This Is It! This is the Day, the Week of Our Nightmares and Dreams. Our Opportunity

This is it! The day we’ve been thinking about and hoping for, dreaming about and dreading. This is also our chance, our opportunity for a possibly grand day. A day that could begin a gradual climb out of malignant chaos to a more democratic, just, stable government and future. A day—or days we will remember; because it’s possible it might take a few days or dreadfully, take weeks to get the results, accurately. But we just don’t know what will happen. We must be ready.

 

We’ve been suffering from a leader who is more a threat to us than someone who cares for us. Who talks crazy talk; who operates by creating chaos, creating an image that he’d do anything to get what he desperately lusted for. This is all we can be sure of; we know his history of racism and misogyny, his cruelty, spite, and envy. We also know he can spontaneously lash out, especially at reporters, but dreads confrontation unless he has total control. How stable can anyone be who needs to lead by making those he leads distrustful and afraid of him? Whose character is one that usually lives in nightmares? And in his case, maybe “crazy like a fox” is still crazy.

 

Images of Jan. 6, 2020 explode in my mind. Images of violence against Congress people, threats against poll workers and vote counters and state Attorneys General. Will DT interfere in the 2026 elections, order the DOJ to seize ballot boxes? Or force state legislatures to fake results? He’s done such things before. What will happen? Our televisions and other news outlets will be getting a workout. What a week awaits us.

 

If you need reasons to vote, or information on who to vote for, or against, please ask yourself: Who started a war on a whim, or maybe to distract from the Epstein Files, that he’s losing, and is costing each and every one of us more than we even know? The war is raising the costs of living, depleting resources, threatening the loss of positive standing and allies in the world. Who is it that talks of “America First,” but is creating “America Alone”—Except possibly for Putin and other autocrats.

 

Who, as reported by The Hill, had his Secretary of War/Defense, Pete Hegseth, recently fire another key general, Army Lt. General Brett Sylvia, for meeting with journalists in the Pentagon. This despite the fact we’re in a war that’s costing us greatly. The firing took place not only just before the midterms, but concurrently with the U. S. Central Command drawing up plans for more attacks on Iran. Hegseth has pushed out more than two dozen military officers. Why? And why now?

 

He’s trying to take away our constitutional right to speak freely and won’t tolerate any opposition. His attempts to seize dictatorial power run the full spectrum of our lives; for instance, there are his media bans and his use of the FCC to pressure and threaten broadcast networks and other media companies to bury any content that hints at opposition. Have the generals also been voicing opposition to or spreading the truth about how badly the war in Iran is going?

 

In the same vein, on 10/26 we learned DT’s DOJ had for the third time filed charges against James Comey. The case goes back to 2016 and was previously investigated two times and dismissed by the courts. Several commentators, like Chris Bowers, have written about how all 3 cases are, at best, flimsy, and clear examples of vindictive prosecution. DT is continually undermining the rule of law and has turned the former Justice Department into a Revenge Department.

 

Also recently, he once again acted to undermine our constitutional right to vote and has been interfering in another election. One example: according to an investigation reported by MSNOW, his DOJ claimed over 20,000 cases of election fraud in California. But from September to mid-October his DOJ brought charges against only 28 of them, which constitutes .0001% of California voters. 5 were dismissed almost immediately. The charge against the others mirrors a similar case in Nevada, when DT claimed there were 16,000 cases of election fraud. Then the DOJ published a list of only 185 cases; and when the state investigated, it found zero had voted illegally. The intent here is intimidation, particularly of people of color. Even if all the charges get dropped, they create fear in these communities.

 

He’s continuously been trying to force states to turn over voter records and information to the DOJ. After the courts continued to block and deem these orders illegal, on October 28, he requested subpoenas, more than 100 of them, demanding the records. Voting is in the hands of states, not the President, but he doesn’t seem to care what the constitution says.

 

Ask yourself: who is undermining the healthcare system and health insurance? Who is undermining the economy with tariffs that just raise our cost of living, undermine businesses, and fail to decrease the national debt? And according to the Congressional Budget Office, his one legislative victory, the Big Ugly/Beautiful Bill, is costing the poorest Americans on average $1200 while boosting the income of the richest by $13,600….

 

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

We Need Joy Even When Inundated with Fear and Sorrow, Or Maybe Especially Then: Acting Not for the Quantity of Acclamations but for the Quality of Our Lives

I need to talk about joy. I need to feel it; so many of us need to feel it.

 

Yet it feels a little weird to talk about joy when such a consequential election is only 9 days away. It’s an election that feels, no, that we know can mean the difference between creating a positive future or losing our right to a positive future; to losing our health care, seeing the destruction of our natural environment, and the loss of the ability for too many of us to achieve a livable income. And when we’re daily slapped in the face with a level of corruption and cruelty from our government that was in all probability never witnessed before in this country.

