asahi, I appreciate your thoughtful comments. Every human has only so much energy, and only so many hours in a day. We can only hope that the sum of our actions — from small, local, everyday interaction with neighbors, to occasional participation in larger-scale movements — will push society a little in the right direction.
Four days ago, some moron spray-painted an awful anti-Muslim phrase on the storefront of a businessman here. My son wrote a “your family is a welcome part of our community” card, after gathering with neighbors we hadn’t ever met before (connected suddenly through social media).
Two days ago I was teaching human geography to college freshmen, and the subject happened to be movements of populations among the Americas, and I let it slip that there was no national crisis related to this nowadays.
Ram Dass and Paul Gorman once write a book “How Can I Help?”. It’s mostly about people who do Doctors Without Borders-style direct heroism, but there’s also some good wisdom about everyday attention — and this includes doing what you need to do as a parent, spouse, etc. The Trump/Trumpista insanity is NOT an excuse to neglect these things — quite the opposite! It makes it all the more critical that we get them right (as best we can, imperfect as we all are).
And I think it responds to what I was talking about in the last part of my post - the element of meanness is something that we, as individuals, as parents, as friends can do something about. We can’t always fight corruption and bigotry among those in office, though we can certainly organize against it. Beyond that, though, it is important to be just good citizens.
One thing this very thoughtful discussion between asahi and JKellyMap reminds me of, is that though the stuff of everyday life - work, family, friends - fills up most of our days, calling our Congresspersons is a very simple thing to do, and consumes very little time.
Look up your elected representatives’ phone numbers.
2.Add them to the list of contacts in your phone.
If there’s an issue on your mind, IME it takes less than a minute per call to contact each of your Congresspersons about it.
Mine go something like “I’m [RTFirefly] and I’m a constituent of Congressman [Soandso]'s, I live in [Freedonia], and I’m calling about [the Sylvania situation]. [I am for expelling Ambassador Trentino from the country immediately.]” At which point the person taking my call tells me they’ll pass that on to the Congressperson. (If it’s an issue where they’ve been getting a lot of calls, they’ll say they’ll add me to the tally.) I say “thank you,” and end the call.
Fill in your own details for the bracketed stuff, of course. But really, that’s all it takes. Most of us can’t make that sort of call from work, but if you can take a couple of minutes when you get into your car as you leave work, or on your lunch break, or as you’re walking to the subway, you can do this.
And it’s worth doing. They may not notice any one call, but they DO notice what people are calling about, and which side more people are coming down on. You can be part of that.
That’s not normal. For a normal president, that’d be four major scandals. For Trump, it doesn’t even really register - that’s just “business as usual”. Except it isn’t, and if we treat it like it is, shit goes downhill hard. We can’t let it be normalized.
Speaking of calling one’s Congresspersons, 538 has a whip count of the Senate as regards Trump’s declaration of a state of emergency. If you’ve got a GOP Senator who’s listed as undecided or having concerns/doubts (22 Senators from 17 states), you should be calling your Senator, whichever side you’re on! (8 GOP Senators already oppose the emergency declaration, so if the undecideds/concerns break 12/22 against the declaration, it would be veto override city.)
Probably best to wait until tomorrow, though; nobody will be answering the phones today because of the holiday, and this late in a long weekend, their voicemail boxes are usually full.
This kind of thing drives me nuts. On an absolute global scale,* “left of center” describes the Tories in the UK better than any non-fringe Democrat (who are arguably to the RIGHT of the Tories).
*I will agree that it is valid to NOT evaluate the USA on a global scale when the USA has been physically separated from the rest of the globe.
Thanks for the heads-up, RTFirefly! Will do. One of my senators said the emergency declaration “would be a pretty dramatic expansion of how this was used in the past,” so it’s worth a call.
I’ll copy your post (with credit to you) in the Trump’s Shutdown thread.
I thought I’d linked to the whip count so posters could see which Senators weren’t firmly on one side or the other, but apparently I didn’t. Here it is. You can sort the list by any of the columns - sort by state to quickly find out where your GOP Senators stand, and if either or both are up for grabs. (I think the assumption is that all 47 Dem Senators are against the state of emergency declaration.)
There’s a difference between seeing it as “normal for Trump” and “something a normal president would do.” The first isn’t really a problem–as long as, when we can actually do something about removing him, we actually do.
To me, normalization does mean what you describe though: as in Trump’s behavior become acceptable for others rather than an aberration. And while I have seen some of this, it’s not widespread, and a lot of people who try to act like Trump have lost.
A lack of outrage isn’t really the best measure of whether or not something is normalized, either. Sometimes a lack of outrage is just an energy problem, conserving the energy for when it actually matters. The thing about outrage is that, while you can’t sustain it 24/7, you also don’t have to. You can take a break and pick up where you left off.
No. You have to know the U.S. The reaction to Trump the Chump is to brace ourselves and see if we can withstand the four years. After all, it’s only four years. We endured Nixon for six! There are those who require an immediate *something *be happening every day. It’s how they make their money, jumping up and down yelling, “Something’s happening! Something’s happening!” Don’t allow yourself to be caught up in their frenzy, unless of course you’re *being *paid to. The U.S., regardless of what people with an axe to grind or a drum to beat may say, is noted for its confidence - and often criticized for it. It may be like my mom says, the thin line between wisdom and insanity. It may be experience. Ain’t nobody *normalizing *anything. Another factor about the U.S., we as a group don’t believe in the concept of normalcy.
