure such prolific brutality from our alleged leadership and remain tethered to sanity. But then we look to our left and to our right; to the people around us who are, at best, silent enablers of this violent historic farce, or, at worst, willing collaborators. We inventory the ever-expanding list of human beings we share holiday tables with, make small talk with over the fence, work, study, and worship alongside, and once felt an easy affinity with, mourning the blackened hearts we’ve come to realize they harbor. And perhaps most devastating of all, there are the people who raised us to be human beings of empathy, who taught us to love our neighbors, who instilled us with a respect for the Rule of Law, who called us to lean upon our better angels. Over the past ten years, we have watched them abandon every ideal and precept they passed down to us, jettisoning God and Country, while continually broadcasting their supposed allegiance to both. We now find ourselves ridiculed, shunned, and demonized for becoming the very loving, open-hearted, generous humans they told us to become. The wreckage of this relational warfare is everywhere: In the room-clearing arguments, the protracted emotional cold wars, the social media disconnections, the text chain ghostings, the slow but now undeniable attrition of affection, the silences and empty holiday chairs. These are as heartbreaking injuries as anything this white supremacist vampire colony at the Capitol has thrown at us. I don’t know quite what to say to those of you reading this who grieve America as we approach its 250th year, because on most days, I’m not even sure what to tell myself. I wish there were words in our lexicon that I could string together that would magically lift the burdens from your shoulders, quiet the chaos in your mind, and swiftly usher peace into the warzones of your heart. All I can do today with any honesty is to name the grief and hope that will bring some comfort. Naming it helps me. In fact, perhaps, that shared sorrow is the connective tissue that will hold us all together as we endure this impossible to fathom or describe nightmare. Maybe, our collective tears over the America that is will water the seeds of the America we can still be. This morning, despite the losses that seem endless, I cling to the hope that we, the multitudes who lament how far we’ve fallen as a nation, will find a way to pull us from the seemingly endless darkness we’re immersed in and into the dawn of better days. To every American mourning, know you do not grieve alone. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

I'm Not Afraid Of Artificial Intelligence; I'm Afraid Of Natural Stupidity

AI is inevitable. Well, at least, we're certainly being led to believe it is. The message is everywhere right now. It’s coming from tone-deaf University commencement addresses,from soulless techbro vampire startups,from morally bankrupt data center builders, from myopic local politicians,from woefully lazy journalists,and from massive organizations that have gutted their creative departments. They want us to believe that the mighty horse of progress has left the barn; that the inexorable march toward the future has begun, and we’re either gonna figure out how to ride it or be trampled to death trying to stop it. I’m calling BS on that. Yes, artificial Intelligence’s existence is guaranteed, but humanity’s response to it is still well within our hands, and that response will determine whether we allow our ethical and moral convictions to bear on the technology or remain silent and be swallowed up. Will we value the already-fragile environment enough to fight the fatal blow the current proposed proliferation of data centers presents?Will we continue to cheapen the work of human creators, whose art we’ve gradually been conditioned to believe we should get for free?Will we allow ourselves to be lured into the seductive shortcuts and quick solutions generative AI provides, or will we honor the creative process and the slower road to discovery? Artificial Intelligence evangelists insist that we’re afraid of this technology, but they’re misreading the situation and our response. I’m not afraid of generative AI; I’m morally opposed to it, and there’s a big difference. I don’t resist progress, but I do resist technological movements that pillage our natural resources, devalue human beings, harvest their creativity without compensating them, and enable talentless parasites to profit from the work of billions of flesh-and-blood people, who since the dawn of time have spent themselves on behalf of their art. Pushing back against the unethical rise of Artificial Intelligence isn’t as complicated as we’re led to believe. Some steps you can take right now: Stop sucking up thousands of gallons of drinking water just to turn your dad’s texts into a song for a 90-second Instagram reel. Turn off the AI assists on your search engines and email portals.Stop using ChatGPT, Claude, or other platforms to find information you already have near-immediate access to.If you’re a student, stop trying to cheat your way to knowledge and experience. Enjoy the long, often meandering but ultimately fruitful road of study, failure, and exploration. If you’re in charge of a creative project for a business, church, or organization seek out actual qualified, experienced human beings who’ve devoted their lives to their craft; investing in people who’ve earned their expertise and their price tag. Find out where data centers are being proposed in your area, and show up at town halls, board meetings, politicians’ offices, and wield your power as a resident and taxpayer.Stop using generative AI to make a meme that’s no one’s going to care about thirty seconds after they’ve seen it.Use your brain instead of your thumbs. A few quick prompts will give you immediate ideas which can be seductive, but it’s fool’s gold. Part of the creative process is to sit with the empty page, the frustrating silence, and the blinking cursor; the invaluable times when the wrestling and the waiting force you to go deeper than an Internet search. Partner with advocacy groups to hold CEOs, executives, employers, developers, and lawmakers accountable to the human beings in their midst. Financially support artists whose humanity feeds your soul. If you reject the threat of AI to creativity, one of the ways you can fight it is to support flesh-and-blood creators. If there are bands, writers, comedians, journalists, painters, jewelry makers, small businesses, or songwriters who make life more beautiful or bearable, please tangibly partner with them as you can. If financial support is not possible, please leverage your social media platform to share their work and help them break out of the prisons of the algorithms.Artificial Intelligence, like any new technology, can either be a useful tool or a deadly weapon. We shouldn’t be afraid of progress, but we should be very worried about sacrificing one another and ourselves on the altar of that supposed progress. AI’s replacement of humanity is not inevitable, but the greed, ignorance, and short-sightedness of human beings are, which means we’re all going to push back against it with urgency and ferocity to ensure that we don’t gain some time and a little ease, and lose our souls. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a fully human, non-AI, reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

