Politics, sorta

"If there's a world here in a hundred years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of little things.  The powers-that-be can break up any big thing they want.  They can corrupt it or co-opt it from the inside, or they can attack it from the outside.  But what are they going to do about ten million little things? They break up two of them, and three more like them spring up!"   

                                                                                           -Pete Seeger

This political season has brought me much pain and despair.  I believe that Hillary Clinton is a really bad presidential candidate.  One whom I would normally go out to vote against. And yet, she is so superior to Donald Trump that I will be voting for her and will be hoping fervently that she wins.  Everything I see about Donald Trump confirms that he is completely unfit to be President of the United States.  

I've come to see his candidacy as a moral problem, not just a political one.  How many times have I heard the saying, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"?  Many, many times is the answer.  Well, I can remember the past.  I've learned about Hitler.  And I have learned about the Japanese internment camps here in the United States as well.  I've learned about slavery and Jim Crow and what happens when people start to believe that a group of people is "less than".  Donald Trump sends up so many red flags for me, I could form my own color guard.  Shoot, I could have my very own parade. There is no reason to believe that a person who acts as he does while running for president will suddenly stop behaving that way when he becomes president.  He won't. He'll probably be worse.  Giving real power to a bully is not a good idea.  This makes me feel that I need to be taking action now, to prevent his presidency.  Not just waiting for it to happen and then claiming to be upset about it.  He's someone who could do real damage to this world.  This can not come to be.

But what can I do?  I can vote.  No problem.  What else?  Uh... uh...  Truly, there are no obvious answers.  So I need to look deeper.  Looking deeper points me in one very clear direction:  His followers.

Who are these people who support him?  What can they be thinking?  If it came out that he's a pedophile and a serial killer, would they change their minds about him? My guess is no, they wouldn't.  It shouldn't surprise you that I think the answer to this problem is emotional.  

Life is hard.  So many awful things happen so often, it's hard not to feel attacked by the world on a regular basis.  Donald Trump's political base is formed by people who feel attacked.  They don't understand why they feel attacked, so they look for an answer that makes sense to them.  And Donald Trump gives them that answer.  It's the "other". Anyone who is different is the cause of their suffering.  This makes them feel united against an enemy and strong in that unity.  It's not relevant that the "other" is no real danger to them.  What's relevant is that they feel attacked and fighting an enemy makes them feel strong and safe again.

When this kind of thinking is so dramatically impacting life at a national level, it becomes a real problem.  Is this what Germany was like during Hitler's rise to power?  Fear giving rise to bigotry, nationalism, violence?  I think it probably was.  

How do we stop something so amorphous as fear?  If you attack a person's fear, it will make them feel more vulnerable, and they will dig in even more.  That's how we got here. It does nothing productive.

It seems like we need to assuage their fear.  But how can that be done?  We've already seen that their fear is baseless.  How do you appease something that is not real?  I believe we need to ignore the actual fear, because it is baseless, and just try to help them feel safe.  This is, obviously, no easy task.  But if we all committed to acting in a compassionate way at all times, we could make an impact on the world.  People with irrational fears are highly changeable.  If we could start to create a more compassionate environment, they won't like it, but they'll still be impacted in a positive way by it.  

I know we're not going to change the outcome of the election at this late date through the use of compassion.  But what happens if he wins?  We'll have the same problem and we'll still have no way to go about fixing it.  This is how to fix it, because it addresses the real problem.  You can talk about the lunacy of building a wall between us and Mexico all you want.  It won't change the outcome.  But if we start to be more compassionate, particularly to the most fearful among us, we'll change our society and remove the conditions that bring people like Donald Trump to power.  

"First they came for the Socialists,
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists,
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak for me."

-Martin Niemöller