Please Take the Time to Read!
Patriciafaye Marshall
The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story
Normal is coming unhinged. For the last eight years it has been possible for most people (at least in the relatively privileged classes) to believe that society is sound, that the system, though creaky, basically works, and that the progressive deterioration of everything from ecology to economy is a temporary deviation from the evolutionary imperative of progress.
A Clinton Presidency would have offered four more years of that pretense. A woman President following a black President would have meant to many that things are getting better. It would have obscured the reality of continued neoliberal economics, imperial wars, and resource extraction behind a veil of faux-progressive feminism. Now that we have, in the words of my friend Kelly Brogan, rejected a wolf in sheep’s clothing in favor of a wolf in wolf’s clothing, that illusion will be impossible to maintain.
The wolf, Donald Trump (and I’m not sure he’d be offended by that moniker) will not provide the usual sugarcoating on the poison pills the policy elites have foisted on us for the last forty years. The prison-industrial complex, the endless wars, the surveillance state, the pipelines, the nuclear weapons expansion were easier for liberals to swallow when they came with a dose, albeit grudging, of LGBTQ rights under an African-American President.
I am willing to suspend my judgement of Trump and (very skeptically) hold the possibility that he will disrupt the elite policy consensus of free trade and military confrontation – major themes of his campaign. One might always hope for miracles. However, because he apparently lacks any robust political ideology of his own, it is more likely that he will fill his cabinet with neocon war hawks, Wall Street insiders, and corporate reavers, trampling the wellbeing of the working class whites who elected him while providing them their own sugar-coating of social conservatism.
The social and environmental horrors likely to be committed under President Trump are likely to incite massive civil disobedience and possibly disorder. For Clinton supporters, many of whom were halfhearted to begin with, the Trump administration could mark the end of their loyalty to our present institutions of government. For Trump supporters, the initial celebration will collide with gritty reality when Trump proves as unable or unwilling as his predecessors to challenge the entrenched systems that continually degrade their lives: global finance capital, the deep state, and their programming ideologies. Add to this the likelihood of a major economic crisis, and the public’s frayed loyalty to the existing system could snap.
We are entering a time of great uncertainty. Institutions so enduring as to seem identical to reality itself may lose their legitimacy and dissolve. It may seem that the world is falling apart. For many, that process started on election night, when Trump’s victory provoked incredulity, shock, even vertigo. “I can’t believe this is happening!”
At such moments, it is a normal response to find someone to blame, as if identifying fault could restore the lost normality, and to lash out in anger. Hate and blame are convenient ways of making meaning out of a bewildering situation. Anyone who disputes the blame narrative may receive more hostility than the opponents themselves, as in wartime when pacifists are more reviled than the enemy.
Racism and misogyny are devastatingly real in this country, but to blame bigotry and sexism for voters’ repudiation of the Establishment is to deny the validity of their deep sense of betrayal and alienation. The vast majority of Trump voters were expressing extreme dissatisfaction with the system in the way most readily available to them. (See here, here, here, here) Millions of Obama voters voted for Trump (six states who went for Obama twice switched to Trump). Did they suddenly become racists in the last four years? The blame-the-racists (the fools, the yokels…) narrative generates a clear demarcation between good (us) and evil (them), but it does violence to the truth. It also obscures an important root of racism – anger displaced away from an oppressive system and its elites and onto other victims of that system. Finally, it employs the same dehumanization of the other that is the essence of racism and the precondition for war. Such is the cost of preserving a dying story. That is one reason why paroxysms of violence so often accompany a culture-defining story’s demise.
The dissolution of the old order that is now officially in progress is going to intensify. That presents a tremendous opportunity and danger, because when normal falls apart the ensuing vacuum draws in formerly unthinkable ideas from the margins. Unthinkable ideas range from rounding up the Muslims in concentration camps, to dismantling the military-industrial complex and closing down overseas military bases. They range from nationwide stop-and-frisk to replacing criminal punishment with restorative justice. Anything becomes possible with the collapse of dominant institutions. When the animating force behind these new ideas is hate or fear, all manner of fascistic and totalitarian nightmares can ensue, whether enacted by existing powers or those that arise in revolution against them.
