Rebecca James Hecking's Blog

2016 is nearly over, thank heavens. It’s been a rough year! Like many, I’m more than a little nervous about what 2017 and the new president will bring. Those of us who are concerned about freedom of speech, freedom of the press, women’s rights, LGBT rights, and the like will need to really see clearly through the obfuscation and noise. In these dark times, we will need “night vision.”

Years ago, while on retreat, I walked a labyrinth in a field by starlight. That day, my friends and I had built it by hauling heavy stones and laying them out in a complicated design meant for meditative walking. The ground was rough and uneven and I kept tripping, even in daylight, so when I went back late that night to walk it alone, I was keenly aware that I had to pay close attention to my footing. As I got away from the campfire, my eyes adjusted to the dark and I discovered I could see the path ahead. Even with only starlight I could discern enough detail on the ground to find my way. I think there are lessons there for the present moment.  I know that the sun will rise again for my country, but in the meantime, we who oppose the incoming administration need to learn to function in the dark.

We need to adjust our vision. We need to learn to see clearly how Trump operates in order to oppose him and stand up for the constitution and for our country.  Traditional standards no longer apply. Normal order has been turned on its head. Business as usual is dead.  Civility has fallen by the wayside. Conventional ways of thinking no longer work.

Fortunately, our dear leader to be has shown us his character (or lack thereof). Moving forward, we need to see three things very clearly.

First: he has no respect for traditions, norms, or standards.  Anything that “all presidents” have done (like release their taxes or address conflicts of interest) are out the window. If he isn’t forced to comply, he won’t. He has absolutely no interest in learning anything (see my next point).  He will flout convention at every turn and upset decades of diplomacy and foreign policy on a whim. Expect it.

Second: there are only two things he really cares about. His money and his ego. That’s it. There is no compassion or decency to be found here. He simply doesn’t have it in him. Money and ego are his motivation. He cares not a whit for you, me or anyone else but himself. Don’t be misled, no matter what he or his surrogates say. Don’t believe whatever convoluted apologist garbage Kellyanne Conway spouts on the Sunday talk shows. Watch what he does, not what he says.

Third: he will overwhelm us with the sheer volume of his lies and obfuscation. The reason conventional fact-checking doesn’t work is not only do his most fervent supporters simply not care, but that by the time we’ve fact checked item A, he’s moved on to lies B, C, D all the way to Z and back again. It’s like using a test tube to collect water from a fire hydrant. We cannot get bogged down with his distractions and red herrings. We need to pick and choose our battles carefully.

I expect that as long as he is a “useful idiot” for the Republican Congress, and rubber stamps whatever they send him , that they will tolerate anything he does. This is true especially if the Republican base shows no signs of unrest. However, I think it’s likely that at some point Trump will overplay his hand. Either his base will start to turn on him as they realize they’ve been conned, or he will pick a fight with his fellow Republicans like the petulant child he is. At that point, Congress will turn on him, impeach him and install Pence who they much prefer anyway.  I don’t care for Pence, but at least he is an emotional adult and mentally stable. He will function conventionally and we will oppose him conventionally, and some semblance of normalcy will return.

In the meantime, train your night vision. Open your eyes. See clearly. See very clearly.

As a liberal who keeps up with current events, I find myself emotionally bouncing back and forth between denial and panic. 2016 has been rough. All of us have had personal challenges this year, which layer on top of our collective social challenges. Those personal challenges may have to do with relationships, physical or mental health, or maybe grief. Sometimes, we just want to curl up under the covers and not come out at all.

Now the holidays arrive, like they do every year, whether or not we are in the mood for them. The family gathers, decorations are put up, we go to luncheons and parties at work, we send the cards…then the worry creeps in. The anxiety. The sadness. Whatever messy feelings we have that are dissonant with all the bright-shiny, sugar-sweet seasonal trappings all around become a noticeable presence. They pull at our tattered emotional edges.

What now? I’d like to invite all of us, including you personally, to dig a little deeper. Let’s sink down below the surface glitz for a few minutes, to the heart of the holidays in several traditions. I’m focusing on three that are based in Western culture, but feel free to venture farther afield in the coming days.

