Category: politics

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Turning Away

Pavowski4 Comments

So this week has been … well, it’s been something, hasn’t it? One of the weirdest and perhaps most depressing weeks in recent memory.

But I can’t wallow in the pain, the uncertainty, the massive, all-consuming doubt that the imminent Trump presidency carries with it. Maybe it’s my unbridled optimism. Maybe it’s the fact that I have faith (how? where did this faith come from? I hate everything, after all) that, though it will certainly be bad, it won’t be that bad. Maybe it’s that I can’t stand being in a pain- and griping- and complaining-spiral.

Trump’s presidency will either be a total cock-up, or it won’t. And I know people are protesting in the streets, and I know the petitions are swirling and people are social-media-sharing that there are still things we can do to stop it, but … sorry, I don’t have that much faith. The electoral college is not going to negate itself just because the country has heartburn. Trump isn’t going to resign because he sees the protests and all the #notmypresident-ing. (By the way, you won’t catch me saying such ridiculousness. For better or worse, Trump is our president. That doesn’t mean I endorse him, but it does mean we get to hold his feet to the fire. We have to be good skeptics, as I said the morning after, and that means giving him a chance — even a short one — to not be a total scumbag as the leader of our great nation.)

We have to get on with our lives.

And yeah, I know, I speak this from a place of privilege. I know that I have the benefit of being allowed to get on with my life, as a middle-class white dude. And a part of me is more than frustrated with myself on that account. You can’t just move on like that, I hear myself insisting. Others can’t move on; that’s why this is so important.

But he’s only one man, and our country is bigger than one man.

I just … I can’t stay here, in this state of mind where the election of the orange nitwit is front of mind every day, for too many hours in the day. I’ve lost too much productivity and too much mental energy down that black hole (and a black hole it is; it sure as hell doesn’t give anything back for everything I’ve poured into it over the past several months).

He’s the president-elect, now, and in January, he’ll be the president proper. I think that sucks. I think it’s an embarrassment. I think we (and by “we” I mean basically the entire USA, even those of us who voted against him — because we couldn’t stop it) have made ourselves something of a joke on the world stage.

But I’ve got books to write. I’ve got students to teach. I’ve got kids to raise up into something resembling decent human beings. And miles and miles to run.

I’ll keep wearing my safety pin for solidarity, as long as that’s a thing. I’ll stay informed and vote in the 2018 elections, and I sure as hell urge everybody out there to do the same. And I’ll certainly be keeping tabs on our new president as he creeps toward office.

But — and I realize I’ve said this before, but now that the election is over, it feels more final — I’m not going to be posting about it as much around here. It’s tiresome to me, and I’m sure it’s tiresome to my readers. This is supposed to be a blarg about writing and running and parenting and other lighthearted sharknado like that, for fargo’s sake.

I’m not going to be thinking about it all the time. I’m not going to waste my mental energy worrying about a thing that’s out of my control.

I’m going to co-opt a bit of religious wisdom (without the religion) in the form of the Serenity prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.

You don’t even have to believe in god to see the wisdom in that. Any good meditationalist (is that even a word?) will tell you that serenity comes from within.

For me, at least, it’s time to turn away from Trump and the noxious cloud that surrounds everything about him. It’s time to turn inward.

It’s time to get back to work.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Trump’s Election Confirms: God Exists

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A theory:

Conventional writing advice states that an author should, generally, step on the throats of his protagonists. Occasionally , you shift your weight and allow the poor bastards to catch a little air, but mostly, you keep them down until they’re almost dead … and then you stomp on them some more.

One could argue, then, that this campaign season has been an extended size 13 to the windpipe. It abated, for the briefest of moments, as the election drew near and it looked like Clinton would win.

And then the boot came down for a crushing blow, and what the hell do we do now?

So: God exists, and he’s an evil fiction writer.

Hopefully he’s set us up for some sort of triumphant third act.

But I kind of doubt it.

This Shouldn’t Happen

Pavowski5 Comments

Just a short addendum, and then I’m going to shut down the part of my brain that thinks about these things (or try to, at any rate).

I had students in my class today in tears over the results of yesterday’s elections. Young people (girls, with some major identity issues to begin with) who are terrified about the future of the country. Petrified that they’ll lose their rights, or that friends will lose their rights. Sickened that the nation has essentially endorsed a man who … well. Who represents some of the worst that American males have on offer.

Now, these are teenage girls, I’ll grant. It isn’t like hyperbole and overemotionality aren’t the standard operating procedure. I wouldn’t have anticipated a reaction like that, but it’s not hard to understand it, either. Most of them can’t even vote, but that’s hardly insulation against the all-consuming house fire that this campaign season has been. But it’s exceedingly difficult to picture the same reaction swinging in the other direction; that is, young boys (or, okay, girls) crying over a Trump defeat.

