The answer to her question is, of course, no. We are not at the lowest ebb. But, we are at a crisis point: the Texas Democrats are preventing the unconstitutional gerrymander of their congressional maps. It seems that there is some fire and fight in the Democrats after all. The governors of blue states are going on offense against a rogue republican party that no longer believes in democracy.
As Governor Gavin Newson said, “We have to get off our heels and get on our toes.” The gloves are coming off. Even more hopeful is a sentiment from Mark Elias: if they gerrymander 5 seats, we gerrymander 30. This cannot be a game of tit-for-tat; our constitutional republic is at stake. We play their game, only better.
So. Are we at the lowest ebb yet? Certainly not. But there is now at least some small hope that our democracy has a chance of rising from the ashes. The stewards of democracy are like a sleeping giant that are finally opening their eyes, finally waking up.
In the hiker/outdoor community there is a fundamental principle articulated in two similar mantras: First, “Leave no trace”. Second, “Leave it better than you found it”. Tom used to say it this way: “Take care of your own trash; don’t leave it for other people to deal with.” He was speaking about more than plastic bottles and candy bar wrappers. All variations of the theme are good rules to live by.
We are merely visitors to this planet. We do not own it or control it. Ours is to care for it and leave it better for those who follow. Ideally that is what it means to live in community: care for others, care for the environment. Consider the long and short-term impact of our actions. We are stewards.
Consciousness of impact. Acting with care and intention to “leave it better than we found it” requires a simple fundamental skill: the capacity to address what is actual, to discern between what is real and what is blind-belief.
This is what is actual:
“Ten of the eleven U.S. recessions between 1953 and 2020 began under Republican presidents. Of these, the most statistically significant differences are in real GDP growth, unemployment rate change, stock market annual return, and job creation rate.” Wikipedia: US Economic Performance by Presidential Party.
The operative word in the wiki post is “real”. Real numbers. Real growth. Real job creation. Real science.
Our current leadership (I use the term loosely) on every front is waging a war against what is real. It is the reason US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Erika McEntarfer was just fired; she reported real employment numbers and the sitting republican president, rather than deal with the actual impact of his real policy failures, killed the messenger.
With stock market losses, free-falling jobs creation rate, a shrinking economy, a historic shift of wealth from the poorest to the already morbidly wealthy, the tariff tsunami about to hit…in only six months the bustling economy that the republicans inherited from the previous democratic president, called the Envy of the World, is rapidly disintegrating.
In the real world it would seem prudent to buckle up for yet another recession engineered by a republican president, eleven of twelve. This one bodes to be a whopper. It does not take long for trash to foul an ecosystem.
Not only will this republican administration not leave the nation better than they found it, in their war against what is real they seem singularly dedicated to looting it with nary a concern for those who will follow. Like all republican administrations in the past 80 years, they will leave the messy trash from their gluttonous party for others to clean up.
We are now faced with a very real and sobering question: will our democracy survive this reckless trashing?
As if the world was not topsy-turvy enough, last evening, just as the sun was setting, I opened the back door and was met with a wall of rising heat. The sun was going down and the temperature was going up!
We are in the land of Lewis Carroll. Logic spins like a wheel of fortune. Alice awoke from her Wonderland dream when she stood up to the Queen of Hearts. She awoke when she’d had enough of chaos and challenged the madness. It was a threshold moment, marking the passage into adulthood. Everything we need to know is in the story.
Do you remember Field of Dreams? “If you build it, he will come.” It’s a story of the power of following a dream no matter how irrational. Lately I’ve thought that our democracy is like the baseball field built in the middle of a cornfield. How irrational is it to imagine and then create a single nation, a field, that attracts and is home to people from all over the world! A nation where a wildly diverse populace governs itself. By the people, for the people, of the people. Build it and they will come.
Redemption is one of the themes of the movie. As is true in life, redemption for the characters comes after reconciling with their past. All of it: the good, the bad, the ugly. Redemption is a door that opens when a person or community – or nation – is brave enough to honestly look at and deal with the full scope of their history. There’s a good reason that Honesty is the first step in the twelve steps of addiction recovery. An honest reckoning opens the door to the pathway that leads to a second chance. It clears the vision, clarifies the dream.