In the Christian tradition, the season celebrates a birth, a beginning. All babies conjure within us fresh hope, whether we are searching for it or not. Look in the face of a tiny human, and one can’t help but feel joy on a primal level. This is the future. Life goes on. The particular baby of the season, the Christ Child, brings hope, and the truth that the divine can be found wrapped up in the ordinary.

The Jewish holiday of Hanukkah invites us to look at hope through a different lens. When our resources run dry, when we are tapped out, at the end of our rope, exhausted, we can stumble upon the miraculous. The lamp keeps burning; the light does not go out. We survive. We endure. Hope is tenacious and strong. We will not be beaten down forever. Our light is not extinguished.

The Winter Solstice is an astronomical moment that is the subtext for all our December celebrations, whether we realize it or not. It was celebrated explicitly in Europe before Christianity became established. Now, in our modern age, the solstice feels simultaneously ancient and science-y. The physical reality is that the planet has a tilt and an orbit, and we’ve mapped it out to the millisecond. Earthbound as we are, we go thus far and no farther before we begin to journey back to the light again. Darkness has its limits. Remember that.

What do we take from all this? Hope. Endurance. Courage. Strength. Light. Life. The holy present in the ordinary. The ordinary elevated to the sacred.  No matter what 2016 brought to all of us, or to you personally, we can look past the politics, the tinsel, and the stress and sink down into all this good stuff like a squishy pillow of soul-deep comfort.

It’s right there, waiting.  So light a candle. Take a deep breath. Eat a cookie. Hug a child. Sing a song. Read a poem. In the longest night, dream good dreams.

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And now, a shameless plug! You, dear reader, may or may not know that my second book The Thoughtful Caregiver: Surviving, Thriving and Growing in Spirit as You Care for Your Elderly Parent was just released and is available in print and Kindle versions on Amazon.  I wrote it specifically to provide support for adult-child caregivers. It’s like having a friend who’s been there, done that just a little bit ahead of you. It is suitable for readers of all faiths and all political persuasions. I invite you to check it out and support a writer (me!). It would make a great gift for anyone facing this stage of life.  Thank you for reading and Happy Holidays!

The election of Donald Trump is behind us now, and liberals like me are facing a very long, difficult four years. To be honest, I think the Republicans in Congress are also facing a long, difficult four years too, but that is another story. They now have to deal with their very (ahem) unusual president. That’s their problem now.

Since the election, we on the opposing side have cried on each others shoulders, ranted to friends, and made a lot of donations in Mike Pence’s name. Now, the task before us is to keep up a vigorous opposition in the face of what lies ahead of us. There is much work to be done, and there exists the very real possibility that we will at some point succumb to  protest-fatigue. I offer the following as a blueprint for the next four years, so each of us can run this marathon without collapsing into a puddle on the side of the road.

First of all, define for yourself what issue or issues will be your focus. There are so many, and you may care about them all, but we all have jobs and lives and we cannot devote ourselves 24-7 to all causes.  What is YOUR thing? Racial justice? Women’s rights? Children’s issues?  LBGTQ rights? The environment? Fair districting? Jobs? Standing up to the alt-right? Education? International issues? Standing up for science?  Immigrants and refugees?  Being a watchdog on conflicts of interest? Wall Street regulation?

Pick one, or two at most. That’s your activist focus.  Yes, you care about them all. We all do, but remember, this is a marathon, and you need to pace yourself.  There are lots of us, and you aren’t the only one in the fight. So pick your most important issues, and leave something for the rest of us.

Now, what’s your mode of activism?  Are you in the streets carrying a sign? Marching? Rabble rousing? Good. We need folks like that who get really jazzed over making lots of noise. But not everyone is the march-in-the-streets type.  Maybe your mode is letter writing, or phone calls instead. That’s great. We need well-spoken writers and callers too.  Maybe you will be an activist with your dollars. If you can afford to donate to groups who advocate for your cause, that’s fantastic. Not everyone can afford to donate, and those of us who can should put our money where our mouth is. Maybe your mode is something else entirely.  Art,  maybe.  Or teaching about your issue. Or whatever.  Wonderful! We need you too.

