You might think that, in the face of an Administration whose approach to a pandemic crisis is another round of "Wishing Will Make It So," combined with finger-pointing at everyone who won't reflexively lick its boots, the press, or what's left of it, would finally wake up and understand that the numbers T**** generates for them simply doesn't outweigh the damage that T**** is doing to their country--or, for that matter, their readers.
You would be wrong.
Once again, the right-wing narrative of the "liberal" press is outweighed by the ancient and irrefutable maxim that freedom of the press belongs to the people that own one. And, in an age of near-total economic consolidation, one that has not spared media-owning corporations, it has never been more clear that the press reflects not the politics of the reporting or pundit class, but the politics of the shareholding class. In other words, conservative politics. Very conservative politics.
Which explains why, in the face of a press event on the coronavirus crisis that featured a President who could not speak coherently, and an overall response to the crisis that made it clear that the focus on dealing with it would be a combination of partisan messaging and wishful thinking, the coverage of said event treated the event as though it was an appropriate way of responding to a potentially lethal emergency.
You can, if you have a strong enough stomach, and were not previously exposed to this clusterf**k, experience the gory details here.
But take heart. It's not as if the media owners are totally incapable of a major response to a crisis.
During this same week, one of them fired a veteran political reporter for acting in a way that allegedly threatened its reputation for objective reporting.
His crime?
Speaking privately to an individual about his personal views. Not on the air, or in print. Privately. (Or so he thought, since the person he was speaking to was part of a right-wing sting operation.)
I was not aware that reporters had a First Amendment obligation to cease being human upon accepting employment as a reporter. In fact, I'm quite sure that they have no such obligation. ABC, apparently, sees this differently.
Which is why you should boycott ABC, and demand that they reinstate David Wright immediately.
And why you should monitor any other media outlets you follow for nonsense like this. It's poisoned our democracy for far too many decades.
It is not the obligation of the press to be fair and balanced.
It is the obligation of the press to tell the truth, whether one side or the other thinks it sucks or not.
Saturday, February 29, 2020
Sanders: To Stop Him, Or Not To Stop Him?
After a year of campaigning, campaigning, and still more campaigning by almost enough candidates to fill out the roster of a Major League Baseball franchise (hello, spring training!), we can now put the results of two caucuses and one primary in the books for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination in the books. And we have a front runner, in position to cement that status this weekend by way of the South Carolina primary, and all the more so by way of the results of the Super Tuesday primaries the following week.
So everyone on the Democratic side of the fence is happy, excited, raring to go for the fall election, and, above all, pulling together for the sake of party unity and the national need to end the nightmare that is the T**** Administration. Right?
Silly me. This is the Democratic Party that we're talking about. It wouldn't be the Democratic Party without a near-complete freakout over the results. And that's what we've got, with the emergence of Sen. Bernie Sanders as the front runner.
Sanders' ability to break out of the pack, and defy the conventional wisdom that the path to Democratic victory in November runs in the center lane, has understandably shocked a lot the people who mold the conventional wisdom, to say nothing of the majority of the voters/caucus-goers who did not support him. I try to avoid exaggeration in this space and elsewhere, but I've read a lot of the media reaction to Sanders' successes, and it's hard to view most of it (on the negative side) as being anything other than hysterical. One way of measuring the hysteria: for the first time in decades, the dreaded M-word--McGovern--is being used to describe a Presidential campaign.
It's easy to understand some portion of this intensity. One of the hoariest rhetorical cliches in electoral politics is "the stakes have never been higher." Well, this time around, the stakes truly never have been higher. Post-impeachment, T**** has been even more out of control when it comes to making the Federal government his personal plaything, and enlisting the aid of his Attorney General in making that happen. The risks involved in allowing this to continue without limit have, this past week, been exposed and heighten by the revelation, related to the coronavirus crisis, that T*** has fired the government officials responsible for handling pandemics.
But, as I counseled in my previous blog post about the virtues of our taking a deep, collective breath at this point in our national ordeal, it might be useful to walk through some of the objections to Sanders' candidacy, and see if they really require resignation to four more years of the Orange Nightmare and the potential collapse of the Republic (the latter being a real risk if the former becomes a reality). And we'll begin with the not-so-obvious one, in part because it drives me crazy that it's even advanced as an argument.
