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This blog attempts to capture my attitude toward the state of our country in 2019. I first began to think about the country's demise in 1980, when Reagan was elected president. My greatest fear with ultra-conservative policies is that they ultimately lead to a nationalistic, narrow-minded state that ceases to progress and thrive, when compared with much of the rest of the world. Its evolution is slowed and even reversed.
Now, almost forty years later, we face that dilemma. Despite all of the great things that individuals and organizations do, the country is run by a handful of ultra-conservatives who tweet, lie, and damage relationships with our allies. In 1980, I gave the country 150 years of remaining life. Because we still have the same dismal voting habits that we had in 1980, when only 52.8% of voting-age people actually voted, that trend has certainly not been reversed.
Ultimately this blog is about the actions I choose to take in a country that refuses to take action in so many things. We choose what we deserve, and we deserve what we choose.
Venting On Facebook
For the most part, I don't listen or pay attention to political news. When there is a newsworthy story, such as a hurricane's path and destruction, I watch a small portion of what's on TV--just to get the facts. I read the top ten headlines of the New York Times once or twice a week, and occasionally I read their editorials, when they appear to have a unique perspective. That is increasingly less frequent; it's difficult to say anything new about the state of this country, except that it is much closer to being a plutocracy--government by the wealthy--than a functional democracy.
I have an average number of Facebook "friends." These are people with whom I actively stay in touch. People with lots and lots of FB friends are invariably teachers, who really have connected with many hundreds of their students and stayed in touch with them, or artists, including many musicians, who are in the business of meeting hundreds of fans and professional contacts. Some people use FB to accumulate acquaintances and thus have many hundreds of "friends," but that seems pointless to me. Once or twice a year, I winnow my list by removing those who no longer use FB or with whom I've had no contact for ages.
In the last couple of years I've winnowed the list (or at least "hidden" the posts) for another reason: friends' non-stop indignation concerning the state of the country.
I check my Facebook news feed about twice a day. I want to hear about people's lives, including seeing all the food, baby, dog, cat, wedding and vacation photos they care to post. All of that stuff is still interesting to me--Karen's trip to South Africa, Jack's raspberry harvest, Ken's new grandchild, Becky's new rescue dog. I like the exchange of milestones and accomplishments, no matter how small or insignificant they may seem to others. Those little things (and sometimes very big things, like George building a barn!) represent what people have done, what they've accomplished or hope to accomplish. And in all of those things, there is joy!
But some of my friends can't resist posting several comments a day expressing their indignation over the current, highly-dysfunctional federal government. It seems to me that these posts amount to nothing more than a daily dose of complaining--venting to the gods. They are not only preaching to the choir over and over and over again, but their complaints accomplish the opposite of what they intend. They don't unite people; they drive people away by desensitizing them. Who really enjoys listening to so much angst?
My friend, Keith Taylor, is a world-class cartoonist in Chicago. He has filled many sketchbooks with his political cartoons in the last few years. His cartoons are funny, brilliantly-drawn, topical, creative, and spot-on with the day's news. It seems to me that his efforts unite people, for they are interesting, concise, and funny. He's sort of the Dan Rather of cartoonists. Oh, and by the way, Keith and I have never actually met. We share so many FB friends from the University of Illinois that he and I simply became friends by default many years ago. I appreciate his contribution to my life each day.
That's the thing. When you post something to Facebook that boils down to how indignant you are, does that really contribute to anyone's life, after you've already posted something like it twenty times? Occasionally we all post things that reflect our sadness or disappointment or grief. I've done it when my dogs have died. We want connection with others in those times, support from people who understand. And yet, we don't complain about a dead dog, or even a dead person, for weeks and weeks on end--even though they're still dead. In fact, we begin posting good memories very soon after the tragedy, and we look forward to better times and plan how we're going to accomplish them. Constant indignation does none of that.
There is, however, one interesting thing about viewing so many anti-administration posts from friends: I have a clearer idea of whose lives are filled with angst by choice. Don't get me wrong; I think the current administration is the worst in my lifetime and maybe in the history of the country. But I choose joy and action over angst.