So you’ve chosen your focus, and you’ve identified your mode of activism.  Now, you need a plan.  A sustainable plan.  A plan that you can stick with for the next four years. What can you do? First of all, commit to following any policy related to your cause. Commit yourself to a higher level of understanding than the average person. Educate yourself first about the nitty-gritty details of your issues. Join groups of like-minded people. Now, for your personal activism.

If you are the protesting type who lives in a city, and can take to the streets often, then maybe you can commit to engaging in peaceful protests on a regular basis.  Maybe you can commit to writing your representative once a week.  Maybe you can make a phone call to congress twice a month.  Maybe you can set aside money in your budget and commit to donating regularly.

The important point here is to make that plan and follow through consistently for the next four years, even when you aren’t in the mood. Even when you are tired. Even when there’s been a string of bad news. No matter what.  Keep that commitment.  If enough of us do that, we can keep the pressure on, keep our spirits up, and make progress toward our goals.

What won’t serve us is to flail around in an emotional state, only to burn out six months from now and go back to watching cat videos on Instagram.  It won’t help anyone if we make lots of noise on inauguration day only to sit out the midterm elections. It won’t help our cause if we only do the fun stuff (rallies with like minded folks) while ignoring the very un-sexy but extremely important redistricting process that will happen in 2020 after the census.

We must be strategic. We must be smart. We must manage our energy and our focus. We must not be overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. We must be responsible for doing our part while not becoming bogged down by trying to do too much. We must also support one another, and not turn on each other. We must run the marathon that is the next four years.  Start stretching and warming up, people. We’ve got a long road ahead.

I awoke yesterday morning to find myself in a state of shock. I did not expect this outcome, and I’m certainly not alone in that. From what I hear, even those within the Trump inner circle were surprised by how things turned out. He defied political gravity.

What now? In terms of policy, who knows? He is a chameleon. Will he be a hard-line conservative ideologue? Probably not. Will he be able to actually get things done in a bipartisan way? Maybe on some issues. Maybe. In any case, we will get policy proposals that serve to bolster his fragile ego, which is what matters most to him. They will flip-flop, and be blown hither and yon by the fickle fragility of his narcissism. Of that, I am certain.

To be honest, that’s not my main concern right now. The portion of his supporters that belong in Hillary’s basket of deplorables will remain there. These are the hardcore racists, the white nationalists, the misogynists, the haters. The rest of his voters, who may have voted for him hesitantly, have (intentionally or not) legitimized and given sanction to the worst of the lot.  They themselves might not be card-carrying members of the KKK, but they are shoulder-to-shoulder cozy now with those who are.

To them, Trump’s hateful behavior was unfortunate, but not a deal-breaker. They will tolerate it. That, I suppose, is what bothers me. They seem willing to throw their daughters under the Access Hollywood bus. They seem to turn a blind eye to his words about veterans, all the while furiously waving the flag. They are quick to abandon what they claim are their Christian principles and sell out to a greedy rich man with the best camels,  and the shiniest, gaudiest golden needles (see Matthew 19:24), the embodiment of hubris.  Christian principles, it seems, are very selective and mostly have to do with refusing to bake cakes.

What has emerged most clearly from this election is the fact that we have not made as much progress as we perhaps believed. Racism has made a roaring comeback, and don’t you dare tell me that this has nothing to do with our first black president. Misogyny has come back out in the open. The patriarchy is alive and well, and a new generation of young women who thought that feminism was irrelevant are realizing that their mothers and grandmothers aren’t so out of date as they previously thought in spite of their sensible shoes and pantsuits. The Religious Right has shown itself to be what it really was all along: a vehicle for channelling hatred and hypocrisy while ignoring all those pesky verses about loving thy neighbor.

We see clearly now. The scales have fallen from our eyes.

For now, let us tend to our own. Parading in the streets with hand painted signs chanting anti-Trump slogans might make you feel better, but they won’t help much at the moment.  2020 will be here soon enough. In the meantime, what can you do? Reach out to those in your circle who might be feeling vulnerable right now. This includes pretty much anyone who isn’t a straight white Christian adult male. Speak up for them. Donate to organizations that do good work on the ground, in communities.

