CxD #147: The Great Revelation
Meet your new President:
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
1. The election revealed that approximately 70.3 million Americans—47.7% of voters— are not concerned with character and its impact on the policies by which we agree to live together. Ours is a country that has been cancerous for a long time, and the cancer is now malignant; we have a tremendous amount of work to do together to heal. And we must do that work or die.
2. If you’re fixing for a more in-depth view of the difficulty we find ourselves in, read this somber essay by Tom Nichols.
It’s clear now that far too many of Trump’s voters don’t care about policy, decency, or saving our democracy. They care about power. Although Trump appears to have received a small uptick in votes from Black men and Latinos, the overwhelming share of his supporters are white. The politics of cultural resentment, the obsessions of white anxiety, are so intense that his voters are determined not only to preserve minority rule but to leave a dangerous sociopath in the Oval Office. Even the candidacy of a man who was both a political centrist and a decent human being could not overcome this sullen commitment to authoritarianism.
3. We cannot do this work of deep healing by insulting each other or giving people reason to hate and fear more than they already do. At this point, when the evidence is so clear, all paths forward must depend on all our most skillful and compassionate and fiercely optimistic and clear-eyed tools that we have. We must resist temptation to increase the cumulative hatred. The tools are all different for each of us; but resist the temptation to shame and be contemptuous we must. And I, with a heavy heart, admit that I’m so full of those two impulses at times that sometimes I have failed to contain them. But I vow to do better going forward, knowing that there is no other way.
4. Instead of “Red” and “Blue” division—an “us” vs “them” duality— we need to accept these colors as our lived reality:
5.
A powerful book I’ve been reading. Notice his posture, which needs to be our posture in everything we do.
Buddha says—don’t worry, everything is okay. No sentient being is forever lost in delusion. Relax! Still, ordinary people say, “oh, no, this is terrible! and whimper and cry.
6. Practice saying “I don’t know” regularly and sincerely and allowing room for reality to carry you. Otherwise, things will get pretty heavy.
I love, love, love the Vice Presidential visual! Thank you so much:)
I think you are imagining "people" to be a collection of independent thinkers. In my mind, most people are followers and just do as others in "their tribe" do. It isn't that they look at Mr. T. and say, "this guy doesn't have character so I won't vote for him." It is more that they are looking at their friends and doing what the gang is doing. I think that is why it is so hard to change individuals. And why separation is so essential for brainwashing. "View" seems like COVID, where it permeates a community. We've both experienced the impossibility of plucking out an individual and changing their mind. Most don't act as individuals. This makes our job a Herculean task!