Tag: politics

When Events Collide

personby Gillian Polack
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This is the year of many confluences. I want to note just three, because those earlier in the year were more confluences of grief and do not need revisiting.

The first one is tomorrow, that is to say, November 5.

First, there is the US election. I am hoping that the US turns out and votes in massive numbers and that the outcome is one of the better ones. This is not an easy election and I’m very glad I don’t have to deal with some of the issues everyone’s handling right now. I hope things improve and that clever voting opens the door to US lives being significantly better. I also hope that the idiots learn to listen and understand what rampant fools they can be, but this is probably a pipe dream.

The election is, obviously, the biggest thing tomorrow. The second biggest is a rather fraught historical memory. Australia mostly doesn’t celebrate Guy Fawkes Night any more, but I found out yesterday that New Zealand does. We never burned figures, even when we had bonfires and fireworks and for this I am so very grateful. I have to admit that it’s kinda appropriate that there is a history memory on the same day that the US is busy creating its own history memory.

The third thing tomorrow is a race. Not the same type of race as the US one, but a horse race. Victoria (the Australian state, not the city a long way from me) gets a public holiday and most of Australia stops to watch. Tomorrow I won’t, because the friends I usually drink with (because it’s a drinking festival, really) are busy and I have a lot to do and…

I feel as if I’m betraying my childhood with no race and no fireworks, but at least I don’t have to worry about supporting something that really is not kind to horses or an historical event that, in the way it’s celebrated, isn’t that kind to Catholics.

That’s tomorrow’s confluence: the election, Bonfire Night, and the Melbourne Cup.

The next one is on November 11. I might leave it until next week and tell you about it then. Let me just say that only one of the events that collide is celebrated in the US and the UK. Watch this space…

The other collision is a bit longer. December 25 is Christmas this year (as it always is) and, for a wonder, it’s also the start of Chanukah, thanks to a handy leap month last Jewish year. New Year is also Chanukah. So are all the days between the two. I feel it’s a bit of a cheat to call this a confluence, but it’s a fun one because it’s going to tangle all the folks who were finally accepting that Chanukah and Christmas are not on the same dates. The Christian calendar is solar and fixed to the sun. The Jewish calendar is lunar/solar, that is fixed to the moon with solar adjustments. This explains the leap month – the adjustments are a bit bigger because, really, the Moon and the Sun don’t talk to each other and make everything work in harmony.

The shape of the year gives you something to think about if you really, really don’t want to spend more thoughts on the election. The fact that I’m supposed to be frying food in midsummer (for Chanukah) is another useful distraction.

Good luck with your Tuesday confluence!

Embracing the Contradictions

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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In November of 2020, right around the US election, Master Li Junfeng, with whom I studied Sheng Zhen (a practice related to Qigong) while in Austin, offered an online meditation workshop for – if I remember right – 17 days in a row.

I signed up, even though it was at 6 am Pacific Time, since Master Li was in China and they were trying to set it for as reasonable as possible a time for people all over the world. And I made every class.

It was a very good decision, despite the fact that getting up to do something at 6 am is not one of my favorite activities. I sailed through all the election nail-biting and even lessened my pandemic anxiety.

I did keep it up for awhile, but since then I haven’t been all that regular with meditation. I’m trying to get back in the habit now. What with the election, the multiple climate-change-caused disasters, and the fact that even with sane people in our government we haven’t even come close to dealing with public health crises – not to mention what all this stress does to my blood pressure – I need to take time to breathe deeply and find my center every day.

I do Tai Chi daily, but I need the meditation as well.

I’m a bit eclectic at the kind of meditation I practice. I’ve picked up some Zen Buddhist techniques over the years. Master Li’s approach comes out of Taoism, I think. Some days I just focus on my breath. Other days I watch the Qi or Ki (depending on whether I’m channeling Chinese or Japanese practices) flowing through my body.

Sometimes I recite this verse that I believe I learned from a book by the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn:

Breathing in, I feel my body.
Breathing out, I smile.
Living in the present moment.
This is such a beautiful moment.

