The Movement Has Begun in Earnest⎼ And Just in Time, I Hope

I joined maybe millions of others in over 1400 cities and towns across this nation in the Hands Off rally and march on Saturday, April 5th. It was both deadly serious and wonderful; a reminder of the terror we face and an awakening of the heart⎼ an awakening of a commitment to act. And an act of caring for ourselves, others, and our physical and social worlds.

 

It was deadly serious for obvious reasons and maybe some not so obvious. After about 40 minutes of speeches and songs, the rally became a march, from the downtown commons to a Community Center. It stopped at a busy intersection, where it became a “honk & wave” demonstration. So many cars honked to join in and support us, 50 times more than those that gave us a thumbs down. Many cars even had signs supporting ours.

 

At that point, I was with a good friend, standing on a busy street corner crowded with cars on the roads, and protestors for several blocks filling both sides of the sidewalks. I leaned in, giving a thumbs up to a car, and my friend grabbed me by my coat and pulled me back. He said you never know when someone opposed to our message might come by and try to push you into the street in front of cars.

 

The obvious reason of the deadly seriousness of the march, of course, was DT, EM, and their attacks on every aspect of our democracy, almost every aspect of life. They’ve attacked our rights to free speech, due process, voting; to health care, in the process destroying federal agencies and the lives of workers who’ve dedicated themselves to looking out for our health. They’ve fired, attacked, and  threatened anyone who speaks out against them or shares the truth about DOGE, illegal deportations, etc.

 

They’ve attacked our children in so many ways, but one major attack was the dismantling of the Education Department, making it more difficult for our future generations to get food, get the support many need, and receive a good education. They’re attacking our future economic security, dismantling Social Security.

 

They’ve increased tensions throughout the world, undermined our international standing and our national security in countless ways, from firing thousands from the defense and state departments, destroying the Voice of [Democratic] America, which formerly had enabled people in nations with censored media to get reliable facts. They cut USAID, threatening our influence over third world countries. DT even threatened to invade our closest allies, Canada and Greenland.

 

DT’s tariffs not only threaten American businesses and the pocketbooks of most of us but have started trade wars with allies! The tariffs undermine both our national security and our personal incomes. One reason for the tariffs is to pay for tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Such cuts lead to an increase in the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands, and a loss of power for the majority. And it means the rest of us will have to cover more of the costs for government functions, for so many things, from repairing roads, to researching cures for illnesses, and protecting our food system from contamination and us from criminals and terrorists both foreign and domestic.

 

They’ve undermined our environment by dismantling whole sections of the EPA and transforming its mission from safeguarding the environment to increasing the huge profits corporations get from our natural resources, while destroying our heritage of forests, polluting land, air, and water. They’ve even removed bans on forever toxic chemicals.,,,

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

It’s Just Who I Am Now: Feeling More Deeply at Home in Our Bodies

One gigantic reality each of us must face is aging. We can feel it when we’re 11 going on 18, or 65 going on 85. At first, the aging, the changes are usually so small, so subtle, just normal reality. Then, seemingly suddenly, the change is immense, startling, towering over our old understanding of ourselves.

 

A few days ago, I was experiencing persistent shortness of breath and thought I should go to the ER for immediate diagnosis and treatment. The symptoms started during a hike; suddenly, it got so intense I couldn’t tell if I would be able to make it back to my car. I kept imagining having to call on my phone for an ambulance. It was too late in the afternoon to call a doctor; so I slowed my pace and distracted my mind from the fear by counting my steps until I reached my car. And when I did see the car, what an amazing relief it was.

 

But despite all that, I didn’t want to go to the ER. I had a physical sense of what might be going on, and it wasn’t a heart attack. So, I drove home.

 

The difficulty breathing abated for a while; but after dinner, it returned, with even more symptoms added on. So, my wife drove me to the ER. After several hours, the ER medical team decided I had issues, but nothing warranting a stay in the hospital.

 

When we got home, the sky thundered. I couldn’t see any lightning, but I felt not only thunder but a driving wind; and an intense rain seemed to fall suddenly out of everywhere, from the sky, the hills, the buildings. We ran inside, dried off, and went to bed as soon as we could.

