This was the week that was: this week we had school shooting number 22 of 2018. This is week 20 of the year. Let that sink in for a minute. We have also had incidents where police roughed up an innocent black person, though thankfully haven’t killed anybody this week. I don’t know how many people of color that makes for the year. Another black man was exonerated and released for jail after serving a sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. White people have again called police when they see black folk doing innocuous things and businesses have accused innocent people of color of stealing. The president’s lies while in office have climbed into the 3100’s. A climate change denying politician has ignorantly claimed that the sea level is rising because rocks keep falling into the ocean. Congress hasn’t passed laws protecting “Dreamers” from deportation. The immigration police keep arresting people who have committed no crime except being here illegally despite Trump’s promise that they wouldn’t. The Israeli army killed over a hundred Palestinian demonstrators and wounded over 2,000. As Marvin Gaye sang “makes you want to holler and throw up both your hands.”

Bishop Michael Curry speaking at the royal wedding called for love and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau called for acceptance of others in a college commencement speech. We are so far from either that their words seem laughable. Our politicians both Democrats and Republicans, are bought and paid for by corporations and the wealthy. They not only do not represent the people who elected them, they have become so partisan that even compromise on small issues seems impossible. Compromise on large questions seems out of the question. Progressive candidates have made small progress at the state level, but there are no signs that they will do so at the national level come November. Some polls indicate that Democrats have squandered whatever lead they had for the 2018 election.

What can we do about it? The first thing is not to give into despair and accept that this is normal or inevitable. Outrage overload, compassion overload, or whatever you want to call it is the first thing we must avoid. We cannot become numb to this onslaught. The second thing is that each one of us has to do something. When you are trying to get all the garbage off the beach it doesn’t matter where you start, only that you start. Different people can do different things, we all have different talents, personalities, and opportunities. It means not being silent anymore. It can be as simple as voting or talking to others about voting. It can simply be talking to your neighbors about the issues, donating to and working for political candidates, or writing blogs like this one. The more active among us can help organize groups to protest, write letters to Congress (although I don’t have high hopes that they will be effective,) or help get people to the polls to vote when the time comes.

There are some hopeful signs here and there. Gerrymandering is at least being challenged in a few courts. Progressive gains at the local and state levels may eventually work there way up to the national level although  much work needs to be done before that happens. Change will not be quick or immediate. We will have to endure more weeks like last week and things may get worse before they get better. We may have to take many baby steps and learn how to walk before we run. We may have to look in the mirror and acknowledge unpleasantness about our own behavior. We will have to face inconvenient and uncomfortable truths about ourselves, our friends and loved ones. We might have to challenge long and closely held “truisms” about our country and society. Remaining patient while we slowly move forward is not easy, but we must be relentless.

I have lived long and fought many fights, winning some and losing some. Whenever I feel myself getting too weary to continue, I see my little granddaughter and worry about what kind of world she will grow up in. If I didn’t do what I could to shape that one into a better one even if it is not the beloved community Dr. King, Bishop Curry , former president Obama, or even Justin Trudeau can envision, I would feel I let her down. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let her down.

The survival of Obamacare rather than a loss for Trump may be the best thing that has happened to him so far. The pundits (the same ones that have been wrong about Trump before) are spinning this as a political failure, the inability of the “master of the the art of the deal” to be able to get his own party in line,  or a civil war within the Republican party. If we look at this from the perspective of a Trump supporter it changes the narrative that most liberals and progressives have of his presidency. For Trump supporters Trump has been a Teflon president for whom charges of ineptitude, Russian illegal activities, enriching himself at the public’s expense, “insane” behavior, unconstitutional actions, and out and out lying, have bounced off and not put a dent in their support of him. Recent polls show that a majority of his supporters believe his lies. For example one poll shows that 59% believe his claim that Obama wiretapped him during the campaign. His supporters can argue that he has tried to keep his campaign promises but outside forces have prevented him from doing so. Courts concerned with the niceties and complexities of the Constitution have prevented him from keeping them safe from Muslim immigrants. He has claimed to keep jobs from fleeing abroad even taking credit for deals that had been decided before he took office. He says that the Keystone and Dakota pipelines he approved will create jobs. How many jobs has been exaggerated and the number of jobs going abroad has hardly slowed, but the headlines for the few that he claims to have saved are what matters to his supporters. His proposed budget tries to cut what he calls the “fat” in the federal budget by eliminating those items that benefit the elite e.g. the National Endowment for the Arts, the poor, other ethnic groups, LGBT groups, and women who want to have abortions (or in most cases health care.) At the same time his budget plans to increase spending by the military and for those keeping us safe from illegal immigrants.

