Grit

And a quirky writing exercise

I’ve had a week to process the presidential election results. My only firm takeaway: welcome to recrudescence. While I remain incredulous that a majority of Americans are comfortable returning an immoral convicted felon who fomented an insurrection against our country to office and I am filled with fear for the long-term consequences, my primary response has been to try and clear mental space by focusing on the people I love and for my own creative energies. While it feels nearly blasphemous to reduce so wise a writer as Toni Morrison to quoted lines that have been circulating widely on social media (in full transparency, lines that I have shared as well), her words are currently my guide:

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write… That is how civilizations heal.

“I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.”

Morrison wrote this passage in a 2004 essay for The Nation after the election of George W. Bush. I can’t begin to imagine what she might write if she were alive today. She reminds artists that their predecessors continued to produce art and nurture voices of acceptance, compassion, and beauty from gulags and prison cells and hospital beds and while hounded and bullied and exiled. I’m trying to keep my head down and write. Writing is the only way I have ever fully processed my thoughts and my emotions and the only way I have ever been able to find the means to engage with others with any intelligence or nuance. Mine is a slow mind, one that better matches the pace and deliberation of writing. My desire to focus on craft, to block out much of the noise that can interfere with my ability to discover and tell the stories in which I find meaning has also necessarily meant trying to eradicate toxic voices from my life where I am able. I refuse to hide. I reject listening only to the echo chambers of those who share my views. I will not cease to speak out against injustice and ignorance and to try and help others and protect others, but I won’t tolerate myopia or incivility. I will, as Morrison demanded, try to produce art.

I mentioned my time teaching at Journeys School in last week’s newsletter. Among a series of personal and learning attributes we tried to demonstrate and gently prodded (sometimes less gently) our students to embody was “grit.” Grit, as applied to moral character, is the display of courage and resolve. It is a personality trait that can help one develop resilience. I think what Morrison was calling for is best described as grit, the ability to move past despair and take action.

Getting past the fear is more difficult. I have real fear for what an unleashed, aggrieved, and declining Trump will do. Republicans have bought and paid for the Supreme Court (cue their blocking of Merrick Garland, which should endure as a refrain against technocracy we chant forever), a court that has capitulated on its participation in checks and balances and has granted presidential immunity. We have known Trump’s character for decades, long before he ever ran for president. We know he is little more than a selfish liar mired in self-deception. Anyone who has attempted to listen to him speak will recognize he is at once simple-minded and a charlatan. He has demonstrated these traits in actions and in words ad nauseum. But my fear is far less about Trump and far more about how far we have fallen as a civilization. People will say, “Get over it. So you lost an election, big deal.” On the literal level, liberals will “get over it” and accept the election results, something Trump and his supporters never did, which was a fundamental denial of democracy. My dear friend who is working his way through biographies of every president reminds me that there have always been scandals and power grabs and incompetents who have won their time in the White House. As much as I respect my friend’s wisdom, what we have not seen before is a president who has denied the results of a democratic election or who called for an insurrection against the very government he was supposed to lead.

What this election has revealed is not Trump’s character but ours. Half of our citizenry has said, “We know who Trump is and we still believe he is the best choice to lead the country.” I guess the cliché really is true: “We get the government we deserve.”

I have offered my opinion of the man. Yours may be different. All I ask is that opinions be thoughtful and based on substance, that we gather fact-based evidence in their formation, that they be opinions on which we have reflected, and that they be our own rather than soundbites heard and repeated from echo chambers of siloed news and social media. If my opinion offends you and offense is all you can muster for reaction, then feel free to unsubscribe. Those few conservatives who have commented on any posts from this newsletter have done so vacuously, with the literal responses of amorphous taglines: “fake news,” “communist,” and “tree-hugger.” If instead you wish to have reasoned, reasonable, and respectful discussions about differing desires for policy, about differing perspectives on what’s needed for the future, then I remain as open to such discourse as I have always been. I have never been interested in surfaces or the superficial, but I cherish real dialogue.

