Katie’s Ground Podcast

The farmers are on the move. Finally. It’s been a cold week, as chilling as any week in the middle of the winter, with a few mornings of frost, and cold winds roaring through. I watched a maple tree’s leaves wilted, trembling on a rare still day, as if those leaves were trying to warm themselves or trying to say something. The lilacs have lasted longer than normal. I walk past their scent, heavy, the smell of spring which is better than the chemical that blew in dust across our fields—chemical I taste. I make sure docs know Bruce and I have been exposed to the spray—herbicide, fertilizer, whatever else.This week I posted a perspective on our local NPR Station that touches on the political, something I prefer to avoid especially when people want to talk politics to “understand.” I don’t have a mind to call up things I’ve studied to give a reason. Beside politics are ephemeral compared to the people who bear the image of God, who as Lewis said next to the eucharist are the most holy thing we’ll encounter. Well, here’s what I wrote.Not again. Not another assassination attempt on President Trump. I watched the videos of journalists crouching by their tables, of the gun man running through the hallway. I listened to Trump say he hoped the dinner would continue. He looked brave and tired, maybe close to tears.I wondered how the would-be assassin got so close. Forty-five years ago, I was at the Washington Sheraton promoting well known Christian authors, when the Secret Service cleared us out of our rooms so we could avoid the sniffer dogs because President Reagan was speaking. The black SUVs parked outside were something to see.Yet again, national chaos grabbed my attention. I began doom scrolling. One writer wondered how these lone wolf types seem to know where security is porous. Others said this attempt like Butler was staged. But this time it was so Trump could get his ballroom. With regards to the would-be assassin, NPR correspondent Odette Yousef said, “But honestly, his content falls into a kind of mainstream left now.”1 During the protest outside the correspondents’ dinner, a man held a sign--Death to Trump supporters.“Rainbow!” I yelled, jumping up from the news to run into the sun shower, to see a rainbow as bright as I’ve ever seen arching over the neighbors’ farms. Why am I doom scrolling when there’s this? When daily I walk past redwing blackbirds sitting on sticks of weeds? I thought about the yard sign “Hate has no home here,” how it also applies to Trump and his supporters.I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.2I wonder how you feel reading this. Are you hoping I’m pointing fingers at Trump and his supporters? I’m not. I realized after I recorded it that the ending is ambiguous, even though the essay points to that line: “Death to Trump Supporters.” Is the protestor’s next move a weapon aimed at me?(I’m not exactly a Trump supporter, but I felt he was better than the alternative. He’s done some good things and some awful things. I’ve given up trying to make an opinion because there are dogs to walk, a horse to curry, books to read.)Is the death-to-Trump-supporters-protestor’s next move a weapon aimed at me?Even my own governor, J.B. Pritzker has called for violence against Republicans. State representative Kevin Schmidt summarizes what he was saying a year ago:Referring to President Trump at a speech in March, Pritzker said, “Bullies respond to one thing, and one thing only, a punch in the face.” During that same speech at a California LGBTQ convention, Pritzker said, “I won’t continue to advocate that we wage conventional political fights when what we really need is to become street fighters.” Pritzker’s calls for political upheaval and his wink and nod toward political violence didn’t end there. Just this week, at a New Hampshire Democratic party fundraiser, Pritzker ramped up the rhetoric. First, he started his speech by saying, “It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once.”Then, Pritzker dipped his toes in even more dangerous rhetorical waters.