Whether the nominee is Sanders or anyone else, T**** is going to win because T**** has done a great job of handling the economy. Let me answer that one as unambiguously as possible: no, no, a thousand thousand times NO. He has taken an economy that was making the biggest comeback in American history since the Great Depression, and saddled it with debt and tariffs that have already begun an economic slowdown. In fact, under three years of T****, the economy has produced fewer jobs than it did during the last three years of the Obama Administration, with a Republican Congress fighting President Obama all the way during the last two of those years. Don't believe me? Well, then, believe Snopes.
And you might also want to believe one of T****'s favorite constituencies: farmers. They haven't got tired of winning yet; in fact, they haven't even started winning. Unless bankruptcies can be considered a form of winning.
Wage growth? It's happening primarily because of states that have (finally) raised their minimum wages. Consumer confidence? Up and down, but when it's been down (and it's been down recently), it's really been down. Industrial output? Same story. Business borrowing? Hitting a wall. In fact, there's reason to believe that we may already be entering a recession. In any case, there's no reason to doubt that the American Dream is, for the majority of us that want to have a family, effectively dead.
Oh, but what about the Dow? That's supposed to be--pardon the pun--the President's trump card (I'm spelling it out here because it's not his name). In fact, it's been the recipient of all those corporate tax cuts, the ones that were supposed to create the jobs that are now disappearing. That money is going into the repurchasing of shares, or investment in offshore tax havens (never to return to the U.S.). And, in the process, it's exploding the Federal budget deficit and the national debt, which is beginning to send interest rates in the wrong direction.
On top of all of this, there's the acid test every President must be able to pass: dealing with the unexpected. The coronavirus threat is a classic example, one that has already knocked almost 3,000 points off of T****'s beloved Dow. And that's likely to get even worse, if it's really the case that T****'s only plan for dealing with the threat is to wait until spring.
I vividly remember my assessment of the 2008 presidential race, up to the point at which the Wall Street meltdown began. Up until then, I genuinely believed that the race was John McCain's to lose. Despite the Iraq quagmire, the economy was still strong enough to support a vote for a Republican successor to George W. Bush, and Barack Obama was still a relative unknown whose electability as the first African-American nominee of a major party was still open to debate. This rationale went out the window with the onset of the financial crisis. The events of this week, and T****'s predominantly political response, going so far as to tell a friendly rally of paid attendees that the coronavirus is a Democratic "hoax," make think that we may be witnessing the beginning of a double-barreled meltdown, one propelled by economic weakness and a pandemic of epic proportions.
This is the bottom line: Under T****, we do not have a great economy. We have what remains of the Obama recovery, menaced by threats that T**** has either created or ignored. Any Democrat would do better, as the track record of the last two Democratic Presidents will attest, compared to the track records of the two Republicans that preceded them. And, in this case, "any Democrat" includes Bernie Sanders. And, on top of that, not only do we not have a great economy, we may not even have a safe society. This "President" is not politically bulletproof, no matter the events of the past three years. No President is. We need to stop letting his braggadocio and the mindlessness of his followers live rent-free in our heads and hearts. With one nominee or the other. If the majority of Democrats decide that Sanders should be the nominee, all Democrats and other progressives should get on board for him.
But what about the fact that Bernie isn't a complete "progressive"? His positions on guns, immigration, and civil rights sound more like things a Republican would say. On the other side, he's lavished praise on Communist dictatorships that not even the most liberal of Democrats would make. These are completely fair criticisms, and it's entirely on Sanders' shoulders to figure out how to deal with them. From listening to some of his recent speeches, he seems to be dealing with the former dilemma in much the same way past candidates in similar positions have dealt with it: the "Darwinist" approach, in which you talk about how much you've "evolved" in your thinking. (See, e.g., George H.W. Bush in 1980 on the subject of abortion.) Will it work? Maybe, maybe not. It's pretty much all he can do.
