Marietta, I don’t hate you. What else can I say?

This morning as I was about to post this essay, I received sad news and glad news and both fill my heart in connection to the people they relate to. Heart, connection, relationship: these are core ingredients for the way forward. I may as well add two other core ingredients for me, in my case received from sources in yoga and buddhism: honesty, and non-harming to myself and others. These are easier than they sound and more difficult than they sound.

Opening note: I started addressing Marietta in my head soon after the election. I started writing this essay about three weeks ago. When I started I wasn’t reading the news and commentary. Very personally and emotionally affected by the election, I thought and wrote with reactivity and deep feeling that could not simply be bounded and rationalized by logical thought and “data.” Then I returned to reading news and commentary including from more conservative sources. Logical thought and data have filtered back in but I have tried to keep this personal: a real person (me) addressing a real person (Marietta). I’ve felt internal pressure to wrap it all up into a comprehensive view, a stable edifice of argument that preemptively knows and responds to potential critique, but I cannot. This long piece comes from a mess of feeling and thinking.

     I met Marietta in over-canvassed PA the weekend before the election. Over-canvassed by the Dems, that is. I saw no other canvassers and few Trump signs. We had the ground game. They played a brilliant game of disinformation.
     Marietta was on my list, a registered Democrat. Two Trump signs — two of the very few we saw in this area that likely voted mostly for him — stood side-by-side in a small front yard. It wasn’t clear whether that stretch of green was part of Marietta’s property or belonged to her neighbor. Undeterred, I rang the doorbell. Little dogs set up barking, an annoyance to their owners I knew, so I prepared myself to offer an apology. No one answered. I walked away from the door and a man came out of the open garage. He wasn’t on my list.
     I’m here canvassing for Kamala Harris, I said. I am voting for her, he said, my wife isn’t. A mild man. I was puzzled; he wasn’t on my list which included independents. Marietta came out. I always voted Democrat, but not this time. My father was union, she said. We always voted the same, he said, this time she’s different. The prices, she said, and immigration. She was emphatic. She was voting for Trump. And so it went on. I tried to listen, a fellow canvasser argued. Marietta was emphatic. I was in the Iraq war, she said, wars aren’t good. Trump will stop the wars. And Biden let the prices go up. Not everyone has to have an abortion, she said, but everyone has to buy food.
     Marietta, you came out to talk to us. You were never rude, hostile, or aggressive. You continued to speak with us. We left. We had to do our list. To my ear, you were not happy, or proud, or angry; maybe sad, maybe defensive; always emphatic. I felt that you were trying to persuade us that you were doing the right thing. You wanted us to understand. I do; and I so, so don’t, as I still reel from the results of this election.
     I don’t hate you Marietta. What else can I say?
     I don’t fear you. I don’t hate you. Hate is a strong word I use sparingly, and very, very rarely in relation to people. I wish the Democrats, the left, would not call people “haters.” If, as a thought experiment, I call someone “hater,” I feel myself narrowing. Perceiving you boxed in by “hate,” I box myself in. So then we shake our fists at each other from our boxes. Our boxes open in trusted spaces of family, parks, forest, seashore, dog-love, sunrise, a recognized constellation of stars. But as those moments pass, the itchiness and stuffed sinuses of narrow-box air return. Well, if all that happens is that we shake our fists at each other from those closed boxes, it sounds limiting, maybe somewhat unhealthy — chronically high cortisol levels, not good — but that’s not so bad, is it? I ask you, I ask myself.
     I’m writing to you, Marietta, but not just to you. Do you fear that I’m setting up a springboard for myself and a trap for you? Are you curling your fingers as you listen to me. Mine are already clenched. 
     The thing is: you curled your fingers around a pen or a pencil to let a genie — a potentially very destructive genie — out of the bottle. This is what I experience, this is what I see.
     Donald Trump and his enablers and sycophants are not an ordinary trusted family. They are certainly not a park, a forest, a sunrise or a seashore. Well, you might say, I’m not looking for a park for a President. I’m not looking for family. Prices and immigration, remember. Does trust have value for you, I might respond. I feel it does from the way you engaged with me. Trump and his gang blow hot, smelly winds of fear, greed, and ignorance. They offer illusion. While they conjure an illusion of beauty and wellbeing for you and you and you, offering each of you the fantasy you want, they themselves grasp at money-power-power-money. Amassed behind the delusions they offer are breakage, pain, and repression, even as they declare that only they can shepherd you away from the loss, lies, and theft that — they say, and perhaps you believe — incompetent and corrupt liberals represent.