And sometimes I try to imagine all the elements of our planet – from the tectonic plates to the oceans to the forests to all the creatures and people – and then go on through the Solar System to the Milky Way to the Universe.

When I do that last version, I remember that I am a part of the universe, and so are all the microbes living inside me as well as everything around me.

I am a tiny speck of the universe and whatever happens or doesn’t happen to me is part of that whole. Continue reading “Embracing the Contradictions”…

Presidential Ambitions

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Back in my pre-teen years, when I first started paying attention to politics, I thought I might want to become the first woman president of the United States.

That was about the time when my parents started encouraging me to consider law school. I remember traveling through Texas on vacation at one point and asking my father who he knew in the county we were in who could help me get elected governor (governor being a stepping stone to the White House).

When I got out of law school, the state representative seat for my parents’ district was open and they wanted me to move back home and run. I thought about it, but in the end decided against it.

While it was a labor-liberal district in those days, I would have had to ignore racism while soliciting the (mostly white) union vote and would also have had to pretend I loved the appalling development going on as Houston continued to sprawl.

Which is to say, if you want to be elected to public office in this or many other countries, you’ve got to compromise on something. And while I’m actually pretty good at working together with other people in good faith to come up with something we can all live with, the kind of compromises that involve my basic values are much harder for me to do.

I am very glad I made that call back then. I was still lurching around, trying to figure out my way in the world. Politics would have been a path, but I don’t think it would have made me happy.

And I don’t want to be President of the United States.

Presidents are the front person, and while they do their best to put people they can work with in key positions, they really have to trust that the people doing the core work are approaching it in a way similar to what they would do in that job.

Also, they inherit decisions made in the past, particularly on foreign policy. A new president has to tread with care around relationships with other countries and their advisors may well be telling them to do things they don’t personally agree with, but don’t see any way to change.

If I were in that job, I would never get a decent night’s sleep because I’d wake up at 3 a.m. every morning second guessing myself or cursing the fact that I had to do something I really didn’t want to do because of a lot of decisions made twenty years ago.

What gets me are all the people who do want to be president. I don’t mean the actual politicians with a shot at the job, the people who have spent their lives in various elected offices and see the chance to advance once again. Those are the people who really like the political life, the ones who don’t wake up second-guessing themselves, who don’t mind asking people for money, who really like political games.

No, I’m thinking about the people who run as third party candidates, not to mention the individuals with no organization who just decide to run. Continue reading “Presidential Ambitions”…

Meditating on the Writing of Postcards

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Like many other people in the United States, I’ve been writing postcards to voters in other states as a way of doing something about the election. I’ll vote, of course, and I’m sending a little money here and there as well.

Given the number of postcards I can reasonably write and the amount of money I can afford to send, not to mention the value of my single vote, all those things only matter if a lot of other people do them as well.

But the stress of “the most important election of our lives” is weighing on me. I don’t call people, because I despise getting such calls and cannot bear to do that to others. Postcards I can do without having to talk to a stranger who doesn’t really want to talk with me.

In general, while I worry a lot and always vote – the last time I skipped an election was a runoff between a dishonest Democrat who was going to win anyway and a well-intentioned good-government Republican whose ideas on how to run a city were disastrous – I am not excited about electoral politics. I prefer to put my energy for change into building something that might grow into better systems. Co-ops, for example.

I came to that after being active in the antiwar movement back in the day when I realized that I preferred making things to protesting them. Not that I haven’t done a lot of protesting as well – it’s kind of like voting: you gotta do it from time to time.

Anyway, I’m trying to do my small part to fend off fascism – and yes, there is a right and wrong side in this election and not just in the presidential race. I don’t think the United States survives as a nation if we don’t stop this latest effort to create an authoritarian state.

And though I can think of reasonable arguments for the dismantling of the United States, it would be hell to live through that period and while I’m old, I’m not so old that I won’t have to.

Also, I’m pretty much in favor of getting a sane base in place and trying to fix the country’s problems from there. See above, where I mentioned I preferred building things to protests.

