Another Look at Our Two Tasks
Issue #2.06 ~ April 19th, 2023
(1) Another Look at Our Two Tasks
In the December 2022 issue of TLBR, I proposed “two tasks for the next two years” as priorities for those of us concerned about the awful possibility of Trump’s return to the White House in 2024. Here they are again, in slightly abridged form:
Our first task, over the short-term, is to prevail at the polls in 2024. We can’t afford any let-up in the energies we expended over the past year in successfully holding off the widely predicted ‘red wave’ deluge in the 2022 midterms. Trump [supporters] have almost certainly not [been] chastened by the November results; it’s more than likely that most of them are already hard at work laying the groundwork to win, by any means possible, the 2024 presidential election.
Our second task, over the long-term, is attempting to communicate effectively with some of those enthusiastic Trump-supporters, in the hope of persuading them to let go of the extremist views they currently cling to.
So far in the new year, there have been some promising signs with regard to our first task. Progressive candidates have been prospering at the polls, as indicated by the recent victories of Brandon Johnson in the Chicago mayoral election and Janet Protasiewicz in the Wisconsin state supreme court election. As Robert B. Hubbell frequently exhorts the readers of his excellent Substack newsletter Today’s Edition, welcome outcomes such as these are reason for hopefulness, but not complacency. While much more work lies ahead of us, we can - at least for now - push forward with that work heartened by a well-earned feeling of optimism.
As for the second task, there is scant evidence of even the slightest thaw in the chilliness of our civic discourse. Or that such a thaw is anywhere near in the offing. So where does that leave us?
Before venturing the following suggestion, I need to offer this disclaimer. I’ve always been skeptical of the excessively overused cliche, “Be the change you want to see in the world”. To my mind, it’s much too facile a phrase. Its opening injunction - to “be the change” lacks the necessary companion command to do something on behalf of bringing that change closer to fruition. It’s all too easy for one to think they’re being the change without doing anything useful at all.
My skepticism notwithstanding, I’m going to task myself with the assignment to be - and act - as the change I want to see. I have more than a few MAGA supporters among my extended family, and since Thanksgiving 2016, I’ve been stepping around any topic even remotely associated with politics as carefully as if I were stepping through a minefield. Seven years into this self-imposed topic avoidance, I find my relationships with many of them not just conversationally crippled, but somewhat emotionally estranged as well.
I’m familiar with what Buddhism teaches about unskillful speech - but what about unskillful silence?
So the commitment I’m making is to attempt replacing my closed mouth with a pair of open ears, whenever the situation deems it possible. I already know - or so I think - what they’ll say when I invite them to speak their mind, but what I don’t know at all is what they’ll think when they find me willing to listen, and whether being listened to will make any impact upon the way they think.
I hope to find out in the months ahead.
(2) Lost and Found
I’ve just finished reading the book “Lost & Found”, a memoir by New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz, in which she recounts two hugely significant, and completely distinct, life-changing events that happened to her simultaneously over the past few years. In the first part of the book, entitled “Lost”, she describes in heartbreaking detail the slow decline and eventual death of her elderly father, interweaving this profoundly personal loss with a series of anecdotal observations on the nature of losing things in our everyday lives. Then, in the second part, entitled “Found”, she narrates in heartwarming detail the steady maturing of her relationship with her eventual life partner (referred to simply by the abbreviation “C.”, but in actual fact her fellow New Yorker staff writer Casey Cep) from their first meeting up to their decision to marry. In this section, as in the first, she periodically pauses her account of finding love in order to offer a variety of reflections on the nature of finding things in our everyday lives.
With these two separate and vastly differing sections, Schulz could well have ended the book, and it would have stood as an insightful study in contrasts - finding and losing, happiness and sorrow, life and death. Or, she could have expanded each of the sections into a completely satisfying separate book of its own.
But fortunately for us, Schulz wasn’t done yet. Instead, she’s added a brilliant third section, entitled (unsurprisingly) “And”. The narrative here is about her and C.’s wedding day, the occasion which most poignantly unites her opposing feelings of sadness at having lost her father and elation at having found her life partner. And this final narrative in her memoir, like the two that precede it, is interspersed with Schulz’s musings upon the essential place of the conjunction “and” in all our lives.
It’s this closing section that binds the previous two sections together, such that they ever and only could have constituted one cohesive memoir. As it turns out, Lost & Found is a study not in contrasts, but in complements.
As one final enticement for you to read this wonderful book yourself, here’s a passage I’ve marked and re-read several times already. I’ve written repeatedly in TLBR about the significance of the Buddhist notion of the interconnectedness of all beings. Read on for an excerpt from Schulz’s eloquent articulation of this idea, emanating from her consideration of the preponderance of “and’s” in our everyday experience …
We have all tried to experience something in isolation, an exercise that promptly reveals the extent to which our minds are perpetual “and” machines. Even when you are attempting to focus on just one thing, such as the paragraph you are reading, or attempting to focus on nothing, as when meditating or falling asleep, your brain is forever spitting out other things as well: items on your To Do list, anxiety about an upcoming doctor’s appointment, the memory of something embarrassing you said the day before, the itchiness of the mosquito bite on your ankle, the lyrics to “Raised on Robbery”.