“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption, but I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.”3So my governor is saying as a Republican I can’t know a moment of peace? He is advocating “a punch in the face” for his political opponent?While I’m not comfortable pointing fingers at the left, because judge not and all that, I feel it might be useful to point out my alarm at the left’s violence. It’s disturbing, well frightening, to hear Governor Pritzker say I should not have a moment’s peace, when all I want to do is walk the road, say good morning to red wing blackbirds and offer thanks. All I want to do is wave at the neighbor driving by and take my other neighbor to her hair appointments trading stories about the fields.Using the language of 12 Step groups, Beckett Adams in “Political Whataboutism has Gotten out of Control” says, “The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. And the left has a very real problem. Nearly as great a problem as left-wing violence is the left’s refusal to admit it has a problem.”4I’ve thought this for years. When Biden talked about how white nationalists were a threat, I wondered where’d that come from? White nationalists weren’t burning cities across this country. Ironically it turns out the notorious white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, turned out to be funded by the supposed anti racist group the Southern Poverty Law Center, in order to keep the funding coming in for their anti-racist work.Adams continues:When a Republican or conservative is shot, stabbed, or beaten by a left-wing assailant, the activist left adopts one of three standard responses:The first: The violence is deserved. He had it coming! The second: It didn’t happen. It’s a hoax! The third, and by far the most common, is: Right-wing violence is still worse…Anything to deny legitimacy to the idea that conservatives deserve dignity, sympathy, or even empathy. To grant any of these would be to concede that conservatives are human. But in the universe of left-wing activism, the right is evil incarnate.4Seeing someone as evil incarnate is the ultimate in dehumanization, and when people are dehumanized, it’s not a big step to move from a sign saying “death to Trump supporters” to actually carrying it out.Adams summarizes the violence: You can have multiple presidential assassination attempts; the attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; the murder of Kirk; multiple shooting attacks on ICE facilities; a violent, weeks-long siege of a federal courthouse in Portland; “social justice”-themed riots of all shapes and sizes; and nearly 100 crisis pregnancy centers and pro-life groups vandalized or firebombed since the 2022 Dobbs decision, to name just a few, and the response from dedicated leftists will still be: I don’t care; the right is still worse.4And don’t forget the Bernie Sanders supporter who tried to assassinate Republicans at a softball game.I hear whispers that civil war is coming in the comments sections. People who just want to be left alone and live their lives are growing weary of the left’s violence, the left’s insisting on getting their way, if they don’t, a tantrum erupts. I see a number of “vote red” comments that were silenced a few years ago when cancel culture was dominant.These days feel like a replay of the late sixties, early seventies. Those years felt like our civil order was fraying. I wondered if I’d have a country where I could grow up, go to college, get married, build a career. Back then bombings of academic and government buildings were common. I remember how jumpy I was with regards to the Moral Majority and talk of revolution on the evangelical side and how a journalist friend said the inertia of the majority of the American people would prevent that. Now I’m not so sure. Families and friends have spun apart over politics.Social media has given everyone the right to be an amateur pundit, to say things we might not say in person. Ben Sasse in Them says, “The incentive structure in the media complex rewards pushing the gas, not tapping the brakes—or qualifying a point…No one wants nuance. We want white hats and black hats”5.I dread the reaction to this post, dread the outrage, when the point I’m trying to make has to do with how political rhetoric is fomenting violence. Outrage is the enemy. Outrage that silences, that abandons relationships. Outrage that paints dehumanizing words on placards and in memes.Awhile ago, I was wondering what Jewish people did with the violent God portrayed in the Old Testament. One day, right there in the bookshelves at Barnes and Noble, I pulled out Not in God’s Name by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi in England. I felt like God answered my question as I walked through the stacks. Sacks offers three moves a people makes toward genocide.He says, “Pathological dualism does three things. It makes you dehumanize and demonize your enemies. It leads you to see yourself as a victim. And it allows you to commit altruistic evil, killing in the name of the God of life, hating in the name of the God of love, and practicing cruelty in the name of the God of compassion”6. Only instead of the name of the God of love, this dehumanization is being practiced in the name of “tolerance.”Sacks says, “The first stage is dehumanization. This is the prelude to genocide. The paradox in the phrase ‘crimes against humanity’ is that the great crimes are committed against those you do no see as sharing your humanity. To the Hutus, the Tutsis were inyenzi, cockroaches...”7 (57). Republicans are called Nazis, fascists, racists, white supremacists, magats.