Tag: politics

In front of a faded wall mural of Donald Trump with an American flag background, a real hand holds up a real flag

America, the Irrational.

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In the past two weeks, I’ve been unreasonably addicted to the impeachment hearings. They’ve taken over my life, dispiriting me, swallowing up precious windows of time. Driving my children home from school, as the chatter slows down and we could settle together into silence, I turn up the volume on the radio. Instead of focussing on a writing project beckoning my attention, I’m one-hand-coffee-one-hand-remote in front of the TV.

It’s big news, of course. History-making. As a citizen, I’m called to witness that history, but let’s be honest, there’s a deeper story here. My unreasonable, addictive preoccupation with the impeachment hearings belies a hope that if I watch for long enough, some ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ might magically jump off the screen to save us all. Continue reading “America, the Irrational.” →

A person is screaming. The face is covered with cracking mud, and the person's fists are pressing in one each side of their head

PART TWO: Strength – The Essence of Anger (3 of 5)

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She’s mad but she’s magic. There is no lie in her fire. – Charles Bukowski

On January 21st, 2017 between 3-5 million American women walked out their front door and onto the streets for the largest single-day protest the country had ever seen. One day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Women’s March proved a preamble to the foment of the unprecedented impact of the #MeToo movement that followed. There was more than enough evidence that a groundswell of American women were done with being “nice” and had simply had enough. Books released in 2018, like Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad, or Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her, brought laser focus to this reality, exploring the history of accomplishments attributable to women’s ferocity in taking action around circumstances that were simply no longer acceptable. In the days after the women’s march a conversation was mounting about women taking off in our country, reflecting, perhaps, the Dalai Lama’s prophecy that “the world will be saved by Western women.”

This broad display of angry, defiant women is progress, no doubt. The record level women and minorities elected during the mid-terms reflected this. It was something feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of The Yellow Wallaper, written in 1892, could hardly have imagined during that early period of first wave feminism. Gilman’s character had found a kind of liberation through a ‘crazy’-madness where she began to challenge the status quo around her, but herein was a different kind of mad: angry mad, publicly angry mad, mad by the millions!

However, just as statistics about a rise in anxiety during the Trump presidency don’t tell the personal story of people’s experience of that anxiety, how it has changed them for better or worse, nor do statistics about the number of women (and their allies) who took to the streets tell the story of how women across America have experienced their anger, fed-up-ness and outrage. How it has over the last several years perhaps deepened their cynicism or, potentially, spawned a new level of empowerment and vision. This is the inside story. Continue reading “PART TWO: Strength – The Essence of Anger (3 of 5)” →

PART TWO: The Inward Turn – Exploring the Soul of Citizenship In The Trump Era (1 of 5)

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Madness in Mad Times

In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a short story titled The Yellow Wallpaper. Gilman’s female protagonist was relegated to an upstairs room by her husband, a doctor, for a ‘rest cure’ to address her ‘nervous depression, despair, and hysteria.’ (Gilman had been given this “treatment” for depression herself, by a Dr. Silas Mitchell).

Enclosed, trapped, powerless, and pathologized (gaslighted), Gilman’s character became intoxicated by the wallpaper in the room. In the first third of the story, we find her in what seems like a petty preoccupation with the wallpaper, irritated and angered by the pattern in it, the sallow, yellow color, the sheer incongruence of the design. But as the pages turn, her intrigue with the wallpaper grows, over time ‘finding’ a woman trapped within its patterned contours.

The story continues to chronicle the protagonist’s building ‘madness,’ as she alternates between self-doubt and engagement with the woman (sometimes women) she is able to discern in the wallpaper. The protagonist refers to the guidance of those who are taking care of her, guidance she originally obliges but comes over time to question, then confront. Before long, you can’t help but join in her mounting irritation with the way they dismiss and minimize her distress and coddling her into ‘recovery.’ Over the course of the story, Gilman’s character builds the capacity (in a kind of defiant, madness) to dismiss these ‘caretakers’ who pity her condition (again, gaslighting). She finds an intimacy with her direct experience, learning to trust what she is seeing, feeling, discovering in a conscious awakening to a self-authorized reality of her own.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life. – Virginia Woolf

Gilman’s story culminates with the protagonist successfully stripping the wallpaper off the walls setting free, to her great satisfaction, the woman she sees caught there. When her husband opens the door in the final passage, he finds his wife proclaiming in delight: “I got out at last, I got out at last!” Said husband then faints and we are left with the image of a woman crawling in circles around him in the room, ‘mad’ and elated. We are also left with a disturbing but strangely intoxicating paradox about the relationship between a woman’s madness and her liberation. Continue reading “PART TWO: The Inward Turn – Exploring the Soul of Citizenship In The Trump Era (1 of 5)” →

PART ONE: One Woman, Post-Trump Stress Disorder & the Whole Catastrophe – The Political Just Got a Whole Lot More Personal

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November 9, 2016 – USA. Over the last half-century, a number of stark memories have been seared into America’s psyche so shocking or painful or unexpected that they live largely unmetabolized as an image, a recollection, something we turn to each other to say: “Where were you when it happened?”  The images of the balcony of the Lorraine Motel the day after Martin Luther King was shot. The slowly driving motorcade and Jackie O. scrambling to climb back over the front seat towards her husband.  Two planes flying into twin towers and their slow, knee-buckling collapse into clouds of billowing dust. And, now, the day Donald Trump was elected.

