Letter from an American (repost)

I have never posted twice in one day, nor have I reposted someone else’s writing.  But I read this after my reassuring post urging caution, and I feel compelled to repost Heather Cox Richardson’s December 18^th ‘Letter from an American.’ I have been reading her posts for the past six months and find her to be reasonable and direct in her reporting and analysis. I pass this on because I find it so disturbing and important. In our intention to move toward a civil society we must also be realistic about our assessment of the dangers of the moment.

A year ago today, the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald J. Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

In his plea to Senators to convict the president, Adam Schiff (D-CA), the lead impeachment manager for the House, warned “you know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country.” Schiff asked: “How much damage can Donald Trump do between now and the next election?” and then answered his own question: “A lot. A lot of damage.” “Can you have the least bit of confidence that Donald Trump will… protect our national interest over his own personal interest?” Schiff asked the senators who were about to vote on Trump’s guilt. “You know you can’t, which makes him dangerous to this country.’’

Republicans took offense at Schiff’s passionate words, seeing them as criticism of themselves. They voted to acquit Trump of the charges the House had levied against him.

And a year later, here we are. A pandemic has killed more than 312,000 of us, and numbers of infections and deaths are spiking. Today we hit a new single-day record of reported coronavirus cases with 246,914, our third daily record in a row. The economy is in shambles, with more than 6 million Americans applying for unemployment benefits. And the government has been hobbled by a massive hack from foreign operatives, likely Russians, who have hit many of our key departments.

Today it began to feel as if the Trump administration was falling apart as journalists began digging into a number of troubling stories.

Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, appointed by Trump after he fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper by tweet on November 9, this morning abruptly halted the transition briefings the Pentagon had been providing, as required by law, to the incoming Biden team. Observers were taken aback by this unprecedented halt to the transition process, as well as by the stated excuse: that Defense Department officials were overwhelmed by the number of meetings the transition required. Retired four-star general Barry R. McCaffrey, a military analyst for NBC and MSNBC, tweeted: “Pentagon abruptly halts Biden transition—MAKES NO SENSE. CLAIM THEY ARE OVERWHELMED. DOD GOES OPAQUE. TRUMP-MILLER UP TO NO GOOD. DANGER.”

After Axios published the story and outrage was building, Miller issued a statement saying the two sides had decided on a “mutually-agreed upon holiday, which begins tomorrow.” Biden transition director Yohannes Abraham promptly told reporters: “Let me be clear: there was no mutually agreed upon holiday break. In fact, we think it’s important that briefings and other engagements continue during this period as there’s no time to spare, and that’s particularly true in the aftermath of ascertainment delay,” a reference to the delay in the administration’s recognition of Biden’s election.

Later, the administration suggested the sudden end to the transition briefings was because Trump was angry that the Washington Post on Wednesday had published a story showing how much money Biden could save by stopping the construction of Trump’s border wall. Anger over a story from two days ago seems like a stretch, a justification after the briefings had been cancelled for other reasons. The big story of the day, and the week, and the month, and the year, and probably of this administration, is the sweeping hack of our government by a hostile foreign power. The abrupt end to the briefings might reflect that the administration isn’t keen on giving Biden access to the crime scene.

Republicans appear to be trying to cripple the Biden administration more broadly. The country has been thrilled by the arrival of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine that promises an end to the scourge under which we’re suffering. Just tonight, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized a second vaccine, produced by Moderna, for emergency authorization use. This vaccine does not require ultracold temperatures for shipping the way the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine does. Two vaccines for the coronavirus are extraordinarily good news.

But this week, as the first Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were being given, states learned that the doses the federal government had promised were not going to arrive, and no one is quite sure why. The government blamed Pfizer, which promptly blasted the government, saying it had plenty of vaccines in warehouses but had received no information about where to send them. Then the White House said there was confusion over scheduling.

Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo has been following this story, and concluded a day or so ago that the administration had made no plans for vaccine distribution beyond February 1, when the problem would be Biden’s. Kovensky also noted that it appears the administration promised vaccine distribution on an impossible timeline, deliberately raising hopes for vaccine availability that Biden couldn’t possibly fulfill. Today Kovensky noted that there are apparently doses missing and unaccounted for, but no one seems to know where they might be.

Today suggested yet another instance of Republican bad faith. With Americans hungry and increasingly homeless, the nation is desperate for another coronavirus relief bill. The House passed one last May, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to take it up. Throughout the summer and fall, negotiations on a different bill failed as Republicans demanded liability protection for businesses whose employees got coronavirus after they reopened, and Democrats demanded federal aid to states and local governments, pinched as tax revenue has fallen off during the pandemic. Now, though, with many Americans at the end of their rope, McConnell indicated he would be willing to cut a deal because the lack of a relief package is hurting the Republican Senate candidates before the runoff election in Georgia on January 5. Both sides seemed on the verge of a deal.