Most especially, be very awake to the fact that a large portion of our country is willing to go along with the level of hatred, misogyny and bigotry shown by the president-elect. Be awake to that. Never forget. It is the ultimate lesson of 2016.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but that arc is long. It is longer than our lifetime. It stretches deep into our history, and reaches generations into the future. We have come far as a nation, but there is clearly a long way to go.

When we all wake up on November 9, the election will be over. Amen and Hallelujah! Hillary will win. I think that is fairly clear if one is living in reality, not the delusional fantasy Trump-world. She will likely carry the Senate along with her, but the House is less certain, although it is within the realm of unlikely possibility.

So, what happens late at night, after midnight, in the wee hours of the 9th, when the results become clear enough for even Fox News to agree. Will there be anything resembling a concession from Trump? Is he capable of such a thing?  I have my doubts. The results may be crystal clear by 9 pm on the 8th, but let’s give him a few hours to come to terms with it all. My guess is that Trump will declare it all to be “rigged” just like he does with any poll he doesn’t like.

So, in those wee hours, what? Will Trump slink back into Trump Tower or go on the offensive and refuse to admit defeat? Will his most fervent followers take to the streets? Realistic Republican leaders may need to take to the streets themselves along with the airways en masse to defend the process, and calm down the angry Trump folks. I am trusting them to do this. I have no choice. Only Republicans living in reality can do this particular task.

What then, from January onward? Hillary is still very polarizing. I believe her to be competent and no more dishonest than any other average politician, but reality dictates that I acknowledge that she is a lightning rod for the opposition as well as for the progressives within her own party. For the good of the country, I believe that the best thing she could do right from the beginning is to declare that she will not run for a second term, and that she will focus her energy on working together with Congress to actually govern beyond gridlock. This would remove the incentive to block her at every turn for the purpose of denying her a second term. It would open up positive possibilities.

To be clear, I don’t think this is a likely outcome, but I do think it would be a good thing in the long run. It would be a noble gesture, one that put country above personal ambition, and would be a strategic move to push Republicans toward cooperation.

Republicans at this point would be wise to work with her. Congress is nearly universally despised in recent years, and the tactic of party-line polarized obstructionism has been a catalyst for the emergence of the disaster that is the Trump candidacy.  If they can govern, actually govern, through compromise and civility, we can begin to heal the deep divisions that exist within our society.  We must address the legitimate concerns of Trump voters even as we reject their racism, misogyny and xenophobia. This is work for serious, thoughtful people of goodwill.  Our elected leaders must rise to this standard and stop feeding the trolls of division and extremism.

In 2020, after the census, our next great task must be to undo the gerrymandered districts that have led to extreme polarization in the House. No one is served by solid, “safe” districts (on either side) where moderation and compromise are dirty words. We need to bring back the middle ground.

As citizens, our task is to learn again to be civil to one another, to rise above the worst in our midst, to re-marginalize the scary fringe that has become so normalized in recent months, to realize that we all must live together when all is said and done.

Since I am living in reality I must acknowledge the likelihood of Trump refusing to fade away gracefully. He will probably make noise from the sidelines. We must ignore him. We must, as a nation, simply walk away and deny him the attention he craves so desperately. We have more important things to do. No more free media. No more retweets. No more passing along stories of his latest shenanigans. No more. As a country, we need to drop him like the toxic sludge he is.  I don’t doubt that he and his small band of the most deplorable will populate the fringes (and we should keep an eye on them), but they have no place in the American mainstream from November 9 onward.

Moving forward, we must heal. Moving forward, we must learn to work together again. Moving forward, all of us must call on the best within us. There is no other path.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult in recent years for both sides of the US political realm to simply agree on facts. Blame the internet. It used to be, in the olden days (think Woodward and Bernstein in print and Cronkite on TV), that all sides agreed on the basics of a situation: what happened, who said what, relevant actual data. We agreed on the facts, and then each side would spin those facts, highlighting stuff that was favorable to their position and downplaying stuff that wasn’t. Since we all had the common ground of agreement on facts, we mostly saw the spin for what it was, and that sort of stuff was on the editorial page anyway, so no one confused the spin with reality.

