Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Who's Got Your Back? Day 7- Not our Family, Friends, or Neighbors

Humans are social animals.  We need each other to thrive and in most cases to survive.  We even need to need others.  So what does it mean when members of a society cannot truthfully say that someone else has their back?  Yet this is true in American culture for many people today.  Many of us have nobody whom we can call in the middle of the night, or in broad daylight for that matter.  Some of us might call but not find a warm reception on the other end of the phone. Others have a spouse that they can't count on or have lost hope that anybody cares for them.

Trump's politics are happening in the context of a society where the operating assumption is that we can't expect anybody to be there for us.  More people don't have children or a family to care for them. But even when people have others they can count on, they anticipate a day they won't be there.  In other words, living as if nobody has their back to some extent, they aren't surprised when they lose government assistance.  


In such a context, it is possible for Trump to make one of those famous Manhattan deals with us where he offers us trinkets like a few low wage manufacturing or mining jobs or a couple hundred dollar tax break in exchange for our land (our common resources), our time, our money, and our lives (in war, lack of regulations).  Trump hasn't told us what we need to know to make this deal with him with free informed consent.  He hasn't disclosed his tax returns and he has impeded investigations concerning his involvement with Russia, for example. By denying us this knowledge, he manipulated us into empowering him with our vote.  He is now using this power for himself, the powerful, and the wealthy. 


Initially we don't have a problem with that because we see ourselves as hard working, capable, and not needing any of those resources that we are giving away politically.  But in the second half of our lives (>45), life has a way of teaching us to be downwardly mobile and we must depend on and share our lives more and more with others. T
hat's still not an issue until we discover that others aren't there for us when we need them, or perhaps we didn't learn how to reach out to them.  


Maybe there is something unattractive about us such as appearance, older age, low self-esteem, or a mental problem.  It isn't hard to imagine a situation where we wouldn't be able to work sufficiently to keep a roof over our heads (this is part of the downward mobility people >45 experience).  When this happens in our rugged individualist culture, many people can't count on having family, friends, or neighbors with the resources and close-enough connection to give us the help we need.


Where Trump is taking us now is to allow Darwinian survival of the fittest take over and let us die when we get to this place.  We become part of the undesirable population that he wants to keep out by either letting us die slowly or more mercifully putting us out of our misery.  We do have one other option.  We could decide today to enshrine in our laws and in our culture the value that we are not here on earth as individuals to fend for ourselves like animals, but that we have the support of a community and that together we will work for the good of all.  Without this continental shift in worldviews, we can't count on our family, friends, and neighbors to have our back. 

Who's Got Your Back? Day 6- Not Our Military

When we think of someone having our back, we might think of somebody with a gun whose job it is to protect us.  This image especially resonates with anybody having military experience.  However, if the money spent on the military since WWII had been spent on humanitarian assistance instead, we would be much safer and the world a far more loving place.

World War II was a history lesson only partially learned.  We got the part that if we helped Germany get back on its feet, we wouldn't have another Hitler to contend with.  But we didn't learn how to keep our own country from becoming the victim of a demagogue.  Since World War II, there have been several justifications for the greatest military buildup that the world has ever seen.  The Cold War and the fight against communism had a lot of traction through the 80's.  Since then as we cut down on humanitarian aid, we became the world's policeman- essentially humanitarian killers.

The humanitarian killer thing was always more of a myth for U.S. consumption.  The rest of the world never really bought the idea that spending all this money for troops all over the globe and using them wherever a case for police action could be made, was done out of the goodness of our hearts and a desire for everyone to have the peace and freedom of democracy that we enjoy.  Americans seemed impervious to the horror stories that surfaced concerning our peacekeeping operations.  Our allies played along with the myth and joined us in the military training operations (wars) it supported.

Now that Trump is in office the myth of a benevolent "Pax Americana" is shattered.  When Trump says "America First,"  he admits that it has always been that way. The myth of benevolence is exposed as much by his rhetoric as by the wide swath of destruction that has followed all of our recent "peacekeeping" efforts, most notably in Afghanistan and Iraq.  We can blame others, such as ISIS, for a lot of this destruction, but our leaders knew that military interventions breed terrorist movements.  But we didn't care because the oil and defense industries and allied politicians profited.

Trump's new justification for war that most of Americans have already signed onto is against terrorism and Islam.  The justification seems to be, it's either us or them, so it should be us Christians.  While this new crusade sounds ok to many Christian ears, it really sounds the death knell of democracy as well as the beginning of Christian persecution.  Isolating ethnic groups by closing borders to them will result in more home-grown terrorism.  

