Waving the White Flag

"I do not have to fight anybody or anything anymore."

Anonymous -- from Daily Reflections, June 22

MANY WISE MEN AND WOMEN, far more spiritually progressed than I can claim to be, have come to this realization and point to it as one of their keys in maintaining and progressing in their spiritual health. "When I fight authority," as the great philosopher John Cougar Mellencamp once observed, "authority always wins." You can substitute many things for the word "authority": the weather, the police, the courts, death, alcohol, drugs, sugary food, or God Him-or-Her-self--the idea is the same. We, as mere mortal and flawed human beings, cannot "win", at least in any conventional sense of the word; paradoxically, our best chance at winning comes in surrendering.

With this realization comes obvious, if unsettling, parallels. Specifically, I write today of what is happening in our country and in this state (not, thank God, in this city--yet) in the age of Trumpism. (An aside: I define "Trumpism" loosely--a time of high economic insecurity and inequality, heightened racial tensions, tribal politics, and what some commentators have dubbed "the post-truth era", when an agreed-upon set of facts does not exist and thus allows a highly amoral and incompetent person to win the presidency of the United States. I give Donald Trump himself very little credit--or alternately, place very little blame on him--for the current state of affairs; he just happens to be president right now, hence "Trumpism". For people I blame more, see "Koch, Charles and David" and "Robertson, Pat" and "Powell Memo, the").

In this moment, goings-on at the state and national levels are almost, perhaps completely, out of my hands. Yet for the better part of the last 18 months, I (I suspect, like many like-minded Iowans and Americans) have followed the news--television, newspaper, Facebook, iPhone--to a near obsessive degree. It became my primary form of entertainment--or, perhaps more accurate, I ceased to entertain myself. I kept waiting for that one last metaphorical nail in the coffin of Trumpism and its many cancerous outgrowths (cutting the social safety net, crazy-ass abortion bans, lowering the minimum wage, etc.).

But it never came. Slowly, it dawned on me that the only people in a position to do anything (Congressional Republicans on the national level, Iowa Republicans on the state level) were, in fact, not going to be moved; if anything, they were taking advantage ("Never let a good crisis go to waste" goes the old political adage).

But I digress. This wasn't supposed to be a political post. It is supposed to be spiritual in nature (although who says the two can't co-exist? Oh right, the Bible...). So let me try and right the ship.

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Over the last several weeks, I came to realize that no matter how much time Mark Plum devoted to Vox or MSNBC--and this is not a criticism of their important, and generally high-quality, work--very little, that is to say nothing, was changing. I gradually came to suspect that to continually (24/7) receive, and worse, depend upon, an unstoppable onslaught of news of the horrors and cruelties of these political times was not, surprisingly, facilitating my powers to change them. Alas, it was the other way around: it was forming an impenetrable, self-reinforcing and downright surreal bubble around me that left me impotent in its presence. When the attacks just keep coming from all sides, one finds little left to do but curl up, fetal position, on the ground, and just pray that the arrows stop flying.

So I declared a truce. "Truce" is not the right word; "truce" implies that (at least) two sides are going to stop fighting, and my action is a unilateral one. On the other hand, it is a perfect world, in the sense that my truce is not with myself and some other entity, but within myself. To feel sadness, horror, empathy, is a valid reaction in these times. To feel guilt, shame or inadequacy is not only an invalid reaction, it is self-defeating.

So: world, in general, and political and social "conservatives", more specifically. Actually, to be perfectly specific: to the parts of me that are disgusted by what the latter are doing: accept my white flag. I'm not going to dwell on you anymore. I'm going to acknowledge you and move on. Don't be confused: I'm not saying I agree in any way, but I don't agree either with tornadoes or hurricanes or earthquakes, and I can't prevent those. I'm simply acknowledging the current state of affairs and recognizing that I can't change it, at least not by just obsessing over the news and all by myself. All those folks are out of my control. I admit it, because that's how it is, and I'm not being all I can be without accepting it.