DECEMBER 5, SUNDAY

But first a little Christmas cheer of people feeling good together at CeCe’s Christmas party last night to lighten things up.

LISTENING, UNDERSTANDING AND THEN WHAT?

PREAMBLE

First I have have to listen to MAGA voters and to understand them from their perspective if I can. But what do I do when I do understand their perspective and the reasons for feeling the way they do and still feel that their need to affirm their MAGA identity and to defend their identity causes too many other people who feel demeaned and rejected for the effort to maintain their identity to be worthwhile. The problem, as I see it, is not with the people who hold these MAGA traditional values. They are good people who have simply accepted traditional American values, as all Americans have done to one degree or another. The problem is with the traditional American values themselves. The problem is being an unquestioning American growing up with values that now either turn out to be toxic for many people and at the same time not very useful for dealing with the time of rapid and unsettling change that we live in. Just as the constitution, on which we base our values was written in and for a different world, our traditional American values were developed in a different world with many of these values are no longer viable. My argument will be that the values Donald Trump champions are just what he says they are, traditional American values, which he is determined to defend and which makes him seem a savior to good people who also are aware that he is an asshole. It is not that he misreads traditional American values, which he wants to restore to make America great again, it is that those values are often toxic and not viable in the world we live in today.

So, for myself, as I try to wriggle out of being caught by American values of the past on which I was raised, I’m going to first try to look at American values from a MAGA perspective and to understand why these good, Christian people are so angry, and then see if I can find a solution of some sort for myself, if for no one else.

HISTORY OF TRADITIONAL AMERICAN VALUES FROM WHAT I THINK IS THE MAGA PERSPECTIVE

Through our European heritage we settled an empty continent, used enslaved African labor to built plantation agriculture and finally settled and developed vast parts of Mexico into a thriving economy through American hard work and ingenuity. This isn’t just a Southern viewpoint, this is what we learned in school and is believed by most Americans to one degree or another.

We thrived through the hard world of both men and women. Women bore children, nursed and the nurtured them and kept the family together and made the home a liveable retreat. Men settled the land, developed the capitalist free market economy through hard work and were the natural people to govern wisely while protecting and supporting the family. Both men and women had roles to play and the family was central.

We came to America often to escape religious persecution and to worship as we pleased. We were, and are, a Christian land with strongly held Biblical fundmental beliefs and our Christian heritage is one of the reasons we have prospered, one nation, under god, indivisible. Fundamentalist Christian religion was, and is, our bedrock.

We came to America to be free of the tyranny of Europe and of an elite governing class. We were government, of the people, by the people, for the people and the people best suited to govern were white, well to do, practical, level headed men. Just as men guided the family, they guided the nation.

Our belief in freedom led us to believe that economic freedom was also important. We were Horatio Algers who, if we worked hard enough, would prosper. We coddled nobody. The best economy was one in which everyone’s self interest led to the national self interest. Everyone was free to prosper on their own without a handout or interference from the government.

Because of this we became a powerful country, the most powerful in the world, and a country with a manifest destiny to make the world a better place, to repel enemies and reward friends. And it is important that we remain the most powerful country, threatened by no one.

Because of all these things, Americans are exceptional, hard working, innovative, fair and the envy of the world which would love to flock here if we would let them. We are caring, but we also need to not be taken advantage of by people whose countries are not able to care for their own.

MAGA DEFENCE OF TRADITIONAL AMERICAN VALUES

But we have to be careful that our values are not corroded or threatened by weakness or sin or by giving into practices which threaten the family or counter the teachings of the Bible or interfere with our freedoms or our lessen our power. We need to be proud of our country and be patriotic and strong.

This may be overstated in one way or another, but I think it represents the way that I grew up. These are the values that are embedded within me. They are also the values of Make America Great Again. And now we have strayed. New foreign and subversive notions are threatening us, we are falling into sin, and America is being weakened.

I can see why good, upright, moral Christian people feel this way and feel threatened by change that seems to be weakening every pillar of American society. I can see why people support the strong rural family and church centered rural values of my grandparents working an Illinois farm. And it must seem incredible to these good people that America seems to be rushing into change that is taking it off the tracks and heading for a train wreck.