As the definition of "terrorist" expands to include anybody who speaks out against Trump, our citizens will be "purified" in various ways, racially and ideologically and won't have other countries to conduct humanitarian missions for them.  The coming wars will be on two fronts, wars of aggression fought outside of the United States, and one against the people of the United States who speak out against this aggression.

Getting back to that partially learned lesson of World War II.  We didn't learn that war doesn't bring peace, doesn't make us safe.  Jesus, tortured by the Roman equivalent of the "Pax Americana", taught that violence begets violence, that those who live by the sword, die by the sword, and that their legacy is hate, not the love that brings all to know and love God.

Monday, February 27, 2017

Who's Got Your Back? Day 5- Not a Supreme White Culture

It took my watching "American History X" last night to finally become fully aware that hate-filled racism is alive and well in the United States and just what that means for all of us, whatever our race.  You would think that I would have gotten that message after seeing President Obama treated by Republicans in Congress for 8 years as if he were to them nothing but a N-boy (pardon the expression but it conveys what happened).  

These esteemed Congress people got more and more brazen as Obama refused to behave in a less than completely dignified, patient, rational, and respectful manner.  Finally, they pulled out all the stops, discarded their constitutional duty, and refused to allow Obama to appoint a supremely-qualified Supreme Court justice.  The insidious nature of racism is such that nobody will ever prove that Obama was done in by it, but signs point to this being the most profound damage to our country ever caused by racist attitudes towards a single person.

I acknowledge that even saying this is highly controversial.  People simply cannot admit that this kind of outrageous injustice exists at the highest levels of our government.  But we better deal with it because the top 3 policy persons in the White House, Trump, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and their buddy, Jeff Sessions, all have strong associations with the white nationalist movement. A Huffington Post report into what is known about Bannon shows a person living in a world of hate and conflict that makes him believe that we (U.S. Christendom culture) are already at war with Islam and that this will have to become a raging all-out war involving destruction foretold in biblical accounts of the apocalypse.  (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-apocalypse_us_5898f02ee4b040613138a951)   

It wasn't until I saw "American History X" last night that I saw the connection between such a dangerously unstable worldview and the mental mindset of racists.  Bannon told a conference in 2011 that "the Judeo-Christian West is collapsing.  It’s imploding.  And it’s imploding on our watch. And the blowback of that is going to be tremendous."(op.cit.)  Bannon is the right hand man for Trump and the first partisan strategist to have a permanent seat on the Security Council.  Jeff Sessions, who now oversees the investigation into Trump's ties with Russia, is their white nationalist ideological leader. (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2017/02/government_by_white_nationalism_is_upon_us.html )

Since Trump's election, hate attacks and threats on Jewish and Muslim people have increased threefold.  It appears that people who cowered in the background before are now emboldened to assert their worldview.  Trump banned Islamic countries and decried terrorism related to Islam, but hasn't addressed hate crimes related to white nationalism.  In interviews Trump refused to disavow the support of white supremacists such as David Duke.  

The immigration ban directly impacts everyone.  If one group is targeted now, every group that espouses alternate values, such as every true follower of Jesus, will eventually be targeted. Current European culture demonstrates a wonderful alternative to white "European" nationalism. Most Europeans learned the lessons of fascist Germany that we haven't. This is the European culture that has our back, white nationalism doesn't.

Who's Got Your Back? Day 4- Not Government Entitlements

Most conservative anarchists (those who want to do away with government, Bannon, for example) see us as the "entitled generation," because we feel entitled to government assistance.  Government assistance violates the rugged individualist work ethic that no self-respecting American should get assistance from anyone.  Anarchists see paying for government programs as a communistic transfer of wealth abridging their freedom to hoard wealth. 

"Entitlements" are seen by conservative anarchists as the reason our country is in debt and the reason Americans pay more taxes (so they believe) than anyone else.  They believe "entitlements" create a generation full of lazy, leeching, and libidinous liberals.  But spending anarchists want, such as Trump's "historic" windfall for the defense industry, aren't labeled "entitlements."  It lines the pockets of the wrongly entitled class- capitalists like the bankers, investors, and Goldman Sachs swamp kings appointed to Trump's cabinet.  Supposedly they deserve tax breaks and other forms of corporate welfare because they earned it and the money will convert to jobs.  Such spending conveniently starves those whom they see as an insatiable beast but who really are those who deserve our investment and would return it with dividends.


