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Archive for 2024|Yearly archive page

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Dumbocracy – Face it, America, we suck at this.

In Politics on November 8, 2024 at 8:52 am

As I write this, it is just three days since the 2024 Presidential election, and the pundits and talking heads and “election experts” are going at it hammer and tongs to explain how an orange-faced, seventy-eight-year-old, unhealthy, increasingly demented, ignorant, hate-spewing, fascist, male felon managed to win election over a highly qualified, highly intelligent, demonstrably competent, healthy, sixty-year-old woman.

I suspect that, as you read that last sentence, you have already begun to form your own opinions about the reasons.  And the reasons you will come up with are probably the same as the ones being proposed by the swarm of analysists now converging on the subject.  I haven’t even read or listened to any of it, but the headlines are to ubiquitous not to be seen, and I already know what they are saying.  It was her sex, her racial and ethnic heritage; it was the economy; it was Gaza; it was her choice of running mate; and on and on ad infinitum.  

The way I see it, however, is that while all of those things may have had some influence, none of them, nor all of them together are the real reason Donald Trump won the election.  They are the symptoms, not the problem?

So, what, you may ask, is the real problem, then, oh great and all-knowing person sitting in my living room and offering no qualifications whatsoever on which to base my opinions.

Thank you for asking.

The problem is that, for some time now Americans have sucked at democracy.  We do it badly.  We do it stupidly. We do it in ways that fling us out and reel us in between right and left like some bizarre existential yoyo trick.

Allow me to explain.  Or don’t.  I’m going to, anyway.

—  First, as a general rule, Americans pay remarkably little actual attention to our democracy.  (I know, we’re not “really” a democracy, we’re a democratic republic, a constitutional republic, a representative constitutional democratic republic.  Whatever.  It’s irrelevant what you want to call it.)  Most of us ignore it.  We go about our daily business until we are called upon every two or four years to vote for the people who will do the actual business of governing – or not.  And we congratulate ourselves for our neglect.  “I don’t like politics.” We announce proudly, justifying our dislike and inaction by claiming that all politicians are the same, both major parties are the same, it doesn’t make any difference, it doesn’t affect me.  None of which is actually true.  The majority of people in politics and government are good, hard-working people doing a difficult, frustrating job through the best of times and the worst.  (The Tale of Two Cities reference was deliberate, in case you missed it, or were wondering.  I’ll get back to it later.) 

— When we do pay attention, every two or four years at election time, we let ourselves think that voting is all that’s required of us.  And we complain about having to do it at all.  We let all kinds of things keep us from it.  We put our elections on a day when people have to work, but don’t insist that voting day be a national holiday.  (Note that the root meaning of “holiday” is “ holy day.”  If we’re going to treat anything as sacred, shouldn’t a day of direct involvement in our of/by/for the people democracy be a good choice?)  We ty to solve that by allowing things like mail-in voting, on-line voting, and early voting; then we accuse those of being fraudulent, we say they shouldn’t count, we make them as inconvenient and difficult as regular voting.  And we complain about how the news is suddenly all politics, politics, politics, and can’t we talk about something else for a change?

— When it comes to politics and the actual state of our democracy, we decided a long time ago that ignorance is, in fact, bliss.  No ifs about it.  And we want our democracy to be blissful.  We want someone else to take care of it.  You know, the politicians.  Those corrupt, self-serving, probably criminal people we keep electing to take care of it.  So, we don’t have to worry.  And we help ourselves in our blissful ignorance by latching onto sound-bite reasoning gleaned from simplistic infotainment news and, more recently, social networks.  It’s the economy, stupid.  We know that because we were told it fifty years or so ago; and we know it’s true because we remember that a loaf of bread cost, like, fifty cents when we were kids.  And clearly, the President is charge of all that, right?  The President can do stuff, right?  We don’t know what, because we really don’t know how it all works, but that’s the President’s job.  Right?  Any problem we have, small or large, anything that threatens to interfere with that bliss we believe is our right in a democracy is something the President should be fixing.  I won’t go into all the many issues of things like health care, individual rights, and so on, but pick any issue and we’d rather be ignorant than uncomfortable.  Quick democracy hack – if a Presidential or any other political candidate mentions a problem and says they’ll absolutely fix it, they’re lying.  What they will actually do is take some sort of action.  Won’t be a solution, because solutions are difficult and not blissful, but an action.  We like actions.  The more simplistic and immediate, the better.  Especially if we don’t have to do anything in particular, ourselves.

— When we do have to actually know about a problem, we go straight to the most important question: who do we need to blame?  Second question: who else can we pick to solve the problem, or take action, whatever?  To put it another way, who can we pick to blame for the problem next time, once we’ve gotten rid of the people we blamed this time.  Not all our blame is for politicians or government, of course.  We have lots of usual suspects.  The Others.  People whose color, or religion, or traditions, or culture, or choices about the way they live their lives are always available for blame.  Tell us how we aren’t the problem, tell us that we are the real Americans, tell us that God, but not Allah, has chosen us specially, and we will pick you to fix the problems.  This time.