My husband and I were at the theatre. The play was about Haitian immigrants in America, a powerful and touching story about racism and its overcoming. In spite of the standard request to turn off our cellphones, the news flickered on screens through the audience and ‘broke’ somewhere halfway through the second act.  Surely the actors must know, I kept thinking, watching them come back on the stage after leaving a scene.  I kept wondering how they came back to perform, devoted to their craft, following cues they returned while something inside them was surely collapsing.  “The show must go on” I kept thinking to myself, along with the spirit of the arts and our desire to digest, give human meaning, and resurrect love in the face of the history’s horrors. But the memory I have of the morning after is the one that stands out more fully, perhaps because it took at least the night for the reality to have the first opportunity to sink in.

I sat on the leather couch in our living room staring at the television with the sound on mute. My children had just left for school, boisterous and blissfully naïve about the bomb that just detonated in America’s constitutional soul. I stared at the talking heads on CNN, my awareness focused inward.

Something important is happening in our world that you will not read about in the newspapers. I consider it the most fascinating and hopeful development of our time, and it is one of the reasons I am so glad to be alive today. It has to do with our notion of the self. – Joanna Macey

Like others, I was still in shock but settled between the various pesto smudged stains and illicit pen marks on our family room couch, I could sense, next to my disbelief, something else hovering in my awareness. It seemed like inside the hollow silence created by this news some part of me was assessing the size of the test we were about to be put to, one that carried the potential to either break us as a nation or to birth something new – in me and in Americans. Whatever birth might be possible, however,  was going to depend on a pending breaking point, but I had no idea what that meant, what the timing would be, or what it would look like. Accompanying this intuition was also the haunting sense that everything in my life had somehow prepared me for this moment. Continue reading “PART ONE: One Woman, Post-Trump Stress Disorder & the Whole Catastrophe – The Political Just Got a Whole Lot More Personal” →

Floweing blades of grass stick up between cracks in pavement

ESSAY SERIES INTRODUCTION: The Feminine (R)evolution

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Using the word ‘feminine’ in the title of my blog has not come easily. In fact, in the way the word is generally used, even hearing myself say it still makes me cringe. I remind myself this is a reclamation, a rising up of the real deal from a barren, dry landscape of forgetting.

In fact, it took a journey into darkness, a journey that turned my understanding of life upside-down, in order to re-discover the word ‘feminine’ and its significance in our times.  This journey is about how a pissed off, white woman found her humanity and a profound sense of purpose in the heart of shitty, crazy times in our country. The story of that journey, and the dots I have connected subsequently are chronicled in a series of essays (some complete, some pending) about the inner work of citizenship, about post-patriarchal values, relationships, and an emerging, devotional love of our World.

We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.
― Charles Eisenstein

The first essay shares an account of how Donald Trump had everything and nothing to do with all this – how he perfectly, though inadvertently, catalyzed in my mind and heart a whole new frontier for Citizenship.

But, first, something more about that troublesome word feminine… Continue reading “ESSAY SERIES INTRODUCTION: The Feminine (R)evolution” →

The Obama/ Buttigieg Difference: On the Appeal of a Post-Patriarchal Masculinity

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Amidst the rapidly growing pool of candidates for the democratic ticket in 2020, the relatively un-known, Pete Buttigieg, is making an un-expectedly big splash. “Mayor Pete” distinguishes himself in many ways — he’s the youngest candidate, an outside the beltway democrat from a red-state and, of course… he’s gay. People are also impressed with his grounded rhetoric — a down-home, reasoned and whip-smart common sense. Likened by more than a few to Barack Obama, Chris Cillizza writes: “Don’t look now, but (another) skinny kid with a funny name is turning heads in the presidential race.”

Like Obama, Buttigieg does have that remarkable ability to focus his sizable intelligence, (he’s a Rhodes scholar with a philosopher’s reflective interest in all-things-civic), on our complex political reality in readily, relatable ways. Also like Obama, he has that unflappable capacity to sound reassuring with every answer he offers, coming off cool no matter the curve ball.

But, I think there’s another reason why Buttigieg reassures us. Of all the candidates, he has something Obama had that’s essential to our future and yet that’s rare among men in leadership today: what I would describe as a post-patriarchal masculinity.

Continue reading “The Obama/ Buttigieg Difference: On the Appeal of a Post-Patriarchal Masculinity” →