Sympathy vs. Empathy
For every political post I see in one day (and there are probably only 10 or so), I am forever amused by the responses from my friends' friends (which may number one hundred a day). "Oh, I know! I'm so depressed!" "I cry each day over this." "It's the worst I've ever seen." I read only a small portion, because I know the gist of most of the comments. I don't read these comments for the content; I honestly read them for my amusement.
The indignation is so rampant and so unoriginal that it has accomplished an amazing thing. It has moved my attention away from the original story line--whatever daily travesty the administration has committed--to being distracted by the daily circus of reactions. And in that refocusing of my attention, I've found out a deep-rooted truth about life: there are limits to empathy.
If you look up the definitions of "sympathy" and "empathy," two words often used interchangeably (and incorrectly) by people, you'll find a simple comparison: sympathy is when you care about another person's suffering, while empathy is when you feel it. (A third word, pity, is when you simply acknowledge another person's suffering.) I recognize that I've backed away from being too empathetic, because that has some real pitfalls. Truth be told, I mostly feel sympathy for the plight of others, not empathy.
There are really two types of empathy, but only one is useful. The other one is easy to fall into, but it complicates and clogs a person's heart until that person is almost nonfunctional (and dysfunctional). My mother was like that. If she saw news of a disaster, she would get terribly distraught, and for many years I thought she had a good sense of empathy--feeling the pain of others. But then I understood it one day: she was experiencing the disaster as if it had happened to her, losing sight of the fact that it had really happened to someone else! She was projecting her own fears, feeling her own pain, not the pain of others, and she was sitting in front of the TV for hours to feed that quest for personal suffering.
That's the difference between the two types of empathy. With one type, you feel the pain as if it's happening to you; with the other type, you're focused on trying to understand another person's pain. Empathy can be selfish or selfless. My mother's empathy was not selfless.
During 9/11 in 2001, my empathy was so strong for the people in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C. that it was a devastating experience for me. It was easy to feel the selfless form of empathy, because it was almost impossible to imagine it happening to myself. I didn't cry for me and my family; I cried for others who had lost loved ones. That is in stark contrast to what I feel now. As a country, we've gotten ourselves into this situation by expecting sympathy from the rest of the world without returning (or deserving) it in kind. We have cosied up to dictators and alienated our friends. The current policies of this country are to try to win the sympathy game, allowing only a small portion to "trickle down" to how we treat immigrants and foreign cultures. The "trickle down" policy doesn't work with economics, and it doesn't work with sympathy either.
Voting For Colonel Sanders
A good friend of mine has a term for those who buy into the administration's rhetoric: it's like the chickens voting for Colonel Sanders. This is not applicable to the wealthy Americans who still vote Republican, because they still abide by those ideals and will be the last to feel losses. I respect their conservative fiscal values and even agree with a few--like free trade. But the middle and lower classes will suffer more and more, as our nationalistic policies continue. And that's where sympathy comes in.
I have discovered that at least 90% of why I am a progressive is that I am naturally sympathetic toward others' plights. I care deeply about voting rights and untainted elections and a woman's right to choose and climate change and accessible, affordable health care and our national education system and a free press. I am empathetic in special circumstances, like feeling the pain of immigrants and transgender people who strive for nothing more than freedom and equality. If I were, instead, to focus 100% of my attention on my own life, I wouldn't even vote! What would be the point? What would I ever gain except more wealth?
I am convinced that most people who vote for the far-right agenda do so from habit, peer pressure, fear, religious affiliation, and/or ignorance. Probably a large portion of those people are single-issue voters. The far-right made abortion the primary issue in the 1980's and 1990's. Then the single issue became the economy, after the Dotcom crash, and now it has turned to the issue of immigration. Perhaps in the next decade there will be a backlash against technology, as low-income people--those whose wages are mostly stagnant--can no longer afford all of the newest technological advances, nor find jobs that haven't been replaced by technology or China.
Progressives tend to not focus on single issues, but see a much broader spectrum of issues, and most of those issues are in the context of how other people will be affected, not necessarily themselves. Progressives usually don't think about how life will be easier for themselves if things change; they think about how life will be easier for other people--how those in poverty will have health care, how young parents will be able to afford college for their kids, how countries on other continents will survive climate changes.