That is why, as we enter a period of intensifying disorder, it is important to introduce a different kind of force to animate the structures that might appear after the old ones crumble. I would call it love if it weren’t for the risk of triggering your New Age bullshit detector, and besides, how does one practically bring love into the world in the realm of politics? So let’s start with empathy. Politically, empathy is akin to solidarity, born of the understanding that we are all in this together. In what together? For starters, we are in the uncertainty together.
We are exiting an old story that explained to us the way of the world and our place in it. Some may cling to it all the more desperately as it dissolves, looking perhaps to Donald Trump to restore it, but their savior has not the power to bring back the dead. Neither would Clinton have been able to preserve America as we’d known it for too much longer. We as a society are entering a space between stories, in which everything that had seemed so real, true, right, and permanent comes into doubt. For a while, segments of society have remained insulated from this breakdown (whether by fortune, talent, or privilege), living in a bubble as the containing economic and ecological systems deteriorate. But not for much longer. Not even the elites are immune to this doubt. They grasp at straws of past glories and obsolete strategies; they create perfunctory and unconvincing shibboleths (Putin!), wandering aimlessly from “doctrine” to “doctrine” – and they have no idea what to do. Their haplessness and half-heartedness was plain to see in this election, their disbelief in their own propaganda, their cynicism. When even the custodians of the story no longer believe the story, you know its days are numbered. It is a shell with no engine, running on habit and momentum.
We are entering a space between stories. After various retrograde versions of a new story rise and fall and we enter a period of true unknowing, an authentic next story will emerge. What would it take for it to embody love, compassion, and interbeing? I see its lineaments in those marginal structures and practices that we call holistic, alternative, regenerative, and restorative. All of them source from empathy, the result of the compassionate inquiry: What is it like to be you?
It is time now to bring this question and the empathy it arouses into our political discourse as a new animating force. If you are appalled at the election outcome and feel the call of hate, perhaps try asking yourself, “What is it like to be a Trump supporter?” Ask it not with a patronizing condescension, but for real, looking underneath the caricature of misogynist and bigot to find the real person.
Even if the person you face IS a misogynist or bigot, ask, “Is this who they are, really?” Ask what confluence of circumstances, social, economic, and biographical, may have brought them there. You may still not know how to engage them, but at least you will not be on the warpath automatically. We hate what we fear, and we fear what we do not know. So let’s stop making our opponents invisible behind a caricature of evil.
We’ve got to stop acting out hate. I see no less of it in the liberal media than I do in the right-wing. It is just better disguised, hiding beneath pseudo-psychological epithets and dehumanizing ideological labels. Exercising it, we create more of it. What is beneath the hate? My acupuncturist Sarah Fields wrote to me, “Hate is just a bodyguard for grief. When people lose the hate, they are forced to deal with the pain beneath.”
I think the pain beneath is fundamentally the same pain that animates misogyny and racism – hate in a different form. Please stop thinking you are better than these people! We are all victims of the same world-dominating machine, suffering different mutations of the same wound of separation. Something hurts in there. We live in a civilization that has robbed nearly all of us of deep community, intimate connection with nature, unconditional love, freedom to explore the kingdom of childhood, and so much more. The acute trauma endured by the incarcerated, the abused, the raped, the trafficked, the starved, the murdered, and the dispossessed does not exempt the perpetrators. They feel it in mirror image, adding damage to their souls atop the damage that compels them to violence. Thus it is that suicide is the leading cause of death in the U.S. military. Thus it is that addiction is rampant among the police. Thus it is that depression is epidemic in the upper middle class. We are all in this together.
Something hurts in there. Can you feel it? We are all in this together. One earth, one tribe, one people.
We have entertained teachings like these long enough in our spiritual retreats, meditations, and prayers. Can we take them now into the political world and create an eye of compassion inside the political hate vortex? It is time to do it, time to up our game. It is time to stop feeding hate. Next time you post on line, check your words to see if they smuggle in some form of hate: dehumanization, snark, belittling, derision.., some invitation to us versus them. Notice how it feels kind of good to do that, like getting a fix. And notice what hurts underneath, and how it doesn’t feel good, not really. Maybe it is time to stop.
