Tag: election

Tag Along

.Reading time 8 minutes.
Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

I sent a friend a text message last night during Super Tuesday on March 5, 2024 that sums up what I think many black people and people of color voters might feel about the 2024 Presidential Election cycle:

“Watching white people decide the future of the country is not fun.”

Although this was arguably the norm in the pre-Obama era, it was less blatant and less existentially debilitating then.  Ignorance was a twisted bliss.  Particularly for those of us children of the Civil Rights Movement, there was at least the vague and performative indication that one’s vote as a black American (a long fought for right that was severely compromised in 2013) counted for something.  In 2024 however, it is simply a fact that whiteness, or really the various convulsions of whiteness are driving the politics and policies of the country.

White liberals are still congratulating themselves on Obama, whose policies by and large look like every other mid 20th century Democrat politician.  While physically so, politically Obama was not a black president.  Arguably, he shouldn’t have had to be.  Biden is a coda to Obama as well as a throwback to the Johnson/Nixon era touting an underlying message of universality and “gee can’t we all just get along”-ism that struggles against its tendency toward colorblindness and flattened playing fields.  In contrast, Trump actively courts Nazis, racist and homophobic radical Christians, and the KKK while making a place for blacks who really want to see themselves as white (I’m looking at you Sen. Tim Scott) and Latinos who already do when it is convenient (Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Marco Rubio).  They provide Emmy worthy theater, by playing along while not getting in the way…yet staying in camera shot.

But Emmys are given for fiction and our politics actually change people’s lives.  The phalanx of white men currently closing ranks around our national decision making is an odd mix of impotent liberals and rabid conservatives who have never had to consider gestation inside their bodies, or what it means to be the target for gun violence because from a distance you might look like someone, or being shut out of housing or jobs because you talk with sibilance. But they want to convince us that they really do have everyone’s best interest at heart, and we should all just tag along.

But tagging along with, that is “trusting”, someone who has no idea what a life lived outside of the safety of being a white penis holder has never served those of us without that embodied experience well.  Voting is more difficult now if you have brown skin, having a uterus is more difficult whether you identify as female, male or trans and I can already hear the key in the lock on that old closet door, ready to swing open to welcome the gays back in.  While the dominant white men in politics and academics see this as a natural ebb and flow of “society”, for the rest of us it is life and death.

Electing Barack Obama was the best and the worst thing possible for the United States.  It was the best thing because 220 years of white male rule seems like a lot in a country that is only 236 years old.  My goodness, not even Great Britain did that.  It was the worst thing because it exposed the reality of American ignorance about what representative government actually is.  Or maybe it just laid the true bias and bigotry bare?

Back in the day, one of the arguments against women achieving the vote as well as the argument against blacks having the vote after emancipation was that women and non-whites were not capable of holding the responsibility for civic duty.  This seems odd considering the rather central role women have in literally creating life and the fact that illiterate white men who led lynch mobs to wantonly kill blacks could vote.  The legacy of questioning the capabilities of non-white, non-male individuals is built into the system, codified in law and regularly reasserted in policy.

But in 2024, non-white is nearly dominant and non-male has been dominant for decades in this country.  If we look at the representative reality, neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden should be president of the United States.  Not intending to be ageist, it is impossible to look at global demographics and international leadership without seeing them both as fossils. Neither of them will be capable of solving the crisis at the border because they have only literally flown in and flown out of that situation.  Neither of them can solve the problems of US involvement in international war because their experience of conflict is at existential arms length (more so for Trump).  Neither of them can understand the conflict in Gaza because their understanding of the region and the people involved will always be academic at best and trope based at worst.  These are not leaders for a modern world.

The United States is at a crossroads.  It is dragging its elderly politicians to places they are ill equipped to go.  It is silencing the voices of its diverse electorate through gerrymandered voting maps and restrictive voting policies, to keep the myth of a status quo happy.  Through what can only be called radical judicial decisions, it is enabling criminals and dismantling the one guardrail that we have.

There is a deep irony in that Trump is noted for regularly making the case to “take our country back.”  I would say he’s right.  But the people who need to act on this mandate aren’t at his rallies.  They aren’t white and they don’t stand to pee.  Women, brown people, immigrants, “minorities” of all kinds…that’s whose labor (both kinds) built this country, that’s who has kept it going, that’s who has always innovated and who has always made a way out of no way.  This is who needs to take it back.

It’s time for the white guys to tag along,…if they can keep up.

–ALD

Billy Bigelow is Dying…

.Reading time 10 minutes.
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Shirley Jones & Gordon MacRae in “Carousel” (c) 1956 20th Century Fox Pictures

‘Billy Bigelow’ is the lead male character in the musical Carousel.  He is a carnival barker…a “carny.”  He is a braggart and a loudmouth who is always ready for a fight.  He is a liar and a thief.  He is the man that no one should ever be in a relationship with but the one that far too many fall for.  Most tragically, he is also an abuser of women.  While many find him intoxicating, he is ultimately just toxic.  This kind of character is dying on Broadway.  People are less eager to spend hundreds of dollars to see stories about abusive dreadful men, hoping for their redemption.  Actors and producers are tired of glorifying jerks.  People just don’t want to glamorize pathetic, hateful bullies and make excuses for them simply because they might be even a little bit handsome or rich.  The theater-going public is finally growing up.

