Had a great discussion with my eldest daughter weeks back and was impressed by her insights. This is a normal occurrence but her thoughts hit me differently this time. Perhaps it’s that she’s almost a college girl and conversations are valued more than they might otherwise be; maybe it’s that all the work my ex and I put into raising compassionate, strong, thinking women is finally paying off. No matter.
“Dad, your content is good and your writing is decent,” she began, referring to my bad habit of writing what upsets me. “But offering words that continually blast Trump have a limited shelf-life and can make you sound like every other person trying to be a thought-leader.”
OK. Fair enough. Guilty.
For the record, I took her message to heart and decided to take some ‘time off’ from writing about how the USA is slipping as a country, as a people, and as an ideal. Too many people, far more talented than I, are already drawing attention to this problem. And my work was getting to sound like a one-note symphony that I was no longer interested in conducting. Besides, while I have continually counceled against catastrophizing, this is exactly what I was doing in so many of these essays, albeit in a quieter voice than I’d used in years past.
We all (including me) should try to view the current state of affairs as a correction that may lead somewhere meaningful, even if we can’t see it now. Call it “equanimity”, if you will. We just don’t know. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t intentionally and consciously oppose things we know to be unhelpful or wrong, but it allows for us to eschew the strident emotional approaches to certitude that merely exacerbate war-like postures in the form of anger and disgust with self and other. Getting curious about MAGA and MAHA is more in line with my Zen training than an opposition to them in ways that are burning with righteous indignation. This approach may not be for everyone, but stewing in one’s juicy anger and indignation is a sign of narcissism and doesn’t help anyone.
To be sure, democracy and liberalism, in general, are at risk of faltering. Make no mistake about this. I’m reminded of an adage attributed to Earnest Hemingway that described bankruptcy as something that “…starts slowly then ends suddenly.” Democracies are subject to this axiom, and to assume that we can act as passive observers in the “slowly” part of this slide without significant cost speaks to a disastrous denial that we should all be aware of and counteract by reading for at least as much time as we watch our televised news. Reading builds thoughtfulness, television builds faith-structures and quasi-religiosity. Thoughtfulness supports democratic/liberal ideals (btw, “liberal” in this case refers not to “Left-leaning” but rather post-Enlightenment ideals that spawned things like one-person=one-vote and equality under the law regardless of race or gender). So read at least as much as you watch, and take great care to curate what you read AND watch.
Engage, as best you can, with those that disagree with you and stop hiding out of fear. Be less concerned with being “right” and more concerned with being “curious”. We have nothing to fear, as FDR noted years ago, but fear itself. Those that predicate their behaviors on fear (read: anger) are holding all of us back in ways that cause damage especially in the ways they look to corporate media to help them navigate a path toward belief and faith, as opposed to critical thought and meaningful, mindful analysis.