And the latter dilemma? Well, that's a much bigger rhetorical hill to climb. Thus far, he is trying to explain it by saying that even bad dictators do good things. In other words, he's effectively praising Mussolini for making the trains run on time. I don't think that's going to fly. He's going to have to hope that people really hate T**** a lot. He may not be far-fetched in nurturing that hope.
Okay, but what about the word "socialism"? Bernie wears the label "socialist" proudly. Isn't that all by itself the kiss of death for any American politician. Don't the recent election results in the United Kingdom reinforce that point? Let's unpack this carefully, starting with the point about the U.K..
Jeremy Corbyn's loss, and the losses of his Labour Party, to Boris Johnson and the Tories, was not about socialism versus capitalism. One simple way to illustrate that point is simply with the commitment Johnson made to support a number of positions that are essentially pro-Labour positions, including and especially additional money for the National Health Service. There was one and only one issue on the ballot in that election: Brexit. And Corbyn's position on that issue was not fundamentally different than Johnson's. For what it's worth, I believe that, had Corbyn decided to make a determined, coherent argument for the Remain position, he might have had a shot of winning, or at least seeing his party lose fewer seats. Even then, however, the anti-Semitism he has unleashed within Labour may doom the party's chances for years, even with shifts in the larger political climate. I think, by the way, that we will not have to wait long, but that's a post for another day.
But what about socialism itself? Isn't that an ideology that's just too far left for a center-right country? Even if you qualify it as democratic socialism, where the concern is with building an effective social safety net rather than having the government take over the economy? Don't we pride ourselves on having more rugged individualism than our European forebearers?
Well, that's the thing about the nation's demographics. They are simply not as "European" as they used to be, just as they are not as male as they used to be. There are more women and people of color than ever before, and they are both victims historically of discrimination. They are, for that reason, more open to various forms of government assistance, and less inclined to see it as a source of oppression; if anything, it's the capitalists that have historically oppressed them.
Beyond that, however, we are at the end of a 30-year worldwide run of untrammeled capitalism, and, for most people, the results are in: lower wages, more dangerous jobs, a planet being pushed toward the far end of its existential rope--and the rewards for all this going only to 1% of the total number of people. Even if you accept the idea that, in politics, stability can be most commonly found in the ideological mean, if you want to get to that mean, there's only one way for all of us to go, and that's to the left.
One thing I will say in favor of the Never T****ers: even they seem to be able to get this, to a much greater degree than the MSM seems able to do. Here's Bruce Bartlett, for example. And isn't it interesting that, in the news story he references, you see a prominent conservative member of the T**** Administration advocating government purchases of corporations? Gee, isn't that the kind of socialism everybody hates?
And it's not just the Never T****ers. If you look at the positions of the current (and former) 2020 Democratic presidential candidates on a number of issues, especially health care, it's painfully clear that the "moderate" positions are much farther to the left than they were 20 or even 12 years ago. Who would have thought, back in 2009, that the "public option" would become the middle-of-the-road position in the health care debate? Back then, advocating it made you a "dangerous lefty." For that matter, this was also true of many of the "moderate" Democrats who helped the party take back the House in 2018. I believe that Sanders can and should take a great deal of credit for that shift.
And this is why, whether or not I think Sanders would make a successful President--and I have doubts on that point, based on his temperament and lack of legislative trophies--it would be utter folly to try and stop him, should he win the nomination. At that point, there is no viable alternative. You may, like me, have wished for a nominee that better reflected America's diversity. But, at that point, the best thing to do is to advocate, through the process of selecting a running mate, a ticket that does indeed reflect that diversity. We need to let the process run its course, a course that every candidate committed to in advance, regardless of any imperfections it may have, and choose the candidate that the people want to choose.
We need to do this because, if politics in this country is ever going to regain the dignity that it deserves in a democracy, it needs to reverse a 50-year trend of focusing on personalities, on resumes, on alleged questions of character, and once again focus on ideas. America is, and always has been, as much of an idea as it is a nation. And that idea depends on related ideas that support it, that sustain it, that advance it, and that makes it matter to everyone. I think that's what the youth movement that has supported Sanders cares about most. They aren't burden by the boomer-based battles over who is the most telegenic candidate, or who can do a more effective job of smearing their opponents. They understand what matters about politics the most, and that is what politics can do for all of us, and not just what it can do for one party or another.