Challenge the madness.
Say, “Enough!”
Get honest.
I took some small comfort when I read these words this morning: “…it’s never too late to reconcile with the past and find peace.” Follow the dream “…even when it seems impossible or irrational.”
we are trying to regroup, rethink and refocus our melange blogpost writing a bit. we – like you – know what is really happening in our world and do not need one more person – including ourselves – telling us the details of this saddest of descents destroying democracy and humanity. though we know our effort will not be 100% – for there is sooo much to bemoan in these everydays – we have decided to try and lean into another way – to instead write about WHAT ELSE IS REAL. this will not negate negativity, but we hope that it will help prescribe presence as antidote and balm for our collective weariness. ~ xoxo kerri & david
***
Sometimes what we see is obvious. Sometimes it is not. We showed this photo to 20. Kerri told him it was a painting. I told him it was a granite counter top. He narrowed his eyes. He knows us too well. It could be a photograph taken by the Webb telescope: the surface of an unknown planet or a particular slice of the galaxy analyzed through a monochromatic lens. What else could it be? A satellite image of earth’s weather pattern? A microscope image of lymph moving in the body?
Without context it is difficult – well, it is nearly impossible – to arrive at an agreement of what we see. And isn’t that the epicenter of the interesting times in which we live? Deceptive contexts. Most often dueling contexts. We do not wrangle over what we see; our fight is about context; the loss of shared context. We cannot agree on what we see.
His parents used the railing of the bridge to stretch after their walk. The young boy peered down into the water and said, “Yuck.” The family moved on. We stopped at the yuck spot and looked down. Pollen swirling in the slow moving river.
Kerri whipped out her camera whispering, “Gorgeous!”
Whose interpretation is correct? Kerri’s? The young boy’s?
Both. They share context so neither need be right or wrong. They agree on what they see just not on the aesthetics.
What else is real? It is a good question to ask. Especially now.
Since I asked a question in our most recent smack-dab, I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind: “What actions – beyond awareness-raising – will effectively save our democracy…?”
If you are like me, you are sick-to-death of reading posts from our elected democratic leaders decrying the latest moral-offense and breach of the Constitution of the republican administration. It’s become something of a game to read the first comment which inevitably is something like, “I know this already! So what are you doing about it?”
The operative word is “do”. The question for our elected leaders should not absolve us of responsibility and would better read, “What are we doing about it?”
We are aware. What are we doing?
Raising awareness is not action. It’s a step toward action but is not itself a useful action. Crying, “The house is on fire!” is necessary but if it doesn’t prompt a call to the fire department it is useless.
When I asked the question on my saturday-morning-smack-dab post I did not have a clear set of answers. I know the first action-set has to protect our elections since the current occupant of the white house has been manufacturing crises since day one so he might circumvent congress. His authoritarian power grab is nearly complete. All that remains is to rig or stop our next election. His party is already erecting voting barriers to women and people of color.
I want to be inundated with posts from democratic leaders detailing potent action rather than shared-awareness-alarms.
I do not have answers. I have ideas. Lots of ideas. I’d welcome conversations about doing that arrive at specific actions aimed at specific targets. I’d cheer if our democratic leaders went on offense rather than perpetually playing defense, reacting and responding. Stop telling me the house is on fire. I already know. Take the ball back. What’s in the playbook?
The morning glories are out. They line sections of the trail. They have a very short blooming season and so have come to represent transience. They caught my attention as we walked and I pondered my question about effective action. Because the morning glory grows in complex environments, the flower has also come to represent the overcoming of adversity and renewal. Our democracy need not be fleeting.
I realized the morning glory is the perfect symbol for my meditation/question. Don’t take this – our democracy – for granted. It will die. Renewal is our job. We live in a time that our job requires immediate action, targeted action meant to overcome authoritarian/republican adversity.
The house is on fire. We already know it. We can stand by and tell each other about the heat of the flames or we can get busy working together to douse the flame.
