wholepeace

Posts Tagged ‘Politics’

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MOURNING IN AMERICA

In PeaceAble on December 11, 2025 at 7:31 am

It’s been more than 50 years since Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described the five stages of grief.  I have been wondering how to apply those stages to what is happening in America under Donald Trump, because make no mistake about it, America under this administration is grieving. And I have come to the conclusion that it’s impossible.  The normal processes do not apply.

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America is grieving.

We are grieving those we have lost to extreme weather events, fires, and other climate-related disasters.  We are grieving those we continue to lose to gun violence.  We are grieving those we are losing to preventable diseases because they weren’t vaccinated.  We are grieving the loss of those who have been snatched off the streets and sent to foreign prisons and domestic concentration camps.  We are grieving the banning of books, the suppression of dissenting voices, the attacks on the arts.  We are grieving the loss of rights we thought we had protected forever.  We are grieving the wanton destruction of our democracy by those who should be responsible for its preservation. We are grieving the loss of some certainty, some control, some confidence that our lives will provide us with at least the minimum we need for not just happiness, but survival.

We are grieving so many things.  Too many to list.

And the list keeps growing.  The grief keeps compounding day-by-day, hour-by-hour.

The grief is simply too profound, too overwhelming, and too unrelenting.

How do we grieve, how do we process our grief, how do we heal?  Grief takes time.  Grief takes effort.  We cannot simply move on, and we cannot deal with either our grief or the causes.

And it seems that this overwhelming onslaught of grief is deliberate.  It’s intentional.

A political class that rose to power by feeding the grief, and the grievances of millions, have now institutionalized, legislated, and militarized grief as their primary strategy to keep the power other people’s grief has given them.

And the mourning will continue, and the traumas compound.  We hear the threats to take over cities, to turn the military loose on US citizens, to defund universities, to slam on the brakes on alternative fuels, to destroy decades of progress on human rights, minority rights, on access to vital resources for people other than white, nominally-Christian men, to flout both law and morality at home and abroad.  And the threats are made manifest by men with hidden faces and flaunted weaponry, by politicians who steal from the most vulnerable to give to the most powerful, by politicians and bureaucrats who lead by lies and conspiracies.

Suddenly, those three brass monkeys with their hands on their eyes, ears and mouths seem as though they have the right idea.  Shut it all out.  Stop the noise, stop the pictures, don’t say anything that might cause argument or worse.  But we can’t shut it all out.  Even those monkeys can only do one thing at a time.  Cover your eyes, and you can still hear the cacophony.  Cover your ears, and you can still see the chaos.  Cover your mouth, and you are left with no way to say what everything you can see and hear is eating you up with grief.

And so, our grief is manifested in fear and anger.  We hide away or we strike out.  We cling too tightly to the people and things we love, or we push them away because our grief makes love too painful.  We shout rather than talk.  How can we empathize with others’ pain when we are paralyzed by our own? 

This is the real, comprehensive, most dangerous consequence of Donald Trump and those who surround him, prop him up, hide behind him as they destroy our democracy to build a white nationalist fascist state around a theocratic rhetoric they don’t even really believe or practice.

We need to accept that the process of grief – that long, delicate, exhausting path toward acceptance and healing – is, for now, a luxury we can’t afford.  We cannot allow our grief to keep us from acting. 

The window of opportunity for turning things around is both too short and too long.

There is speculation that Donald Trump may be about to succumb to failing health or failing politics, or he may be around for a long while yet.  But the damage is already done.  When he is gone, the grief will remain, and we cannot let it keep us from doing the necessary work.  Recovery will be long and difficult, and we cannot wait until the next election or the one after that, the next administration, the next generation of leaders. 

The work has to start now.  It has to start with all of us, individually and in our families and in our communities.  The public work, the protests and the resistance are important, but we also have to make it close and make it personal.  We must not let our mourning isolate and weaken us.  We need each other, our collective and shared empathy and support, our common will and our common strength.  Talk together, grieve together, cry together, shout together. 

There is every reason to hope that the country will survive this and have a chance to rise anew from whatever is left of us.  Until then, let us try to turn our grief into positive action, into empathy, into helping each other.

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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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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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Just Do Something, Anything — except solve the problem.

In No Particular Path on February 27, 2022 at 10:28 am

The climate crisis is worsening, so we debate whether to pass a carbon tax or just keep recycling.  Should we go with wind power, solar, or thermal?  Maybe we should go back to building big dams.  Nah, let’s just call fossil fuels like natural gas “transitional,” and discuss the possibilities of “clean coal.”