Can Sanders beat T****, if he wins the nomination? Honestly speaking, I don't know. I pray with all of my heart that, whoever the Democratic nominee is, I pray that he or she will beat the living daylights out of him. I'm not sure that Sanders can do that.
I do know that, with all my heart, with all my mind, with all of my resources, and with all of my hopes for those I love, and for the nation I love, I will do all I can to make it happen.
And I don't hesitate to add that, if you give a damn about the future, you'll do it, too.
So everyone on the Democratic side of the fence is happy, excited, raring to go for the fall election, and, above all, pulling together for the sake of party unity and the national need to end the nightmare that is the T**** Administration. Right?
Silly me. This is the Democratic Party that we're talking about. It wouldn't be the Democratic Party without a near-complete freakout over the results. And that's what we've got, with the emergence of Sen. Bernie Sanders as the front runner.
Sanders' ability to break out of the pack, and defy the conventional wisdom that the path to Democratic victory in November runs in the center lane, has understandably shocked a lot the people who mold the conventional wisdom, to say nothing of the majority of the voters/caucus-goers who did not support him. I try to avoid exaggeration in this space and elsewhere, but I've read a lot of the media reaction to Sanders' successes, and it's hard to view most of it (on the negative side) as being anything other than hysterical. One way of measuring the hysteria: for the first time in decades, the dreaded M-word--McGovern--is being used to describe a Presidential campaign.
It's easy to understand some portion of this intensity. One of the hoariest rhetorical cliches in electoral politics is "the stakes have never been higher." Well, this time around, the stakes truly never have been higher. Post-impeachment, T**** has been even more out of control when it comes to making the Federal government his personal plaything, and enlisting the aid of his Attorney General in making that happen. The risks involved in allowing this to continue without limit have, this past week, been exposed and heighten by the revelation, related to the coronavirus crisis, that T*** has fired the government officials responsible for handling pandemics.
But, as I counseled in my previous blog post about the virtues of our taking a deep, collective breath at this point in our national ordeal, it might be useful to walk through some of the objections to Sanders' candidacy, and see if they really require resignation to four more years of the Orange Nightmare and the potential collapse of the Republic (the latter being a real risk if the former becomes a reality). And we'll begin with the not-so-obvious one, in part because it drives me crazy that it's even advanced as an argument.
Whether the nominee is Sanders or anyone else, T**** is going to win because T**** has done a great job of handling the economy. Let me answer that one as unambiguously as possible: no, no, a thousand thousand times NO. He has taken an economy that was making the biggest comeback in American history since the Great Depression, and saddled it with debt and tariffs that have already begun an economic slowdown. In fact, under three years of T****, the economy has produced fewer jobs than it did during the last three years of the Obama Administration, with a Republican Congress fighting President Obama all the way during the last two of those years. Don't believe me? Well, then, believe Snopes.
And you might also want to believe one of T****'s favorite constituencies: farmers. They haven't got tired of winning yet; in fact, they haven't even started winning. Unless bankruptcies can be considered a form of winning.
Wage growth? It's happening primarily because of states that have (finally) raised their minimum wages. Consumer confidence? Up and down, but when it's been down (and it's been down recently), it's really been down. Industrial output? Same story. Business borrowing? Hitting a wall. In fact, there's reason to believe that we may already be entering a recession. In any case, there's no reason to doubt that the American Dream is, for the majority of us that want to have a family, effectively dead.
Oh, but what about the Dow? That's supposed to be--pardon the pun--the President's trump card (I'm spelling it out here because it's not his name). In fact, it's been the recipient of all those corporate tax cuts, the ones that were supposed to create the jobs that are now disappearing. That money is going into the repurchasing of shares, or investment in offshore tax havens (never to return to the U.S.). And, in the process, it's exploding the Federal budget deficit and the national debt, which is beginning to send interest rates in the wrong direction.
