IdeaJones

Tag: politics

How To Save Your Own Life

(Or Break Your Own Heart).

It’s been a scary year. No matter which side of the fence you were on, or if you chose to stay home, or when offered a choice between A and B you decided to order a mongoose, someone has called you a deluded moron, either online or to your face.

We’ve been played, dear ones. And we’re still being played.

We were encouraged to be angry and suspicious of each other. To believe that *our* side held the golden ticket to the 100% pure, diamond-studded Answer From On High, and the people on the other side were idiots, deranged, dangerous, barely human. If you found yourself saying (insert group of your choice) are (stupid, crazy, dangerous, unpatriotic, selfish, lazy, whatever insult you’ve got), say it with me now, “Baaaaaaaa!” We’re growing wool, dear ones.

Doesn’t matter what party you belong to or if you don’t belong to a party at all. If you criticized not the candidates, but their followers, you got played. Because those people you’ve been calling names? They’re the same people you’re going to have to work with if anything is going to get better. No group is big enough to do it alone. And no group is large enough to do it despite the others. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We may have come to this country on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now.” He wasn’t wrong.

The riots going on? No matter what party we belong to, we own those. If you’re a Republican, and you spent this last year saying “they” don’t love this country, or “they” want to take away jobs and don’t care about what’s important or are just blindly following the party line, you personally asked your neighbors to refuse to accept it if the GOP candidate won and fight to protect themselves. If you didn’t stand up and loudly refuse to go along when candidates and supporters called other people a threat, then you bought a piece of the discord going on now.

Democrat? Spent the year ridiculing supporters on the other side, saying they’re dangerous, stupid, crazy or all three and want to throw the country back to the Stone Age? Congrats, you helped solidify the opposition’s support and gave those people no good way to simply change their minds.

Third party voter or nonvoter? By not bothering to find out how the Electoral College works, you turned yourself into a cipher. You removed yourself from the process and made it that much easier for the powers that be to ignore you.

If you got this far, first off, thanks, you’re a brave soul. And yes, I count myself in the “us” that screwed everything up. We all belong to this club.

Mason Cooley said “Enjoy an insult as you deliver it, before you learn its cost.” Congratulations, you win a riot, and you win a riot, and we all win a riot! Yay for us?

So what’s next, dear ones? Where do we go from here? What do we want done? Let’s be clear — no matter who won, that person would still be an insider gaming the system. Not that whoever it is would wish you ill, but chances are his first priority would be pleasing the people who got him there. He’s willing to do you some good if it does him no harm.

So let’s not leave it up to whoever’s in charge. Leaders can only lead if followers follow — otherwise that “leader” is just a person going it alone. Talk to your neighbors, yes, even the ones you disagree with. What do you want in your community? What can you agree on? Find that stuff, take all this wild energy we seem to possess, and let’s get to work. Together.

One thing to remember is that when you’re hurting or unhappy and someone tells you the problem is *that* person *over there,* it’s usually to deflect you from noticing that at least part of the problem is right there, pointing at someone else. People who genuinely want to help you don’t waste time getting you to blame somebody else. They help you.

November 13, 2016
Doing Your Civic Doody

We will never forget this election year. Oh, we’ll try, but we’ll never forget.

Lord, I’m looking forward to the end of this election.

I envy people who came of age in the 60s. Who knows what kind of President JFK would have been long-term, but they at least had the chance to be idealistic.

It was bad enough when the “bleeding heart liberals” faced off against the “heartless right-wingers.” The language has gotten harsher. This time, it sounds as if all sides believe the other side is no longer human, not just mistaken, but evil. Only one side gets heard in the end, because the winning side continues to paint the losing side as tainted, untouchable. We’re giving up the ability to become one country after the votes are tallied.

While I’ve spoken out about the issues and the candidates in this election, I’ve tried to avoid demonizing or deifying any side. Back someone into a corner, and his only way out is to fight you. Everyone is worried, scared, tense and tired. Not the best condition in which to make decisions. We have to leave each other room to negotiate our shared future regardless of who wins the election.

