The Lunatic State of America

I was one of those who 4 years ago thought it unimaginable that Donald Trump could be elected president. He was so obviously a liar, a fool, and an irresponsible narcissist that I couldn’t imagine there would be enough Americans to fall for him, despite the arguable lack of good alternatives (personally, I thought Hillary Clinton was a decent candidate who would've made a fine president, but I understand how and why others could reasonably disagree). But it's what's happened since Trump's ascent that is truly disturbing. The party that originally put him forward with some uncertainty has now practically deified him. Some go so far as to proclaim that he is Heaven-sent.

I have remained baffled these 4 years, that even as his approval ratings have never reached 50 percent of the American people, they have only rarely dipped below 40 percent. And one of the things that baffles me most is that White, God-fearing, Christian Evangelicals make up the solid core of his base. And that this core overlaps with working-class, minimally-educated White men. On the surface, these are groups I would’ve thought least likely to embrace an arrogant, wealthy, New York City celebrity. I stumbled across a podcast that has helped to shed some light on this phenomenon. “Straight White American Jesus” by “two ex-evangelical ministers-turned-religion professors” is worth a listen. (https://straightwhiteamericanjesus.podomatic.com/)

Trump has managed to whittle away belief in science, in the press, the judiciary, the military, and of course the Federal government, which he has rendered almost deserving of dismissal through his gross mis-management. The Deep State conspiracy theory has been fueled, and up to 40% of Americans believe that the only trustworthy sources of information are the Bible and the Tweets of IMPOTUS - despite the fact that both are riddled with inconsistencies. 

My nightmare throughout the Trump presidency has been that he would lead the country into civil war, or even global war. I confess deep relief that neither has happened, yet. However, his recent tweets to “liberate” states from Corona virus measures, explicitly citing 2^nd amendment rights, and in support of fully armed protesters, affirms the reasonableness of my concerns.

For years I’ve heard Islamophobes insist that a fundamental difference between Islam and Christianity is that the latter is “too mature a religion” to promote the levels of intolerance and violence spawned by Islam. But sadly, that maturity is nowhere in evidence in MAGA-land these days. And bringing young children together with automatic weapons to street protests strikes me as a few steps beyond anti-social, and beyond sanity.

One of the big problems with Christianity is that its call for “true faith” dares the believer not only to reject negative proof, but also to reject the need for any positive proof. Reliance on proof or scientific evidence only demonstrates that one has little faith. The more illogical and absurd Trump’s actions and statements, the more he piles lie upon deflection, and blame upon lie, the more urgent becomes the call to faith, and the more blessed is he or she who remains true.

Though I’ve lived in Canada for over twenty-five years now, and even since becoming a dual citizen, I’m still much more American than I’ll ever be Canadian. I would cite as evidence that I watch mostly American news, follow the NFL and not the CFL, and I’m hardly aware of Canadian films or television shows, but those things are all true of lots of Canadians. One thing that marks me as “still a Yankee” for sure – to myself, anyway – is my lunatic way of looking at politics. 

As Americans, we cling more tenaciously to philosophical and political ideals than do Canadians. We’re more dogmatic, and quicker to stake everything on our dogma. Canadians too, boast of being the greatest country on Earth, but more in the way that most of us will say that our parents are the greatest – though we mean it, we won’t feel offended, or that we’ve been betrayed when we hear our best friend say the same thing. Canadians are just as fallible, just as error-prone as Americans. We had Rob Ford as major of our largest city, after all. And he was almost as shamelessly outrageous, arrogant and ignorant as Trump. I sometimes wonder how much of Ford's playbook Trump stole. Maybe it's just that Canadians have more humility, and don't stake quite so much on being RIGHT all the time, so don't put so much fervor into making the other WRONG. In any case, it is clear to me that sanity prevails to a substantially greater degree here, North of the border.

The current political divide in America really scares me. Trump has been campaigning for a second term since the first week of his first term. And I don’t think he’s above using the Corona crisis as cause to make voting in November as burdensome as possible where this will help him. And I don’t doubt that there are groups of zealots out there now, armed to the teeth and impatient for the Second Coming, who will be all too happy to usher in a Holy War when a humiliated Trump claims that a “fake”, rigged, witch-hunt of an election forced him from power.

I pray it ain’t so, but in the current Lunatic State of America, it seems that anything is possible.

Eluding Death, Pursuing Life

              I’ve heard so much lately about how young people take risks because they feel that they are beyond harm or death, that they believe themselves to be invincible. And while I get it – after all, I took my own share of thoughtless risks in my early years – it wasn’t because I felt invulnerable. I never felt that way.

