A Prayer for Election Season

In church on Sunday, one of our prayers asked God for help that in the midst of this divisive election season that we might refrain from demonizing the other side.  I was so struck by this!  

Demonization of everyone not like “us” is everywhere.  Clinton v. Trump v. Third Parties v. DNC and on and on, and the candidates are leading the charge to the bottom.  Oddly enough, after Hillary’s now infamous “basket of deplorables” comment, I came across a recent interview of Bill Clinton online where he was not demonizing Trump supporters.  He was talking about looking at the life circumstances of many of the people in the demographics that contain the strongest Trump supporters.  He was talking with Trevor Noah about looking at where these people were coming from.  I am no fan of many of the policies championed and enacted by Bill Clinton, but at least he offered some lip service to the need to look at things from the other side’s perspective. 

So much of the anger underlying this demonization online is misdirected anger. I would summarize my recent Facebook reads in the statement,“Dubya was the fault of all you Nader loving contrarians!” I would ask, where is the anger at the Supreme Court for stopping the count or for the State of Florida who purged 181,157 voters purged from the rolls in the lead up to the 2000 election?  Where is the outrage over the butterfly ballots in Palm Beach County where it is estimated that they took around 2,800 votes from Gore and gave them to Pat Buchanan (Palm Beach Post.)  Looking at 2016, where is the concern over our voting process itself?  Look at what happened in NY, Brooklyn, Arizona and California.  Where is the concern, the outrage over the probability that our democracy could be hacked in a million different ways, that our voting system is not secure?  There is so much that is wrong with our country that deserves our energy, attention and outrage!  

Creating hard feelings isn’t going to help us on Nov. 9.  No matter which candidate moves into the White House next, it is going to be a tough road for most of us.  If we have alienated each other, if we have broken the ties of friendship, if we have lost the ability to listen, if we continue to blame each other rather than acknowledging and looking honestly at the powerful forces that have set the stage what is for so many of us a horrible choice, then we will not be able to work together for a better world in the face of what is to come. 

 

The Ascendancy of the Easy Answer: My under-informed thoughts on the Brexit

With 95% of the total in, it looks as though the populace of Britain has voted to leave the EU. 

Who am I?  I have no qualifications to write on this.  Ten years ago next month I moved back to the US after two years as a graduate student in London, an illuminating and priceless experience.  And an experience that was, again, 10 years ago.  The people I am still acquainted with in England are either Eastern European friends or English people I sang with at a church in Fulham.  Everyone I know there thought this was a terrible idea and has been aghast at the entire proceeding. 

From this side of the Atlantic, it looks as if the Brexit was viewed by many as the easy answer.  If you think and read enough, you normally come to believe that easy answers do not exist.  Who do you blame for the economic challenges in your life?  Who do you blame for all that is wrong in your community and country?  It is much easier to blame Europe.  It is much easier to blame the people who don't look or speak like you, the people who weren't so numerous when you were younger and times were better.  It is much easier to let this be their fault. It is much easier to kill an MP than work to form a rational argument against what she has to say.

I fear that we are entering dark times as a species and as a planet.  So much is wrong and none of the answers are simple. 

My country is facing its own horrible choice in November.  I know what I won't do, but I haven't yet decided what I will do. 

Donald Drumpf appears to me as an American style Brexit in that he is an easy answer, albeit an easy answer with a bad hairdo.  Rather than facing the fact that our leaders have lied to us and sold us out with their neoliberal policies, elephant and donkey alike, many voters will look at the Other and blame them.  They will look at the Mexican immigrant who has a job, a job they would probably never take but a job none the less, and say that person took the job from someone like me.  They will look at the violence in their community, and rather than examining the closet of guns in their own house, they will blame the guy who worships at the mosque down the street.  Dare I say that this new demogogue says just enough that IS true to lend a sheer of legitimacy to all he says with no basis in reality.  Yet these lies are easy to accept because they do not require thought.  They do not require self-examination. 

God save us all from the tyranny of accepting the easy answer.

Hilary vs. Trump: The Oligarchical Dream Race

Hilary vs.Trump = Oligarchical win- win: A Trump win can be blamed on Bernie supporters and used to discredit progressive ideas for another decade or a more.  A Hilary win can be used to legitimize a continuance of neoliberal policies while ensuring the silence of most of her supporters over continued economic devastation, war and extra judicial killing. 