— Oh, and by the way, since we don’t really want to know about the real issues, give us lots of non-issues to help us keep our ignorant bliss.  Facts are so boring.  Especially facts about thins like how the economy really works, or how government really works, or how biology really works, or how, really, anything important really works.  We welcome any random squirrel that comes along to take our attention away from all of that boring knowing about important things.  And random distractions allow us to become excited or enraged without having to actually know stuff.  We listen to all the noise around us (and the noise is, itself, part of the problem), so we know that the really important issues are whether a candidate can prove that she did a short-term, minimum wage job fifty years ago, or whether a candidate’s time vacationing and leading student groups in China was during or after Tiananmen Square. (When was that, exactly, anyway?  I think I remember hearing about that at the time, or I was supposed to read about it in history class, or something.  It was a bad thing, right? Those evil Communists did it, right?)  Oh, and we need to wonder if the guy who went there might be a secret communist agent, like, you know, in that movie, the one with, who was it?  Doesn’t matter.  Could be true, though, right?

All right.  I could go on, and I sincerely appreciate those of you who have paid attention, or at least stayed around this long.  So, let me finish with one last, I don’t know, recommendation, piece of advice?

We all need to do better.  We need to pay attention more closely, more of the time.  We need to be involved in and knowing about our democracy and our reality.  And we need to do it all the time, not just during elections.  We need to insist that our sources of information tell us the truth, based on relevant and compelling facts and rational thinking.  We need to shut out the noise and focus.  We need to have uncomfortable, but necessary conversations about our democracy, about our history, about our humanity. 

These things may become increasingly difficult over the next four years, but they will be necessary if this democracy we are so exasperatingly bad at is to survive.  And we need to start doing this right away, because we will have an opportunity in just two years for a course correction.  Presidential power is still limited by our tri-partite government.  The party now in power has shown us how difficult it is for a President to do whatever a President might want to do, when one or both houses of Congress are controlled by the other political party.

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You’ll Be Told A Lot Of Things Over The Next Few Weeks; Try Not To Listen.

In PeaceAble, Politics on July 22, 2024 at 12:36 pm

Now that Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 Presidential election, we may expect to see several storylines being promoted by the parties and the press.  We should at least ignore and probably protest all of them.  And the Democrats should actively resist becoming part of them.

The first story is that Biden’s stepping down is a sign that the party is in disarray, or that there will be a chaotic, divisive, disorderly convention.  This is predicated on two other stories.  One is that the Democrats don’t want VP Harris as their candidate and will try to replace her.  This story will persist in spite of the fact that nearly all the major alternative candidates have already endorsed Harris.  The second is that essentially making Harris the candidate without a contested convention would somehow disenfranchise those who voted for the Biden/Harris ticket in the primaries.  But Harris has been a heartbeat away from the Presidency for three-and-a-half years now.  And that is because the voters put her there.

Another story, being pushed by the Republicans is that Biden should not just bow out of the election, but step down from the Presidency.  If he can no longer run for office, they say, then he must also no longer be fit to govern.  This will persist even though it is patently ridiculous argument.  Of course he is fit to finish out his term.  He didn’t leave the campaign because he can’t function; he left because he became convinced that he couldn’t win.  And those promoting this idea undercut their own argument by also saying that he shouldn’t be allowed to drop out.  Again, there could be a whole slew of reasons why a candidate may not finish a campaign they started.  One big one would be if someone assassinated them.  So, if DJT had been killed after choosing Vance as his running mate, how would the Republicans move forward?  And if Biden leaves the campaign, for any reason whatsoever, it is his decision, and the normal course of action would be to nominate the VP.

There is also the story that Harris can’t be elected because she is a multi-racial woman.  Corollary to this story is one that says the Democrats can’t pick someone like Governor Whitmer as VP because “the country isn’t ready” for an all-woman ticket.  The democrats as a party, including their more progressive wing, and the U.S. as a whole have long suffered a blatant hypocrisy around the idea of new achievements for anyone who is not a white male.  When the question arises, there is an immediate cry of “if not now, when; if not this person, who?”  Which is immediately followed by “well, of course, we don’t necessarily mean that we should pick this person now; it’s just a hypothetical.”

All of us need to reject these stories and write a new one.

The Democrats should stop worrying about running against Donald Trump.  Aside from regularly showcasing what a truly horrible person he is, and how badly he is declining both physically and mentally; they should ignore him.  They should focus more loudly and vigorously on Project 2025; on the Republican opposition to abortion, to LGBTQ+ rights, to diversity and equity initiatives; on the Republican economic platform; and on plans to dismantle or hobble the departments of Homeland Security, Education, Energy; and to destroy the FDA, the NLRB, unions generally; and their desire to make loyalty to the President (which will really be loyalty to the authoritarians and oligarchs who are propping him up) a condition of serving in government, the military, and the judiciary.