In chaos there is pattern. This is the pattern emerging amidst our national chaos: people are dying in floods because early warning systems were interrupted by “waste, fraud, and abuse” cuts to the National Weather Service. People all over the world are dying due to the shuttering of USAID. People are losing their social safety net and public services to afford tax cuts for the morbidly wealthy; it’s estimated that over 50,000 citizens each year will die unnecessarily due to loss of their health care and access to services. People are being plucked off the streets and out of their homes by masked government agents and being “disappeared”.
The pattern in the chaos: ordinary people are suffering and dying, sacrificed on the altar of financial gain. Apparently the common person is counted among the waste to be cut. Certainly, it’s clear that the everyday person on the street is seen as a resource to be exploited, used and discarded. Republican Joni Ernst in a contentious town hall told her constituents protesting cuts to MEDICAID that, “We are all going to die.”
Consider this: The children were swept away in a flood that surprised them because the early warning system broke down due to staffing cuts. There was no one staffing the office necessary to pass on the evacuation warnings. The director of the DHS couldn’t be bothered to sign off on an emergency response for over 72 hours after the flooding began. She was too busy posing for the camera.
Indignation is useful fuel but can only carry us so far. As Kara Swisher asked in a recent podcast, “Would you rather be right or effective?” Yes, we are right to be indignant about the lies, the gaslighting, the fraud, the corruption, the grift, the incompetence, the brutality, the immorality, the hubris…
And, as we watch our democracy swirl around the drain, it is obvious that we are not-at-all being effective in our response. Words to myself and to you: perhaps it is time to rethink our ranting and raising-awareness about how wrong this is. That certainly feels good to share in the indignation. It certainly feels like we’re doing something. A lesson I learned early in my consulting life: raising awareness is not action. It’s a step toward action. If raising awareness was action, gun violence would not be the leading cause of death of children in the USA.
If the republican’s BBB is any indication, we are not being effective at all because our actions are limited to awareness raising: we call representatives who no longer listen; we march in order to send a message to representatives who no longer care. The polls have the tyrant and his party in the basement and they do not seem concerned at all. We raise awareness within our social media bubbles with people who are already abundantly aware how wrong this is.
Calls to representatives. Marches and civil unrest. Polls. If you are hearing what I am hearing, then we have to realize that this is a whole new ballgame. They are playing as if our votes – our voices – no longer matter. We are assuming that our votes will eventually correct the course. The clear message that we need to grok is made obvious in the pattern: To them we are waste to be cut, an unnecessary obstacle on the road to their gluttony. We can protest all we want. They are aware. They do not care since democracy is not in their plan.
It’s way past time to be effective. Our right to vote, our representative government, is being auctioned off to the highest bidder. What actions – beyond awareness-raising – will effectively save our democracy from a leadership so bloated and corrupt that it cannot be bothered to care or to listen?
This sedum is a volunteer. It somehow took root beneath the deck and yet has found a way to reach the sun. It’s funny. Each day I check on this little plant because its resilience gives me some small measure of hope: good things can take root in dark places and through natural tenacity, find a way to the light.
When I step back from our national horror story and take in the whole picture, I am overwhelmed at the abundance of light. People showing up for other people. People expressing outrage at the treatment of others. The shadow spaces are small in comparison.
In this way people are no different than plants. Our tendency – our need – is to seek and find the light and the light is found in the community and what it values. A community can only stay in the dark for so long before it – like a plant – begins to perish.
“They have no respect for human life,” she said, showing me the latest video of an ICE arrest. And then came her list of disrespect: “Decimating USAID, cuts to Medicaid and SNAP…” It was a very, very long list.
I responded, “They have no respect for others because they have no respect for themselves.” It would be impossible to vote for that Big Bloated Bill and be able to look at yourself in the mirror.
They crawl into dark places to flee the light. The assault on the free press. The prevention of congressional oversight – and the nation – from seeing into their “deportation detention centers”. The restrictions (elimination) of due process and habeas corpus…This, too, is a very, very long list. Dark hearts creating dark places.