That deal fell apart this afternoon after Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) with the blessing of McConnell, suddenly insisted on limiting the ability of the Federal Reserve to lend money to help businesses and towns stay afloat. These were tools the Trump administration had and used, but Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin tried to kill them after Trump lost the election. The Federal Reserve’s ability to manage fiscal markets is key to addressing recessions. Removing that power would gravely hamper Biden’s ability to help the nation climb out of the recession during his administration.

It’s hard not to see this as a move by McConnell and Senate Republicans to take away Biden’s power—power enjoyed by presidents in general, and by Trump in particular—to combat the recession in order to hobble the economy and hurt the Democrats before the 2022 election.

Money was in the news in another way today, too. Business Insider broke the story that the Trump campaign used a shell company approved by Jared Kushner to pay campaign expenses without having to disclose them to federal election regulators. The company was called American Made Media Consultants LLC. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, was president, and Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew, John Pence, was vice president until the two apparently stepped down in late 2019 to work on the campaign. The treasurer was the chief financial officer of the Trump campaign, Sean Dollman.

The Trump campaign spent more than $700 million of the $1.26 billion of campaign cash it raised in the 2020 cycle through AMMC, but to whom it paid that money is hidden. Former Republican Federal Election Commission Chairman Trevor Potter is trying to take up the slack left by the currently crippled Federal Elections Commission. His organization, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan clean election group, last July accused the Trump campaign of “disguising” campaign funding of about $170 million “by laundering the funds” through AMMC.

This news adds to our understanding that Trump is leaving the White House with a large amount of cash. He has raised more than $250 million since November 3, urging his supporters to donate to his election challenges, but much of the money has gone to his own new political action committee or to the Republican National Committee. Recently, he has begged supporters to give to a “Georgia Election Fund,” suggesting that the money will go to the runoff elections for Georgia’s two senators, but 75% of the money actually goes to Trump’s new political action committee and 25% to the Republican National Committee.

Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times note that are very few limits to how Trump can spend the money from his new PAC.

The Seduction of Being Right

Many years ago a friend of mine who studied the Middle East gave a talk in which he spoke about how the radical fringes of each side, both the Israeli and the Palestinian, functioned to potentiate each other. The extreme actions of one side served as evidence to validate the extreme views and actions of the other side. This dynamic is present in every polarized situation, whether it is between countries, within countries, within organizations, or even between two people.

Once we become polarized, our beliefs and opinions of the situation tend to increase the gap between us. Part of this is due to the confirmation bias—the tendency of our minds to seek out information that confirms our opinion and to ignore information that would bring our beliefs into question. All of us want to be confirmed in our position. Much as we might not want to admit it, we like to be right. If I think you are out to get me, then I will notice and interpret everything you do and don’t do as evidence to support my theory. It feels good to be right.

One of the most challenging parts of confirmation bias is that it mostly operates below the level of our awareness. Most of the time, most of us think we are seeing the world as it is. From the perceptual point of view, I am rarely aware that I am creatively participating in constructing the world I see. The fact that I am paying attention to some features of reality while ignoring everything else is usually hidden from me. One researcher estimated that there at 8 billion bits of information available to us at any moment and we can only process approximately 8!

It turns out, that our input awareness apparatus, our senses and our brains, are woefully outmatched by the richness of the cosmos. One confirmation of this (and notice I’m presenting bits of evidence that confirm the rightness of my position) is that when we slow down, it is often possible to see and sense more about where we are than we had previously been conscious of. When you are looking into the world, any place you start turns out to be more interesting and complex and interconnected than you had previously imagined.

In my work as a life and leadership coach, I find that wherever we start our coaching conversation leads to everything else, including the center. The particular issue you are dealing with at this moment, contains everything else that has ever happened to you. When we look closely at the world we are encountering, we can begin to see both our part in creating whatever is here as well as the choices available to us that had previously been hidden.

I’m thinking of all this because of the ongoing polarization of our country with Trump’s relentless assertions of election fraud. Some people say Trump is really a sadist—that he enjoys the pained reactions of liberals like myself when he does or says something outrageous. Certainly some of his followers delight in his outrageous behavior that is so upsetting to us New York Times and Washington Post type people. There is some release from feeling ignored and powerless in this quickly changing society.

And the primacy of conspiracy theories—about the election, about Q-Anon’s wild assertions of a deep state that is running child slavery rings that only Donald Trump knows about and can truly fight—these are believable to many because they fit our human psychological need to be right. When we are upset by the actions of those we disagree with, there is something thrilling about imagining our worst fantasies.

Ross Douthat of the NY Times put it this way last week when he wrote of:

a fantasy in which your political enemies are poised to do something unbelievably terrible — like all the right-wing militia violence that liberals expected on Election Day — that would vindicate all your fears and makes you happy in your hatred. (bolding added)

Being confirmed is a wonderful and dangerous thing. The workers at security check-in at the airport, there must be some excitement and sense of confirmation when they actually do uncover something of danger. Given how rarely their search uncovers anything more than too much shampoo or a Swiss pocket knife I wonder how they stay awake and alert through the endless lines that used to be a normal feature of airports.