This cannot be run as simply a race between Harris and Trump.  It needs to be remade in the public’s view as a choice between two diametrically opposed visions of America’s future.  Do we want a Chisto-fascist vision of a faux democracy, ruled by white men, under a banner of Christian Nationalism, in which even the most personal, most fundamental decisions are dictated by nominally religious pronouncements; or do we want to move toward an America which is inclusive and welcoming, and which seeks just and equitable opportunities for all its citizens, and for all human beings, in the economy, in  access to health, in the enrichment of life through the arts, in the benefits of all that America has to offer.  Electing Donals Trump or the Republican party would seem to guarantee the first American future.  Electing Harris and her running mate will certainly not immediately usher in the second; but it keeps it alive as a goal that we can all continue to work on together.

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OFFICIAL AXE: THE CONSTITUTION, THE RULE OF LAW, AND PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY

In Politics on July 2, 2024 at 7:59 am

Most of what is terrible about the Supreme Court decision declaring that Presidents have immunity from prosecution will be discussed at length for months, especially as the 2024 Presidential election draws closer.  Let me suggest some important points to remember.

You will hear a lot about the rule of law, but there has never been a clear idea about what that means.  Lawyers have always gotten rich, and the rich have always found a way in the effort to twist and turn the law to mean what suits them, while those without sufficient means have been forced to make plea bargains even when there is simply a possibility that they might be convicted, regardless of their actual guilt.  Every law on the books has been written by flawed human beings, who have relied on language that is never absolute in its meaning.  The rule of law is a rule that says, “whatever the law says, guilt and punishment are a function of class, not of the law.” 

There will be much discussion, also, of the court’s “conservatives.”  Don’t be fooled by the word.  This decision is not a conservative one, it is a radical one, arrived at by justices who have expressed extreme right-wing views on a wide range of issues, and who have no interest in setting their views aside to adjudicate the Constitution, nor in recusing themselves when there are obvious conflicts of interest.  At least four of them were appointed to the court specifically so that they might wreak havoc with what had been established law and Constitutional rights.

It would be pointless, in fact, to look for the Constitutional underpinning of this decision, though many pundits may try.  The majority didn’t really even try to justify the ruling on Constitutional grounds.  The principal arguments for the ruing involve an imagined future in which Presidents will be afraid to make bold, decisive decisions and take necessary actions because they will fear prosecution when they leave office.  Yet, in more than 200 years, over the terms of 46 different Presidents, only one has ever felt the need for this kind of protection against legal accountability.  And he wants the Presidency back, with this new lack of constraints that will allow him to become a dictator.

But the most disturbing thing about this ruling is that its justification ignores a simple fundamental idea, that a bold and decisive action is not the same thing as a criminal one, and never should be.  The court has essentially argued not that Presidents need to be able to act boldly, but that they need to be able to act illegally, with abandon.  A President with immunity is a President who does not have to think carefully about their decisions, weighing not just the actions, but all of the larger implications and consequences.  Such a President need only decide that their actions suit them.

Apparently, the Court has given themselves the power to determine when a President’s actions are within the realm of their official responsibilities.  This means that any attempt to prosecute a President (in or out of office) would invariably hinge on proving that the actions were not official, and then having to argue that through the entire legal system until it eventually reaches the Supreme Court where it could simply be tossed out.  How many Attorneys General or prosecutors would be willing or able to spend that much time and tax-payer dollars on what would likely be a fruitless task?

The decision is not now absolute for all time, though it will not be easy to fix.  It is, however, more imperative now than ever that the 2024 election reject the right-wing extremists decisively.  We need to elect Democrats to keep the White House, keep control (and expand it) in the Senate, and retake the House of Representatives with a clear majority.  We also need to keep or take leadership and control of governments at the state level in a large enough majority of states to pass a Constitutional amendment, and that amendment needs to state as clearly and unequivocally as possible, that Presidential actions, regardless of their justifications, regardless of their official nature, may be prosecuted if they are perceived to be violations of the Constitution or the law.  Presidents shall never be above the law, but will have the rights and responsibilities as every other citizen, including the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, and to defend themselves in a court of law – or ask for a plea bargain.

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THE STORIES WE ARE TOLD  — AND THE DANGER OF BELIEVING THEM

In Politics on June 28, 2024 at 6:39 am

In approximately the 1970s, the major networks decided that their news programs weren’t making enough money, so they turned over management of the news to their entertainment divisions.  This had several consequences.

First, it meant that the news had to become entertaining, in order to attract viewers and advertisers.  News, told simply and honestly, it turns out, isn’t entertaining.  The only people who watched it were people who actually wanted to know things, learn things.

