Dare We Hope?

    This Moment - this overcast, early spring, barely shirtsleeve warm Saturday - I realize that I'm feeling hope again. 

I want to crush it, that feeling of hope.

    Because, for over two years we've lived in a series of overwhelming emotions - none of them in any way hopeful.  Stunned shock. Anger so deep all many of us could do was cry.  Confusion - we never really understood that The Cruelty was & is The Point.  Underlying it all - despair and feeling powerless.  Slowly, slowly we've moved toward taking action.  

But never during those years did I allow myself to feel hope.  Until now.

And after that time of existential quandary, allowing hope to the surface feels too vulnerable.

    Yet there's no denying it. This IS a Moment.  We have twenty - 20! - candidates.  ALL of them are persons of character, persons of intelligence, persons who have demonstrated that they care about people.   How is this Not a Moment?  

    We have amazing candidates who are saying on the world stage what we've been saying to each other.  We have candidates articulating policies that would help millions.  We have candidates showing respect for each other and still speaking unvarnished, well-articulated truth to power.  Our candidates have shown courage in both their careers and in their candidacy.  This IS a Moment.

    Feeling hope does make us feel vulnerable.  The other side works hard to instill and instigate fear, and that fear has covered the landscape.  Hope struggles to create points of light.

I'm scared of this hope.  We've been destroyed in our hopes before - all of us.  Yet it's in the struggle that hope grows stronger.

    I'm remembering the words of one of my favorite young men in the world - Karl Anthony Townes.  Karl played basketball at the University of Kentucky - and won over the world with his authenticity and charm off the court as well.  A few months back he wrote an opinion piece for The Players Tribune, about the times, the divisive political climate, and his own life.  The words I've been remembering from that piece are these:

"Remember, There are More of Us than there are of Them"

Add That to our wealth of candidates, and to our actions, our dollars, our doing what we can - and hope feels a bit less shaky.

Things could be stranger, but I don't know how: the Unthinkable has become the Everyday

Every. Single. Day.

Each of us enters the world in our own way, daily. Maybe you start with a walk, or stretching, or yoga. Maybe you move slower, coffee, taking meds, planning out your day. 

Whether you ease into the day or move straight into the merging traffic of others who have somewhere to be; at some point each day you'll hear about or read about a tweet, a speech, an event. And what was said, tweeted, or happened turns out to be something that was Unthinkable before.

Today's Unthinkable - the Trump Department of Justice states that the government should not have to be responsible for finding the deported or lost parents of more than 450 children. The government forcibly separated these parents and children, but feels it is not their responsibility to reunite them. DoJ suggests that it should be the responsibility of the ACLU, and others.

Unthinkable, before now. Now we're hardly even surprised.

Since we're not trying to be all impartial here, can we talk about how we feel, how we're affected, by this rapid change in the environment? Let me start . . .

Here's a story, an imagining, of my own viewpoint:  

Nasrudin was traveling by train to a neighboring village. The conductor came to Nasrudin and asked for his ticket. Nasrudin began to search all his pockets for his tickets. When he couldn't find it, he began looking through his luggage. Then he frantically began looking in everyone else's luggage.

At that point the Conductor got impatient and said "Nasrudin, you always keep your ticket in the top left pocket of your jacket. Why don't you look there?"

Nasudin stopped his frantic search and said to the conductor "I can't look there. If it's not there, then I have no hope".

First - let me explain Nasrudin. In Sufi myth and mysticism Nasrudin is "the fool" character. I see him too as simple, straightforward, but with no self-reflective qualities. 

I feel, right now, as if hope is something to be guarded, almost guarded against. One reason for this blog is to express, to reach out, to engage with others who might have similar feelings. 

It's ok to admit that we are reeling, that we feel overwhelmed by the Unthinkable happening every day. It's ok to do as my friend Nancy does - just avoid it all. "There's nothing I can do about it," is her refrain. It's ok, but still I find it sad when people do that.

I may defend against expressing too much hope, but I know it is somewhere - and encounter it in interacting with others. And find in these encounters that more people want to KNOW - that they're not alone, how to keep abreast of actual news and information, that they aren't as powerless as they feel. Another reason for this blog.

Maybe some were thinking I'd jump right into how to evaluate info. Sorry. But we have to bring up the emotional toil, and emotional toll, of this sense of "I don't know what to do." And talk about it first. Without understanding the impact that these Unthinkably Interesting Times have on us, we won't look at the info we find with reliability. 