On top of all of this, there's the acid test every President must be able to pass: dealing with the unexpected. The coronavirus threat is a classic example, one that has already knocked almost 3,000 points off of T****'s beloved Dow. And that's likely to get even worse, if it's really the case that T****'s only plan for dealing with the threat is to wait until spring.
I vividly remember my assessment of the 2008 presidential race, up to the point at which the Wall Street meltdown began. Up until then, I genuinely believed that the race was John McCain's to lose. Despite the Iraq quagmire, the economy was still strong enough to support a vote for a Republican successor to George W. Bush, and Barack Obama was still a relative unknown whose electability as the first African-American nominee of a major party was still open to debate. This rationale went out the window with the onset of the financial crisis. The events of this week, and T****'s predominantly political response, going so far as to tell a friendly rally of paid attendees that the coronavirus is a Democratic "hoax," make think that we may be witnessing the beginning of a double-barreled meltdown, one propelled by economic weakness and a pandemic of epic proportions.
This is the bottom line: Under T****, we do not have a great economy. We have what remains of the Obama recovery, menaced by threats that T**** has either created or ignored. Any Democrat would do better, as the track record of the last two Democratic Presidents will attest, compared to the track records of the two Republicans that preceded them. And, in this case, "any Democrat" includes Bernie Sanders. And, on top of that, not only do we not have a great economy, we may not even have a safe society. This "President" is not politically bulletproof, no matter the events of the past three years. No President is. We need to stop letting his braggadocio and the mindlessness of his followers live rent-free in our heads and hearts. With one nominee or the other. If the majority of Democrats decide that Sanders should be the nominee, all Democrats and other progressives should get on board for him.
But what about the fact that Bernie isn't a complete "progressive"? His positions on guns, immigration, and civil rights sound more like things a Republican would say. On the other side, he's lavished praise on Communist dictatorships that not even the most liberal of Democrats would make. These are completely fair criticisms, and it's entirely on Sanders' shoulders to figure out how to deal with them. From listening to some of his recent speeches, he seems to be dealing with the former dilemma in much the same way past candidates in similar positions have dealt with it: the "Darwinist" approach, in which you talk about how much you've "evolved" in your thinking. (See, e.g., George H.W. Bush in 1980 on the subject of abortion.) Will it work? Maybe, maybe not. It's pretty much all he can do.
And the latter dilemma? Well, that's a much bigger rhetorical hill to climb. Thus far, he is trying to explain it by saying that even bad dictators do good things. In other words, he's effectively praising Mussolini for making the trains run on time. I don't think that's going to fly. He's going to have to hope that people really hate T**** a lot. He may not be far-fetched in nurturing that hope.
Okay, but what about the word "socialism"? Bernie wears the label "socialist" proudly. Isn't that all by itself the kiss of death for any American politician. Don't the recent election results in the United Kingdom reinforce that point? Let's unpack this carefully, starting with the point about the U.K..
Jeremy Corbyn's loss, and the losses of his Labour Party, to Boris Johnson and the Tories, was not about socialism versus capitalism. One simple way to illustrate that point is simply with the commitment Johnson made to support a number of positions that are essentially pro-Labour positions, including and especially additional money for the National Health Service. There was one and only one issue on the ballot in that election: Brexit. And Corbyn's position on that issue was not fundamentally different than Johnson's. For what it's worth, I believe that, had Corbyn decided to make a determined, coherent argument for the Remain position, he might have had a shot of winning, or at least seeing his party lose fewer seats. Even then, however, the anti-Semitism he has unleashed within Labour may doom the party's chances for years, even with shifts in the larger political climate. I think, by the way, that we will not have to wait long, but that's a post for another day.
But what about socialism itself? Isn't that an ideology that's just too far left for a center-right country? Even if you qualify it as democratic socialism, where the concern is with building an effective social safety net rather than having the government take over the economy? Don't we pride ourselves on having more rugged individualism than our European forebearers?
