Just in Time for Halloween, the Republicans Cornered the Market on Hell

It’s been a hell of a week for civil society, the rule of law, women, the vulnerable among us, the qualities of compassion and empathy, and any hope we might have for narrowing economic inequality. As always, the Republicans, both elected and not, jumped on their high horses, grabbed their metaphorical lances, and brought hell to their fellow citizens. 

So far, none of them has pleaded that the devil made them do it, but one does have to wonder. 

Let’s make a little list of their transgressions, shall we?

1. Our right-wing Dept. of Health and Human Services, supported by the courts (through the opinion of two Republicans judges), blocked an immigrant teenager who is currently held in a detention center, from getting a legal abortion. Instead, they made sure she had anti-abortion counseling, an ultrasound and enough legal stalling to risk that she will be forced to give birth when the deadline for an abortion passes. 
2. Trump told a grieving widow of a black soldier, “her guy” "knew what he signed up for”. He promised another grieving father $25,000 for his loss, then didn’t send the check.
3. The Congress has passed a budget “framework” that will lead to their appalling tax cut proposal, which will further increase both economic inequality and the national debt.
4. Betsy DeVos, the incompetent idealogue who runs the Dept. of Education, has gone after regulations that support students with disabilities.
5. Trump continued his full-blown attack on the ACA and the less fortunate among us who rely on it for health care coverage.

There was more …. but this, from the Republican electorate, took the cake:

"Many Trump voters who got hurricane relief in Texas aren’t sure Puerto Ricans should”, declared a headline from the Washington Post.

And why would this be? Well, it seems only some of us humans are actually deserving of help.

“Guess what? There’s a big chunk of the population that lives without electricity all the time,” Ramirez said, saying she was sharing the experiences of a friend who has family on the island. 

Hogg, 76, nodded his head in agreement: “They never had it. Never had it.” 

“They don’t live deprived, because it’s a beautiful environment,” she continued. “The weather is nice, the climate is good most of the time, so it’s different from here . . . It works there because of the climate. It wouldn’t work here.” 

About 96 percent of Puerto Rico’s electricity customers had service before Maria made landfall, according to federal data; many of the rest had no power because of Hurricane Irma two weeks earlier.

Sounds an awful lot like "Those slaves sure had it good! They had free room and board and good weather to work in!" Several voters interviewed, made sure to pledge their continued devotion to the president and their resolve to elect him again. Their opinions were clear: People, even those in the mainlaind U.S. who have recently suffered, have themselves to blame if they couldn’t afford flood insurance, had no resources to pull themselves through, or by implication, were the wrong color. When one woman suggested that Puerto Ricans should move to the mainland where there was better infrastructure, her husband countered that they should stay right where they were and “fix their own country up”.

The callousness, the denial of government’s legitimate role to help its suffering citizens, the enforcement of religious beliefs on all when others may not share them, is a stark reminder of what the last election exposed and legitimized. A significant number of our fellow citizens are unfeeling, brutal defenders of the belief that they are better than “those people”, that there is a bright line between the deserving (them) and the ones who aren’t. They are compelled to ensure that the rest of us know which side of the line we live on; their commitment to community extends only to those who live in the red zone, not the blue one. And that zone is defined not by your state but by your worthiness as a person. And a whole hell of a lot of us are not worthy.

If I believed in hell, I’d be praying hard that the whole lot of them end up there. They are sure willing to assign the rest of us to perdition, both here on earth or in some make believe world below our feet. And just like the Borg, they are doing their best to ensure that "Resistance is futile".    

A War or Genocide?

Many of us are finding it increasingly difficult to get out of bed in the morning. The daily news is punishing. If you're one of us, a person perpetually living in dread, this film won't make it better. Watch it anyway.

This is what genocide looks like. The old story of the frog being cooked to death in water that slowly warms, is the story of us living under Trump rule. The actions by the President and his EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, could well mean the end of humankind. Slowly. Almost imperceptibly... CO2 accumulates, fires rage, water swallows us whole. While we watch all the other shenanigans going on in this deeply dysfunctional, reactionary, near-tyrannical administration, every meaningful government action or program to minimize the impact of climate change is being annihilated. 

