The Coward that is Donald Trump

Guys,

I’m writing to you as a fellow White guy.  I’m getting older but I can still remember lacing up my cleats in football and trying hard—and unsuccessfully—to dunk in front of the home crowd in basketball.  I had to try.  I still have my hiking boots, though they are more like a memento than something I wear.  I’m writing because I’m confused and need you to help me understand this Trump love of yours.

When I played sports, we were taught not to find excuses when we lost or when we didn’t play our best.  The idea was simple: I’ll do better next time.  We were taught to respect our opponent, especially if they had played a good game.  The way Red Sox and Celtic fans cheered for Jeter and Magic when they retired and how Yankee fans will cheer Big Papi next week.

We respect quality and effort.  We hate people who don’t give it their best.  We love that Brady works his rear end off.  We love the hustle guys, like Dustin Pedroia.  We hate the guys who trot to first base or who give up on plays.  We hate guys who focus on their individual statistics at the expense of winning for their team.  We love team-first players because… because they represent us.  At least, they represent the best in us, the people we want to be.

We aren’t the naturals who make it to the big leagues.  We have to hustle.  We have to depend on our teammates.  And we love our teammates.  When we are playing, there is no closer bond.  The closeness is visceral.  Truth be told, that’s one of the only place we can express that closeness without being considered a little less than the men we want to be.  At least that was true when many of us were growing up.

We like guys who keep their own counsel and don’t have to be told all the time how great they are.  What a drag those guys are, with their faces always in the TV camera, their insincere smiles begging for praise.  And when the praise isn’t forthcoming, they do the work themselves.  They boast and preen.  They are braggarts because they are needy.  They lack inner strength and faith in themselves.

Most of all, I think we respect courage.  The ability to take on something that’s hard, where we might fail, where we have to rise to the big moment. Watching guys like David Ortiz, bases loaded in the ninth inning in the World Series, we kind of know we wouldn’t rise the way he did.  But we dream of it and we admire it.  Guts.  That’s what he has.  That’s what the cops that we love following on TV have.  Guys like Frank Reagan in Blue Bloods.

We respect Frank Reagan not because he would take a bullet for a friend, though he would, but because he’ll wrestle with morally complicated issues.  Should he do the ‘right’ thing or should he favor his son.  Should he take the easy way out to please the public or risk public opprobrium to do what he most believes is right.  He struggles, he stays awake at night, he consults.  He does everything in his power to follow his ethical compass.  He’s not a poll watcher.  That takes courage and we admire him for it.

We would like to knock bullies on their rear ends.  We’ve all known them on the playground and at work.  Too many colleagues and especially too many bosses are bullies.  They pay us and they think it gives them the right to push us around, yell at us, belittle us.  We know that, in different circumstances, we could show them a thing or two.  We have heard like everyone else the line “the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”  We’d like to help with the fall.  We know that bullies are cowards.  But when do we get to be in places where we can force them to show their true colors.

We despise cheats.  Look at those guys who hit hundreds of home runs with the help of performance enhancing drugs.  Keep those guys out of the Hall of Fame.  Right?  Look at Spy Gate.  When Belichick and the Patriots stole signals from other teams, it turned the whole country against them.  Think about the basketball players who flop when you brush them with your pinkie.  They get fouls and points that way.  They are despicable.  Right?  They’re not our kind of guy.

These are all forms of lying.  Lying is not what men do.  We face the music.  We’d rather not cheat—that’s not what men do, either—but when we do and when we’re caught, we face up to it.  We like guys who, when they are wrong or when they let us down, they say something simple like “my bad.”  Then we’re done with it.  Guys who can’t admit they’ve failed are cowards.  They are weak.

Weak is not losing.  It’s losing without trying—for fear of losing.  Weak is when we can’t admit our own limitations.  Weak is when we can’t depend on others, just like point guards depend on big guys for rebounds and big guys need the guards to get them the ball in good position.  I just read that Derrick Rose, once one of the premier talents in the National Basketball Association, said that his job was now to support Carmello Anthony.  Rose had carried teams by himself until he began injuring his knees.  He’s still good but not great anymore.  He could demand to be treated as the top guy, he could let his ego rule, but he wants his team to win.  If that means recognizing his limitations and changing his role, he’ll do it.

I can’t speak for combat experience, but I can well imagine that guys who have been to war wouldn’t have much time for a person who only values himself and his own success, who lies and cheats and bullies, a buy who has no guts.  This is what puzzles me the most.  How could guys with these values connect with such a blowhard and a coward as Donald Trump.

Imagine how people would react to Donald Trump if he were to say that he doesn’t know that much about public policy but he’ll try to learn and he’ll surely depend on others to help him.

Imagine if Trump, upon being thumped by Clinton in the Debate, were to say that he lost fair and square and admires her abilities.  He could even say that debating isn’t leadership but still admit she’s a better debater than he is.

Imagine if Trump said that he exaggerates a great deal, probably because he’s afraid that the bare facts won’t pump him up enough.

Imagine if he said he is, in fact, thin skinned, gets hurt pretty easily, and then gets angry when he feels attacked.  He’s sensitive guy but he’s trying to stop that from ruling him.

Imagine if Trump were to admit that he’s like lots of other people: biased against people of color because he doesn’t trust them.  It’s hard, after all, to trust people he doesn’t know—really doesn’t know—and who look angry when he’s in the room.

He’d be a different guy and some people might give him a second look.

But there’s no chance that Donald Trump will fess up to the truth—because he is a coward.  That’s what’s underneath.  He lies, cheats, bullies, brags, and preens like an insecure little boy in search of a big blond mother to make him whole again.  That won’t happen either.  He won’t feel whole because he is looking outside, not inside, for the sources of his anxiety and fear and neediness.  That makes him both pathetic and dangerous.  Dangerous because he will do almost anything to try to reclaim his absent manhood.

