Tag: election

Anybody else ready to move on from this political dumpster fire? Let’s #GetSynaptic

On By Kay LorraineIn community, conflict, connection, distance, neurology, neuron, politics, separation, unityLeave a comment
File:Proposed Excitotoxicity by Activation of Extrasynaptic NMDA Receptors.gif – Wikimedia Commons –  Wikimedia Commons | License details

So, Joe Biden is now the projected winner of the 2020 presidential election. There are a variety of challenges to the results going on, recounts, protests, and so forth, but a whole lot of people seem ready to move on. And that’s fine. I’m more than ready, myself.

Just for the record, I’m politically unaffiliated, and I see real problems with both major parties. I have issues with the whole party system (and I’ll be talking about that inhuman condition a lot more in the future), so don’t send me hate mail for siding with Biden. I hate taking sides, for a whole bunch of reasons.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, here’s the deal with me. I’m ready to move on from politics as it’s been played for as long as I can remember. I’m even more ready to move on from it, the way it’s been played for the past 40 years or so, with each side (Democrats and Republicans) becoming ever more entrenched in their ideology.

I’m ready to move on from each side carving up the cultural landscape into their own set of “talking points” that they own and dominate.

I’m ready to move on from the name-calling and the demonization (literally) of “the other side”, falling back on all sorts of elaborate explanations about how “they” are evil incarnate and must be vanquished, no matter what the cost.

I see that kind of behavior on both sides of the political playing field. Both sides demonize the other. Both sides use inflammatory language that brings the souls of the others into question. Not only does that harm us on the side we’re on, by making other people seem less human, less deserving of respect and compassion, but it also alienates the “opponents”, because they can see very clearly how intensely they’re being disrespected.

Don’t get me wrong. In no way am I saying it’s okay to kill, maim, rape, troll, or otherwise threaten people you see as your enemy. The policies put in place by the US government for the past 4 years have gone directly against what I personally believe and hold to be true.

But all the while, I’ve seen opponents of that approach behave in ways I could never sign off on. No way, no how. You can’t claim the high moral ground while doing things the way the Democrats — and other political parties — have been doing them. It just doesn’t square with my own experience and belief system.

It also doesn’t square with how we’re built. Within our bodies, we’re made up of billions upon billions of separations between nerves. That’s especially true in our brains, where we’ve got more nerves than most of us can even imagine. Each of those nerves has a bunch of connections that reach out to other nerves to pass information. Our neurotransmitters jump those gaps in a wild “storm” of neurological activity, as chemicals get passed from one nerve ending to another.

It’s how we function. We can’t function without those storms. And the minute that connection stops, we start to die.

It’s not the separation that kills us. It’s the failure to cross the gaps that does.

Which is a big reason why I dropped my political affiliation a while back and refuse to sign on to a Democratic or Republican or Libertarian or Green or Democratic Socialist or Constitution or Natural Law party. Because the party system as it is now is killing us. It’s killing us by keeping us separate from each other. It’s killing us by “owning” certain “talking points” and consolidating power around a select group of people who all agree with each other. It’s killing us by making it impossible to have a civil conversation between people with different perspectives, and making the other side out to be crazy or stupid or hateful or naive.

Party leadership has been doing it for decades, maybe even centuries. The guy in the White House has been doing it — ninja level ridicule with all that name-calling — for the last four years. And as one side has gotten less and less humane, the other side has decided to meet them, match them, and out-do them, each side using terms that the other doesn’t completely understand. But that’s okay, because the “right” people understand, and all that matters is strengthening the bonds of the tribe.

Using separation as a political tool is exactly the opposite of what we need, as a country and as individual human beings. It not only dehumanizes others, it dehumanizes us, as well. Anytime we stop the flow of interaction between separate sides, we make ourselves more brittle, more easily insulted, more easily broken, more easily manipulated, more easily fooled. And the less capable of connection with different others we become, the more it matters how much we’re connected with “our own kind”.

The gap widens. The divide expands. That’s not the problem. The real problem is that we don’t know how to get across that gap and actually communicate outside our own little circle. And that makes us — literally — less human.

So, if you’re feeling all morally superior because your political viewpoint prevails under one circumstance or another… or maybe because it hasn’t come out on top… and you can’t see the perspective of the other side, nor do you want to… you can stop feeling morally superior now. Because what you’re doing is being non-human. You’re going directly against the way you’re built — the way we all are built.

