National Bully

I watched the so-called presidential press conference even though I knew it would sink me.  (So-called because press conferences are where the press asks questions and the president answers them, and this was something completely different.) I watched it at the risk of wrecking the rest of my day because I knew there was important information I needed to get from it. 

When my son moved from a small, intimate school to a larger one, he encountered bullies. I remember how awful it felt as he worked through the solution. (I will tell you that he figured out how to retrieve his power in that situation without reciprocation or revenge.) I wasn’t personally bullied, but I was witness to the bullying of others. And with a father who was by turns tyrannical, I know what it's like to feel powerless. Feelings of powerlessness in childhood can easily turn from a springboard to healthy independence to a neurosis constantly seeking to be thawed in adulthood. My guess nearly everyone has some relationship to bullying, directly or indirectly. 

Searches for bullying come up mostly with advice for parents on how to help children. The advice usually ends with the importance of telling their parent, teacher or principal about the bullying. I didn't see any advice about what to do if the parent, teacher or principle is the bully. For adults with bullying issues, say in the workplace, the advice included creating separation, speaking truthfully to the bully, and possibly a visit to HR. I found a questionnaire from a school district to help determine if someone is a bully. I mentally checked yes to every item for Trump. 

I reviewed in my mind how those reporters asked their questions. They maintained their professional, detached demeanor. They asked questions more than once, even though it was clear to everyone in a press seat that it would not be answered. They were earnest. At least one person tried using humor. Nothing worked, nothing changed the direction that the bully in the room, the man at the podium, the man in charge, was determined to take. This a bully of exceedingly great determination.

The questionnaire list listed how others follow in the bully’s orbit, envious of his power. Another site wrote how people who've been bullied in the past might later ally themselves with a bully in an attempt to reclaim their own power, for them own protection, to be on the safer side of an unsafe situation.

I did, in fact, sink into a feeling of hopelessness after the "press conference". It was because own feelings of powerlessness from the past had been triggered. If I'm right that nearly everyone has some kind of relationship to bullying, directly or indirectly, than maybe I'm not the only one. In my own household, my 6'3", professionally respected and self aware husband is triggered, as is his tough, 92 year old, ranch-raised mother.

My husband says memories of bullying in his life, toward himself and his brother, still inspire feelings of rage and impulses of revenge, though he knows he won't act on them. Films and books capitalize on these feelings and impulses and offer temporary relief from them. But using bully techniques against bullies never works in real life: Bullies are much better at those techniques than their targets are. That was the source of my hopeless feeling.

Martin Luther King transformed the reality of bullying into spiritual practice and inspired others to join him in that practice. Attempts to humiliate his spirit, harm his body, and diminish him in every way, while they may have sunk him from time to time, never held sway. How nearly impossible it is to never give into the ego gratification of striking back against a bully! I contemplate with awe the volume of practice he had to perform to hold onto his truth in the face of attacks on his right to be alive—and even more importantly, allowed him to act, to inspire awareness beyond his original constituency, and to dissolve the edges of the seemingly hopeless problem which that bullying embodied. 

In comparison to his example, most of us are confronted with a national bully without such refined spiritual skills. So we need to get them, and fast! Maybe it would help to start by taking a good look at our personal relationship with bullying, whatever that was. Some insight about that would go a long way toward moving us into effective action without side tracking ourselves with the flail of striking the bully back.


My country is not what I thought it was. I knew it was imperfect, seriously so, founded as it was on slavery, genocide, and oppression. But I saw so many positive qualities—that it was also founded on immigration on an unmatched scale, innovation unique in the world, and a certain big-heartedness, a willingness and friendliness that is hard to quantify. And like a good boyfriend it seemed that my country was really maturing, especially in the last eight years, into a guy you could settle down with and trust. Even if you knew it was flawed, it seemed like it could ripen into a really good country.

Then the secret life of my country was revealed to me. A hidden, shadow side of despicable acts and practices, beliefs, and proclivities. Many already knew this from the personal experience of oppression and exclusion, brutality, imprisonment, and reservationization. Apparently it was just me who didn't realize it was as bad as others knew it was. Why didn't they tell me? Well, they'd been telling me all along, but I didn't want to hear it. Or I thought I was hearing it sufficiently. And I was relieved to hear our half-black president say that while we still needed to improve, civil rights had come a long way, and nobody would want to go back. That sounded pretty much like what I believed, and I felt that we, that I, was on the right track.