 

Acting Well in an Absurd World

 

 

I write this essay on the morning of the Clinton-Trump debates.  As the possibility of a Trump presidency grows in strength, sounds of confusion and the stink of fear have begun to fill the air.  How could a man who lies like a psychopath, who bullies and mocks and finds common cause with White Supremacists be our president. It makes no sense.  We must be living in an altered state of consciousness.

We have been lied to before.  Think back to our entry into the Iraq war, the Iran contra affair, Watergate, and the torture chambers that we transferred to foreign soil, lest they infect our own.  We have had presidents who have torn down what we thought was almost sacred—the New Deal safety net—Reagan, Bush, and Clinton readily come to mind—and helped to build a world in which the 1% own 50% of our wealth and god knows what percentage of the decision-making power.

What I want to talk about today, though, is the impact of the presidential campaign on us, moderate, liberal, and Progressive Americans who wonder how this could be happening to them, feeling like bystanders to a process that is out of our control.

I have studied the European climate during the rise of fascism and Nazism.  It was fed by extreme poverty and loss of life during World War 1, which, in turn, fueled the rise of Nazism and the concomitant anti-Semitism that almost wiped out the entire Jewish people.  For me, just behind the actual death and destruction, the worst part was that so many people just stood by and let it happen.  I don’t mean the time-worn and erroneous way that later anti-Semites described Jews as passively accepting their fate like lambs to slaughter.  I mean the millions of people who did not believe in fascism or didn’t wholly  believe in it, who were offended, but who did nothing to resist.

Now I am afraid that we are standing by.  Almost 70% of Americans dislike Trump and much of what he stands for but—and this is the point—I don’t believe that we are taking the threat seriously enough.  If we don’t, it may not be the “basket of deplorables” who are most to blame, it will be us.  As Albert Einstein famously warned, “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”

In the face of our own fear and confusion, it is hard to know what to do.  Many in the middle and on the left seem dispirited, depressed, just short of giving in to despair.  Genuine hope seems an illusion.  Others are in a state of denial.  Hillary Clinton will surely win in the end, they say, however timidly.  We are Americans.  We will come to our senses.  We can’t be this lax, can we?  This is just how political contests go.  They tighten up at the end.  The forces of good will come through in the end.

Alternatively, we whisper that Trump may not turn out as badly as he seems.  He’s just saying all those terrible things to win the votes of the Republican base.  Look at the influence of beautiful Ivanka and her new childcare proposals.  Maybe these “denials” will prove out and Clinton will win or Trump will turn out to be better than he seems.  Maybe, but are we willing to take that chance?

I know that this article will seem alarmist to many, extreme to some.  But shouldn’t we raise the cry, just in case?  We do need to organize.  We do need to fight our own despair and impotence.  We need to fight our way out of this nightmare.  The question, then, is how do we do that.  I know that the Democratic Party will organize.  I get several fundraising emails every day.  The “ground” troops are hard at work.  The ads are ubiquitous.  But that hasn’t worked so far.  The harder the Clinton troops work, the more they seem to be losing.  Trump continues to gain; and he is now tied.  When you continue to try one strategy—characterize Trump as an immoral lunatic who can’t be entrusted with the keys to the kingdom—and that strategy does not work, you can’t keep repeating yourself.  You will lose.

We need to be heartier and more creative in the coming weeks.  We need to shake our confusion and despair.  Before we strengthen ourselves on the big stage, we have to raise our spirit, one person at a time.  Here are some thoughts about breaking loose.

When I start down that road to despair, I generally try to make sense of what’s going on.  I’ve been trying to do that for months and months now, and I can’t.  It makes no sense that Trump’s popularity grows.  I have written more than ten essays about the subject, trying to understand and not just condemn White working class voters, but I have failed to clarify things even to myself.  The political situation just seems absurd.

So I have begun to turn to the master of absurdity, Albert Camus.  Camus, who wrote in the face of fascist and communist totalitarianism, simply began with the premise that the world is, in fact, absurd.  The absurdity that we face in the present day is not an aberration, it is our shared reality.  We cannot grasp it logically.  Theological explanations are not helpful: no amount of sin or the need for cleansing, for example, could explain the rise of Hitler.  Our moral compass just seems to spin.  As Camus would say, we live in a godless universe and Trump exemplifies that universe.  Sociology and psychology also bring us to a kind of dead end because explaining the horror doesn’t stop it.  What to do, then, in the face of this absurdity.

Camus’ philosophy is complex but here’s the simple version from his The Myth of Sisyphus that has sometimes kept me going.  Sisyphus is a character in Greek mythology who was condemned to repeat forever the meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain only to see it roll down again.  This sometimes characterizes the experience for those of us who have tried year after year to build upon progressive values.  We push the rock up the hill for a generation, then it comes tumbling down. Why, we ask, should we keep trying.

Camus tells us that Sisyphus is only freed from his despair when he recognizes the absurdity of his situation.  I suppose that goes for progressives like me, who might call ourselves realistic but who have in mind an idealized future just beneath the surface of our policy proposals.  What I feel when I fully acknowledge that the Trump surge may well win out, when I give up hope, even for a moment, is first terror that is soon, paradoxically, followed by relief.  I can stop trying to push the rock to the top.

By pushing and pushing, I had become robotic.  I had lost all creativity and, maybe even compassion for the people I want to help.  It was as though I had been closing my eyes and holding my breath, hoping that the nightmare would go away.  When I give up, when I stop pretending that the world is other than it is, and that includes a world with Donald Trump in it, I can breathe again.  With breath, there comes relief.  For a moment, I relax, as though the worst is past.   Relief is then followed by a sense of freedom.  There is no rock.  I can do as I please.  I can choose my future.

What do I choose?  I still choose to push the rock of progress up the hill.  But now, no gods are making me do so.  And maybe, free from the constant struggle, I can find more creative ways to get that rock up the hill.  A lever?  Jet propulsion?  I sustain my effort because there is nothing else that I can do that fits my values, that gives me a sense of meaning, that sustains my integrity. My struggle for social justice is selfish in this way.