There are two classes of "entitlement" that everybody should agree do create an actual entitlement. We are entitled to funding we have paid for over the course of our lives which we need towards the end of their lives when we are incapable of producing in the capitalist system (most still contribute to society in other valuable ways).  The other is entitlement to programs that do what only the government can properly do, such as manage shared resources through agencies and regulations, or pool health risks to insure that all are covered at the lowest possible rate.


But Obama's progress with these proper entitlements is being undone by Trump. Social Security and Medicare are in the process of being voucherized and privatized so that those who are in most need of this assistance will get back only pennies on the dollar of what they paid into it.  The Affordable Care Act, painfully crafted by bi-partisan committees, is now being repealed without a replacement. Trump said today that "nobody knew that health care could be so complicated."


Government regulations are being decimated and we are desecrating God's creation for generations to come at an apocalyptic rate.  If economists learned anything in 240 years since Adam Smith, it is that regulations make free markets work for the common good.  They create a level playing field that doesn't harm free competition while ensuring that the results of the competition benefit everybody. Without regulations, corporations must choose between benefiting their shareholders or the common good. 


Trump is a wake-up call to the fact that living in the U.S. doesn't entitle us to a democracy or to receiving governmental favors.  What the Constitution entitles, we must still work for, now more than ever.   Aristotle and the fathers of the Constitution knew better than anybody that without continuous effort, our fragile form of government, representative democracy, will become an autocratic oligarchy.  We should know now that government entitlements don't have our back.

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Who's Got Your Back? Day 3- Not the Freedom of the Press

It is disorienting for me to live in a society that is complicit in publicly-proclaimed falsehoods, but what has my head reeling is the prospect of not even knowing what real events underlie these falsehoods.  But this is what we are facing now that Trump is disallowing news agencies from covering press events.  Such restrictions are unprecedented in the history of White House news reporting (except a failed attempt by Obama to keep Fox News out).

The right that is needed to support all other rights in a democracy is Freedom of the Press.  Our forefathers could see that democracy can only function when the public knows the truth so that it can vote accordingly.  The framers of the Constitution strove to prevent a demagogue or autocrat like King George from gaining power.  They gave the press right of access to the government and the right to report on it without undue hindrance of libel laws.


Trump has already begun blacklisting news agencies from White House press events & calling on those correspondents who appear "friendly" at press conferences.  This cripples freedom of the press because the press needs access to White House events to survive as a business. If a news agency is threatened with not being able to attend based on how it reports the news, then the bottom line forces it to consider slanting the news to what will allow it to stay in business. Even if the reporting weren't affected, the suspicion that it is will affect its trustworthiness.


By making the "media the enemy of the American people," Trump is taking away the Freedom of the Press by discrediting what it says.  He is elevating a few far-right news agencies such as Breitbart and Fox to the status of state news outlets, depicting their problematic coverage as "real news" while labeling CNN as purveyors of "fake news."


Diminishing the press is so important to Trump because it maintains the gaslighting strategy that normalizes previously disqualifying behaviors.  If enough people see common agreement about "alt-facts" and their implications, even if this differs from previously held common belief, then these "alt-facts" become the new set of "operative facts," or "alt-facts."  But if truth tellers point out the obvious falsehood of these "alt-facts," or if all leaks aren't plugged, the gaslighting won't work.


Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are also mentioned in the Bill of Rights.  Both of these are now gravely endangered by legislation being adopted at the state level.  One bill proposes that anyone can be arrested who participates in a peaceful assembly even if there is a chance that the assembly will become violent.  Other laws make it possible for people who express a desire to attend an assembly having some violence to have their assets forfeited. When it's not possible to attend a protest without the possibility of arrest, protests are effectively illegal.


Freedom of speech is also curtailed by the NSA surveillance and social media checks by border guards which could provide information that can be used to accuse anyone of being disloyal to Trump or the U.S., thus keeping us from expressing ourselves freely over the media.  Freedom of the Press is our friend, not our enemy, but it no longer has our back.

Who's Got Your Back? Day 2- Not Law, Rights, Morality, or Truth

Trump talks a lot about us feeling safer within the United States but the truth is that we are very much at danger now if we travel abroad.  For one thing, some of us are afraid that we won't get back into the country.  This is the case of my almost 80 year-old mother-in-law, a U.S. permanent resident for over 50 years and an Austrian citizen, by every means a law-abiding, peaceful, Christian but one who has always harbored some fear of this country because of her immigrant status. 

