Imbolc Valentine Moon
I’m weary of politics, bet you are, too. A sports columnist compared Trump’s flurry of executive orders to a strategy in basketball where one team fouls the other so much in the first five minutes that referees are less careful the rest of the game. It turns, she said, into a very physical game after that. That’s why we need to stay angry, but stay cool. This is a long game and we need to stay in it.
It’s also why we need to point our anger at its source, not its symptom. The source is the cynical manipulation of fear and despair that Trump and his team of mediocres represent. The symptoms are those who feel fear and despair. Solutions to the current crisis, and it is one, lie in a two-pronged approach: 1. resistance to the actions of Trump and his team of mediocres and 2. finding policy solutions to those matters, principally economic, that drive the fear and despair he and his team exploit.
The resistance has begun. Organizing for Action-Conifer is a local example, but there are thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions participating. Again, and probably again, I will quote Rabbi Tarfon: “It is not your responsibility to complete the perfecting of the world, but you are not free to desist from it either.”
I do not see much evidence, yet, of people proposing policy solutions for the divide that seems most troublesome of all: the economic prospects of U.S. citizens with a high school education or less. Such policies exist, many of them are well known, but the ones that will not work are those that count on the free market. Rising tides do not lift all boats, especially those not seaworthy. Counting on the ocean that sank the smaller boats in the first place is not a plan, it’s a recipe for disaster.
Make no mistake. This time is the direct result of Democrats and liberals ignoring fundamental politics, the politics of financial well-being for those not in the 1%. The shift away from these fundamentals was done in a good cause, this change in focus away from the old union, working persons emphasis of the Democratic party of my youth. Here’s an excellent article that explains how the shift happened and why it’s been so problematic, while also accomplishing a lot of good things along the way: The Peculiar Populism of Donald Trump.
I know. The drumbeat of political war drums can rattle the best of us, make us want to hide until this is all over. I get it. I feel it. Why not just stay up here on Shadow Mountain and let the flood wash up against the foothills below us? Tempting. But not who I am and, I imagine, not who you are either.