As a result, we went from “news” to “news stories.”  It literally became necessary for news programs to wrap every fact, every event, in a story.  Those stories, in addition, had to be entertaining.  And they had to have a consistent, coherent narrative.  Such a narrative, of course, as every fiction writer knows, must have a controlling theme.  The problem with this is that most raw news is random and disconnected, so news “writers” had to create the controlling narrative, themselves.

 Also, the development of news as stories to attract viewers and advertising dollars meant that network news programs began to compete with each other, which now no longer meant having the most complete and honest reporting of the news, but meant, instead, having the most entertaining or compelling story.

(As an aside:  Newspapers had wrestled with this same problem earlier in the 19th and 20th centuries, but newspapers never had the ubiquity, or public impact that television and radio have.  They were simply to slow and cumbersome, and readers always had the ability to self-select what and how much of their content to consume.)

In contemporary news “coverage,” we can see that the media develop their story, and its controlling narrative early and are reluctant to change it.  They also have an incentive to make that narrative as compelling as possible.

Which brings me to modern politics and the Presidential election. 

Note that there is a tendency to call it a “race,” rather than an election.  An election is a story about a choice, in which it is important to know what is relevant to that choice.  A race is about who’s winning and losing.  As such, it is in the interest of the news to make the race as exciting as possible.  The really important parts of electing the President – such as the actual state of the economy and it’s effect on the country as a whole, or issues of race, gender, health care, and so on – are useful in elections, but aren’t particularly relevant to the question of who’s winning, unless they can be presented in dramatic tones, with less emphasis on the facts and more on how people feel about them, which is circular because people will feel about them according to how dramatically they’re reported and what the stories are.

The controlling narrative of this election was decided long ago, at least as long ago as 2016, when the choice was between Trump and Clinton.  Now, the news networks will try to tell you that the issue is competence, but that is, at best misleading, at worst a lie.  Competence requires a narrative definition, because the actual definition is simply the ability to do the job the way it’s supposed to be done.

So, instead, we talk about age, on the one hand, and bluster on the other.  When the news talks about Biden, it presents his age, not as a marker of his experience and his accomplishments, but as a question of his competence, despite the fact hat he is only 2 years older that Trump, whose age is never reported on.  When Biden is showing his age – his gait is slower, his voice is raspy and his stutter is ore apparent, for example – the questions are about his competence.  Or more accurately, about how the public should view his competence, because those who actually work with him all the time, both domestic and foreign, have no doubts about his ability to do the job.  When Trump blusters and lies and rambles his way through incomprehensible word salads, the reporting is not about his competence, it’s about his power over his party and his base.  We are told the lie that power is, itself, competence, without enough emphasis on the source of the power or its potential use and potential danger.

Trump is the more dramatic of the candidates, which means that he better suits the news networks need for dramatic story-telling.

We need, also, to understand that it is in the interest of the entertainment news to keep the race close.  The story of a runaway winner lacks drama in an election.

If this election were being reported simply and honestly on the most important issues, there is no reason for it to seem so close.  In terms of accomplishments with regard to economic issues, infrastructure issues, issues of individual rights and freedoms, issues of health care, issues of international relations, and the future of the American democratic republic, there should be no reason for it to be this close an election.

The question the news media want you to ask is “do you want the old guy or the obnoxious guy?”

What we should be asking is, “do we want the candidate whose record shows that he will at least try to advance policies that will benefit us as a nation, or the candidate whose promises nothing more than the power of gaslighting, narcissistic posturing, retribution against his perceived enemies and virtual dictatorship founded on his own ego and the allegiance of Christian nationalists and neo-fascists.

We need to start seriously tuning out the 24-hour news/opinion/punditry narrative and focus on the real issues.  Stop worrying about Biden’s age.  He’s only one part of the whole picture.  What do you want to accomplish over the next four years?  Which candidate is more likely to try to do those things?  No candidate is going to be able to do all of it.  Who are you electing to Congress?  Who are you electing locally or state-wide?  The U.S. government is a vast, interconnected system.  It is not supposed to be one man.  And it is especially not supposed to be an egotistic, irrational, power-obsessed, would-be dictator who seems to believe that it IS supposed to be one man and that man is himself.

The news-as-entertainment media are not going to easily abandon their chosen narrative.  We must change the narrative ourselves, and show them that their narrative is both wrong and irrelevant.

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Maybe Don’t Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself – Do Better Than That

In A God of Infinite Possibility, PeaceAble on February 2, 2024 at 9:56 am

“When you are told both to love your neighbor as yourself, and to love your enemy, it is important not to conflate the two, lest you and your neighbor become your enemy and you treat each other accordingly.”

I just saw a meme that repeated the adage “Love they neighbor as thyself.”  So simple.  So profound.

Except.