The one campaign promise that might have rattled the cage of his supporters was dismantling Obamacare. This would have affected his base by taking away some of the benefits that actually had an impact on the lives of many of them. His attempt to change it and its failure due to Republican Party politics was actually the best of both worlds. The president was seen as honestly trying to keep his campaign promises, but being prevented by others. At the same time none of his supporters lost actual benefits. It is a double win for him. Of course he is not out of the woods yet. The investigation into Russian collusion with his campaign may yet turn up a smoking gun. At this stage however to his supporters it is all innuendo and “fake news” of interest only to the liberals and their media. Those outside the Beltway do not pay close attention to what the media says about politics.  They are more concerned with actions rather than the process itself. Budget cuts may eventually affect his supporters but as long as the actualities of the actions do not affect them personally they do not pay attention to the stories being told.

The gloating and celebration of liberals and progressive ignore the long road ahead and the many battles to come. Future success will depend on the mobilization of our forces not the erosion of support for Trump. Even when he loses a battle it just strengthens his support.

I know it is early but here are some questions Trump supporters should ask regularly. “How will this improve my life?” He cannot get rid of corrupt politicians because you have re-elected them. His bans on immigrants do not keep you safer because few immigrants commit crimes against Americans. Immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. Immigrants didn’t take your job automation did and will continue to do so. The few jobs he prevented going abroad (and there is great controversy over how many that is and whether he had anything to do with it) do not mean that your job or town will be saved. His administration is made up of non politicians sure, but they are the same bankers, corporate CEO’s and billionaires who have been corrupting the politicians. He has simply cut out the middleman leaving the 1% in control.

What about the plans coming down the road? I heard a heart rending story about how a person could not afford the health care for his mother and she died while immigrants were receiving benefits from the government when she did not. He was therefore all for restriction of immigration. Your mother didn’t die because of immigrants, she died because of her lack of access to health care and insurance. It is the Trump and Republican plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act that you should be fighting. Plans for non taxed health accounts simply means that your savings may have to be spent on health care and one catastrophic illness will clean it out. Block grants for Medicare or Medicaid to the states mean that access to health care will vary from state to state and yours may or may not improve your health care. Privatizing Social Security puts your future at risk and is dependent on the ups and downs of the stock market.

His initiatives do not curtail government involvement in your life, they expand it. He wants the government to know your religion, intrude into women’s personal health decisions, and to initiate costly projects (e.g. the wall, increased immigration policing, expanded vetting) If you couple this with his tax cuts that will save the middle class taxpayer a couple of hundred and the 1% millions, this will explode the deficit. As Bill Clinton (the only president in the last 25 years to balance the budget) said “arithmetic.” As conservatives will tell you Trump is not a true conservative.

As comedian Lewis Black once said Democrats versus Republicans is “the party of no ideas versus the party of bad ideas.” For the prospect of actually getting their “bad ideas” passed Republicans have been willing to: weaken ethics enforcement, overlook Russian involvement in our election, ignore Trump’s love affair with Putin, look the other way about his vindictive “tweets,” discount his threats to reinstate immoral and ineffective torture, pooh-pooh his “shoot from the lip” diplomatic style, and take no notice of the sinking esteem in which the world hold the United States. It will be up to Republicans to grow some cojones and stand up for the country rather than the party. We must choose between living up to our professed ideals or just hiding a monster behind them.