Giving up the robotic struggle leads to freedom and freedom leads to possibilities for a better future because—and this I believe even if logic won’t verify it—the world demands that we strive towards freedom and decency, respect and equality for all.  It urges us forward like a mighty river.  It is the only path that is worthwhile. So we take it.

Completing a Career

This essay is the first in a series of personal explorations into the completion of careers.   Ending a career marks a monumental shift in a life, especially for those who have very much defined themselves through their work.  The essays will address questions like: what does it mean to be done?; how can we say that we have done enough to satisfy the desires and demons from within; how can we feel proud and at peace with ourselves so that we can meet the challenges in the next stage of our lives.

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The year was 2005.  I was sixty-three years old.  I had already had a substantial career.  In the way that novelists have with book jacket bios—truck driver, cowhand, waiter, and drifter—my own winding career had its own cache: historian, therapist, consultant, writer, entrepreneur. I had adjusted well to my failure to become a professional basketball player, a Pulitzer prize winning novelist, and the leader of a social-democratic revolution. But I didn’t feel complete.  I wasn’t sure why.  And the years were whizzing by.

Part of the urgency came from my sense of living on borrowed time.  My father had died from pancreatic cancer at fifty.  I was twenty-six.  I was filled with a childlike sense of magical thinking and believed that I would also died by the age of fifty.  This wasn’t a vague notion.  I believed it with the same certainty that the sun would rise in the morning.  My friends and family still tease me about how well I prepared them for my impending death.  I seem to have survived my fiftieth birthday but at fifty-eight I got cancer, myself.  When the initial surgery failed to capture all those cruel little cancer cells, my conviction about a short life simply reignited.

The next few years again defied my expectations.  I was alive and energetic, and I was faced with the question of what to do with my life.  I had given up psychotherapy.  After almost thirty years, I was too restless to sit still listening to an endless stream of distress and rage.  I had returned to my consulting business, often working with big organizations like State Street Bank and  Honeywell Corporation.  While lucrative, the work felt barren to me.  I really didn’t care about helping rich people get richer.  I did care about supporting the work of the nonprofits to which I also consulted.  Their mission to empower the disempowered, to house, feed, and educate people living in poverty, appealed greatly to me.

If I was going to live, I wanted that ever-present “one more shot” that you hear from people who are not yet ready to cash in their chips.  And I wanted to focus on communities most in need.  I wanted a shot at doing something worthwhile.  Yes, helping couples and families resolve their difficulties had been a good thing to do.  I loved many of the people I worked with and felt gratified when their lives improved—and heartbreaking when they didn’t.  When I complained to my wife that it wasn’t enough, she would remind me of the hundreds of people I had helped and about the thousands of people that my students had helped.  But it still didn’t feel sufficient.

Sufficient for what, though?  I don’t know how to put this in psychological or professional language but I wanted something that touched my soul.  I wanted work that drew from the well of my deepest values.  Only that would permit me to complete my career and to feel that I had done enough.  At the time, I couldn’t articulate this desire very clearly.  It was more like an ache in my heart in need of fulfillment.

In 2005, I saw an opportunity.  I had been engaged with the Boston nonprofit community for some time, consulting to organizations and coaching its executives.  These are dedicated, often gifted people who work long hours for modest pay.  But they have learned their craft in a hit and miss manner, mostly by trial and error.  Maybe they found a mentor along the way, but they rarely find the time or resources for formal education.  I had some experience building training programs, in 1974 founding, with David Kantor and Carter Umbarger, the Family Institute of Cambridge to teach practicing therapists how to work with couples and families.  I believed that I could do the same for nonprofit leaders.

What made the opportunity most compelling was the potential to build a more diverse leadership cadre.  Nonprofits serve people and communities of color in disproportionately high numbers, but only 12-14% of the organizations are led by people of color.  This needs to change.  It is both unjust and ineffective.  The ability to mobilize the resources of organizations and communities depends in part on the credibility of leadership and the rapport among them.  What’s more, the time seemed ripe to make a great impact on nonprofit leadership.  Research now tells us what I knew intuitively in 2005.  The imminent retirement of the baby boomers meant that 70% of nonprofit leaders would leave their jobs within the next five years.  If we could educate and help place young leaders of color in urban centers—now minority-majority cities—powerful social progress could be achieved.

During that first year, Hubie Jones, the dean of Boston’s nonprofit community and a member of my Advisory Board, asked me a simple question: “What’s in this for you, Barry?”  With a little bit of tongue in cheek, I said “It would make my parents proud.”  Once out of my mouth, I realized that I meant it.  My parents had long championed social justice.  That was the religion into which I was born and raised; and the development of the Institute for Nonprofit Management and Leadership (INML) felt to me like a homecoming, a return to direct contact with the values that animated my childhood.  The possibility of feeling whole, bringing together my values and my actions, seemed tantalizingly near.

 

So I began.  I called lots of friends and colleagues, described the new curriculum and asked them to send students.  They did: fourteen that first year, more than half young leaders of color. I loved the teaching.  I loved just getting to know all of the young people who attended classes.  Even without knowing or, in the beginning, thinking, I could build the INML into a substantial force in Massachusetts, the work was satisfying, in itself.  I didn’t have a blazing dream nor great ambitions nor even clear goals.  I just thought that I’d start something that I liked to do and that I believed in.  Now there are over 700 graduates of year-long programs situated in four cities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island with more to come.

Building the INML meant talking and writing about it all of the time.  I had to recruit new students.  In the beginning I met with each prospective student to discover his or her goals and to explain what our program was all about.  Our connection felt—and was— personal.  I had to recruit teachers, board members, philanthropists.  There would be weekly meetings with foundations in which I had to try persuading program officers that the INML was a wonderful investment.  All of this meant that all day, every day, I was talking the language of social justice and diversity, skill and network building and gathering a cadre of strong, well-educated, well-positioned leaders of color.  I bathed myself in a world of language that spoke directly to my values and informed my actions.  I was incredibly active but often it felt like the experience was happening by itself and I was carried along in its surge.