Sadly the voting public is slower to this party than the New York theater in-crowd.  But it should be some reassurance that Donald Trump, like the rest of us, is also dying.  Quite literally, he’s a 72-year-old white man in a country where the average life expectancy for someone like him is just over 79 year of age.  He is our oldest elected President.  If he is lucky (and he has been exceedingly lucky in where and to whom he was born) he could live more than the 7 years expected.  As a personal trainer and wellness professional, it was my business to be able to look at someone and add up their overall health.  Despite US averages and his protests, Donald Trump is not helping himself to the fountain of long life.  Today, as a faith leader, I have a different perspective on the human arc of life and health.  I now have the added sureness and peace in my heart that God will ultimately deal with Trump the man and the body, not in retribution for his actions, but because he is human like the rest of us.  He is finite.  Death is a feature included with every living body.

But like the character ‘Billy Bigelow’, “Donald Trump…the concept”, is also dying.  True, we are seeing a spike in authoritarian, nationalist (white and otherwise) leaders around the world who echo the stances of the original Donald Trump.  They are mimicking his rhetoric and aping some of his worst slogans.  Everything from “fake news” and calling the media the “enemy of the people” to “Make (fill in the blank) Great Again” and “Lock (gendered pronoun of your choosing) up” have become popular catch phrases with an increasing number of new leaders around the world.  But these are the actions of leaders who must resort to the brutish tactics of carnival barkers and used car salesmen because they literally have nothing of long-lasting quality to offer.  The classic carnival barker, like ‘Billy Bigelow’, doesn’t have anything to sell except lies, but because he is the loudest and flashiest, he attracts the biggest crowd and the most attention.  These are the “leaders” in the Trump model and this is the reason their success can only go so far.  Like a drug, they offer a thrill for the moment.

The Donald Trump “leadership” style must ultimately die because real leadership is not an act.  Government is not a fictional series.  When someone is murdered because of anti-Semitic or racist domestic terrorism, they don’t get cleaned up when the camera stops rolling and move on to the next show waiting for an Emmy nomination…they die…the end.  Rather than accolades for “Best Performance,” all that is left is an irreparable, gaping, raw hole in the lives of those they loved.  The cycle of news and publicity may move on, but the people remain and they suffer.  There is real pain and true leaders must deal with this.

The death of the Donald Trump “leader” is also inevitable because even the people we see chanting at rallies, the people spitting at journalists, the people invigorated in their sense of racial identity and superiority…even these people do not want to be in pain; this is another piece of the human condition.  It is no coincidence to me that the Trump “leader” would emerge concurrent with rampant addiction in the United States.  I have lost friends to and counseled people who struggle with opioids and addiction.  Addiction is not something I take lightly and it is difficult for me to make the following comparison.  Still, it is clear to me that the Donald Trump “leader” has leveraged the basic human search for comfort and pain relief and offered a brightly colored cocktail of celebrity/hero worship and aspirational falsehoods to lull followers into a stupor telling them “follow me and it will all be fine”.  Like addiction, the attraction to Trump “leadership” feeds on itself.  Like addiction, the attraction sits at a deeper place than simply with the substance being abused.  Like addiction, it will require intervention, education, support and deep love to help people to move out of its grip…if they are willing to choose to do so.

The true leaders that must…and will emerge from this will be the ones who can speak to all people in pain.  It will be someone who, rather than never having experienced an empty stomach, will be able to look in the eyes of a parent who has fed their children and not eaten themselves and communicate without words “I have been you.”  It will be someone who has lost a family member to a racially aimed police bullet who can be fully present with officers while communicating both the human pain and real solutions. It will be someone who has stood among neo-Nazis chanting hatred and has been transformed through deep relationship with those who were previously their targets of scorn into an advocate for re-education and reconciliation.  It will be someone who grew up on a reservation, completely disenfranchised from US privilege and erased from US history, only to claim a voice in an unwelcoming government and advocate for Indigenous rights.  It will be someone who is proud to have come to this country as a migrant with or without a “legal” status. It will be someone who does not casually inflict pain because they have never experienced it or have numbed themselves to it in a cocoon of wealth and access.  It will be someone who acknowledges they are dying and mortal…someone who acknowledges all of our shared humanity and seeks to make the best of what life (long or short) they may have left in this world.

There is nothing weak or “snowflake” about facing the reality and complexity of living in a diverse world.  On the contrary, it takes tough as leather resolve to navigate the emotions of the vast experience of life and death on this earth.  This is my greatest learning as a minister and why faith leaders and the real leaders that I mention above inspire me so much.  Behind every tear that these leaders shed is a piercing and steady vision for a world built on basic freedom and the human right to justice; it is creative, relentless, fearless and crystal clear.  My belief in this kind of leadership comes from personally accepting that there is a higher power to which we can choose to answer.  Some call it God, others believe it is the human spirit, some have no name for it at all.  It is what I believe guides leaders who authentically and truthfully speak to all who would listen and it requires no theatrics.  It needs no curtain call, no stage…no rally.

Its time to vote.  Elect leaders…not carnies.