The Stakes Just Got Higher

Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death is a great loss to lovers of a liberal interpretation of freedom and individual rights of expression and choice. But there are others who may be slightly sad but are mostly quite pleased with the possibility of creating a six to three conservative majority on the US Supreme Court.

Personally, I am most upset by Mitch McConnell’s immediate assertion that he would use his position as Majority Leader to ensure that the Senate confirms any candidate that Trump proposes before the November elections. The is the same Mitch McConnell who held up the appointment of a Supreme Court justice for a year and a half at the end of Obama’s presidency under the rationale that ‘the people’s voice’ should be heard through the elections before a new justice is appointed. Now he has decided that it should be different.

I don’t expect our politicians to be saints, but I had thought that there was some decency, fairness and commitment to the system of checks and balances—some adherence to underlying shared assumptions. With the Trump/McConnell Republicans, this seems to have totally vanished. Is Trump’s self-dealing and fear-mongering just the logical extension of the party of Nixon, Reagan, Cheney and McConnell?

I am so reluctant to label them bad and self-serving while asserting the goodness of my side. Yet when Attorney General Barr compares stay-at-home orders to stop the spread of COVID-19 to slavery, I can’t find any other explanation except willful blindness and a willingness to do whatever it takes to stay in power.

Are we all as blind as that? Are we all simply opportunists who cloak our self-interest in whatever convenient rationale is available at the moment? Of course we are all subject to our human limitations, none of us are perfectly congruent with our actions and our words. But we can and should act with integrity and honesty against those who actively spread rumors and lies to maintain their power and position. We should use whatever power we have to stop or limit forces of oppression, division and destruction.

Sometimes there are not two equal sides. Worshipping the gods of self-interest and privilege for a few is both morally wrong and ultimately self-defeating. As Dr. King said, we are all ‘caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.’ Those who willfully ignore our interdependence tear at the fabric of our future and should be actively opposed.

I don’t yet know exactly what this means for me. I feel the urgency and momentousness of these next few months. The death of this champion of liberty, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and the opening on the Supreme Court has pushed the stakes of this moment even higher than they already were. How do we oppose bigotry and stand for justice and equal rights? How do we add our voices and our energies to tip the balance toward restoring and healing this divided country?

P.S. after completing this entry, I found the link to Heather Cox Richardson’s wonderful piece on RBG.  One of the comments to Richardson’s piece was the following suggestion:

Both Heron and Koi

There’s a simple brush painting scroll on the wall of my room that shows two abstract fish. The black one is swimming down and the red one is swimming up. Melissa gave it to me for some past occasion and said it symbolizes prosperity. I’m wondering this morning what it might mean.

Out back, in the temple pond, we have three beautiful koi.  There used to be five, but two of them disappeared shortly after I sighted a great blue heron flying away from the pond. I was on the porch and the great blue must have been right by the waterfall. I heard some commotion and looked down in time to see him flying low over the pond and grass and into the trees. He was big and I was surprised.

I have always loved great blue herons. They look like flying dinosaurs who have survived from ancient times to wander the watery landscape of the northeast. They are large birds, with wingspans of five to six feet. Great blue herons fly with a soaring ease but are most often found standing still in the shallow edge water of lakes and streams and estuary shores of this area.

I remember a surprising sighting one morning when my sister and I were camped on an island off the coast of Maine. We had woken up that morning totally engulfed in the dense fog that sometimes descends up there. The fog was so thick, we couldn’t see the shore that was twenty feet away from our campsite. Though we had our trusty compasses and charts, we had no urgent place to be so we decided to leave our kayaks on shore and sit tight till the fog lifted. While we were eating our morning ambrosia of oatmeal, raisins and maple syrup, we were startled by the sound of birds overhead. We looked up, and right over our heads appeared first one, then another and another huge blue herons.

We sat in our camp chairs, looking in silent awe. They flew with such large ease. Great blue herons are generally solitary and shy birds that like to keep their distance from us humans. But these herons were just ten or fifteen feet over our heads and they kept coming as we sat still. Each one appeared out of nowhere, coming from over the open water to the southwest, headed together up the coast. It was a few minutes and many many heron later that the quiet stillness of the dense fog returned.

We later surmised that this siege of great blue heron were using the tip of our island to verify their internal navigation as they flew to their morning hunting grounds. They flew effortlessly together for support and safety in the middle of the disorienting fog. We were surprised and delighted by their collective visit and were certain we had been graced by this flight of ancient angels.