More than that, for these good people, there suddenly is a growing coalition of Americans who are threatening these values in one way or another and this growing coalition through immigration and having large families and bringing their families from abroad is a rising tide that will soon outnumber and outvote traditional Americans. And in addition to this threat are the corruptions of city life with sodomy and the murder of unborn babies which are the result of promiscuity and a porn culture that is taking over, so that these strong rural values are being upended and even mocked. We have to wake up. We are in an overwhelming crisis. This is the last stand for patriotic American values and any means justify the end, America must be protected or it will corrupted and will disintegrate. Good, moral, upright, Christians need to stand up and fight back before it is too late.

This sounds tongue in cheek, but it isn’t. If I think of MAGA people as the defenders of the traditional AMerican values that I was taught and that we all believed to some degree until recently, then MAGA fury and defensiveness and attacks make perfect sense.

CHANGE UPENDING TRADITIONAL AMERICAN VALUES

So where did all this sudden corruption and change come from? It wasn’t there in the placid 50’s when America became triumphant, when I was a boy in a Norman Rockwell paradise of prayer around the dining table. In my experience it started in the 60’s with flower children and the freedom marches led by Martin Luther King and angry questioning of America fighting the Vietnam war. It is not new. For me the greatest change that upended everything starting in the 60’s were two things. The first is that a huge number of Americans were disenfranchised in this mythic version of our history. Women, Blacks, non European immigrants, LGQT people who didn’t fit gender stereotypes, the poor, intellectuals, religious people who were not fundamentalist Christians, young people. ANd it turned that when these people formed a coalition of disenfranchised people that they were as numerous as the believers in traditional values that I believed as a boy but was also now beginning to doubt.

Blacks were furious at being excluded which led to the Civil rights movement under Dr. Martin Luther King which is only growing today. Women were liberated by technology and needed in the workplace to support their families but were discriminated against. Many also wanted to control over their own bodies and when they would have children. LGBQT people were sick and tired of being kept in the closet and wanted the same rights as anyone else. Being discriminated against angered many non European immigrants legal or otherwise. The tradtional family values seemed rigid and suffocating to young people and the authoritarian teachings of the church alienated young people so that churches were left to old people. At the same time the white proportion of the population was declining, the old with the strongest traditional beliefs were dying off and democracy, one person one vote, majority rules, was becoming a threat to American traditional values because conservatives were soon going to be outvoted.

The other thing that was even more dislocating from my perspective were the changes caused in all aspects of everyday life by technology and particularly by the computer. Every aspect of life was transformed in such a rapid way that that is was both exhilarating and frightening. Every form of work was and iss being dislocated, all the forms of communication were and are being transformed, instant transportation and the internet and global supply chains pushed jobs from one part of the world to another, suddenly everyone had access to all kinds of knowledge, fact or fiction. Rapid change made everything cheaper and allowed us to do things we couldn’t do before but at the same time threatened our jobs, our religion, our sense of what is real.

And at the same time the tradtional American values and our shared mythical history of America began to crumble. It turned out that traditional history was mainly the history of well to do white males. And suddenly everyone who was left out challenged this history and are ever more forcefully challenging it today.

So what to do if traditional American values are central to your identity?

INTUITION

Intuitively you are sure that you are right, worse than that for me, intuitively, I also believe in the old values. American history might be a history of racism agains native Americans, enslaved blacks, displace Mexicans and Latinos and other immigrants but I don’t have to look very deep to see my own racism. Does my unease with threatening Blacks come from some inner visceral intuitive fear of people who are different from me or did it come from being brought up on traditional AMerican values? Either way it is there.

Intuitively sex between men and women seems natural and sex between women or between men seems unnatural. Did that come from how I was taught or does it come from some intuitive sense of natural and unnatural within me. Either way it is there.

I am full of prejudices against old men, young men, Africans, Chinese, Blacks, believing Christians, young hippies, old hippies, even old men or men with beards or fat men, all of which describe me. If these prejudices come from some form of out of consciousness intuition then I can’t accept my own intuition. But I can certainly understand how a MAGA person finds homosexuality to be abhorrent. And from a MAGA perspective the murder of an unborn child seems horrific.

