Posted on November 19, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
My dear Judy checked in. She was worried for me since my recent posts have been dark. Her outreach came at a good time since I have been aware of the difference between what I am currently writing and what I am experiencing as I write. For this moment in time, for my journey in this life, what I am writing may sound dark but it couldn’t be more positive.
I was writing notes to myself to try and articulate why, for me, my posts are so life-affirming, when Kerri showed me this video. I couldn’t have written a better or more clear description. If you haven’t yet seen this, take four minutes and watch it. Take it in.
I have spent much of my life attempting to “keep the peace”. Mostly, that has meant withholding my voice. To be silent in an effort not to stir the pot. To not be contradictory and rock the boat. It has never really worked. What I have achieved is voice-less-ness; laughable, I know, since I write a blog six days a week – but true. I have until recently been very careful to edit thoughts that might offend. I have consciously attended to calming the ripples of other’s feelings more than the honest expression of my own.
This video nicely encapsulates the imperative I now feel. Peace demands that we speak up for each other. Peace demands that we stand up and say, “This isn’t right.” Peace demands that we look at elected Republicans and ask, “Where is your spine? And, if you can’t find your spine, can you possibly locate your moral compass? Either will do. Either serve us in this moment.”
Peace demands that we look at ourselves and ask the same two questions. And then give voice to our disgust and outrage. An arsonist is setting our house on fire. Many people are being burned. Many more are in danger. This is no time to smile sweetly and pretend or to play peacekeeper. A lesson from Gandhi who was not silent. An example set by Martin Luther King, Tarana Burke and so many others. They were loud. They are loud. Their aim is peace.
For me – and for you – there is no peace in silence or pretending. As I am learning, we become centered, unified and stronger when we speak up and speak out.
Posted on November 18, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
Well, it is nothing short of Faustian.
In the tale, Faust makes a pact with Mephistopheles, the devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited power and material gain. Nothing can touch him for the term of the bargain: the span of his lifetime.
We are living at a moment in time when truth is stranger than fiction, a time in which fiction has made a stranger of truth.
The despot-elect is currently scheduled to be sentenced for his 34 felony convictions on November 26. The opinion prior to the election:
A “get out of jail free card”. An appropriate analogy since it refers to the game of Monopoly, where money amassers gain dominance over the board and rise above the rules. Money in our real-world-game allows delays-to-justice to stretch into eternity.
In addition to being found guilty of 34 felonies in his Hush Money case, there are three other federal indictments: Federal Election Interference, Georgia Election Interference, and the Classified Documents case. What will happen to these indictments? Poof! The moment he steps into office, they go away. The “get out of jail free” card is the presidency.
We are learning that there is, in fact, not justice for all.
In literature there are two endings to the story of Faust. In the early version, the term of the bargain expires (he dies), Mephistopheles claims his soul and carts him off to hell. In the later version, Goethe’s version, scrubbed clean for those who like Hallmark happy endings, Faust is redeemed. Gretchen, the woman he used and abused, pleads with the divine to spare him. The eternal feminine redeems him. Plucked from the arms of Mephistopheles, the divine swoops in and saves Faust from himself, from fulfilling the terms of his bargain.
Faust got his cake and ate it, too. No lessons learned. No responsibility for choices or actions. No justice for all the people Faust used, exploited, ruined, and chucked away.
Redemption for a soulless man is a fine ending for an opera.
In real life, not so much.
Is there justice for all? Not according to the supreme court.
Is there justice for all? Not according to the voting public.
Is there justice for all? Not according to the republican party that twice refused to find him guilty when impeached. The evidence was clear for all to see and hear. It was broadcast across the world. And then, poof! Get out of jail free.
Is there justice for all? We’ll see on November 26 but I wouldn’t bet on it. I’m not a big believer in devils and gods but watching this horror-story-of-a-human-being repeatedly skate away from his crimes and ascend again to power is making me wonder. This time around, he can pillage with court-granted-immunity. Mephisto-Impunity.
It has made me wonder if Mephistopheles is giggling at the possibility of a much bigger score: the despot-elect might just help him walk away with the soul of our nation.* It is, I suspect, the terms of their bargain.
*We are a nation of laws. Justice for all is not simple rhetoric. It is the the north-star of our nation.