Today, by contrast, it’s the digital wild west. Anyone with a computer connection can make up a crazy story without having to bother with any ridiculous nonsense like facts. Toss it out there to one side or the other to an electorate with precious little in the way of critical thinking skills or the ability to evaluate the quality of a source and we get utter chaos and a collective disconnect from reality.

This election cycle has seen some really good investigative journalism done by Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold, but it’s getting drowned out by a sea of conspiracy theories, far-fringe spin, and the elevation of unsubstantiated fluff alongside attempts at serious analysis.

Trump has fed this beast by simply overwhelming us all with a barrage of lies and contradictions that arguably border on him gas-lighting the entire electorate. Non-partisan fact checking organizations struggle to keep up with the sheer volume from Trump, but the most tragic thing of all is that no one seems to care. If the facts disagree with our opinions, we just ignore them. We are officially in a post-factual era.

We are also beset with false equivalence. Yes, Clinton has lied, but Trump as liar-in-chief far exceeds her both in the sheer volume and the magnitude of his falsehoods. And yet, we see the media, in an attempt at “fairness” giving equal time to Clinton and Trump, with the result being that Trump looks like less of a liar than he actually is.

I have absolutely no reason to believe that it will get any better any time soon. This is the dark side of freedom of speech. I don’t see any sort of self-correcting or self-regulating mechanism that could possibly bring civilization to our online anarchy. If our representative republic (not a democracy-look it up) is to survive and thrive, we will have to find some way to get back to a fact and reality based world. How to do that and still maintain freedom of speech?? That is one very serious question for the 21st century.

Does it feel like the world is just coming apart at the seams? Feeling anxious? Afraid? Worried about what’s coming? Well, relax. Seriously. It might not feel like it, but things are pretty damn good right now. It’s a great time to be alive.

According to the Washington Post, since 2015, there have been 658 deaths due to terrorism in 46 attacks in Europe and the Americas. Globally, in that same period there were 28,031 deaths in 2063 attacks. For the families of the victims, it was tragic indeed, and I don’t want to minimize that, but bear with me while I offer a few other numbers for some perspective.

The Battle of Gettysburg alone took more than 51,000 lives. In World War I, the Gallipoli campaign took over 470,000 lives. In World War II, the Battle of Stalingrad claimed over 1.2 million lives (the conservative estimate).  I could keep tossing out numbers and statistics, but that’s dull. Let’s go on a little time travel thought experiment instead.

If you were a man living in England in the 1460s, you would likely be a peasant, eking out a living off the land, shorter than the average man today because your nutrition would be so poor. You probably had rotten teeth and fleas. You might also have been swept up in the so-called “Wars of the Roses,” a civil war fought over the English succession. You might have been conscripted to fight on whatever side your local lord favored.

If you were a woman living in that same time period in Europe, you might have found yourself accused of witchcraft for the simple reason of having a mole in the wrong place. Or maybe your neighbor’s cow died. Or whatever. It didn’t take much. Thousands of women were tortured and murdered by church authorities in horrific ways too gruesome to describe here.

If you lived a few hundred years earlier, you might have perished in the bubonic plague, which claimed an estimated 100 million lives, and wiped out entire villages. The plague still exists, but it’s now a treatable bacterial infection. It’s not the devil. It’s just bad hygiene. Aren’t you glad to know that?

If you lived in west Africa in the 1700s, you might have found yourself on a slave ship, headed for the Americas and a life of unspeakable misery. Actually, the whole idea of slavery being repugnant is a modern one. Throughout the ancient world, slavery was common, and if you had lived in pretty much any ancient culture, you could have easily been sold off to pay your family’s debts, or even better, if you were an Aztec, you might have been one of the 20,000 killed every year to appease the gods. Lucky you!!

If you were a young man unfortunate enough to live in the early 1900s, a mere 100 years ago, and found yourself on a battlefield in World War I, even if you survived your injuries, your chances of dying from infection were very high. No antibiotics. Sorry! If that didn’t get you, maybe the flu pandemic of 1918 would have. It claimed 50 million lives, mostly young and otherwise healthy people.