But the last three months have shaken that sense of measured vigilance. While watching the train wreck of a presidential election, I read and watched inspired work that ripped my protective armor off piece by piece. 13th entirely ripped the bottom out of my still contained countenance, and I am now detached from the reality I previously took refuge in. I see my country no longer as flawed but excusable, and am confronted with a reality that might be irredeemable. I don't know. I'm in despair. My heart aches the way only deep loss can make it ache.

This ache is exactly why I didn't want to see what I now see about my country. It explains my self-deception. Who wants to feel this way? Would anybody choose to feel this way? We love people despite knowing that loving them opens the door to the possibility of feeling brokenhearted. Sometimes we avoid loving people to avoid that potential pain. When we lose them, we think we'll never get over it. And in a way, we don't get over the pain. We adapt in some way, recover some functionality, some normalcy, but the pain finds a permanent place to live in our hearts. 

But that's not even where I am right now. I'm just in the beginning of the grief of loss. I'm looking at my friends and I'm seeing that they are here too. Sometimes furious, sometimes despairing, always seeking some point to it, sometimes finding a thread of a point and clutching it tightly enough to keep it but loosely enough not to snap it. It just feels horrible, and knowing it will continue for years makes it hellish.

What would it take to disassemble the structures of oppression, the fear of one another? The mind reels. The heroes are those who take one step at a time, as if every act of love, courage, and deep intelligence matters, and who refuse to give into hopelessness. Radical loving resists the overwhelming urge to meet fear and hate with more fear and hate, stronger fear and hate, smarter fear and hate. I am trying to follow the example of these heroes. I need lessons from them. But first I have to feel this painful new awareness, to put it on and wear it, to weep and rage, in the presence and with the comfort of others. Maybe after a bit we can create a ceremony of appreciation for all the hearts that remain open, and start taking one step at a time.

Civil War

My brother in law was eavesdropping on my sister in law's Facebook conversation with her friend. They are Trump supporters and he is not, and he went on the attack. She informed my husband that she cut off her brother. My husband, who's political views align with his brother's, is upset and hurt by both his brother's impulsive behavior and his sister's reaction to it. I am watching what I fear are just one of many battles between family members, battles made more frequent by our current situation.

This morning, I'm feeling so deeply worried, afraid really, about where my country is headed, that I feel much more understanding toward my brother in law. Facebook is an big part of his life, which is a big part of the problem. But this man, more isolated because of health problems, is no more worried and afraid than I am. I have outlets to express my grief, yet I'm still emotionally backed up. I imagine he is as well I can understand how he might lash out at his sister out of pure frustration.

My routine for many years has been to get up and read the newspaper. If I do that these days, I begin my day full of anxiety. This morning I checked in on the news and felt so downhearted I had to stop. But before I did, I googled this question: "Are we in a civil war?" Because I think we are. It's not a shooting war—fortunately, because my side doesn't have the guns. When we studied the Civil War as children, we learned that it turned brother against brother. Families, which at their best provide the most basic of human comfort and safety, were riven by their opposing views. We were told to imagine drawing a gun on our little brother or sister and shooting them. That was how the horror of the Civil War was brought home to us as young children. 

I know my sister in law to be a loving person. How do I square this knowledge with the positions she's willing to take? I read articles explaining how rural white people feel left behind as our country gives a leg up to minorities with a legitimate claim to oppression, a zero sum game in which they were the losers. That is the part they can see, along with trade policies, but less the automation and digitization which gave them smartphones but took away their ability to support their families. It's easy for me to criticize their view as narrow from my status on the other side of that resource divide. My sister in law and her friend have guns, though I don't believe they would blame me for their feelings. But what if Trump is successful in convincing them otherwise? Because I'm quite sure that is exactly his plan. That's how he wins, winning always his unquenchable thirst, by manifesting anger around him, regardless of what "side" it arises from.

The threat of guns is enough. The actual weapons, twitter and facebook, are proxies for the guns. If everyone decided to back up their proxies with guns, the big winner would be the gun industry. The weapons industry has always benefitted from fear, anger, war and destruction. There are no new human flaws.

If guns are the weapons of hate and fear, what are the "weapons" of peace and love? Listening and compassion can seem so weak against those destructive weapons. 

When I'm not catching up on the news, which I only do enough to stay abreast of things these days, I'm reading what spiritual teachers suggest to help in these dire times. They say we are on a knife's edge. Our species, along with the millions of species whose fate rests with us, can fall either into self-destruction and the enormous and infinitely laborious do-over that entails; or join the mass awakening to our true nature and purpose as expressions of divine love. To which I can hear some of my dubious compatriots respond, "Uh, maybe we should just get our own guns."

Today, I admit, my view is colored by the grief I feel, also the fear I feel for those I know and love, those I don't know but somehow still love, and to be very honest, myself as well.