It begins, after all, with a talking animal.
- William Tell 1
- Feb 19
- 4 min read
My response to the election.
This text has been pending for several months, but the only way I can write it now is very different from what would have been in December or January. I correctly anticipated that the new Trump Presidency would bring confusion and turmoil, but I never anticipated that it would bring so much turmoil so fast.
Just in a matter of days, at the end of January:
He pardoned ALL the January 6, 2021 rioters, including those who had assaulted uniformed police;
He fired all the DOJ prosecutors who had worked on those cases;
He fired all the FBI agents who had worked on those cases; and
He directed the CDC to purge all its web pages and publications, of any reference to homosexuality.
And all that was even before Elon Musk got involved.
And now he’s spewing belligerence toward Canada, Mexico, Panama, Greenland, Denmark and Gaza.
HE IS THE PRESIDENT.
If it were not, as it seems to be now, a question of efforts to eliminate the separation of powers, the system of checks and balances; I would say that, whether one likes it or not (and I don’t), he IS the duly elected President, and one needs to accept that fact, along with anything lawful that he does within the limits of his constitutional powers. If one objects to any one of his policies, one is free to, and has means to, act on that objection through normal, lawful means.
THE RABBIT HOLES
The term "rabbit hole" -- it was a long time before I learned where it came from. At the beginning of Alice in Wonderland, the little girl sitting under a tree, falls asleep without realizing it. She sees a white rabbit wearing a vest run past her, looking anxiously at its pocket watch and saying anxiously, "I'm late." The rabbit dives into a hole in nearby woods, and she decides to follow. At once, she finds herself in -- and stays for quite some time, in -- a world where the most preposterous notions have the force of fact.
So, "rabbit holes" refer to any theoretical world in which absurdity rules fact.
i recently posted on FB that public policy is now being formed by people who believe fairy tales. This has been, for me, the most frightening feature of the Trump Presidencies, from the beginning. Every day, every day, some new pronouncement came from the White House that was patently absurd on its face, but that we were nonetheless expected to believe and take seriously. "I can't believe that," I said. "I can't believe he said that."
But he did.
The most outstanding example, for me, has been the fairy tale he spun about the 2019 hacking of the DNC's e-mail system. As I have posted elsewhere:
Sometime between May and June of 2016, in the midst of the then-Presidential primaries, someone hacked the computer servers (plural) of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Weeks later, that person leaked tens of thousands of e-mails to WikiLeaks. The DNC hired the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to investigate. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that it was the work of Russian military intelligence.
In November 2019, in her testimony to the House impeachment inquiry, Fiona Hill admonished Republican Congress members for promoting a counter-narrative that she said had its roots in Russian propaganda. That narrative held:
That Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the DNC server. It did so to help Hillary Clinton.
CrowdStrike itself actually performed the hack.
The server (singular) somehow got spirited out of the country, and is now physically located somewhere in Ukraine.
The White House said Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, had made a number of trips to Ukraine to investigate this matter, though his only source was a known Russian agent, Andriy Derkach.
It caused me no small discomfort that Trump’s inner circle would not just believe, but even invest resources in, such a preposterous story. There was delusion at work at the highest levels of the Executive Branch.
It begins, after all, with a talking animal.
WHAT GOD REQUIRES OF ME
... is very clear to me. It may have little to do with the current national situation, but if I do not respond well to the national situation, I will certainly be off-track as to my own mission and vocation also. The path to which I am called is difficult and frightening, which is the main reason it has taken me so long to write this post.
What God requires of anyone is, first and foremost, to manage one's own affairs and respond charitably to the people and events one meets in person from day to day. I will not be doing that if I drain my energies in anger or anxiety about the national situation, or give my thoughts over to what worse situations may still come; though it's hard to imagine things can get much worse.
But I am to attend first and last principally to my own business, my own activities, to the material things and needs in my physical presence; to keep my attention here-and-now.
I am at a point in life where there is no practical obstacle to doing just whatsoever I please. And I need to train myself to focus on that: the activities that do or will bring me joy; the possible future events that may please me. Again, this is the opposite of grieving the national situation.
I need to get my house in order. Literally. At this writing, my literal house is very disordered. Largely because I have wasted so much of my energies in grieving the national situation.
In dealing with those who disagree with my politics, I need to not seek to persuade them or even to understand them; as, in the end, I may never manage to do either of those things. I need instead to simply love them, as they are. If and only if I love them, do they have any reason to listen to me or find my words persuasive. If and only if I love them, am I likely ever to truly hear what they are saying, to listen to their hopes and dreams, and then possibly come to understand them. But loving them is first. First and last.
Having finally said this, maybe now I can get on with it.
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