What I want to say tonight...

Tonight I am feeling overwhelmed.  I am overwhelmed by a corporate media who has been relentlessly campaigning for the idea of the inevitability of a Clinton nomination for about a year now.  I am overwrought from reading seemingly endless reports of votes denied, flipped, stolen or just disregarded.  I am distressed by the corporate media’s blindness to these stories.  Rather than suggest or even look at the possibility that something might be seriously wrong with our democracy, they hold televised vigil waiting for “The Donald” to give his next inarticulate public rambling in front of a microphone.  I am disheartened when only the news stories with attacks on Sanders gain traction while story after story about decades of Clinton corruption are ignored.

Here I sit in my overly large Bernie hoodie, sadly looking at the cat who is looking at the dog.  The dog is curled up in a ball looking sideways at us both, and she looks as dejected as I am tempted to feel.  Yet, what I want to say to everyone I know, and don’t know, who believes in the ideas Bernie stands for is don’t give up.    

1)  When Bernie started to run, we knew this wouldn’t be easy, and he has done better that probably anyone could have guessed a year ago.

2)  A vote for Bernie is more than just a vote for an individual candidate; it is a vote for a vision of what we would like our country to be.  

3)  To me the fundamental difference between Sanders and Clinton supporters with similar policy preferences is their understanding of how change is accomplished.  Clinton supporters seem to see change as more of a top down and incremental process.  Sanders supporters recognize change as the inevitable outcome of movements that start from the bottom and do not give up.  As recent evidence of this, I point to the marriage equality movement and the $12 and $15 minimum wage laws passed across the country.    Historically, I look to FDR and the New Deal.  Yes, there was a devastating financial crisis in the 1930s, but there was also an active left that pushed hard for policies that would benefit ordinary people.  

4)   I wonder if our country has ever really been a democracy.  What will it take for the evidence of democracy's demise to be so overwhelming that it can no longer be ignored by the corporate press?  I wonder if this cycle might bring us close to the tipping point.  This emperor has been hanging out in his birthday suit for a long time now.

5)  I choose hope.  Wealthy interests that like our political system just as it is do not want the majority of people to vote.  They have been going to a great deal of trouble to prevent many of us from doing so, so I will vote.  My vote may not be counted or may be changed electronically, but I will do it with great enthusiasm anyway.  

I will vote for a candidate whose ideas and integrity I believe in rather than engaging in another soul destroying bout of voting for the practical or least worst candidate.  I choose hope by continuing to voice my support for a man whose ideas I agree with wholeheartedly, no matter how fiercely all the talking heads and respectable people in the media tell me it is fruitless.  I choose hope by vowing to continue to work for those ideas regardless of the outcome of this one race.

I choose hope because I do love my country and my planet.  They are both in danger, and I want them both to be here for a long time.

To those who say, “Don't you care about stopping the Republican menace?”  or “We need to unite the party,” I say, I’m not interested in uniting behind a party that doesn’t represent me.  If the party can change and discard some of its corporate moorings, I will consider it.  Living in California, I know my vote doesn’t count for much according to the pundits, but my vote matters to me.  I hope it matters to you, too.  Damn the torpedoes.  It is time to vote for someone I actually believe in. 

I can't stop reading news articles about Bernie Sanders

I can’t stop reading articles about Bernie Sanders.  The last time I was this obsessed with the news was during the Occupy protests.  I avidly consumed news of them.  After visiting the Los Angeles encampment around city hall, I felt solidarity with these people. They brought me hope. 

As soon as I heard Bernie was running, I was in.  At best, I thought he might help to push the main stage candidates into a bit of lip service for progressive values.  But now the favored main stage candidate is no longer a sure thing.  She is running scared because despite a near silence in the main stream media, Bernie’s message is being heard.  And this message resonates with people. And this brings me hope.

My cynical soul says the corporate powers either haven’t figured out how to shut him down yet or they are letting him continue for some reason of their own.  At the same time, some small part of me dares to hope, to say that this time it is possible for things to be different.  Our world is in a different place than even a decade ago, and masses of people are yearning for the movement that Bernie symbolizes.  Bernie has been singing the same song pretty much for his entire political career.  The difference now is that much of the country is ready for this song. 