I don't like the current approach to public education, but it hardly affects me. I'm not ever going back to school, so if schools are privatized, what does it matter in my life? If abortion were to become illegal, it would not impact how I live. If Medicare and Social Security were reduced or eliminated, we'd sell our home and live on the proceeds and our retirement savings in a much less expensive area, but we'd be fine. In fact, we have the financial means to ignore climate change, trade wars with China and Europe, all of the destructive decisions of a conservative Supreme Court, and all of the nationalistic bigotry that is rampant in the United States. We have the means to ignore all of the crap promoted by our current federal government and move to another country.
But most people don't have the means to make such sweeping, immediate changes in their lives. And yet, a large portion of those people are careless in how they vote for their leaders, as if they could withstand any stupid decisions those leaders might make. Where over 90% of eligible voters exercise that right in Australia, fewer than 55% do the same in this country. Australians have learned how to vote; Americans haven't.
It's easy to become myopic if you're in a family that is poor and without opportunities. It's easy to be swayed by bigotry, if it promises you something more than you have. It's easy to be the chicken who is voting for a Colonel Sanders who promises a roomier coop, ignoring the man with the axe who will eventually show up.
The Loss of Empathy
For the first time ever, more than 100 women were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2018 elections. That still is less than 25% of the 435 sitting House members, but it shows some progress in our country, although the progress has been incredibly slow. The country had no women in the House of Representatives for 141 years, and it took another 101 years for women to top the 20% mark! At that rate, it will take another 150 years for half of the House to be women, which would be a truer representation of our country's population.
I often laugh when conservatives deride progressives for their "radical" ideas, as if those desired changes are too sudden, too extreme and too unthinkable. The reality is that none of those changes is sudden; they all have a history of gradual evolution through decades of ignorance and rejection, followed by a growing awareness, empathy and capitulation. For more than half the life of this country, having women in the U.S. Congress was considered a radical idea, and now it would be a radical idea if there were none.
But to get from the state of empathy to acceptance of an idea, something strange has to happen. I'm convinced that changes finally happen when there is a general loss--or at least a general dulling--of empathy, followed by a groundswell of real action. It's almost counter-intuitive, but it's true. Empathy leads to inaction. One's daily dose of angst (and a prayer or two) is simply enough for most people. Until it isn't. Until the issue affects them personally.
As an example, the country is in the middle of its empathetic phase regarding climate change. Non-believers of climate change may have sympathy for victims of drought, frequent "hundred-year" hurricanes, devastating forest fires and massive floods, and their donations and prayers are plentiful--and they may even feel empathy. But as all of those conditions worsen, the importance of empathy and prayer pales next to the need for action and change. Right now there is a surfeit of sympathy and empathy, but slowly people are tiring of that habit and turning to action.
In a wonderful conversation with a good friend, he told me, "I simply don't care any more," and I knew exactly what he meant, because we had already discussed the state of the nation on previous occasions. I have reached the point of not allowing myself to care as much as I did. For several decades my personal motto has been "you choose what you deserve and you deserve what you choose." The country chose the current administration, and the country deserves it. The citizens of many other countries have made wiser, more conscientious choices, with much higher voter participation. According to many metrics, their lives are better, and so they deserve that as well.
The average "middle-class" family in the United States is likely to experience stagnant wages, low personal savings, high debt, drastic climate events, uncertain health care benefits, high childcare costs, exposure to drug addiction, and an ever-growing distance from their dreams. And yet, equivalent to the effects of chickens voting for Colonel Sanders, they continue to elect politicians who oppose raising the minimum wage, passing climate change laws, regulating the pharma industry, enacting common-sense gun laws, reducing education and childcare costs, and providing healthcare for all.
I used to agonize over such illogical views. I know the fossil fuel industry prevents politicians from passing climate change laws, just as the NRA prevents those politicians from passing gun-control laws, but why do people keep voting for those politicians if they disagree with their policies? Why does a middle-class family support elected officials who do very little for them? The answer is complex but also obvious. Inaction and believing in the status quo is a lot easier than action and changing the status quo. As long as you have empathy and contribute a little money and prayer, you don't need to do anything else! You feel you've done your fair share.
