Fuggedaboudit

Why gangster family values are not conducive to large-scale problem-solving.

I published this on Medium a few months after the attempted coup in DC. (I’m moving my work off Medium onto this platform.) I think it’s pertinent in light of the fact that Trump is still with us. He’s the front-runner in the Republican primary. Lately he has been talking about how he wants to get rid of ‘vermin,’ aka anyone who does not buy into his self-serving democracy-destroying agenda. Hitler much?

What will history (if we’re still around) make of the phenomenon of Trump? How is it possible that such a person is beloved by so many? I seriously do not understand this. How can a man bereft of any impulse to uphold our system of democracy be elected President of the United States once, and in my worst nightmare, elected again?

As much as I don’t have a strong urge to be politically active, I’ve been feeling that in the next year I have to contribute in whatever way I can to artfully pointing out how insane it is to act like Trump as the probable Republican nominee for president in the next election is some kind of business as usual, instead of a tragedy of epic proportion. Mainstream Media, I’m watching you.

And I’ll probably have to write postcards and make phone calls to encourage people to VOTE. That system has not yet been completely dismantled by gangsters.

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Apr 13, 2021

Kissing the hand of the Don… Illustration by Janina Lamb

Questions to ask yourself if you are a gangster:

How much can I get away with? How far can I game the system to get what I want? How many pussies can I grab and how many people can I shoot on 5th Avenue before someone tries to stop me? Why should I try to hide who/what I am? (There are many fine people who admire a shameless huckster with power.)

The Unbearable Lightness of Gangster Family Values

Watching the US Government function, before Trump, was like watching teams with different objectives and styles play hardball with each other. Not great, but checks and balances baked into the system (including voting) helped to maintain a level playing field.

The President Trump Show was like watching someone agree to play a game, walk in, kick over the board, grab all the pieces and money and run out of the room straight down to a smoky cellar where his gang awaits, ready to kiss his hand and other places on his body, and then help their dear Don decide who or what to intimidate/con/whack next as part of a loosely structured initiative to consolidate personal power in any way, no holds barred. In other words, democracy can go f**k itself.

What did we learn from watching the T-mob’s attempt to whack democracy?

It helped us to see more clearly that our system of government, like all systems designed to be sustainable, cannot easily withstand an attack from without. All the checks and balances that clever white men thought up in 1787 do not protect the system against an actual desire to destroy the system. Yes, the system dodged a bullet in Trump’s failure to steal the election. But there are still plenty of players eager to game the game — to exploit the system to get what they want, even if that means bumping it off.

It helped us to see more clearly that people who use all their energy in an attempt to deceive and dominate others do not have the bandwidth of mind or attention to solve problems that go beyond their self-referential goals. If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, even clouds and pizza. And pandemics.

It helped us to see more clearly that the survival of our species depends on facing reality. Thanks, pandemic! Truth matters, not because of some Judeo-Christian or other system of morals, but because inherent earth-based systems are actually running the show, whether we know it or not — whether we like it or not. The only way that our species will be able to continue to share the planet with the rest of earthly creation is if enough of us smarten up… fast.

Winston Churchill: photo by Yousuf Karsh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. ~ Winston Churchill

Questions to ask yourself if you are not a gangster:

How does 1. Democracy, 2. Dictatorship, 3. Gangster Family Values, help or hurt the effort to wake up to a more humble, service-oriented approach to our place in the great chain of being? Why does fear obscure the awareness that we function as parts of an organic whole? What circumstances promote love over fear?

Dictatorships and gangster family values are about controlling individuals, not empowering them. Only a critical mass of individuals who are taking responsibility for their individual actions, joined together, can unite our species into acting from a recognition of, and deep respect for, the interconnected systems that sustain us.

As it says in the I Ching, “Only collective moral force can unite the world.”

The ideal of democracy is a system of political organization that encourages personal responsibility in the context of community — of the whole. It is a system that works more or less well depending on the integrity and maturity of its leaders and participants. In other words, on the degree and quality of a personal sense of responsibility.

If it weren’t for some key players whose integrity protected the results of the recent election, Don Trump might have succeeded in his desperate and determined attempt to rig the results of the election in his favor.

Wholly Holy

I am well aware that there are plenty of people who will continue to strive for small-group-dominates-large-group hegemony. It was ever thus. But the evidence of interconnectedness in the form of pandemics, climate change, and other large-scale systems and situations, reveals that many of our constructs of separation/justification lack the expansive suppleness we need to answer the questions and challenges of the day.

A growing network of people are seeing and contributing to an awareness of responsibility — to ourselves, to each other, to the planet, and to the deep energy, call it what you will, that animates matter—our holy responsibility to all that exists in time and space and beyond time and space. Our responsibility to cause and effect, and the effects we have caused. Our responsibility to what we are a part of, and therefore, to what we are.

And that brings me to the real point I want to make in my work and in my life, which is that there is no tribe, no scribe, no story, that can override the call to individual self-awareness, self-organization, and self-acceptance — an organic and internal process based on an individual’s willingness to open to the mystery at the heart of life.

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

How far have we come since the serpent sweet-talked Eve into tasting the apple of awareness?

Sometimes it looks to me like we are at a transition point between an adolescent sense of limitless power and the emerging realization that trying to outrun the cops, who are chasing you for speeding, by driving down the highway at 95 miles an hour, is likely to have unpleasant consequences a little further down the road. Will we slow down enough to avoid a crash and accept responsibility for our actions? Hmmm, remains to be seen.

All I know is that our species needs to figure out that the use of force arising from the desire for domination doesn’t work. It’s a short term fix. Sorry, kids. Faith that the empowerment of all persons will result in the intelligence and energy we need has not yet appeared in great letters across the sky where it can be seen by everyone. But it’s growing, under and above ground, like a beautiful mycelium network. Keep the faith. Better days are coming.