“The second stage is establishing victimhood. Just as it is necessary to rob your enemies of their humanity, so you have to find a way of relinquishing responsibility for the evil you are about to commit. You must define yourself as a victim. It follows that you, in committing murder, even genocide, are merely acting in self-defense.” 8 For instance, Luigi Mangione justified killing Brian Thompson because of how insurance companies treat people unfairly.“When dehumanization and demonization are combined with a sense of victimhood, the third stage becomes possible the commission of evil in the altruistic cause.”9 The young man who attempted to assassinate Trump claimed he was doing a good thing. He says, “And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”10I fear we have sidled very close to that last move, the commission of evil in the altruistic cause. As I said earlier: Death to Trump supporters on a sign is a short step, to picking up a weapon. I fear either side could blow, the aforementioned civil war coming to no good end. I’ve been reading Joe Jackson’s Splendid Liberators about the Spanish American war. The Cuban and Philippino revolts against the Spanish rule lead to death and starvation for ordinary people. And left both countries open to brutal American intervention. (I haven’t gotten to that part yet.)The only ways I know to combat this is to identify my own resentments, put them away, and reach for the common ground. I’ve said often that our friendship is more important than our political opinions. We need to resist the powers that are jerking us around. I’ve resented how non citizens are awarded free health care, free housing etc when citizens have been denied those benefits. Well, I am putting that away because that disparity is a tool to build outrage. I want no part of it. People, whether citizens or not, are next to the eucharist as the most holy thing I will encounter, made in the image of God.In a recent report in Newsweek the authors talked about how our values have become inverted. A famine is reported in Gaza for instance but that famine turns out to be inaccurate, but the retraction is too late. People are already running with protests against genocide. Instead of the in group being hyper nationalists who love their country, it’s the opposite, people joined together because of their hatred. This is manipulated by the CCP.At their worst, they have learned that accusations generate attention—corrections do not. When the United Nations declares famine, governments mobilize and courts take notice. When that declaration later turns out to rest on bad data and buried evidence, no correction follows. The damage is done. The funding has already moved.The second force operates at the street level, where organized protest ecosystems amplify the accusations that institutional bodies generate. Documented research has traced how the Singham network, a global infrastructure with documented financial ties to Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-affiliated entities, directed funds and narratives into American activist organizations. The protest activity that followed was, in significant part, engineered.The institution names the violation. The protest ecosystem amplifies it. The accused defends itself. And the regime actually responsible recedes from scrutiny.11We are being jerked around. Maybe the real revolution is to resist the outrage, resist hating our neighbor, hating the undocumented immigrant, hating the Jewish person, the black person, the Islamic person, the man or woman you can’t stand. Maybe we should value our culture, even though we’ve done stupid and cruel things because we have the sense to reflect on those. We also aspire to freedom of speech and religion and protest and the press. Stripping the clothing that is our culture just leaves us naked and vulnerable and angry. This wreck of a system that is working is better than no system at all.It was a beautiful Friday afternoon walk with the dogs. Soft sunlight with cloud shadows. Green grass. Freshly tilled ground. The weed killer settled and not in my breath which reminds me of the New Testament reading from this morning.