Politics and the Cockroach in the Kale

A Halloween Meditation on the ties that bind us

Years ago, I sat down to dinner with people I barely knew, and before the main course began, I was planning my escape.

I had briefly met the husband through mutual friends. He was into gardening, and I was eager to learn his organic gardening techniques. He invited me over to see his elaborate backyard setup, and since it was around dinner time, he asked me to stay and share a meal made from what he had grown.

I didn’t know until I sat down that they were a Scientology family. I discovered it midway through the meal, as I began to feel the gentle but persistent probing that proselytizers are so good at. Living in Clearwater, I was fairly used to it, so I tried to navigate the conversation without being rude.

At one point, the mother began telling a story about something that had happened at her tween-aged son’s school. As the details unfolded, it became clear that her son had been the bully in the story.

I waited for her to shift gears, to share the moment when she explained to him why that behavior was wrong, or how he could make it right. I assumed it was a long wind-up to a pitch to join her faith. Instead, she launched into a rant about the “sniveling weaklings” who had reported him, and how she was proud to have raised a boy who knew how to win.

It was unsettling. I sat there, a guest at a stranger’s table, wondering why she thought cruelty and domination were virtues worth celebrating.

Side note: while the greens were delicious, I watched the husband scoop up a forkful that included half a cockroach and shovel it straight into his mouth. Queasy and disoriented by this strange Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, I found as polite an excuse as I could muster and left.

But it wasn’t the roach that stuck with me most vividly from that strange encounter It was the reminder that so much of how we live together in this world depends on shared agreements. Not laws, but understandings. We rely on mutual expectations. I won’t harm you, and you won’t harm me.

That is why the old Halloween story of the razor in the apple still resonates. It never actually happened, but the rumor alone was enough to destroy trust. Generations of parents threw out fruit and homemade Halloween treats of all kinds because somewhere, someone might have violated that basic bond by shoving a sewing needle into a Red Delicious.

So much of life runs on that invisible contract. We trust that other drivers will stay on their side of the road. We trust that strangers will stop at red lights.

But we are living through a moment when that trust is being deliberately eroded. There are people who see basic decency as a weakness to exploit. People who lean on the expectation that others will follow the rules so they can break them with impunity.

Trump lives by one rule: Who dares to stop me? He counts on our norms, our normalcy bias, our restraint to shield him. And it won’t be the bootlickers in Congress or the corrupt and compromised Supreme Court majority that will stop him. They have traded away integrity for power.

What we are left with is the need to rebuild a social contract from the ground up. To remember that our survival depends on decency toward one another and solidarity against those who dismantle democracy and strip away our shared humanity.

We have to write a new story together, one that defines the world we want to live in, one where we protect each other from the greed and predation of those who see the world only through the lens of what they can take.

Because in the end, the world collapses into whatever we tolerate or rises to what we aspire to be.

Happy Halloween!