 

I’ve thought and written about this before. We need joy even when inundated with fear and sorrow, or maybe especially when so inundated. The emotion has been so twisted and suppressed by DT’s constant and chaotic assaults on almost every aspect of our lives. He not only started a capricious and malignant war against Iran—he started a war within our nation and in ourselves. A wall of hate isolates too many from all others, while a cloud of chaos obscures and disconnects us from our own needs and from our communion with others and our world.

 

And the bad rep that contentment and happiness have traditionally had in many sections of our society just reinforces this. Many of us grew up thinking how can we be content, or happy unless we’ve found success and security? But in DT’s economy, the possibility of security is getting ever more difficult to achieve. And in the face of DT, if we get past the grief for our world and depression in ourselves, shouldn’t anger, outrage, and a commitment to change prevail?

 

So many of us, even the critics in my own mind, seem to doubt we deserve joy. We’ve been educated in discontent with ourselves. Yes, anger and outrage have their place; but so does joy.

 

Historian and activist Tmothy Snyder has written with great clarity about the authoritarian’s playbook and how DT is intent on to filling the air with despair, anxiety, helplessness, defeatism– a sense of being crushed and alone without the power to resist.

 

Snyder recommends we need to acknowledge the thoughts and feelings DT ignites, without letting them control us. And we need to recognize we’re not alone. In fact, knowing how many people share our feelings and are trying to do something to resist DT’s destructiveness is already a step out of isolation and toward community, and action. To act shows us we can act.

 

He then said something else that felt so real to me. “You have to be in the moment to get through the moment.”

 

Fear and depression often thrive when we ruminate in our thoughts about life or about fearful things that might happen instead of being present in what is happening. We might think we can put off joy until the election is over, and if we win. But this can prove counterproductive.

 

Two weeks ago, I wrote about how emotions are created. Our body, mind, and perception systems follow a natural process to provide direction on how to respond to a situation. First, we come awake. We get a message to “pay attention now.” This is followed by appraisals of the stimulus, whether it’s good or bad, wonderful or painful, a problem or a threat. Bodily sensations and feelings are created with an almost unconscious impulse to go either toward, away, or ignore the situation.

 

Then our mind gets even more involved, bringing in memories and judgments. Likes and dislikes are created, or a story to tell ourselves to make sense of what we perceive. And then how we respond, what actions we choose to take depends on how we’ve interpreted the situation we face.

 

Joy opens us to go toward a situation, a problem, a person, not withdraw. One teaching about meditation that has been helpful to me is to notice how the act of meditation itself can be joyful. When we acknowledge and value such feelings, we want to do it again. With political actions. there can be great fear there, but also excitement, a sense of freedom, camaraderie, joy. These latter feelings reinforce our commitment to do it again.

 

But if we do it just to capture joy, we chase it away. If we do it just for headlines, we lose it. So often in the rest of our lives, we do things transactionally. We act for what we can get. We focus on possessions, money; we focus on who we defeat, not who we are.

 

To feel joy is to do something for the quality of our lives, not for the quantity of acclamations. When we do something just to do it, or because it’s the right thing to do, we feel joy. We don’t focus entirely on an idea of what should happen, although such ideas and analyses can guide us. Joy arises in being present in a moment. This is why a deep physical exertion can be so joyful, or seeing a child smile at us, or a sunrise. Or hearing a beautiful piece of music or an unexpected bird call or having a deep revelation. Or when someone we don’t know acts to help us. All these can lead us to forget everything except being right where we are, at home in ourselves and the world.

 

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

 

Being Aware of the Models of Masculinity and Humanity, We Favor, and the Pain They Can Cause: Who Do We Want to Lead This Nation and Model to the World What It Means To Be A Human Being?

The world today is certainly screwy and frightening. I keep getting shocked, so many people keep getting shocked, and asking ourselves, “what is going on here beyond the obvious?” What is going on in me? What more can I do to make things better?  It would be easy to just dull the shock of this administration’s politics of hate, cruelty, and corruption and lose ourselves in games, streaming shows, or whatever. But many of us honestly can’t do that. And the models of humanity provided by the men leading the nation today, of what it is to be a male human being, are malignant, frightening, painful to listen to. And insulting.

 

On 9/30 Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave a State of the Force speech at the Pentagon. If you didn’t hear it, or didn’t hear quotes from it, he spoke about how he’s transforming the military. “We are no longer the woke department, or the weak department. Simple translation of that, no fanny—no fatties, no trannies, no beardoes, no weirdoes, no wimps, no radicals, just warriors… The war Department is color-blind, gender-neutral, and merit-based. The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in with testosterone testing on top.” Is he looking in the mirror when he speaks about “ideological clowns”?

