Who am I?
You’ll forgive me if I am unable to answer that yet.
I’ve been exploring the question in my writing. I went into my recent drafting thinking that I had the answer, but as often happens, I discovered through the process itself that I didn’t really know. It is wonderful that the writing can be the path to discovering the knowing. Such can be the power of writing. But it makes it hard sometimes to figure out how to put together something that feels like, you know, an actual piece.
A part of me died when Donald Trump got elected. Sorry if that sounds melodramatic; I don’t mean it that way. I don’t mean that it was murdered. I don’t mean that it was a terrible thing that it died. It was ready to die, I think, and the election gave it permission to do so.
What died was the part of me holding on to the illusion that our system and our society are working.
That part of me might have survived had Hillary Clinton won the election. I could have relished the feeling of my side winning and used it to feed my complacency. But our system isn’t working. Our society is dissolving in hatred, caustic as acid.
Whenever something to which we are energetically connected dies, it leaves behind an empty place. We feel that emptiness, that hole, first as a shock and then (optimally) as grief, and certainly I have had to grieve its loss, because the death of that part of me renders untenable any choice to remain on the the path I was on. I am now facing a critical question: Without that part of me, who am I?
While I’m not a Tiger Woods-level athlete (to say the least), I had a substantial history with weight-training when I first started working with Jerry. I started lifting weights as a freshman in college, got certified as a personal trainer in my early 20s, and have included weight-training as part of my exercise routine throughout my adult life. I had my first session with Jerry at the age of 40, so at that point I had been involved in weight-training for literally more than half my life.
In our first session, we started with centering and the breath, and then Jerry explained to me the problems with the athletic model of training. We went out to the weight room, and Jerry instructed me on how to lift with a focus on breath and feeling. The intensity of the workout was less than I was used to–no more sets to failure–but Jerry explained that I’d be able to work out more frequently, because the lower intensity meant I didn’t need a day off for recovery.
Jerry sent me off with the instruction to practice, and so I did. I worked out nearly every day. I was not suffering from physical injury when Jerry and I started, but the relationship between myself and my body was definitely askew. To my fascination, it wasn’t long at all before that started to change.
Oddly enough, Facebook helped. Commiseration with others helped assuage some of the despondency.
Many friends of mine were feeling as I was, or even worse. Some of us decided to bring our virtual support group into real life. We met at a favorite bar for beers. It was good to see good friends.
The pain lingers today. I’m still despondent, shocked, angry. A couple of times, I have squelched the urge to scream.
Yesterday, most of the people I saw were just going through the motions. (Which, for most of the day, was more than I was capable of.) Today, people are coming to grips with this reality. But the anguish continues. You can feel it in the air.
I’m kind of at a loss for words today. I guess a lot of people are. I had read enough of Five Thirty Eight to understand that Trump had a real chance of winning, and I wondered if there was a chance that Trump was furthermore underpolling his actual support, not unlike what happened with Brexit.
That parallel with Brexit seems apt. In both cases, the technocracy underestimated the sense among a substantial portion of the electorate that the system was no longer serving them.
Trump will be our next president. I’m honestly deeply afraid.
I’ve felt waves of anger at times today. I guess a lot of people have. I’m not angry so much with the people who voted for Trump. I’m perplexed by them, and I shake my head when I think of the enormous divide in our country right now. I’m definitely angry with the leadership of the Democratic Party. I’m angry that it never seemed to really occur to them that negative views about Hillary Clinton–that she’s viewed as elitist, dishonest, and totally in the pocket of Wall Street–might be a problem. I’m angry that at a time when the richest are seeing enormous gains while the rest of us get left behind, it’s the fucking Republicans who have benefited from the populist uprising. The party of business is now being seen as the party that might help the little guy. How the fuck did the Democrats cede that mantle?
I’ve been saying that I would leave this country if Trump got elected. “If we’re going to steer our Titanic country directly into the icebergs, I’m gonna go ahead and get off this boat,” I said.
Time to put up or shut up.
I’m Not With Her. I am praying that she wins, but I’m not with her.
She’s the standard-bearer for the Democratic Party, anointed by the Democratic Party machine, the same machine that got handed a disaster substantially of Republican making back in 2008 and squandered the potential for real change in only two years.
Think back to 2008. Our economy was burning. An out-of-control financial sector had insisted throughout the late ’90s and early 2000s that what they needed was less and less regulation, and then predictably had brought the world economy to the brink of collapse. The government kept that collapse from happening by borrowing huge sums of money–from you and everyone you know and your children and your children’s children–to use to pay off the gambling debts of the richest institutions and people in the world. It was beyond vile. Maybe you remember.
Obama swept into power promising change. He brought on his coattails the first true both-houses-of-Congress Democratic majorities since 1994. I wept on Election Night 2008. These long years of horror are finally over, I thought.
Wrong.
In the face of the destruction wrought by the richest against the rest of us, what did Obama do with his ample political capital? Did he break up the Too Big to Fail banks? Did he reinstitute Glass-Steagall? Did he bring us sorely needed regulation of derivatives?
No. He put all his capital into health care.