Overt racism and misogyny are reenergized.  Let’s make a mixed-race woman Vice-President.  We’ll appoint an African American woman to the Supreme Court.  Nah, how about we just stop our kids from reading or talking about these things.  Also, let’s make sure they don’t see any of it on television.

Our LGBTQ+ youth are committing suicide at an alarming rate.  Let’s set up a hotline.  Or we could just make being trans illegal.

The country’s wealth gap is widening and the middle class is disappearing.  Let’s raise the minimum wage inadequately, let’s increase taxes tentatively on the super wealthy.  Or let’s just promote exciting stories about billionaires doing exciting things with their obscene wealth; like trying to end a disease somewhere or grow food somewhere else.  Or something really exciting, like building their own space ships and making even more money charging other super-rich people millions of dollars for space-tourism adventures.

Pick a problem. Any problem.  Now slip it back into the deck.  And is this your card?  The one that says, “All right.  Let’s . . . do . . . well . . . something.  Surely there’s a law we can pass, someone we can give an honor to, or a day or a week or a month we can spend talking about good stuff peripherally related to it.  Is there someone we can bomb?”  Or is it this one, with the picture of the ostrich looking for a hole to put its head in?  And the holes are labelled things like “ban it,” “oppress it,” “deny its existence,” and “call it socialist.”

We are most certainly a more polarized citizenry than I can remember our being in my lifetime.  Far too many of us are living at the extremes, and the things we want to do, believe we need to do, defy compromise.  But the fundamental problem isn’t our divided society, it’s something we all seem to agree on, though we may not realize it.

We prefer actions over solutions.

Solutions are hard.  Actions are easy.  Solutions can be expensive.  Actions can be cheap.  Solutions take time and patience.  Actions are quick and we can say we did something right away.  Solutions require all, or nearly all, of us to be part of them.  Actions can be done by those few people we elect to do those things so we don’t have to worry about them, or by those who want to do them.

So, we eschew solutions to our problems in favor of an action here, an action there; like taking one lick every few years at a lollipop, thinking we’ll eventually get to the special treat in the center.  Or our kids will.   Or their kids.  As long as we, and they, can keep licking.

And we think it’s a virtue.  Compromise and patience are always good things.  Better to do something than nothing.  And there is some truth in that.  Each extreme sees their actions as doing something good.  And the things we may do aren’t necessarily bad things to do.  Some of them make a real positive difference in people’s lives.  Maybe other people’s lives, or maybe just our own.  But they make a difference.

Allow me to interject here, that I am a progressive, and I have some very strong opinions about which actions are doing good and which are causing unconscionable harm.  I have debated these things elsewhere, and will continue to do so.  For the moment, though, I want to focus specifically on solutions versus actions.

Within the political divisions currently playing out, the differences in our actions have, themselves, become destructive, even deadly.  Now, more than ever, we need a larger plan.  We need to be working more comprehensively on solutions, not just chipping away at our problems on one side and trying to bury them on the other.

I have said before that there are no isolated incidents.  There are no problems that exist without context.  Like our natural world, our personal, social, economic, and political realities are an ecological system in which everything is connected.  The wealth gap, for example, is not simply a problem of our capitalist economic system.  It exists within a context of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, sexual and gender bias, religious intolerance and self-righteousness, white male privilege, and the destructive exploitation of the natural environment.  That isn’t even close to an exhaustive list.

And the effects are reciprocal.  Racism isn’t a separate problem that can be solved separately.  The climate crisis cannot be resolved in isolation from the economic imbalances or racial prejudices.  You see abortion as a problem?  You cannot ignore poverty, ignorance, racism, or misogyny.

This is what has been behind ideas such as the Green New Deal.  This is what we can learn from critical race theory (the real thing, not the bastardized versions being promoted on the right).  This is why we need science and the arts and history and philosophy, all of these, as part of the discussion.

We do need to prioritize, to triage, of course.  We do need to see that this will take time.  But we need to start seeing everything we do as part of a larger plan, a comprehensive solution that looks beyond the current actions and imagines a better world.  And our actions need to be larger, bolder.  We need persistence as well as patience.  We need courage to tackle the hard work, commitment to spend the necessary resources, the wisdom to see that the solutions will never be just about us, about what we will gain individually or group by group.  Patience isn’t license to procrastinate, it’s being willing to take the time to do it right.  Compromise, properly employed, isn’t about finding some imaginary middle between two extremes, it’s about being willing to see that there can be no solution that will not require something of us that we do not yet want to give.

