Monthly Archives: September 2016

Our admirable foolish pride helps Trump

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I am not jumping up and down with joy because Hillary Clinton is the Democrat’s nominee for the presidency. However, you can bet I’m going to vote for her because Donald Trump is a direct threat to what freedoms and rights we do have at the moment. You’re a fool, delusional, or, astonishingly gullible, if you don’t think the man is a flat out racist and bigot and misogynist, if you’re going to vote for him, you are, to some degree, a bigot.

Now, there are friends of mine who, like me, love Bernie Sanders and wish to hell he’d won the nomination. Sanders has urged his followers to vote for Clinton, pointing out, correctly by the way, that now is not the time for a protest vote. Some, marching under the banner of admirable but misguided foolish pride, have rejected his advice. Some have even gone so far as to treat him as if he betrayed his own message. Rubbish. He realizes, like many of us do, that our country’s very ability to keep what shaky and unfairly distributed freedoms it currently has, is at risk. He realizes that the very freedoms we do have is what allowed his candidacy to succeed far more than anyone predicted (except Sanders) in the first place. He realizes that if Trump wins, these freedoms (and many others) that allowed his candidacy may not be around next time. Trump is already lining up freedom of the press in his cross-hairs.

When it comes to how a leader must treat the public, consider Trump: “[T]he better he understands how to treat them psychologically, the less the workers will distrust him, the more supporters he will win among these most energetic ranks of people. He himself has nothing in common with the mass; like every great man, he is all personality.”

By the way, Hitler said that, not Trump.*

Scared yet? I am. I’m also voting for Hillary Clinton.

*(The Rise & Fall of Third Reich, Simon & Schuster, 50th Anniversary Edition, pg. 48)

The power of kindness

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I am not beholden to that influential piece of propaganda that says kindness is weakness. Here’s one example of how wrong that propaganda is. The act of responding to anger and rage by walking away is an act of kindness because the person walking away, disengaging, if you will, is choosing not to inflame the moment any more than it already is. Yet the act of walking away is often considered weak. Rubbish. If it is an act of weakness to be kind, to walk away, then why is it so hard for so many to do exactly that?

If walking away was weakness doing it should be breeze, and it ain’t. As a human rights advocate, I’ve walked away, figuratively and literally, from some nasty, cruel and very often dishonest people, when a part of me fancied the idea of dribbling a few of them around the room and out the door.

 
There is a reasonable question to be asked. How is it, exactly, that walking away is, in fact, an act of kindness? If we equate the world we live in to the body and mind we live in, would it not be fair to say I am treating my body and mind with greater kindness by sparing both surges in stress and anxiety and anger? Are we not being kind to the world we live in when we choose not to add conflict? I certainly think so.

 
Kindness is just about as close to sacred as a human trait be, in large part  because you can’t have kindness without respect. Nearly every wound one human inflicts on another requires the absence of respect.  In fact, the depth of the wound one person inflicts on another, can often be measured by the degree to which the respect for the person is missing.