The saying assumes (even requires) that you first love thyself.  And there-in lies the problem.  Far too many people don’t love themselves; or love themselves too little to make that love manifest in their treatment of others.  Or love themselves in toxic ways, which they think are love.  Neither humility nor narcissism is necessarily love.

We might even say that many of the problems of the world are caused by the fact that few of us genuinely love ourselves sufficiently to be able to consistently treat others as we wish we could treat ourselves.

See what I did there?  Slipped the old golden rule in.  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

That’s because the two ideas – loving others as yourself, and treating others as you would like to be treated – are related.  And they are linked by the concept of “deserving.”  If I do not love myself, I cannot see that I deserve to be treated better, and if I project this on others, then I cannot love them enough to believe that they deserve better treatment from me.  To put it another way, we may do unto others as we believe we deserve to be treated, which is not necessarily how we wish we could be treated – if only we had earned it.

Our culture assaults us daily with messages of inadequacy, scarcity, and fear.  There is a new product being advertised, which tells us that underarm deodorant is no longer enough.  We’re told that we really need to deodorize our entire body. Pleasant, clean-looking young people sniff their elbows and legs, and react with disgust.  It’s not just our underarms that stink, we’re told.  Everything does.  How do we, the stinking mass of humanity, dare to go out into the world like this?  How could we not have noticed that everyone is offended, repulsed even, by our stink?  No wonder we aren’t more successful, more fulfilled, more popular, more loved.  We don’t deserve it.

(As an aside of sorts, the ad shows two young women.  Women in our culture are already bombarded with negative messages about their bodies.  Our culture tends to treat women’s bodies as fundamentally disgusting unless they are properly shaved, perfumed, deodorized, especially in intimate areas, covered in cosmetics to hide all the “flaws,” and covered in clothing except for the purpose of titillating men with their shaved, perfumed, cosmeticized bodies.)

Loving oneself – truly loving – means beginning with a baseline understanding of our fundamental humanness.  But human beings decided a long time ago that our fundamental natures need to be altered.  We decided that we are not enough just as we are.

Basic hygiene, of course, is not really about inadequacy or disgust at the fact that we are, first and foremost, animals.  Hygiene is also about humans having come to better understand disease.  Whether cleanliness is next to godliness may be debated, it is certainly next to healthiness.

A full-body deodorant is only one small example.  The basic message of oppression is that the oppressed are undeserving even of the little that their superior oppressors magnanimously allow them to have. 

And the mass of humanity is made into both the oppressed and the oppressors.  We are pitted against each other and ourselves.  We are told to ask why others should have more, rather than why we all have so little.  We are told, by explanation, that we are competing not only for resources, but also for our level of deserving.  We are competing for love: the love of our oppressors, the love of those we oppress.  We are even asked to compete for the love of whatever god we believe in.  How special can Heaven be, if everyone gets in by default?  If everyone deserves god’s love, then why do we have to try so hard to be deserving of it?

Consider the concept of human rights.  Our important social documents lay out our “inalienable, god-given” rights.  We know, of course, that none of those rights actually come from god, but are enumerated by governments of flawed humans.  None of them are, in fact, inalienable or absolute.  All our rights will regularly come into conflict with someone else’s rights.  But if we truly loved ourselves, and loved others equally, there would be no problem with that.  We could love each other enough to find a way to meet our needs, rather than assert the supremacy of one right over another.  But that would require us to love each other enough to see what is needed rather than what we think is deserved.

The world is changing rapidly around us.  If we are to survive – as individuals, as a community, as a nation, as a planet – we will need to relearn how to love each other, and ourselves.

Life takes us down paths of our own making, but the paths available to us are not all the same.  Regardless of how we are traveling our own path, or where it might lead us, we can learn to love it; and we can learn to love the paths of others, to see where we going in the same direction, or to honor the different direction each of us is taking.  We can look for where our paths might intersect or run parallel or diverge in interesting ways.

We can and must learn to love ourselves, then love others as ourselves; and learn how to do unto others as we all ought to be done, because that is the least we all deserve.

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Keeping Things Moving

In Gallivan's Travels, No Particular Path on January 30, 2024 at 4:14 pm

          No matter where I go, I’m always here.

One of my favorite poems is Mark Strand’s “Keeping Things Whole,” which begins:

  ”In a field/I am the absence/of field”

And concludes:

  ”We all have reasons/ for moving./I move/to keep things whole.”

I am sitting here, thinking about a trip that will have to be delayed a bit.  Life requires that sometimes.  We had planned on taking Gallivan, our 2019 class B camper van, on a five to six week trek from Rhode Island to New Mexico and Arizona.  Instead, we will be making a number of shorter trips in the East.  This is not a terrible thing, and the circumstances that require it are merely inconvenient, but it does provide me with the opportunity to write something I have been contemplating for a while.

There are, it seems to me, three reasons for traveling, which might also be called ways of traveling.