 

The next morning, I at first wanted to buy myself something, some material compensation for going through the confusion, fear, and physical discomfort, but wasn’t sure what it could be. I imagined going to some local store, maybe a bookstore. I love bookstores. Or go online, if I could just think of something I felt I really needed or wanted. Consumerism shows itself in unanticipated ways.

 

Then I realized these occasional symptoms and physical changes were just an important element of who I now was. I didn’t need any distractions from my own life. It was just that my self-image was miles behind my reality. My awareness hadn’t comfortably settled into my moment-by-moment experience. But now, maybe, this was changing, like everything else. And maybe now I could perceive this seemingly new situation or time of life as valuable, not just something to deal with⎼ but as something interesting in-itself to observe and learn from.

 

And it became clear to me that no material gifts, or outside objects was what mattered the most to me. What mattered the most was my response⎼ what I did, what actions I took, how I understood whatever occurred. This mattered. This was what would most determine the quality of the next moments and years of my life.

 

A few days later I ran into a co-worker from a job I had years ago. We went through the usual greetings⎼ how are you? what’s your life like now? And we answered as honestly as possible without going into many details. She talked about being 80 years old and beginning to feel old; and she added that young people she knew described older people as afraid of change.

 

But I replied I didn’t think that assessment of older people, of us was entirely accurate. As we age, certainly as I age, I notice changes more quickly than I used to, especially changes in my health, in my environment, in my friends….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

Learning How to Face Right Now: The Deceptions We Inflict on Ourselves and the Possible Liberation

It can seem that some lessons need to be learned over and over again until they finally live in us. These lessons are often the most basic, maybe even the most obvious.

 

But sometimes, instead of an old lesson needing to be re-learned, we’re noticing a new perspective on an old situation, or seeing a new dimension in something we thought we should’ve known all along.

 

For example, we have an expectation, fear, or regret, a project and we get lost in it; we ruminate on a detail and forget why we started the project to begin with. We lose ourselves in thought and don’t recognize that we’re living being lost in thought; we’re living an idea and no longer feel our life. We do something and feel we did it incorrectly and think we’re now and forever a mistake. And then we live angry at ourselves. Or we get angry at someone; and somewhere inside us we imagine this anger at another will save us from our own shortcomings⎼ but there’s no such escape. We’re just living scapegoating, living resentment.

 

Oh, and here’s one that’s common: we’re exercising and thinking mostly of getting it done. Or, similarly, we’re in a car driving to meet friends in order to relax together. But we drive fast; we get all tense trying to get to a future where we can let ourselves relax, instead of driving at a more leisurely pace where we’re at ease right now. How many times do we have to learn such lessons?

 

These insights are inspired by the 13th century Japanese Zen Master Dogen Zenji’s Being-Time, not that I have more than a basic understanding of his teachings. We often try to withdraw from or escape a situation, emotion, or expected future. We certainly can “time travel;” it’s one of humans’ greatest gifts. It allows us to plan ahead, empathically feel what another person feels, imagine a work of art or what the consequences of an action might be. It makes critical thinking possible. But when we lose perspective, time-travel can become a great peril we inflict on ourselves.

 

We can never step outside our lives, outside the universe, outside time. The imagined mental travel is itself a moment of life. A thought is time. A cry is time. A book is time. The first flower after winter, the first snowdrop, is the time that is spring. We are being time.

 

We too easily forget everything around us, everything we’ve experienced, every being around us is our life now. This, right here, right now. There’s no exit from it, not until we die, if then.

 

The French philosopher, J. P. Sartre, who was a member of the French resistance during WWII, gives us an interesting angle on these insights. Sartre wrote a play during the WWII occupation of France by the Nazis. The play was called No Exit. From one perspective, the play can be seen as an exposition of the hell created by a hellish war and the way the Fascist occupiers treated their fellow human beings. The Nazis deceived themselves, lied about their aims and the reality of others, refusing responsibility, refusing to feel the enormity of pain and destruction they inflicted. The play was first performed in 1944, during the occupation with Nazis in the audience ignorant of this layer of meaning in the play.

 

The three main characters in No Exit share a room together in hell for eternity. There are no torturers other than themselves, no flames other than the fire of lies and deceptions they lit in themselves….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

The U. S. We Hope and Expect to Be Here Is Almost Gone: DT and DOGE are Killing U. S.