 

As Nicolle Wallace pointed out on MSNBC Deadline White House, he announced a 20% cut in senior military officers, including generals and admirals, when we’re in a war that drags on and on. And which he, and his boss, Mr. DT, started with no clear, justifiable reason or plan, and have no idea how to end. He’s cutting the very people who might have the true expertise to get us out of the crisis, and it seems advised them never to get into it.

 

What also stood out from the speech was not just the disturbing content; it was the beauty pageant that he demanded for his audience. According to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, not the home of radicals of the progressive sort, the troops nominated to attend the speech had to meet certain “physical standards” including “waist-to-height ratios, [and] be impeccably groomed…” —so, as Wallace said, the ones who didn’t measure up, “literally, the less attractive or fit ones stay on the battlefield” to fight the war without end while, according to Hegseth’s standards, the more fit perform for the media?

 

And earlier, on September 18th, near the time that Pete Hegseth was calling for the shaping of a MAGA, male beauty pageant of a military, a lawsuit was filed in Ithaca, NY, detailing allegations from 2024 of a gang rape of a woman by fraternity brothers. As reported by the Cornell Sun, a woman described being raped by seven men after being coerced into consuming drugs at a Chi Phi frat house on the Cornell University campus. She is suing the University, several Chi Phi fraternity organizations, sorority organizations, the men who allegedly raped her, etc. The defendants deny the allegations.

 

The plaintiff reported the rape to Cornell Police almost 3 weeks after it occurred. She was later deeply disappointed in the initial lack of support by the student community. The local district attorney declined to file charges, saying there wasn’t sufficient evidence to do so. Cornell’s Office of Civil Rights and Student Conduct and Community Standards held a title IX investigation. They suspended the Chi Phi fraternity chapter and expelled two students, suspended others. That’s it.

 

What do we do with these events? Especially viewed through the lens of the Epstein files and a president continuously talking in demeaning, dismissive, even predatory ways about women? A president talking, in the Hollywood tapes, about “grab[bing] them by the pussie.” A secretary of the Defense Department who was investigated for sexual assault in California.

 

There’s been a great outcry against Hegseth and Cornell and the Ithaca District Attorney.  But will the outcries result in any real and substantive action? Will the demonstrations and outcry about the Rape at Cornell and lack of an appropriate, just, and compassionate response lead to change? Change not just at Cornell, but nationally, and at the ballot booths? We need changes in how institutions treat rape, change in national leadership, and changes in models of and understanding of how we should be with each other.

 

The New York Times published an article detailing how Jane Doe went from a shamed victim to a powerful, courageous actor. What will we do? What will we learn from these events?

 

Sometimes, a negative model can be helpful, if it’s short term….

 

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

How to Better Face What Needs to Be Faced: When We Feel More at Home in Ourselves, We’re Better Able to Act in Ways That Help Heal Our Nation

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to face challenges more freely, happily? Or at least feel less fear?

 

What can we do when we know we must face something difficult? Or we wish some event, situation, or person wasn’t beating on the doors of our mind? Or when we wish we had a magic wand to make whatever frightens or disturbs us disappear, but we can’t find any such magic for sale in any local store or the internet? Or when a memory or nightmare from a trauma is so hurtful or disturbing, we have no way to even begin facing it?

 

Our body, mind, and perception systems follow a natural process to provide direction on how to respond to a situation. When we experience a stimulus, an “orienting response” arises, and we come awake. We get a message to “pay attention now.” This is followed by appraisals of the stimulus, whether it’s bad or good, wonderful or painful, a threat or a problem. Bodily sensations and feelings are created with an almost unconscious impulse to go either toward, away, or ignore the situation.

 

Then our mind gets even more involved, bringing in memories and judgments. Likes and dislikes and mental labels are created for the situation, or a story to tell ourselves to make sense of what we perceive. And then how we respond, what actions we choose to take depend on how we’ve interpreted the situation we face.

 

We always have such choices about how we interpret a situation and respond. But the behavior modeled by the people we see around us and how we’ve faced such situations in the past greatly reverberates in the present, in the form of the emotional responses this process creates. We can feel fear if we normally turn away, or anger at the mere fact of having to make such a choice. We can feel excitement and run towards it, maybe because we like adrenalin surges, or adrenalin helps us feel alive or helps mitigate the fear. Or maybe we feel engaged and we welcome a challenge. Or maybe the fright tries to wrap the situation in layers of forgetfulness.

