Capitulation Is Not An Effective Strategy

Before Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, people were wondering what would happen if he lost the election and refused to concede. Of course, nobody thought to ask the same question about Hillary Clinton because we all knew the answer: she would quit the fight even if she had the majority of the votes, just as Al Gore did in 2,000. Funny in those 16 years between Gore and Clinton nobody on the Democratic side of things did anything to ensure that voters’ rights were guaranteed, did nothing to appeal to their left flank, and did nothing to get rid of the electoral college that has now cost them 12 years of Republican presidents in 20 years.

Let me point out for you some of the differences between the Republicans and Democrats:

--Democrats lost in 2,000 and are still blaming Ralph Nader. Republicans lost in 1992 and still quote Ross Perot. No animosity there, despite the fact his presence enabled Bill Clinton to be elected.

--Election after election the Democrats insist the better candidate is unelectable and go with the establishment option. Republicans nominated Donald Trump.

--Democrats say NAFTA was a done deal by the time Bill Clinton got into office and he had no choice but to enact it into law. Republicans promised to put an end to Obamacare their first day in office, even though it’s already been the law for years now.

See, the difference between Democrats and Republicans is that when Democrats lose an election they look into moving to Canada and when Republicans lose elections they buy guns. In short, Republicans bravely attack while the Democrats are a bunch of…well, let’s just say Trump wouldn’t be shy about grabbing them.

The difference is as obvious as the difference between Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes. Of course it’s set up on Fox News to allow Hannity to be the tough guy, but I suspect it’s similar with the party candidates. I truly believe the game is rigged to support strong Republicans and weak Democrats. Even when we get a winning candidate he ends up moving the country to the right. Barack Obama entered office with a Democratic congress and did nothing more than bail out the big banks. He turned Bush’s two wars into four. The healthcare plan he managed to get passed was modeled off his Republican opponent’s plan.

Yes, Hillary Clinton lost, and the result is something that appears very much like fascism. But the answer to that threat was never going to be another Clinton. Donald Trump is the bloom upon the plant the Clintons have been diligently watering for the last 24 years. Had it not been for NAFTA and TPP Trump would not have had trade as a weapon to use against her. Had not Clinton in her role as Secretary of State overthrown the government of Libya and stirred the pot in Syria, had she bravely refused to vote against the war in Iraq, Trump would not now have the anti-immigrant cudgel he now wields.

If it was fascism we were facing in the 2016 election, then Hillary Clinton was Neville Chamberlain. No, worse than that, she was the Maginot Line. Even worse yet, she was Vichy France. She was a facile attempt to deal with very real issues by not dealing with them. She was a coat of paint on a crumbling bit of infrastructure. She was a wolf who took the time to dress herself in a sheep’s pantsuit.

Let me give you an example of how a tepid candidate not only loses you elections but doesn’t allow you to pass your agenda should you happen to win. The climate is changing. The freaking climate is changing and it’s our fault. The climate is changing, it’s our fault, and only people who deny the preponderance of scientific evidence will claim otherwise. It will require immediate action to ameliorate the effects and nobody knows for certain how bad it will be even if we turn the boat around this instant. This is actually happening. Something’s actually happening, Reg, and we have to do something!

Hillary Clinton had this issue to work with against a science-denying half-wit and because she was in the pockets of the oil industry she made no mention of it save when on the same stage as Bernie Sanders and could not avoid it. She had in her possession the flaming sword of God’s own justice and she never bothered to unsheathe it, let alone use it to cut the head off the ogre. We are actively destroying God’s greatest gift to us—the planet—and Hillary Clinton could not bring herself to make it a campaign issue.

You cannot be timid about such issues as climate change. If it is real it is terrifying and if you don’t act like it is terrifying, people will assume it is not real. It only feeds into the mindset of those brainwashed by the rightwing media that tells them global warming is a hoax. They have been told in confident tones that Global Warming is not real, it must be countered with an even firmer response if they are ever to be swayed. The truth of it must be shoved in their faces, not whispered timidly only when in the right group of people.

Hillary’s career has been one of capitulation. She is the example of everything Trump supporters don’t like. She is the reason people were willing to believe in Trump if only because he did not sound like a politician. They wanted to hear conviction, wanted to see it, and it showed more in Trump than it did in Clinton. It was a naïve choice on their part, but you must remember they had no other option than the status quo that had shipped their jobs overseas and bailed out big banks while leaving them with more mortgage debt than house equity.

To be a leader you must be bold. Clinton had at her disposal a youthful and zealous army but she refused to rally them to her side. Nobody rallies to a flag with the emblem of a weasel or a snake but instead to one with an eagle or a lion. How did you expect that we would follow you? Who is willing to go into battle unless they believe the cause is just and the generals trustworthy?

You had the arrows of truth in your possession but you could not shoot straight. You had the scars of countless campaigns but they were undermined by the myriad whispered rumors of you secretly being in the camp of the enemy. We simply could not trust one who had been rewarded so handsomely without ever actually winning any battles.