Well, that's the thing about the nation's demographics. They are simply not as "European" as they used to be, just as they are not as male as they used to be. There are more women and people of color than ever before, and they are both victims historically of discrimination. They are, for that reason, more open to various forms of government assistance, and less inclined to see it as a source of oppression; if anything, it's the capitalists that have historically oppressed them.
Beyond that, however, we are at the end of a 30-year worldwide run of untrammeled capitalism, and, for most people, the results are in: lower wages, more dangerous jobs, a planet being pushed toward the far end of its existential rope--and the rewards for all this going only to 1% of the total number of people. Even if you accept the idea that, in politics, stability can be most commonly found in the ideological mean, if you want to get to that mean, there's only one way for all of us to go, and that's to the left.
One thing I will say in favor of the Never T****ers: even they seem to be able to get this, to a much greater degree than the MSM seems able to do. Here's Bruce Bartlett, for example. And isn't it interesting that, in the news story he references, you see a prominent conservative member of the T**** Administration advocating government purchases of corporations? Gee, isn't that the kind of socialism everybody hates?
And it's not just the Never T****ers. If you look at the positions of the current (and former) 2020 Democratic presidential candidates on a number of issues, especially health care, it's painfully clear that the "moderate" positions are much farther to the left than they were 20 or even 12 years ago. Who would have thought, back in 2009, that the "public option" would become the middle-of-the-road position in the health care debate? Back then, advocating it made you a "dangerous lefty." For that matter, this was also true of many of the "moderate" Democrats who helped the party take back the House in 2018. I believe that Sanders can and should take a great deal of credit for that shift.
And this is why, whether or not I think Sanders would make a successful President--and I have doubts on that point, based on his temperament and lack of legislative trophies--it would be utter folly to try and stop him, should he win the nomination. At that point, there is no viable alternative. You may, like me, have wished for a nominee that better reflected America's diversity. But, at that point, the best thing to do is to advocate, through the process of selecting a running mate, a ticket that does indeed reflect that diversity. We need to let the process run its course, a course that every candidate committed to in advance, regardless of any imperfections it may have, and choose the candidate that the people want to choose.
We need to do this because, if politics in this country is ever going to regain the dignity that it deserves in a democracy, it needs to reverse a 50-year trend of focusing on personalities, on resumes, on alleged questions of character, and once again focus on ideas. America is, and always has been, as much of an idea as it is a nation. And that idea depends on related ideas that support it, that sustain it, that advance it, and that makes it matter to everyone. I think that's what the youth movement that has supported Sanders cares about most. They aren't burden by the boomer-based battles over who is the most telegenic candidate, or who can do a more effective job of smearing their opponents. They understand what matters about politics the most, and that is what politics can do for all of us, and not just what it can do for one party or another.
Can Sanders beat T****, if he wins the nomination? Honestly speaking, I don't know. I pray with all of my heart that, whoever the Democratic nominee is, I pray that he or she will beat the living daylights out of him. I'm not sure that Sanders can do that.
I do know that, with all my heart, with all my mind, with all of my resources, and with all of my hopes for those I love, and for the nation I love, I will do all I can to make it happen.
And I don't hesitate to add that, if you give a damn about the future, you'll do it, too.
Sunday, February 9, 2020
Maybe We All Need To Take A Deep Breath
I really mean it.
Maybe it's just because the past week has been, on the national political scene, an especially tumultuous one. Maybe it's because, for personal and professional reasons, the beginning of the new year has been a hectic one for me. Maybe it's just because having D***** T**** in the White House for the past three years plus has made every day of that time period an emotional journey I would just as soon not have, for my sake and everyone else's (even those who voted for him). Maybe it's some combination of those things. Maybe it's all of them.
At this point, I really don't care. Because this was the week that, among other things, was the week that I took some time to take stock of what the T**** years have specifically done to me.
And I came to some pretty upsetting conclusions.
I realized that, to a degree I'd rather not completely reveal, I'd been drawn into the angry emotional world that lives inside of T**** himself, and found myself far too often reacting to statements and events about him and his Administration in the same impulsive, mean-spirited way that must characterize every waking moment of his life. I'd talk to other people about him in an angry way. I would use social media to project angry feelings about him. I've even spent a lot of time in this space allowing my rhetoric to, at times, become a very poor imitation of the speeches that he gives at the campaign rallies he prefers to attend, in lieu of doing the actual work connected with his day job.