 

In Buddhism, there’s a teaching on what’s called the 84th problem: we all face difficulties, problems. Let’s say there are 83 of them. The 84th is thinking we shouldn’t have problems. Steve Hagen, a Zen Priest, in his book Buddhism Plain and Simple: The Practice of Being Awake, Right Now, Every Day explains this exceedingly well. We might want reality to be different from what it is. There’s so much hurt in the world right now. Too many of us face so much pain and confusion every day.  But just telling ourselves it should be different doesn’t make it happen. Instead, it can make the sense of something lacking or missing in our lives hurt more and be more difficult to face.

 

A negativity bias can arise from this emotional construction process. This is an inclination or natural push to see the negative first and foremost. This bias, if understood, can help us avoid or lessen any threat to us. But it can also lead us to interpret a situation that could be merely a challenge as a danger.

 

When we push away or retreat from a situation, we might also push away an understanding of ourselves that could assist us in perceiving how to best face it. In the same way, we might think of ourselves as something separate from a situation we live, separate from others and our world. We might wish we were different from who we are. We might get hooked on wanting what we thought we lacked or thought others had; or we might wish we didn’t have what we had. We then feel separate from ourselves, from our body and mind. Our home becomes some distant place we can’t easily get to. It’s difficult to feel at home in our skin if our very skin feels wrong….

 

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

 

Why Do We So Easily Put Ourselves Down? When We Feel Tenderness for Ourselves and Others It Gives Us The Ability to be Fully Present in Our Lives

Too often, I judge myself negatively or put myself down. So many of us seem to feel this nowadays. I read a statistic from The Cybersmile Foundation saying that 9 out of 10 young people view themselves negatively. I’m not of the GenZ or Cyber generations, yet I still can do this. Why is that? Usually, I become aware of it when it happens and know to not let myself get kidnapped by such thoughts and hopefully let it go. But why does it arise so easily?

 

I’ve also been very aware lately how we get something, or enjoy something, live something, like a vacation, a compliment, an achievement, a fright, or a kiss, and then it’s gone. Something we’ve looked forward to is there and then it’s passed, merely a memory. We can try to hang on to or prolong a moment, but a moment is too quick to grasp. I imagine this is something we all share.

 

And I think these two experiences are related, although I didn’t realize it at first.

 

When I was a child, I had the unusual thought that I might be the Messiah– or maybe that I should be. Not a Divine figure, as in the New Testament; not an Ideal King from the lineage of King David who would establish justice and universal peace on earth, as in the Old Testament. But someone anointed to stand up for a just and good God, or for what is just and good; or someone ready to suffer to bring about a better world. This was partly from parental expectations, but even more from hearing about the holocaust. I couldn’t understand how a purportedly good, just, all knowing and powerful God could allow such a thing. To my young mind, He clearly needed a champion.

 

When in my late twenties or thirties, I remembered I had had this notion and wrote a story about it called The Boy Who Thought He Was the Messiah. The writing helped me see and understand a powerful and impossible expectation lingering in my psyche.

 

Of course, when I was young, I had a very childish notion of God. I thought of Him, Them, or It in a very spatial way. He was The Man or the Being Upstairs looking down on us all. And even though I had never met Him, at least not face to face, or not clearly, I was very curious. And I wondered what it could be like to be so different from everyone and everything else, so above us all, and to know so much. I felt that He must be so lonely.

 

I had also watched all these movies and read heroic novels, and I wanted to be heroic, or to live at least one moment, one moment where I was a hero, for God or justice. I wanted a moment of perfect clarity about who I was. Wouldn’t that be something? To live a moment that was so full, so real and profound? It took years to realize that was quite an expectation to live up to. I was set up early for disappointment and for judging myself negatively.

 

We expect ourselves to be something that’s definitive, delineated from others; that stands out in some way. And that persists. Something beyond not only our body, but beyond our sensations, emotions, memories, maybe beyond our mind. A soul, maybe. Yet, all these change; they can’t be the “who” that we look for. Clearly the sensations we feel, the emotions, the thoughts and other content streaming through our mind is always changing. They’re there, right there, and then gone. We can’t find something other than consciousness, maybe, that has or that experiences all of these. But the nature of consciousness is perpetual change. Looking for a self beyond the moment-by-moment reality can hide what’s true.

 

Our culture pushes this distorted expectation, emphasizing the material, what we accumulate, what separates us from others over what unites us. And with social media, and the constant comparisons with others, how they look, what they’ve done, how many friends they have, this just makes it difficult to notice and value what’s true in ourselves.