“For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming.”12Did you hear that? With the breath of his mouth, the Lord Jesus will kill the lawless one. The breath that breathed life into Adam, the breath that said “Let there be and there was, the breath that breathed “my God my God why have you forsaken me, father forgive them, into your hand I commit my spirit, today you will be with me in paradise, it is finished.” The work is finished. That breath. The breath that breathed on the frightened disciples when Jesus showed up alive. The breath that poured out on Pentecost, so lively, people heard the good new in their own language.And to the guy in the ratty turquoise truck, our roadside is not your personal trash can. Were you trying to provoke me to shake my finger at you? I’m not stupid and not up for road rage against me and my dogs. Bruce says he’s a neighbor. Sigh.If my words have filled you with outrage, with what about, with how could she support Trump, well maybe take a look, maybe walk down the road to pick up the bag with a Casey’s sandwich box and empty water bottle, and put it in a proper trash can.References1 Odette Yousef. “Shooting suspect’s online presence belies claims of ‘radicalism’”. April 27, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/27/nx-s1-5800212/alleged-assassins-online-presence-belies-claims-of-radicalism2 Katie Andraski. “Doomscrolling.” WNIJ. May 5, 2026. https://www.northernpublicradio.org/wnij-perspectives/2026-05-05/perspective-doomscrolling3 Kevin Schmidt, State Representative District 114. “Pritzker’s dangerous rhetoric aimed at Trump heats up as IL Governor dips toes in presidential waters.” https://repschmidt.com/2025/05/01/pritzkers-dangerous-rhetoric-aimed-at-trump-heats-up-as-il-governor-dips-toes-in-presidential-waters/#:~:text=The%202028%20Presidential%20election%20is,Governor%20JB%20Pritzker%20is%20behaving.4 Beckett Adams in “Political Violence Whataboutism Has Gotten out of control” https://www.nationalreview.com/2026/05/the-political-violence-whataboutism-has-gotten-out-of- control/5 Ben Sasse. Them. St Martin’s. 2018. p. 1116 Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Not in God’s Name. Schocken. 2025. p. 54.7 Ibid. p. 578 Ibid p. 599 Ibid. p. 6210 Stephen Nelson, Chris Nesi. “Read White House Correspondents’ Dinner suspect Cole Allen’s full anti-Trump manifesto.” New York Post. April 26, 2026. https://nypost.com/2026/04/26/us-news/read-whcd-gunman-cole-allens-full-anti-trump-manifesto/11 Joel Finkelstein, Shawn Chenoweth, and Judea Pearl. The Moral Mob And the Human Rights Industrial Complex. Newsweek. April 30, 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/the-moral-mob-and-the-human-rights-industrial-complex-opinion-11882578?fbclid=IwZnRzaARloLRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeCbTRqu9eJFIdyd7_JGM84bQONE76n1YjmJvsM872pIETyIKlX-EX-Clv20g_aem_m3h5ZvCu4-bOLiFperTbHg12 2 Thessalonians 2: 7 – 8, ESV Get full access to Katie’s Ground at katieandraski.substack.com/subscribe

Early, when I’m doing chores I notice but don’t notice: the wood walls of the barn. The manger where I set dusty grooming tools. The shavings pushed back in Mrs Horse’s stall. Water buckets I sloshed and tossed out even before Mrs. Horse walked around looking for me and her portion of hay. I turn on the My Daily Office Podcast because I can sometimes hear the word of the Lord better than I can read it. As I hauled a bucket to pour for Morgen’s afternoon drink, I heard the first reading from Job:23 Then Job replied:2 “Even today my complaint is bitter; his hand[a] is heavy in spite of[b] my groaning.3 If only I knew where to find him; if only I could go to his dwelling!1The bucket pulled on my arm. I hoisted it and dumped it into the bucket I’d just sloshed and emptied and clipped to the wall. Mrs Horse stepped up to the doorway, ears forward, friendly. I put my hand on her face. Job’s longing, his longing, his longing, his longing. How I’ve longed to see God up close and personal, in the flesh, the fire, ever since I was a little girl.But I was afraid he might take me up on it. I was outside looking at the stars, standing by the elderberry bushes growing alongside the Big Barn at my childhood home. It was so clear I could see the bubbles in the Milky Way. I wanted to see God like the guys in the Bible, like Moses and Elijah, like Abraham and Jacob, like Ezekiel and Daniel, like Mary Magdalene and Thomas and John, who saw the weird turbulence of heaven.I didn’t ask because I was terrified at