     I don’t think you hate me. I don’t think you want to hurt others. But your vote helped invite out the gloating boy who wore a blue t-shirt with large letters imprinted on the front: MASS DEPORTATION NOW. You want immigration controlled. I heard you. You don’t want what you experience as masses of undocumented migrants spoiling your America. The boy with the blue t-shirt goes further, and expresses careless cruelty. With Trump, what you want and what the boy expresses come together. The boy’s careless cruelty draws strength from what you want and from Trump’s messages of fantasy and fear. The boy turns to cruelty to find pride again, a pride he feels entitled to, that he thinks would have been his in the past, that he believes he can have back when America is Great again. Trump draws strength from what you want and from the boy.
     America is great, Marietta. You and others are right when you ask me and others like me: why did you come here, if you don’t like it? In my case, I didn’t have to come; it wasn’t desperation that drove me, I wasn’t a refugee. I came because of the creative energy and individualist freedom of this country. Bound by the norms of my old country (where I also was held with love and offered much beauty), I came here to grow. And this country, your country, my country, fully my country now, offered me growth: space, affection, beauty, complexity, sometimes loneliness. I slowly learned — first in my mind, increasingly in my body and spirit — that amidst the wide open spaces and the wellbeing of many people lie pain, repression, poverty, illness. Under the promise of opportunity is cruelly different access to wellbeing, indeed to opportunity itself. A lot of this has to do with how race and color are embedded in our common experience and understanding of what is rightfully “American.” As Europeans settled on this continent, in the process taking more and more land from indigenous peoples, the “United States of America” emerged. Peoples of European descent (“white people”) grew to have more access to opportunity than colored people, especially indigenous peoples and descendants of Africans who were brought and held in servitude with vicious force and disrespect. Layered with race and color are income, type of education, and the kind of work we do. Academically well-educated people grew to have substantially more access to wellbeing. There is an unfairness there as well, hard to pin down, and hard to address. 
     But perhaps I am wandering away from the moment and space of our engagement. I am wandering into a larger space and time that holds us both; if I keep wandering I will lose you. 
     It’s the economy, you say, our prices!! It’s the wars!
     The prices affect me also Marietta. You and I are about the same age. My income is flat, and right now declining because of higher prices. Soon it will decline more rapidly because of my age. I am beginning to confront inadequate health care in the face of slow deteriorations in my body, my home, my food, my life. On prices, I don’t think Trump will do any better than Harris, though he inherits a strong economy from Biden. Strong, you might protest! Yes, the fundamentals are strong and hopefully will fill the sails of many younger people’s lives. My concern is that some people will benefit more than others: under Trump, the very rich will benefit more than the middle and working classes. We who are older with limited incomes are always vulnerable, quite significantly so in this country, more so under Republicans, and even more so under Trump.
     The wars: we didn’t start them. Biden didn’t start them. The war you served in, in which you directly saw the horror of war, was started by a Republican. All the wars the United States has officially fought in the last few decades were started by Republicans. I’m glad you are against war, Marietta. Wars are a terrible thing. I am still struggling with war and violence as a human condition. And I deeply fear that Trump may bring about more war, more suffering, including war in our country. It’s not a big step from the cruelty of the blue t-shirt to mass violence, mass destruction. You remember the illusion — the lies — on which the terrible war you served in was based. There will be lies and related violence under Trump, and I am afraid.
     Am I really writing to you? Am I just writing for myself, for people who think like me, feel like me? Rationally it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Emotionally? I am afraid. I am afraid, not just, not so much, for myself, but for the people who will suffer humiliation, placelessness, and real and big wounds of the body.
     My meditative practice acknowledges — or wants to acknowledge? — the placelessness of everything in life, the impermanence, the flow. Right now I am ok enough to have the luxury of making such an acknowledgement. If you fear losing your home and feel that your world is increasingly relegated to a disrespected past and future, you may feel further disrespected by such meditative placidity. Indeed, those struggling with very long histories of disrespected pasts, presents, and futures might also reject such placidity. Fuck meditative placidity you, and they, might say. I’m realizing as I write to you, that my meditative practice is a personal practice. It shapes how I listen and act, but has little relevance apart from that.
