Every day is a new adventure. The great Chinese curse says “may you live in interesting times“. These times are nothing if not interesting. In 2017, as Donald Trump took the reins of government in his first presidency, we were all unhappy or surprised by many of his choices for senior cabinet positions, Bringing Rex Tillerson in as Secretary of State made us all wonder what was going on. Jeff Sessions as Attorney General was not a shock and while he was considered strongly biased, was at least an institutionalist. Following Sessions with Bill Barr, a prior Attorney General under George H.W. Bush, was also unpleasant but not shocking. This time around Trump is taking a no holds barred approach to his appointments. Loyalty seems to be the only qualification many of his chosen have to show for themselves. Before the election a few weeks ago, many of us assumed that there was simply no chance that Trump would win reelection. Obviously that was misguided optimism at work. But one of the outcomes of that thinking was that we spent little or no time bothering to contemplate how a second Trump presidency might take shape. We heard all the rhetoric about mass deportations, revenge, and autocracy, but I’m not sure we spent much time thinking about who he might select for his cabinet posts. Now that that is being revealed to us, it’s less about the shocking nature of his proposals than it is about our own inability to cope with what all this means.
We all have our own coping mechanisms. They are there to preserve our sense of stability. But one of the most important means of getting through a difficult time is to retain a sense of hope for a brighter day. The worst thing that can happen to most of us is to get a sense that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. If all we can see is darkness, we tend to wander aimlessly for lack of that guiding light. I believe that is the stage that many of us find ourselves in at this point in time. I’m speaking now mostly about people of my age, which is to say, Baby Boomers. I know I feel at the moment that this Trump debacle is unlikely to end in two years (with a mid-term election reversal), or even four years with a new election, as happened in 2020. I somehow feel that given what we saw in Trump’s unwillingness to cede power, and the extremes to which his followers were prepared to go to support that obstinance, they are likely to be much better prepared for that possibility in the next cycle.
There is an old movie from 1955 called Women’s Prison, starring Ida Lupino as Amelia Van Zant, the warden in a women’s correctional facility. The story is about a young reporter who decides to do some investigative reporting about the women’s prison, which has gotten a reputation for cruelty to the inmates. She gets permission to go into the prison, impersonating an inmate in order to uncover the truth. The twist in the plot is that Ida Lupino figures out what’s going on and effectively blocks the reporter from communicating with the outside world. She thereby render the reporter helpless and unable to get word out in order to save herself. For some reason that movie made a huge impact on me because it created a situation, in which hope was literally lost and, despite knowing that something was wrong, the reporter (and by extension, the viewer) was left to wander aimlessly and without purpose other than to extricate themselves from this horrible bind. The scenario created a sense of utter desperation. In many ways, these first moves of the impending Trump administration are setting up a similar feeling. When Hope gets lost and aimlessness sets in, a terrible shroud descends to darken the mood.
There is talk of Republican senators standing up against the worst instincts of Donald Trump, but we have seen powerful Republicans like Cheney and Romney try and fail to stand up toTrump’s improprieties. Both of those people have been left standing by the side of the political road. There is also now talk about the 23 Democratic governors like Newsom of California, Pritzker of Illinois and Shapiro of Pennsylvania doing things to “Trump proof” their states. This is being termed the new federalism initiatives, invoking the theories of our Founding Fathers as to how best to prevent a presidential autocrat from running roughshod over our country. How ironic that the notion of states rights, something most often referenced by conservative Republicans, is now being touted as perhaps the best tool to thwart excessive exuberance by conservative Republicans. Some might see this as a ray of hope, but it’s possible that all of these efforts may prove futile in the face of shrewd Republican opposition. And I think we can all agree that Republican politicians have rarely suffered from a lack of shrewdness.
It’s funny, but I remember hearing during my travels in the Middle East that the best compliment you can give an Arab father is to say that you find his son to be very shrewd. It strikes me that shrewdness is a characteristic most closely linked to survival in the face of natural obstacles. I suspect that shrewdness is more of an innate characteristic than a learned characteristic, and that it is, at its core, highly primordial. That naturally brings me back to my favorite juxtaposition of nature versus grace. To me, you’re either born with a tendency towards shrewdness or you are born with a tendency towards grace. Many things in life are not so black-and-white, but I somehow feel that this is mostly a binary distinction.
None of that thinking eases my concerns about our collective national sense of hopelessness in what I estimate to be 50% of the population. But that does not mean that half the population will be wandering aimlessly for the foreseeable future. That would represent too much of a dystopian picture. The truth is more likely to be that some of us will wander aimlessly, some of us will simply go about our business as though nothing has changed and yet still others will thankfully take up the banner and fight back against what they see to be an unacceptable and harmful state of play. The challenge will be to force ourselves into that third category whenever and wherever possible. It won’t be easy because it requires us to squint down the dark tunnel and pretend that we see a sliver of light whether it’s there or not. Young people have better eyesight than older people so hopefully many more of them will trouble to squint down the tunnel. None of us enjoy being aimless, but not all of us have the stamina to fight back as hard as we need to to affect a change. Nature and shrewdness are very tough enemies and aimlessness is an all too easy path. So I guess my prescription for what ails us is to manufacture some sense of hopefulness the degenerate that sliver of light. And one thing we all know is that the only way to create light where there is darkness is to ignite every little candle that we can find. So let’s all stop the aimlessness and start finding candles.