I mean, we already had a civil war over how the country should be governed. As someone who has read a bit of history, I contend that we wouldn’t be in this mess if we hadn’t abandoned Reconstruction after that nasty war. The Civil War Amendments to the Constitution gave us a way to build the country we ought to be, but we haven’t used them as well as we should. Continue reading “Meditating on the Writing of Postcards”…

Do Not Murder In My Name: The Rush to Execution

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Today it feels appropriate to repost my essay on my opposition to the death penalty as a family member of a murder victim. This is from 2020.

 

Now, in the waning days of 2020, the criminal in the White House has pushed through a string of murders. I realize I have used inflammatory language, but nothing less conveys the intensity of my outrage and revulsion. Simply put, someone who initiates and demands the ending of a human life is a criminal. The deliberate, calculated, cold-blooded taking of a human life is murder.

 

From the BBC: 

As President Donald Trump’s days in the White House wane, his administration is racing through a string of federal executions.

Five executions are scheduled before President-elect Joe Biden’s 20 January inauguration – breaking with an 130-year-old precedent of pausing executions amid a presidential transition.

And if all five take place, Mr Trump will be the country’s most prolific execution president in more than a century, overseeing the executions of 13 death row inmates since July of this year.

The five executions began this week, starting with convicted killer 40-year-old Brandon Bernard who was put to death at a penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. The execution of 56-year-old Alfred Bourgeois will take place on the evening of 11 December.

I am the family member of a murder victim, and I speak from personal experience of the impulse to revenge the taking of my mother’s life. I also know that this is a natural expression of grief, and that with healing, it passes. To me it is essential that those left behind be given the support and time to process that loss and to re-engage with their lives. To focus on killing someone else freezes us in retaliation mode.

Over the years, I have spoken out against the death penalty, telling my story to groups as diverse as city councils, law students, death penalty abolition activists, and state legislators. In 2012, I was invited to participate in an international conference put on by Murder Victim Families For Human Rights. Then I met others like me, who had lost a single family member to violence, those whose loved ones had been executed or were on death row, and those who experienced both. Every single person who had experienced both was Black. There is no escaping the racial injustice in the way the death penalty is applied (or the way crimes are investigated and prosecuted). Yet the most moving part of that weekend was listening with an open heart to mothers weeping for their executed sons — and realizing their grief and loss was no less than mine. 

If you, who are reading this, take away nothing else, remember this: every person who is put to death is or has been loved by someone, and is grieved by someone, and missed like an aching hole in the heart by someone.

In 2019, I penned a blog for Death Penalty Focus, called “When we focus on revenge instead of healing, we never heal.” You can read it below.

Continue reading “Do Not Murder In My Name: The Rush to Execution”…

Of Politics and Time Zones

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’ve been paying some attention to the Democratic National Convention this week. I didn’t watch the whole thing – I know too much about politics in this country to be able to watch a lot of political speeches – but I did listen to Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech.

While I don’t agree with everything she said, I am excited about her candidacy. I’d be thrilled to see her as President even if she weren’t running against the criminal grifter and even if she wouldn’t be the first woman in the job.

Plus she has brought a new wave of effective political action into the mix, which also makes me happy because frankly I have no more stomach for Democrats running as Republican Lite.

So I’m hopeful that the Democrats will soundly defeat the convicted felon and force the Republican Party to either remake itself or fall apart.

I checked on the convention earlier in the week and was highly amused when I saw complaints online from various political writers about the fact that the Democratic National Convention was running behind schedule and President Biden wasn’t going to be onstage during “prime time.”

By “prime time” they meant not just broadcast-television-dictated prime time, but broadcast-television-dictated East Coast prime time, which is to say between 8 and 11 pm EDT.

I had several reactions to this.

First of all, I started paying attention to U.S. political conventions in 1960 – I was a nerdy kid and my parents were both journalists and liberal Democrats – and I have never heard of a convention not getting behind schedule.