What should you watch for? Watch for his attempts to muzzle the media. No other president has tried to do as much as Trump to see that even respected media outlets do not tell the truth about him. What will be the reaction of the rest of the world? Will other countries (e.g. Iran and other Muslim countries) ban Americans from travel or will other countries raise protective tariffs on American made goods to retaliate against Trump’s? Will we send more troops to fight and die abroad? We are certainly the biggest bully in the world, but there will be times when cooperation rather than conflict will be needed. Will foreign policy now be guided by the interests of major corporations rather than the American public. Will he use some incident to get you to willingly curtail your civil liberties and strengthen his powers?

Being POTUS is very different from being a CEO. For a CEO what you say goes; for a president you have to negotiate much through a Congress to pass laws or through a bureaucracy to execute policy.  I predict that Trump will try to change the system that has lasted since 1781 so he can behave more like a CEO. Eyes open and we shall see see what we shall see.

To paraphrase something I read recently, “Idealists mature badly. If they can’t outgrow their idealism, they become hypocrites or blind. Trump supporters and sympathizers have chosen blindness, fixating so much on the system’s flaws that they believes those who oppose it must be paragons. That it’s not perfect says nothing about our opponents.  As it turns out, they’re mostly bad. Bad enough that Trump’s rule is a cataclysm, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some good points about the system. It doesn’t mean that every fool who works for them is evil. It simply means they have to be stopped.”

The marches and demonstrations against Trump have been successful and they should continue, but what else should we do. If the outpouring of concern stops with the marches we will not have effectively resisted Trump. Remember the Occupy movement. We must take continued action to either rebuild the Democratic Party to get back to its FDR concerns for the common man, or we need to build a new party that will. As our guiding vision I think we need to go back to Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. preached concern for others and standing up for what you believe is right, but he did more than that. He espoused the creation of a beloved community in which there would be no poverty because society would support all at a basic level of existence; there would be no racism because each would see the other as a brother or sister; there would be no war, not because people would live without conflicts, but because they would find non-violent ways to settle them. This beloved community was not some pie in the sky utopia for King, but an achievable goal if enough people adopted his belief in nonviolence.

Over the last few weeks I have been collecting the ideas of others as to what to do going forward. A friend of mine recently wrote me:

“The difficulty of convincing Americans that this [MLK’s beloved community] is possible presents a challenge that has stalled social change in our country. I don’t see it as utopian at all, but it is beyond the recent or living experience of many. It is also contrary to the ideologies and social logics of Lockean liberal individualism, Social Darwinism, Ayn Rand, neoliberalism, and machine politics. [It is] incompatible with the reward-your-allies-screw-your-opponents politics that Congressional leaders have often practiced, encouraged by … cycles of gerrymandering that replaced competitive legislative districts with safe ones often represented by extremists who pay little attention to the views or wishes of constituents outside their party.” (Patrick Inman)

“What to do, you ask? It begins with the first step of awareness and commitment. Just go forward. Engage. Don’t despair.”  (Ken Burns)

Educate yourself. The Trump presidency will operate on misinformation and misconceptions. You need to investigate each claim, analyze each move, and find out the facts. Trump says we need more law and order, but crime is actually down. He says we need more jobs but unemployment is lower than it has been in several years. Trump says immigration from Mexico is a problem; this immigration has been dropping for years. Apply your critical thinking skills to examine the assumptions, evidence, and reasoning of the new administration.