The first, of course, is to get to some other particular place than where you are now.  This I will call “destination travel.”  When we destination travel, there are almost always constraints of time, distance, and purpose that influence the traveling.  We know (if there is a deadline to meet) fairly precisely when we have to be there, and how long the trip is likely to take.  We know how far away the destination is, and we can plan specifically for travel expenses such as meals, lodging, transportation, and destination costs.  And we know why we are going, what we intend to do there, and when we’ll be done and ready to come home.

The second way of traveling is to enjoy the trip itself, to stop and smell the roses along the way, to find experiences as we go.  It’s the journey, not the destination, so I call this “journey travel.”  When we journey travel, the constraints may be less specific than those for destination travel: how prepared are we to see and do whatever experiences present themselves?  Can we be spontaneous, serendipitous, adventurous?  Do we have the resources of time, money, physical attributes, curiosity, and observation?  Sometimes, we may have constraints of time; we have limited vacation time; or appointments, responsibilities, or obligations for which we must return.  Aside from that, however, we are free to travel as far and as long as we wish, and go wherever the journey takes us. 

The third way of traveling is simply built on the desire to be on the move.  We have no specific destination, and we aren’t especially interested in what we can discover along the way.  We just want to be on our way.  This is what I call “motion travel,” and sometimes it is my main reason for travel and my favorite way to go.  When we motion travel the principal constraint is time.  How long can we be away; when can we get started and when must we return?  As we go, we can choose at any moment to stop for a moment or a while, visit someplace new or familiar, to discover or explore, or just keep moving.  There is the maximum amount of freedom in such traveling, and the least obligation.

It is, of course, possible to combine all the types of travel in a single trip.  Two summers ago, Sue (my spouse) and I set off on a trip that took us from Rhode Island, where we live, to New Orleans for the Jazz Festival, up along the Mississippi to Nebraska, then west to California, north along the Pacific to Washington, then back along the Canadian Border (and briefly across it), straight through the middle of New York and Massachusetts, and on back home.  We had only two specific destinations: the festival, and relatives in Washington state.  We were on the road from late April until mid July, and most of that time was unplanned in advance.  We stayed some places for a week or two, because we found something interesting, or beautiful, or new, and had the time and resources to do what the experiences offered.  We visited a friend in Florida, we explored the California Redwoods, we discovered a town in Arkansas that was steeped in the Americana and music we enjoy, found the Nobrara River in Nebraska, and made side trips along the Salish Sea and Puget Sound, and the northern edge of the Olympic Range.  But we also simply stayed off the interstates for long distances, not looking for anything in particular, but taking whatever came our way, small towns with pretty parks, funky restaurants, unusual and fascinating museums in places like Elko, Nevada, or Minot, North Dakota.  And sometimes, we just drove, with a CD playing music we could sing to, until we had gone far enough for that day.

We aren’t nomads.  We like the comfort and security of a home base, of a starting and ending point.  We have friends who have made their RV their home for years, now, and there is something appealing about going where you want, when you want, without having to be anywhere in particular in order to be home.  By combining destination, journey and motion travel in a single, extended trip, however, I like to think we have found enough of the freedom and adventure of nomad life to satisfy our needs.

And this is key, I think.  Let your travel, whether a few miles or across the country or around the world, meet your needs.  Your travel owes nothing to places, people, or time, except what you choose to give.  Travel as you will, and let that travel inform your spirit.  Let every trip be, first and foremost, your trip.

So, I would say to all who long to go, don’t overthink it.  There will be plenty of times when we just have to get somewhere; plenty of times when we just want to see what’s out there; and plenty of times when we just have to move.  But whatever the way you travel, travel consciously, travel joyfully, and travel on your own terms. 

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WHAT SIDE ARE YOU ON? – AND WHY IS IT ALWAYS THE WRONG ONE?

In PeaceAble on January 16, 2024 at 1:53 pm

“A door is something my cat is aways on the wrong side of; and these days I think I know exactly how she feels.”

You have to choose.  You have no choice.  And you have to choose *this* way.  Or else.

This is where we are now.

On virtually every issue facing us, this is where we are now.

We’re told that we must choose a side.  And must do it right away.  Taking time to think about the issues or events, to consider how to choose, or even whether to choose is considered weakness, at least; or even worse, cowardice; or at the worst, complicity.  And then, having chosen, we are condemned by one side or the other.  Every choice now carries significant risk.  We may find ourselves threatened, attacked, vilified.  We find our lives, our professions, our families, everything we love, value, and need, being threatened, being destroyed.

Do you support Israel or Palestine?  Quickly!  Choose!  What’s that?  You support Israel?  So, you have no compassion for the suffering of the Palestinians, then!  You support the Palestinians?  So, you’re antisemitic, then!  What’s that?  You’re not taking sides?  Then the Zionists win!  Then Hamas wins!