It is way past time to stop taking actions, and start finding solutions.

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THE DISUNITED STATES

In PeaceAble, Politics on December 12, 2020 at 10:46 am

Perhaps we should have seen it coming.  Maybe it was always inevitable.  Possibly the plan was fatally flawed from the very beginning.

America.  No, wait.  The United States of America.  Sure, we regularly use the shorthand, but the 50 states and 5 unincorporated, permanently inhabited territories are not America.  They are, in fact, not even most of America, which refers properly to two continents that comprise nearly all of the western hemisphere.

I bring this up because the 2020 presidential election, following four years of a presidency that has ripped the sheets off deep and abiding divisions and enflamed them nearly to the breaking point, has led to what may seem impossible-to-heal polarization.  On the left there is talk of never forgiving those who have so egregiously wounded the fundamental bonds of democracy; and on the right there is talk of a new civil war, of secession.  Each side is throwing around charges against the other of sedition and treason. 

How very “American” of us.

We call ourselves the “United States,” but a degree of disunity has always been there, has always lingered in the shadows, waiting for its chance to break things apart.

Each of the “united” states has individual sovereignty.  We have always been a federation of sovereign states, not a nation with a unitarian identity.  Our differences and divisions have been part of who we are since before the revolution, and have been codified by the Constitution and the courts since the 18th century.

The most obvious manifestations of this have always centered around racism and slavery, but have expanded to include all kinds of arguments involving every kind of human characteristic that distinguishes white men as the natural ruling class; wealth as the equivalence of superior intelligence and ability; nominally Puritan ideas about sex, gender, matrimony and general morality as normative; protestant Christianity (itself rife with internal division) as the institution of authority for all things called god; and Manifest Destiny as the final word on the United States’ proper place in the world.

We are, in other words, not really designed to be a nation at peace with itself, with a singularity of purpose or vision.

In some ways, this has been our strength.  We gave ourselves permission, whether the founders knew it or not, to become incredibly diverse, to become a melting pot, to become a home to so many who found themselves homeless in other nations. It gave us a foundation on which to build arguments of justice and freedom and fairness for non-whites, for immigrants, for the differently-abled, for LGBTQ+ individuals, for followers of a broad range of religious beliefs and doctrines or none at all, and all kinds of educational, economic, and cultural classes, communities, practices and personal choices.

But it has also allowed us to hang onto deeply rooted prejudices, and normalized discrimination.  It has allowed us to abuse, disenfranchise, dehumanize our own citizens.  It has allowed us to make self-aggrandizing claims of freedom, equality and justice while maintaining embedded exploitation, inequality, and injustice.  Freedom has come to mean a measure of anarchy; equality has come to embrace the idea that the false is equal to the true and the harmful equal to the healthy; and justice has been reimagined as the rule of authoritarian law.

This is the great dilemma that must ultimately be resolved.  Are we to be a single nation?  Will we embrace in reality our idealistic pledge of indivisibility?  Can we at last find a way to reconcile and repair our violent, bloody past and the long-festering, unhealed wounds of intolerance, bigotry, and human exploitation?  Can we, in the 21st century, use this moment of open – even honest in its own way – polarization to become what we have fantasized ourselves to be?

Have we, at last, hit bottom?

For the moment, the ball is in the Progressives’ court.  If meaningful change, lasting change, substantive change, is to happen, it will be because Progressives are able to seize this moment without rancor, without vengeance, without exacerbating the divisions that plague us, but by finding intelligent and effective solutions and advocating tirelessly for their implementation.  It will require perseverance, patience, and genuine adherence and fidelity to our most important principles, even when we have to apply them to people we have heretofore denigrated as deplorable and dismissed as irredeemable.

I sincerely hope that we are up to the task.

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COMPARING RACISM

In Politics on October 23, 2020 at 10:45 am

It is, to put it plainly, ridiculous to argue over which of two white American men in their seventies is more racist.

Comparing degrees of racism is like comparing how much “special ingredient” Minny put in our pie.  I mean how much should we be okay with?

Now, if we accept the idea that it is nearly impossible to find an adult white American male who is completely free of racism, then we can begin to address the more complicated issue: what are we going to do about it?