Posted on November 16, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
What is real? It’s not so easy to answer this very simple question these days. With A-I manufacturing videos and images that seem real, with foreign interference in our elections, with a pathological liar about to once again take the national bully pulpit and a propaganda fox willing to magnify his hooey, with people believing tik-tok, X and instagram are sources of news…it is damn hard to know what is real. It’s damn hard to believe the dull-witted-ness in ascendence.
Who is real? This is a much more complex question. A heartbreaking question.
Post election we’re everywhere seeing and hearing from the maga-madcaps the phrase , “Family over politics”. Yet, a vote for the despot-elect was a vote against my son who is gay. A vote for the rapist-in-chief was a vote against my daughter’s rights. It was a vote against my wife’s rights. She was raped so it’s not a small thing to her that half the nation, including family and friends, seem okay to look the other way. To minimize his multiple sexual assaults as locker room talk. She feels deeply in her body – her soul – the national endorsement of rape. The national assent of sexual violence.
Every time she sees the phrase,”Family over politics,” Kerri hisses, “Back-at-you!” Real family, real friends would have thought to protect our children’s health and well-being before voting against them. They would have thought to protect our nation from an avowed fascist with retribution fantasies; they would have thought before voting against basic morality. They would have had the simple dignity to consider the sexual predation, the pathological lying and gross indecency of their candidate. Instead, they cheered. They voted for it. It’s left us nauseous with the question, “Are you for real?”
They put politics (if you can call it that) over family (if you can call it that). For real.
Posted on November 15, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
The birds on a wire brought my Periwinkle book to mind. Context is everything. It is now as relevant as the day I wrote it:
Peri Winkle Rabbit was lost.
All the other animals were lost, too!
There had been a fire. Peri Winkle was asleep when grandpa Harry Winkle Rabbit shook her awake and said, “RUN!”
Peri ran. At first, Peri ran with her mom and dad, her sisters and brothers and grandpa Harry Winkle, too.
All the other animals were running, too, the deer and the bears and the foxes and the squirrels. Some were running in circles but most just ran away from the fire.
It was confusing. There were so many legs and paws running this way and that. Peri could no longer see her parents. She couldn’t see her brothers or sisters. Even grandpa Harry Winkle Rabbit was nowhere to be found.
Peri stopped and got knocked down. She hopped back up and called out for her mother. She called for her father. She couldn’t see them anywhere.
A great paw scooped her up and she was suddenly eye to eye with a bear!
“This is no time for still standing, little ears!” said the bear.
“I can’t find my family,” squeaked Peri Winkle Rabbit. The bear was holding her very tight.
“We’ll find your family, little ears,” puffed the running bear, “But first we have to find a place safe and beyond the fire.”
The bear held Peri Winkle Rabbit close to his chest. Peri could hear the boom-Boom of the bear’s big heart as he ran swiftly away from the flames. Peri Winkle Rabbit felt so sad and so tired, she couldn’t help it when she fell fast asleep.
“Good morning, little ears!” The bear smiled as Peri blinked open her eyes.
“Where am I?” asked Peri.
“I don’t rightly know, “ said the bear, “but we’re now safe and far from the fire.”
That’s how Peri Winkle Rabbit came to be lost. She looked around and saw that the forest was gone! The other animals looked and they saw it too. All the green was now black and the mighty trees were charcoal twigs twisted in ruins on the ground.
The animals started to cry. Even the big bear cried. Peri cried, too. Together, they made lots of loud crying sounds and it felt good to wail the loss of their forest home.
And then, they each told their stories of escape from the fire. They told of their lost homes and missing family and friends. They told the stories of their cuts and their bruises, their fears and their worries. They told of how they came to be together, in that place at that time. Peri Winkle Rabbit told her story, too.
“What do we do now?” a red fox asked, which was exactly the question that Peri Winkle Rabbit was thinking!
No one said a word for a very long time. They looked at each other, all covered in soot, dirty and singed and ruffled and tired.
“Well,” a great ram began, “I am sure footed, I can help carry what’s needed.”
A hawk landed on the ram and said, “I can see far away and can help find your missing families and friends.”
The great bear said, “Yes, and I have a nose that can smell good smells for many miles, I will help supply all of my new friends with food!”