Oh, and there's one more huge reason why people so affected by destructive policies don't change how they vote: tradition. In general, they believe that, if the system was good enough for their parents, it's good enough for them. If they and their parents have always voted for a particular political party, it is extremely difficult to buck tradition, even if that party has changed and most of the policies they used to support are championed by the "other" party now.
While visiting friends in Germany in May, 2019, I had a very interesting conversation with our hosts, when they explained to me how the German political system works. Vaguely speaking, they have six political parties--the far left, the mostly left, the center left, the center right, the mostly right, and the far right (each party has an ambiguous name that I still can't remember). I asked which party they support, and their emphatic answer was that they don't support a particular party; they support specific candidates with whom they most agree. In one election they might vote for a mostly left candidate, and in the next election they might vote for the center right candidate. Because there are so many parties, Germans are less tied to the tradition of voting for one party, come hell or high water. Their debates center on candidates and issues, not parties and ideologies. If they are against nationalistic bigotry, for example, that might rule out two of the parties, but there are still candidates from four other parties who might be attractive to them.
With a two-party system, you are almost forced to be tied to one political party in America, although more and more people are identifying themselves as Independents now. I like that idea of being an Independent. In addition to a gradual political shift, more and more people (if comments on Facebook are any indication) are gradually becoming dissatisfied with the habits of empathy and much more interested in action. To paraphrase one friend, "Screw empathy. When's the election?"
The reading on my "empathy meter" probably started to decline about twenty years ago, although the decline of America certainly began many years before that, coinciding with voter apathy. As fewer people vote, I become less and less empathetic. If people don't care about themselves and their families enough to choose who represents them and leads the country, I have reached my limits of empathy for them when their lives are in turmoil.
Between 1840 and 1908, eligible voter turnout in the United States was always over 65%. (Just remember that this was before automobiles and mail-in ballots!) A century later, in 2016, voter turnout was down to 55.5%. There was a huge 5-point drop between 1968 and 1972, as voters soured on all politicians during Vietnam and Watergate, and turnout dipped to 55.1%. The turnout has not revived in almost 50 years, although the mid-term elections of 2018 may hold a silver lining. At 53.4%, it was the highest mid-term election turnout since 1914--and it was 11.5% higher than mid-terms in 2014!
I like to compare America's voter turnout with that of Australia. Since the 1920's, voting has been compulsory in Australia, but the penalty for not voting (and not submitting a reasonable excuse) is only $20 for a national election. Voting is made to be fun in Australia. Elections are always held on a Saturday, and most communities hold barbecues and parties on an election day. As one Australian responded to a New York Times article, “Voting in Australia is like a party. There’s a BBQ at the local school. Everyone turns up. Everyone votes. There’s a sense that: We’re all in this together. We’re all affected by the decision we make today.”
If only America were like Australia!
The Arc Of Suffering
For many, many years I truly agonized over every event that impacted a woman's right to choose--the appointment of every Supreme Court justice or law passed by a conservative state or fake propaganda espoused by the "pro life" movement, most of whose supporters are pro capital punishment also. As more and more countries passed "pro choice" laws, clearly separating church and state, America chose to regress. In a May, 2019 Gallup poll, the country was split about 50/50 between "pro choice" and "pro life," but it's revealing that men now exceed women as being "pro choice"! (Both genders are very heavily "pro choice" for people under 30 years old.)
The issue of abortion rights is one of many about which I have lost interest and become much less empathetic. I will continue to vote, contribute money, and voice my opinions about those issues, but I have stopped agonizing over them. I have stopped watching 99% of the political content on TV. I have unfriended or hidden the posts from all far-right acquaintances on social media. I get my news updates from the New York Times and some public television and CNN broadcasts (although I sneak peaks at the Washington Post and Reuters). I have reached my limits of empathy for people I don't know, and I have increased my interactions and empathy for people I know well.
