The news has been crushing. It’s hard to think about much else. Or rather, I should say, more accurately, everything else I think about feels dwarfed by all the horrible news.
The richest man in the world is destroying the one government agency that provides critical help to millions of the poorest souls in the world, and he cackles about it in his idiot tweets.
And of course that’s just one story out of so many. Shock and awe is having its impact on me. And I’m pessimistic that our democracy will survive a second Trump term. He knows where the levers are now, and he’s got stooges in there to help him, and the Republicans in Congress are ignoring his lawlessness and rubberstamping his diabolical cabinet nominees. (Yes, I said “diabolical.” As I type this on Thursday evening, Russell Vought was confirmed today to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Vought is a primary architect of Project 2025.)
Sheer Batshit Insanity
This week Trump proposed evicting two million Palestinians from Gaza, sending them to Jordan or Egypt or somewhere, and remaking Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East” with the United States in charge.
Susan commented: “I think the whole idea is the most crackpot scheme I ever heard, and cruel too. But if he’s going to remove them [the Palestinians, from their homeland], then he should offer to bring them here and welcome them – full visas, full citizenship, everything.”
Agreed.
Good Things that Might Not Have Happened Had Harris Won Instead
I probably wouldn’t be serving lunch to homeless folks tomorrow were I not feeling newly called upon to do something for my community.
And I believe hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are getting politically involved now in ways they never have before and perhaps never would have. (Speaking for myself, in 1980, I was devastated when Reagan won the presidency, and vowed to become “more active,” which I did, and that was a life-changing – even a life-definingcourse change for me, given the things I subsequently learned, experiences I had, people I met, etc.)
Also, I doubt Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde would have given her historic sermon, which to my mind is one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard in my life, and may prove – in its indirect effects – to outlive even the damages wrought by this administration. Please watch the whole thing if you haven’t yet. It’s phenomenal, heartfelt, and only 15 minutes long.
Some Essential Reframing
It has long been my contention that the stupidest thing I ever heard a politician say was when Hillary Clinton, running for president against Trump, stated that she would assign half of his supporters to a “basket of deplorables.” She made it even worse when, responding to the firestorm of criticism that followed, she “apologized” by stating that she “shouldn’t have said half.”
So I guess the implication was that slightly less than half, or maybe even only one quarter, of Trump’s tens of millions of supporters were “deplorable.”
Wow. Not only did that lose her the election (I firmly believe), it also gifted the GOP with a powerful meme that they wield successfully to this day.
Disclaimer: I like Hillary Clinton and I did vote for her. I think she’s an admirable woman. But even very admirable people do dumb things, and that was one of her dumbest imo.
But back to the deplorables. Contrast Clinton’s foolish words with what Reverend Budde had to say about people who hold different views from our own:
On the third and last foundation I’ll mention today as a foundation for unity, is humility, which we all need, because we are all fallible human beings. We make mistakes. We say and do things that we later regret. We have our blind spots and our biases. And perhaps we are most dangerous to ourselves and others when we are persuaded without a doubt that we are absolutely right and someone else is absolutely wrong, because then we are just a few steps from labeling ourselves as the good people versus the bad people. And the truth is that we are all people. We are both capable of good and bad. Alexander Solzhenitsyn once astutely observed that the line separating good and evil passes, not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties, but through, right through every human heart, through all human hearts. (emphasis mine) And the more we realize this, the more room we have within ourselves for humility and openness to one another across our differences, because, in fact, we are more like one another than we realize, and we need each other.
Well. As I mentioned in our last newsletter, I’ll be conversing civilly with some GOP voters this coming week, at a meeting organized by the Braver Angels of Oregon. Maybe the deplorables will have something to tell me.
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