“I can gather nuts!” cried the squirrel, rubbing his nose with his hands.
“I have great ears!” cried Peri Winkle Rabbit! “I can hear what is needed and help find who can do it!”
And all the animals offered their great gifts in service to their new friends. They slowly began to do what was needed with whatever they could find. They found water and food. They found shelter from the rain. They looked for their families. They made new friends.
“Remember, a forest must grow back slowly, one day at a time,” said the bear when Peri felt impatient.” Our job is to help it grow.”
“It is all different than before,” said Peri, suddenly missing her old home.
“Yes,” said the bear. “We are all different now, little ears. The fire has changed us forever.”
Peri Winkle Rabbit wrinkled her nose.
The great bear smiled and hugged her close, saying, “Now might be the time for still standing, little ears, we don’t want to miss the lessons of the fire.”
So together Peri Winkle rabbit and the great bear sat very still, listening to the forest and thinking about all that had happened. And though she didn’t quite know where she was, Peri Winkle Rabbit wasn’t lost anymore.
A one-copy book made for a child who lost their family during Hurricane Katrina. I’ve never published the full text but thought it was time. I included photos of a few of the pages.
Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora
Posted on November 14, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
“A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” ~ James Baldwin(via The Marginalian)
We picked our window of time perfectly. We needed to walk, to get out of the house and breathe yet it had rained much of the morning. Antsy, we took a chance when there was a small break in the weather and headed for the trail.
We walked slowly. We kept an eye on the sky. We watched the next band of storm clouds roll in. It was beautiful. It was ominous. The rain came a few moments after we completed our loop, just as we were getting into the car. We laughed at our good fortune.
Some people take photographs to record events. Kerri, like all artists, takes photographs to feed her spirit. She sees beauty and the photo is way to connect or harmonize with the beauty. It is akin to a hummingbird drinking nectar. I watched her take photos of the coming storm. There was a fierceness in her posture. There was joy in the face of the tumultuous clouds. As I watched I remembered a conversation I had with Brad about the reason artists create. There is a precise moment for the child-artist that a spark lights a soul-fire. In my moment I desperately wanted to see clearly what was happening behind peoples’ eyes; behind my own eyes.
Later I looked at her photograph of the rolling storm and thought it a perfect image for our times. The storm is coming. Lydia wrote a comment musing about the surprise rise in prices the maga-faithful (and the rest of us) will experience when the people who pick our crops are deported. I responded darkly that the artists and intellectuals will pick the crops from their place at the corporate farm detention camp. Despots always have to eliminate voices of reason, voices of criticism and opposition. Voices of clarity.
Today, now, more than ever, I want to understand what-on-earth is happening behind peoples’ eyes. As I understand it, this is exactly the time, when chaos and deception rule the day, that artists get-crackin’ to clarify.
Posted on November 13, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
Life has a way of flipping you on your head. As a former facilitator of DEI workshops I have had innumerable conversations about intolerance and the necessity for standing in “the other’s shoes.” Tolerance is a step on the path to an open mind. Throughout the course of this election I have discovered within myself the necessity of intolerance. The absolute necessity.
There has to be a line. I cannot stand in the shoes of intentional indecency. I cannot afford an ounce of grace to the ugly racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, violent ambitions of maga or its dictator-wanna-be. In a democracy, there is no validity, nothing remotely defensible about their fascist aims. I cannot listen – even for a moment – to the rabid justification of a thought-less-babble-tower built of lies and grievance. It is less than sandy soil. It is a disaster in the making. A foul permission structure of deception and nonsense.
I have found my hard intolerance and I couldn’t be more proud to declare it. At first I feared it made me a hypocrite but lately I know better. There is a place for intolerance and it is this: Intolerance of injustice, intolerance of hatred, intolerance of fear-mongering, intolerance of misogyny… is the vanguard of an open-heart, the guardian of an open-mind.
There has to be a line.
I am learning that within my intolerance of this maga-hatred is the living-seed of common decency and respect of others. My intolerance of whipped-up division constructed by a pathological liar gives bright energy to my belief in truth and goodness. It points the way to the virtues I was taught, to the ethics that are my inheritance.
Our parents and grandparents fought against fascism. My imperfect and messy nation strives to fulfill the ideal that all people are created equal. As the stewards of democracy it is now our imperative – my imperative – to claim my utter intolerance of the authoritarian bilge poisoning our nation.