The courts are increasingly stacked against environmentalists and their efforts to protect public health and well-being. Trump is loading up those courts with far right judges all the way from crucial appeals courts to the Supreme Court of the United States. Our last bastion against the forces Trump has unleashed has always been the courts. Those are now becoming a substantial barrier to protecting the future. Our armamentarium has never been so compromised.  

Those who thought all candidates were equally evil are complicit in creating the nightmare we all live in. They cannot be absolved of responsibility for what is happening. 

And a message to the Resistance, of which I've been a part: No amount of letters, phone calls and faxes will fix this. Scott Pruitt isn't listening. Large crowds in the streets -- and I mean large ....thousands --  will draw attention to the gravity of the situation. But only a monumental effort to get voters to throw out fossil fuel supporters and climate deniers has any chance at all of saving us. It isn't clear that if we are successful in turning around the entire government in 2020 that there will be sufficient time to hold the line against catastrophe. It is clear that only by electing an entirely Democratic Congress and a Democratic president can there be any hope of enacting macro level climate action in our country.     

The most important litmus test we can have for candidates in 2018 and beyond is a commitment to climate action.  But those candidates also have to be able to win election in red states in sufficient numbers to ensure a groundswell of action. The strategy that will accomplish that is as yet uncertain. In the meantime, the water in our collective pot gets warmer and warmer. 

When Stretching Isn’t Yoga

Stretch goals. Remember those? I hated them. They were impossible and rarely met. People felt set up for failure. They gave up. The organization did poorly and got crummy morale to boot. When I left corporate America, I thought I was done with those. Well, here we go again.

Welcome to Medicare for All, the ultimate health care reform stretch goal.

The Harvard Business Review, in an article called The Stretch Goal Paradox; confirmed the perils of putting forth impossible dreams unless you are already successful (that’s the paradox). Those who are in dire straits seem compelled to set out to accomplish the impossible, a Hail Mary pass if you will. But setting stretch goals, aiming for the impossible, is exactly what a group that is already at risk, shouldn't do. The criteria for success: a group with resources, people to support it, a recent history of success.

Oh, and the authors warn that it will be extremely difficult to achieve even in the best of circumstances.

So the question for the Democratic Party and its allies is: What kind of “company” are we right now? The one looking for a Hail Mary pass or the one well-positioned for success already? If we aren’t in a position to achieve a stretch goal, then being strategic with something that is a reach but not a moonshot, might be more likely to mobilize citizens beyond the base, and get something meaningful done on health care reform.

How to Choose? What to Save? Where to Fight?

Triage is a messy business. You choose who to salvage and who to let go. So leave your rose-colored glasses at home. Decisions must be made. Some will lose the one thing you can never retrieve …life itself. Sometimes those decisions haunt the deciders. But when you’re in the thick of it, reality punches you in the face. You can’t pretend that everything is possible. 

The question of what to save is front and center again as the Trump administration opted out of saving 26 species, some of which are threatened by climate change. Most of us are outraged. We know that the decision wasn’t based on science. Stepping back from the political fire that issues like this fuel, maybe we need to ask some other questions about the concept of wholesale species protection. I know, I’m treading into sacred territory, but suspend judgement for a moment, and read on.  

We’ve entered the Age of the Anthropocene, a time when human dominance over nature has altered the course of life on the planet in profound ways. The war to mitigate the impact of the Antropocene has a simple but daunting goal — prevent catastrophic Climate Change and mass extinction. Like all wars, it will be fought on multiple fronts and will yield a lot of casualties. To win we will need resources, savvy fighters, and a strategy. Maybe most importantly, we will need the courage to challenge our assumptions about the role environmentalists should play as well our beliefs about what or who to save and how to save it.   