     Your eyes glaze over. 
     What is placelessness, your face asks.
     Placelessness is most drastically not having a physical place of safety. More broadly, it is not having place to be — physically, socially, culturally, economically. 
     Marietta, you’ve known placelessness in some form or the other; by our age, we all have. You fear it, perhaps, as a result of economic vulnerability or what you experience as mass immigration of people different from you. Perhaps you fear losing your home. Perhaps you see your world increasingly relegated to a disrespected past. You honored the worthy struggles of your past. Your own struggles, laid upon those of your past, were to lead to golden years in your present. You worked for this, and now you may feel your present has been tarnished by people who dishonor your past and don’t care for you. You didn’t work for this fool’s gold, you want your world back.
     You don’t want placelessness; you may feel you don’t deserve it. Residents of the U.S. who are “legal” don’t deserve placelessness either you might allow, but they have to work for the real gold; you’ve worked for it, work is all it takes if you are legal. They, who are “illegal,” who are here illegally, deserve placelessness. This is not their place, you protest, and it isn’t your concern where their place is. This is God’s Country and there’s a line and a process for finding a place here.
     I’m getting sadder, not wanting to fight, understanding, not understanding, scared, sad, angry. I am in some middle: I legally placed myself in our country, seeking and finding creative freedom. And as my place became part of the fabric of your world, I became increasingly bound to the weft and weave of that fabric, and I saw the dirt and blood, dirt and blood in the fabric, over and over. Some of that dirt and blood is the suffering and heroism of your ancestors’ struggles. Indeed, in my youth in India, I read about the tribulations and resilience of early European settlers, pioneers to the west, and successive waves of Europeans who came looking for better lives. Already at that time I was discomfited by the depictions of “savages” and the destruction of their lives. I sought comfort in the romantic accounts of “Indians” who became friends and loyal, most of them as servitors, but occasionally in a glowing moment an equal. I held on to those glowing moments to redeem the rest of that world. Until I became friends, truly friends not just smiling acquaintances, with African-Americans and met members of tribal communities in California.
     Listen to me, Marietta. I am telling you I don’t hate you. As you tried to tell me that you don’t “hate” me. Hate is an aggressive feeling that tries to deny the being and integrity of someone or something. What I feel in response to the election results is fear, grief, uncertainty, and loss. I could speculate how you feel. Perhaps you feel the same as I. It doesn’t take much for fear, grief, uncertainty, and loss to be expressed as hate. I heard you wanting to hope from a boxed-in place; it’s the same for me.
     As my friendships with African-Americans got deeper, I learned their anger and their constant awareness of woundedness, threat, and fragile-place-possible-placelessness; and I learned and grew from their wisdom and profound awareness of love and beauty in the midst of imperfection and insecurity. In their writing and art, in their relationships, they reveal the dirt and tears in the fabric of our country, but they’ve also turned that dirt, if you allow yourself to see it, into gold, real gold that glows for all of us. They, many of them, are afraid of what you have chosen Marietta, of you. In the glow of the gold they created out of pain, hope, and love, I see wider and deeper into the history of Europeans settling in North America, into the physical and ontological decimation of tribal communities that were native to this continent for millennia. Ontological decimation? Destruction and denial of who they are, of their being.
     European settlers on this continent are not the only, or first, people to engage in this kind of denial of being. Humans have a great capacity for this. But Europeans have done this with a consistency and power — sometimes with assumptions of right and goodness, sometimes with wide-open greed — over the last six hundred years or so. Their increasing dominance — economically, militarily, politically, culturally, and racially — has led to a racialized social layering of obliviousness, cruelty, and pain. All humans suffer struggles and pain, we all do, but the social stratification of obliviousness, cruelty, and pain means that some people have more constant and larger struggles and greater and more generational pain.
     Am I losing you? There is real feeling behind my distant words, but perhaps the feeling is lost for the words. And, you might say, some of these words, really, they feel like a way of silencing me. The onto-word? Yup, even I find that word and phrase clumsy. Destruction and denial of being. People who’ve felt it know it. I think it’s likely you’ve known it and felt it in some way.