 

So, by expecting that we ourselves are a thing that can be defined and delineated, that persists, we expect something impossible. It creates an unreal expectation of who we should be. And this leads us to feel, in the words of Buddhist philosopher David Loy, lacking in some way. Wrong. Unattractive. Unlovable. No one can always be good, knowing, or courageous.

 

So, what do we do?…

 

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

Outrage Directed by Compassion Can Save Us: How Do We Recognize and Call Out the Hate and Blindness that Others Carry Without Letting It Turn Us to Blindly Hate?

Sometimes lately, I worry I’m losing empathy, losing an ability to see myself in others. And this scares me. It can lead me to feel I’m losing the heart of who I am.

 

I was listening to a program on NPR hosted by Tonya Mosley. She was interviewing Jia Tolentino, a staff writer for the New Yorker, on an article she wrote called Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare. The program went into totally unanticipated topics that I previously thought had little to do with plastic surgery.

 

Or maybe I should say plastic surgery has had unanticipated consequences. The technology has become so precise as to be practically undetectable. So, what’s the problem? With such advances, it’s easy to feel even more pressure to work to maximize our appearance and make it conform to what we think other people consider beautiful. And when every face can be “optimized,” it becomes less a window into character and emotion, and more another field of artificiality. It becomes something to buy, not to live our way into. No longer will we see smile and tension lines, or other signs of character and the realities of a lived experience. A dimension of the face as a vehicle of communication will be lost. Instead, another vehicle to hide ourselves from others and from ourselves will be born.

 

What Tolentino found is that the images people are using to model their appearance on are AI generated. And these images are predominantly of people who are white, young, and based on one idea of what’s beautiful. They are also very much alike one another. The face is being separated from the person, the person from their humanity or soul.

 

The program then went on to talk about “Looks Maxxers,” a purported self-improvement or men’s rights movement I never heard of before and had trouble understanding. It largely began around 2010, during the “Me-too” movement and the Presidency of Barack Obama. It was a reaction against a perceived rise in prominence of feminism and maybe of African Americans, and diminution of strong white men. A large segment of this group blames women for their problems building romantic relationships. This perception tipped these young men into a reactive, hateful belief that women are less than men, more superficial, who do not deserve equal rights.

 

According to Tolentino, it’s also an attempt to discover and classify the bodily characteristics of successful men to imitate those characteristics. In the “manosphere,” an influencer named Braden Peters became famous for striking his jaw with a hammer, as well as using softer methods like work outs, peptides, supplements, etc. to make his body and face more rugged, more “masculine,” and in his eyes more attractive.

 

But all these efforts to be attractive are not for sex or even happiness. These men are purportedly heterosexual but show little or no desire to get closer to women. Their purpose is to attract women to display power and dominance over them, and to be seen by a virtual, disembodied audience. She called this “eroticized attention;” it’s also attention that could be used to make money from internet forums.

 

Tolentino’s article and my emotional response to it alerted me to how much I feel the human world is severely straining my ability to understand it and is close to spinning out of control. We might be facing an array of threats way beyond what was faced by any other generation I can think of. The philosopher Noam Chomsky warned that humanity is approaching [or is now in] the most dangerous and critical moment in history. We have a climate emergency, an economy that doesn’t serve most of the people, as well as too many unjustifiable, unbelievably destructive wars. We even have a fairly new technology, AI, that some reputable experts warn has at least a 10% chance of causing the extinction of all humans in the next decade.

 

And we have a president specializing in undermining every aspect of our lives as part of a human community. I hope I’m not pushing an analogy too far, but I think this administration is causing many of us to feel what’s been called moral injury. I first heard the term used in describing, along with PTSD, part of what many soldiers experience from serving in a war. According to the Moral Injury Project at Syracuse, University, the injury entails damage to one’s conscience from perpetuating, witnessing, or failing to prevent acts that violate one’s conscience. Many feel harmed by a betrayal of core values, of justice, fairness, and loyalty, by our leaders, by other members of our community, or by our own actions or inaction. We know that many of our leaders have failed not only to protect us but even care about us. We feel our very humanity is being threatened.

 

Even more than ever, and as much as we individually can, we can ask ourselves several questions. Maybe the most important is how can we hold compassion in the face of hate? Instead of sacrificing our empathy, as the “Looks Maxxers” seem to be doing, how do we instead protect and act in accord with it?

 

Does every generation of people feel an inability to understand or feel empathy for those born in different decades? It certainly seems true here, in the US. When I was a teenager, I felt my parent’s generation didn’t understand me. They couldn’t understand the reality of life for my cohorts and myself and kept wanting me to conform to their images of success and reality, not mine. Is my trouble feeling empathy for or understanding the “Looks Maxxers” anything like what my parents experienced with me?