I wasn’t so pleased, however, to see the single heron near the Temple pond a few years later. I suspected he was checking out the menu at this out-of-the way fish joint. After he flew away, we didn’t see any of the koi for a number of days. We were afraid he had eaten them all. But eventually the three uneaten fish gathered their courage to swim out of their cave and re-inhabit the pond. Ever since this time, they have been much more cautious. People or shadow or sounds will send them quickly back into hiding.

I wonder if they think back to the good old days when they didn’t have to take heron precautions—when they could swim near the surface without fear? Do they mutter among themselves in the dark of their caves about feeling cooped up and missing how it used to be? I suppose not, but their new normal is a far cry from how it used to be.

In spite of this, most mornings they eagerly wait by the corner of the pond for Melissa and I to come down with our tablespoon of fish food. We scatter it on the surface of the water and they quickly gobble it up. They only take a minute or two, sucking up the little pellets of nutrition like candy, then quickly head back to the deep water as if they were being chased by the heron that flew away long ago.

Through all this, the koi are growing noticeably bigger. Their elegant and brightly colored bodies swim through the water with ease and power. I could watch them for hours. They remind me of the fish on my painting swimming both up and down.

Perhaps prosperity comes as we learn to navigate through the fog and appreciate both the ups and the downs—the cycles of fear and ease. Sometimes we carefully hide in the cave of our solitude. Sometimes we join with others for safety and encouragement. All of this beauty, loss and surprise is necessary and included, no need to hold back.

Exhaustion and Opportunity

I’ve seen a number of articles in the Times and the Globe that have focused on the rising concerns about the mental health of our nation. The days are getting shorter and cooler as winter approaches. Those of us in the northern climes will begin having to spend more time inside—and this is just after some of us had begun feeling comfortable with socially distanced backyard visits with friends. The meager semblance of normal we have created will have to change. Again!

Our President is now touting a vaccine that will be a game-changer and will certainly be ready for mass distribution within the next few weeks. But he also touted a health care plan that would be better and cheaper than the one his predecessor created. That was four years ago and nothing has materialized on that front so most of us don’t expect his promise of a widely available vaccine is anything other than the continued ranting of a delusional authoritarian strongman.

Colleges and universities are struggling to keep students safely on campus. (I do think the reckless partying behavior of a significant percentage of the students is verification that the full reasoning capacity of the human brain does not come on line, especially in young men, until the early twenties.) I heard yesterday of a school district in California that has already decided they will be in virtual mode through the entire school year. More restaurants and businesses shutter their operations daily. THIS is our new abnormal and it just drags on and on.

How do we make new lives with what we have when what we have is not what we want? I suppose this is the perennial human question. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably already noticed that everything always keeps changing and the things we have, we have only temporarily. This is just the universe appears to be constructed.   But in a culture such as America’s where the meaning of life is tied in to endless growth and accumulation, these changes and losses provokes a crisis of meaning.

But maybe I am being too doctrinaire. Maybe it’s not just our pernicious capitalist culture that is our problem. Our current crisis is also about the unprecedented challenge of living with less physical and in person social contact. We are, after all, mammals who are genetically programmed to live in herds and tribes. We like to sniff around and check out each other. Who’s here with me? Who’s our leader? What’s our task? We love to be part of a team with a clear mission. We are hard wired to orient around purpose and collaboration. When the direction is clear and our relationships are in order, we are happy.

People who study physical and social systems sometimes say that a system can only make fundamental change when it is far from equilibrium. When things are going well, the inertia of the status quo prevents any significant deviation from the usual. When things are deeply disturbed, then the endless experiments that arise gain new significance and can influence the whole system.

The time of break-down is also the time of new life. Though many people I talk to are struggling with exhaustion and discouragement, many of them are also reporting their new necessity of living in deeper alignment with what is most important. ‘Being nice’ and just ‘going along’ are not viable options in a time of crisis. This disturbing time both allows and forces us to do a new kind of work within ourselves. With our usual coping strategies taken away, we have no choice but to find something deeper.

We are all swimming in the deep end of the pool now—no more splashing around in the shallows. Drowning is a real possibility, but so is discovering some natural buoyancy of things that we had not trusted before. It’s exhausting but also exhilarating.

Now that everything is different, what do YOU want to make of your life? What is most important? And though you can never know the outcome of your actions, what is the next step that you’re willing to take?

Finding Fulfillment

One of the useful definitions I learned in my life-coaching training was: Fulfillment is what happens when we act in alignment with our values.

We all want to be fulfilled in this life and it is easy to think of fulfillment as some place we will arrive when certain conditions are met. Once I get that job or find the right partner or get my second book published—then I’ll be fulfilled. But fulfillment is often the carrot on the stick that is dangled in front of (and tied to) the donkey. Every step the donkey takes, the carrot moves forward too—ever temptingly dangling just out of reach.