If you lived in China in 1960, you might have been one of the 15 million who died of starvation as a result of  Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.” Fifteen million people. Gone as a result of bad agriculture policy combined with authoritarian rule.

Get it?

Especially as a woman, I consider myself incredibly lucky to live in the industrialized West in the 21st century. I have access to food, education and medical care that my great-grandmother couldn’t even imagine. I can vote. I can get on a plane and travel the world. I have the knowledge of a thousand libraries in a device that I can hold in my hand (even if I do use it to watch cat videos). I have a roof over my head, and luxuries that royalty of centuries past could only dream of having (raspberries in January if I want!). I can keep in touch with friends and family around the world with the touch of a button. When it thunders, I don’t fear the wrath of Zeus. I delivered my three children safely, and all three grew to healthy adulthood. When my bad knee becomes intolerable, I’ll just have a surgeon swap it out for a replacement.

Damn. I really did win the lottery.

Of all the places and times to be born, right here and right now is pretty fantastic.

Yes, there are conflicts in the world, large and small. At the moment, Syria is especially tragic. We cannot forget this as we become aware of our own privilege and luck. We must continue to work for peace and justice on all fronts.

What we should not do is to lose perspective. I remember life before the internet. Yes, I’m THAT old. So, I’ve seen the world both pre and post internet. What the internet has done is to amplify the most extreme voices, the most violent voices, the most hateful voices, and to give them a way to spread hate that is disproportionate to their numbers.

For example, estimates of ISIS fighters number in the tens of thousands. That’s not a small number, but in a world of over 7 billion people and 1.6 billion Muslims. We fear them because their hateful acts show up over and over again in our social media as stories are circulated again and again. Pre-internet, those acts would have not gotten nearly the level of attention and publicity that they do today.

Chances are that the most dangerous thing you will do today is to drive your car. Statistically, you are far more likely to die in a car crash than in a terrorist attack or random shooting, but I’m betting you aren’t afraid to drive your car.

So relax. Unplug from the media. Ponder your incredible luck at living where and when you do. The world isn’t really coming apart at the seams. It just feels that way.

So, chin up, buttercup!! It could be a helluva lot worse.

Brace yourself, I’m blogging about Hillary. She is far from being the perfect candidate. She has personal weaknesses, historical baggage and Bill, but she also evokes a real visceral hatred from her opponents that isn’t explained solely by her mistakes or center-ish policies. It’s a deep streak of gut-level misogyny. Just as the rise of Obama brought a backlash of racism, so the ascendancy of Hillary brings with it a backlash of sexism that is virulent, raw and painful to see. Don’t believe me? Just read the comment section of any article about her, or (if you dare) look up the images and words on some of the t-shirts that were sold at the RNC convention.

There are only a few acceptable ways for women to exist in patriarchal culture (which is also bad for most men, but that’s another story). You can be the good girl, the baker of cookies, the mommy (the Madonna), the PTA president. You can be the bad girl, the sex kitten, the vixen, the home-wrecker, the whore. Of course, ideally you should be both. At the same time. Innocent, yet sultry. Slim, and yet buxom. Bright, but not so smart that you threaten the egos of the men around you. Sound impossible? Well, duh…  Of course, those acceptable modes of existence apply only to younger women. Once you hit a “certain age,” you are expected to disappear, become invisible, fade away as your youth fades.

Any mode of existence outside of these carries a social cost. In generations past, the woman who refused to be boxed into the good girl/bad girl duality, who dared to want something other than the roles scripted for her usually wound up invisible before her time. The spinster librarian trope comes to mind. These women followed their own path, but paid a heavy price by essentially giving up the possibility of marriage and family.

The boundary-pushing revolutionaries who dare seek something more than being invisible, who speak out or step up or challenge the norm also suffer more serious consequences on all fronts. These are the women who take the brunt of our collective social abuse. They are blamed and shamed in the mommy wars. They are paid less and passed over for promotions. In generations past, they might have been burnt at the stake, locked away in an asylum, or just declared hysterical. As a general rule, they need to work twice as hard, be twice as smart and twice as tough to be taken half as seriously.  Climbing the corporate ladder takes a heavy toll on one’s psyche, and it’s no surprise that few make it to the top. These are the witches, the bitches, the harpies, the shrews…caricatures that hint at the male fear that underlies the entire patriarchal enterprise.