I can’t say that I grasped the full meaning that the INML would have for me right away.  Rather the meaning spread through the days until I had to acknowledge it.  There are about 36,000 nonprofits in Massachusetts serving more than a millions people.  If we could make the leadership even a little better, they would make their services better, which would mean a great deal to those millions.  We could make a difference and I, personally, could live in the world of difference-making.

This, more than anything—joining the fight for social justice and doing so in a way that I had something to offer—was not only satisfying, it also permitted me to complete my career.  I had immersed myself for a decade in the convergence of my values and my activities.  The immersion was sustained.  It was like completing a circle, from childhood to old age:  living my values more deeply, more immediately, and to some effect.  My parents might be proud but, at last, I felt proud.  I felt at one with myself, peaceful and fierce in my work.  And ready to let it go, ready to enter the post-retirement stage of life.

The Right to Protest

Dear friends,

I don’t know if you follow sports enough to catch the uproar over Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police brutality.  Kaepernick is a football quarterback playing for the San Francisco Forty Niners.  He’s not great but he generates attention because he began his career so quickly and dramatically.  He’s young and earnest and a little impulsive –like  many young people.

During the playing of the National Anthem, Kaepernick continued to kneel while his teammates stood at attention.  He did so quietly, with little fanfare.  To me, this gesture did not seem very confrontational but the press made a big deal of it..  Gradually, others have either followed his example or tried other ways to stand for the rights of young Black men, like linking arms or raising their right fists the way that Tommy Smith did in the 1968 Olympics.  Stephen Ross, the billionaire owner of the Miami Dolphins, among an increasing group of people across American, have joined in common cause with the protesters.

But the general reaction to Kkaepernick’s protest has been negative.  Throughout the country, innumerable politicians, business owners and countless others have offered their often heated objections to Kaepernick’s gesture. The public conversation has not focused on police brutality or equal rights.  It has focused, instead, on Kaepernick’s right to protest versus the “disrespect” he has shown to a patriotic American ritual, the National Anthem.  The challenge to his right has been stunning to me, considering all of the abusive, massively disrespectful behavior we see in local, state, and national politics.  Compare Kaepernick’s behavior to Trump and the outrageous, fact-free Birther challenge to Barak Obama’s presidential legitimacy.  And this is but one sign of disrespect to the dignity of our highest office.  Why should Kaepernick be held to a different standard than the politicians.  In fact, his “protest” was relatively respectful.

On the other hand, the objections that have filled sports pages of newspapers, have, paradoxically, added great fuel to athletes’ desire to protest.  There seems to be a little movement building.  For better or worse, athletes are in the limelight and have some power to influence their fans.  Since so many of these athletes are people of color and have managed to ‘rise’ in one of the arenas most open to them, why shouldn’t they be able to use their success in the service of their values?  Business people certainly do.

New York Times columnist David Brooks addressed this issue in his September 16th column.  I found the article smug and misguided and wrote a Letter to the Editor in response.  Given the substantial response that Brooks’ article received, there seems little likelihood that mine will be published.  So I decided to send it to you in the form of a mini-blog post.  This version is slightly changed just in case The Times does publish it. I hope you like it.

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David Brooks’ invocation of American civic religion, “The Uses of Patriotism,” runs much too close to the 1960’s condemnation of Vietnam War protesters.  “Love it or leave it” was the sanctimonious and divisive cry.  Why can’t we love it and protest when our country does not live to its values?  The right to protest is baked into the American tradition and the American Constitution, which guarantees the freedom of assembly, association, and speech.  The Boston Tea Party, a disrespectful protest of British taxation, helped precipitate the Revolutionary War.   In my view, we honor our nation by continuing practices that led to its formation and that guarantee the values on which it stands.

Brooks, himself, notes that “Every significant American reform movement was shaped by” self-criticism.  Protest is self-criticism in protean form.  Should we not have protested slavery when it was sanctioned by the Founding Fathers and enshrined in the Constitution?  How about the absence of women’s suffrage and discriminatory housing practices that have made it hard for every group of immigrants, from the Irish to the Latinos, to buy their own homes?  Almost all of America’s great social and economic achievements have come on the back of protest.

Every protest is met with resistance and disdain, as though they don’t fit in polite society.  I have written, myself, in favor of a more dignified and restrained presidential politics. (https://barrydym.wordpress.com/2016/08/26/a-call-for-a-more-dignified-and-restrained-presidential-politics/); and I find the current lying, name-calling, and bullying vile.  But, Brooks wants to sanitize protest too much.  He should know that self-criticism is inevitably messy and upsetting; and it does call into question the culture and values of the ruling classes.  In fact, protest, by its nature, arises outside of the halls of power.  It is the means taken by people who lack the institutional power to enact change through formal governmental channels.  In Thursday’s column, Brooks stands with those ruling classes and against the very tradition at whose shrine he asks us to worship.

We must stand with the original Tea Partiers, with the Abolitionists and the Suffragettes, with Martin Luther King, Jr., and his call for nonviolent protest, and with all who seek to highlight the need for changes in law and public behavior—even when they are irreverent.  Irreverence towards one set of “values”—standing for the National Anthem—often signals reverence for another set.  In this case, the more hallowed statement of values comes in both the right of free speech and in equal protection under the law, as it is assured by the 14th Amendment.  I believe that we should be proud of young people who speak up in this way.

 

The Devil Incarnate; the Devil in Us

I have sometimes been accused of having intemperate political views.  With this in mind, I generally try to moderate my passions and to adopt a reasonable tone of voice.  But I identify so closely with America and its values that the possibility of a Trump presidency has strained my resolve. I am heartsick about Trump’s momentum in the presidential race. He is insufferable and dangerous.  I’m frightened and angry, and not just at him or at “those people” who favor him, but also at myself and at all of the liberal and Progressive people who are so appalled yet have allowed this to happen.  So, in this essay, I need to let it rip.  Here goes.