Every religion, spirituality and belief-system I’ve ever studied (and I’ve studied more than I can count) instructs that I am my brothers’ and sisters’ keeper – as they are also mine, to help others – especially those who are downtrodden. As Kerri says, “If it’s not about kindness then it’s not about anything.”
That seems pretty straight forward and absolutely unequivocal to me. Especially now.
Posted on November 12, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
We are still recovering from covid. The progress is slow but certain. We’re finally -after a month – able to walk pieces of our usual trails. Each day we gauge what we can realistically do, we stop often, we turn around or cut short our regular loop when our bodies signal it’s time to stop. “My legs are shaking,” I say as we return to the car. We are not frustrated by our weakness, rather, we are inordinately grateful to be outside, in nature, marveling at the November sky. Especially now. In nature we find sanity in a nation that has lost its mind.
Within our information bubble there is an energetic discussion about self-care. There is encouragement to disconnect from the doom-scrolling and, instead, firmly focus on what brings joy, what invokes love. There is a concurrent ubiquitous conversation about feeling unsafe in a nation that put a rapist in the white house, a convicted felon and avowed fascist who daily promises violence to those who oppose him. Fully half of the nation opposes him so feelings of insecurity are warranted.
The third conversation strand is quieter, a question filled with inordinate sadness. It is the question of whether or not to disconnect from people – family and friends – who knowingly voted for fascism, who support the coming violence. These relationships, personal and familial, no longer feel safe. It’s a matter of trust – of being able to trust someone who either lacks a moral center or who is so enraged that they see themselves mirrored in the despot-elect. It’s impossible to trust people so completely unplugged from reality and so willing to justify thuggery.
It is confusing to love but not to trust. It is bewildering to feel threatened by those you love. It’s a question of vulnerability. It’s a question of honesty, “Do I pretend…” It is made more untenable when taking-a-break or disconnecting is understood as not-loving.
I understand the choice – either way – to be self-loving. We must now protect ourselves.
Also, there is this: a loving parent will not let their child run into the busy street. It is a loving act to shout, “You cannot do this!” It is not without love that we look at our maga-voting family and friends and say, “I cannot pretend that this is election was like all others; I cannot pretend that we are merely having a difference of opinion. We are not. Your vote was for an amoral grotesque who openly promises violence as an authoritarian dictator. Our difference runs much deeper than mere opinion.”
The most loving thing we can do for ourselves is nurture and attend to relationships with those we trust. The most loving thing we can do for our friends and family now hurtling toward the dangerous fascist road is to shout, with voice or with silence, “You cannot do this.”
Posted on November 11, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
This weekend while I was busy elevating Neil Postman to prophet status I realized I was also putting to rest a debate that began with my business partner during the dawn of social media. Her contention was that meaningful relationships were possible over social media. I held – and still hold – now more than ever – the opposite view. Our latest election is all the proof I needed.
Meaningful relationships are complex. They require time. They require presence – slowing down and paying attention. Listening. They are expansive as well as intricate. They are investments in the other.
The medium is the message. Social media is reductive. It is immediate. It does not slow down, rather, it speeds us up. It affords only simplistic exchanges. It’s great for memes, for sharing photos, for updates. It is self-centered. It is limited in characters and increasingly relies on emojis. It is a great medium for the superficial, the tit-for-tat. Jabs. Clever comebacks. And, if you don’t like what you are hearing, a touch of a button unfriends the annoyance. No investment required.
Social media has become our public square.
Our ease of unfriending creates information eddies, impenetrable echo chambers. We sort to bubbles of agreement with nary a nod to fact or uncomfortable truth. We do not have to listen to each other since insulting and negating each other is within the reduction-capacity of the medium while listening, questioning, discussing and debating is not.