My carelessness was another thing altogether. Usually it was a matter of focusing on things other than any apparent risk, like whatever I was trying to get (sex, very likely), or what I was trying to avoid (like embarrassment or shame). At other times – maybe even most of the time – I just wasn’t thinking. When I was young, it was easy to get caught up in the moment. Or in my emotions. I often didn’t even recognize those risks that adults thought I wasn’t taking seriously, until I was seeing them in the rear view mirror. Being oblivious – or pre-occupied – may make it appear that a young person thinks they’re invulnerable or immune, but that sure isn’t how I remember feeling.

I don’t know that I ever felt particularly safe or secure when I was young. I had doubts about everything. And I spent lots of time imagining horrible outcomes to my actions and inactions. It’s just that my worries and concerns weren’t the ones that adults thought I should be pre-occupied with. So, for example, I wasn’t nearly as worried about catching a venereal disease as I was about not getting laid and there being zero possibility of catching one.

              Life for the young is about living, and there’s great insecurity in fearing that life could end before real living has even begun. Bad possibilities abound. And don’t the worse possibilities involve not getting the things we dream of?

              Compared to me in my twenties, it’s the 66 year old I’ve become who has a cavalier attitude about risk and death. And it still has little to do with thinking I’m invulnerable. Of course I’m not invulnerable. It’s very clear to me that I’m just a tiny speck of life in a vast universe, and that I can be obliterated instantly. Existence provides no effective insurance policy.

              It’s just that death isn’t so threatening to me anymore. Not in the way it used to be. Because now, I’ve been there and I’ve done that. Not nearly everything, of course. But enough to know that I’ve been, I’ve existed. And though I’m but the merest speck of being, I’ve danced with this universe that surrounds me.

              I’ve tipped over my share of dominoes. I’ve negotiated a few forks in the road, turning one possibility into reality and relegating another to what-might-have-been. And while I don’t believe in anything like heaven or hell, I do believe that a sort of cosmic recycling is at work, from which nothing escapes. It’s not that I expect to ever be ‘me’ again after my physical death, but something of me will be part of something else that will come into being. So I can’t really be afraid of dying in the way I used to.

I say all this without having had kids, which is one of the treasures I once looked forward to as a defining component of my future. That failing stands as my life’s biggest disappointment. But the fact of it hasn’t soured or crushed me, and it has contributed to an acceptance or understanding that I will try to put into words, though I’m not sure I can.

I had a daughter who didn’t quite make it into this world. She came along late in my life, when I’d given up the dream and had already begun to mourn. And she was unplanned, a surprise. I immediately began to imagine who she was, who she might become. With no evidence of it, I decided that we were being given a daughter. And I named her Flame. And she immediately began to impact my life, and the life of her mother, and our relationship.

Her mother and I made life choices in preparation for becoming Flame’s parents and welcoming her into the world. I can’t describe for you – but many of you parents must know better than I – the thrill and excitement of preparing to bring a new Earthling to life. It gave me future vision like I didn’t know was possible, suddenly projecting my awareness years and decades into the future.

Flame turned out to have a serious, genetic defect, and within a few days of us receiving and beginning to digest that news, her mother miscarried. Flame never made it into this world. But I realized soon after that Flame had already changed us in irreversible ways. We had set our lives on different paths, and new doors had already opened, while others had closed. And so much newness and beauty has continued to flow into our lives ever since. I think frequently of Flame, the daughter I never got to know except inside a dream inside of my heart. And yet, she’s had as real an effect on me as anyone else I’ve known in life.

So what’s there to fear about dying? It isn’t that I don’t want to go on living. I love my life, and while I’m not one of those who would like to live forever, I hope that I have a good bit more of it to look forward to. There are still some things I’d like to see and do. But also many others things that I’ve accepted I never will. At this point, death can’t take anything away that I need to hold onto.

Even as I write this, I can see what an odd thing it is to express. Especially now, when the world is being turned on its head by this wave of sickness, when so many are dying suddenly and unexpectedly. And often needlessly, from the taking of thoughtless or defiant risks. I guess that we all fear death in some way, if only in the same way that we tense up in anticipation of the unknown. For many of us, there’s concern about how we might die, hoping it won’t be painful, or that we don’t hang for long in a borderland of misery.