Do you support Donald Trump, or Joe Biden?  Quick!  Choose!  Right now!  Today!  We’re taking a poll and we want to know who’s ahead, who’s winning.  Right now!  At this very moment!  Are you for Democracy or for fascism?  These are your only choices.  Ten months away from the election, these are your only choices.  What do you mean you’re studying the issues, trying to decide if there are any other possibilities?  What do you mean you don’t know yet how you’ll vote in the election?  Why do you hate democracy?

You say you don’t have enough information?  Why can’t you see that the answer is obvious; that there’s only one right answer, one right choice?  The situation is still developing?  Don’t you see that’s why you have to choose now?  If you wait for developments, you might choose differently, choose wrongly.  If you wait for things to change, then you’ll be to blame if they don’t change the way we want them to.  If they do change the way we want, then you’ll be left out, left behind.

We no longer have any patience for patience; we deliberately eschew deliberation; consideration has become inconsiderate; careful thought is recklessly unthinkable.

The world has become too complex for simple answers.  And simultaneously expectant of exactly those answers. 

There does come a point in most issues where a decision needs to be made, of course.  Life is always about choices.  Most of them are simple, mundane, spontaneous.  And the consequences of the choices are fairly immediate, not life-threatening, and clearly connected to the immediate choice.  Do you want chicken or fish for dinner?  Choose now or take what you get.  Should I wear the blue shirt, or the plaid?  Choose and discover whether you feel awkward or attractive. 

All our choices then lead inevitably to more choices.  Buy the new sofa and you realize the chair no longer matches.  You’ll have to get a cover for that.  Love that new pattern, but the rug doesn’t really fit any more.  Maybe you should paint the walls, get new curtains.  The living room looks great, but now the kitchen is looking like it needs some TLC.

But there are choices we need to make that can have literal life-and-death consequences for us, our community, our nation, our world.  Some are directly in our control, of course.  If I drive carelessly or dangerously, I may risk anything from a ticket and a fine to an accident that results in injury or death.  Such consequences are foreseeable and require us to take personal responsibility. 

The choices we make about larger issues and events, however, often have consequences that are just as serious, but which may seem somewhat distant from us, don’t affect us directly or immediately, don’t create any sense of individual responsibility.  Such choices, like who we support in an election, require us to understand our actions as part of the group, rather than just ourselves.  These decisions should be made with deliberation and thoughtfulness, based on the best information and evidence available to us.  Quick, emotion-driven choices can create the kinds of consequences that can take decades to unravel.

Choices of great import and vast consequence also have a moral component.  We need to consider the choices in light of what we believe, what our priorities are, what compromises we’re willing to make, how we wish to be seen in all our humanness by those whose opinions and esteem we most value.  These are the choices that are often presented to us with the loudest, most insistent, most passionate voices, by people with agendas we may or may not share.  These decisions should be approached, even if they need to be made quickly, with clarity of mind and conscience, lest we find ourselves in serious conflict with our deepest, most personal selves.

How much of the divisiveness and polarization of our society could be lessened if we allowed ourselves and others to make our own choices in our own way, without judgment, without blame, without categorization and without the simplistic reductiveness of either/or?  If we really want to find effective, comprehensive solutions to the problems we face, we need to learn to engage the fullness of our choices and choose as effectively as possible.  We need to find, each of us and the collective whole, the best answers we can, not just the quickest or most immediate or the most convenient.  And certainly not the ones promoted by the loudest voices or the most passionate.

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What the F**k?:  The Decline of Words

In PeaceAble on January 5, 2024 at 1:15 pm

In the beginning, we were told, was the word; but I contend that there was never a word that ever existed that was not preceded by the existence of whatever it was the word was trying to express.  Eliminate the word, and what it was expressing will still exist, but we will be unable to know it or express it.

I’m going to assume that everyone reading this knows exactly what the third word in the title is.  If any of you would have been offended or disturbed in some way if I had written the word out without the asterisks, then does the altered version also offend?  If not, why not.  You recognize the word, you find it offensive or disturbing, so why does it not offend you?  And if you are offended, then what difference does it make whether I have used the alteration?

Popular social media has become not just prudish, but actually frightened by the use of certain words. They have created censorship and punishment algorithms that weed out those words in order to eliminate their use online.  As a result, many social media users have begun to do two things: self-censor their language, and seek inventive workarounds to evade the algorithms.

In addition to using asterisks or other symbols to substitute for specific letters, or even whole words, as in the title, users are employing a range of tactics.  They’re rearranging letters, creating nonsense words: fcuk.  They’re putting dots between the letters of the words:  f.u.c.k.  They’re blacking out or otherwise simply removing letters: f__k.  Sometimes, they are simply blacking out or leaving spaces for entire words, leaving imagination and context to, they hope, let the reader know what was intended.