the thought He might show up with those burnished bronze legs, and hair so white I cannot look, and blazing eyes and a sword flying out of his mouth. I wanted to see God but then again I didn’t. I still don’t, but then again. The terror would kill me. I don’t even want to hear his voice calling in the night, no I don’t, except through the Bible, his love letter to all of us, or what people tell me, or my pastor, or even books, or the created, blessed world. I don’t want to lose my mind.Right around the same time, I was five or six, my mother took me to a foundry, long since abandoned. Foundries shape steel. To be shaped, steel must be liquid, a thousand degrees hot to make it liquid. It was a field trip for the Helderberg workshop, a summer school for children that paired them with their interests without their having to slog through high school to get to explore it in college.Dark. The windows high up. An overcast sky on the other side. The smell, the smell, burned metal like a burned coffee pot water boiled away smell. The floor sandy, black. I didn’t feel my mother’s hand, though she held it, I think. A man lead us. Huge pots swung here. Swung there. White molt spilled out. Then sparks beneath a plate. Somebody welding. Jump. Jump over it. But I couldn’t. What if I stepped on that plate, hot from sparks? Someone lifted me over.Huge pots, out of control pots, with white molt. A vat tipped and liquid light and heat poured out. I screamed in terror—those pots might swing into our bodies, splashing us with living fire. Huge pots tipping, spilling the white molt into a trough. Sparks flying up. Sparks beneath me. Huge pots swinging anywhere they wanted. Huge pots swinging at me. Sparks everywhere. I screamed. Couldn’t stop screaming.Mother hoisted me in her arms. Somebody walked us away from the tour to metal stairs to the office, a wood paneled office and a secretary. My mother set me down, looked out the window. I could feel her impatience. She wanted to see the rest of the fire. Though she said nothing.Even now I feel like Job though right this minute I’m not demanding an audience, to stamp out my frustration at unfair suffering like Job. Simmering underneath my heart is this longing. In the Daily Office, I’ve read how Moses asked to see God face to face and God said he could only see his backside and stuck him in the cleft of the rock, otherwise Moses would not survive. I wonder if that’s because God didn’t want to show the scars in his hands and feet, the pinpricks on his forehead from the crown of thorns. I wonder if God’s suffering would be too much for Moses to see, the suffering of a God whose people betray him by shaping a golden calf, a cow for god’s sake, to control him, by pouring him into a mold, from gold they’d just worn in their ears. The suffering that billowed into anger that Moses quelled with his prayer that God keep his honor among the nations by not destroying the people he’d promised to deliver, promised to give the beautiful land.But Moses threw down God’s careful writing on the stone because he was furious. I wonder what those letters looked like. Were they scrawled with flourish or straightforward print? I don’t get the golden calf. I don’t get the perversion that must have been a wickedness close to Sodom’s, that drove Moses to call out who is on the Lord’s side, the Levites answering, taking swords through the camp slaughtering 3,000 neighbors and brothers and sons. Then Moses called them good. What kind of God is this? Did the vultures dive down to peck at the bodies? Did the flies buzz?And the stink and the tears of the families of the slaughtered men who walked with them through the Red Sea?What kind of people who’d seen the plagues in Eygpt, who’d seen the Red Sea stand up, so they could walk on dry ground, who’d been fed by bread from heaven, and wild quail and water from the rock would fashion a gold god, would dance so crazed they sounded like a battle? Was it the terror of the trumpet, the smoke, the rolling fire, that sent them to Aaron with their gold, pleading for a god they could see and touch and carry from place to place?What kind of gold calf have I built, after I’ve seen God’s work in my life? Heck just the fields and redwing blackbirds and flashing rainbow, a world full of God’s love, and the consecrated bread and wine, even if puny bites and sips, should be miracle enough. And what kind of ferocity do I need to cut down my attachments to those things like the Levites cut down their calf worshipping neighbors? I’ll tell you right now I don’t have it, the ferocity to wheel a sword at my favorites. Or