On Memorial Day and Every Day, Donald Trump is an Insult to Those Who Died Serving This Nation

Picture someone you love who died serving this nation, or even someone you’ve never met. Imagine them wherever they took their final breath on this planet: Jumping into churning, frozen foreign seas in a screaming storm of artillery fire. Shivering in a filthy trench in the terrifying blackness of an insect-blanketed jungle floor. Leaping from a fire-engulfed plane into a disorienting maelstrom of explosions. Crouched in the blazing sun within the crosshairs of a sniper perched 500 meters away. Slowly withering away from malnutrition in anonymity and solitude. Try to place yourself in the company of one of the hundreds of thousands of eldest sons, sisters, husbands, fathers, wives, best friends, and favorite uncles, who, with a courage and selflessness we will never fathom, placed themselves in the path of bullets, bombs, torture, and brutality in the cause of America. Now, imagine telling those brave servicemen and women just before they gave their very lives for this nation, that it would one day be placed in the hands of a treasonous felon with abject disregard for the laws of this land; a man lacking a single noble impulse or patriotic thought. Imagine breaking the news to those beautiful souls facing certain death, that five or twenty or sixty or one hundred years later, America would be helmed by a billionaire insurrectionist who would ridicule their bravery, make a mockery of their sacrifice, and place those who followed them in harm’s way, by allowing a disgraced TV personality to oversee them. I wonder if they’d have reconsidered their path, if they’d have declared themselves conscientious objectors in his coming war on the Constitution, if they would have abandoned the road that would bring their lives to a premature and violent termination. Given their unfathomable courage, I don’t imagine they would, but as someone standing here today and living through this historic farce, I sure as hell wouldn’t have blamed them. We have allowed ourselves to have our freedom suffocated by the very fascism our forebears leveraged their very beings trying to defeat. Watching our current service members being unnecessarily placed in peril in Iran, used as disposable pawns in a reckless and illegal war of distraction by a morally bankrupt parasite, should be enough to make any actually patriotic American sick to their stomachs. As we witness our children being carelessly thrown into half a dozen conflicts around the world designed to pad the portfolios of billionaires and swallow up oil-rich real estate, we should be mourning our shared failure as U.S. citizens. By allowing our Military to be at the whims of this traitorous felon, we have failed our veterans; squandering their service and wasting their sacrifice. Donald Trump’s seditious presidency, his undeserved occupation of the Oval Office, and his very repugnant presence in the highest seat of power in America are a slap in the face of those we honor on Memorial Day who died so that we could endure. His kleptocratic Administration, populated by grifters and foreign assets, serves as a massive middle finger to the millions who lost years and careers and futures and limbs trying to protect a Republic that is now teetering on the edge of the abyss. And whether on Memorial Day or Veterans Day or Independence Day, or any day we wake up with such a small, cowardly, petty disgrace of a man leading this nation, we should be livid at the insult he is to those who truly loved and love America. We should collectively grieve our part in this mockery that is being made of their sacrifice, and openly and loudly stand in opposition to him as a way of properly honoring them. With our voices and circles of influence and financial resources and votes, we should stand on the front lines of our lives to continue their brave, sacrificial work of protecting this beautiful but beleaguered nation. It is the very least we can do for them, knowing they did the most they could do for us. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Stephen Colbert and The Late Show's "Joy Machine" Won. Donald Trump and MAGA's Misery Movement Lost Again.

Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show is over. After 11 years and over 1,800 episodes, the final installment aired this week to great fanfare and emotion. The show’s premature demise was, of course, the direct result of Donald Trump’s eggshell-fragile ego and his complete inability to withstand criticism of any kind. The joyless, narcissistic Man-Child-In-Chief has always despised people like Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jon Stewart; guys who possess a comfort in their own skin that he will never know, a razor wit that will always escape him, and an easy humanity that he is simply incapable of. Though he positions himself as an overconfident Alpha Male, his raging insecurity and naked resentment have always exposed him as a terrified fraud who knows he doesn’t measure up. Trump has spent an embarrassing amount of time and energy during his two presidential terms trying to silence and de-platform any members of the media who do not bend the knee and kiss the ring: leveraging his social media platform, weaponizing the FCC, and begging his billionaire buddies to purge the airwaves of dissension or critique. With his surrogates now overseeing CBS, the thin-skinned wannabe despot was finally able to shutter The Late Show, something his similarly morose disciples have hailed as a kind of righteous victory. In reality, though, all it really did was illustrate why MAGA will always lose: it is a misery movement of deeply unhappy human beings. Colbert began his series finale with a poignant, heartfelt monologue [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_SVdzTXdnE], addressing the home and studio audiences simultaneously about the genuine gratitude he felt for those who have traveled this journey with him. Speaking about the small army of collaborators responsible for making The Late Show possible five nights a week for over a decade (writers, booking agents, crew members, musicians, artists), the host described their collective endeavor as ‘The Joy Machine,’ saying: ”We call it the Joy Machine, because to do this many shows, it has to be a machine, but the thing is, if you choose to do it with joy, it doesn’t hurt as much when your fingers get caught in the gears.” Manufacturing joy. When you hear Stephen Colbert deliver that simple, elegant mission statement, you can rewind through those 1,800 shows and realize that this is exactly what he and his team have been doing all along. The Late Show helped us all face the terrifying, infuriating, grief-worth reality around us by making sure we stayed emotionally buoyant enough to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Colbert, leading by example, never let his hateful adversaries win by becoming them. It has been his resiliency and optimism that have made him the perennially sanguine counterpoint to Trump’s unceasing nihilism. Continuing, the host said of his team: “I cannot adequately explain to you what the people who work here have done for each other and how much we mean to each other.” Joy. Gratitude. Affection. In just over two minutes, Colbert exhibited the kind of quiet, confident humanity that the current president has never had access to. Over the last decade, though he has quite literally never shut up, Donald Trump has never expressed any kind of genuine appreciation for other people, never centered anyone but himself, and never offered humility of any kind. He has never been anything but a sad, insult-hurling, grievance-wielding malcontent who will never find peace in this life because his self-hatred will not allow it. And this unrelenting unhappiness is something his followers are similarly afflicted with. It’s the reason that, although they have their president in the White House, a chokehold on Congress, a compromised Supreme Court, and a near-complete monopoly on the media, they are all still miserable. They continue to be in perpetual war with the world, and the rest of us need to pay attention. Yes, while Colbert’s cancellation is certainly a sad milestone, another tangible sign that we are approaching the throes of authoritarianism, we can take heart in being reminded that in inhumane times such as these, victory is found in holding onto our humanity. We are not fully defeated when we lose platforms, have rights stripped away, or face corrupt power’s persecution, but when we forfeit the love of life and of the people around us, that Trump and MAGA’s misery movement have long since discarded. Trump can continue to abuse his office to attempt to silence criticism. He can leverage the power of the presidency to try to steamroll dissenters. He can marshal every resource at his disposal to remove voices that ridicule him, and his hateful acolytes across this country can celebrate all of it. But none of these things will deter those of us who refuse to fall prostrate before him. They will not break us down or shut us up. We will continue to traffic in laughter and beauty and connection. We will continue to dance and dream and create. We will continue to give and celebrate and embrace. We will not become as miserable as the people who seek our demise. Friends, be encouraged, be courageous, stay human… and let the Joy Machine roll on. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

