Trying To Make Some Sense of it All in Everyday Ramblings

“They will attack you, they will slander you, they will seek to destroy your career and your family, they will seek to destroy everything about you, including your reputation. They will lie, lie, lie, and then again they will do worse than that, they will do whatever is necessary.”

Donald J. Trump said the above last night in a dark and frightening speech about the Clintons and the mainstream media. What I thought when I heard it is that he is projecting exactly what he is doing in his campaign onto them.

Mind you I am not defending the Clintons here, I am making an observation about a dangerous worldview that is locked in a box that reverberates energetically that contains only one very insecure small self.

He clearly feels that whatever he does or says is completely justified, but when the exact same thing he does, is perceived as being done to him it is worse than unacceptable, it is actionable. Both legally and based on his profoundly disturbing asides and the actions of his fervent followers, violent.

I am still reeling from all the men who have said in the aftermath that what Mr. Trump said in the bus video and his verified actions in terms of treating women abhorrently was locker room talk and a distraction from more important issues.

The elephant in the room here is that the biggest issue of all that we have not been addressing as a nation (although Mrs. Clinton actually does talk about it) is all the ways men treat women as objects and worse. As a number of you have said…sexual assault is not okay. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the double standard and unequal pay.

You want to tap into a vein of incandescent anger? Taking the lid off and giving voice to how women really feel about how men treat them (not all men, not all the time) and their daughters and granddaughters and you are releasing a kind of energy that I don’t think this very connected world has ever seen before.

Again, if we could harness that energy for good, for open and honest debate, for health and safety for all and for our planet, for taking care of each other then we would have nothing to fear.

The emperor has no clothes.
But his followers have guns. Lots and lots of guns.

My aspiration is to live in a world where there is hope and kindness and compassion knowing full well that fairness only lives in our ideals and we are all vulnerable.

I am struck by how kind and funny and caring most of the people who have voted for or will vote for Trump can be. They are people just like me, in so many ways, we have so much more in common than that which divides us.

Getting past a sense of aggrieved anger is hard though. And it is interesting because in so many ways I too feel aggrieved. For most of my life I have felt powerless, that I had no voice. That my opinion didn’t matter, that my feelings don’t matter.

I think many of us do, and particularly if we are women.

Last night in the Mythos class there were nine people and the facilitator. This facilitator is amazing. He is really good. I have never worked with a theater director before but he seems to be skilled at bringing out what is best in people and learning what is important to them.

He asked each of us in turn to talk about our relationship to the Christian story in our lives. Three of us were raised Catholic, three fundamentalist, three mainstream Protestant and me, raised a kind of sort of Unitarian.

The act of active listening to each other was fascinating and the stories were fascinating. It was respectful and engaged. They kept going but I needed to leave to walk home in the rain and high wind.

When I retire I’ll be able to stay for the rest of the conversation.

May we still be talking to each other then.

Last updated October 14, 2016