“Expecting marginalized people to educate you isn’t being an ally, it’s being lazy and expecting others to do the work for you. Being an ally also means actively doing your part and learning more about the inequalities that certain people face on a daily basis. At this point, there are endless resources that we all can use to learn more about a variety of issues – from racial inequalities to transphobia. While it is beneficial to hear how people have personally been affected by injustice, Google is always free and there to find you resources of all kinds.” (Christopher Lawrence )

“You should find like minded people — not just from your social circle, but everywhere. Change the opinions of others, not with ridicule, but reason.” (Ken Burns) Social media is not the place for this, it demands face to face interaction. We can respond in a number of ways. “Assuming the main issue is misinformation, science about climate change and data analyses on the feasibility of various proposals including mass deportations, border walls, and registries can be brought forth. Assuming the main issue is dialogue, friendly conversations can be pursued.  Assuming the main issue is fake news, more real news can be circulated. We must understand that those people who did not vote as we did are not our enemy. In fact, true engagement is walking into the heart of that constituency, offering shared stories and real solutions rather than narratives that are calculated to divide. We should offer fellowship and unity, where fake news has helped stoke tribal angers.” (Daniel Jose Camacho)

These are only starting methods to bring about King’s ideas. The problem is that the opposition to King’s dream has a particular vision of the world supported by people with the power to carry it out. “This kind of political project can’t be fact-checked away. As the profoundly undemocratic conditions in the state politics of North Carolina have recently proven, conciliatory attempts to compromise with this project are absorbed and outmatched by those wielding power. In such cases, our American value of bi-partisanship is exposed because there are certain things that cannot be met halfway and there are times when both parties fail us.” (Daniel Jose Camacho)

You should contribute to organizations that will press the agenda you support.  We can no longer count on the federal government to press King’s issues for us. “Give to organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Anti-Defamation League, or to the Sierra Club, and Planned Parenthood. Making a donation to help someone else is no substitute for individual and collective mobilization, but it is one thing we can do. In any liberal democracy, the ultimate guardian of decency and civil liberties is an active civil society, which can push back against efforts to mislead the public, flout accepted norms, and centralize power.” (John Cassidy)

We should support civil society. “What is civil society? In addition to big national organizations, such as labor unions, the A.C.L.U., and the N.A.A.C.P., civil society comprises countless local groups, including charities, environmental activists, church groups, think tanks, reading groups, peace campaigners, parents’ associations, and youth groups. It encompasses any group that mediates between the individual, the government, and the market, and whose goal is promoting the common good. The thing to do is to pick an organization that reflects your personal interests or an issue that motivates you, get involved, and stick with it.” (John Cassidy)

We should support independent journalism. For all the power of Twitter, fake news, and the social-media echo chamber, real news can still break through all the noise. “We must understand too that we have also been betrayed by the so-called “mainstream media,” who fawned for months over one candidate, giving him billions of dollars of free media. We have been betrayed by cynical executives more interested in a buck than the facts of the matter. We have been betrayed by the lazy paid pundits more interested in protecting their own “brands” than in the well-being of the Republic they pretend to serve.” (Ken Burns)

We should contact your congressman and senator and tell them to stand up for King’s ideas. “For good or ill, the first line of defense the will be the U.S. Capitol. It will be up to legislators in both parties not to cut deals that target the weak, encroach upon civil rights, or enrich the new first family. Thanks to the Internet and a growing number of apps, it is now very simple to find your elected representatives and let them know what you think. Surprising as it may be to some skeptics, elected officials do listen to their constituents, especially when they get in touch with them personally in large numbers by telephoning their local or D.C. offices.” (John Cassidy) You can also contact Congresspeople and Senators in other districts who take the proper stands, to let them know they are not alone and their courage is appreciated.

We should support local initiatives. “Democratic lawmakers in California, put forward a series of measures designed to protect undocumented immigrants in the state from deportation.” (John Cassidy) Anthony Rendon, the speaker of the State Assembly, said “We are telling the next Administration and Congress: if you want to get to them, you have to go through us.” (Anthony Rendon) Jerry Brown, California’s governor, vowed to fight any efforts from the incoming Administration to rollback efforts to tackle climate change. Reacting to a suggestion from one of Trump’s advisers that Trump could eliminate NASA‘s earth-science programs, Brown said, “We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the lawyers, and we’re ready to fight. . . . If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite.”(Jerry Brown)