Donald Trump is, without doubt, the Devil incarnate.  He tempts and taunts, seduces and destroys.  He seeks out good people and bad.  But, and this is my main point, he is not an isolated phenomena, crawling out of the dark swamps of con artists and circus performers.  He only succeeds because of the fertile ground within us.  If we look honestly, Trump, holds a mirror up to the worst in ourselves.

First, he reflects our culture’s retreat into self centeredness.  All those gurus, psychologists, and marketing mavens telling us that we, each one of us, is the most important person in the world.  We need to take care of number one.  And, even if we have an altruistic impulse, it won’t be effective, it won’t be authentic, if we don’t take care of ourselves first.  A culture of encouraged narcissism if I ever saw one.  We have swallowed too much of the encouragement.

How do we know that we’re number one.  The polls tell us.  Twitter and Facebook tell us through Notifications and Likes.  People tell us that we’re “awesome.”  Really?  I’ve been good, effective, kind at times but I doubt I’ve often been awesome.  Most tellingly, parents tell their children that they are number one.  They watch and comment on their every move, photograph and film every event, virtually eulogize their children when they graduate from grade school.  Those speeches about the accomplishments of young children are bizarre.

The laser-like focus of parents doesn’t stop there.  They help with term papers and exams.  Sometimes this “support” goes on right up through graduate school.  Food is provided at a distance.  I have heard numbers of university professors talk about parental calls to argue grades.  “This will ruin my child’s life…”  How else could they guarantee that their children get the right start, the competitive edge in life.  How else could they avoid unnecessary pain.  Is there necessary pain in growing up?  I think so but it doesn’t seem to be part of the contemporary agenda. Helicopter parents are there on cell phones at a moment’s notice, trying to help their children avoid an anxious moment.  They guide, criticize, assist.  Everything their children do matters to them.  Everything positive and negative tells their children just how important they are.  Attention tells the story.  No man I have ever observed craves attention more than Donald Trump.  Yet there may be more like him on the way.

Since the children are so important, it is vital that they don’t make mistakes.  If their grades aren’t up to snuff, it must be the teacher’s fault.  If they get hurt, it must be someone else’s fault.  If the perpetrator isn’t obvious, parents and children, together, will find someone to blame.  Taking responsibility for flaws and faults is no part of their Trumpian agenda.

In contemporary society, certainly in contemporary politics, we refuse to admit our mistakes or accept losses.  When confronted, we begin with denial and misdirection.  If that doesn’t work, we attack the critic or we sue the sources of our pain.  We sue those who actually hurt us, and those who might.  For justice sake?  I don’t think so.  To get even, yes; but that’s not justice; it’s vengeance.  To line our pockets.  Sure.  You can earn a good living by suing people.  To intimidate, of course.  Trump’s love affair with litigation and bullying grows right from the ground of our litigious culture.  We have created a litigious society that has more people covering their rear ends than standing courageously for what they believe.

We sue and blame so we don’t have to deal with pain.  Pain is not supposed to be part of the equation for important people.  And when we see pain in others, it makes us uneasy.  To relieve our uneasiness, we blame or isolate them.  We blame victims.  We blame disabled people.  We blame “losers.”  We pump ourselves up by putting others down: immigrants, people of color, the disabled.  This approach seems to be reaching a crescendo in contemporary culture.

We have other ways to pump ourselves up, too.  We build larger and larger houses, wear more fashionable clothes, spend inconceivable amounts on hair “treatments.”  Can you even imagine what Trump pays to keep his hair looking like a horizontal yellow facsimile of his obscene towers.  This is the new gilded age, garish and full of self aggrandizement.  It is very much like the turn of the nineteenth century, when the Vanderbilts and Jay Gould fashioned castles in homage to their egos.  How has it gotten lost that Trump Tower, Trump Airlines, Trump whatever is just a hilarious and exaggerated caricature of the mcmansions  and malls that now fill the American suburbs.

We are narcissists, loving or trying to love our own image and trying to stay young forever.  We are social, national narcissists.  The social form of narcissism is nativism and racism.  These bigoted extensions of self love are just kissing cousins to America First, American exceptionalism, and making America Great Again.  Never mind that democratic ideals, practically applied, are what really make us great.  Give us a good carpet bombing or a Gucci bag to make us feel strong and beautiful.

Trump believes that sensational gestures, Hollywood come to politics, are what makes the difference in our political life, and we reward him by paying avid attention.  All of us.  Those who love him and those who hate him.  This is nothing but free marketing for him.  It’s a betrayal of American democratic ideals for us.  But we have grown accustomed to sensationalism.  We need it the way others need drugs.  We need our fix of Fox-generated drama.  We thrill with identification or humiliation to the angry crowd screaming to put Hillary in jail or even to kill her.  The media are ecstatic and we are their prey—or their mates.

We have lost the sense of what is real and what is not.   We have learned to watch carnage on TV, as if it is a video game.  We play video games that aren’t very different than the drones that bomb far away villages.  We are numb.  We have lost our sense of agency.  We are so consumed by our own lives that we want someone else to do it for us.  If that means a dictator, so be it.  He’ll be our dictator, like our Jedi.  There are many times when Donald Trump sounds almost exactly like Benito Mussolini.  Some alert journalists have pointed this out but it has not awakened us.  I suspect the image arouses many of his fans.

The Devil, with all of his excitement, has lulled us to sleep.  We are numb to his lies, numb to his reversals, numb to his bigotry, numb to his ignorance, numb to his immaturity and name calling, numb to the vile way he treats people.  We are almost literally in a trance.  Why are we so numb?  Because, the Devil is us.  We don’t want to hear that we are flawed, angry, bigoted, and self-centered.  And I mean all of us, not just the conservative right.

We the people of the United States need to wake up, cast off the Devil’s potions, accept responsibility for what is wrong, begin to redress those wrongs, and thrill to the opportunity to do so.  If we don’t, the Devil within us will win.