My response to this election is quite different from 2016, for eight years ago I was mired in utter shock, whereas this time I only feel dismay, for we’ve seen this clown show before and apparently a majority of my fellow citizens support its reprisal. I’m not terribly surprised. We have fallen so far, apparently set on embodying the catch phrase MAGA has told us we represent, as has Trump’s dystopian portrait of an eviscerated nation. Last week in advance of the election I shared my belief that Trump would lose the popular vote and win the Electoral College. That he won the popular vote for the first time in three attempts is the greater shock because voters supported him in the knowledge that this time he has remade the Republican party in his own image and those who previously served in his administration and were willing to either say no to him or to shift his attention by bandying other shiny objects for diversion are gone. He is free to act on impulse. And that is all Trump is, like most children, impulsive. He does not develop policies, he reacts on perceived grievances.

If his supporters wished to discuss actual policy, we would find far more agreement than disagreement. Among his base I have encountered almost none willing and few capable. Do we need comprehensive immigration reform? You bet we do. Did President Biden make a bad problem worse? Most certainly. But the fear mongering portrayal on which Trump relies, crafting portraits of all immigrants as murderous criminals is not only a lie, it fails to actually discuss the larger realities that make people risk their lives to cross our border. Never has he, or any conservative I’ve heard, argued for punishing those who hire undocumented workers, whether they be corporate HR heads, the guy who swings through the Home Depot parking lot and says, “Hop in,” or the privileged white charity ball couple who “loves our housekeeper so much we treat her like family.” While the forces that make desperate people seek safety and employment far from their homelands are both complex and human, in economic terms, they represent a supply and demand issue. Trump thinks he can cut the supply by deportation and building a wall. He fails to address demand on either end of the exchange. If those who hire undocumented workers were punished, there would be no jobs for which to cross borders (and then we could face the reality that almost no American workers would take most of the jobs performed by undocumented workers). And on the other end of the exchange, if we supported entrepreneurship in impoverished places, buoyed the kind of infrastructure development that allowed economic diversity and provided income by gainful employment for the kinds of aimless young men who currently turn to gangs, we would help to remove the impetus for those seeking livelihoods and fleeing violence. I suspect that if you had no job, no prospects and regularly witnessed women in your life being raped, you’d leave home too. Of course, such ideas get dismissed as liberal nonsense.

A majority of Trump voters in exit polling say that their support is based on a belief that he has better economic policy. The only two things close to economic policies he has ever discussed are tax breaks and trade tariffs. Proposing tax breaks, or in this case, extending the tax breaks he passed in his first term is the easiest kind of political promise in the universe. I mean, who doesn’t want to give the government less money? The problem is that his version relies on trickle-down theory, something that has been disproven time and time again since Regan. In truth, few Americans benefited from his original tax breaks because they are entirely focused on the wealthy. If you are not a person of privilege, you probably saw no actual impact. After all, so many of us who scramble from gig to gig are heavily invested in the stock market, right? And if you voted because you feel “taxed” by inflation, well, while we all feel the pain, just wait (and by the way, the actual inflation rate in October was 2.4%). If Trump passes his tariffs, we’ll be in for far more pain. You don’t really think corporations will eat the increased cost of goods, do you? And speaking of that, do your really thing the inflation we have faced over the past two years is entirely the result of pandemic spike (or that Biden created it, kind of like we manufacture hurricanes—thank Marjorie Taylor Green-jeans) and there is no way that any red-blooded American corporation would say, “Well, shit, they’re pissed at somebody else, maybe we can bump some prices up and not take the blame.” Yeah, tariff costs won’t get passed to us, just like Trump will unwind nearly forty years of international trade from corporations seeking the lowest possible labor cost. Right. And how many manufacturing jobs came back to the U.S. from 2016 to 2020 and still exists? Hmm. Oh, and when he presses the U.S. military into deporting every undocumented worker he can identify, that won’t have any effect on food prices, right? So I’m not buying the economic argument. I suspect his supporters will be quiet as crickets when inflation elevates, home and rent prices remain out of reach, and the national debt soars.

I see Trump supporters forming five primary camps. There’s the “I vote Republican” camp. My parents belonged to this group. I can’t know for certain, but to the best of my knowledge, they voted straight Republican ballots for the whole of their lives. Were they alive, they would probably have continued this streak. I find voting a straight ticket on principle baffling. I do recall, however, when my mother in 2020, just on the cusp of turning ninety-four, told me, “I don’t like Trump. I don’t like how he acts. But there’s no way I will ever vote for any Dam-o-crat.” My brother and I both counseled her gently, “It’s okay to leave any part of your ballot blank, Mom. You don’t have to vote for either candidate.” “Really,” she said. “You can do that?” I see this group of voters as including both folks like my mother who believe themselves party aligned and those who so hate politics and politicians (quite understandable) that they don’t wish to engage in the work of discovering what positions candidates actually hold. Who can blame them when modern politics is mostly based on personality cults rather than governance and when we have cable news tell us what we are supposed to think.

