Turn off the Gas
Ideology, Indoctrinate, Binarism…
Donald Trump has only ever been surrounded by whiteness and wealth. His education lacked a moral compass and he was emboldened by an era (the 1980s) that celebrated everything big, regardless of its actual quality, logic or sustainability. While I do know the era, I do not know the man. I cannot speak to what wakes him up in the morning (or in the middle of the night). However, as he is the primary agent of political policies that are aimed at making my world a hostile and uninhabitable place he will be mentioned in what follows…
I’ve placed the words above and through this article with their definitions because what the individual man, Trump is attempting through his newly minted office of chaos is for Presidential Executive Orders to take on power that he, nor any government actually has: the ability to control, shape and speak on behalf of belief. In the latest garbage (linked below), the administration is attacking a variety of “ideologies”.
But there are two problems. First, the Trump administration is bundling together what they see as “radical-left” or “woke” into a single package and framing it as “indoctrination”.
The second problem is that those of us who are in the crosshairs of this and other policies are taking the bait. We have let the true ideologues convince us that we are under attack. Our response as a result is classic crabs in a bucket which will get us nowhere. This is a big mistake.
The beauty of true equity work is that it is NOT based on ideology. It is NOT built on a singular or narrow idea of what is right or wrong. It is a philosophy of accommodation. That is, it looks at individual unique needs and seeks unique solutions. It empowers and fortifies individual agency. Equity is built on uniqueness, adaptability and flexibility, while what the administration is presenting as “making America great again” is doing the opposite. In fact, looking at the definition of ideology and indoctrination, that is exactly what the Executive Orders are, just as was promised in Project 2025.
In addition to indoctrination, the administration is intentionally trying to confuse people into exhaustion; they are trying to convince people that they aren’t seeing, hearing, feeling what they are feeling. Gaslighting. What is being done is that the administration is trying to accuse the “radical left” of doing exactly what they themselves are doing.
Turn off the gas
To fight this insanity, it must be first remembered that while we may all want to play like we are “unified patriots” with “universal goals”, that is actually not helpful framing. If diversity is what we truly believe in, and if it is really our strength, then that is what we need to muster. The response to this shouldn’t be as simple as “give me back my rights” or worse some kind of self-hating apology for being “extreme”; the response needs to be “I don’t want your tired, narrow and inadequate rights” and “I will not be limited in my wholeness to make you feel safe.” The hatred coming from Pennsylvania Avenue is pretty God-awful loud, but robust, authentic diversity can be MUCH louder. Human diversity is literally endless and infinite and that’s what has the true ideologues shaking in their Cybertrucks. Diversity is the superpower. What’s more, it is built in, so we just need to figure out how to harness it. The response cannot give in to the impulse to hold tight to single issues as diversity. What needs to be embraced and pushed by leaders on the left is a better grasp of diversity as a powerfully organic capacity for humans to be different whether or not someone writes a poorly worded (and frankly petty) document.
Last week, I posted to my blog about how Unitarian Universalists are hamstrung by whether they first need to be free or human (Free or Human?). What I’m trying to do in this new post is address the same challenge to a wider audience. Being human is only limited by the limitless capacities of the human body. Our embodied selves are vastly more expansive in body and mind (as any medical professional will tell you) than even in our advanced society is capable of understanding.
There is no “radical left”. That is an invention of deeply troubled, narrowly educated and scared, ideologues. What they are scared of is all the people who are able to look in the vast reaches of the human self and recognize infinity. They don’t want that. They want the safety of on-off, black-white, boy-girl, good-bad. They’ve been taught that spaciousness is to be feared. And yes, true innovation is terrifying, but the human body innovates every time it overcomes disease, or adapts to an environment, or gives birth. Innovation and the capacity for creative problem solving and the generation of ideas is what we do. The limited, uncreative, unenlightened mind builds a rocket and tries to get to a single destination (for example Mars) to create an empire. The creative mind, builds a rocket to explore space and learn from all of existence.
Do I have an exact strategy for applying what I’ve written above? Not yet. But part of me looks to some of the most creative people I’ve known for help getting to the answers. People who hear music that is first in their heads and then they are able to translate that music for the rest of us to hear; people who see themselves differently in the mirror than the rest of the world sees them and are brave and honest enough to live that truth; people who explore the reaches of human understanding and reveal better ways for us to be with each other; people who save lives, people who accompany those coming to the end of life.
Somewhere in the endlessness of our ability to be human is a way to drown out the annoying and harmful tune of one-note ideology, indoctrination and binarism.
–ALD
