The Day After

November 9 2016

Perhaps writing my thoughts will serve as a pressure release and keep me from going on off on someone who starts talking about Trump’s victory, in the next few days.

I feel like I was on a wild roller coaster ride screaming with joy only to have it malfunction and slam to a halt, threatening to kill me and all the people I love who were on there with me. In my simile, I cannot say it killed any of us, since no one I know has actually died as a result of last night’s debacle. There, that’s the good news I was looking for. No one I know is actually dead this morning, as a result of Donald Trump now being President-Elect Trump. I think it will help me that I was able to type those words: President-Elect Trump. So, I typed it again, just in case it really does help.

All of us Hillary supporters seem to have been victimized by the mass euphoria that came with the idea of the first female president and of denouncing Donald Trump for his racism, sexism, bullying, and all the other awful things he does – is - represents. Even President Obama was all swaggy during his appearances on behalf of Hillary, saying things like: “Come on man” and “They took away his twitter,” for laughs. I can understand him being giddy at leaving what must be the most difficult job in the world, after eight long years; and he can be forgiven for believing along with so many of the rest of us, that Hillary was destined to be his successor, but when I think back on his demeanor, it’s like when I think back on so many things leading up to this awful end – it makes we liberals, those of us still basking in the glow of having help elect the first black president – look smug and overconfident.

I want to be angry at her for not fighting back when they called her crooked, criminal, nasty; but I know the pundits will do it without my help, for the foreseeable future. They will pillory Hillary the same way they gore Gore and bury Kerry. Striking out at the “loser” is as predictable as a knee jerking when it is hit with a mallet. I suppose they are searching for the same thing I am, someone or something to blame, that helps the universe appear to make sense. She deserves great respect, though, even for her restraint. Her calm under fire may have helped –oddly enough- lead to her defeat, but she can walk away from politics with her head high - and to paraphrase Michelle’s mantra- while those who falsely accused her, may someday be brought low. That’s the way the world works, right? Justice comes later if not sooner? Please say yes.

I have a nagging feeling this morning, of knowing I could have done more. I could have made phone calls to voters in Ohio, when they emailed me to do so. I could have been more vocal with the people I know; and I could go on with the could haves, relating to the campaign. But there is another sort of woulda, coulda, shoulda feeling I have, which is much deeper, more personal.

As I look back at my life, I can see how I have – at times- been sort of Donald Trumpish in my approach. At times in my life, I have been arrogant, cocky, I have no doubt come across as something of a bully, I have been sexist; treating the women I interact with, with less respect than they deserve. I must have seemed hollow or shallow to others at time, people who would not tell me so, either because they love me or – I shudder to think- because they were afraid of my reaction.

I think that is what I want to try to take away from this whole thing. I want to try to fully grasp who I am by holding up Donald Trump as a comparison; to see where I can improve. That is available to all of us now, and it will be for at least the next four years, unless something even crazier happens and his time is cut short.  

Bullies will have him to remind them how ugly that behavior is. Racists, bigots, religionists, etc. might be shamed into understanding how unfair it is to use one fact about someone to define them; by watching Donald Trump do it on the international stage – hopefully with results that might even make him at some point, feel ashamed.

We will have a woman president someday, we will have another African-American president, and who knows, we may even get to the point that we can elect Michelle Obama to that office. Meanwhile, I think we all understand, we are entering -what I hope is a relatively brief – modern-day version of the dark ages. A woman’s right to choose is imperiled, as is Obamacare, as are seats on the supreme court – I mean, Trump has all of congress and most of the statehouses on his side, so he will be able to inflict maximum damage on: science in general and as it pertains to global climate change, decency, civility, and diversity. He will be able to continue our long nightmare of corporate-controlled government and thus, to keep the gap between the haves and the have-nots at its piteous high.

Nonetheless, I still believe in the enlightenment, the renaissance and perhaps most importantly, evolution. In fact, my hope rests mainly in evolution. Human beings did not have the capacity to reason until relatively recently. Perhaps it was predictable we would exhibit cognitive dissonance about critical reasoning – evidenced-based thinking- since it requires us to suppress our basest instincts, our superstitions and tendency toward grand conspiracy theories. When people are sad, they get afraid, when they get afraid, they get angry, when they get angry, they lash out at the world – and in this case, the “whitelash” as Van Jones called it – will have national and international ramifications.

But just as we will continue to evolve biologically, we will evolve socially and psychologically; until which time humans will be able to think of all sentient beings on this planet as their kind, as their brothers and sisters and their in-group. I doubt if I will see this in my lifetime and I can now see it was probably a pipe dream to imagine I was about to see it soon. I am strong, as are the ones I love who are feeling the same pain I am today. We will not only get through this, but some of us might even live to witness the time when we claim higher ground as a species; and refuse to give it up.

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The Power of Love

When a person is in love, she could keep her hand in ice water until it is frost bitten; lift a car off a toddler – not even her toddler; eat 50 hotdogs in under 30 minutes; give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to an anteater; walk across burning coals; run across the Mohave Desert in a wool coat and so on like that.

Corporations should hire only people in love, fire them when they are no longer in love and replace them with other people who are in love. If everybody who worked for a company was in love, the company could get away with sexual harassment, pay people far less than they are worth, and repeatedly ask them to do things near the limit of their capacity. Not that we want our companies to do those things, but they could, if everyone was in love- and no one would hardly notice.

If everyone on the planet was in love, global climate change could be soon solved. Those who lived in cold climates would never complain about the cold, they would just cuddle up with the one they loved, without needing to produce greenhouse gases to stay warm through energy use. Those who lived in warm climates would never complain about the warmth and not care about air conditioning, because they would want to spend all their time looking at the body of the one they love in its relative state of nakedness.

Of course, if we were all to stay in love, we might have to give up one of our long-standing traditions – monogamy. It is not easy staying head-over-heels in love with the same person for more than a few months or years. So, for everyone to maximize the amount of deep love they feel over the course of their lifetime, we would likely need to be polyamorists.

You may think it a strange thing for a marriage and family therapist to be advocating polyamory, but let me explain. Sure, it would be devastating to our families, our children, even our economy, for everyone to shift immediately away from monogamy. However, what if all of us were constantly seeking to improve ourselves, to the extent that every few years the people who knew us before could not recognize the new us. This could mean those who loved us before might be able to fall in love with the new us, especially if they too were evolving and becoming new people.

What sort of “new people” should we seek to become? We should seek to become the person we fantasize about being, the person we find most admirable, most attractive. We could constantly roll out the new us, excited and refreshed, ready for the person who once loved the old us to find the new us, and fall in love with us once more.

As long as we are all moving ahead with our lives, finding excitement in now, in tomorrow and at future prospects; the odds of the person with whom we are in love falling out of love with us, would go down dramatically, I would suspect. Science could be done to either bear me out on this, or not.

The more we all stay alive and fresh to what life has to offer, the more likely it is the person with whom we are in love, will stay in love with us and we with them; without having to become polyamorous – in anything other than the new way I am proposing here- or otherwise jeopardizing the social order that makes traditional families possible.

I know, you hear it all the time, that being in love is always temporary and you should not look for love to sustain your marriage but rather you should look for something like compassion or commitment or some other word beginning with C. I say, that may be, but since we all know love has a singularly strong-positive effect on human beings. Why not figure out a way to stay under its influence for as much of our lives as we can?

In some ways, I think we are given this proposition by life: if you want to increase the likelihood of staying in love, sign a mutual change pact between yourself and the one with whom you are in love.