 

And for those of us older people, what might it be like to be part of a generation that grew up with social media and the increasing climate and other previously mentioned threats dominating their world?…

 

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

Changing the Climate in this Country and World: Stopping the Malignant Madness

It’s raining this morning, but it doesn’t feel like a “normal” rain. The sky is so dark and ominous, and the rain hits the roof and windows like stones, like pellets. It grabs my attention so deeply it doesn’t feel like any other rain. It can’t be ignored. It falls like fear, like power. Like life itself.

 

The thunder and lightning shake my home. They shake the earth and seem to split open the sky. I hope it won’t split open my roof.

 

And the rain and thunder are not over there someplace; they’re not at any distance. They’re right here, speaking in words the size of the universe.

 

It’s raining as I think of Nepal. The flood that we now know killed over 1,114 people, that sent over 4,000 missing; and the pets, animals, all killed, homes, gardens destroyed, washed away, except for memories, except for the grief of loved ones. That flood was right out of my nightmares. Did you see the videos of it? When I was younger, I used to have nightmares of floods and of being totally overwhelmed. Of forces way beyond me.

 

And then there’s the flood in the Grand Canyon that killed 2, 1 still missing. 80 needing evacuation. Nothing like Nepal but so much closer to home. Floods all over the world this year. And to think we had a part in it? That climate change, human caused climate change played a big part in it? And that our present government and leader are actively pursuing policies that make the situation worse, that make such floods more likely and intense, deadly? That hurts.

 

And the rain and thunder send images of other sorts of rain and thunder to my mind. Like the thunder and lightning of the wars in Iran, Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, Israel, etc., etc. According to the Peace Research Institute Oslo, over the last ten years interstate conflicts have increased sharply. They show the world right now is facing more violent conflicts than any time since World War II. And although no one nation or leader is responsible, but rather a whole shift in international relations, our president is greatly contributing to the violence and undermining efforts to reduce it.

 

He’s ended what some have called the “Pax Americana,” undermined our diplomatic and “soft power,” which used to be one of our primary ways to exercise influence in the world. He’s done this by drastically cutting our diplomatic corps, our foreign aid, Voice of America, etc.

 

He’s done this by his clueless negotiation strategies. His “art of the deal,” or his “calculated unpredictability,” his public appearance as a “Mad King” crazy or greedy enough to do anything, might have worked at some point in his personal business operations to get what he wanted. But it’s not working now with international relations. As Andrew Roth wrote for the Guardian, his vague and contradictory comments, claims, and actions have failed to bring peace. His foreign policy has “fully passed through the looking glass.” He’s risked undermining the world economy and the lives of millions on a whim.

 

And he’s totally clueless about how to end what he’s begun. According to Congressman Adam Smith, his rhetoric has strengthened the hardliners in Iran and is designed to drive our allies away. What he’s succeeded in doing is increasingly isolating us and undermining our credibility in the world.

 

According to columnist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, “[DT]’s mind has gone.” Maybe his “Mad King Strategy” is not a strategy at all but a description of the reality of his mind….

 

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

Finding Our Power in How We See, Hear, and Speak: Hearing Both the Speech of Other People as Well as Trees as the Way the World Speaks in Us

I was recently walking down my rural road. It was a quiet afternoon, mostly sunny and in the 80s. About a half mile from home, on the edge of a forest, the road turned sharply. When I reached the turn, it was suddenly windy. The tree leaves were shaking. The energy was the same as what precedes a rainstorm. But there were no clouds. And as soon as I walked 5 or 10 feet past this group of trees, the leaves were quiet.

 

I realized I had noticed the wind that inhabits this space many times before. And this was, as I said, especially true minutes or maybe hours before a rainstorm, when the leaves and trees in this curve in the road vibrated. It served as a semaphore or audiphore, a warning system, to turn back before the rains came. Why did the wind speak like this? Did it have to do with a change in air pressure caused by the road turning and butting against the forest? Or something else? It felt like the spot had a life of its own and could speak on its own. But somehow, before now, I hadn’t grasped anything of what was being said.

 

Life can give us so much, but we miss a great deal of it. In a way, our senses exist both to notice and ignore, to sense as well as filter what we perceive. The research psychologist and professor Dr. Robert Ornstein talks about the senses as “data-reduction systems.” He points out if we took in everything, if we became conscious of everything going on around us at any point in time, we’d be overwhelmed. It would be too much stimulation.

 

Ornstein quotes the 19th century philosopher and physician, often called the “father of American psychology,” William James as saying the mind acts like a sculptor. Out of the raw and swarming chaos around us we, through cumulative choices and with the help of our ancestors, our culture, and linguistic systems, we select this and reject that. We create the world we live in and feel. We’re also taught or conditioned to accept this and deny that. What we consciously perceive greatly depends on what we’re taught to see, what we expect and pay attention to, and what we value. Other minds create other worlds.