And I can peddle platitudes, and I can share my optimism (such as it is) and I can acknowledge their fears (many of which I share). But words kind of feel empty when the future generation is looking at you with tears in their eyes, asking in despair how this could happen.

And the fact is, this shouldn’t happen. A disagreement in ideology is one thing. A healthy thing. Uncertainty about the future is normal in a time like this. But fear — real, visceral fear for the future, or even for their safety — that shouldn’t happen.

Then I come home, and I see protests springing up in major cities across the nation (and it turns out, one is scheduled for my neck of the woods tomorrow). And I think, holy shark. This shouldn’t happen.

Trump came out with a pretty positive message in his acceptance. Clinton came out with a similar message, as did Obama. Move forward. Work together. Heal. Unite. This is all good, but for a lot of people out there, the message clearly rings hollow.

This shouldn’t happen.

…I don’t have any answers tonight. I just know this shouldn’t happen.

On a Trump Victory (welp, that happened)

Pavowski3 Comments

I guess this is what the Brexit felt like.

Image result for dumbledore welp

What else is there to do for a guy like me on a morning like this, but go for a run under the early morning stars and try to write some things down?

Unfortunately, of course, the stars don’t have any answers for the questions I’m asking today — what went wrong? how could this happen? what the hell do we do now? — in fact, the stars themselves are hidden behind a smoky veil of clouds, like they don’t want to think about it either.

But we have to think about it. We have to deal with the reality that’s been plopped on our plate like a pile of cafeteria mystery meat.

So what do we do?

Well, for one, we can’t rise to the bait. We non-Trumpers are going to face a fair bit of heckling and bragging, and we’re going to have to weather that. Fair’s fair, after all, and we bragged for months that this was impossible. Well, it happened. Let’s not cry about it. Let’s swallow what’s left of our pride and move on.

That means, for better or worse, letting go of Hillary. She needs to retire in the country, or to a mountainside, or to her own private island. I know a lot of us were pretty excited about the prospect of her presidency. But an enormous portion of the country (a majority, as it turns out) were not so jazzed. Even many of her supporters were less than enthusiastic about her as a candidate. Is that fair? Is it justified? Hard to say. The Republican hate machine has been working against the Clintons for decades, and the slime is all over everything. Yes, we’re due for a woman president. But it’s clearly not going to be this woman. Let her go. Give somebody else a shot.

And we’re not going to do ourselves any favors demonizing Trump more than we’ve done. That case has been made, it’s been heard, and it’s been dismissed. The fact that he’s a misogynist, a bully, and a political opportunist has been established, and it turns out, people don’t care.

Nor will it help, either, to bash his supporters. At the end of the day, they are people with hopes and dreams and fears and thoughts about the state of the world we live in, and they made their voices loud and clear. This is their right, regardless of what you might think of what they have to say. The man managed to galvanize his support in a way that Hillary simply couldn’t — helped along in no small part by the case the GOP has been making against her, again, for decades. What the race came down to, I think, is that his supporters felt a lot more strongly about putting him in office and keeping Hillary out than Hillary’s people did, and that’s why they turned out when it mattered. But at this point, it doesn’t much matter how he got there. What matters is that he is there.

So all that’s left is for those of us on the other side to be good skeptics. Republicans are going to find out whether they actually want what they’ve bought and paid for in Trump very, very fast. The rest of us have to watch this thing as it develops and be willing to be proved wrong on some of the horrible things we said about Trump. For instance: is he actually going to attempt to build the wall he promised? Is he actually going to shut down all Muslim ingress to the country? Is he actually going to try to reverse gay marriage? I suspect that he won’t. Pragmatism will dictate that, now that he’s in power, he will have to stay within certain lanes, and there are some things that just can’t be done.

That doesn’t mean I think he’s going to pull a perfect about-face on the things he’s said. But let’s not forget that he famously said in 2008 that, if he ever ran, he’d do so as a Republican. Not because of his ideology, but because of the voters.

I still believe, 100% and unwavering until I see some good evidence to the contrary, that Trump is in this thing for Trump.

Maybe that means that, now that he has it, he’ll put his feet up on the desk and delegate the actual ruling to people who actually know what they’re talking about. Yes, in the meantime, those will be Republicans, but we can only deal with so much heartburn first thing in the morning.

I reassured my wife this morning by pointing out that realistically, I don’t think much changes for us. We’re heteronormative white folks, after all. (And I feel a little bit dirty and shortsighted, pointing that out, but we can’t change our stripes.) But there is a fight to be had if (and more likely, when) Trump and co. come for the rights of people with less privilege.

And it’s a fight that we have to be ready for.

We won’t help ourselves out by being ridiculously hyperbolic, though there will certainly be a lot of that in the coming weeks. We haven’t lost our country. This is not the end of freedom. The atmosphere hasn’t turned into chlorine gas overnight, the bastions of democracy aren’t burning.

The sun still rose this morning.

We just have to stay vigilant. It’s up to Republicans to hold Trump’s feet to the fire and make sure he behaves himself in office.

