Shards of meaning and splinters of spring

My thoughts have been far from the day-to-day this year.

My mind is in books, the stories of four brothers in the vortex of pain in my parents’ generation or the never-real, ideal world of a boy and a marten on Mount Hood. My hands are painting the gleaming fir of new garden-bed posts in the sunshine that is far too early.

Image of pumpkin ridge and mount emily in northeaster oregon in early spring with a lone hiker visible - by arie Farnam

My mind gnaws at the fact that the spring is too early, that we scarcely had any snow, that whole nations are becoming climate refugees. But for us locally it still isn’t too much of a problem. Even the forest fires have struck mercifully elsewhere. My hands are filling the washing machine and turning the dial. My feet are tramping through the kitchen.

My mind is drowning in dying languages and resurrected tongues, in Wall Kimmerer’s desperate struggle to learn Potawatami from the nine remaining fluent speakers, in the legacies of Czech students in the 19th century studying at the feet of country codgers, of Hebrew rekindled with such hope and of St. Patrick burning the last rare books written by Irish Druids. My hands are cutting spaghetti squash and cooking meatballs or dribbling a basketball with my teenage boy.

I’m always listening to some audiobook, always trying to run fast enough to get to something that matters, always writing something while resigned that the chances of an unknown writer getting published these days are minuscule, always trying to reach my kids through the addictive fog of social media and video games, always trying to figure out what really matters.

All this, while my body is going to medical appointments, weeding the garden beds, washing the dishes, organizing transportation for my son and doing physical therapy exercises. My mind is like a restless toddler but one with sophisticated taste.

On a good day, my mind is drawing plot lines and character arcs for two new novels, weaving snippets of poetry in for one character and plant lore in for another. My hands are making flash cards for students an ocean away. Even my mouth and my face are speaking through the computer screen, the same trusty lessons I’ve been teaching for twenty years. Or my fingers and eyes are working over a medical study manuscript, editing for grammar, while my mind is gibbering in helpless fury over the news.

Since January, I’ve been writing down the important things in a date book—not the garden preparations, the dishes or even the tutoring of students but the insights in the books I’ve read, the plot holes and their solutions, my kids’ struggles and tiny triumphs, the news and my various epiphanies. I want to be connected to the day to-day-world, but my mind needs this nourishment and stimulation the way a seedling needs water and sun.

It stretches toward the light in one direction and reaches roots through the soil the opposite way. It can’t help it. No matter where I’m planted, my mind is an unquiet and seeking thing. The only things that truly quiet it are mountains, big sky, trees and an unhindered wind. Meditation every morning settles it some but only temporarily.

This is one reason that I’m going to graduate school, starting this summer. But I also worry because I have a lot more responsibilities and duties and needs and distractions than I did the last time I was in school—twenty-five years ago. I did well in school because there was endless time. I read very slowly because of my wiggle, wobbly eyes, but that didn’t seem to matter when there was nothing else but studying and reading in my days. Now it will be different.

I’ll soon have assigned reading and critiques for my restless mind to dig into. And hopefully, that will be copasetic. But I think this restlessness is partly me and partly the times we’re living in. How can we live quiet contented lives in a world that threatens to self-destruct every twenty-four hours or so? How can we ignore the crises enough to live and give and nurture while also not losing our sense of soul? I am betting these questions are not mine alone.

Post election blues over seeing red

Please forgive my mixing of puns. It isn’t that I don’t take this seriously. My nerves are as frayed as those of many of my readers. But coming up with a title that wouldn’t drive my readers away screaming wasn’t easy.

A title is supposed to tell you why you should read a particular post, but it is often hard to put into a catchy phrase. Why look back at this messy and painful election? Why dwell on a future that is still uncertain? Trump lost. Sometimes that feels like the only thing that matters.

But this really was a vote about the soul of the nation. And we’ve got to look at that soul, once it’s bared. Otherwise, we’ll end up having to go through the same painful things again and again and again. That’s why I didn’t give in to the strong temptation to write about herbs instead. So, bear with me if you are in need of some steadying or even if you just want a space to bounce your thoughts off of.