is it letting go of control, of laying ourselves in God’s hands, to let him mold us the way he wants?At times I have wondered if the visions of mystics were mere, clear imaginations, sprung from the Holy Spirit. I’ve written down a few. But I am no starving saint holed up in a cave somewhere.My longing had gone quiet for years until I started reading Martin Shaw and Tony Hoagland’s Cinderbiter, a compilation of old stories about creatures crossing between this world and the other, though maybe it’s all this world, but modern eyes can’t see those creatures because we are so seated in materialism and that we have gone blind to other presences. Well at least I have. (My brother claimed he saw a flying saucer land on our flat. A friend says she’s seen ghosts.) Shaw’s Snowy Tower and Malcolm Guite’s Galahad and the Grail call forth my longing to look for what can only permit itself to be found.Though sometimes I feel something heavy, fat and slow that swells like bubbling insulation squirted out of a bottle, that swells like a fat pig in the cracks that I can’t push out of the way-- acedia-sloth, the noonday demon where I can’t even call my neighbor to find out how her surgery went. I’m tired of waking up feeling my feet shocked, waking up feeling accusation crawling over me—you’ve wasted your time, you’ve not studied enough to prep for the coming catastrophe. Prayer, my friends’ prayers for me, and a good night’s sleep can shove it out of the way. But a good night’s sleep itself would take a miracle, or good, safe drugs. My longing can turn bitter, it can devolve into longing to die, especially when my sorrows rise. They are never clean, bittersweet tears. The scholars say dying is the route to God’s presence, the gateway to becoming fully human. But my longing to leave this life is a smack in the Lord’s face for the presence he’s already scattered in the world.Other scholars say we can have paradise, here, now. That right now we are seated with Jesus at the right hand of the father. That we are the most frightening thing in the room. A truth that is like a sword popping that acedia pig, dissolving it to nothing more than dew on the grass the sun dances on. That longing is a call to die before you die, to go on a quest for loving God and your neighbor, to not let any root of bitterness or resentment take hold.Malcolm Guite’s Galahad and the Grail and Martin Shaw’s Snowy Tower, both talk about the search for the holy grail, an image for this longing to see God, for a power that feeds the people like manna and quail from heaven, or the five loaves and two fishes that fed the 4 and 5,000 or the bread and wine, body and blood that feeds us now. It’s a relief there are stories pointing the way to how a person might search for something as mystical as the grail. It’s a relief to crack open Galahad and the Grail and read about wonder, about a story when rivers can be embodied and cry out at their ravaging by machine men and see that kind of magic dwells in the land.Job talks about how he doesn’t see God but God sees the path he takes:But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.11 My feet have closely followed his steps; I have kept to his way without turning aside.12 I have not departed from the commands of his lips; I have treasured the words of his mouth more than my daily bread.2There’s comfort that God is close enough, though hidden, to walk with us. I can tell him things and they get straightened out, quietly straightened out. Though I don’t get it, the confidence Job has by saying he’s kept the way, the commands have not departed from his lips. How do we walk into that, as aware as we are of our failings as people? By faith in the finished work? Faith in what Paul says in Colossians: “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority.”3I gather up Mrs. Horse’s hay and walk it outside. I toss half in her bucket behind the barn, where she nuzzles through the clover, candy hay and walk the rest to the other side of her paddock so she gets some walking. The clouds and sun make shadows that move across the distant fields, the sunlight against brand new leaves, the shadow against fields quietly waiting for tilling and seeds, the shadow making me see the light illuminating the fields bathed in it.References1 Job 23: 1 – 3, NIV2 Job 23: 10 – 12, NIV3 Col 2: 9, ESVThank you so much for reading and/or listening to this essay. I hope you’ll consider a paid or free subscription to support my work. If you enjoyed this post, I would love it if you left a tip. Get full access to Katie’s Ground at katieandraski.substack.com/subscribe