My tolerance does not extend to the candidates themselves and their handlers. One especially. I understand how someone could support Donald Trump in the beginning, and once there, with people saying you’re stupid or worse, switching requires eating a huge slice of humble pie. They didn’t leave you any way out with your pride intact.

But if you can do it, if you can manage to choke down that much humility and admit he fooled you, know that at least one person admires you for that. It is hard to say you’re wrong. I hate admitting I’m wrong. So if you look at the way he hasn’t released his tax records when he’s the only candidate in decades not to do that, the way he says things and then says he didn’t say them when they’ve been recorded and it’s irrefutable that he did, if you can see that you thought you were getting a can-do businessman, but what he’s selling you is a hazardous, toxic man-baby who would lie to your face, use you and discard you in a heartbeat, then I and every other reasonable, decent person in this country, possibly around the world, will owe you our respect. Everyone gets fooled from time to time, but it takes a lot to admit it.

It’s not you I don’t respect — it’s him. You’re not evil. You’re not stupid. You got conned. It happens to most of us. Even if you can’t quite admit it publicly, which is even harder, admit it when you vote your ballot and kick this toxic con artist where it will pain him most — in his ego. You’re in the position to give him the lesson he desperately needs.

And once it’s over, we all need to put down our darts and knives and come together to keep our government working on the problems we need it to handle. So those who have been demonizing the opposition will have to swallow those “I told you so’s” unsaid, refrain from saying or posting that perfect insult, stop being unmitigated asshats, and work for the common good without name-calling. Mason Cooley once said, “Enjoy an insult as you deliver it, before you learn its cost.” The people you demonize will not work with you. If you want things to get better, you’re going to have to leave those witty barbs unsaid.

We need to get back to working with each other, talking to each other, and admiring posts of each others’ lunches and pets. It won’t be easy, but it will feel good.

If we’ve ever wanted to be superheroes, now’s our chance.

October 18, 2016
A Piece of Peace
Hi — I guess it’s current events that have me working on peace symbols. Here are some events from 1966:
- Sniper atop the tower at the University of Texas kills 12 and wounds 31.
- Riots in Watts, Cleveland and Atlanta
- Civil rights marcher James Meredith shot.
Sound familiar? Here’s the good news — while it feels as though current events are unique, each generation laments how the world it going to ruin. We remember the past through filters of our own youth. Looking back, we’re always younger, probably fitter, definitely less aware of mortality. I told Mark the other day that what I really want is to move to Santa Cruz circa 1966. He said that Santa Cruz might be doable, but 1966 wasn’t. Would I really want to return the world to 1966, with the same social problems we have now but less progress on them?

With pollution but less being done about it? People I have come to care about shoved back into their closets, or kicked off the bus? No, of course not.

The world is always what we make of it. It’s as good as we decide to be. Which means there’s hope. So I keep making peace symbols and giving my pennies to charities helping people and pets in need, and hoping.

Look at Opening Doors, a small charity helping refugees resettle in the Sacramento area. Just as we’re hearing a lot about how we should just boot anyone who comes here back, there are people helping those who have fled violence and hunger to start over in America.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. ” That’s from our Declaration of Independence. We’ve spent all the time since trying to decide who is included in “all.” Does it mean dark people? Women?
Like the Biblical commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” it’s hardly ambiguous, yet we argue over the meaning. Both are ideals to strive towards, and imperfect human beings fall short of them, but they give us a goal. Like the idea of peace. We may never achieve perfect peace. We’re not even sure what it would look like if we did. But it gives us something to reach for, a destination to head toward. It gives us hope.

I hope that for today at least you are at peace.

By the way, these designs are available on jewelry at Zazzle.com, and on bags, clothing, and more at our Redbubble shop, where a portion of each sale goes to charities helping people or pets in need.
July 30, 2016