We should support electoral reform. “In still relying on the Electoral College, we are beholden to the prejudices and interests of an eighteenth-century ruling class that was white, landed, and dedicated to preserving the prerogatives of their individual states. With the winner of the popular vote having lost two of the last five Presidential elections, you might think there would be a movement to change the system—and there is. It’s called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and it’s an agreement among a group of states to award all of their votes in the Electoral College to the candidate who wins the popular vote. The beauty of this scheme is that it doesn’t require a constitutional amendment to insure a truly democratic outcome. But it does need the support of states with two hundred and seventy electoral votes between them, and so far only eleven states, representing a hundred and sixty-five votes, have signed on.” (John Cassidy)

We must organize, organize, organize. Organize wherever you are so that actions taken are the work of a group not just an individual. “We must try to remember that the tactic of demonizing whole groups of people, nearly always backfires, that real change will come when middle class whites, Hispanics and blacks realize they share more in common with each other than those in whose interest it is that they stay divided. This has been a successful strategy for generations in this country: why not blame the other, who might take your job, rather than blame the boss who laughs all the way to the bank.”  (Ken Burns)

We must engage the business sector — “corporate America will play a huge role in helping maintain our equilibrium, either by applying pressure to retrograde political forces or facing the pain of consumer boycotts. We must try to point out that even with a progressive president who taxed the wealthy, the gap between the haves and have-nots has grown; we can be assured now that this gap will only grow, not shrink.” (Ken Burns) However, Henry Ford paid his workers well because he wanted them to be able to buy his cars. We just have to convince businesses that paying workers well will result in high sales and profits in the long run.

We must protect the vulnerable whether this includes Muslims, immigrants, women, or the LGBT community. I read just today about a petition organized by actor George Takei. (You might remember him as Sulu on the original Star Trek) As a child he and his family were put in a Japanese internment camp. He has vowed to fight anything that would lead to that for others. His petition is against the formation of the Muslim registry that candidate Trump proposed.

In the end the important thing is to keep our eye on the power we do possess and the various avenues by which we can resist. Don’t let anybody steal your power by convincing you that you don’t have any. What can resistance look like? Not everyone can do all of the things on this list, but everyone can do some of them. As Trump represents all that is bad about America, let us be all that is good about it.

Okay folks we need to have our period of mourning, but then we need to get back up and figure out what our next moves are. The first thing to figure out is why Trump’s message was so appealing and Hillary’s wasn’t appealing to enough people. Trump’s support was wider ranging than most of the pundits predicted and are now acknowledging. Yes there were the racists, white supremacists, and nativists to whom Trump appealed with both actual appeals and dog whistle politics. The upsurge in racial, anti Muslim and anti-immigrant incidents following his election are signs of that. His supporters were either people attracted by his racism or willing to vote for him despite it. Either way they were willing to throw people of color under the bus in order to further their own interests.  They all count as racists in my book. It is effects not intentions that matter. Unless there is a voting upsurge in the number of people who are harmed by this and their white allies, anti-racism and anti-nativism will not be enough to defeat him next time. He also appealed to those whom mainstream politics ignored. Both the Democratic and Republican elites had taken for granted the people of middle America in their plans, ideologies, corruption, and inaction. The Republicans did indeed attract those who felt they were being left behind by arguing they were right to be upset and that the problem was too much government. This fit with the conservative ideology, but it has ultimately not changed life for those who were being left behind. The Democrats also have not taken actions to help these people, but rather been just as much the tools of Wall Street that their Republican counterparts are.

So these people turned to an outsider who said he would listen to them. Trump in words and innuendo cast Hillary as all they hated, the old corruption, a perceived favoritism toward people of color and women, the continuation of the old regime that had failed them. Hillary in her turn did not excite enough white men and women to come out and vote for her. Voters were looking for something new to change from the old which Hillary represented. We all know the final result.