While "Woke" White People Were Sleeping, The Bigots Stole America

It’s morning here in America, and for many white people who fancied themselves as “woke,” it’s been a rude awakening. A lot happened while we were sleeping. Our prolonged repose actually began in November of 2008. Back then, we basked in the warm glow of what seemed like the dawn’s long-delayed arrival. Reveling in the once unthinkable reality of a black President, we all grew comfortable, nestling into a seductive complacency that only the blind spots of privilege and ignorance provide. The unfettered joy of that moment became a slow-acting emotional sedative that slowly squeezed the urgency from us, gradually dulling our senses and clouding our judgment. Day by day, naive jubilation numbed us into believing we may have finally arrived together at Martin’s glorious mountaintop, that the arc of the moral universe had bent permanently toward justice. If we had taken the time to ask black and brown people, they’d have warned us not to fall asleep, but we didn’t. Instead, we believed that the aspirational “we shall overcomes” that rang out over decades had become a fixed and unchangeable present. We exhaled too deeply; collectively, settling into that cozy space where the heart rate slows, and the limbs and eyelids grow heavy; where, without realizing it, slumber suddenly overtakes you: one blink awake, the next blink asleep. And for the next eight years, we sleepwalked through the world, physically here but not fully present, not entirely lucid, not truly seeing; caught between the actual and the unreal worlds, between the real nightmare and the imagined dream. Yes, we still planned and marched and campaigned and worked, but we did so slightly sedated in the haze of bad stories, willful ignorance, and wishful thinking. Meanwhile, the bigots were the ones who really woke up. Shaken violently from their sleep in November 2008 by the reality of what decades of irrational fear, inherited racism, and perverted theology taught them was the absolute worst place they could find themselves, they began to mount a fierce counterattack. They created news outlets and social media platforms designed to filter out everything except that which would fully trigger terror within the hearts of their intended targets and would-be allies:fantastical stories of a pervasive and coordinated Gay Agenda coming to convert their children;of violent, heavily armed, brown-skinned drug gangs overrunning our borders;of godless, abortion-mad progressives having indiscriminate sex without concern or care;of Muslim terrorist hordes infiltrating our neighborhoods and bodegas;of America-hating Democrats coming for their jobs and flags and prayers and guns. And we were still sleeping. They played the long game of local political wins, incrementally gaining footholds in the spaces where legislatures are commandeered, supermajorities are formed, districts are redrawn, courts are polluted, and democracy is slowly suffocated. And on we slept. The bigots leveraged thousands of Christian pulpits, where every seven days they’d wildly stoke the fires of people’s phobias and fears, weaponize the Scriptures against queer people and migrants and Muslims, and pervert the expansive Gospel of Jesus into a gated white community of rabid nationalism. Sermon by sermon, the opportunistic pulpit predators enlisted them all into service as passionate soldiers in the Army of the straight, white, American, male Lord. And we kept on sleeping. And then, in 2016, to inculcate the terror fully, they propped up an amoral sideshow carnival barker as their chosen one; a barren, narcissistic, empty husk of a man with no discernible moral convictions of his own. They recognized they could use this breathing void as a flesh-and-blood avatar to embody their grievances and perpetuate their phobias. The bigots erected a vile, blustery false idol of greatness and whiteness around which their easily-manipulated rank and file would fall prostrate; a shameless grifter who would daily dig into the putrid muck to find an ever-deepening moral bottom. In the sleep-induced state we were in we thought it was a joke at first. We laughed ourselves back into a dreamworld where everything would be fine and where decency would prevail and where the system would work; so much so that one hundred million of us slept all the way through an election cycle. You’d have thought that would be our ultimate wake-up call. Yet, somehow, over the next decade, despite horrors and abominations never visited upon America, though we imagined ourselves rightly woke, we still could not coalesce and leverage our voices and our influence enough to avoid our nation making this grievous, likely fatal error a second time. And here we are perilously close to theocracy, a hair’s breadth from authoritarianism, within inches of our Republic’s collapse, and still, I wonder if we’re fully awake now. I wonder if we’re ready to cast off the cobwebs of our complacency and enter fully into the bloody fray in front of us. I wonder if we’re willing to rouse ourselves into lucidity and step into the jagged trenches of the fight of our lives and for the disparate swath of humanity that we’ve let down. I wonder if we’re prepared to face our culpability and admit our failures and make amends with our time and our resources and our votes. I wonder if we have the intestinal fortitude to face what is ahead and what it will require from us. Or maybe we’ll just find another way to anesthetize; distracting ourselves with retail therapy and mindless scrolling, soothing ourselves with false hope, sedating our systems with American exceptionalism. Will we somehow find a way to again retreat into the comfortable places and once more grow so tired that we’ll nestle back into a deadly slumber? I wonder if there’s still time to undo the present nightmare. The only way we’ll have a chance to know is if we wake up and stay awake. It’s morning in America. There’s mourning in America. Time to rise and shine. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]