Those of us who identify as “environmentalists” are poised to become a part of humanity’s battlefield triage staff. Most of us are unprepared. Environmental leaders, from the grassroots to national standing, are in the throes of self-examination as we face demographic changes in our membership, a decrease in environmental activism among youth, and a shift in media emphasis from traditional environmental concerns to worries about the impact of climate change. In 2010 Grist identified the emergence of a new kind of eco-warrior: the Climate Hawk. Hawks, reluctant to adopt the environmentalist label, have a pure agenda: combat climate change with any means necessary, including civil disobedience. They reject focusing on the usual environmental campaigns — like saving whales and polar bears or lobbying to protect wilderness. They wanted to save humanity. Period.

As often happens during transitions, some Hawks, looking for a comfy place to roost, eventually find their way into traditional groups like the Sierra Club. They embrace some of the concerns of the old-fashioned environmentalist but are most energized by combatting the threat of Climate Change. And being a feisty sort, they have converted some of the old guard into Climate Hawks too. 

It’s 2017 and the folks who’ve dedicated their lives to preserving wilderness and species of all kinds (let’s call them the Conservationists), sit cheek to jowl with those Hawks, making decisions on messaging, campaign strategies, and resource allocation. Climate Change increasingly dominates the environmental agenda though the groups known collectively as Big Green (Sierra Club, NRDC, the Wilderness Society and others) continue to simultaneously pursue traditional initiatives (i.e. wetland conservation, wilderness preservation, species protection). As we debate what it means to embrace an agenda that combats the looming existential threat of climate disruption, an uncomfortable question arises: How do we do it all? Or from those who are even more heretical: Should we even try to do it all? 

What Happened? What Next?

My blog took a long pause after my review of Hillary Clinton’s new book, “Hard Choices”. 

Fast forward three years. Another book. The autopsy of her failed election campaign. The question: What Happened?

Pundits, data jockeys, and campaign strategists will be years trying to sort that out. But while we dig and probe and investigate, we can declare one thing: the election exposed the repulsive 21st century American underbelly.

Hillary lost an election. We may lose the country and our future. 

The symptoms of a critically wounded society are rampant. We talk openly of the threat of authoritarianism and tyranny. We slip and slide through our days, skittering from one domestic or foreign disaster to another. We have lost our footing as individuals and as a citizenry. Our civic and planetary health are deteriorating, with a report today on what might prove to be the largest mass shooting in our modern history. We are all depressed and anxious, not just anecdotally but clinically, as physicians report an escalation of anxiety and depression in their patients. 

These may be the early days of a failed presidency and possibly a failed federal government. Roosevelt was wrong. We have plenty to fear: tyrannical governance, financial fragility, the sixth extinction, climate catastrophe, and nuclear war, among them.  

This blog has been my platform for cataloguing, understanding, and tackling the challenges to health and well-being in the 21st century. In the last three years, I and others have been working towards overcoming many of those challenges. We thought we’d made progress. With the election of Donald J. Trump, nearly all the accomplishments of the last 45 years have been systematically diminished or dismantled. What remains is under constant attack by dark forces. Sound dramatic? It feels worse. 

How to cope? What to do? The Democrats are searching their souls, resisting when they can. The potential for even small victories or just standing in place is uncertain. Much of what we’re doing to keep the body politic intact is being played out on social media. But Facebook and Twitter prompt fleeting, reactive responses to the fake and the real. Bombarded with images and stories of our great unraveling, nothing changes. We organize online. We protest. We call, fax and write letters. Sometimes we hit the streets. But we have no enduring strategy for change. We shout "no". But then what?   

Some days I’m not sure what I believe any longer, what principles should guide my action, how to focus or find leverage to catalyze responsible change. So I’m taking my seat at the keyboard again, facing the demons within and without. I hope you’ll join in. Maybe we can find clarity together. For to make a difference, as the world seems to be falling apart, we need to understand what happened and then muster the will to make hard choices. It's long past time to change … for the health of it.