An African revolutionary named Amilcar Cabral once said that a member of the ruling class has to commit “class suicide” that is, to stop thinking of the interests of his class, in order to truly work for the people. Convincing people that a New York billionaire would do this is a massive con job that we will see play out. The presence of lobbyists among his advisers, the tax plan that benefits most the people of his class, the massive tax breaks he wants to give corporations, and the narcissism of his entire life, do not bode well for changes in the lives of his supporters.  It is early but the transition team of Chris Christie and Newt Gingrich that Trump has put together does not augur the change that Trump supporters want or expect. Putting a climate change denier as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Giuliani as Attorney General, Ben Carson in charge of a health department would do little to help his middle and working class supporters or those suburbanites who voted for Trump. Will he do enough to maintain his supporters or will they realize they have been duped. Only time will tell.

In the meantime we will have to endure his dismantling of Obama’s legacy, hope that his belligerence and short temper don’t lead us into war, and trust that the bulwarks already in place will protect the health rights of women and the human rights of the LGBT community. We will have to endure the racist attacks but we have endured them before. We will also have to live through changes in the immigration policy. We don’t yet know how sweeping and far ranging those changes may be. All in all it promises to be a bumpy ride. To ameliorate it we will have to organize not despair. Let’s think of ways to do that.

The two surprises in this early presidential election season have been the strength of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. It is much to early to tell if these showings will end up in the forgotten footnotes of presidential politics like the candidacies of Howard Dean and Herman Cain to name just a couple of surprisingly strong early campaign figures in recent history. Or, will one or both end up as an insurgent candidate like Barack Obama upsetting all the pundits and prognosticators? They could not be more different from each other and disagree on most any issue you could name: foreign policy, women’s issues, race, taxation etc. To make my prejudices clear at the outset I find Trump to be an annoying, narcissistic, overbearing, politically inexperienced, jackass with a soul so ugly that it hurts my feelings (to paraphrase the philosopher Moms Mabley.) On the other hand Sanders’ progressive policies and understanding of the current situation are much closer to my own and the man could not be more dissimilar to Trump. For the moment though I want to put my own feelings aside to try to take an objective look at the situation.

The two candidates are in structurally analogous positions within their respective presidential contests. Both are long-shot candidates but the similarities go deeper than that. Each is the personification of what the other’s base would see as the anti-Christ. Trump’s base sees Sanders as a radical socialist who would take away their guns and freedom.  Sanders’ base sees Trump as the epitome of billionaire capitalism taking over the political system and trying to buy the government for their own interests. Within their own bases however they are seen as the anti-candidates who are not afraid to speak the truth (as they see it) to the do-nothing leeches in the political system who have frozen real action into a political quagmire that gets nothing done. Each is therefore trying to appeal as a populist candidate as opposed to the establishment candidates others like Hilary and Jeb!. Their appeal is therefore similar and the support they are receiving is in part a rejection of status quo politics;  above all they advocate change in the political agenda. The growth of their support is the electorate saying “none of the above” to the usual list of candidates. Some other “insurgent candidates” e.g. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina are therefore also doing well.

The insurgent candidates have been able to appeal to a section of the electorate base with plain talk, braggadocio, and chutzpah which tells us little about how they would govern. The problem with these insurgent candidates is that even if they win they have to negotiate through a political system in which they have minimal support.  Unless the Congress changes radically too we will be stuck with the same quagmire that we have now: a political system in which the executive and the legislature are constantly at odds with each other. Unless the legislative majority moves to the left in case Sanders wins or to the right in case Trump wins (God forbid) the odds are that neither would be an effective president. I am not advocating that one should or shouldn’t vote for one candidate or another at this point.  Let’s see how it plays out. I am arguing that if you support one of these candidates you should also realize that you have to bring the same zeal to turn the Congress around.

The effect of these candidacies has been to push the other candidates to take stands, issue sound bites, and make stump speeches about the insurgent candidates’ agendas. In the competition for media attention the insurgent candidates have drawn the spotlight from the mainstream candidates. The mainstream candidates have responded by saying “me too,” attacking the insurgents, or working behind the scenes to blunt their insurgencies. In doing so they reveal their respective party’s real colors or at least what they hope will sway their respective bases.