Maybe, hopefully, we’re all realizing that the country many of us loved; that, in a variety of ways, many fought for and dreamed of, is disappearing. DT, Musk, their GOP sycophants and billionaire cheering section are doing all they can to rip away our rights and incomes to feed their own power and greed. And people are already, and increasingly, dying from this.

 

Take elementary aged children people in Reserve, La, whose school is located next to the Denka Performance Elastomer Plant. The region is called Cancer Alley, and rates of deaths, especially for children, are one of the highest in the US. The Biden administration sued to finally curb the plant’s emissions. The DT DOJ stopped the suit. DT seems to care more about profits than common people; and in this case, the majority of residents are black.

 

DT’s EPA has announced it would cut 31 climate, air, water, and emissions regulations, putting the health and lives of millions at risk. According to Health Policy Watch, under attack is a 2009 EPA finding that climate change-causing pollutants, including methane and carbon dioxide, harm human health. Without this “endangerment” clause, the EPA will clear the way for widespread dismantling of greenhouse gas emission regulations.

 

“The potential increase in health-related expenses, environmental degradation, and the stifling of innovation will lead to higher costs for consumers and impede economic growth,” said Margo Oge, former EPA director of transportation and air quality. “These actions will not make America great – they will just make Americans sicker,” she said in a LinkedIn post.

 

The safety of the food we eat is being drastically threatened by DOGE’s cuts to the US Department of Agriculture. According to interviews taken by WIRED, thousands of workers, food inspectors, disease-sniffing dog handlers and trainers fired by Musk remain unemployed, leading to food rotting and pests proliferating. Without inspectors, invasive pests and diseases can slip through inspection cracks, and wipe out an entire agricultural commodity, which can cause national security concerns and price increases. Some people thought DT would lower their food and other costs of living—not so.

 

The same is true with the bird flu killing chickens and raising the cost of eggs (15.2% increase since December)⎼ among those fired (and later re-hired) were those from the Department of Agriculture who had been working to respond to the bird flu outbreak.

 

I’ve written elsewhere about the measles epidemic increasing and spreading due to DT’s Health secretary, RFK Jr.’s history of spreading anti-vaccination misinformation. RFK Jr.’s fixation on attacking vaccinations is also interfering with research into cancer and other diseases. A senior official at the National Cancer Institute told KFF Health News that DT’s acting NIH director sent an agency-wide email directing all grants, contracts, and “collaborations involving mRNA vaccines” be reported to Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy’s office and the White House. The mRNA technology, crucial to the development of successful COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic, has also exhibited promise in research on HIV/AIDS and cancer.

 

In a recent column, Heather Cox Richardson warned us that RFK, Jr. is now proposing to address the bird flu decimating US poultry and cattle farms by letting the disease free to run rampant.

 

She writes that veterinary scientists say that letting the virus sweep through flocks is “a really terrible idea,” as Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas, told Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project. Thanks.

The Deeply Personal Can Reveal the Universal Patterns that Empower Us to Act: Curiosity & the Transformative Power of Awe

I so enjoy writing and reading about subjects and experiences that are deeply personal, or that bring me greater insight, more than ones about hate and inhumanity. And I don’t think this is just me; it feels clearly true for most of us. When there’s so much in the news about DT and his fear and hate-filled executive orders and pointless cruelty, I need to also discover and support what feeds my sense of love and demand for justice and humanity. But it’s an awareness of the deeply personal that strengthens this sense of ourselves, this sense of connection with others and this world of ours. And it’s this awareness that fuels our ability to face what is most difficult to face.

 

One experience and emotion that particularly feeds and strengthens this deeply personal strength in ourselves is awe. Awe brings together a need to feel and preserve our sense of beauty, love, and wonder so we can face the destructive and horrible around us, to face realistically our fear of hardship and death.

 

Our brains are hardwired to worry, to perceive negatives, threats first. And according to research from the Greater Good Science Center, there are good reasons for that. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to be aware of any danger that might emerge from the world around them and prioritized this awareness. But to do that, they had to be ready, open to search beyond themselves, so they could discover ever more about themselves and the world. They had to let go of what they thought they knew to accurately perceive what they hadn’t known. In other words, they had to be curious.