We'll get into info evaluation soon.

In the meantime - a song, so right for our times.

https://youtu.be/j-K0MeOMt1k

Invitation - the curse of Interesting Times

A grey, socked-in, flat sponge of a day today. Each one of these downer days remind me of that day, November 8, 2016. Maybe the sun did shine that Wednesday, but I don’t remember it happening. Unlike the day before, the day of the election, when I distinctly recall walking out of the polls into sunshine. Issuing a satisfied “yes.”

But not that November Wednesday. Each day like it since then, nearly two years of being reminded how it felt – to know what was going to happen. Oh yeah, no brag, just fact. I knew how this would play out, because I made myself watch as much as possible. You didn’t have to watch a lot to get the gist of it.

Media, bad. Rivals, stupid. Women, pussies. And so forth. I watched because everybody covered every minute of it. Every cable channel, every network, every radio show and local news had all-Trump-all-the-time. I saw what would happen if the unthinkable happened, and it did.

I watched because the sight of it seemed, at the time, like sitting at the steering wheel of your car as it spun in a circle, on ice, across a lane of oncoming traffic.  There ain’t nothing you can do but watch. And wait for the crash – which never came.

I watched too because I kept waiting for it all to explode, and to marvel at the systematic ways the MAGA campaign worked to destroy people’s trust in any institution, any news source (except Fox of course), any authority figure at all. We were to distrust all of them, and trust him. And there were too many people who thought it all made sense.

• We’re not gonna talk here about those people, or even that campaign – unless you, like I, consider what’s passing for a presidency to be one continual campaign. Here we’re gonna talk about how we respond and react to a world in which information is both overwhelming and being censored. 
• Here we’re gonna talk about how we choose what to attend to and why we do. 
• Here we can chat about the feelings of craziness that are really survival reactions.

Why might you want to come along on this journey with me? Here’s a story I love:

A guy’s walking down the street, paying no attention, and falls in a hole. It’s deep. He’s gonna need help getting out. Above he sees a doctor walking by. He yells up, “Hey Doc, can you help me out?” Doctor looks at him, pulls out a prescription pad, throws a prescription down in the hole, and walks on. Guy sees a priest above. He yells out, “Hey Father, can you help me out?” Priest makes the sign of the cross over him and walks on. Then the guy sees a friend. “Hey Joe, can you help me out?” Joe jumps in the hole. Our guy says, “What are ya, Stupid? Now we’re both down here.” Joe says, “Yeah. But I I’ve been here before, and I know the way out.”

I have been here before, and find, since that miserable day in 2016 I’ve also found myself more and more in conversations like these. Picture a coffee shop, two women-of-a-certain-age, mid-morning.

• Me: Hey, I read this article about something or other.

• Friend: How do you find these great articles, like the one you posted about . . . 

• Me: Hey, did you see some show or other last night?

• Friend: We’ve had the grandkids two days a week for a while now. We are way behind on news, and even shows we always watch. Frankly, it’s a relief. I don’t even know who to trust any more.

Just like the twenty-one years I worked as a Librarian, helping folks find not only what they said they wanted, but the best source of that information, I find that folks who aren’t in a library still could use a Librarian. Everybody seems to be struggling with fitting in to their hectic schedule any time for keeping up with what's happening. And when they do try to keep up, folks quickly get lost in the weeds - and it seems like there's way more weeds than plantings recently.

Because understanding how and why we search for information, and process what we come across come out of both mind and psyche, the training and practice I have in psychology can be helpful as well. How are we emotionally triggered by what we see and read? Do we have our own biases, and is that ok? 

Even more important - you just might find that traveling along with me can be fun. Song lyrics, lines from movies or from some of my favorite tv shows, poems, jokes, and just my own (sometimes admittedly dark) thoughts and comments can be counted on. 

I find that a life of six decades has allowed me to not take myself, and really a lot of the world, too seriously. Yes – I do think we live in “interesting” times – but by that I mean that the challenges that we face are just the flip side of the opportunities we can’t yet see. 

I believe it is our responsibility to address the challenges and find in them the opportunities. And we don’t need to do this alone – CAN’T do it alone in truth.

So come along on this journey, if you dare. Challenge me, and challenge yourself and others. Offer your point of view, tell your own stories. Or, as I do sometimes, just listen in on the conversations around you.

You are very welcome.