So it must be bewildering and maddening to a MAGA believer when believers in choice mock her for being anti abortion.

So it helps me some to try and see from a MAGA perspective and to be able to understand why they feel this way and to realize that I have embedded in me many of these values. From their perspective they are doing the right thing.

AN ATTEMPT AT RESOLUTION

But it doesn’t resolve the problem for me. And this is partly because I can also see from the perspective of a woman who simply can’t choose to have child at this time so that the choice of whether to have another child or not is the most important choice she must make. The fetus is not a child and miscarriage is not the death of a child from my perspective. It is a wrenching choice that a woman has to make but only she can make that choice, someone else can’t make it for her. But just being able to understand both sides doesn’t resolve the tension either.

Maybe I have chosen the wrong example in showing that both sides seem to be right from their own perspective.

But it seems to me that for most of the dislocation that comes through rapid change there is no clear right choice.

But in making choices in an uncertain world one thing seems certain to me. The old ways left a lot of people out and hurt a lot of people. The myth of America white supremacy, Biblical certainty, American hard work and exceptionalism may have been useful for awhile, but in retrospect, a huge number of people died of genocide, lived painfully as slaves, were hurt when demeaned, were hurt when patronized in so many ways. All of those people need to be listened to as much as MAGA believers. If I am going to listen patiently to a Maga person and see how they could come to feel as they do, I have to listen with just as much empathy to those hurt by MAGA values and those who are the disenfranchised. They are right here and I can listen to them. For their sake I can’t go back to the old values, as important as they are to the identify of MAGA people. And I can’t go back for another reason. The world is changing so rapidly. The only way to get along is to find ways to adapt, to either benefit from the rapid change or at least to try and make a new life for myself with imagination and effort. The problem is that while we cannot go back, we don’t know where we are going as we go forward. The challenges of global warming, dislocated refugees, rapidly changing kinds of work, the huge battle between those who want to go forward and those who want to go back all make everything uncertain. We can’t know where we are going and we can’t go back to what once gave us identity. We have to let go and adapt and adapt and adapt whether we want to or not. We not only hurt others by insisting on going back to the narrow, but for many people unbearable, past, we hurt ourselves by refusing to adapt and we block the people who are willing to adapt when we do. The fight over vaccinations is that kind of choice. The anti vaxxers hurt themselves and they hold back those who are trying to adapt to the pandemic and to make their way safely into the future.

MAGA people don’t need to be mocked or be called stupid or irrational. They are good people trying to return to the past and willing to suffer for doing so and willing to make others suffer. Arguing won’t convince them since they know in their bones they are right. I can feel empathy, but unless they are willing to open their eyes and see the coming deluge before it washes over us, there is nothing that I can do except to help them make the transition and to try and make the transition for all of us as painless as possible.

But, I suddenly remember, I am not a doer. Doing flattens me. I am not going to do anything. I can understand what is happening and then get out of the way of MAGA anger and can support them if they decide that they, too, want to adapt. They are, after all, good people who want to do the right thing, that think they are doing the right thing, and it pains me to have them hurt themselves.

And then I realize that I feel their pain because they are close to me, because I accept them and care about them, because they are fellow Americans. We live in a world where millions of people are dealing with rapid change and irrational anger whose lives are completely upended, who lose everything, family, home, country as they flea for their lives and then are rejected in the countries to which they flee. Somehow they have to adapt to survive, without many alternatives, to living miserably. And yet I don’t feel their pain directly and can ignore them. But we, all Americans, right here, whose pain I can feel directly, are better off than those Syrian refugees fleeing for their lives. Somehow by listening to and empathizing with each other we can find a way as fellow Americans to stop fighting and to find ways in which to adapt to a rapidly changing world. After all, we pride ourselves on being resilient and being innovators.

One of the must successful human traits is adaptability and change. That is why we have thousands of languages, more thousands of cultures, have adapted and innovated in every direction. If ever there was a time to use that skill it is now. We cannot go back. We can’t go back any more than we can become young again or raise the dead, we have to go forward, not having any idea what the future will bring, and have to have a good time doing it. But we will do this better if we do it all together, supporting each other, realizing that we are all Americans with 90% of who we are in common.

And that is my muddling through for the day.