Even when we accomplish our goals, our sense of fulfillment is short-lived. With the new job come new problems. With a new relationship come all the issues of actually being with another human being. After the second book is published, then there is the third and the fourth. Accomplishments and achievements are wonderful things, but they do not create a lasting sense of fulfillment.

Fulfillment is not a destination. It’s not a place you can ever arrive and settle into. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that fulfillment is available in whatever situation we find ourselves—even when our goals and dreams seem impossibly far off. We are fulfilled when we our actions align with what is deepest in our hearts.

If this is true, then our first work is to clarify what we care about. It’s difficult to act in alignment with something that is unclear. This ‘what we care about’ is not the same as what we think we should do. Clarifying our values is a process of uncovering of some deeper part of who we already are. Some of us love to work in the garden, some love to solve problems, some to work with our hands, some to organize spaces. Fulfillment begins by noticing what brings us alive.

One of my values, something that brings me alive, has to do with exploring and following and shaping things. I might call this value improvisational creation or following aliveness. For some reason, piling a few rocks on top of each other in just the right in some corner of the garden way delights me. Sitting down each morning with no particular plan and then following whatever comes to mind and shaping it all into sentences and paragraphs, is a pleasurable and meaningful activity to me.

I do hope that my improvisational creations bring some joy or understanding or comfort to others. But I try to keep my focus on what is happening in the moment, the balance of the stones, the feeling and the shape of the paragraphs as they appear on my screen. I play and fiddle and shape as best I can, then I let them be—sitting quietly under a tree or off to my blog page in cyberspace to settle in with the other reflections from the past days.

With this focus on fulfillment as alignment with something deeper, we are not hostage to the outcomes that are beyond our control. When east is our clear direction of travel, though we will never arrive, each step we take is the fulfillment of our intention and can be a full expression of our love.

Collaborators with Injustice

For the first time in my memory, a sitting President of the United States is questioning the legitimacy of our electoral process—the very process that brought him to power in the first place. Trailing Joe Biden in the polls, Trump is beginning to question the results of the election in advance. He is claiming that the only way he will lose this election is if the Democrats commit fraud. And this follows his encouragement to his loyal followers that they vote twice to ‘test the validity of the process’.

Many of us are scared—not just for what will happen if Trump wins again, but what will happen if Trump loses. It appears that he will continue to us the power of his position to hold onto power as long as possible. And, with the Republicans in Congress, he appears to have a loyal cadre of collaborators who will support him against the very fabric of our democratic processes. My first fear is that he will convince just enough voters to swing the electoral map in his favor. (As he did four years ago.) But my bigger fear is the aftermath of the election if Biden wins.

Trump has been operating a hall of mirrors since he was first elected. Immediately after his unpredicted victory, he began telling lies: ‘The crowds at my inauguration were the biggest in history.’ From the outside, this seemed unnecessary and rather insignificant. We could all see that this wasn’t true. But Trump’s utter insistence of his alternate reality and his requirement that the people around him repeat his lies has been the pattern of his Presidency.

In a powerful article in the Atlantic Monthly with a long and descriptive title (History Will Judge the Complicit: Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president), Anne Applebaum explores the psychology of collaborators. Looking at Vichy France in the 40’s, East Germany in the ‘50’s and the Trump impeachment process, she looks at how people make the decision to go along with immoral and repressive regimes, even when it goes against their basic human values.

She lists a number of ‘familiar justifications of collaboration’ that Republicans have used to justify their support for our self-dealing and self-consumed President even has he attacks the very foundation of our political system:

• We can use this moment to achieve great things.
• We can protect the country from the president.
• I, personally, will benefit.
• I must remain close to power.
• LOL nothing matters.
• My side might be flawed, but the political opposition is much worse.
• I am afraid to speak out.

Of course it is easy to sit in judgment of others and I feel compelled to continue into the uneasy extension of the righteous talk of others’ collaboration. We are all collaborators. We all live in a system that denies basic justice and opportunity to a wide range of people, especially those with black and brown skin. While many of us are quite comfortable with our current economic and ‘democratic’ political system, this system is clearly based on a violence against black people that has its roots in the very founding of our country. With the ever-increasing gap between the rich and poor, our society oppresses the many for the benefit of the few. Children go hungry. Basic medical and housing needs are only provided to certain of us.

So while I will work to expose the dangerous collaboration of people supporting Trump lies and lust for power, I feel obligated to also work to expose my own collaboration with the very system that has made my life so comfortable.

These are not easy times but are, I believe, times of great possibility. In the disturbances of the moment, we can all begin see what has been hidden from so many of us. We can acknowledge our blindnesses and perhaps begin to work toward truth and healing for ourselves, each other and our burning world.