 

 

 

 

Personally, I am heartsick about Trump’s momentum in the presidential race. He is insufferable and dangerous.  I would hate to end my life with him as president.  That would feel like a defeat to all that I have stood for in my life: kindness and compassion; equality and pluralism; democracy and collaboration.   I am now seventy four years old;  and I dread entering old age and dying, while a narcissistic, cold-hearted bully and liar is the representative our once-proud nation.

 

Resilience and Aging

Last week my grandson, Eli, and I were tossing a ball around. The sun bathed the lawn and the little pond beside it.  We were laughing and teasing and sweating.  He would try to catch balls on the full run.  I would reach for high and low balls so that I didn’t have to run.  If Eli threw it too far away, I insisted that he get it.  No reason I should have to move because of his poor aim.  If he threw it over my head, I’d reach up but stop short of leaping, twisting, and turning.  Why risk hurting myself.  As the ball flew over my head, I’d make a mock angry face and we would both laugh.  These are such good times.

That evening I thought about my refusal to twist and leap.  It marked a change in life, a loss.  Just one more way that I was never again going to thrill to my strength and agility.  I had been a very good athlete as a youth, free and easy, quick and powerful.  I thought there were virtually no limits to what I could do if I tried. The joy of movement may have been my greatest friend.  That relationship lasted, in modified form, well into my sixties.  I ran and played tennis, hiked for weeks on end in the high mountains, jumping defiantly from rock to rock as we crossed rushing streams.  With a friend, I built a house without power tools, cut out acres of trees to dig a pond—all for the pleasure of it.

At the time, my ability to pursue these activities seemed invaluable.  I felt I couldn’t live without them.  And there have been substantial losses.  But here’s the interesting thing.  Mostly I don’t mind.  The sorrow is gentler than anticipated, and I find so many things to do that engage me just as fully. It might look like  my life is more limited now, but it doesn’t feel that way.  It is filled with friends and families, and activity, thoughts, reading, writing, and sharing what I have learned with younger people.  I love as deeply as ever.  I follow my enthusiasms as avidly as I did when young and unformed.

These good experiences don’t feel compensatory, and generally, I am not aware of anxiously struggling to replace the old ones.  For instance, now I walk for exercise.  During my decades of running, walking looked paltry.  I had to lecture my pompous young self not to feel superior and contemptuous of the walkers.  Now I don’t feel humiliated by “just” walking.  I “just” do it and feel pretty satisfied when I’ve had a good walk.  As far as I can tell, I like what I’m doing.  I feel as pleased now as I did a year or a decade ago.

I don’t fully understand my internal experience of losses.  Do I say, oh well, I can live without this or that?  Do I simply forget the joys of the past?  To some extent, I do.  Is it a matter of focus?  I simply focus on what I have?  I think that’s a big part of it.  Do I grieve and then recover because I have grieved?  Maybe.  Do I adjust my expectations?  Surely I do.  But after saying all these things, I still don’t really understand.  I am more comfortable saying that there is some form of alchemy going on, some unconscious process, working on my behalf, that puts the losses behind.

Maybe the alchemy is best expressed through the more modern concept of resilience.  While resilience is commonly applied to children—the “resilient child”—and to victims of trauma, it may tell us as much about aging.  Resilience is variously defined (Google) as “the ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity…”  or “to adjust easily to misfortune or change.”  It is “springing back” and “rebounding.”  But I like the original meaning:  “the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress.”  As we compress, our abilities are diminished.  As our shape changes—literally in very old age—resilience represents our ability to regain our essential form.  This is important: not our physical or mental form but the essence of our being.

There are two qualities of resilience that I especially want to focus on: optimism and self-determination.  Let’s begin with self determination, or what psychologists call an “internal locus of control.  “From a young age, resilient children tend to meet the world on their own terms.”  They tend to be independent and able to mobilize whatever skills they need to solve problems.  “They believed that they, and not their circumstances, effected their achievements.”  I have never understood why people blame others for their failures.  I don’t mean this in a moral ,but rather a psychological, way.  I feel the same about losses. They upset me at first but, if I pay attention to whatever I’m doing—say playing catch with my grandson—then they don’t stick.  As my attention turns to the present, the losses sort of disappear into my current activity.

I have been fortunate enough to not have suffered terrible, debilitating losses, and can’t imagine how I would respond to them.  But I have struggled with cancer and other illnesses.  And I have come to believe that the ability to move on, to not obsess about what is wrong, represents an intentional, attentional discipline.  I’d like to claim that it is a discipline that I have achieved after years of meditation, and maybe that has played a role.  But it is less conscious than that, a quality of mind long ago ingrained in me, so automatic, that I don’t hold onto losses.

I’m pretty sure that self determination is not enough.  It needs a partner: optimism, a belief that things will work out if you work hard enough.  There is plenty of scientific support for the relationship between resilience and positive feelings.  Studies show that “maintaining positive emotions while facing adversity promotes flexibility in thinking and problem solving.”  How you perceive events is critical.  Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic.” In other words, what is traumatic to one person is not to another.  So it is with losses.  The power that loss has over you depends on how you conceive it.  The way you conceive it depends on your discipline.

There were two things I have always wanted for my children, now 45 and 37.  First, to feel loved.  With that feeling, they would be free to approach the world with security and an open heart. That would make them resourceful.  Second, to believe that with hard work, almost anything is possible.  You have to put the work in but first comes the belief that things will come out right if you do.  It never occurred to me that the same lessons would be the ones I would lean on myself as I grew older.  But I do.

Do Working Class White People Vote Against Their Self Interest

I can’t count how many times I’ve scratched my head—no, begun to pull my hair out—trying to figure out why poor and working class people ever vote for contemporary  Republicans, no less Donald Trump.  My puzzlement—and yours, I imagine—persists no matter how many times the apparent contradiction is explained to me by observers as shrewd as Thomas Frank (What’s the Matter with Kansas?).  And even I know that the question of why people vote against their self-interest is a terribly narrow way of framing the question, because it focuses almost exclusively on economic concerns instead of all the social, class, racial, and religious concerns that people have.

