Voting from our wounds ...

Voting from our wounds …

This morning mist rose from the mountains east of the apartment. Yesterday, there was a double rainbow across the valley. The pear tree, leaves a perfect slick red, is still holding on to handfuls of its leaves. These are comforting physical facts. Reminders of beauty in what has been feeling lately like a world without hope.

There is such fury, fear, and invective on all sides in this election – whether it is the mainstream democrats toward progressives voting for Jill Stein, or Bernie supporters heart-broken and enraged by the stealing of their candidate’s votes in the primary, to the fear-and-despair-driven invective of Trump supporters. We see a politics of conflagration arising out of the demise of the American dream, and a lack of confidence in the very concept of democracy as a form of government. (According to an article in The Economist, 25% of Americans born after 1980 think democracy is a “bad” form of government.)

No one is happy about this election, its candidates, or its potential outcomes, except perhaps the corporations which have made this state-of-affairs inevitable. With no one left to speak for the poor, the working class, and even the bleeding-at-the-seams middle class, the right-wing Democrats (who would be considered conservatives in any European nation) have pushed the Republican party right into the territory of the Tea Party and the wild-west reality-tv hucksterism of Trump.

On a day when I read about how Trump plans to eliminate all funding for alternative energy research if he wins the presidency (And seriously at this point I think that those in positions of power who act on their climate change denial should be considered criminals against the planet) I thought I would share some Noam Chomsky wisdom. Needless to say he is an idol of mine. Chomsky is a person of deep insight and keen intellect.

In an insightful article from progressive news outlet AlterNet, authors Jeff Cohen and Normon Solomon discuss “3 Dangerous Myths about Trump that Some Progressives Cling To”. The first is that Trump can’t win – and of course if you’re following the polls right now as obsessively as I am, you’ll see this isn’t necessarily true. The second and third myths both generally have to do with Trump not be able or “allowed” to enact his frightening social policies – but with episodes of armed Trump voters already harassing voters (and plans for mass turnout on election day to suppress the Black vote) the rhetoric is already being made reality. And if you think the Democratic machine or the Republicans currently against Trump are going to obstruct him – just take a look at history and notice that what these politicians mostly, ultimately, want is power (a main reason we’re in this situation). They ended with Chomsky’s advice on voting in a Clinton-Trump match-off: “in a swing state, a state where it’s going to matter which way you vote, I would vote against Trump, and by elementary arithmetic, that means you hold your nose and you vote Democrat.” 

But unlike so many of the voices I read out there, although he feels that if Trump wins, “the human species is in very deep trouble,” Chomsky also believes that Trump supporters have been failed by the system. As he says: “They give the impression of being hard-working serious people who think they’ve been doing everything right. They’ve been doing what they’re ‘supposed’ to do … What are they doing wrong and how come their lives are so crummy?” He goes on to say: “They’re not getting answers. The answers they are getting are not only crazy, but extremely dangerous, so the right response is to ask ourselves, why are we failing to organize these people?”

From my own limited perspective of this election, it feels like we are all the walking wounded. Each side elides negatives about “our” candidate and focuses with fury on the faults of the other. We are voting with our wounds. It isn’t something that I think is very new. I think in the past our “wounds” have made the majority of us vote for whichever candidate we felt would take over and then we could just forget about it, and go back into sleep mode for another four years. By and large we have voted for a “parent” to fix the problems, keep dinner on the table, and tell us how to feel about the issues. This in and of itself reflects a wounding of our ability to take responsibility for our own lives. 

And this year I think those wounds are particularly raw, deeper, scarier, more personal. It might be a woman voting for Trump who can’t admit the pain of having a father who denigrated and objectified her as a girl. Or a Stein voter who, as a progressive activist all his life, has shouldered the shadow-burden of America’s horrors and can’t bear to “take another one for the team.” It is all of us who have had faith in the massive edifice of our government, unable to square that faith with the daily reality of racism, gun violence, environmental disaster, poverty, misogyny, and perpetual war.

The thing about our wounds – the personal or the social – is that the scariest thing is to turn around a face them. But until we do there will always be fear, lashing out, and blind spots. The blind spot could be a professed liberal not seeing the corruption of the corporate-owned Democratic machine. It could be the inability of a Trump supporter to discern that despite his words, Trump, as a representative of the corporate model, will only ever look out for his own bottom line.

Without looking at the wound we will continue to blame each other for the problems of this world, rather than beginning to look rationally and with hope at reality. The thing about the United States is that it is us. And that can be harrowing, having to turn around and face the guilt and shame of our shared history. But it is also remarkable—because it means we can change it.