But we should all feel less safe traveling abroad because we have put ourselves at odds with every other country with our "America First" doctrine, and Trump's pernicious comments about life in Paris et. al.   By banning Muslims and asserting that a state of war exists with Islam, Trump has made our American passports endanger us wherever we go.

If something does happen to us overseas, we cannot claim that our rights were violated.  This is because since the 1990's, the United States has rejected the idea that we are bound by international law based on human rights, thus depriving us of the protections as well as the limitations that such law provides.  We were one of only 7 countries to vote against ratifying the International Criminal Court which would have granted us a procedure for grievances outside the U.S.

Then there was U.S. Representative Dick Gephardt's famous debate where he advocated for permanent removal of Most Favored Nation trading status for China because of human rights violations and the assertion, framed in our Constitution, that there are human rights by which all people should abide.  Gephardt was voted down.

The same refusal to acknowledge human rights abroad has come home to roost stateside.  Rights are being disavowed at every level of government.  Freedom of Speech, the hallmark of a democracy, has been under extreme siege.  Property rights, privacy rights, consumer rights, to not be illegally detained & tortured are all on the chopping block.  Federal courts have upheld rights on principle but pending appointments jeopardize that.

Impacting the loss of rights in our country is the erosion of belief in morality over all, and the sense that nothing is good or bad independent of what each of us claims is good or bad.  This sentiment (not really a thought-out position) has enabled demagogues to get away with murder (as Trump famously claimed for himself).  In this unmoored liminal space, we can be swept off our feet by a strong man who knows where he is going. 

By far the biggest loss is that of truth itself.  Since Trump ran for office, Truth has been beaten down, corrupted, and tossed away like a useless corpse.  Recourse to it is no longer of any avail.  Trump's repeated, unabashed lies, his disregard for finding the truth whether through his own effort or those of others, his disdain for alternative viewpoints, his tirades over truth that leaks out, his sophistry aimed at what his adherents want to believe rather than what they need to know. All of this has resulted in alt-speak and all manner of disqualifying behavior becoming normalized.  

Friday, February 24, 2017

Who's Got Your Back?- Day 1 of a Week-long Lament to prepare for Lent

Not Your Representatives        By Stephen Wise

It has been said that we live in a representative democracy in which we
democratically elect people who represent us.  Indeed, many of the structures are in place that could allow this to happen.  We have semi-democratic elections, and procedures that allow those we elect to represent us.


But even if structures remain for now, it is clear to me that we no longer live in a representative democracy, at least in spirit, for the following reasons. The most important of these relates to cooperation.  No government can function as intended when its members don't cooperate with each other for the good of all. 

  
The worst lack of cooperation happens when political decisions are not driven by what is best for the country but are driven by what would defeat what the opposing party is trying to accomplish. This happened during the 8 years of the Obama administration with prime examples being what are considered by some as Obama's achievements- the nuclear treaty with Iraq and the healthcare act that derisively bears his name.


But the 2016 presidential election, its prelude, and aftermath, have transformed a dysfunctional democracy into a burgeoning autocracy.  It is evident that promoting the good of the American people is at best only indirectly the goal of whatever Trumpists strive to accomplish.  Directly, Trump is motivated by his own vanity, and Republicans are motivated by increasing their own power and that of their party.  Many are also guided by the conservative myth, as they, not William Buckley understand it.  And some align conservatism and Republicanism with Christianity.  They say in striving for these values, they're doing what's best for all.  


Tribalism and Partisanship set the political agenda as the presumed modus operandi. Evident facts or facts that would be evident with a little research are sidestepped if they don't advance the partisan purpose. We assume that every American and the U.S. as a whole should pursue its own interests without even law, facts, honesty, or reasoning to keep us in check. There is no reality check among the checks and balances.


Each side advocates for its own position like a courtroom lawyer and only brings up evidence that supports its cause.  Sometimes the judiciary branch does mediate but increasingly, that branch has become partisanized. But most of the time, rhetoric is used having no foundation in fact or practicality. The rule of law is thrown under the bus as partisan "representatives", only concerned for themselves, abandon the rest. Aren't we better than this?