And it’s up to the rest of us to regroup, figure out what went wrong, and fix it for the next time around.

 

A Last-Chance Election Post

Pavowski3 Comments

I’ve made it a point not to write about the election around here for a while. Partly it’s because I’m not an expert (and my lack of expertise is surely readily apparent to anybody who has read a word of my election-related drabble), partly it’s because I’m sure it was tiresome (how much can you really say about these two deplorables that hasn’t been said in this election season), and partly it’s because I needed to preserve my own sanity — nothing frays your edges like trying to make logical sense of people who aren’t using logic to guide their actions.

The fact is, I’ve been puzzled by Trump supporters from the word go in this thing. (I’m puzzled by some Hillary supporters, too, but more on that later.) This is a man who made it obvious to anybody who was paying attention — pretty early on even in the primaries — that he didn’t know or care much about policy, that he was painfully (maybe even dangerously) ignorant on foreign and military matters, and that he would say or tweet anything if his opponents poked him the right way.

And the farther we went, the worse it got. Not only did we learn that he’s simply unprepared, by almost any measure, for the office, but he’s been revealed to be an even worse human being than we all thought. Responding to questions about his pretty detestable attack on Ted Cruz’s wife with “he started it.” Posting his nonsense about  former Miss Universe and encouraging the whole of the country to look up a sex tape. Mocking the disabled.Claiming that a judge of questionable lineage couldn’t rule fairly on his court case. Claiming that the election is rigged. And then there was the so-called “boys on the bus” video, wherein the man literally bragged to a fanboying idiot about sexually assaulting women.

His apologists can spin it any way they want. They can divert and argue, well, Hillary is WORSE. But you can polish a turd only so much. The man is a joke and an embarrassment. And even if you think he’ll blow up the system and that’s what the system needs (and that may be true!), it’s hard to get around the fact that electing the man president is a more-or-less tacit endorsement of everything he’s done, everything he’s said, and everything he represents.

I really don’t know how Republicans can swallow that.

But in the waning days of the election, polls show that the race is tightening. His numbers are growing. And he may well have a chance at winning this thing.

What that tells me is that politically and ideologically, things in this country are as bad as ever. It tells me what I began to fear about a month ago: that the Republicans who took the moral stand, who stood up and said no, this man does not and cannot represent us, party loyalty be damned, are suddenly going weak in the knees. When it comes right down to it, even those Republicans whom Trump alienated are going to walk up to the voting booth, look at that binary choice between Trump and Clinton, and pull the lever for Trump. Not because they like him. But because they’re Republicans, and voting party is just what we do. Everything is us versus them. Trench warfare. Never give an inch.

Maybe it’s about the Supreme Court. Maybe it’s about his stand on terrorism (which, at least on rhetorical terms, is stronger than Hillary’s — he at least calls the spade of Islamic terrorism a spade, even if he takes it to ridiculous and unfounded extremes). Maybe it’s because they’ve bought into the Republican crusade against Hillary that has raged for decades.

Whatever the reason, on the day, they’re going to return to the party, much like the Blob reforming itself after being hacked to bits with an axe. (And Trump has most certainly done that to the Republican party.)

And I get it. Hillary’s not a good candidate. I wish there were another democrat to vote for. People who get all glowy-faced and glassy-eyed when they talk about Hillary? I don’t get that either. She’s a politician who represents basically every unsavory thing we associate with politicians: corruption, cover-ups, political flexibility for expediency’s sake. The e-mail thing is a legitimate and real problem for anybody considering a Hillary vote.

But it’s Hillary or Trump.

I don’t fear that she’s going to feed our entire democratic system into the wood chipper the way I fear Trump will. I don’t fear that she’ll feel slighted by a foreign power and reach for the nuclear button the way I fear Trump will.  I don’t fear that she’ll abuse the power of her office to jail political opponents or shut down critics in the press the way Trump has explicitly said he will.

This race is bigger than party. I feel for the Republicans — like my own parents! — who are crushed in between the rock of party loyalty and the hard place of voting for the orange monster. It sucks that he’s the guy for Republicans this time around.

But he is.

Which is why all of us who recognize how dangerous he is have to, have to, have to vote.

We see the most recent polls. We know he’s getting a late surge.

We have to surge harder. We have to stand up and say that hate is not okay in a president. That idiocy is not okay in a president. That narcissism and degradation of women and unhinged twitter rants and the constant threat of violence and censorship and and and… these things cannot be synonymous with the American president.

Don’t waste your vote on a third party. While that sends a message (maybe), the fact is that one of these two evils will be president. And making sure Trump is not president is immeasurably more important than whatever message a third-party vote sends.

It’s okay to vote for the lesser of two evils.

In fact, if we think ahead to what might be, one could easily say that voting for the lesser of two evils is a moral imperative.

We need less evil in this world.

We need less evil people like Trump.

That’s why I’m with her.

(As half-heartedly as possible.)

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