And it isn’t just obscene language that is being elided.  They are altering or censoring any word or idea that they anticipate might cause any offense or disturbance whatsoever and alert the algorithmic overlords.  Words such as die, death, murder, rape, racism, homosexual references, racial or ethnic slurs, even words like hurt, are being routinely disguised.  Badly disguised, but disguised.

The censorship of obscenities has been a part of all kinds of public discourse and entertainment for a long time, but it has not always been the same.  Many of you may remember that, in 1939, the three-hour film, “Gone With the Wind,” was released with a degree of both scandal and titillation.  The film decency board had allowed it to be released despite some disturbing and objectionable content.  I’m not, of course, referring to the fairly graphic scenes of war and violence, including a long gruesome scene of the civil war dead, dying, and butchered soldiers laid out in a railyard.  I’m also not talking about the prominence of respectfully portrayed characters such as prostitutes and their customers, gun-runners, or libertines.  And, of course, the film retains the inherently racist stereotypes and thematic elements associated with the civil war era and the cultural norms of the first half of the twentieth century.

The scandalous content that the censors nonetheless allowed was one word, spoken by the principle male character in his very last line, almost at the very end of the movie, at the end of the three hours, when Rhett Butler says, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  Guess which word.

Now ask yourself, are you offended by that word?  If it is spoken in a major film, or written in a novel, said in a podcast, or public broadcast of some kind, are you shocked, disturbed.  Do you blush or titter?  Do you write an angry letter to someone?  If you knew that word was buried somewhere in the text of a book your high-schooler has been assigned to read, or might just have available in the school library, do you storm into a school board meeting demanding the book’s removal?

We are becoming pre-emptively afraid of our own language.  And we are consequently doing to ourselves what George Orwell predicted would be done to us.  We are reducing the number of words we have available to us to express what we wish to express; and through that self-censorship, limiting our ability to think, to reason, and to try to resolve some very serious social, cultural, and personal issues.

Now, before I continue, I want to acknowledge that there are people who have suffered trauma, or injury, or prejudice of all kinds.  I know that some of those people find certain trigger words or difficult images and representations and depictions to be terribly disturbing.  And even the prohibitions enacted by the censors in 1939 used those things to justify their actions.  Warning labels, ratings symbols, and other public recognition of those words and images have become common.  But alerting those who might be harmed by those things is not the same as trying to hide them away, pretend we don’t see them, or that they don’t actually exist.

Acknowledging another’s pain is not the same as taking responsibility for it or assuming that we must protect them from it.  And the censoring of individual words or ideas does neither of those things, anyway.

Moreover, there is great danger for us as individuals, communities, societies, nations, and the world in the prohibition of words and ideas.  The simple fact is that what we cannot adequately express, we cannot ever resolve.

And substituting other words – or pretending that we aren’t actually using those words – means expressing our ideas and feelings less accurately and less effectively.  The words exist for good reasons.  Even our most disturbing vulgarities exist because they were necessary to express what we really mean.  And when we can no longer use those words, or they have lost their power, we must find new words for them.  If we don’t do that, then our most powerful thoughts and emotions will have no place to be expressed except through the power, often turned into violence, of our actions.

We used to talk about the marketplace of ideas, where everyone would be free to express themselves, so that their ideas could be tested, discussed, challenged, argued.  The end result would be, we were told, a natural evolution of thought, reasoning, knowledge, arts. Even faith, belief, and opinion would have a chance to be expressed and subjected to the forces of the marketplace.  But a healthy market, a vibrant, functioning market, requires more than just a limited number of choices, more than just either/or.

A healthy, vibrant market also requires that everyone have access to the market, and currency to spend.  Language is the currency of ideas.  Words are the tender by which we buy and sell our ideas, our knowledge, our beliefs.  When control of that currency is taken out of the market place, when the powerful have access to all the words they need to get what they want, but the rest of us are told we must be frugal, we must sacrifice, we must learn to live with less, then the market collapses and takes us all down with it.

If we are to save our democracy, if we are to make progress on the issues that challenge us, we need to have the words.  If we cannot talk honestly and truthfully, using the appropriate words, then we cannot solve the problems we face.

Now, we know that there are forces within the culture who want exactly that.  They want to keep us from talking about racism, about abortion, about homosexuality, about science, about the broad spectrum and diversity of faith and belief, about human rights, about the environment, about all those things (and this is nowhere near to a comprehensive list) that must be dealt with if we are to survive as a society as a people, as a world.

We must learn not to be afraid of our words.  The words themselves are not the problem.  The problem lies in what we need the words to express.  Sometimes, the words will seem be hurtful, they will be difficult to hear, we will struggle to understand them, we will be made uncomfortable by them; but it is the ideas, not the words, that are hurtful, difficult, misunderstood, uncomfortable, challenging.

So, let us reclaim the words.  Use them.  All of them.  The beautiful and the ugly ones; for as long as both beauty and ugliness exist in the world, they will need to be expressed.