I mean, you give politicians a mike and they’re gonna talk. Plus if there’s enthusiasm – and this year there is a lot of enthusiasm – there’s going to be applause and standing ovations and other things that slow the schedule down.

And while I’m sure there were speakers that no one would have missed much – say the governor of New York – one of the purposes of a convention is to allow as many players as possible to speak as well as bringing in some folks that beef up your presentation.

Secondly, the convention is being held in Chicago, which is on Central Time. Now I grant that CDT broadcast-television-dictated prime time is actually 7-10 pm, but it still was an hour earlier in Chicago.

Thirdly, it was 8:30 pm in California when I saw these complaints. That’s just the most populous state in the union, with the sixth largest economy in the world.

I note that Vice President Harris’s acceptance speech ended a little after 8 pm PDT – 11 pm EDT. Maybe that was close enough to prime time for those doing the griping.

Every once in awhile it’s nice when something important happens on the West Coast’s schedule instead of the East Coast’s.

Continue reading “Of Politics and Time Zones”…

A Sigh of Relief

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I noticed two major reactions in my (carefully curated) social media after President Biden decided not to run for re-election and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

Mine – and the most common one – was a sense of relief and a bit of hope.

We are visiting Seattle, and I overheard someone discussing Biden’s decision at the Ballard Farmers Market (an overwhelming place, though full of good food). I checked the news before I shared the information with my partner and our friends.

As the day went on and I saw people – including prominent Democrats – quickly chiming in to support Harris, I felt my stomach unclench and my feelings of doom recede. It has always seemed to me that she could bring the strong presence and fight we need in this race, so long as she got support.

On Monday morning, for the first time in weeks, I didn’t wake up panicking about the felon nominated by the Republicans getting back in office.

The other reaction among people I know is the not unreasonable fear that misogyny and racism can still prevail. Too many women (in particular) are still reeling from 2016 and misogynoir is a very real thing.

There’s no question that things are going to get ugly.

But it’s also good news that the felonious con man and his minions were caught off guard by this. I’m sure they’ll get more sophisticated with their attacks, but right now it’s just bog standard nastiness.

From what I can tell, Biden handled this brilliantly. He announced just after the Republican convention ended, taking away their advantage. And apparently they were not ready for such an announcement, perhaps because their dear leader can’t imagine someone willingly giving up power.

After the drip, drip, drip of ageist bullshit (I’ve never met the president, so I don’t know anything about his health, but given that no one was doing the same thing with the equally old Republican nominee who rambles incoherently and is known to lie about his health, I am skeptical of the claims), the great strategy came as a relief. The pundits’ dream of an open and chaotic convention would be a disaster.

And no, such a convention would not be more “democratic.” I remember when conventions were actually contested and even as a teenager – OK, a nerdy teenager who watched conventions – I knew that everything happened in the smoke-filled rooms. Continue reading “A Sigh of Relief”…

Institutional Failure

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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In the United States, our institutions have failed us.

This is most obvious in the recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has progressed to declaring that at least some presidents are kings after having undermined voting rights, taken away women’s rights, and made it impossible for government agencies to do their jobs properly.

But the failure is broader than that. The Republican Party failed us long ago when it hooked up with right wing extremists to try to shore up its small base of rich people. Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt would be appalled. Even Dwight Eisenhower might be appalled. And it still only represents a minority of voters.

Congress hasn’t worked since the 1980s, when the Democratic majority in the House decided it had to work with Ronald Reagan. That wasn’t enough for the extremists, as evidenced by the shutdown games that are now a frequent issue.

The Senate, which should have been restructured decades ago to fix its vast inequality, has been a mess for a long time, but even when the Democrats have power, they avoid fixing the things that make it easy for the extremists to obstruct them.

People complain about polarization, but the problem is extremism enabled by those who’d still like to pretend we’re bipartisan.

The fact that voters turned out en masse to throw out the grifter and his minions in 2020 should have enabled the Democrats to take firm charge and make it impossible for the extremists to ever again be a threat.