So how do we stay alert to the damage and potential hazards Trump continues to pose to democracy and to our country without falling into the world of emotional whirlpool of happy hatred? How do we stay focused on what incremental steps are possible right now rather than the many fantasies that swirl around us?

Peter Block, author and organizational consultant, once said ‘If you want to change the world, change the room you’re in.’

Manifesto of Liberation

I didn’t want
to get out of bed
this morning
so I didn’t—
until just now.

So there!

The Sound of Snow

If you listen carefully, you can hear the weather outside. Last night was peculiarly quiet with snow. I didn’t really listen all night, but the absence of sounds was vivid with me as I slept. In the quiet darkness I dreamt I was given a complex problem to solve. There were four elements involved in the issue. They were presented on a clipboard and I had to come up with a solution. The problem wasn’t clear. There wasn’t enough information. But I dutifully worked hard on the problem, thereby creating a problem for myself.

The dream went on and on, as I am both a dedicated dreamer and a hard worker. I suppose I am most familiar with myself when I am working hard. As a younger man leading a small internship-based school, I was often exhausted and overwhelmed by the pace of my work. When I began to investigate why the boss (me) was making me work so hard, I realized that I was only comfortable when I was working hard. There was always so much to do—so many problems arising and so much that couldn’t be fixed—that only when I was at a near frantic pitch did I feel like I had a plausible excuse for not setting everything right.

My unconscious operational theory was: ‘You can’t be blamed for what doesn’t get done if you’re visibly and earnestly working hard all the time.’ It turns out not to really be true. But I also noticed that when I slowed down, I felt more guilty about all that was undone. How could I not give my all when there was so much more to do? Hard work was a shelter, a pre-emptive escape from the awareness of all that is undone. Exhaustion was preferable, for a time, to the discomforting realization of my inability to control and fix the universe. (These days, and at this point in my life, I spend much more of my time leaning and easing into the manifest realization of my lack of control.)

The other factor was, and is, I love to be engaged. Working hard, getting things done is fun. To give myself to something (like writing every morning) that requires attention and effort is clearly what I am designed to do. Like the sled dogs that love to pull. When you harness them to the sled, the main thing to remember is to secure the sled to a tree, or the excited dogs already tied in will run off with the sled before the final dogs are engaged.

My dream problem last night was a difficult one. After much tossing and turning and partial waking, a solution emerged. I realized (for the umpteenth time) that the problem was not the problem. The four elements on the clipboard could be combined in any number of ways. The only stable solution was to be present with the people around the clipboard.

This was not a satisfying solution at first. I abandoned it several times to back to the familiar sense of working hard. Then, in a combination of exhaustion and insight I realized that abandoning focus on the purported problem was the only true solution. The four elements on the clipboard could be continually reshuffled, some combinations would work better than others, but there could be no resolution in that realm. And it wasn’t even about getting the people around the clipboard to do anything or be in any certain relationship, it was just being present with them. That’s my real job. That’s the durable resolution: resting in the web of dynamic relationships.

That was the revelation in the long silence of last night’s snow. Now, in the early morning, the beams of streetlights sparkle with the fine and cold falling snow. The wind sounds a low and ominous hum. Pleasant Street is wonderfully vacant. Like the ancient days of the early pandemic, this main thoroughfare lies empty. Just an occasionally truck going slowly. The hard-driving lawyers are not driving into the office to produce early morning billable hours and the early morning cleaners too are sleeping late.

The grand gears of corporeal life have mercifully slowed with the snow. Though the high pitched inaudible whine of the internet will screech forcefully on and a day of work will appear for most of us, the wind and the continuing snow will keep us safely contained within our warm homes. (Here I insert a quick prayer for those with minimal or no shelter. May they be find warmth and safety in the midst of these life-threatening conditions.)

Later this morning, the same snow will drive some of us to the streets and sidewalks to clear paths and have neighborly conversations about the weather. I promise to pay as much attention to our idle chatter as I do to the snow we are clearing.

Learning To Remember

He held my hand on the
way home and I was
in heaven. We were
together in the backseat,
happy to see each
other after school after
a week apart. He was
talking excitedly and I
couldn’t help reaching out.

At first I pretended
I was just warming
his cold fingers, but then
we kept holding on—
contented to hold
hands and chatter away
about the color of passing
cars and his new sneaker-shoes.
His vocabulary is limited
but his brilliant being
shines without constraint.

In the back seat, as his
mother drives us all home,
miraculous life passes
between and through us
as if it were the most
ordinary thing in the world.

He already knows there is
nothing else to wait for,
while the rest of us are
still learning to remember.