Of course we’re going to disagree about a whole lot of stuff. Of course we’re going to have extremely different outlooks. Of course we’re going to oppose a whole lot of stuff we don’t agree with. That’s normal. It’s to be expected. But when we stop making an effort to understand, and we stop making an effort to reach out to others and interact with them, just because they don’t agree with us… well, then we do ourselves a disservice. And we insult the very essence of our humanity.

And that needs to stop.

The good news is, it can. We can. We can stop this willful, artificial separation and actually start interacting with each other. As people. As human beings. We can get past our personal political opinions and accept the fact that others have different experiences, and they’re entitled to their viewpoint — just as we are. We can start dealing with each other with respect and consideration. And our leaders can start behaving that way, too. I’m old enough to remember a time when the “left” and “right” were diametrically opposed, and yet we all managed to live together and actually enjoy each other’s company. I grew up having intensely heated arguments with people who didn’t think like me, at all. And yet, we ended each conversation agreeing to disagree, and we remained friends.

Imagine that… people with different opinions remaining friends, rather than tearing each other a new one… It can happen. It used to. And we can get back to that, absolutely.

But we have to want to. We have to be willing to do the work that goes along with it.

And we have to be willing to sacrifice a bit for it — our self-righteousness, our gloating, our mental-junk-food-elation at the suffering of others.

Personally, I’m not sure there are many people who have the nerve or the appetite to do this sort of thing. Everybody’s too drunk on their high-horse, and who wants to lose that buzz? But I can’t see any other way to move forward. And I’m going to do what I know to be true about the way we’re actually built to survive… even thrive. I’m going to keep roaming beyond my own little perspective (not sure I actually have one of those, actually) and keep paying attention to what’s going on out there — past, present, future… here, there, and everywhere else. You can do what you like, but this is the only way I can see us getting past this dumpster fire we’re in.

Seems worth it to me.

You may agree. If not, that’s fine, too. Do what you please. Just don’t harm others in the process.

A time to heal and unify the United States? Maybe…

On By Kay LorraineIn community, conflict, connection, politics, unity
Source: Samfunnsfaglig engelsk (SF VG3) US Politics US Politics – 2008-2018

So, the 2020 U.S. presidential election is over, and whether you agree with the outcome or not, the fact remains that there’s a pretty significant division between Trump voters and Biden voters. There has been for years – a division between Trump supporters… and everyone else, that is.

I’m not getting into my own politics here. There’s plenty of room for that elsewhere. Let it be known that I would rather be kind, than right. And I absolutely positively don’t believe in caging children who have been ripped from the arms of their mothers. I understand how others can justify it. I just can’t.

Anyway, now that Joe Biden is the projected winner of the election, everybody’s talking about how he’s going to unify the country. He’s been crossing the aisle to build alliances with “the other side”, his whole career (as I understand it). And people expect him to continue to do the same.

Which is fine. He can try. And it may work with some folks. But frankly, I think the divisions of this country are too deep and too ingrained in people’s identities, for the supporters of his opponent to reach out to him, or respond to his advances. There’s too much at stake for them, particularly when it comes to who they believe they are, and who their constituents expect them to be.

Likewise, I really believe that the folks on his side have a deep-seated investment in maintaining an autonomous ideology, a frame of reference, that is theirs and theirs alone. It’s been four years, since they had the chance to exercise any sort of influence, so now that they’re ascending, they’re certainly going to do it.

And there’s not necessarily any reason for them to reach out to the other side and build bridges. Not when they have their newly won position at stake.

This might sound dire. It might sound depressing. But think about it.

People need to have their own identity. They need to have their tribe. And the lines between the old tribes have become so blurred, over the past 40 years, that it’s hard to tell exactly who belongs where, anymore. The old ways of growing up in one place and living out your years there… or getting a job at one company and eventually retiring from there… being the member of the same church, or the same softball league, or the same social circle your entire life… well, that doesn’t happen for all of us in this country, anymore. Heck, some of us don’t even stay in the same families, our entire lives. Others of us “rotate in and out”, as our family’s levels of tolerance and acceptance fluctuate over time.