This does not mean to withdraw from political conversation, but to rewrite its vocabulary. It is to speak hard truths with love. It is to offer acute political analysis that doesn’t carry the implicit message of “Aren’t those people horrible?” Such analysis is rare. Usually, those evangelizing compassion do not write about politics, and sometimes they veer into passivity. We need to confront an unjust, ecocidal system. Each time we do we will receive an invitation to give in to the dark side and hate “the deplorables.” We must not shy away from those confrontations. Instead, we can engage them empowered by the inner mantra that my friend Pancho Ramos-Stierle uses in confrontations with his jailers: “Brother, your soul is too beautiful to be doing this work.” If we can stare hate in the face and never waver from that knowledge, we will access inexhaustible tools of creative engagement, and hold a compelling invitation to the haters to fulfill their beauty.
Image: Creative Commons – picture by Abhi Ryan
larry
I read almost anything I can get my hands on as true knowledge does not
come pre labled or as a hypodermic needle injection.
Wish more would do the same
So.
Let's parse this reading material shall we.
"A Clinton Presidency would have offered four more years of that
> pretense."
So where was this person when the voting took place?
If we discount the possible (and might I add quite easily accomplished
in full view except for those who refuse to see) electronic election
fraud pulled off in dozens of districts, Trump not only trashed her in
the electoral college but won the popular vote by very wide margins as a
rational person would expect.
So where did the rest of the voting come from?
Those who prefer to commit political suicide?
In a rational country there would have been three votes for HIllary: her
own, Bills and Chelsey's with Bills vote being a maybe as I don't think
even he likes her. That's is if voting was based simply on her 'open
like a book' past history.
"rejected a wolf in sheep’s clothing in favor of a wolf in wolf’s
> clothing, that illusion will be impossible to maintain."
She clearly spells out the fact that Hillary never met a fact she would
not lie about and it also proved to be her and her bloated dead corpse
of a party's undoing.
Now can I hear a Hallelujah and Amen?? May the corpse never rest in peace.
"> I am willing to suspend my judgement of Trump and (very skeptically)
> hold the possibility that he will disrupt the elite policy consensus of
> free trade and military confrontation"
Hillary was more pro free trade and military confrontation supporting.
Both issues Bernie supporters tried to declare their disdain for and the
same rhetoric that comes from most declared Democrats.
So once again where did the votes for her come from.
I have said many times that both Republicans as well as Democrats appear
to be capable of holding two completely diametrically conflicting
thoughts simultaneously in their head and declare both to be valid.
This is a clear sign that one has become a part of a cult.
"it is more likely that he will
> fill his cabinet with neocon war hawks, Wall Street insiders, and
> corporate reavers, trampling the wellbeing of the working class whites
> who elected him while providing them their own sugar-coating of social
> conservatism."
It's the natural order of things and has been since man emerged from the
cave.
And his actions will of course be carried out in full sight of both his
supporters as well as those who now show their complete lack of an IQ
above room temperature as they protest across America because their
chosen Neo-Con Tyrant lost the election.
And it's guaranteed that when the time comes to protest Trumps
transgressions these same moron's will be doing more protesting. And
that's all they will do as actually solving the problems will require
them getting out of bed and looking away from their electronic form of
mind pablum known ironically as a 'smart' phone.
God help us.
"> Racism and misogyny are devastatingly real in this country, but to blame
> bigotry and sexism for voters’ repudiation of the Establishment is to
> deny the validity of their deep sense of betrayal and alienation. The
> vast majority of Trump voters were expressing extreme dissatisfaction
> with the system in the way most readily available to them"
Yet the entire campaign of Hillary Clinton was based almost exclusively
on this so called reality that did not exist in actual form except as
defined by the Clinton Mainstream Media, which by the way has now gone
from being accepted as truth by less than %6 of the populace,to %0 as
it's now as much a dead and rotting corpse as the Democrat party (note
the lack of ic as the party has no relationship at all to democracy)
So once again how did she exceed three total votes?
> Millions of Obama voters voted for Trump (six states who went for Obama
> twice switched to Trump). Did they suddenly become racists in the last
> four years?
Is there anyone left who watches or listens to any of these media
sources who is not also into necrophilia and gets a rise out of gazing
at the dead??
"> We are entering a time of great uncertainty. Institutions so enduring as
> to seem identical to reality itself may lose their legitimacy and
> dissolve. It may seem that the world is falling apart. For many, that
> process started on election night, when Trump’s victory provoked
> incredulity, shock, even vertigo. “I can’t believe this is happening!”"