Hillary is the ultimate boundary-pusher. She won’t just disappear. She won’t shut up. She is a smart, tough, ambitious, savvy politician who knows exactly how the game is played, and has managed through incredible skill to play that game better than many of the good old boys around her. She knows how power works. She knows the system and has mastered it.

Of course, in our patriarchal culture, men who are smart, tough, ambitious and savvy are admired and socially rewarded.  For women, those same qualities translate into bitchy, mouthy, shrill, whiny, power-hungry…

For a female politician to stand up to the torrent of hate and abuse that inevitably comes with the territory requires emotional armor: she must possess a calm steely exterior that surrounds a solid sense of self. She can’t listen too closely to the haters, the critics, the naysayers. She needs an ego of teflon, and an incredible degree of self-control. She must constantly prove herself, and never expect to be liked. She must work harder than the men around her, always. She must be on the defensive, even as she advances her agenda.

Does this sound like a certain presidential candidate?

Hillary never fit into the good girl/bad girl dichotomy of acceptable female-ness. She was always a revolutionary, always ambitious, always challenging the good old boys, and always hated for it. She certainly isn’t quietly fading away, as women of her age are supposed to do, and the white males who gravitate to Trump embody the collective response of patriarchal society. They rage, they scream, they hate to high heaven all the while their orange screamer-in-chief, the literal embodiment of white male privilege and patriarchy throws his tantrum du jour.

I don’t believe that Hillary is any more corrupt, or dishonest, or power-hungry or whatever than any male politician out there who has risen to national prominence. They too take donations, and make speeches, compromises and deals. They too stretch the truth at times. They too juggle various factions of supporters. They are power-brokers and king-makers. The only difference is that we hold Hillary to an impossible standard, one to which the men around her are not held. To paraphrase a famous line, she does everything the male politicians do, only backwards and in high heels.

Hillary is highly qualified and competent. She is incredibly intelligent and well-read. She understands the workings of government, and has a realistic grasp of the possible. She is far from perfect. She has made many mistakes. She is no saint. She is no angel. She just plays the game as well as the men, and that alone is revolutionary.

Wow. In the few weeks since I posted last (after the Orlando shootings), it feels like the whole world has gone mad. Two more shootings of black men here in the US, followed by the shootings of police officers following a Black Lives Matter march, and just a few hours ago, yet another attack in France.

It really does feel like the whole world has tipped over the edge, and is now falling into the “there be dragons” unknown from the old flat earth maps. Objectively, when looked at through the cold lens of absolute numbers, the world of 2016 is (believe it or not) rather peaceful compared to other times in history. 100 years ago, World War I raged, with battles that routinely claimed tens of thousands of lives in a single day. World War II saw even worse carnage by the time it was all over. So, perspective…

The difference now is that the internet and social media in particular amplify the worst of humanity. This is the dark side of our technology. Extremists and purveyors of hate can easily find each other and organize.

An attack that kills a few dozen amplifies fear around the world. This is not to minimize the loss of those families involved, but consider this: if ISIS really was powerful enough to launch a full-scale war on the order of either World War, don’t you think they would have done it already?? But they can’t, because so few actually buy into the ideology. So, they claim small-scale attacks here and there, carried out by lone wolves, for the purpose of instilling fear and making us hate our neighbors.

Even as bad as racism in America is now, objectively things have improved. Compared to the overt institutional racism of the past, we have made progress. We have a long way to go, but we’ve come a long way too, and we shouldn’t forget that.

So what’s our response? There is a temptation, voiced in some quarters by a certain candidate who must not be named, to build walls, deport masses, shut the borders, lock them all up, beat them all up, eye for an eye, demonize those who don’t look like us, believe like us. More guns. More guns.

Nope.

Nope nope nope.

Nope.