We finally got a moment of celebration, but it is likely to be very brief. I hear and read people all across America and in other countries marveling that so many American voters were still willing to vote for that uncouth, hateful and psychologically unhealthy man. We were all well aware that he still had supporters, but it seemed like many people had dropped their support for him.

It doesn’t surprise me that fundamentalist Christians didn’t change their tune, regardless of their posturing about “character” and “values” when it comes to other politicians. It doesn’t even surprise me that some Hispanic voters went for Trump. It is time America realized that this is a very diverse group of citizens with widely differing interests. And the Democrats did take them for granted and ignore them after all.

But what both surprises and dismays me is the gains Trump made among white women. I stand stunned. What could possibly possess more than half of white female voters to support a man who has made his opinion that women are objects and only valuable if they please men very clear? How could MORE of these women support him this time after having to endure his sewage-mouth for so long?

It’s been through a battle and the war ain’t over. Creative Commons image by John M. Cropper

This is part of the sickness we have found in the nation’s soul. One of the ways I try to comprehend this soul is by reading Christian bloggers to get a perspective that is definitely outside my bubble. One of those I read on occasion is Kieth Giles, who grew up in a right-wing, white Christian environment in Texas. He’s made the mental trip across the big divide in America and while I still may not agree with him on lots of things, his perspective on what makes Republican voters tick is invaluable.

“Republican Christians tend to care about the unborn, the traditional family, and the right to bear arms,” he wrote in a recent post. “Therefore, they vote for Republican candidates who at least ‘say’ they care about overturning abortion laws, defending traditional definitions of marriage [anti-gay marriage, etc.], and protecting the Second Amendment.”

Add to this that many right-wing, white Christians have been surrounded by a highly charged bubble of constant media messaging on these three topics and what you have is a deeply passionate response. They don’t just care about abortion. They are torn apart by the thought of innocent babies being killed. They don’t just dislike the idea of gay sex, they fervently believe that traditional families are the last defenders of all that is good in this messed up world. And feeling under threat, they truly fear gun snatchers.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard any of this, but it is maybe the first time I’ve sat down and taken a good hard look at the emotions behind it. I always kind of figured that anti-abortion activists didn’t really care about the babies. They just cared about controlling what they see as “loose women.” They cared about punishing those they saw as breaking religious purity laws. That was what I believed.

But what this election and its fallout are telling us is that the leaders may have started the movement that way. The pundits who push the propaganda may be coming from that cynical perspective, but many white women are buying the message about protecting babies on a deep and emotional level.

The same goes for the issue of the “traditional family.” Now, I really don’t doubt that there is an element of hate mongering going on here. A lot of people have gotten caught up in the us-and-them game. People who abide by gender norms are on one side and those who don’t are on the other. Just like with sports teams, a lot of people can get whipped up into a frenzy of antagonism over something that doesn’t need to take over a person’s identity. But what I am seeing now is that there is also a deeper emotional element.

We can all relate to the root emotion—the overwhelming anxiety over the troubles in our world. Whether you are focused on climate change, pervasive racism, vast inequity and the finite nature of the earth’s resources or the loss of authentic opportunities, disconnection from spirit, fractious tribalism, endless consumerism or the addictive pitfalls of substances and entertainment, the world really looks like it’s going to hell in a hand basket a good share of the time. Our biggest differences aren’t usually in what we think the problems are but in what we think the solutions are.

Many women have subscribed to the idea that family is the one good thing in all that mess. Despite any unpleasantness, micro-aggressions, suppression of spirit or acrimony in family life, it is still the one thing we can really hang on to. My mother and I recently came to the same conclusion in one of our long, meandering discussions on life, politics and the meaning of the universe. So, we aren’t really that far away from these women either.

But the Trump supporting women have absorbed a worldview that narrows family to a very traditional model. And given the threatening pressures from outside and that sense that family is our only real haven, their attachment to that traditional view of family is authentically passionate.

How exactly that leads them to enthusiastically support Trump, rather than supporting him with the kind of resigned frustration that so many progressives feel for the Democrats, I can’t say. That is a mystery the Christian bloggers have yet to reveal.