Here’s the thing: in dark places people lose track of where they are. Disoriented, they also lose track of where others are. In panic, they lose track of how important others are. They become physically, mentally and morally confused. They default into “every man for himself”. In survival-mode, people push others underwater in an attempt to elevate themselves. In the end, all drown.
In the dark we lose track of who we are because we can only know ourselves in relationship to others. Societies collapse in shadowy amorality and the dim fantasy land of every-man-for-himself (obviously).
It is the way of fascist regimes to drag the people of their nation into the dark. Our current leadership in these un-United States is following the Nazi playbook exactly. To perpetuate their dark intention they need to manufacture enemies; the trail of enemy creation will eventually lead back to themselves. They will eventually have to eat each other in their dog-eat-dog fascism. Even though it doesn’t look like it at this moment in time, dragging us into the dark will bring them to perish in an inky bunker.
Like the sedum rooted beneath the deck, it is our natural tendency is to reach for the light.
The only real question that remains is how much dark-malfeasance will we tolerate before we-as-a-nation say, “Enough,” break free and turn toward the light?
And, if we make it, if we survive this dark time and stumble back into the sun, I hope we will have the courage to look at what the light reveals to us – about us. I hope we have the capacity to see fully the totality of our history – all of it. I hope we are capable of asking why so many of us drank from a fox-fire hose of lies and so willingly embraced fantastic falsehoods. I hope we might once and for all align our actions with our rhetoric and put to rest the ugly idea that We-The-People only applies to a privileged few, but applies equally to all of us – a wildly diverse community dedicated to keeping the experiment of democracy vibrant and in the light.
Inundated as we are in the political darkness, we made an effort to steep our minds and hearts in the positive and seek the affirmation of the light. So, we went to the arts. We spent a few minutes with James Taylor’s Shower The People (listen through to the end when Arnold McCuller sings a back-up vocal that will make you smile-weep) and we bumbled into a duet of You Can Close Your Eyes that James Taylor sings with his son Henry. Heart opening.
I spent some time reading and rereading Horatio’s latest poem, The Real Work. It’s brilliant and a reminder to seek what we love every single day of our time on this earth. His poem was good medicine for what has recently ailed me.
“Never, never, never give up.” These words by Winston Churchill hang in Kerri’s studio. We’ve both been witness to too many gifted artists give up, lay down their brushes, close the lid on their piano, step off the stage. An artist’s life can be a very hard road so a reminder taped to the wall is sometimes the only thing that brings you back to the studio the next day. Never give up.
These days the quote rings loud-and-true with the meaning it was originally intended to carry. The quote is a shortened version of what Churchill said in a speech in 1941 as Britain stood its ground against the Nazis. Today, everyday Americans stand their ground against the attempted fascist takeover of our democracy. As Kerri said last week on the trail, “It’s like a depraved checkmate.” The supreme court, the republican congress, the department of justice…are all in the pocket of the tyrant-wannabe. Loyalty to the man has overtaken loyalty to the Constitution. The last line of defense is a citizenry who refuses to give up on democracy.
Anne Lamott wrote a piece for the Washington Post on the 4th of July. It provided her reasons to celebrate in this time of national shame. “This Friday, my friends and I will celebrate the land that embraces political marches and rallies, the ones so far and those still to come. This is “We the people,” and that is the ultimate and most profound aspect of America. We are going to keep showing up and talking about what needs to be done and what is possible right now.”
The power of the people is the power of the imagination. The power of the arts is to access the heart and ignite the power of the imagination. What we’ve witnessed these many months is an assault on the imagination of democracy, a lie-pact of the mean-spirited and dimwitted, those who lack the courage and conviction – and imagination – of “We the people”.
As we keep showing up and showing up and showing up it is vital to fill our heart-tanks with the words of writers like Anne Lamott, the heart-opening music of musicians like James Taylor and Bruce Springsteen…to intentionally and regularly drink from the sources of light that fire the imagination and help us do more than resist the dark but reach for what is good and right and possible.