You played it safe all your life in order to win the ultimate prize and in the end you lost. You retreated whenever the battle was upon you, as you did upon the eve of the Iraq war. You betrayed those truest to the cause and most willing to fight for it and instead sought to enlist officers from the enemy’s camp: Glen Beck, John Negroponte, Brent Scowcroft, John Warner. Politics is as much about emotions as it is intellect, but you appealed strongly to neither.

The people were frightened, they were frightened by a world you helped shape. Many who voted for Donald Trump couldn’t precisely put their finger on what was wrong but their senses told them, quite correctly, that there was something rotten in our political system. They voted for hope and change, just as many voted for hope and change when they went to the polls for Barack Obama in 2008. I’m guessing a fair amount of people voted for Trump as they once did for Obama, placing their hopes irrationally on slogans and aspirations rather than thoughtful proposals and a proven track record.

It is not the rank and file who can be found wanting, not us who should be judged. It is our leaders who have failed us. 50% of us did not march to battle at all, most of the rest did so grudgingly. Should a true leader someday emerge, he will find himself with a nation of eager followers, ready to take on whatever tasks are asked of us. When someone comes along who can unite us, not divide us, we will once again show what the United States is capable of. We can yet be an example to the world, a city upon a hill that demonstrates liberty and justice. Until that time, I suggest that it is best to avoid going to war for generals who are interested in nothing more than enriching their own coffers and their own sense of glory. Do not take up arms against those who they claim is your enemy. The hatred and the violence will only worsen your lot while feeding the egos of those who seek victory, heedless of the cost.

The Abuser Has Two Faces

I am not going to tell you who you should vote for, since I have no idea what issues are most important to you. I will, however, suggest how you should vote. You should vote with an attitude of love and hope, just as you should do all things with an attitude of love and hope. For love and hope grow stronger and spreads to others the more we practice it, just as fear and hatred tends to spread like some contagious disease.

If you vote with hate and fear as your motivations, you will create a system that furthers hate and fear, it really is that simple. If you believe that you cannot support either of the major party candidates in a spirit of love and hopefulness, then walk away from the system because the system does not offer the solutions you or society needs. When we can no longer bring the better angels of our nature into the voting booth with us, it is the system that is broken. And when the system is broken, working within the parameters of that system is supporting that system. To support either of the two-party candidates is to support the two-party system. That is what we’ve been doing for generations now and it has led us to where we are now. There is no logical reason to assume it will be different this time, that voting for the lesser of two evils will bring about the change we really need. It will at best delay the inevitable, permitting all that is wrong to become further entrenched.

Of course, if you are comfortable with the situation as it is, then there is no problem. If you believe that the vote you cast will make for a better tomorrow, by all means do so. But if you vote in fear of what will happen should you not do as you are told by those who know better than you, then you are not behaving as an autonomous adult in touch with your human potential and ability. You are alienated from what makes you a truly independent and powerful human being. You are, in fact, behaving like an abuse victim.

It is a trap nobody expects to fall into. One day you suddenly realize you are reacting in fear all of the time. You feel helpless and you feel stupid and you feel like a bad person no matter what you do. You find yourself timidly acquiescing in hopes of receiving the lesser punishment, hope to deal with the less threatening face of the abuser, but his abusive behavior will continue as long as you continue to play the abuser’s game. If you ever want to break out of that prison, that box that has Democrats as the left wall, Republicans as the right wall, a front wall that has the corporate media as your window to the world, and the ever present wall of fear at your back, you will have to refuse the parameters that have been set for you. You cannot permit yourself to give into the fear and the hatred. You have to have faith that there is something better and transcend the walls that have you imprisoned. You must trust in others and in yourself.

We have lost faith in our fellow humans and in ourselves, handing over that faith instead to institutions and figures of authority. To abusers. We see all too clearly our shortcomings and do not permit ourselves to see what we as individuals and a society are capable of. We give our inalienable rights away to abusers who promise to make things better and always end up making things worse. Why else would we vote the way we do except that we let ourselves see the worst in others and in ourselves? We fear true democracy, afraid that we will have to make real decisions. Why else would we tolerate the political advertising that pollutes our airwaves and our souls and allow ourselves to believe there is no better way? There is a better way but it is up to us to find it.

That’s the way abusers work, by getting us to stop seeing any beauty or goodness in life. For them it is about keeping you in a constant state of fear and uncertainty. But if you are ever going to make things better, you will have to walk away from the games, the threats, the controlling behavior. You must first see yourself as more than helpless if you wish to be something more than a mere extension of the abuser.

An abuser has two faces. A victim of abuse always tries to curry favor with the more peaceful side of the abuser so that he or she doesn’t have to face the violent side. Donald Trump is the ugly, violent side of the abuser. Hillary Clinton is the side that says: “I’m sorry I hit you, baby, it won’t happen again. I love you. I know I voted for that war in Iraq and I was for all those trade agreements that took your job, but I changed.” Of course the implied threat is that if you don’t deal with the Hillary side of things, the Trump side is going to bang your head against the wall.

It takes courage to leave an abuser, courage and a plan. For too long you have convinced yourself that if you just go along with him you can make him change. You constantly compromise what you feel is right so that you don’t displease him. Then the violence occurs, followed by the apologies and the promise that it will never happen again.