And I say this as a white American man in my seventies.

From my admittedly privileged perspective on issues of race, I would argue that there are two kinds of institutional and systemic racism: white supremacist and white privileged.

White supremacist racism ranges from the overt acts of racism by proud white nationalists to the small daily doubts of people who grew up in overtly racist times and can’t quite free themselves of the occasional racist response.  It is the second group that needs to be helped.  The first group will need to eventually die out – or not.

A lot of the white privileged group are sincere, kind, honest, and loving people who have tried very hard to change, and may even be convinced that they are no longer or have never been racist.  They have lots of professional and social interactions with non-whites.  Their circles are broadly diverse.  They may even intermarry, or genuinely celebrate the inter-racial relationships of their friends and family.  They may even work very hard to advance social change around things like ghettoization, income and work inequality, unequal treatment in interactions with the legal system, hate speech and hate crime, and so on.

But.

Every once in a while, there is a moment when they wonder if “black on black crime” may be a fair point; or they have to fire up Google to fact-check whether Black communities really do have an “absent father” problem that white communities don’t.  Every once in a while, they may listen with a moment of sympathy or thoughtful intellectualism to a debate about whether the principal cause of the Civil War was rooted in slavery or in economics or in states’ rights, before it kicks in that the economic history of America is inseparable from slavery and the states’ right being fought about was the right to own slaves.  Every once in a while, they realize that they are far more aware of, and concerned with, in ways both small and large, the race of their non-white friends than their white ones.

Racism is part of our national character.  We have all been affected by it.  Even non-whites raised in America have internalized it. It’s a disease that lingers in us, and occasionally erupts into noticeable sores. We have learned to live with it, but we would be so much better off if we could find a cure.

What cure?

I don’t want to overstate it or give the wrong impression, but the current COVID-19 pandemic may provide a useful, though flawed, analogy.

We have to start by understanding that racism is highly contagious; can be debilitating or even fatal; requires us to assume for our own safety that everyone we come into contact with may be infected; and even asymptomatic carriers can transmit the disease.

To fight the disease, we will need to watch ourselves carefully.  Try to stay away from people and places where it is likely to be spread.  Especially avoid potential super-spreader events, like certain political gatherings.  Know who in your personal bubble is less likely to be putting themselves in harm’s way, and self-isolate within that bubble. When you must venture out, take precautions.  Sanitize regularly; every time you have had contact with anyone or anything that is suspect, wash your hands of it.  When your “crazy uncle” tells a “Mexican” joke, tell him it’s not funny and you won’t have any part of it.  When a white acquaintance tries to “whitesplain” the BLM movement. Refuse to cooperate.

And here’s what may be the hardest part.  Wear a mask to reduce the possibility of your inadvertently spreading the disease.  Think before you speak, before you act.  If you’re about to argue with a non-white person about their described experience of being non-white in America, stop yourself; and just listen instead.  Remind yourself regularly that even the smallest droplets of racism you might unconsciously breathe into your surroundings can spread the disease.

There won’t be any vaccine any time soon.  We aren’t going to discover any miracle cure.  Herd immunity is clearly not going to happen.  The disease will be with us for a long time.  It will continue to be a drag on our society, our economy, our lives in myriad ways.  We may need to shut some things down for a while.  Some radical surgery may be needed, such as tearing down memorials to racism or racists, such as cutting irredeemable racists out of our social and political and economic systems, such as cutting our own ties with those persons or institutions that are helping to spread the disease.

But the first, and most important step is to recognize both the severity and the inevitability of the disease itself, and to take responsibility for our own part in it.  The second step is to take whatever action we can to root it out and deal with it both within ourselves and within the culture.  The third step is to demand the kinds of systemic, institutionalized, and culturally normative changes that will be necessary to someday eradicate the disease.  And all of these steps need to be taken simultaneously.

Now let me reiterate.  I’m a white American male in my seventies.  I am, by definition, a carrier of the disease.  It is my responsibility to do whatever I can to treat the disease in myself, reduce the spread of it to others, and advocate for treatments now and a cure in the future.

I can’t be certain, of course, that I am speaking for anyone else, or reflecting a perspective that others will find useful, or even valid.  What I am certain of is that if I don’t say something, do something, try something, then I will never fully recover.  And if we, none of us, do, say, or try, then there is a real possibility that the disease will prove terminal for us all.