Since Thomas Frank and others have already been so insightful, why write about a contradiction that isn’t a contradiction.   It is simply that I want to get this straight in my mind, straight enough to move beyond my frustration and anger at all of those “ignorant” people, and to think productively about how to build the type of alliances that make democracy viable.

Let’s begin with some of the most familiar drivers of “voting against self interest.”  Social issues include: opposition to abortion and gay marriage; a preference for school prayer (and a Christian country), gun rights and the need for self defense against a government just itching to steal the rights of loyal Americans; and opposition to immigrants who steal jobs from those same loyal Americans.

According to Arlie Hochschild’s new book, Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, “…white Americans … have worked hard and believe themselves to be waiting in a long line for their chance at the American Dream, only to see others—African Americans, immigrants, Muslims, women, gays—cutting ahead of them.  And the line cutting, they believe, is enabled—encouraged!—by the government, the very government they support through their too-high taxes.  To add insult to injury, the cheaters consider them ignorant and backward.”

It is easy to dismiss this as an illogical and misinformed argument.  For example, haven’t African Americans and Latinos been here for a long time themselves, and haven’t they been even more disempowered?  But let’s leave the comparison for another time.

What is indisputable is that these White voters get highly skewed information from TV,  radio, and politicians.  They were told that the United States Army’s exercises in Texas were prelude to a federal coup.  They are led to believe that climate change is a myth, that crime is on the rise in our cities, that immigrants are far more dangerous than native-born Americans—even though scientists and social scientists have demonstrated otherwise.  It doesn’t matter that pollution is worse in poor communities – White, Black, and mixed.  As Arlie Hochschild tells us, poor Whites remain loyal to local corporations and indignant about the incursions of the federal government trying to diminish to pollution.  Local politicians, dependent on funds from fossil fuel corporations, create this story line.

What is also indisputable is that the media who publish this misinformation—in the spirit of a nation at war—are mostly run by Republican businessmen with a powerful interest in lower taxes, continued use of fossil fuel, and support of the arms industry.   Are the voters to blame (or to be pitied) for acting on this information?  That’s a complicated question, also to be debated at another time.

As the current presidential campaign has brought even more glaringly to the surface, race and racism play a role in White people’s choices. Many White voters certainly see it as in their interest to limit Black and Latino (and Asian) voting rights, access to quality education, and union jobs.  We know that race affiliation is often stronger than class, and shapes the reality that people believe. As Chauncey DeVega has argued, “Poor and working class white people possess much more wealth and assets than do black and Latinos who are nominally ‘middle class.’…   Nevertheless, it is the perception of white insecurity and suffering that matters, not empirical reality. Those who have historically been privileged will feel like equality is oppression.”

Racial resentment has been central to American politics since its founding.  The Constitution, for example, enshrined slavery.  The Democratic Party and the Dixiecrats long dominated Southern governments that made Black Americans second and third-class citizens. Beginning with Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the Republican Party (yes, the party of Lincoln), has taken up where the Dixiecrats and George Wallace left off, cynically playing on the fears of White folks.  The George HW Bush-sponsored Willie Horton ads epitomize the cynical scare tactics that have pervaded the Republican strategy for the last half century.  White people want to stick with their own kind.  They want to vote for those who will promote their interests and not the interests of the “other.”  Is this voting against one’s self interest?  It may be regrettable, but it makes a kind of sense.

I still shake my head, when I realize that poor and working class people vote against funding for health care, education, and environmental protection, and roar their approval for political spokesman who vote in such a powerful block against the incursions of the Federal government.  But I understand the logic: Take your finger out of the dike, let the feds in just a bit, and they will take over.  The feds will favor people of color.  These fears may be emotional but who said that emotions—voting the way that your gut tells you to—are less effective than voting according to the thoughts of Eastern elitists.

There’s another reason Tea Party voting habits make sense.  Beginning with Bill Clinton, the Democratic leadership can be seen as betraying and abandoning the working classes of all races and religions.  Many “liberal” policies favor financial interests.  The imagery that accompanies the policy is often more damning.  It is not hard to think of all those Wall Street interests in back rooms advising the President.  Most damning of all, Democratic politicians court the suburban middle class.  They hardly even mention poverty or working class people anymore.  Bernie Sanders’ popularity and the rebirth of the term progressivism speaks loudly and eloquently to the need for an alternative to the current form of liberalism.

Just for fun, ask yourself who is the more conservative presidential candidate this year.  It’s hard to identify Trump’s interests as anything but self-interest and resentment of others, but he is disruptive; he is anti-establishment.  So a pretty good case could be made that Hillary Clinton is the conservative in the race.  We might see her desire for reforming the health care, child care, education, and workforce reforms as a focus on change, but it’s easy enough to see her as trying to shore up things as they are, which in turn, means defending the status quo.

This country simply has almost no sustained and organized effort to reach out to poor and working class Whites.  We have not created or recreated institutions like the unions and political “machines” of old to provide progressive answers to the truly vexing problems that dampen their hope and depress their energies.  Here’s hoping that the Sanders movement does have some staying power, which means that it develops local power throughout the country.  I seriously doubt that poor and working class White people will believe that there is a genuine convergence of their felt self-interest with Progressive policy unless, in fact, there is such a convergence.  And that will not come from the media and the corporate-dependent politicians.  It will likely take decades of ground level, grass roots activism.  It’s time for the long game.

 

 

Secrets

Secrets!  They are so much with us.  Every day they take up some portion of our minds.  We harbor, savor, reveal and revile them.  Sometimes they are quiet, sometimes they rumble around demanding too much attention.

There are little secrets like the fact that you weren’t really sick when you canceled a meeting you didn’t want to attend.  There are big secrets having to do with infidelity, incest, sexual and physical abuse, or cheating at school and work.  Like the fact that you have children or siblings that your family doesn’t know about. There are even shared secrets, things two people know but can’t share.  I have known many couples who each believe the relationship is boring or ending but they have never uttered those words.  And I know people who love one another deeply and keep just as silent.