Tuesday, February 14, 2017

The Gaslighting of Elizabeth Warren  By Stephen Wise

What is Gaslighting? How is it used by Trump?
A Huffington Post headline reads: “Trump Resurrects ‘Pocahontas’ Dig Against Elizabeth Warren.” Is this really happening?  Since when does a sitting President slur a U.S. Senator with nothing to provoke it? (Warren was just minding her own business that day.  She was busy calling out people who had lied to the U.S. Senate.)
Trump was pursuing a strategy called “gaslighting,” so-named after the 1944 movie "Gaslight" with Ingrid Bergman. This movie is about a husband who controls his wife emotionally by manipulating gaslights and other events to make her doubt her sanity.  It is not until the story’s hero validates her reality that she recovers her sanity and breaks off the abusive relationship.
Gaslighting is "withholding factual information from, and/or providing false information to, the victim - having the gradual effect of making them anxious, confused, and less able to trust their own memory and perception.” (Urbandictionary.com)
Trump’s comments that bully others and disregard evident facts, combined with the authority of his office, are enough to make us question our sanity and make us think we are crazy when our worldview conflicts with his alt-reality.  It seems to be working, people are accepting his idiocy (privately-held worldview) and doubting what they previously took as self-evident.  (“Idiot” comes from the Greek word idios meaning private.  If our view of the world is private, not shared by others, we could literally go crazy, or at the least "feel like an idiot."
Alternative realities created by Trump and validated by Republicans make us think that we are idiots, that our beliefs are private and unreal.  The "shock and awe" of the executive order rollout created a disorienting gaslight effect.  Eventually we are gaslighted- either going insane (you have to see the movie) or being assimilated into the “Borg” of an alt-reality collective consciousness. We could instead fight for what is real for ourselves and others, as Sen. Warren did in last week’s Senate hearings. Her persistence, despite McConnell's wrath, shows us what to do when we are gaslighted. Her courageous stand validates the worldview of those who don’t live in alt-reality.
Debate in a Gas-lit Alt-universe
The alt-reality that Trump operates in assumes that alt-facts and gerrymandered reasoning are normal and desirable and that language is only meant to express personal fiction that can be changed at will.  (As opposed to language pointing to something that exists apart from our own private reality).  Kellyanne Conway is the poster girl for alt-speak, a dialect of double-speak.
Debate (and thus peaceful resolution of issues) is impossible in this alt-reality.  We are already seeing how rational people like Warren are shut down in debate because their words aren't taken as evidence to be measured against reality but, as in Warren’s case, become merely the stimuli for McConnell's subjective (private) experience of insult.
Trumpians like McConnell see Warren as way out in left field because they live in the irrational gas-lit alt-universe that has become the political center.  Under the gaslight of this alt-reality, facts, reasons, and rational debate appear strange and threatening, particularly coming from a well-educated woman marshaling evidence with a commanding intellectual authority. Senator Warren literally threatens their sanity.  They must stop her from speaking or at least stop us from listening to her.  (She tortures their alt-reality sensibility almost as much as Obama tortured them for 8 years just by being an unflappably rational Black man.)

If Trumpians don’t get others to collude with their private reality, they will also lose their sanity. This gives them a compelling personal interest in rejecting any truth that exists outside their private reality. They can’t be reasoned with.  Debate then being impossible, only might makes right.  And so our law-based democracy became a totalitarian autocracy in spirit while keeping the structures of democracy. (Already in the last 8 years we hardly functioned as a democracy due to Republicans' determination to annul Obama's presidency by not playing their part in government.)
Coming out of the Gaslight
It's not just your imagination, Trump really is playing with our minds, bullying us like the husband did in "Gaslight."  One example of this is that we are beginning to doubt our expectation that politicians respect facts, and this is leading to our acceptance of alt-facts.  Gaslighting is difficult to resist because it attacks our core senses of self and reality.  This leads to discouragement, confusion, feeling disenfranchised, and consequent low voter turnout among those who still resist the alt-reality.  The gaslighting effect grows in the shadows.  We must be armed with full awareness of the gaslighting as we intentionally defend ourselves against it.  For this we need the validation of courageous leaders with a firm grasp on reality such as Senator Warren.
Two polar opposite worldviews in politics today stand in stark contrast.  One is based on reality, evidence, reasoning, and the rule of law.  The other is based on “might makes right” where the party with fewer votes wins anyway, and sees this as a mandate to do whatever it wants, as soon as it can be done, even at the sacrifice of much-needed deliberation.
The way out of this morass is to allow ourselves to be guided by the pure, simple voice of impartial reason inside all of us that doesn't seek personal or partisan gain but moves us to stand up for what is loving and truthful, on behalf of all creatures, not just our own tribe. Standing together in the light we will see clearly, the gloomy gas-lit nights behind us.