 

And part of curiosity is that feeling we have before a discovery, that sense of not-knowing, worry, anxiety, and possibly fear of what might be there. Science has shown that our reward centers of the brain, and dopamine, our happiness and reward neurotransmitter, is released not only when we get the pleasure, the goal, but when we seek it. And when we feel wonder, awe at what we notice, the memories of and ability to be curious, is strengthened.

 

What is awe? Dacher Keltner, researcher and Professor of Psychology, writes about this in his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. One definition of awe that he gives us is “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding.” It can transport us back in time or to a sound or aroma, or an epiphany that de-stabilizes our past understanding; that takes us out of our sense of being separate from everyone and everything else, and reveals the vastness around us, reveals an awareness of the mysteries of life.

 

Everything, every experience, says Keltner, originates in how our minds process information. Our emotions are those feeling states accompanied by thoughts, expressions, physiological responses which enable and direct our actions. When we’re locked into emotions about self-preservation or being selfish, feeling totally separate, this undermines our ability to adapt to present circumstances. Awe does the opposite. The sense of vastness, of something beyond ourselves integrates our scattered beliefs, and all the unknowns we experience, so we can create a thesis about the world, a deepened understanding of whatever we need to face….

 

*Please go to The Good Men Project and read the whole article.

How Our Understanding of Freedom Can Liberate or Imprison Us: The Illusions & Delusions in Our Understanding of Freedom

“The mind is the forerunner of all things,” said the Buddha in the collection of sayings called the Dhammapada. We are led by our ideas, not just our emotions. Our mind, our way of thinking guides every element of our lives, what we feel, what we value, what we imagine is possible, and how we relate with others.

 

One word or idea that is so important to understand in today’s world is freedom. The word and what it represents is at the heart of our national anthem; “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” It reminds us of the sacrifices people made for freedom and for the survival of a nation, for resistance to an invader and the preservation of a freedom from external control over us.

 

But our understanding or misunderstanding of that word can cause us to lead a life that imprisons or liberates us; that hurts us and others or one that enriches us. And we see the hurtful way of understanding the word expressed daily by politicians and the news media in this country. Because the freedom from which the national anthem primarily expresses is what philosophers call negative freedom; this might be a necessary condition for us to have physical control over our lives but is not sufficient for us to feel liberated.

 

This was recently made so much clearer to me when I started reading a book by historian Timothy Snyder called On Freedom. The subject is one we have all probably thought about in different ways at different times in our lives.

 

Americans are told that freedom was given to us by the Founding Fathers. But freedom cannot be given, says Snyder. A country isn’t free; people are free. If we think of freedom as only freedom from outside sources of control or threat, then we can be convinced we need to sacrifice freedom for security. We can think the personal and political situation is always us separated from and against the world and we become habituated to always rating ourselves in opposition to others, instead of studying how we feel in ourselves. We reduce human beings, with inner lives not that different from our own, to things. Hitler called Jewish people “foreign bodies,” parasites, vermin infesting the German racial organism.

 

DT speaks in terms that are alarmingly like Hitler’s, dehumanizing immigrants of color, as well as Democrats and those who oppose him, calling them, us, “vermin.” Such thinking as DT illustrates makes us feel perpetually uneasy, insecure in ourselves and our world, isolated, suffering.

 

Such thinking leads us to feel that if we just remove obstacles, barriers, regulations, and, limit the reach of government we expand our freedom. That our freedom is opposed to that of others. That we know the truth, and that no other truth, no other facts, are real. And thus, opinions different from our own must be destroyed. Only leaders strong enough to assert their own truth with absolute conviction and power can save us. This misses the obvious; such an absolute leader negates our own power to lead⎼ or to have a meaningful vote. Negative freedom, says Snyder, is not a misunderstanding so much as a repressive idea.

 

He gives us examples from Ukraine and its struggle for life against Putin, an oppressive invader who wants to kill not only the Ukrainian nation but any of its people who would even consider opposing him. But Snyder reports that when Ukrainians remove Russian invaders from their villages, they don’t use the word freedom. They’re glad that “something terrible has been removed from their lives,” that the threat of imminent death or torture is ended. But the term they use for this is deoccupation. The occupier is gone.