A while back, the phrase “random acts of kindness” was popular. It was a great start, but I’d like to take it a step further, to what I’m calling “Ongoing Active Kindness.” Call it OAK. Ongoing Active Kindness means we reach out of our comfort zone to those different from us, with kindness. From now on. Without end. I don’t mean sticky-sweet sugarcoated polite “niceness.”  I mean genuine, from-the-heart, we-are-all-human-together kindness. Messy kindness. Kindness that takes risks, and keeps on taking risks. Kindness as spiritual practice.

The Dalai Lama once said, “my simple religion is kindness.”

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Forget doctrine. Forget creeds or rules or my god is better than your god nonsense. Forget hateful theology that justified and continues to justify atrocity. Forget it all.

Hold only to kindness.

Ongoing Active Kindness. OAK

Plant an acorn, people.

Go. Do that. And keep on doing it.

No matter what.

This morning we were all greeted with the most recent tragedy from Orlando, Florida. After we dutifully posted our rainbows, we all settled into our usual political corners. Liberals like me started talking about gun control and hate crime. Conservatives started talking about radical Islamic terrorism, and whether or not President Obama would call it that. Religious conservatives started talking about how if only the gays would stop being so gay, God wouldn’t let stuff like this happen. Religious liberals like me condemned comments like that.

And so it goes, and so it went…

The truth of the matter is that we don’t have a problem. We have a predicament. The word problem implies that there is a solution to be found, and if we only find the right one that the problem will be solved once and for all. The word predicament is simply a difficult situation.

If we bombed the entire Middle East tomorrow (as Donald Trump seems inclined to do, never mind innocent civilians), it wouldn’t change the fact that there are individuals who become radicalized and follow an extremist interpretation of Islam. It also wouldn’t change the fact that Christian white supremacists would also continue to be radicalized and follow an extremist interpretation of Christianity. Rounding up all Muslims, confiscating the Koran, prohibiting the practice of Islam… that may be the stuff of Trump’s fantasies, but it would accomplish nothing except to create more radicals in the end. No solution there.

If we passed sweeping gun control legislation tomorrow, and suddenly ceased to sell these weapons of mass murder to any and all who get the itch to buy one, there would still be an awful lot of them in circulation, and somehow, somewhere, someone would eventually find one and go on yet another killing spree. Confiscating all military style weaponry and ammunition may be the stuff of liberal fantasies, but it isn’t going to happen any time soon.

The reality that we live with is that our country is awash in weapons that exist for the sole purpose of killing as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Another reality is that it is impossible, utterly impossible to find and stop someone who is hell-bent on mass murder if they are operating as lone individuals or pairs, and/or if they have no prior criminal history.

We are left with the predicament of living in a society that endures random mass murder on a regular basis. It is a predicament, not a problem.  We cannot solve this.

So what do we do? How do we live? What is our personal response?

I do believe that even if the current reality isn’t a solvable problem, that we can make things better by making it more difficult for radicalized individuals to acquire weapons of mass murder. But hey, I’m a liberal and you know that. So yes, I will do all I can to support reasonable legislation that has the potential to improve on the status quo.

But is that all? Those are the default liberal talking points. Nothing new. No solution, even if it is an improvement.

On a personal level, I think the best thing we can do is to choose to consciously engage with the task of becoming more compassionate people. We can try (even if we fail) to reach out in kindness to those with whom we have disagreements. We will do so imperfectly. I’m warning you right now that yes, I will slip into snarky sarcasm and righteous liberal anger now and then. But then, after I rant, I’ll take a deep breath and try again. I’ll keep moving towards a place of greater compassion. That’s what I try to do, even if I’m not always good at it.

We can work toward expanding our compassion to include even those who would be radicalized, who are radicalized. They weren’t born that way. Every single one of them started out as a cute little baby, with a sweet smile and wide eyes. What happened??  What did they endure, what did they experience that resulted in hearts so filled with hate? We can try to figure that out, then make it our business to show love to every single child. Every single one.

We can feed the hungry, comfort the lonely, educate the young, care for the old, try our best to understand those with whom we disagree. Especially right now, we can reach out to the LGBTQ community, fly that rainbow flag, and stand together as one people.  THAT must be our response, now and always.

None of this will necessarily SOLVE anything, but it will make our present predicament easier to bear, even as we try to embody the change we wish to see in the world.