 

We also depend, of course, on what nature gives us. For example, our eyes can perceive only a tiny fraction of available light. The possibly visible light in the electromagnetic spectrum is so wide, ranging in wavelength from “less than one billionth of a meter to more than a thousand meters,” says Ornstein. But the human eye can detect only a tiny part of that, only 400-700 billionths of a meter.

 

For humans, ultraviolet light is barely perceptible. Ed Yong, in his wonderful book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, says ultraviolet is “an invisible hue just on the edge of our vision—a perceptual void that our imaginations are keen to fill.” But to bees, some fish as well as reindeer, dogs, cats, etc. UV signals are common.

 

So, thinking of our eyes as only windows to the world is a limited metaphor. We’re not merely windows; we’re not, as some would say, merely mechanical processes. And we’re not separate from the world we sculpt. How we think about reality strongly influences our ability to act in it. How we think about our ability to make choices influences how well and what we choose. This is so crucial to recognize. If we think we have no role, we create a world in which we’re powerless. Getting us to think we’re powerless in shaping what we see is a belief propagated by autocrats to enable them to control us….

 

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

Creating a Model of How to Live in Friendship with Life Itself: Celebrating An Educator and Education that Freed and Sang to Us

In this time where teachers are being overburdened and education itself is under attack, where propaganda and lies are being elevated and facts, science, and diverse examples of literature are being suppressed, it’s more important than ever to speak of schools where something very different occurs. Where not only critical thinking but compassion and the wisdom and freedom of young people is fostered.

 

Yesterday, I attended the celebration of life of Dr. Dave Lehman, who died recently. He, with his wife, Judy Lehman founded the Lehman Alternative Community School (LACS), a public secondary school where I was lucky enough to teach for 27 years. Dr. Dave was the principal from 1974-2004. I attended the event as a grieving colleague not as a reporter or chronicler. I didn’t get permission from all the wonderful organizers and speakers, so I can’t mention their names or quote exactly what they said. All I can attempt is to somehow discover and reveal, to you and myself, my feelings about Dr. Dave and the school.

 

The speakers evoked in me so many memories. I was reminded how Dr. Dave sang to us, or more characteristically, led us in song and joy. In fact, all during the afternoon, whenever I looked around me, I was surprised by memories. Time itself took on new meaning. A former colleague shared with me their own experience of this. We might recognize how then influenced now. But what about the “reverse?” How is now influencing then?

 

Here we were, people spanning over 50 years of history at LACS. For me, right over there was a student from my first year of teaching and another from when I retired. There was one who went with me to Toronto to study theatre and one who went whale watching near Boston. There was one who helped create a replica of a Paleolithic art cave or read John Paul Sartre. They were 15, 16, 17 then, are 50 now. 50! They have their own children now in the school. How does who they are now illuminate who they were then? Or who I was? Or am?

 

I was reminded how successfully the school served as a place where everyone concerned, young people and adults, students and teachers, administrators, counselors, and janitors, secretaries and nurses, were allowed and supported in taking responsibility for educating and being themselves. We were learning how to be compassionately aware of our role in creating a community in which we and others could thrive together.

 

I was reminded that Dr. Dave often spoke about relationships and community as being the heart of a school and education itself, so our school was structured accordingly. Some examples: Each student and staff member had a family that met twice a week to plan and support their education. There was a weekly all-school meeting (ASM) where democracy was taught by actually making decisions about the school. There were committees to help plan the ASMs, clean and beautify the school, give support to diverse groups, take ecological action, and mentor new students. Students had choices in what courses they took and input into what was taught. The course material often grew out of student questions and concerns. Students themselves voted to require, as part of their education, 60 hours of community service.

 

I got to the school after having left teaching for a while and drifting from one job or area of interest to another. Then a friend told me about an opening at LACS, and I went to an interview. It turned out all the diverse experiences that I had had, all the courses I had taken and subjects that I loved were exactly what the school needed. Before teaching at LACS, I didn’t understand the underlying themes in my story. I did not know the feeling of being both centered and capable of helping others on a daily basis. But then I did.

 

During the event I kept thinking: how does anyone start such a school? How did Dr. Dave do it? Where did the vision and dedication come from? The persistence? Confidence? He didn’t do it alone, of course. I mentioned his wife, Judy, who ran the office and was like a mother to so many of us. Once started, he recruited an amazing core of educators, ready to give their hearts and enormous amounts of time to the job and with little financial renumeration. Most were so committed to helping young people that, for many years, they gave up part of their salaries in order to increase the number of staff and variety of courses.

