Samhain                                                                    Thanksgiving Moon

Despair and fear crown the pronouncements of GOP candidates about ISIS. Watch mosques. Don’t let in any refugees. Make all Muslims wear an identifying marker. Yes, it’s easy from the left to see these notions as simply stupid, xenophobic canards, but they mean more than that.

At least I think they do. When I listen, I hear people who fear for the stability of their lives. People whose current situation seems so fragile that difference could make it shatter. The economy has consistently displaced the working class, leaving with them no job options that can support a family.

Veterans come home from fighting our misadventures in the Middle East, veterans whose personal origins are most likely working class or even lower on the socioeconomic scale, and find no work. The hawks who wanted them to stave off the coming tide of this group or that group want more money for defense but not for the defenders, especially the defenders now out in the work world after their military duty is over.

The flag wavers, the stars and bars loyalists, signal not so much love of country, but fear of missed or fading opportunity. We’ve created a unique, even Alice down the rabbit hole world where those whose lives are being ruined by the oligarchic 1% pin the blame on people fleeing the very same radical terrorists they want to eliminate.

It’s easy for a Ben Carson or a Donald Trump or a Ted Cruz to ignite the flame of discontent among these Americans. The lesson for those of us not taken in by these poseurs is that the anguish in this country is real. Life in the U.S. has been tainted by decades of war, by trickle up economics, by blindness to the history of this almost 100% immigrant nation.

These dark currents in our common life will not find resolution soon. We (the left) need to convince the Trump, Carson, Cruz voters that we do in fact care as much about them as we do about the Syrian refugees and the struggles of just folks in the Middle East. This sounds like a subtle difference, but it’s not. There is no choice, either us or them. No, we must use that very word, we, to include Americans and victims of terrorists worldwide. Life does not present us with only one option or the other. We can choose both.

And we must.