As my friend implied when he said that he's ceased to care, I cared for a long time while I waited for the chickens to not re-elect Colonel Sanders, and now it's up to them to get themselves out of the coop. When the people of this country decide that voting is more important than rolling the dice, perhaps I will experience a return of empathy. As he and I agreed, the best thing we can do now is take care of ourselves and our families. Make sure our affairs are in order. Save enough money to move to higher ground when the seas rise.
What will really change the country is when a LOT more people begin to suffer significantly. The subject of medical costs is a good example of how people will be changed by the arc of suffering. Unless we adopt a national policy that health care for all is a good thing, as many other countries have done, fewer and fewer people will be able to afford the high health care costs. That's simple math. Health costs are going up much faster than wages. How high must they go before too many people are uninsured and suffering too much?
That's what I call the "arc of suffering"--when a problem gets worse and worse and, finally, affects too many people. It's at the root of my lack of empathy, and it can be applied to many issues we have as a nation (and as a world). The further along the arc, the more likely I am to withhold some of that empathy and act independently of others.
Choosing Action
When my Mom became more and more addicted to her indignation and TV viewing habits, which was her form of social media, I vowed to never be that way. We can't make perfect choices to disengage from propaganda and engage in actions, but we can make good choices. Over the last fifteen years, my wife and I have made decisions to mitigate some of the threats of growing old in a non-voting country. Here's what we're doing and have done, together and separately:
- We learned how to save and invest our money. I spent a couple of years studying how to invest and have always minimized risk. In short, we are conservative but active investors. Since we depend on our money helping us through old age, we pay attention to what we're doing with it.
- We've become as fully insured for the future as we can afford to be. We don't have gold-plated policies, but we have good policies and have tried to insure for the worst cases. Each type of insurance required research to find a good policy, which was our commitment to action. Medical, dental, vision, homeowner, earthquake, umbrella, automobile, dog medical, long-term care. Yup, we have them all. Over-insured? Probably. Under-stressed? Definitely.
- We stopped reading, watching, and listening to almost all political media. We still watch some of the debates, and, as stated, I get my news from the New York Times, Reuters, and NPR News mostly.
- We vote by mail, and we ALWAYS vote. For California ballot issues and political offices, we read the excellent analyses written by good friend, Michael Rosenthal, who spends many hours researching each issue and candidate and then writes a document with his choices and reasons for them. We don't always agree with Michael, but I appreciate that he does exhaustive research and cuts through the fake news. (Let me know if you want to be on his mailing list.)
- We recycle all political mail, without reading it. There are good reasons why other countries have very short political campaigns. Political mail dulls the masses. It may be the biggest reason why people don't vote!
- We choose our friends wisely. It used to be that a person who favored a different political party than I do was simply someone who had different opinions, and I could live with that. But that's changed. A person who supports the current administration now has different values than I do, and that has driven us apart. Life is too short to willingly let someone else's values impact mine. Where compromise is not possible, neither is conversation. Seriously, I have the same feeling about people who support this president as I would have had living in Nazi Germany, for people who supported Hitler. Where there is no morality in office, I have no respect for those who support immorality.
- I now work (at my leisure) with an organization called Vote Forward. I write letters to encourage and help register people to vote. For each letter, I add to Vote Forward's boilerplate, address the envelope, add the stamp, and mail it. A person must commit to do at least five letters a month to be part of VF, and each letter takes about 3-4 minutes. Currently I'm doing 30 letters per month. It's my small way to be part of the one thing that will save this country--voting.
- We contribute money to organizations we believe in, with an emphasis on the environment, the arts, animal welfare, social justice, and feeding people. If a non-profit doesn't use at least 70% of our contribution for the intended purpose, we don't contribute to them.
- We sign petitions to change things. We have no idea if those petitions do any good, in the end.
- Finally, we volunteer where we can, especially in our little townhouse community. If you have the time (i.e., don't work and don't have kids), then there are thousands of ways you can add to the lives of other people.
The values of probably 30% of the people in this country are much more foreign to me than the values of all the immigrants who come here--immigrants who often make my world a better place. It is for them I feel true empathy.