And I've noticed other people doing varying degrees of the same thing. Friends. Co-workers. Family members. Social media contacts. Even professional journalists, who are expected to demonstrate a measure of restraint in their reporting, and, more often than not, are able to do so. Except, of course, when it comes to this subject.
Fear has a funny way of doing that.
And fear is D***** T****'s stock in trade. Fear is the only thing that motivates him. Fear of not being discussed. Fear of not being reflexively obeyed. Fear of not being always the center of attention. And, perhaps above all, fear of not being able to make others do exactly what he wants, exactly when he wants it. As a consequence, because fear is the only thing he fully comprehends, fear is the only thing he can use to motivate others. It's the only environment he understands. And so, he fills everyone with as much fear as he possibly can. His family. His staff. Everyone within his business and his Administration.
And, ultimately, you and me.
Which is why, more than for any other reason, apart from the brazen illegality of his actions and its threat to the rule of law, is why all of us are experiences levels of stress, despair, depression, anxiety, and even worse emotions, all of which are the by-products of fear. As much as I hate to seemingly demean this discussion with a "Star Wars" reference, Yoda perhaps said it best: "Fear leads to hate. Hatred leads to anger. Anger leads to suffering."
I think that the combination of the Iowa caucus meltdown, the State of the Union message that turned into a campaign rally (Rush Limbaugh? The Medal of Freedom? Seriously?), and the"exoneration" of T**** at the end of his Senate "trial" was finally too much for me, and I had to sit down and re-evaluate how I was dealing with everything.
In the middle of that process, and while catching up on my e-mail, I came across something that gave me some helpful food for thought. I'm going to invite you to look at it right here.
I reproached myself at first, because it seemed like just another form of "click bait," but the historic preservationist in me couldn't quite resist. And I'm glad I did. I was reminded of how much natural beauty existed all across our country, in every state. And how much of our social and cultural history has been preserved in every state as well. And how well many of these small towns seemed to function, despite all of the political conflict tearing apart the country as a whole.
At first, I didn't have any other insights other than these from looking at the slide show. But it was helpful, in that it reminded me of something that can get lost in looking at the world through Twitter.
That we have a country worth saving. And people who are worth getting to know. People who could teach all of us many worthwhile things, and who could also learn many worthwhile things from us. In the process, we could perhaps find ways to bridge the gaps that divide us, and begin to solve some of the problems that now produce screaming instead of solutions.
I'm not advocating dewey-eyed idealism about who we are as a people. Right now, we're separated from each other by anger to the point at which it's fair to question whether we are one country, or two. And worse, we have a President whose sole talent is being able to exploit and fuel that anger for his own purposes.
But I am suggesting that we make an effort to disengage from that anger, and the ad hominem arguments and attacks to which it inevitably leads. To focus on discussing ideas, and, in the process, learn more about each other, and why we differ, as well as to build upon areas where we can find common ground.
This isn't about being "nice" for its own sake. I'm aware that I'm proposing something that isn't easy, and I'm not naive about the road that will lie ahead for all of us who attempt to stand down from the screaming to try communicating instead. But the alternative, for all of us, is so much worse.
And there's a practical way to make this political, given the current political popularity of both infrastructure and climate change. One that might transform this county and its politics from an Internet of voices to an Internet of people.
It's this.
I think it should be the moon shot--or one of them--of the 21st century.
And in the meantime, I'll try to do my part to soften my tone and sharpen my thoughts.
Maybe it's just because the past week has been, on the national political scene, an especially tumultuous one. Maybe it's because, for personal and professional reasons, the beginning of the new year has been a hectic one for me. Maybe it's just because having D***** T**** in the White House for the past three years plus has made every day of that time period an emotional journey I would just as soon not have, for my sake and everyone else's (even those who voted for him). Maybe it's some combination of those things. Maybe it's all of them.