It turns out that the thing that makes capitalism viable is the same thing that makes a democracy healthy: a strong middle class. A stable consumer base is the essential ingredient for social cohesion and constructive civic engagement. It’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: when people are secure in their basic needs they turn their attention to meeting the needs of the community – things like equal rights, education and affordable healthcare; they ask, “What is my purpose?” and “How can I help make the world a better place?”
I’ve long believed that the greatest challenge to our democracy is that one of our political parties – the republicans – simply do not believe in it. The Reagan revolution might as easily be called The Great Erosion of the Middle Class. In the past forty years 50 trillion dollars have moved into the pockets of the top 1%. What was branded as trickle down economics has proven to be – just as economists foretold – pick-pocket economics. If we’ve ever needed proof of the republican’s repudiation of democracy we see it manifest in their Mega-Murder-Bill.
Democracies need a strong middle class. Authoritarian states need to keep their populace poor. They need to eliminate the middle class. That, too, is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: when people are trapped in survival-mode, insecure and daily struggling for their basic needs, they cannot focus on making the world a better, safer place. They ask, “How am I going to live another day?” Poverty is an authoritarian’s greatest tool for maintaining their grip on power.
In my lifetime I’ve seen firefighters run into The Twin Towers, an indelible act of courage. Now, I’ve seen an entire political party tuck their tails and vote to rob their constituents to enrich the top 1%* – an extraordinary act of cowardice. A permanent stain. It’s as if the NYC firefighters on September 11 had walked away from the burning buildings, saying, “Too bad, so sad,” and patted each other on the back for a job well done.
Cowardice. Unless, of course, their actual aim is authoritarianism. Then, the systematic decimation of the middle class and callous assault on the social safety net makes perfect sense. It is the ultimate fulfillment of the republican revolution against democracy.**
*They passed their Mega-Murder-Bill. This egregious betrayal of their constituents will most certainly haunt them in the next election. The threat of being “primaried” if they voted against the bill presented, at best, a conundrum, since both paths lead to the loss of their seat. The only possible way that their choice of constituent-betrayal makes sense is if they believe that they will never have to run in another election: in the face of such extreme cowardice, the suspension of free and fair elections cannot be far behind.
**To be fair, they might actually believe in democracy – but just not for everyone. When they read, “All men are created equal” they very likely understand that ideal to only include wealthy white men who claim to be Christian while ignoring all of its precepts. No matter, a wealthy ruling class rigging the system and exploiting the labor that makes their bloated-money-hoard possible is authoritarianism regardless of the label they paste on their back-slapping boy’s club.
I cut the post I wrote for today. The image of this Dianthus flower is too beautiful for the thoughts I paired with it. The color of this flower kills me. The composition of this photograph would make Georgia O’Keeffe smile.
I reminded myself to not miss the beauty-of-the-moment in the middle of the national horror story we currently experience.
Chris has been on a quest for 15 years to develop a play based on Viktor Frankel’s book, Man’s Search For Meaning. A few days ago he took another step forward. He’s knocking on the door of his dream. Viktor Frankel was a Holocaust survivor and the book is based on his experiences in the camp. He makes a distinction that is relevant for us today: we have the choice to either seek meaning from our experiences or to bring meaning to our experiences. Our chances of survival are better if we bring rather than seek meaning – especially in a time, like ours, when amorality and cruelty have the reins of power. It’s hard to find meaning in the wasteland.
It’s the reason I cut my post. I was seeking meaning from the rapid collapse of our democracy rather than bringing a greater meaning to this moment-in-time.
We put the air conditioner in the window because our old Dogga suffers in the heat. Last night he was laying in his now-usual-spot directly in front of the fan blowing cold air. I sat next to him and rubbed his ears. I cannot describe the enormity of what I felt in that moment. It was more necessary, more important than anything rolling across our screens.
As I write this a bird – a house finch – is scratching at the window just behind where I am sitting. It is literally six inches from my head. I can see into its eyes. And it is looking into mine.
The color of this Dianthus kills me.
I cannot stop the national slide into autocracy. I can control where I choose to place my focus and there’s so much around me that would be a shame to miss. It’s the composition of a life that would make Georgia O’Keeffe – and Viktor Frankel – nod with silent approval.
The Direction of Intention 