There there’s the camp who says, “I find Trump funny. He tells it like it is. He probably doesn’t mean half of what he says.” Well, to cast a vote on “funny” … do I need say anything?

There’s the aggrieved camp. This group I feel for because we’re all guilty of seeing the universe through our own narrow lens and thinking we’ve actually seen it. I’m guilty as charged. Some of the grievances are real. Jobs really did leave the country over the past many decades. High paying jobs that require little education largely no longer exist outside the trades. Old institutions and customs really have died. Unions have lost power. These things are real. To believe that Trump cares to change them or that he is capable of doing so is naïve. That such real grievances get clumped in with vast demographic shifts that prompts xenophobia is simply sad and probably not accurate for most in this group, although the presence of a diverse society and a pluralistic one remains a gap beyond measure.

The final two groups of Trump supporters I identify are the ones who truly piss me off. The first is self-serving, wealthy conservatives who often can’t stand Trump as a human and dismiss identity politics but plug their nose, vote for him, and reap the rewards. It’s calculation. Transaction. Trump increases his personal wealth when he takes actions that help other wealthy people and Vis versa. Many will argue this is simply capitalism at work when more accurately it is free market economics. I would argue that capitalism at its best serves people. It creates opportunity. The American myth is that anyone can rise from nothing. It does play out on occasion. Those occasions become rarer and rarer as wealth is consolidated. Those who accept an unintelligent, unimaginative, frequently failed businessman as their protector in order to line their own pockets are as bankrupt as he is (and his companies have literally filed for bankruptcy four times; this from a guy who was gifted $413 million—in 2018 dollars—from his father). Here it feels appropriate to remind you that one simple action we can all take is to vote with our wallets. I try always to support local businesses over national corporations where possible, but I will refuse to support those businesses that are vehemently pro-Trump. For me this includes businesses like Black Rifle Coffee, Co. and Michaels. If you are still on Twitter(X), what’s wrong with you? Here are some of the corporations that have specifically funded “the Sedition Caucus—those 147 members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 election, along with Donald Trump and, later, the 20 new members who won in the 2022 midterms promoting the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen”: AT&T, UPS, Home Depot, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Comcast, Charter Communications, Marathon Petroleum, Honeywell…the list is quite large. (The link contains the source.)

And lastly, the group I find most mind boggling and maybe the most sinister: fundamentalist Christians who are adamant in their support of Trump. If you searched the planet for a person who displays more unchristian qualities than Trump, good luck. He is little more than a bully. He is a serial philanderer. He lies nearly constantly. He is the definition of immodest. He has called for his “enemies” to be murdered. Hypocrisy is one thing. Accepting someone so antithetical to Christian values in order to advance a single cause is morally bankrupt. For those who believe in a book, including many who believe it to be the literal word of their god, as zealously as many fundamentalists, what an irony it is then that despite having been instructed over and over to recognize that the devil assumes many forms in order to tempt them, they still remain incapable of seeing Trump for what he is. For a religion that preaches tolerance, how can so many be so intolerant? I can no longer be tolerant of such individuals. That so many cannot see the disconnect of their purported belief and their support for someone who stands against the values they say they represent suggests their “faith” is little more than a cloak they wear.

I’m done ranting. I recognize rants do little good. But it felt good to get it out of my system. And perhaps it can help clear space to do the real work of creative enterprise. The real work for those of us who will stand against Trump and his administration will be exhausting. It will require intellectual might. It will require regular and organized and amplified protest. And it will require the hard groundwork to build a future that rebuilds decency and democracy from the debris field he will leave behind.

I promise future posts focused on art and music and kindness and hope.

Writing Exercise

And now for something completely different. I’m stealing this from short story writer Steve Fox, who, I believe borrowed it from someone else. I can’t bring you any joy today, not even with music, so please find joy in the writing possibilities that await you in this newspaper page:

Do the work, friends. Good luck. And look out for one another. And re-read that Morrison quotation one more time.