You alone have created this reality
Institutions will lose legitimacy and dissolve? But of course.
How's that go?
"From dust you came and to dust you shall return"
That's what happens to all dead and rotting corpse's dummy.
" Neither would Clinton
> have been able to preserve America as we’d known it for too much longer."
and her entire record showed no intent at all of preserving any piece of
what America once was. You simply would need to look at who her donors
were and look at her record and it became quite clear she has always
hated America and therefore was easy pickings for predators such as
George the Jew Killer Soro's whose sole goal in life is total world
domination. He even has stated as such in public speeches and in
writing. Hard to believe for us normal folks but yes he has balls that big.
Okay. Enough parsing I suppose
This is a well written piece and well thought out
To bad so few who call themselves Democrats were unwilling to read such
writings before throwing away your vote on a servant to the worlds most
viscous predators.
But I feel good about this election in one way.
At least the Democrat party is dead and the Republicans will have a
chance to show their true colors.
Hopefully those who then see them will not be as color blind as those
who voted for a severe shade of grey and thought they saw a pink rose.
On 11/11/2016 10:51 AM, Patriciafaye Marshall wrote:
> This is the context I aspire to embrace!
>
>
> The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story
> Posted on Nov 10, 2016
>
>
>
> Normal is coming unhinged. For the last eight years it has been possible
> for most people (at least in the relatively privileged classes) to
> believe that society is sound, that the system, though creaky, basically
> works, and that the progressive deterioration of everything from ecology
> to economy is a temporary deviation from the evolutionary imperative of
> progress.
>
> A Clinton Presidency would have offered four more years of that
> pretense. A woman President following a black President would have meant
> to many that things are getting better. It would have obscured the
> reality of continued neoliberal economics, imperial wars, and resource
> extraction behind a veil of faux-progressive feminism. Now that we have,
> in the words of my friend Kelly Brogan
> <http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/10/the-big-split/>, here
> <http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/09/the-rejection-of-wall-streets-globalization-project-ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead/>,
> here
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/revenge_of_the_deplorables_20161109>)
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larry
Let this election be a good lesson for our future
Bennie Sanders ran as what he liked to call a Democratic Socialist
Two diametrically opposite philosophies linked in a feeble attempt to
obscure the obvious
Kind of like the feeble attempt at obscuring the lie of crony capitalism
and free market capitalism.
Socialism in all its forms is essentially violence in another form
Don't believe me?
So let me ask.
You attempt to transform your entire system from what we now have (not
sure how best to describe it) to some form of socialism.
What mechanism or system of coercion do you use to make it happen?
It's an ism after all and the only means the state (single most key
element for enforcement with emphasis on force) has in creating
socialism is through some form of violence be it true physical violence
delivered by a form of thuggery or it uses the 'velvet glove method' in
a form such as the IRS where non compliance leads to theft of personal
wealth or prison time. Both methods are violence
So now I hear "but ours will be done democratically"
The omnipotent power we give over to the state to control all of us will
be under our control don't you know.
We just witnessed the greatest failure of what we cynically call
democracy. At least for some members of the herd.
When Thomas Jefferson stated that you cannot have a democracy in an ill
informed populace I'm certain he would find our current situation to be
a perfect example of democracies' greatest limitation.
There's prey who represent the majority and then there's the predator.
This time we defeated at least temporarily a predator that was not even
honorable enough to admit she was one.
We thankfully voted overwhelmingly for a predator that we can at least
recognize as one and thus design a form of defense.
Now the secret will be to gather the prey in a defensive circle and once
again attempt to not become dinner.
perhaps some of us could gather up those who just volunteered to be a
human filet and at least keep the predators busy carving them up while
we move off to a bit of safety.
On 11/11/2016 10:51 AM, Patriciafaye Marshall wrote:
>
>
> The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story
> Posted on Nov 10, 2016
>
>
>
> Normal is coming unhinged. For the last eight years it has been possible
> for most people (at least in the relatively privileged classes) to
> believe that society is sound, that the system, though creaky, basically
> works, and that the progressive deterioration of everything from ecology
> to economy is a temporary deviation from the evolutionary imperative of
> progress.
