Surviving a Trump Presidency

I don't know whether I'm proud or dismayed when I say that I've had several cats who are smarter than Donald Trump.  When I broke my ankle, about twenty years ago now, Twig didn't leave me for the two weeks I spent mostly in bed, except to eat.  When I had Covid-19, Tuck stretched out tightly by my side and Lyra huddled down on my chest, reaching his paw up to place it on my throat or on the side of my neck.  Those are just the most dramatic examples of the behaviour of creatures who know, daily, that their job is to love and provide care if necessary and who understand how love and care are reciprocal.  Lyra and Tuck join me every day for my afternoon nap, when they curl up tightly in my lap or against my hip, as if we were the same tribe, as if differences, even between species, didn't exist.  

I don't think love, care, reciprocity--some of the highest human virtues--are in Trump's emotional lexicon, which is instead crowded with anger, hate, greed, grievance, and vengeance.  His misogyny and racism are evidence that emphasizing difference, calcifying in-group and out-group tensions, has political currency.  He is America's id, and he has given far too many Americans permission to speak the same language--or at least to filter out his obscenities and cruelties and vote for  him because they believe he'll lower the price of gas and groceries.  His language has distorted how we talk to and see one another, emphasizing differences between us rather than the human similarities.  It's one of the first things we need to challenge.

So how do we survive the next four years, whether, as Canadians, we are watching in horror, or whether, as Americans, we are caught up in the madness and touched by it daily? I'm inclined to begin with Henry James, who has said that three things in life are important.  "The first is to be kind.  The second is to be kind.  The third is to be kind." Unexpected acts of kindness make me feel a paradox: how a kind act is so evanescent, yet it's one of the ways we can change the world. It might bloom and lead to another kind act later in the day, or maybe just a smile or a iighter mood.  But that's not the whole point.  Kindness is world-defining.  "This is the world I choose to live in, to help create" a kind act says.  It de-centers the greedy, grieved, vengeful id.

                                
Beauty, too, is world-defining. What is human consciousness that it seeks out something as "pointless" as beauty?  It suggests that the order and freedom that are usually part of what we perceive as beautiful feed human consciousness in an important way. We apperceive order in the natural world, for example, and our valuing of the sound of aspen trees or the bloom of a orchid affirms that we have a place in this world, that there is a consonance between the qualities of the world and the qualities of our minds. But our appreciation of beauty isn't transactional, except that we might share it with someone else.  A lot of the beauty we are moved by is, like kindness, evanescent, and as such can't be measured but merely experienced and shared. How do you measure a sunset or a child's first laugh? Trump has no aesthetic sense. (He hasn't even figured out that suit jackets are supposed to be buttoned when the wearer is standing.) Mar-a-lago is an ugly temple to excess, to things you can measure.   But the immeasurable matters.  We are more than our bank accounts.  Time is not money:  it's an opportunity to glory in the world's beauty and to create an entirely different economy when we share that experience with someone else.

I've been reading way too much about the future Trump presidency (and I'm not going to get into the wholly inappropriate choices for his cabinet here, though their ability to unmake America is terrifying), and numerous journalists have said that in order to mitigate the damage his presidency will do, we need to focus.  Pick one thing that you are going to work towards and give it as much time and effort as you can.  Maybe it's the environment or human rights.  Maybe you want to find ways to push against economic inequality--raises and tax cuts for CEO's and a static minimum wage for the poor--that will doubtless be one of the hallmarks of his administration.  Maybe you think the money Trump is going to spend rounding up immigrants might better be spent creating 3 million homes; they will cost the same amount. Do what you can, beginning by keeping informed.  

Slow down. Put away your phone. Think about where you are giving your attention--with emphasis on "giving attention" rather than "paying attention."  (Thank you, Don McKay for this important distinction.)  Your attention is a gift.  Trump won, in part, because enough of the electorate, exit polls show, didn't pay or give attention to the obscenities or racist comments in his later rallies or to that weird one where he played music and danced, or the sentences that weren't sentences and that led commentators to wonder about his declining cognitive capacity.  Trump will want to keep you busy and anxious--he's brilliant at doing just that.  But what if you remembered that your attention is a gift and spent less time doomscrolling and more time with the people you love and the communities you value? What if you made your primarily relationship this year not one you have with your phone but with the people around you?

Support the arts.  Keep nuance and complexity and humanity alive by going to a concert or taking in a play or spending Sunday afternoon at the art gallery.  What if you re-learned deep reading--something you honestly can't do with your cell phone by your side.  Deep reading is so good for our brains!  One of the most pleasurable ways of learning to concentrate and to think outside ourselves--harder than we usually think and about things we know little about--is to get lost in a book.  Even Pope Francis has weighed in on deep reading.  Both he and philosopher Martha Nussbaum argue that "Without the empathy that literature can instill, 'there can be no solidarity, sharing, compassion mercy.'" I've read articles and articles about what Kamala Harris did "wrong," and I'm not sure I fully believed any of them, but what if the election results have everything to do with the fact that too many of us don't read deeply any more and have lost the ability to pay careful attention and to think about someone besides ourselves?

The other wonderful thing about the arts--I'm only scratching the surface here; whole books are written about this--is that they are rebellious.  They push back.  They give voice to the voiceless.  They are critical and think deeply. They give us some of the deepest pleasures we experience. They keep another strand of history--cultural history, not the buffoonery that politics has become--alive. So rebel against the age of Trump by going to the art gallery or to a concert.

The other rebellious thing you can do is to play.  Again, it's without "value."  A cynic, Oscar Wilde said, is a man "who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."  We are living in a very cynical time.  But play Wordl or scrabble with your family.  Go down the snowy slopes with your kids.  Design your own quilt or knit mittens with deaths' heads or lady bugs on them.  You're not only pushing back at the deep cynicism of our time, but raising your own spirits.

My notebook tells me I'm not done with this topic, but I'll finish for today.  I began with kindness and I'll end with kindness.  Be kind to yourself.  You're going to need your energy for the longer haul, for the Canadian election, probably next fall, or for the midterms in the U.S. "Self-care," insofar as it suggests scented candles or bubble bath, is not all that effective.  Know and respect the limits of your energy or your tolerance.  But the resilience we often seek in "self-care" is found in community.  And your community--even just your small community of friends--need you.