 

They realize “freedom is not just an absence of evil, but a presence of good.”…

 

*To read the whole post, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

Don’t Believe the Make Believe: Listen Critically, Feel What We Feel, But Watch Carefully What He Does

One of the best articles I read recently about DT’s attempts to shred our lives and the Constitution was an opinion piece by Ezra Klein in the NYT titled “Don’t Believe Him.”  DT wants us to mistake him for someone in command, someone with a sense of inner power and utter strength. He wants us to “believe he is already king,” so we will let him govern as a king.  Don’t believe his hype. He’s trying to attack so quickly and chaotically to shock us, so we don’t see who he really is⎼ a man in a political position of tremendous power and responsibility, but who is vindictive, frightened, power hungry, and too weak to hear opposing views or to work step by step with others.

 

Just open a news feed. Today mine began with a Reuters article about DT negotiating with Russia about how to end the war with Ukraine, calling the Ukrainian leader, who has led one of the smartest, strongest, and bravest counterattacks against an immoral and violent invader, “a dictator without elections.” “Zelensky better move fast,” said DT, “or he is not going to have a country left.” DT, seemingly acting in the interests of dictator Putin, basically blamed the Ukrainians for the Russian assault on their own lives and freedom.

 

DT, with Musk’s help, has been moving chaotically and at incredible speed to devastate our federal workforce. His executive orders and mass firings will affect every aspect of our lives. People who are losing their jobs and income are those who hire, manage and fight devastating fires, rescue us from floods and assist our recovery from disasters. They send out Social Security checks and tax returns, approve surgeries, doctor visits, and medicines for the elderly, provide childcare and healthcare information to educate and protect children, and defend us all from foreign and domestic criminals and terrorists. Those fired were given little notice and no justification. Just imagine all the pain this is causing in thousands or millions of lives!

 

In the meantime, our personal information once securely held by the IRS and other government agencies has been or is intended to be made accessible to agents of Musk and DT. According to a suit by labor and tax payer organizations, the information is being exposed in an “arbitrary and capricious manner,” and without compliance to Privacy Act requirements and IRS policies and procedures, to agents without the training, and commitment to security and the law that the career employees had. Imagine what DT could do with this information to take revenge on those who oppose him, or to rip away power and money from the great majority of us and give it to the tiny minority of ultra-rich.

 

All this is supposedly to look for fraud and waste. But such an investigation takes time and sophisticated investigations. DT said these cuts would also bring down the deficit. But according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, his policies would substantially add to the deficit. His goal to cut taxes on the rich and corporations, as well as Social Security, etc. could add $5 trillion to the deficit, while undermining the future of SSI, for example, or undermine the future of our nation.

 

Another article provided the latest example of the spitefulness, smallness, and vindictiveness of DT’s administration. Three migrants from Venezuela, with no criminal records, brought a suit against the government’s attempt to imprison them at Guantanamo Bay. They won the suit one day; and on the next, they were immediately taken to a plane and deported to Venezuela.

 

DT continues to devastate workers throughout the government. For example, he capped NIH funding at 15%, which means firing the people who support the scientists engaged in medical research into diseases, medicines & other treatments, including cancer, viruses, etc. This could totally wipe out life-saving treatments we all need.

 

One of DT’s executive orders stopped 13 operating divisions of HHS from sharing external communications. On Nicolle Wallace, on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House,  informed us that the flu has led to a “serious condition called acute necrotizing encephalitis,” but DT ordered the CDC to hide information on this and other illnesses. This temporarily interfered with the media sharing information to inform parents about the effect of the flu on children’s brains. And then there’s the bird flu. Among those fired (and later re-hired) were those from the Department of Agriculture who had been working to respond to the bird flu outbreak.

 

In Texas, the Health Service alerted the public to a measles outbreak amongst unvaccinated children happening now in Gaines County, Texas. After all the cuts to Federal health officials and RFK, Jr.’s approval as Secretary of Health, would this information even be shared with the public?  ….

 

*To read the whole article and the light in the middle of the dark, please go to The Good Men Project.

What I Learned from My Dad that He Never Knew He Taught Me: We Never Know What an Experience Will Teach Us

When we’re in the middle of anything, we of course don’t know the ending. But even more, we never know what it might teach us. We just don’t know.

