Embrace being politically homeless

 

I remember standing in the Atlanta airport the day after Election Day in 2004, watching John Kerry and John Edwards give concession speeches. I was dumbfounded that America could vote for a second George W. Bush administration. How could any thinking person cast their ballot for such a vacuous disaster as that?

George W. Bush had neither the intelligence nor the dignified manner to hold the office of president. He was tested in his first term by the enormous events of September 11, 2001 and failed miserably by falling prey to his coterie of ambitious and careless advisors. His invasion of Iraq got thousands of Americans killed needlessly; it further destabilized the Middle East and made the mullahs of Iran more powerful.

Four years later, John Kerry was not a perfect candidate, but he wasn’t George W. Bush, and that was all that mattered. The infuriating absurdity of the George W. Bush presidency was compounded tenfold by a public that took this empty suit seriously; many even thought it was some kind of patriot duty to vote for him.

So when Donald Trump won re-election earlier this month, I felt like I understood people who were morally outraged and angry at their fellow Americans. When your opposition candidate is an unqualified absurdity, a high level of moral outrage is natural. I’ve been there.

But I no longer rank among people emotionally swayed by election results. I’ve embraced political homelessness, and with that comes great freedom.

Maybe it’s a certain level of age and experience, or a knowing cynicism that has crept into my worldview, but I don’t see the world in the same black-and-white landscape of good and evil that I did in 2004.

Maybe it is my background working as a financial journalist that allows me to look at issues and policies more clinically and with a sense of emotional detachment. I’ve learned to look at what people actually do and what facts on the ground are, and pay little attention to rhetoric.

I’ve come to expect the worst from everyone and so I’m rarely surprised or disappointed. Of course, the government is going to abuse its power, it wouldn’t have attained power if they hadn’t planned on using it. I’m often saying to my friends, regardless of their political affiliation, “Your side did this too.”

So I went into the presidential election predicting that Donald Trump would win and confident that I wouldn’t be happy with either outcome. I’ve seen Democrats and Republicans sacrifice principles for political advantage repeatedly, over multiple election cycles, to the point that I know neither is capable of keeping its word or staying grounded.

But while I have lost whatever faith I had in the American political system, I have not lost faith in America. If anything, our country shows us over and over again that it is resilient and capable. America exists in a superior plane far above our wretched politics. George W. Bush and his cabinet of incompetents deserve to smolder in the ash heap of history, but the people who voted for him were mostly decent people who loved their country and felt wounded by being attacked. The Trump supporters who put him back into office have seen their grocery bills triple.

There is so much more consensus on vital issues than we’re led to believe, and in the real world, if people are able to meet on their own terms, they can build meaningful bridges with neighbors and political opponents. It’s being done on the local level around the country every day.

So, if you’ve become frustrated and disillusioned, political homelessness may be for you. It won’t cure all frustration and aggravation with American politics, but you won’t blow a head gasket when the next unqualified hot mess takes the Oval Office.

Postcards to the future

An annual tradition in our family is to go to Mohonk Mountain House on President’s Day weekend. It’s a tradition started by my wife’s father and stepmother and we are happy to take part in it.

This year Mohonk Mountain House is celebrating its 150^th anniversary (called a sesquicentennial if you want to use a big word and impress yourself). As part of its observation of this milestone, the historic resort plans to create a time capsule to be opened in 100 years. They invited all of their guests to fill out postcards to be sent 100 years into the future, presumably to be poured over by historians or glanced at by bemused guests in the next century.

One hundred years ago, much of the Western world was still recovering from the First World War, though no one would have called it that at the time because another 20 years would pass before the next World War would start. World War I was called simply “The Great War,” and Western civilization had not seen anything like it. Technology had helped nations create weapons that had not been used in large scale before and casualties were enormous. In fact, there are still areasof France off limits today because of the plethora of unexploded ordinance from the First World War.

Today our world is not in the after math of a great war but rather adjusting to the dissolution of the world order that was began after the Second World War. We have a new dominant world power in China and the world’s greatest superpower, the U.S., deeply divided. There is no shortage of conflict in the world that is taking a drastic human toll.

The world is still a scary, violent place, just in different ways than it was in 1919. We didn’t have mass school shootings in the U.S. in 1919, but we had a flu pandemic that killed more than 180,000 people. We didn’t have MS-13 gangs, but we still had anarchist bombings and labor and race riots. It’s not a bold statement to say that the world of 2119 will be frightening to the historical researchers who read our Mohonk postcards. Between now and then the world will change dramatically in ways we can’t predict, but human nature and the existence of conflict will remain.

But what is also constant, and what I tried to convey in the card, is that while conflict is never ending, so is hope and the human drive for improvement. As long as people have killed one another and destroyed past civilizations with sloth and greed, they have also constructed new communities and sought out the better angels of their natures. 

In the postcard we left for the 100-year time capsule at Mohonk, I wrote to a future that would be as conflicted and fearful as our own. I conveyed to them that now, as will be the case then, people gathered to see the beauty of nature and share good times with the people they loved.

I added our postcard to the gathering mass of missives to the future, hopeful that maybe one of my great grandchildren will be enjoying some time at the Mohonk Mountain House and get to read our note from the past.