     There’s no going back, Marietta. You know that also. I don’t mean that in the campaign slogan way of “we won’t go back.” And not going back isn’t contrary to memory embedded in spirit and body and living fully and dynamically with that body of embedded memories. 
     I hear you wanting (back) a world in which you (and your ancestors) earned your safety and economic security through your (and their) hard work. You (and they) earned something. Others have too. And I fear that with these election results many of us — possibly you as well — will lose, drastically, safety and economic security.
     My fear is that not only will Donald Trump not give you back your old world with its promise of safety and economic security, but he will bring back the bad old days. He and people emboldened by him will try to put layers of people back where they belong, if necessary with force and cruelty. In some ways you are ok with that, I think, but you wouldn’t want to do the dirty work yourself, or would you? I don’t know. What I do know is that in our conversation I not only heard fierce fear and entitlement, but also glimpsed fairness and acknowledgement of being. I heard the fairness of your engagement with me, as we stood there before you, one of us trying to listen, another one arguing, and you trying to convince us and yourself that you are right.
     Why is my fear for myself, others, and my country so overwhelming after this election? This fear does not simply come from deep disagreement on world views and policies. 
     Donald Trump is erratic and his sycophants are erratic also. His enablers —  very rich people and more rational Republican leaders — are less erratic but in their greed for ideological and structural domination, which is a fundamentally undemocratic greed, they have unleashed an erratic power that will likely escape them. They, meaning Trump, his sycophants, and his enablers, freely lie and have disproportionately contributed to our politics becoming a swirl of rhetorical fantasies and illusions. Of course the Democrats have contributed to this as well; if they don’t play the game, they’re out of it. Looks like they are out of it anyway. Trumpian conservatives and Republicans play this game better, indeed they played it superbly in this last election. They don’t really care who you are, about you. They need you and others to win power and they will use the power to go where the money is and where their egos find space and fuel to become and feel larger. 
     They will hasten potentially disastrous climate change without making provision for the safety and security of even ordinary (and “legal”) people like you and me, leave alone people who have few resources even in the best of times and certainly not enough to survive our increasing droughts, floods, hurricanes and so on. Have you noticed your home insurance premiums going up? That’s not Biden. Insurers are protecting themselves against climate change that Trump denies. 
     Regarding job and income security for our middle and working classes, Trump’s enablers and allies will seek and build policies and technology that will drive middle and low income people even further into insecurity. Educated liberal Democrats also do this; they have been at the forefront of our development of technology, sometimes naive about negative effects, sometimes willfully ignoring negative effects, often hopeful about positive effects. After all, there’s always someone else who will ignore effects and follow the money. Now Trumpian Republicans want to grab the technological advantage for conservatism; they have already mastered social media. 
     In addition to their policies that are likely to make our lives less secure, Trump and his associates pose the danger of cultish authoritarianism based on a system of egotism and sycophancy.
     Marietta, your wanting safety and security is understandable, but that’s what you want for yourself, not what they want for you. They want you as a voter (and potentially as a militant), manipulable because of your longing and your fear: your longing to be safe, secure, and whole, and your fear that your past, present, and future are falling to pieces.
    You spoke about the wars, so let me address those, since Trump might indeed “end” them. In many ways it feels like people want them just to end; killing and destruction no longer being before us in the news would be enough. Certainly, an end to the violence, the killing, the dismembering of people, and the destruction of homes would be good.
     Maybe for Ukraine this would be better than the current war — many Ukrainians, exhausted by the long war so far, might now agree. For me and people who know what I know and think what I think — no secret information, we know and think based on what we read and see, and everything I read and see is public — Russia under Putin is, at the minimum, amoral and repressive. If you’re with him you’re fine; if you are not, you will be repressed, mostly on the side and quietly, but loudly if needed. If you are not with him, you are an enemy. He needs and names enemies. Those who are with him are drawn to fear those enemies as well and rely on him to keep them safe. I fear that Trump’s United States might become the same, which will suit some people and hurt others grievously. How many of us will look away or watch from the side as people are silenced, quietly or loudly? Trump and his associates are already well on their way to commandeering and deforming our constitutional guardrails.