It’s rare that we know exactly what to do with secrets. The other evening at dinner, a friend revealed a secret—not his own but someone else’s.  The two women at the table were upset.  It wasn’t his story to tell, they argued.  I wasn’t so upset because it didn’t denigrate and was unlikely to harm anyone.   But here’s the question: are there any rules about secrets?  None that are universal as far as I can tell.  And as a marital and family therapist for thirty years, I was asked for my advice all the time.

There are many ways that people have tried to puzzle out the value and the deficits of keeping secrets.  In general, we think that they are toxic and should find a way into the light of day, but some believe that they protect our feelings and our privacy in very comforting ways. They are safe harbors.

Let’s start with reasons to bring secrets into the light.  Here’s some typical advice from a family therapist, Evan Imber-Black. She tells us that “secrets can divide family members, permanently estranging them.  They can discourage individuals from sharing information with anyone outside the family, inhibiting formation of intimate relationships. They can freeze development at crucial points in life, preventing the growth of self and identity. They can lead to painful miscommunication within a family, causing unnecessary guilt and doubt.”  She goes on to say that “A person who seeks to undo the damage caused by family secrets must accept that revealing a secret is not a betrayal but a necessity.”

That’s a damning indictment and a powerful injunction but contemporary culture has for decades had a powerful bias towards revealing secrets.

Like most of you, there are experiences in my life that validate that bias.  Here’s one. It was 1968.  My father was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.  Though it was a common choice in those days, I have never been able to discern why my mother did not want to tell him that he was dying.  She said that he would do better believing that he could fight it.  There was some truth to her observation.  My father was a fighter; he believed that a concentrated mind could overcome almost any obstacle.  But he wasn’t the only person involved in his dying.  My brother and sister, his friends and family—all were sworn to silence, which means none of us got to talk with my father about the dying and about our relationships over the years.  We couldn’t reminisce or mourn together.  Somehow the prohibition even inhibited our ability to talk among ourselves.  We lay around the house in a stupor for weeks.  It was a very lonely time.

Our cultural preference for sharing of secrets is bolstered by scientific studies.  They say that secrets are bad for your health.  “People hiding traumatic secrets,” for example, “showed more incidents of hypertension, influenza, even cancer, while those who wrote about their secrets showed, through blood tests, enhanced immune systems.”

The culture of candor has had a number of powerful drivers.  Among them was the wave of openness that hit American shores during the sixties and seventies.  A second was the feminist movement, which contrasted the (intimate) way that women talked with one another to the (withholding) way that men did.  Third, the revelations of incest and sexual abuse, long shrouded in shame, were said to be liberating when brought to light.  A fourth driver was the gay and lesbian movement, which insisted that the secret closets they had been forced into were constricting, humiliating, and oppressive.  These were extraordinary and liberating movements in our cultural history.

But I don’t think that sharing secrets is always the best idea.  Too often, people say the cruelest things in the name of revealing secrets.  People also tell secrets without thinking about the consequences: how it will hurt others; how it will damage reputations; how it will spread.  Telling secrets is often a test: will you still love me if you know what I’m really like, what happened to me in the past, who I have associated with. What if this isn’t the best test of love.  What’s more, once out of the closet, secret are no longer within your control.

Here’s a story about the loss of control.  Friends of my Aunts had been happily married for forty years.  They did everything together.  They were best friends and lovers.  One day, the husband, believing that the marriage was so strong that it could tolerate almost any blow—and that, in the end, it would be strengthened by his honesty—revealed that, thirty years in the past, he had had a brief, “meaningless” affair.  Still it bothered him and created a slight barrier between them. He wanted to pull it down.  She quietly thanked him for sharing, thought about it for a day, and decided to dissolve the marriage.  He was stunned but he would be patient.  She would recover soon enough from the hurt and anger.  Divorce was unimaginable.  But no, she was resolved, and that was that.

Secrets are rarely shared for the other.  They are meant to relieve us of a burden, an anxiety, a fearful premonition.  They put a great, generally unrequested burden on those who receive the secrets.  I don’t believe that it is always self serving when people say that they must keep a secret to protect others.  There are, after all, many times that secrecy is necessary.  Think of the needs of resistance fighters, who do, in fact, protect comrades from vengeful dictators.  There are times within families when the potential for revenge for a revealed secret is simply too great. And, of course, there are many lesser reasons to keep things to yourself.

I believe that the culture that fosters the telling of secrets is also a culture that greatly emphasizes individual rights and individual feelings and de-emphasizes the experience of others.  Maybe more importantly, it downplays the importance of larger entities: families, communities, work groups.  Our desire to feel good ourselves should not, in my mind, always supersede the feelings or stability of others.

There are also positive reasons for keeping secrets.  Some think of secrets as a private treasure. “You need to know things the others don’t know. It’s what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”  Don DeLillo.  For both individuals and whole societies, maintaining secrets provides a more orderly and dignified way of life.  “To hide feelings when you are near crying,” wrote Dejan Stojanovic, “ is the secret of dignity.”  Wellins Calcott that “Secrecy is the cement of friendship.” For still others, secrets provide a safe place, a private room where you are unobserved, and where you don’t have to maintain your public self.  “They do much to make you different.  On the inside where it counts.”

Personally, I treasure those moments when I can finally come clear, when I can share a secret and, by so doing, draw closer to the person who is listening.  And I treasure the privacy of my many small secrets.

If asked for advice about what to do, I’d say this.  Take great care in choosing who to tell your secrets to.  Can they handle them.  Will they appreciate the moment, the fear that preceded the sharing, the possibility of relief and joy in the telling.  Even before that, be clear about your purpose: why do you want to let the secret out; what goal do you have in mind; what negative consequences might arise—and can you handle them.  If you prepare in this way, if you make a real decision about whether to share or not, then you are likely to succeed.