Our medium inhibits complicated in-depth conversations or layered debate of ideas which, in-turn, inhibits fact-based conversation while promoting gossip, conspiracy, accusation and misinformation. I am haunted by a piece Kerri included in her Smack-Dab post on Saturday:
“…Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them. An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.” (heather cox richardson – american historian, professor of history – boston college, previously MIT, university of massachusetts amherst )
The info-bubbles generated by our social-media-public-square are fortresses. Inside the walls we are capable of demonizing the other, ramping up our rage, but are incapable of promoting or encouraging the sharing of policy ideas, a comprehensive discussion of competing visions for the nation’s future, the character of the candidates, the possible impact to other nations and the ramifications of our choice…
The info-river is fast-moving and keeps flowing with little or no regard to the worth or truth of the information it carries. Not only are we pickled in misinformation and easily distracted, we are also incapable of tracking the tsunami of information that washes over us each day. We scroll and forget. Our attention span is a long as what rolls through our screen.
And so, we willingly walk behind the mule for a second time. There is nothing new to be learned except perhaps how damaging or fatal a second kick will be. Maybe, just maybe, if our democracy survives, we will have learned to stop tweeting at each other and step into a real public square for our most important conversations. I know, I know. I’m an idealist.
I have a suggestion for our new national meme: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
Posted on November 9, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
Apparently social media is smoking hot with maga-voters who finally decided to look-up the word “tariff”. It seems that they are astounded to discover that they (we) pay the tax, not China. Or Mexico. They are somehow puzzled to learn that the cost of living under their candidate’s tariff plan is – and always was – promised to escalate the cost of living. Also on the info-grill: the reality of the phrase “mass deportation” is beginning to dawn on the red voters. It’s just now occurring to them that their vote has actual consequences that impact their family and friends.
A little bit of illumination a lotta bit too late.
This quote from an NPR interview with Republican strategist Sarah Longwell is worthy of a laugh/cry. It’s crossed my screen a few times this morning: “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, “What’s an authoritarian?”
What’s an authoritarian? Good question. Well. I guess we’re about to find out.
ignorance (noun): lack of knowledge and information*
*dear trump voter: authoritarians rely on your ignorance and exploit your rage.**
**It may feel good up front to vote your rage but that good-feeling rapidly dissipates when a little-bit-of-knowledge-and-a-lotta-bit-of-reality sets in. Next time, if there is a next time (look up the word “authoritarian”) you might want to pull your head out of the fox-misinformation-hole, ask a few relevant questions and look up a word or two before you fill in the bubble.***
***informing yourself is a relatively easy thing to do and as you may have just discovered only takes a few minutes (for instance, how long did it take to look up the word “tariff”?). On the other hand, cleaning up the horror created by an authoritarian takes generations. Look it up.
Posted on November 8, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
In the past three days I’ve seen this quote by H.G. Wells cross my screen more than once: “Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.”
I would say, given the outcome of our most recent election, education just lost the race. It was not an accident that H.G. Wells wrote that we must “learn the truth”. Truth, like democracy, is a question, not an answer. Learning is a pursuit of questions, not an indoctrination of answers. It doesn’t take a prophet to see the coming elimination of questioners, the (continued) banning of books, the suppression of ideas. As we have just witnessed, truth has no relevance in a society fortressed against learning – especially about itself.
In my personal cosmos, Wednesday morning I officially elevated Neil Postman to the status of prophet. There was no ceremony. I’ve included both of these Postman quotes in previous posts but they are startlingly relevant and revealing of our current catastrophe. He published them in 1985:
“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” ~ Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Historians will certainly write extensively about what we just experienced: a serious public servant lost an election to a vaudeville act. A nation finds itself at risk.
I am in a news blackout. I couldn’t bear to hear the pundits debate all-the-reasons-why without actually taking a good hard look at themselves, without actually recognizing that they, too, are part of “the perpetual round of entertainment” squeezed in-between commercials.
“For in the end, he [Aldous Huxley] was telling us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.” ~ Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
The maga-madcap-clan is doing a victory lap and posing for pictures. Their Project 2025 plan will sooner or later drive the faithful – and the rest of us – out of the vaudeville tent. Serious chaos has a way of slapping even the most entranced audiences into consciousness. Catastrophe, if survived, is a great clarifier. The maga-madcaps will look and sound much differently outside the distractions of the tent in the full light of reality.
Maybe then – just maybe – we will be capable of coming together, looking at ourselves, newly unafraid of the rigors of learning and where it leads us, and rekindle an honest pursuit of the truth. We may, once again, start thinking. As is always true in the harsh light of day, when the circus leaves town, serious questions will be all that is left, all that we have to hold onto.
The Direction of Intention 