    And Palestine and Israel? With Trump, there is no hope of fairness and real peace. The denial of being that Palestinians have suffered — which they did not initiate, but, yes, to which they have contributed — will continue until their being possibly becomes merely memory. It seems that for some they are already memory — regretted or silenced — but indeed many Palestinians are still in Palestine, still alive, many of all ages and genders are being killed, maimed, and dispossessed under Israeli government policy right now, right now as I write this. Perhaps they will become another lesson for us humans about the wrong we can do in which many of us collude or stand by and watch. It is a process of wrong that Jewish people know well from their experience of centuries of cruel discrimination, especially by non-Jewish Europeans, that culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust, which remains a shame and lesson for all humankind. All human societies have the capacity for such cruel exclusion — we all do — and Jewish people, too, are humans with human capacities.
     What your vote has helped open up is much larger than Trump. We face inflation of our human capacity for destructive disaffection. Disaffection, yes, is the opposite of affection. Affection is linked to connection, trust, and relaxation of the body; it is a potent source of wellbeing. Disaffection is based on fear, blame, distrust, the cutting of connection, and stress that directly contributes to physical inflammations in the body. Disaffection can seem to offer a promise of aliveness, similar to the aliveness of valor in fighting. Often the initial seduction of valor in fighting comes from feeling that we are fighting for what we value, against what threatens what we love, including ourselves. Often enough, intoxicated by valor we lose connection to what we value, what we love. You’ve seen war, Marietta. You’ve seen how valor in fighting can be manipulated by greed and ego and how much destruction and terror it can bring into the world.
     With increasing polarization in our country, indeed in the world — some of it manipulated by powerful people and corporations — we’ve all tapped into our capacity for disaffection. Meanwhile, some with rising fortunes have become greedier; and some, feeling forgotten or dismissed, have become aggrieved and angry. Some who are among the most vulnerable have become more vulnerable and when they tap on the doors of dignity with their meagre social and financial resources, many of us look at them and say “who are you?” A few of us in that place of dignity they seek will welcome them; most of us will shrug and turn away. Some of us will say you, stranger, you are the cause of my troubles, will try to chase them away and close the door, will try to avoid killing them but will let them die — you are not my problem, you are my problem — and if they become more of a “problem,” some of us may start killing them as well.
    Marietta, would you turn away if a group of proud boys started beating me up? (Would you ask me the same?)
    My language, Marietta, is both dramatic and muted because this is dramatic and I am scared.
     As disaffection has grown, in part stoked by forces that seek power and money, it has grown ripe for manipulation. Donald Trump attuned to our widespread disaffection and his enablers discovered the effectiveness of finding and voicing grievance. He and his enablers crafted a winning formula to push away democratic constraints on power and profit-making. 
     For decades, modern conservatism has been significantly driven by profit-making. Straightforward profit-making needs a functional society which gives it a social ethic, albeit twisted to the pursuit of money. Today’s risk is that the power-seeking which always underlies political leadership has found an egotistical host — Donald Trump — who has repeatedly broken institutional and conventional constraints and, in the process, has attracted and emboldened similar people with great capacity for egotistical seeking of power. Egotism has no social ethic; it serves and feeds its host, itself. Today we face danger because the most greedy forces of profit-making have allied brilliantly and cynically with egotism to stoke and deploy disaffection, all to win, wield, and perpetuate the power of a few.
     Trump is neither a good man nor a good leader. You, Marietta, know that he is not a good man; I heard you.  With regard to the quality of his leadership, look at who he has been proposing to appoint to his cabinet: for the most part, sycophants and greedy, egotistical people. In the military you certainly encountered people like that. In an ethical, disciplined military, such people are contained; in a healthy democracy, such people have limited play. I fear we are no longer in a healthy democracy.
     I hope you are right, Marietta. I hope the wars end, and everyone suffers death, indignity, and insecurity less, not just rich Americans, not just Putin’s supporters, not just Israelis. Yes, we are not the police force of the world. Equally I don’t want us to use very large amounts of our tax dollars to support a government that occupies the land of another people and destroys them. I genuinely would be relieved to find my fears unfounded. I would go back to advocating for my values, what you would call liberal values, and others would advocate for theirs; that’s what democracy is for: to figure out how to live reasonably functionally and non-violently with our different histories, values, and policy preferences.
