The Cost
Some Men Must Not Grow Old
I want to be an old man. I want to sit and watch my grandchildren gather apples in the North Carolina mountains. Feel the light nip of the Southern autumn breeze, which seems to arrive later and later each year. I wonder, when I am an old man, if it will arrive at all.
Last night I dreamed of death.
I could not tell if it was my own or another’s.
I dreamed I was the wife or perhaps the sister of a partisan in the Second World War. Disparate scenes of my life played out before me. I was hiding people from the Reich. Cooking for them in hushed moments. Laughing with them. Protecting them.
There was a man there, my brother or my husband, I wasn’t sure which. The final scene took place in a small avenue next to our home, hiding from armed patrols. There was a sense of anticipation, as if we were about to pull off some long-laid plan. Then I noticed him rising next to me. Rising into the sky. There were guards behind us that we hadn’t noticed. We’d been found out. Now he was being lifted into the sky by a wire noose.
My point of view changed. I was no longer a part of this scene, but instead watching it unfold from a short distance away. The wife too was lifted. She was his wife, I could see that now. She was lifted alongside him in death. No struggle. It seemed as if they were already dead. That they were being lifted as an example to others. To the people in the crowd watching. To me.
They had rifles in their hands, even as they were lifted. Frozen, in one final act of defiance.
In the moment I felt lucid, and chose to wake up, rather than endure the sight of them any longer. Tears formed at the edges of my waking sight. I reached for my phone and began to type.
Unlike Niemöller, Bonhoeffer never yielded to Nazi pressures on his faith.
Hanged Gods
I’ve always hated hanging scenes in movies. The gruesome snap of the neck, or worse yet, the brief struggle for air. I always hated that when they rescue hanging victims in action movies, they always show a few people being hanged before the rescue.
I think about my Lord hanging from a tree on Calvary, on a hillside I’ve seen only from a third story window.
A divine sacrifice of Himself, to Himself.
Not unlike the Allfather, worshipped by my Norse kin of old, who was himself hanged, not for love, but for knowledge.
I ween that I hung on the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was
To Odin, myself to myself,
On the tree that none may ever know
What root beneath it runs.
But these Hanged Gods shared no noose. They hung from trees and crosses, not thin wires. Not like the men and women who defied the Reich and paid the ultimate price for it.
I try not to dwell overmuch on dreams of death. I dream of it only rarely. Dreams may be messages from the deep, but the message is rarely clear.
When I entered Ukraine a few weeks after the Russian invasion, I began to dream about being hunted by Russian soldiers through a house. Always found out. Always seeing the knife or the bayonet about to pierce me as I awoke in a panic, my heart pounding. Sweat pouring from my brow.
Now I dream of Nazis. Of a sudden knock on the door, of agents in the night. Of hasty tribunals and wire nooses and grim futures.
It all makes me think about The Cost.
I am too close a student of history to imagine that my political activity is innocent, or at least that it will be considered so for long.
Our futures grow dark. The gentler timelines seem to get pruned away the further we accelerate this course toward perfect technological surveillance, climate ruin, and cultural fascism.
The vision of our future being spun by our unelected elites is one of austerity and compliance. There is so much going on, so much to do, and all of it happening so quickly. The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it, that’s the real trick of the Imperial thought machine.
Increasingly, it does not feel like idle fantasy to imagine that some of us may pay for our dissent with our lives. After all, some of us already have. In Minneapolis. In Gaza. In the mud-slicked trenches of Ukraine’s far east.
More still will pay with their freedom. Marwan Barghouti rots behind bars in an Israeli prison. Abdullah Öcalan, in a Turkish one.
I think often, lately, of Martin Niemöller’s words:
First they came for the Communists, and I said nothing, for I was not a communist.
Well, I don’t really have that excuse. Do you think the Burger Reich goons will believe me if I clarify that I’m not actually a communist but more of a Libertarian Municipalist seeking to build social ecology through federated councils?
No. I very much doubt it. While the Left obsesses over such distinctions, the Right couldn’t care less. We are all dirty commies to them.
But while Niemöller’s words ring through my ears as both a charge and a warning, it is another German pastor that occupies my thoughts.
The Cost of Discipleship
It would be difficult to overstate how devout of a Christian I was as a child. That is not meant to be a testament to my moral character, but rather to my moral conditioning.
The son of a pastor in the Deep South, I was raised with the heady faith of the Westminster Divines, the celestial courtroom of Augustine’s justification theology, and the witness of the martyrs.
Among the latter, two stood out to me as major inspirations: Jim Elliot, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Jim Elliot was a missionary who got himself speared to death by an uncontacted indigenous tribe in the Amazon. Bonhoeffer was a German pastor who got himself killed by getting involved in a plot to kill Hitler. They hanged him from a wire noose from a gallows with no platform, causing death by strangulation rather than a quick neck break.
He was executed just days before American troops liberated Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, where he had been interred since his arrest in association with the assassination plot.
That noose was the detail I always remembered. It seemed such a brutal way to be killed. How chilling it was, then, to see it reappear in my dream last night.
I read about that detail in a biography of Bonhoeffer by the evangelical author and radio host Eric Metaxas, a work later criticized by historians for reshaping Bonhoeffer into a more modern evangelical figure.
I was so inspired by Bonhoeffer’s courage in the face of fascism that I resolved that, should it ever come to it, I had to be willing to suffer the same fate for what I believed.
Bonhoeffer himself wrote a book called The Cost of Discipleship. I read that too, wondering if Bonhoeffer had the foresight to realize that his discipleship would cost him his own life.
Now I dream of Nazis. Of a sudden knock on the door, of agents in the night. Of hasty tribunals and wire nooses and grim futures.
I was deeply saddened, years later, to learn that Eric Metaxas, the author whose close study of Bonhoeffer made me admire the man, became fully radicalized into MAGA, amplified narratives about a stolen election in 2020, and used his platform to argue that officials who certified the results were complicit in wrongdoing.
He wrote children’s books titled Donald Builds the Wall and Donald Drains the Swamp. Like so many of those with whom I was raised who called themselves Christians, the lure of fascism was too strong for him. He took the Devil’s bargain, the one offered by the Accuser to Jesus in the wilderness, choosing dominion over the earth above submission to the God of Fallen Sparrows.
It was the same decision Martin Niemöller made, in the early days of the Reich. Unlike Bonhoeffer, Niemöller was initially a supporter of Hitler. A traditional conservative, he was not a fascist, per se, but like most conservatives, was more afraid of the specter of “Judeo-Bolshevism” than he was of the growing Nazi terror. After all, that terror was designed to protect people like him. Christians. Germans. Antisemites. At least at first.
Unlike Niemöller, Bonhoeffer never yielded to Nazi pressures on his faith. He never allowed his congregation to be absorbed by the sycophantic state religion of the Reich that thousands of German Christians flocked to, regarding their status as Germans more essential than their status as Christians.
Unlike Niemöller, Bonhoeffer paid the cost of discipleship in full. Niemöller was arrested, but was ultimately freed and got to live out his days regretting his early support of the Nazis, and warning the world of the costs of war and fascism.
He never had to suffer the consequences of unflagging opposition to Nazism, but was haunted by regret to the end of his days. He retired to the town of Wiesbaden, and got to watch his grandchildren pick apples in the crisp autumn air.
In order for evil to be defeated, some men must not grow old.
