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.