Yet here we are. It’s 2020 all over again. Or 2016, with “he’s too old” replacing “but her emails.” The Republicans are putting up an equally old man who is also the convicted felon who came close to destroying the country the last time he got in and yet some polls favor him.

And of course, much of the news media has failed us repeatedly. The major newspapers and television networks want to cover politics like a football game or a horse race. They are not focused on the real problems we face and which would be the best administration to solve them. They’re not even looking at the extremism and absurdity of the Republican candidate.

I mean, all you have to do is compare what happened under each candidate’s term in office. That’s just Reporting 101. You don’t need an inside source to do that.

Continue reading “Institutional Failure”…

It’s Been a Hell of a Week

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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It’s been a hell of a week. Not personally – I’m fine, my partner is back from travels, and even though there’s a heat wave, it’s actually quite pleasant in the shade.

No, what’s making me miserable is the U.S. Supreme Court, which is apparently stocked with the sort of “originalists” who think the American Revolution was a bad mistake, given that they just gave the President (though maybe only the former guy) powers usually reserved for kings. The people who wrote the Constitution had a lot of flaws, but I’ve read enough history to doubt very seriously that they were in favor of kings or anyone else being above the law.

The court also dismantled the administrative side of government – you know, the agencies who deal with air quality, medicines, consumer goods, air travel, workplace safety, and so on. That is, they’re undermining what government actually does.

Combine that with the fact that the Republican candidate for president is a convicted felon and a grifter who is spouting absurd lies and promoting an extremist authoritarian plan for government and yet the coverage of the presidential race treats him as if this is normal.

Despite all this, the news coverage is focused on Joe Biden having a bad debate with the criminal grifter and urging him to drop out.

It’s enough to make one run screaming for the woods, except that I don’t think I’ll be safe there. It’s not the bears; I’m just not sure it’s possible to get far enough away from the disasters of this world.

(I forgot to mention climate change. A category 5 hurricane – unheard of this early – just devastated several places in the Caribbean. And there’s a nasty heat wave in California. Plus fires.)

My response to all of this – outside of ranting and feeling unsettled at all times – has been my go-to response since I was five years old: I read. Continue reading “It’s Been a Hell of a Week”…

Relationships and Values

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The Washington Post editorial board published a ridiculous editorial last week on the fate of marriage given that young women are much more liberal than young men, some of whom are distressingly right wing. The article implied that women should compromise their political beliefs to get married.

My initial reaction to this silly article is best summed up in a saying from second-wave feminism:

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

According to Wikipedia, Australian filmmaker, politician, and activist Irina Dunn said that.

My second reaction is to ask why are we still getting articles like this in 2023. This one’s not quite as bad as the one Newsweek did in the 1990s about women over 40 being more likely to be killed by terrorists than get married — which wasn’t remotely true as well as being stupid — but it’s pretty bad.

I mean, why all this emphasis on getting married?

The Post seems to think married people are happier, but their source for that data is from a right wing organization. There is some data that married men are happier, but ….

Based on my in-no-way-scientific observation of people, single women are as happy as anybody else, and the women I’ve known who were the unhappiest tended to be married women in complicated marriages.

I’ve been in a committed relationship for the past ten years (we’ve lived together for nine). Before that I was single for many years. I’ve never been married and never had a long ongoing relationship before this one. I was happy being single and I’m happy being in this particular relationship.

The things that make me unhappy have nothing to do with my relationships.

It should go without saying that my partner and I share similar political views. There is absolutely no way I could be seriously involved with a partner who didn’t share my politics. In fact, one of the reasons this relationship is successful is that we share deep values.

There’s an implication in this discussion that political views don’t matter, even though The Post also constantly writes about polarization. It’s as if politics is like rooting for a baseball team.

But politics, especially in these times, is a window into values. If my values incorporate feminism, antiracism, addressing climate change, doing something about wealth inequality, and related issues, how can I possibly get involved with someone who embraces authoritarianism and white supremacy? Continue reading “Relationships and Values”…