>
> A Clinton Presidency would have offered four more years of that
> pretense. A woman President following a black President would have meant
> to many that things are getting better. It would have obscured the
> reality of continued neoliberal economics, imperial wars, and resource
> extraction behind a veil of faux-progressive feminism. Now that we have,
> in the words of my friend Kelly Brogan
> <http://paulkingsnorth.net/2016/11/07/the-revolutionary-moment/>, here
> <http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/10/the-big-split/>, here
> <http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/09/the-rejection-of-wall-streets-globalization-project-ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead/>,
> here
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/revenge_of_the_deplorables_20161109>)
Linda Grove
Larry, I'm curious what you think of Sacred Economics...Charles Eisenstein's book and philosophy about "gift economy"? Here's the link for those who may not be familiar:. http://sacred-economics.com
Linda
larry
I've also seen over the years similar ideas put forth from the likes of
a Paul Hawkin, Peter Joseph of zeitgeist fame etc.
Most fall under examples such as these
http://listverse.com/2015/06/28/10-potential-alternatives-to-the-conventional-capitalist-system/
All of these examples of an alternative economy and financial system
rely on the same basic altruistically oriented methods of bringing their
system about.
Unfortunately all are destined to fail miserably for the same reasons we
now have the .01% dominating the 99.099%
Goes right back to predator/prey coupled with an almost built in
willingness of the prey to not fight off the predator and allow all to
thrive but rather to choose the easy path in selecting out certain
members of the herd to be sacrificed so that others can go on living as
they once again pledge allegiance to the predator Kings
Cattle,Bison,Wildebeest and might I add humans. They all do it.
The only means we as humans have to at least make an attempt at
controlling the .01% and having the rest of our society at least survive
is the rule of law. Make rules and regulations too severe and you kill
off the golden calf and end up not only poor but ultimately ruled by the
lowest of the low such as they had in the Soviet Union.
Far too weak and add an additional embracing of a criminal contempt for
your own laws and you have the malignant cancer and rot of an
unregulated Capitalist system hiding behind a sycophantic psychopath
such as a Hillary Clinton.
No one alternative economic system holds any secrets for success
In fact most don't like to admit it but our entire economic resource
extraction and infinite growth model is fatally flawed and will
ultimately collapse just as any system in nature collapses when it no
longer stays within workable boundaries or like humans when they base
economic systems on essentially a belief in Unicorns.
It all boils down to each individual doing their best to stay informed
and setting a goal of constantly questioning authority.
Even a completely uninformed idiot stands at least a chance if they
question authority.
Avoid falling victim to the ideologies of a cult such as our political
parties or most if not all religions.
Now I must go off and attempt to inject at least some level of this kind
of thinking in our local community through the school system and once
again I'll observe how rare it is for leaders to turn their heads and
actually see someone following them and lending a hand.
Suppose they are all too busy now selecting which of their fellow prey
they will sacrifice to the predator class and once again show surprise
that now it's their turn to be sacrificed.
larry
if you think I'm just blowing smoke when I talk about one group of prey
willing to sacrifice others in the herd so they can at least then go
back to pledging allegiance to the King and still remain poor and
uneducated and lower than dirt. Take a look at this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdZCERnEk04
Had Bernie Sanders at least made even a tepid effort at addressing how
the predators really feel about the prey (of course that would have made
him a target of the politically correct cultists) and he was not simply
a Judas Goat in the service of the Clinton Crime Family (essentially the
Democrat Party) and had overcome the factually based and proven methods
used to defeat him in the primary election he could possibly now be your
President.
Perhaps.
But Trump still held the TRUMP cards in this battle.
At least we could have seen first hand how miserably his Socialistic
plans would fail.
Then maybe we get back to something more non Unicorn based as we pick
through the rubble that once was America.
At best I give Europe another decade under best odds before their
embrace of socialism, blind altruism and politically correct death
wishes leads them to be a carbon copy of the waste and ignorance that is
now the middle east and Islam
Question authority and America may still have a chance of being one of
the few places where there is still 'light in the windows'.
On 11/11/2016 11:08 PM, Linda Grove wrote:
Liz Marlia-Stein
Mother Teresa
Larry, I'm curious what you think of Sacred Economics...Charles Eisenstein's book and philosophy about "gift economy"? Here's the link for those who may not be familiar:. http://sacred-economics.com
Linda
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