I have loved Good Friday for many years since I had a unique experience in Mexico, right in the middle of the Yucatan Peninsula. I don’t know that it was a life-changing moment so much as it was an affirmation of a lot of work on my part to learn something new. I had spent more than twenty years reading voraciously a number of subjects, and during one particular Good Friday, I happened to be at Chichen Itza in Mexico, a destination I had wanted to see for myself since I was a teenager. Prior to this trip, I never cared for Good Friday, the idea of Christ being killed by institutionalism has always bothered me, and it was not something I wanted to celebrate. I certainly didn’t like the Bible story that I was born a sinner, weak and meek by heritage, not by my own design, and that Christ needed to die for me so that I would not be locked into eternal persecution by a wrathful god, for all of existence. I always felt sorry for Jesus and had an intimate relationship with him after playing many roles in the Passion Play at my Church as a kid. I felt I had a unique understanding of what Christ went through, and it never seemed fair to me. I always wanted the version of the story where Christ escaped from the cross and killed all his enemies and fed their flesh to the dogs while their harems of lovers cried over their dead carcasses. The idea of sacrifice was never OK with me, not in Christianity, and certainly not in other cultures, which is why my wife and I were in Chichen Itza studying the ruins there of a Mayan culture that had human sacrifice at the center of it, all day, every day. I had many questions, and I needed to visit the site to set things right in my mind about them.
After, my wife and I swam in a local cenote near the Chichen Itza complex, as it was very hot, and the cave water in the cenote felt great. It was crowded, it seemed as if everyone from the local town had the same idea since it was an impoverished region where people lived in literal thatched huts, so nobody had swimming pools. I had put some of the video from that trip into a little promo video I did for Sheriff Jones at the time dealing with illegal immigration for the Liberty Township Tea Party that shows some of the sights from this trip, referred to here. We got to know the Mexican people very well on that trip, well beyond the media cameras, and saw how those people lived, and it was interesting. I couldn’t help but respect how hard they worked and how much they loved their families. Later, after we had cooled off, we stopped by a tiny town for lunch, and we were stunned by a flash parade recreating the Passion Play, where the entire village came out to watch or participate. There were thousands of people involved; it was quite astonishing. Now I respected the Passion Play a lot because I had been in many of them myself, playing all the main characters, from Jesus to Pontius Pilot to Roman soldiers. So, I had seen more than my fair share of Passion Plays, and this one was magnificent. They had great costumes; they had a Mexican Jesus stripped nearly naked with blood covering him, carrying a cross, with very authentic Roman soldiers surrounding him, and mobs of people crying after the suffering of Jesus. The entire town had come to a stop to witness this epic occasion. Because we were in the process of getting food, we happened to be on a street corner with a front-row seat to witness the whole thing. And we really couldn’t move until it was over, so we watched respectfully.
I never forgot that Passion Play on that particular Good Friday in Mexico, pretty far away from America and the news of the night. A collision had occurred with me regarding personal experience regarding the Church, many millions and millions of words that I had read about these topics, my keen interest in politics, which I was thinking about intensely since the terrorist Barack Obama had just been elected under very suspicious methods, and the Republican Party was trying to figure out how to win over people from Mexico and Central America to vote their way as conservatives rather than liberals. According to the Koch brothers, they had a plan, which we now understand as RINOs, moving more toward liberals than holding tight to conservative values. And I was far enough away from my regular everyday life to think about all these things on that street corner, watching a very real Passion Play in Mexico by people who had given up their previous worship of Mayan and Aztec gods for the gods of the conquering Spanish, Catholicism, and the worship of Jesus Christ which they embraced with great vigor. Until then, I had always thought of foreign immigrants who wanted to come to America as often more American than those born in the world’s greatest country but took it for granted. I found that foreign immigrants shared my Passion for America more than the native people, so I have always had a great relationship with people from all over the world who came to America for the Constitution and the opportunities that come with it. Specifically in Mexico and most places considered “third world” I found the people in those places still had a very close relationship to religion and their families, and I love that about them.
With all that in mind, just the other day, I saw a report indicating that Democrats were perplexed why so many Latinos were supporting President Trump and the MAGA movement and not coming to America and voting for Democrats the way that the political class in Washington, D.C. thought they would. And the answer is easy; Democrats had presented themselves as a bunch of godless heathens, which was not attractive to immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Seeing many of those people as I did on Good Friday should have been evident to everyone. But the professional pundits had got it all wrong, and President Trump showed himself to be respectful of strong families and religion. So, of course, once Mexicans immigrated to America, once they learned the various politics would support the MAGA movement. They didn’t want a free lunch; they wanted the respect of good work and a government that would get out of their way so they could raise their families, which they cared about intensely. It’s for all those reasons that even now, I get along much better with people from foreign countries than I do from my own backyard because the immigrants have a romantic idea of America that I share with them. Whereas the dope-smoking losers from the American education system have created a bunch of lazy, entitled babies that look to the Democrat Party to feed them without having to get up off the couch. And the Democrats seem surprised by all this. But I’m not. If you look at the political scene today, it is not a surprise that Latinos are moving toward Trump; the MAGA Republicans are now filled with people of color, and there are lots of very strong women who are just as tough as Trump. There is a lot of diversity that the RINO Republicans missed the boat on wholly, which is now the core of the party. And those are demos that the Democrats lost because they simply presented themselves as the kind of communists that many of those immigrants were running from. And when Democrats presented themselves as antagonistic toward religion, that was the end of that. That’s why this particular Good Friday in 2023 is special and unique. A long-hatched plan is finally coming together, and where the rubber hits the road in politics, religion is at the core of what the future will bring. And the anti-MAGA forces missed it completely.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 