So to end I will say that I pray for Bernie.  Every day I pray that he will remain safe, and I ask that he will maintain his integrity.  As citizens why shouldn’t we vote for and work for the world we really want?  If we don’t at least try, we will have no idea if this better world could be possible.

a new life

It is amazing how quickly one can just walk out of a life.  “Welcome to your new life,”Jeoffrey said as I began to struggle with my second paper jam in the famed RISO machine.  Yes, it is a new life.  For the first time in my adult life without being a student, I am working primarily in an office.  It has been a little over 20 years since I first started working as a professional singer, 25 since I taught my first piano student and 26 since I was first paid to accompany someone on the piano.  I’ve also spent 15 years directing various musical ensembles. 

I turned 40 less than a month ago, and this is the first birthday that I have been unhappy to see.  Looking at my life thus far, I have loved my work. On the whole, I have loved the people I work with. Over the past year I have lived apart from my partner.  We’ve been together for over eight years now.  Circumstances aligned to make his moving to another city for a job inevitable.  I resisted.  I held on.  I spent a year in a dingy little apartment sleeping next to my piano and doing as much work as I could while I was there so that I could spirit off to be with him and our pets as much as possible. 

Again, I loved my job.  Child of a mismatched coupled whose marriage seemed to never have been happy, I swore I would never give up my life for a man.  Never.  I considered these jobs as my prized possessions, as my life.  Over the course of the year and through the inevitable march of time, the luster of these activities dimmed.  My professional singing life was plagued my social unease and personal insecurity.  I loved to sing, but I often distrusted many of my colleagues.  My inadequacies as a teacher magnified in my mind so that I would find myself praying for a good successor who could fulfill all of the needs for these children that I myself felt I was failing to do. 

Over the course of the year apart, I prayed for the right situation.  I dreamed of a perfect situation, thinking that with enough work and preparation I could land in a new city with a situation as great as that which I had developed over years in the old city.  I applied and interviewed and auditioned for many jobs.  I applied for jobs in which my training, experience and years of graduate school would say I was qualified for.  Some jobs were offered, but for salaries that were insulting or under conditions where I was certain I could not have been an effective teacher or leader.  Finally, as I had given in to starting another year in the old place but this time with a large commute, everything opened up.  It was quick and hardly painless, but as I look on the events of the past week there is a strange sense of déjà vu and almost inevitability about them.

In wondering about one’s future, in musing about ‘how will this part of my life end?’ sometimes there comes a quick small thought, and you think to yourself with almost horror, oh no.  I don’t or I won’t leave like that. I’ll be this or more that.  I’ll do it right.  And then, sometimes years later, that actual thing happens and in a dim place inside you remember that reflection of the future that came unbidden once some time ago.

Then in the next moment, you realize that what you had feared may have happened, but the earth is still turning.  The sun still comes up in the morning, and the dog needs to be walked.  In the next moment you see that the majority of external circumstances in your life that you had claimed as yourself no longer apply.  But here you sit.  And really it doesn’t seem so bad so far.  You start to wonder if those notions you’ve held about yourself make it easier or harder to relate to others.  (You look at the dog sleeping and pray she wasn’t poisoned by one of the many dangerous looking things on the street that you tried unsuccessfully to keep her away from.) 

You know that you’ve had a rich and full life in other places, and you pray that you will be able to build one in this new place, even if it doesn’t look like the ones before did.  Somewhere inside you think that you really don’t want that again.  It was fantastic, but in retrospect my life in LA resembled an arc.  It started very low with those first few months in an ill-advised doctoral program where I weekly considered just piling my stuff back into the Hyundai and driving back across the country to New York, that shining past where I imagined all had been wonderful.

I didn’t pack up.  I stuck it out, worked the four simultaneous jobs, eeked by until I found better employment.  By that time I had personal reasons to stay.  Work came. Clarity helped me to jettison unnecessary graduate school. Professional opportunities came.  High profile opportunities even, and all the while I could step back and see the trajectory of the arc.  I could see where it would most likely go, yet I rode it all the same.  I resisted but persisted.

It was time to go.  I week ago, through my crazy tears on the phone to my boss, I finally admitted the inevitable out loud. Finally there was at least a financial net to catch me, and I jumped.