Samain Thanksgiving Moon
My journey on the fringe of Congregation Beth Evergreen continues to fascinate me. In our mussar class yesterday the conversation turned to postelection feelings. Jews are an interesting subgroup in these matters, mostly part of the educated elite, often part of the moneyed elite, yet vulnerable to shifts in public attitudes, very vulnerable, as all post-holocaust, post-pogrom Jews know. I know this intellectually, as I imagine you do, too.
It’s different up close and in person. One woman yesterday talked about her postelection reality. She couldn’t sleep. She had, very uncharacteristically, purchased a gun and headed off to a shooting range. She’s maybe 65-70. She’s getting her homes ready for sale and has looked into landed immigrancy in Canada and requirements for becoming an Israeli citizen.
She sees, she says, the signs of a pre-holocaust Germany. The holocaust devastated her family and left a deep imprint on her soul. Heads nodded around the table, no one dismissed her as hysterical. Her position was extreme for this group, but not at all off the spectrum of reactions.
Other reactions to the postelection time were offered in a round table discussion last Saturday morning. This was the service for that shabbat. The most common words, echoed yesterday in mussar, were afraid, sad, depressed, fearful, angry. I emphasize this because this is not a group lacking power, financial and political. And yet they still find this election disturbing at a primal level. The woman I mentioned senses her survival at stake.
My Beth Evergreen experience has put me in touch with the dread that must be filling African-Americans, Latinos, anyone here without documentation, LGBT folks, Native Americans, the disabled, the destitute, the homeless. This cannot be, must not be our nation. Whole subgroups should not live in fear of their lives or in fear of their lives being reduced from miserable to untenable.
The safety pin is not much, but it’s a start. Let’s at least do that while we get our heads and hearts around what must come next.
A fraught topic. It has become a canard of post-election coverage that racism and other identity based prejudices drove Trump’s outsize performance in rural America. And, there is no doubt that racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia and nativism were part of Trump’s very cynical-and ultimately successful-campaign strategy.
How you define is how you solve. “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it,” Albert Einstein said. If you have a desire to resolve the current political abyss separating the peculiar combination of the Pharaoh’s and the white working class from the rest of us, you have to decide what the problem really is.
Violent conflict between and among members of the working class occur over the distribution of economic resources: jobs, home loans, good education, accessible and affordable health care, housing and food available at reasonable prices. This is where racism and xenophobia get reinforced as African-Americans, Latinos and recent immigrants compete with non-college educated whites for a vanishing supply of living wage jobs. There are few such jobs now available to persons with a high school education or less.
If we can become the ones who offer real solutions to this devastating economic reality, then we will gain the political support of those whose lives have been changed by them. This is not cynicism, this is politics at its highest and best purpose, resolving public problems communally.
Pre-op physical yesterday. EKG within normal parameters. Dr. Gidday walked me through the pre-op questions including one which wondered if I had dementia. When I asked her how I would know, she laughed, slapped my hand, “Everybody says something like that.”
I’ve seen two movies in the past couple of weeks, Dr. Strange and Arrival. I saw Dr. Strange in 3-D. Fantasy and science fiction still have my attention after all these years. Dr. Strange was fun, great CGI, a cast that includes Tilda Swinton and Benedict Cumberbatch, and the Dr. Strange origin story.
neither is the heptapod language. Time is more flexible than we think, malleable. No Randy Quaid flying his jet into the mothership, no Luke flying his fighter into the weak spot of the death star. In fact, no onscreen violence at all with the exception of an explosion, a brief one. Though you won’t understand unless you see it, Arrival is about the power of language.
As the sky begins to brighten over Black Mountain, this spinning Earth reminds me that after night comes the day. The gradual ratcheting down of temperature reminds me that spring follows the fallow time. The spiral nature of the days and months as they peel away from yesterday yet follow the path of the Great Wheel as they do, reminds me that mother earth preaches patience. Wait, and the season will change. Wait, and dark will become light. It is the message of the Tao. Follow the watercourse way.
Foci 1 Climate Change
More than any single cause this election laid bare the casual disregard both parties have given to these issues over the last 30 to 40 years. Clinton’s third-way moved the party farther from these bedrock issues. Obama tried, but after his first two years, the GOP became the party of obstruction, the party of no.
Darkness has begun to settle on Shadow Mountain. Black Mountain takes out the sun at around 4 pm now and at 5 pm, the current time, evening is ready to shift over to night.
This fault line within American culture has only begun to shift. It has not yet slipped, not yet allowed its full constrained force loose on our common life. Trump’s election is not that earthquake. It will follow in his wake as he takes pussy-grabbing and race-baiting to the home of the country’s first African-American president. Ironically, his predecessor.
As I wrote earlier, I’m not a man given to despair and I don’t feel it this morning, this terrible wakin’ up mornin’ when the American dream has ghosts and rapists and Confederate flag waving, gun toting white men ranging uninhibited in it. This election is, I believe, a result of that dream dissipating like puffy cumulus clouds pounded by hurricane force winds. A dream denied, hopes crushed. What happens to the heart when the future dims?
It remains to be seen whether the toxic stew cooked up by the Donald’s political base will poison our common life and prove fatal to this long experiment in democracy. I doubt that it will. I believe we are, still, stronger than the darker angels of our nature.
Well. The countdown clock is at 0 days and 18 hours as I write this. No more nattering, punditing, analyzing, fearing or hoping. Now it’s time for the votes. For the breathless ring of “We’re calling this state for…” An article posted on Real Clear Politics has it exactly right: “Half of America is about to get gut punched.” If you want to see how the stakes look from the red side, read this short screed from Nevada: 
Read a short line somewhere that said re-examination precedes renewal. My hope is that this election is a re-examination of the American political contract, of what it means to be a nation. I’m far away from my anarchist days when I wished for the Balkanization of the states, the U.S. divided into regional countries. We need each other, red and blue, white and black, brown and yellow. We need each other because ours is a country built on an idea, not a people. We become a people only when that idea ties us together.
Love of America comes from all of us boat people, all those whose ancestors sailed here from Europe, even those brought here against their will, all those who walked across the border in search of a better life, all those who flew here from parts of the world in crisis or in economic disarray. That’s all of us with one notable exception: the native americans.
I imagine, all round the U.S., on all political sides, a fervent Thanksgiving prayer will be, “Thank God, it’s over.” Of course, the finish of this demeaning, dispiriting and dismal campaign will not heal the divisions it has unveiled. Welcome to the new America where less-educated white men and women are newly visible as an underprivileged and problematic slice of the citizenry.