But for the young – if I remember correctly and am not just projecting backwards – the fear is mostly about the unrealized potential that may be snatched away. And good for them if they are so busy pursuing life that they give death little thought. My most heartfelt advice to them would not be that they be more careful. In the words attributed to Goethe, “Boldness has beauty, power and magic in it!” And in the end, isn’t it the things we haven’t done and haven’t tried that we regret most?

Surviving the Corona Vacation

              I experienced life among the ambivalently employed for many years. Contract jobs that ended when funding ran out. Jobs I quit or was fired from. And jobs that were part time or seasonal to begin with. Which meant a fair amount of time between jobs, usually but not always looking or waiting for that next gig.

              Which is to say, I have more experience than most dealing with weeks and months of unstructured time. To someone who has worked non-stop with only the occasional vacation, managing a long stretch of time off may be a huge challenge. So I thought that in this period of Corona crisis I might pass along a tip or two on how to survive your unasked-for break from routine.

This is all very basic, survival level advice. And yet, most of it wasn’t very apparent – or I just didn’t consider it important – my first couple of times around this particular block. When all you’ve done is work, it’s easy to develop a romantic sense of what it’s like not to have to work. But time not working is as subject to the pressures and realities of life as time working.

              Maybe the first point to make is that, while the dials on the clock will spin the same when you aren’t working as when you do, you have to take relativity into account. When asked to explain his famous theory, Einstein once said that it was about the difference between the hour you spend waiting for your lover and the hour you spend with you lover before you have to part. In short, the time between you and what you want is always going to feel a lot longer than the time between you and something you dread.

              When you’re working, you can’t wait til the end of the day, the weekend, or the upcoming vacation. You fantasize about a long leave, or retirement. Ahhh … the places you’ll go, the people you’ll see, the amazing accomplishments you’ll rack up on a weekly basis.

              Sadly, it just ain’t so. You see, all that time is gonna shrink to a fraction of what it used to be when you had to work through it. In relative terms, the eight hours that once consumed your entire life becomes reduced to about an hour and forty-five minutes. So don’t be shocked or outrageously disappointed when after a full day you only tick off about one tenth of your optimistic to-do list.

              Now, having taken that first step of re-calibration – having some sort of to-do list can be crucial. I don’t have any doubt that the major lament of people upon returning to work is that they didn’t do most of the things they intended to do. They may then exaggerate what they actually did, leaving them shamed about being even lazier than people already think they are.

            So, have a to-do list, but don’t get carried away with it. My advice is not to start with special projects, but with basic life maintenance and self-care. I mean stuff like eating right, exercising, some type of positive contact with others, some mental activity. These are all areas that may have been somehow proscribed or aligned by work, but in the vacuum, there’s suddenly nothing. And the initial temptation may be just to let it all go. But there’s the great danger, experienced in the past by yours truly, that your routine will devolve into a pattern of late nights, Netflix and ice cream.

I found a good approach was to look at each area of my life and set a daily standard to meet. Areas like: mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, interpersonal, social and creative. These areas overlap a lot, but the idea is to address each of these needs most days, if not every day.

A sample set of activities might be: stretching in the morning; meditation; journaling; a bike ride in the afternoon; always having something to read; and an email or call to a friend or two. Doing all of these things takes up a fair chunk of a day. And it automatically adds enough structure to prevent you from going off a deep end. If you lay whatever special, creative project inspires you on top of that foundation, it keeps you in balance. My own creative outlet usually has to do with writing, but it could be almost anything.

A very important piece for me is to also have some limits. If I don’t keep a lid of three hours on my television viewing, it can easily become six or eight or ten. And when that happens, I can usually wave goodbye to that day’s meditation or bike ride or writing. Another good limit for me is marijuana and alcohol consumption. Toking up a couple of times a week or less is perfect for me. At that frequency, my highs actually stimulate me to be more active. But if it becomes close to a daily habit? Well, that’s when the late nights, Netflix and ice cream take over.

My last bit of advice is to go easy on yourself. These are all simple things to do. But they are also easy to miss. I’ve always been challenged to attend to each of my life areas every day. I don’t punish myself if I miss something. The beauty of not having an externally imposed structure is in freedom and flexibility and feeling. I allow myself to feel my way through most of this. If I’m sensitive to myself, my body reminds me that I need to move more, that I’m not eating well, that I’ve been toking too much herb or sitting too long in front of the tv.

Nothing in my life has taught me to be sensitive to myself like meditation. I can’t recommend it too highly. And if you like where I’m coming from, and would like to explore a method of meditation to take up, here’s a link you can follow: www.dhamma.org

Happy self-isolating everyone!