 

And through the first 20 years or so, the school was frequently questioned, doubted, and even attacked by administrators and sometimes residents of the area, for being too different, not fitting into their ideas of what a secondary school should be or what young people were supposed to be. But not often by students and parents. For many years, there was a long waiting list to get into the school; potential students had to choose to attend. Dr. Dave was a great protector. He so capably worked to protect the school and all of us while our education continued.

 

And he taught us about change. That it was life itself. As one speaker pointed out at the event, he didn’t let us ever get too attached to seeing or doing things one way. For example, he tried to change the 45-minute class structure to 90 minutes, to allow for longer teaching periods and increased involvement in learning. However, after a yearlong trial period, the students voted down the change. And Dr. Dave, instead of getting upset, honored the wisdom and choice of students. Now, some 90-minute classes remain but most are 45.

 

And maybe most of all, Dr. Dave cared about us and for us. He taught us a language of caring. One example: after I had a difficult surgery, he came to my house to help with my recovery. We talked philosophy, and he helped me think about something other than pain, something uplifting. He did such things for all the staff, as well as students. When doors of such deep honesty and heart are opened, they don’t close so easily. A model for how to better live in friendship with life itself is created.

 

That’s what this school did for so many of us. Uplifted us. This is what education is about. This is what leaders could and I think should be. I was lucky enough to have known him, to have worked with him. And to have worked and shared with so many people, so many young people and older ones. Such an amazing group of colleagues; such an amazing assortment of students. What a gift.

 

*Photo by Rebecca Costello.

Getting A Better Understanding of Our Lives: What Do We Do When the Unknown Takes Shape and Emerges from the Darkness of the Woods?

Last Sunday, around 2 pm, just as I was beginning an afternoon meditation, a black bear emerged from the woods behind my home. At first, I didn’t realize what it was. It was hidden by bushes and flowers, and all I could see was its massive side. Then it walked right by the door of the den where I was sitting. I went to the door, thinking my presence there would scare it away. It ignored me. It just continued on its way toward the front of the house, where my wife had earlier put out bird food.

 

I’ve seen bears before, several times. Four years ago, in the early morning, one came right to our front door and raised its paws as if to frame the window and look inside at the bird food stored there. I then went to the door, clanging 2 metal rods together; it immediately ran off. Not this bear. I shouted at him and he just leisurely walked on its way. Its presence was almost overwhelming; so, of course, I got my phone and, from inside the house, I followed him around taking pictures.

 

But at that moment when I first saw but couldn’t identify what it was, it seemed like a black cloud was walking through the yard and into my life. It felt like the unknown was taking shape and emerging from the darkness of the trees, a force both beautiful and fearful. All else was forgotten.

 

Maybe what was taking shape was the silence that resides before speech and memory can be born, and it shook me with its immense size. Maybe all such large, wild animals can seem almost mythological to us. Our Paleolithic ancestors, when not consumed by fear or the drive to hunt for food, were likewise overwhelmed when such animals appeared. And instead of taking photos, they drew bears, bison, or elephants, etc. on the walls of a cave. And then they could more deeply appreciate, remember, study, or spiritually enter the awareness of the animal. Such wild animals even today can allow us to touch the ancient lives of our ancestors.

 

When the bear came out of the woods, what message was my life perceiving in it?  Clearly, it took me out of the realm of the usual. And, yes, it was also a great story to share with my friends and family, and you.

 

When it came to the front of the house, I once again got out the metal rods. But it didn’t run off until I walked out the front door shouting and clanging the rods together. It then disappeared—for the moment. Later, I heard a noise, like a window shaking. It was the bear ripping from a window a bird feeder mounted there, and I had forgotten to take down. When I once again clanged the rods together, it grasped the feeder in its arms and ran off.

 

The depth of meaning that any event can hold for us is rarely, if ever, clear. Nor can it be encompassed by words. To truly understand our lives, we need some humility about our ideas. But I did realize one lesson: when we delay doing what needs to be done, we pay a price. And it can come to bite us, or to steal our bird feeders and rattle our windows.

 

One of my favorite books is Joseph Campbell’s A Hero with a Thousand Faces. This book greatly influenced George Lucas in his creation of Star Wars and other movies. The movie follows Campbell’s analysis of a cycle or pattern that heroic characters have possibly followed in their path to enlightenment, redemption, or saving lives. It can be seen in widely divergent works of literature, myth, and religion such as the story of the Buddha and Bilbo Baggins, Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo to Gilgamesh, the hero of the first story ever written. It can be seen in The Odyssey and ET….

 

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