I have tried my damnedest to be understanding in all this. I’m not writing people off as hateful and authoritarian just because their primary issues have to do with things that seem at first glance to be mainly about limiting someone else’s autonomy, whether that’s the ability of women to make crucial life choices or the rights of everyone to form loving relationships in the way that is most natural for them. I’m making the effort to see the heart behind these stances.

And I still find the soul of the nation in peril.

I will allow that a moral, thinking person can feel strongly about protecting babies or saving the traditional family. But in either case, Donald Trump doesn’t look like a choice to promote those causes. His actions are about as much for the traditional family as a gay stripper might be. And he clearly is happy to endanger the lives of immigrant babies.

Guns? Well, I guess it is legit to say he isn’t out to snatch the guns of rural and suburban white folks. But I have a hard time seeing defending one’s guns as an issue with heart.

Now pundits ask us to “come together” and heal the divide in our country. That would be a lot easier if the other side had concerns that were not focused on controlling or harming other people. The common ground isn’t there, because that is a deal breaker for most of us.

There is one thing I think we can find comfort in, despite the lack of a clear “blue wave” in the election. There was a sand bar in the way.

What this election showed about America, yet again, was that the majority has always been far more progressive than the politicians. And the political status quo is maintained by several anti-democratic mechanisms. One is the winner-take-all voting system where everyone has to vote for one of two major candidates or have their vote effectively turned against their interests. Another is the Senate system that gives preference to states with low population and thus primarily to rural, conservative states.

And most egregiously there is the Electoral College which was specifically designed to protect the institution of slavery and prejudice elections in favor of rural, conservative voters at the expense of urban, progressive voters.

Among my English-as-a-second-language students are adult professionals from the Czech Republic who mostly came of age around the time of the Velvet Revolution, when young activists overthrew the totalitarian Communist regime. They believed that America was the guiding light of democracy and now they come to me confused. Their Czech-language media has started to describe the US Electoral College for the first time and they are alarmed.

“How did the American election system get broken?” they ask.

“It didn’t,” I explain. “It’s working exactly the way it was meant to.”

I give them a history lesson—with grammar and pronunciation points in English to make sure class time is used well. The Electoral College is working just as it did two hundred years ago to extend the lifetime of the American slavery system far past the time when slavery was abandoned by Canada, Britain and Western Europe. It achieved this by weighting votes to give greater voice to rural conservatives. And it is still doing that today.

The fact is that a lot of people still voted for Trump, but more than four million more voted for Biden, a lack-luster candidate if there ever was one. In any country with a modern democracy it would not have been considered a close race. It might not have been a blue wave, but that also might be because of the artificial sandbars set up to make sure we never see a blue wave and the widespread voter suppression that acted as a flood break.

On Tuesday, November 10, I finally received my mail-in ballot for the 2020 election. I usually receive my ballot a month earlier than that and receive it automatically. This time new voter suppression rules by the Trump administration meant that I had to specifically request my ballot in the summer. Then, the Trump administration sabotaged the US Post Office so that even though my county elections office mailed the ballot two months ago, it still arrived a week after it had to be physically back in Oregon five thousand miles away.

This is voter suppression at work. It isn’t generally considered “election fraud” but it is fraud’s sneakier cousin.

I was lucky. I got caught up in only the fringes of voter suppression efforts and my county office was ready and eager to help. They had a backup system to allow me to vote via email and even though it took specific attention to a single voter, they made it possible for me to cast my vote legally and securely. But the point is that I was certainly not the only one hit by voter suppression measures and in many cases that cost Biden and Congressional Democrats votes, because these measures were made to impact groups that were expected to vote against Trump.

People in other western democracies look at the images of Americans waiting in line for hours with masks and umbrellas to vote in the United States and they shake their heads in bewildered sympathy. That is the kind of treatment voters get in Belarus. That is how regimes behave when they know the voters are not their friends.

So, despite the fact that I am disappointed and even ashamed that 55 percent of white women voted for Trump… again, I know that the soul of the nation is still there. It is tattered and torn from way too many battles, but despite a rigged, weighted voting system and voter suppression directed at voters expected to be less than enthusiastic for Trump, such as people who use mail-in ballots, we’re still here.