     I hope you are right, Marietta, that this is simply another “conservative” government that focuses on profit-making, “family values,” and the preeminence of “American” as white and Christian, while also continuing to hold a social ethic and respecting the guardrails of a healthy democracy. I would still oppose such a government. Yes, I am “liberal,” and I would advocate for my values in healthy democratic process. That’s democracy: messy, imperfect, but founded on a social ethic and institutional checks and balances. That said, the most profound imperfection of modern democracy is its alignment with, indeed dependence on, the structures and dynamics of existing and reproduced socio-economic inequality. Trump and his associates have dug deep into this vulnerability, not to address the structural imperfection of socio-economic inequality but rather for their own power and money-making. I am afraid that we are heading away from healthy — albeit imperfect and vulnerable — democracy towards repressive democracy, even more concentrated kleptocratic oligarchy, and quite possibly also authoritarianism. These are big words that come down to repressive rule by greedy, egotistical people rather than democratic and somewhat accountable government.
     You did not bring up gender and Democrats’ protection of the rights and safety of trans people but I know this was a stick used against Kamala Harris and your Democratic Representative Susan Wild who lost in this election. Trump and Republicans’ cynical fight against trans people, who are among the least safe and secure in our communities, was such a sad and ignoble fight. Trans people are a tiny proportion of the population, which Trump acknowledges now. They don’t harm people at any higher rates than heterosexual males and females, but they are actively harmed at much, much, much higher rates. We are still learning how to create space for this kind of difference, that generates so little harm in itself. Yes, I know it’s unfamiliar and therefore feels threatening; after all, in the old days we were just girls and boys, women and men, or so most of us thought. Yes, we are still learning how to make space in our minds and communities, space in which all our children and adults can be safe and have opportunities to thrive. In contrast to making efforts to ask and learn about ourselves and others in generous ways, I see people stoked by the fear-mongering and disinformation of Trumpian Republicanism and  as a result expressing cruelty, and yes in this case hatred, directed against the idea and reality of trans people. This is wrong.
   I don’t hate you, Marietta, and I don’t think you hate me. I am confident that if we lived close to each other little ones from our families would be out selling girl-scout cookies and trick-or-treating and side-by-side we would enjoy it. 
     Our world is changing.
     There is still racism in our world, particularly sharply expressed against and felt by African-Americans, but we are leaving that world behind. I think you know that and don’t necessarily reject the change. You just want to know that you still have being, dignity, security, and respected history. Everyone wants these. Everyone wants these, but some want destructively more, some want to go back to the bad old days of racist exclusion, and too many of the latter are behind Trump and his win. 
     Marietta, uneven privilege based on income and class calls for urgent attention and political action. We can do that together. Could we — so different from each other — be creative together?
         We will never have this conversation. Could we even have this conversation? I think so. If we were chatting, I wouldn’t talk like this! And I would listen more, of course. I would hold myself back and listen. This is my writing. I sometimes talk like this but I adapt very quickly when I see that my listeners are drifting off.
     When we met, I failed you. I wasn’t able to convey how I can both hear you and conclude that Donald Trump poses an enormous danger to our country and the world. I’ve failed you and many, many others, not me alone, but I am responsible for my part. You are responsible for yours.
     The world is changing. 
    Climate crises are coming at us fast. They will affect all of us in this country and many, many others — real people — on our planet. This is not the time to be led by a potentially disastrous government of immoral, unethical, profit-making, uncaring, egotistical, and incompetent people.
     Marietta, I am committed to fairness, including democratic fairness to you. Would you commit to the same?

Closing note: If it seems like this essay is simply about what could go wrong with Trumpian Republicanism, read again. There is a mirror being held up in which Democrats — liberal and progressive — will also see themselves. I don’t have an answer. There is no straightforward, final answer. The world doesn’t simply become simple. Our values may be simple and to paraphrase MLK Jr, the arc of history does bend towards justice, but it is a long and wide arc that sometimes reveals itself to be a spiral, slipping back, pushing forward again, and if you treat it like a straight line on a flat world you risk falling over the edge and having to start all over again. 

So what do I do now? What do we do now?

(How to find a way to democratic change in the face of democratic inertia and alignment with socio-economic inequality?)
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