At this point, I really don't care. Because this was the week that, among other things, was the week that I took some time to take stock of what the T**** years have specifically done to me.
And I came to some pretty upsetting conclusions.
I realized that, to a degree I'd rather not completely reveal, I'd been drawn into the angry emotional world that lives inside of T**** himself, and found myself far too often reacting to statements and events about him and his Administration in the same impulsive, mean-spirited way that must characterize every waking moment of his life. I'd talk to other people about him in an angry way. I would use social media to project angry feelings about him. I've even spent a lot of time in this space allowing my rhetoric to, at times, become a very poor imitation of the speeches that he gives at the campaign rallies he prefers to attend, in lieu of doing the actual work connected with his day job.
And I've noticed other people doing varying degrees of the same thing. Friends. Co-workers. Family members. Social media contacts. Even professional journalists, who are expected to demonstrate a measure of restraint in their reporting, and, more often than not, are able to do so. Except, of course, when it comes to this subject.
Fear has a funny way of doing that.
And fear is D***** T****'s stock in trade. Fear is the only thing that motivates him. Fear of not being discussed. Fear of not being reflexively obeyed. Fear of not being always the center of attention. And, perhaps above all, fear of not being able to make others do exactly what he wants, exactly when he wants it. As a consequence, because fear is the only thing he fully comprehends, fear is the only thing he can use to motivate others. It's the only environment he understands. And so, he fills everyone with as much fear as he possibly can. His family. His staff. Everyone within his business and his Administration.
And, ultimately, you and me.
Which is why, more than for any other reason, apart from the brazen illegality of his actions and its threat to the rule of law, is why all of us are experiences levels of stress, despair, depression, anxiety, and even worse emotions, all of which are the by-products of fear. As much as I hate to seemingly demean this discussion with a "Star Wars" reference, Yoda perhaps said it best: "Fear leads to hate. Hatred leads to anger. Anger leads to suffering."
I think that the combination of the Iowa caucus meltdown, the State of the Union message that turned into a campaign rally (Rush Limbaugh? The Medal of Freedom? Seriously?), and the"exoneration" of T**** at the end of his Senate "trial" was finally too much for me, and I had to sit down and re-evaluate how I was dealing with everything.
In the middle of that process, and while catching up on my e-mail, I came across something that gave me some helpful food for thought. I'm going to invite you to look at it right here.
I reproached myself at first, because it seemed like just another form of "click bait," but the historic preservationist in me couldn't quite resist. And I'm glad I did. I was reminded of how much natural beauty existed all across our country, in every state. And how much of our social and cultural history has been preserved in every state as well. And how well many of these small towns seemed to function, despite all of the political conflict tearing apart the country as a whole.
At first, I didn't have any other insights other than these from looking at the slide show. But it was helpful, in that it reminded me of something that can get lost in looking at the world through Twitter.
That we have a country worth saving. And people who are worth getting to know. People who could teach all of us many worthwhile things, and who could also learn many worthwhile things from us. In the process, we could perhaps find ways to bridge the gaps that divide us, and begin to solve some of the problems that now produce screaming instead of solutions.
I'm not advocating dewey-eyed idealism about who we are as a people. Right now, we're separated from each other by anger to the point at which it's fair to question whether we are one country, or two. And worse, we have a President whose sole talent is being able to exploit and fuel that anger for his own purposes.
But I am suggesting that we make an effort to disengage from that anger, and the ad hominem arguments and attacks to which it inevitably leads. To focus on discussing ideas, and, in the process, learn more about each other, and why we differ, as well as to build upon areas where we can find common ground.
This isn't about being "nice" for its own sake. I'm aware that I'm proposing something that isn't easy, and I'm not naive about the road that will lie ahead for all of us who attempt to stand down from the screaming to try communicating instead. But the alternative, for all of us, is so much worse.
And there's a practical way to make this political, given the current political popularity of both infrastructure and climate change. One that might transform this county and its politics from an Internet of voices to an Internet of people.
It's this.
I think it should be the moon shot--or one of them--of the 21st century.
And in the meantime, I'll try to do my part to soften my tone and sharpen my thoughts.
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