 

My Dad died when he was 96. For the last 4 years or so of his life, it was often painful or frustrating to be with him. Luckily, beautifully, he remained mentally sharp right until the end, but physically, it was a different story. It was painful to see his pain, and frustrating because he took so much time to do anything, from the smallest details to the largest.

 

And he wasn’t always good tempered about it, either, or good tempered with other people. He usually started very polite and upbeat. But if anything didn’t go as he thought it should, like in a restaurant with a server, he’d get annoyed or angry. Maybe he was as frustrated with his own physical slowness as I sometimes was with him, and he let it out instead of restraining it. Maybe he just didn’t have energy left for restraint.

 

He had difficulty accepting his new limitations, as many of us do as we get older. We retain so clearly this image or feeling of when we were younger. When we’re a teenager or in our 20’s, we might be more focused on the future then the past, or on images of what we dream of becoming. When we’re 50 it might be of being 20 or 30. When we’re 70, it’s of being 35 or 50, maybe. But what is it when we’re 96?

 

We carry this conflicting sense of ourselves in our mind and body, a conflict between image and reality, memories or thoughts of other times, and NOW. We think and often feel like we’re much younger than we are, until a medical issue makes itself felt; maybe we have a pain we never had when younger, or we can’t hear or see as well. Or when, like my dad, one minute we can do something seemingly like we’ve done it for twenty or more years. The next moment, it takes us so long to do even the most basic things.

 

And there were days my dad called us to say he went to the ER that morning; and I wondered if he had to do that, or was he just frightened by his aging body.

 

One time when my wife and I we were visiting him, we were awakened by a noise in the middle of the night. We got up and saw my dad getting dressed to go out. He said he was about to call an ambulance to take him to the emergency room. We asked him what was wrong and if he was in pain. I think he was feeling short of breath, but I don’t recall his exact symptoms. He said don’t worry; he’d just go to the ER on his own, and we should go back to bed.

 

I thought the ambulance unnecessary and said we would drive him; we wanted to be with him. We argued about it for a few minutes. And then he started to sound more normal. The more he talked with us, the more his symptoms seemed to subside. He paused for a moment, apparently thinking it all over. And said he felt better. We should all go back to bed.

 

And now, for me, in my later 70s, these images of my father come back to me, almost like a message. When I have back pains that make walking difficult, I see my father walking slowly with a cane or walker. I understand better how he might have felt back then. Or I have a sharp pain in my chest and have trouble breathing and can’t tell if I should go to the ER, and I remember my dad. I wonder if what I felt was being exaggerated by fear and the unknown⎼ or was I having a heart attack?

 

And I remember how our talking with him, our show of love, seemed to soothe his pain….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

There’s (Almost) Nothing Normal About These Times: Stop the Pretense in the Press; Work to Stop the Destruction and Create Something Positive

Listening to news media can be a confusing act nowadays. There’s the political chaos caused deliberately by DT and company to shock us. Then there’s the reporting itself; for example, if a newscaster shows a clip of a speech by DT that’s totally filled with lies and threats to our lives⎼ and then, later the reporter shares that DT had no evidence for what he had said, the damage has already been done. People have already heard the lies spoken as truth. Or the reporter might describe an attempt to destroy the rule of law or invade an ally and then talk about a sporting event.

 

Or over the last few weeks, many commentators have shown a limited perspective on DT’s “shock and awe” campaign. Even on MSNBC, which often provides a needed perspective on events, provided examples of normalizing him. But there’s nothing normal about these last few weeks (or years). Ari Melber, who I normally like to listen to, called DT ’s cabinet picks “disruptors.” Disruptor, really? Destroyer, maybe? Violator? Disruptors is the same term used in a positive manner by DT insider Jason Miller, or GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson to describe nominees like Musk, RFK, Jr., or Vought.

 

Scott Dworkin pointed out the White House press office initiated a new strategy to help control news coverage and perspective. They’ve begun to feature the asking of pre-scripted questions to DT’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt by “new” MAGA media stars, like John Ashbrook or others from Breitbart, et al, in the White House briefings. At the same time, they’ve kicked the NY Times, NPR, and NBC News from their workspaces and replaced them with MAGA propaganda outlets like One America, Breitbart, the NY Post, etc. Yet, NBC ridiculously responded they were “disappointed.” And the NY Times called it a “concerning development.”