But he won’t change, he will never change. The abuser has you in his power and power is the one thing he loves more than anything. He will never really love you, he will merely seek to control and possess you. This is a sad reality that most victims of abuse are slow to realize because they cannot imagine anyone is actually capable of thinking this way. But this I promise, he will never change and it is up to you to get out from under him.

In the meantime he will cut you off from everyone who tries to tell you he’s no good for you. He will cut you off from your family and friends, anyone who is not within his thrall. He will make you feel utterly helpless and at the same time blame you for everything that goes wrong. “I lost because you didn’t support me enough. You didn’t believe in me. I wanted to pass a health-care bill that would cover everyone but everyone is out to get me.”

The abuser wants to make you feel ignorant, that he has all the answers and you better not try to question him. He will tell you the most absurd lies imaginable, and he will demand that you believe him. He wants to make you feel helpless to do anything on your own to make things better. He wants you to believe that you are worthless without him and that you are lucky to have him.

The abuser wants you to see one of his two faces as the real one. He wants you to think that if you love him enough that the other, uglier face, will just go away. But it has kept getting uglier, hasn’t it? The violence more intense and often. Some day you’re going to have to realize exactly who it is your dealing with. It’s time to start working on your courage and your exit strategy, because he is never going to change. It’s time to reach out to all of those who he said was bad for you, time to start making connections with the outside world again. They may be Republicans or Democrats, but they’re abuse victims just like you. And we all need to be strong and support each other if we’re going to ever be free.

I might not have all the answers—I suspect nobody is that smart—but I know the kind of fertile soil from which a healthy society grows, and it is rich in love and hope. Nothing good will come of hatred and fear. If that is all you have within you, stay away from a polling station. No, that is not good enough. That is the abuser in me talking. Instead, find the love and hope that is in you and find a way to make a positive difference. You’ve been inside the box too long.

The Media And Elections

Remember that no matter how much you may dislike a given candidate, the real enemy is the media. The media is the god to whom all bad candidates pledge obedience. As much as candidates try to play the media, in the end it is always the media that plays them.

I even feel sorry for Donald. Seriously. Watching Chris Matthews goad Trump into making an inane comment (as if he needed encouragement) was hard to watch. Donald, even Donald, was trying to avoid a nonsensical question, but eventually Matthews wore him down and got the sound bite he wanted.

Hillary too. I’m not talking about conservative talk show radio, which does an unspeakable butcher job on her while not dealing with the relevant issues that they could actually pin her to the wall on. I’m talking about the mainstream media. No matter how Hillary tries to portray herself, the media always paints her unsympathetically.

Of course, while I feel sorry that they are both victims of the media, they are after all guilty of playing the game. Instead of trying to put forward an appearance that the media will accept, she should worry more about being herself than projecting the right image. And Donald Trump has been playing a game this whole time, knowing how base and immoral the media is that they will lap it up like the sick puppies they are. He had to have known, or should have known, that eventually the media would turn on their favorite circus monkey once the routine got old. Live by the media, die by the media.

Perhaps with this current presidential campaign, though, the populace is finally starting to get it. Perhaps they see that the problem is not so much the candidates but what the candidates have to do to get the attention of the media. I truly believe that the citizens, both liberal and conservative, have finally realized the most corrupting influence on politics today, a media that prefers sound bites to substance so that they have more time for commercials. News organizations that feel no moral obligation to actually report the truth but to bring in more viewers by titillating their audience. Perhaps with the advent of the internet, we are so flooded with click-bait that we now feel we have to sort through all the nonsense in order to find what is meaningful to our lives.

It is the media that has made the election cycle the cesspool it has become. If the media were doing their job, they would winnow out the wheat from the chaff rather than throwing it all on the fire in order to create spectacle. The media is interested in one thing, and that is money. To that end they reduce the amount of reporters they have to pay, avoid controversial issues that they would have to commit to, and accept news uncritically from whatever source is willing to give it cheaply, no matter how untrustworthy they may be. Thus the government, corporations, any powerful figures—the exact people journalism is supposed to protect us from—are able to use the media as its mouthpiece.

Conservatives have learned how untrustworthy the mainstream media is, though they seem less aware that they face the same issue with conservative media. And I really do believe a new generation, that is perhaps a little more media savvy, realizes the media is nothing more than a device for promoting mindsets the powerful interests want you to embrace. Perhaps it is a little more difficult for us who are older, because we remember media that was able to give us, if not truth, then at least scraps of honesty and bits of enriching programming. But we too are getting to the end of our rope.

It’s not over yet, the media doesn’t realize how far from reality or the needs of the people it is supposed to serve it has gone. In the next few months you will be able to see on exhibition all the skill of the competently corrupt media infrastructure spin out its poisonous web of useless and misleading information. It will present for you a final freakshow that will leave Jerry Springer and Marilyn Manson envious.

But it’s breaking down. No structure built on such shoddy foundations that seeks to reach so high can last for long. True, the damage it will cause as it crashes will be severe, but we’ll all be better off once it has fallen.