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WAITING FOR THE PUNCHLINE – AND WANTING TO PUNCH SOMEONE

In Politics on March 29, 2020 at 11:01 am

We have relied, for the past several years, on the network and cable comedy shows to help keep us sane in these difficult times. Often, it seems as though John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, and the other late-night hosts have been a more reliable source of the truth about what’s happening in this country and the world than the main stream media.
And yet.
And yet.
Now that all the shows have been put online without audiences, I have been unable to bring myself to watch them. I see the Daily Show videos, the Colbert monologues, and I can’t bring myself to watch them.
I can no longer allow myself the luxury of relying on comedy to get me through this. It is too great a privilege.
I am a 72-year-old white male, retired, living at home with my wife, who is also retired. I can afford to sit at home and laugh through my anger and fear. I’m not being deprived of a wage that was already less than a living wage. I don’t have to figure out what to do about my children. I have books and television and radio and my cell phone and my computer. I can be isolated and not alone. I don’t have to go to work every day and risk my life. I don’t have to strip off my clothes before entering my house, then deny myself and my family even the simplest intimacies.
I am fortunate and I am privileged.
I even have reason to believe that even if I got sick I could afford testing and treatment.
My wife and I are social-distancing, self-isolating. We go out only to pick up a few things at the grocery store, where she goes in because she is younger than I and all the advisories say that I am more at risk if one of us gets infected. She is also required by family obligations to go out more than I. Of course, we must assume that if one of us were to become infected it is most likely that we both would.
Still, we follow the protocols. We clean everything that comes into the house. We leave groceries on the porch until we can sanitize the packages as best we can. We wipe down the mail. When we go for a walk outside with a friend, we stay 6 feet apart. We wash our hands frequently. We have reviewed all the guidelines. We live in a rural community where the virus has not yet been shown to be present, but assume it is only a matter of time.
We do this not simply because the government or the CDC or WHO or anyone else has required it, but because we want to be as safe as possible and we want others to be safe as well.
We worry about our sisters and brothers, our children and grandchildren, our friends and neighbors, many of whom may be more at risk than we are.
We live in ignorance of the facts. Like everyone else, we cannot really know the extent or location of the virus because testing is not being done as broadly or efficiently as it should. Was that dry cough a reaction to my blood pressure medicine or was I sick? Is there always a fever, or could I have been carrying the virus asymptomatically? Were our grandchildren infected before the schools were closed; before their soccer practice or games were suspended?
Will the measures now, finally, being taken mean that this crisis will be behind us by summer or still with us at Christmas?
How long? How much?
And that is why I cannot look right now at the comedy.
I’m too angry.
I can no longer laugh at Donald Trump. I can no longer see his daily displays of ignorance, pettiness, self-aggrandizement, lack of empathy or compassion, attacks on anyone and everyone who dares to suggest he might be wrong, might do better, might have some genuine responsibility to something other than himself, and not feel frightened for the future of our country, our democracy, our way of life.
I am way past the time to allow myself to believe that black humor, trench humor, can help us. These are dangerous times; not just because of the coronavirus, but because we are witnessing the willingness of the people in power openly and wantonly to destroy the Constitution in order to enrich themselves with both money and political power.
While we sit in our houses or suffer through our lives in the shadow of COVID-19, Our government is conspiring to stack the federal courts with unqualified, ideologically driven judges. They are arranging to give away hundreds of billions of taxpayer money to multi-billion-dollar corporations. They are stealing land and stealing the vote from the First Nations. They are carrying out petty vendettas. And they are dragging their feet on addressing the COVID-19 crisis because of unrelated, unimportant, fringe beliefs and issues. They are spinning lies and conspiracy theories and distortions rather than dealing directly with the very real issues of life and death.
And I want to go into the streets. I want all of us, by the millions to be in the streets. And we can’t be. The coronavirus has not just made us into hermits, it has robbed us of our most important power as citizens.
I expect I will get my sense of humor back. I do see some hopeful signs, good things swirling around in the chaos with everything else. I am, however, afraid that November may be too late for far too many of us. What will be left by then? And will we be able to come back from this?
We must stay engaged. We must stay afraid. We must stay angry. We must stay safe. When the doctors and the health experts tell us it is safe enough, we must go into the streets. And when the Fall does come around, we must take our fear and our anger to the voting booth in numbers that will make it loud and clear that we are not fooling around any longer.