And it’s not just the background hubbub of the mind that throws the world into constant conjunction. Life, too, is a perpetual “and” machine, reliably delivering us a mixture of things to experience all at once. This endless clamor sometimes produces difficult juxtapositions, because life, like “and”, is indifferent to what it connects. Maybe your own personal circumstances are the best they’ve ever been but your nation is in crisis; maybe your brand-new baby daughter looks just like her grandmother but that grandmother is suffering from Alzheimer’s and cannot recognize either one of you. Contrasts like these proliferate both around us and within us. We all have mixed experiences, mixed emotions, mixed motives, even mixed selves. The most cheerful among us is not consistently happy, and the best among us is not consistently good.
By the time we reach adulthood, the very fabric of our life is made of patchwork. We know by then that the world is full of beauty and grandeur and also wretchedness and suffering; we know that people are kind and funny and brilliant and brave and also petty and irritating, and horrifically cruel. In short, we know that, as Philip Roth once put it, “Life is and.” We do not live, for the most part, in a world of either/or. We live with both at once, with many things at once - everything connected to its opposite, everything connected to everything.
(3) Postscript
Interesting reading from the past few weeks:
New Yorker staff writer Susan B. Glasser warned that Donald Trump is an even greater threat to democracy now than he ever was in 2016 and in 2020 … “[We should] disregard the conventional wisdom about the former President being a spent force in Republican politics and pay much closer attention to what Trump is actually doing and saying in his campaign—a doomsday-laden frontal attack on American democracy far darker and more threatening to the constitutional order than even his previous two bids. [He has] framed his effort to return to the White House as an outright war and vowed that, once reinstalled in power, his mission would be nothing less than ‘retribution’ for all the wrongs that he and his grievance-fuelled followers have suffered. His call to arms was not merely the stuff of political symbolism. Echoing the inflammatory language with which he summoned his supporters to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump urged them to fight once again in explicitly end-time terms. ‘We have no choice,’ he said. ‘If we don’t do this, our country will be lost forever. This is the final battle,’ he insisted. ‘They know it. I know it. You know it. Everybody knows it. This is it. Either they win, or we win, and if they win we no longer have a country.’ This chilling peroration by Trump followed his December call for ‘termination’ of the Constitution, if that is what it would take to return him to power. The two statements, taken together, sum up his campaign like no other. Termination and retribution are the reckless pillars on which Trump is running.”
New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman used the recent disclosures of lavish gifts bestowed upon Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas by a yacht-owning billionaire friend as a jumping-off point for this thoughtful commentary on wealth inequality … “[This situation has gotten] me thinking about big yachts and what they tell us about the state of society. When rich people can afford to buy and operate big yachts, they do. Indeed, yachts are a highly visible indicator of inequality, the concentration of income and wealth in the hands of the few. [And] if you had any doubts about whether we’re living in an era of extreme wealth concentration, comparable to or even surpassing the Gilded Age, the superyacht boom should quell those doubts. The rise of superyachts also tells us some important things about the motivations and consequences of spending by the very rich. Owning and operating a really big yacht is, however, as clear an example as you’re likely to find of Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption — spending intended to demonstrate one’s wealth and status. In a way, it’s quite sad: Rarely in the course of modern history has so much wealth been concentrated in the hands of so few, yet much of that wealth is being expended on zero-sum games of one-upsmanship.The rise of superyachts — regardless of whether they carry Supreme Court justices — is a highly visible indicator of the extreme economic polarization that is certainly a factor in the extreme political polarization that is tearing our democracy apart.”
Jerome Roos, a fellow at the London School of Economics, made a strong argument for embracing the uncertainty of the future in this guest essay for a recent edition of The New York Times … “Humanity now faces a confluence of challenges unlike any other in its history. Climate change is rapidly altering the conditions of life on our planet. Tensions over Ukraine and Taiwan have revived the specter of a conflict between nuclear superpowers. And breakneck developments in artificial intelligence are raising serious concerns about the risk of an A.I.-induced global catastrophe. This troubling situation calls for new perspectives to make sense of a rapidly changing world and work out where we might be headed. Instead, we are presented with two familiar but very different visions of the future: a doomsday narrative, which sees apocalypse everywhere, and a progress narrative, which maintains that this is the best of all possible worlds. Both views are equally forceful in their claims — and equally misleading in their analysis. The truth is that none of us can really know where things are headed. The crisis of our times has blown the future right open. It is easy to understand the appeal of such one-sided tales. As human beings, we seem to prefer to impose clear and linear narratives on a chaotic and unpredictable reality; ambiguity and contradiction are much harder to live with. Yet this selective emphasis gives rise to accounts of the world that are fundamentally flawed. To truly grasp the complex nature of our current time, we need first of all to embrace its most terrifying aspect: its fundamental open-endedness.”
Thanks for reading this issue of TLBR. Look for the next one in three weeks, posting on Wednesday, May 10th.
Thanks Tom. Always interesting. I look forward to hearing how communications w family go. Best, Doug