 

Jonathan Capeheart, on MSNBC, appropriately described several DT nominees, like Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard as grossly unqualified. Yet, that’s another understatement. What about their character and pledge of allegiance to DT? And add RFK, Jr, to run the Health Department and Pete Hegseth with the defense department⎼ and nearly the whole cabinet?

 

These nominees are not merely disruptors, unless you mean disrupting the rule of law, the economy, the healthcare for millions, the constitution, the rights of non-billionaire American citizens and certainly immigrants. And if a traitor is someone who deliberately acts to undermine or destroy our constitution and nation or make us more vulnerable to attack by foreign governments, are they traitors?

 

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has had a frightening influence on the new administration so far. During the campaign, Musk said, if given a chance to work for a President DT, he would crash the economy. Nothing about working for the greater good of all. Those who mistakenly link in their minds a DT economy with being “better off” needs to rethink very soon their opinion, memory, and vote.

 

Musk said he plans to use his newly granted power to bring drastic shocks, “hardship” for many Americans to bring long-term prosperity. But to whom? Only his fellow billionaires? He says if he doesn’t do this, the nation will go bankrupt. MSNBC’s Joy Reid responded: There’s no evidence of a looming bankruptcy. And if there was, Musk or DT would be the last people to trust to save it. DT’s tax cuts for the rich, for example, “caused the national deficit to soar.” And his proposed new tax cuts will do the same….

 

*To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project.

Writing to Help Us When the World Hurts: To Write Well, Write Truthfully

How do we write well? Probably thousands have written about this. Certainly, writing is about language. It is about metaphor, rhythm, imagination. Experience. It can seem it’s about which words to use, or how to find a unique story or approach. But from my point of view, it really is about understanding the mind and body that writes. No mind, no words. It’s about being truthful and real, or discovering what’s truthful and real for us.

If we fake it, our readers will know it. We will know it. The plot or argument won’t hold together. When it’s truthful to us, it will engage others.

And it will feel “right” inside us. We don’t merely know a truth intellectually—we feel it. A word of beauty is a path for feeling to follow, or it reveals the path feeling took to get to meaning. Without feeling, words are empty code. Dead. When a sentence feels off or incomplete or it’s struggling for breath, it’s wrong, no matter how attractive it looks. We shouldn’t get distracted by good looks. It’s the heart that counts.

And in this frightful time, when fear is being manipulated to drive a wedge between us and others, and with ourselves, our world. Truth is not just buried but twisted by lies. Uncovering what the truth is, and being able to face what we feel, is now an act of defiance and resistance to DT’s march to dictatorship. Looking at ourselves might at times feel too fearsome to attempt, but never has it been more necessary. Our future depends on us finding the right moments to look within and motivate ourselves to join with others to act for the greater good of all.

Feelings arise before words and memories do. They arise with the first hint of awareness. We’ve all probably experienced not knowing what we want to say or write until we say it, or put something down on paper, or in our computer. The act of writing, putting something in front of our eyes, and listening to the words in our mind as we write or say them, can open the conscious mind to the depths normally unconscious. It’s creating and thinking. It’s revelation. What I’m saying is obviously not new. Writing can be an art and an ancient form of therapy.

So, the first step in writing and creating is awakening an awareness of feeling. We all have our own times or ways to feel some clarity, feel a pathway to creativity. Mine involves meditating, exercising and reading, or writing first thing in the morning when my mind is clear. Meditation clears my mind and increases awareness and focus. Exercise energizes me and clears away blocks and obsessions. Walking in natural settings is amazing. And reading nonfiction that interests me can provide a stimulus, imagery, insights, and intellectual challenges. Sometimes, what sparks our creativity is feeling an inner response to what someone else says or has done.

And then, letting go. Free associating. No editing. Just clearly watching what arises and listening to the winds in ourselves and out in the surrounding world and honestly recording whatever we see or hear.

The philosopher, psychologist, and writer Dr. Jean Huston said in a workshop I attended that immersing ourselves in poetry makes beauty more readily available to us. Beauty will then percolate through the unconscious and emerge in one’s speech and writing. The same with reading stories, psychology, philosophy, history and such. Reading reveals doors which meditation unlocks….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

**An earlier form of this article was published by the Swenson Book Development website, and by my website:  https://irarabois.com/write-well-write-truthfully/