And as we lose our connection with those once-built-in definers of Who We Are and What Matters To Us, we have to come up with our own. We need meaning. And we can’t find it in the institutions around us, anymore. We need a sense of belonging. And that’s not a given, anymore, either. So, we look to our invented tribes, our political parties, our cultural enclaves. And we dig in. Because even though we may not agree with everything that’s said and done by our leaders or other members, they’re our leaders and members, and that’s what counts.

So, while people are thrilling at the thought that we might be able to build bridges between the “battling” sides (more hand-wringing about that imagery will come later), I’m not holding my breath. A lot of us might like the idea of people putting down their swords – or better yet, turning them into plowshares – but a whole lot of people also like the idea of keeping separate, being at odds, and keeping their identities intact.

For some folks it’s the most that they have.

Where do we start?

On By Kay LorraineIn community, connection, distance, neuron, separation, unityLeave a comment

namibia dirt road leading to desert
Like so many other people, this morning, I woke up to news that someone had won a hotly contested political contest, while someone else had lost. Actually — full disclosure — I couldn’t get to sleep last night, until I checked the news and found out what the election results were.

Some people are ecstatic about the results, while others are convinced it’s a sign of the Beginning Of The End. Some are chortling about their victory and pointing out how the losers are scrambling to regroup. Others are voicing various degrees of despair on Facebook.

So it goes. It’s never actually been any different than that for me, in the course of my 50-some years on this earth. I’ve been hearing dire warnings about our inevitable plunge into chaos, thanks to certain sorts of political outcomes. The warnings come from both sides, and they’re so similar, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference.

It’s not the ideology and the platforms that seem different to me, rather the dire tone each side adopts to compel their constituency (both current and hoped-for additions), to join their side. Join the fight. Join the battle. Everything is on the line.

Again.

To say I’m battle-weary would be an understatement. It’s not that I don’t agree that we’re in a dire situation. I believe we are. I mean, look around — war and disease and pestilence are so common, they’re “old news”. The United States seems in a state of perpetual cultural warfare, with all sides utterly unmoved by the criticisms and complaints of everyone else. People seem to have dug in, and exit polls show how sharp the voting divides are, across race and gender. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of our socio-cultural deep freeze that seems to have completely immobilized us — like a tourist from Peoria frozen with fear as a charging hippopotamus bears down on them. (And yes, hippos are the most human-dangerous land animal in Africa.)

Good grief.

While it is encouraging to see some election results which lean in my preferred direction, the whole process sort of depresses me. Even if “my side” does win, as a whole community we still lose something. Every time we splinter into factions and go at each other over ideology or agenda, we pay a price. Some days, it feels like the only one fretting over the cost, is me.

But I know I’m not the only one. There are plenty of people out there who are distressed by the ever-deepening chasms between various segments of our society. Rich vs. poor. Haves vs. have-nots. Whites vs. … er… everybody else. Cities vs. rural areas. Men vs. women. Powerful vs. vulnerable. At every single turn, it seems like we’re splintered along identity lines. And where identity isn’t clearly marked, people seek to create new categories that set them apart.

All this separation. Sigh.

And yet… Is the real problem separation? I’m not so sure. Indeed, I think the real issue is that we don’t really know how to work effectively with separation. We tend to see it as a barrier, and little else. Of course, separation divides us. That’s the point. That’s why we turn to it — specifically because it divides us, it separates us out. And there are a bunch of advantages to that, which I discuss in Beloved Distance. A sense of belonging. A sense of safety. Knowing whom to trust. Knowing whom to avoid. Separation is one of our most valuable tools, and yet it seems to be wreaking havoc with our world.

Seems.

And yet, I have to ask — Isn’t there more to the story than just division? Isn’t there more to our experience than schism? Might our separation actually offer us something we need, both in terms of division and connection? Are we missing something?

I think, yes.

I think we’re missing a lot.

And because of that, we’re losing out on clues about how we can move forward.

By having this one-sided view of things, and not understanding — really understanding — what’s at work in our world, as well as deep within us, we’re passing up an amazing opportunity to step forward and head down a path that may not be all that clear and well-marked, but is still a path forward.

We don’t even have to know exactly what’s to come, or exactly how we’re going to get there. We just need to know that the path exists, and that we have the in-born capacity to really make the most of that path.

You can see current events as a scourge or a gift. I choose to see it as both. And I’m determined to find out how we can make the most of the whole range of these experiences we’re having. I have some ideas about how we can do that.

Watch this space. More to come.