Now, often when I bring up this point, people interrupt to tell me that Obamacare is better than what came before. I don’t deny it–though the latest bad news about huge premium increases seems to suggest that it might be more broken than its supporters want to admit–but that’s missing the point. The point is this: we have years and years and years of historical precedent telling us that the party in power tends to lose seats in the next mid-term elections, which meant that Obama and the Democrats had only two years of surefire political power to bring about the “change” we’d been promised. Furthermore, 2010 was a census year, which meant we’d have Congressional redistricting following the election. Given the prevalence of gerrymandering, the party that won the 2010 elections would have a substantial edge in the balance of power over the next 10 years.
As such, in the face of (a) an economy in shambles, caused by the greed and hubris of the megabanks (serving as proxies for the desires of the richest Americans); (b) understandably widespread anger at (a) and the concomitant loss of jobs, incomes, stability, etc. caused by this dangerously out-of-control greed; (c) the glaringly obvious, furious unpopularity of health-care reform, Obama’s choice to squander his and his party’s goodwill on Obamacare constituted as great a waste of political capital as we’ve ever seen in this country.
I propose that putting their energy into the obvious problem that had everyone mad might have kept the Democratic losses in the 2010 mid-terms manageable. Instead, the Democratic-led Congress gave us slap-on-the-wrist financial-sector reform and Obamacare. And instead of modest losses in the 2010 mid-terms, the Democratic Congress, hugely unpopular for pursuing a hugely unpopular policy, got absolutely crushed, sweeping Republican majorities into both houses of Congress, and giving Republican control to state legislatures around the country. Sure enough, the Republican Party used their electoral gains to do everything they could to consolidate their power, and they’ve used that control to hinder or outright block every serious policy initiative that Obama has brought forth during the last six years of his presidency.
And let’s additionally remember that during the first four years of Obama’s presidency, he chose to renege on his promise to close down Guantánamo, and ordered and had carried out the assassination of an American citizen in Yemen.
All of this is why I was so reluctant to vote for Obama in 2012, and why I felt the need to scrawl myself a reminder of how I felt that day for the years ahead.
The same strategic geniuses who brought us these policies threw all their weight behind Hillary Clinton, despite the loathing she inspired in huge swaths of the electorate. My note stayed on my whiteboard, where I saw it every day. But then the party with with the Machiavellian will to power got blindsided by the rabble-rousing populism they’d been laughingly fomenting for all these years and their once-vaunted discipline dissolved and we ended up with Trump. So I relinquished my resolve.
Despite everything, I’m praying that she wins.
I wrote this note to myself on Election Day 2012. I’d grown sick at the Democratic Party’s constant betrayals of my deepest values and swore to myself, as I held my nose and voted against Romney, that it would be the last time I voted defensively. I’ve kept that note above my writing desk for the past four years, as a reminder.
It never occurred to me that “how bad the guy on the other side is” was a variable without a lower bound.
How bad the guy on the other side is: this is the part of the piece where I might spend a few moments plumbing the depths of my vocabulary to describe just how hideous I find Donald Trump. But there’s nothing I can say about him that hasn’t been said in furious superlatives elsewhere. I’ll leave it at this: he’s dangerously unfit to be president.
The idiom that we generally use in this situation is that the Republican Party, particularly their primary voters, “called my bluff.” But I wasn’t bluffing. I didn’t keep that note in my peripheral vision for four years as a bluff. But if we extend the poker analogy (and play a bit with the language), we could say that I went to the river with an exceptionally strong hand, but the other side had the nuts: they had nuts voters supporting a nuts candidate in a completely nuts election. I wasn’t bluffing. But you fold when you know you’re beat.
So once again this year, I found myself holding my nose as I voted. I’m Not With Her. But I’m sure as hell against him.
Last week I was watching Andy Murray play Jo-Wilfred Tsonga, and during the match Murray reverted to his tendency to angrily mutter in the direction of his player box when things weren’t going his way. I realized that I see that same sort of behavior all the time in the sports I practice and play. In fact, it happens so often that I don’t even think twice about it. Someone muttering angrily to himself after mishitting a shot on the practice tee? Totally normal.
After a bit of reflection, I noticed that what I don’t see is people talking animatedly with themselves when things go right. Indeed, when I took a moment to imagine someone doing so, the image I saw in my mind’s eye was of the kind of person at whom we either stare or else consciously look away.
How strange, I thought. We take it as normal when someone watches a good shot and then moves on to the next one but scolds himself when he hits a bad shot; but the opposite–letting the bad ones go but offering himself out-loud congratulations when things go right–seems weird, even a bit crazy.
From an energy perspective, by engaging in these behaviors, aren’t we leaving ourselves little room for growth? We shrug off the positives, giving ourselves no space to be delighted and thus rejecting the energetic expansion on offer, while meeting negative experiences either by constricting our flow around them or by expending extra energy in self-recrimination. Notice how insidious this is. As non-flow gets more and more ingrained, change becomes gets harder and harder.
This week I have been exploring a new approach: letting the negative things pass with as little extra energy as possible (like a cloud passes in front of the sun) while trying to open my energy, as in gratitude, when I experience the positive ones. I’m finding this surprisingly difficult. But with growth as the goal, surely this is the better approach.
Someday you’ll get to be like, “I was into that dude before anybody.”
Which means that all y’all early adopters will have gotten to see Free Refills before it became the life-altering, world-changing web presence that it eventually became. Becomes. Will become. (Whatever verb tense I’m supposed to be using there. Is there such a thing as future predictive?)