How can we
What does it take?
How much evidence?

It’s not a matter of wagering, well, he he will or he won’t really go through with it

A free people in a free land automatically fire politicians who
try to steal elections
lie about having elections stolen from them
lie about everything over and over again
threaten to use the Department of Justice to go after political foes
try to use federal funds to bribe another nation’s leaders to dig up dirt on political rivals
rage on about immigrants
repeat mean-spirited and disproven lies about immigrants
A free people in a free land must pay a modicum of attention and choose the adequately-plausible over the fantastical
Otherwise they will find themselves
Stuck in the cruel mud
of leaders who are no longer incentivized to govern well for the whole nation because soon they will have make their case to the people and accept the people’s decision about renewing their contract or not;
but instead,
a leadership that is mostly in the business of oppressing, manipulating, deceiving, and — when push comes to shove — destroying the finances and/or reputations, jailing, and/or outright terminating those organizations and citizens who don’t take the hint that this now a land where you get ahead by serving and submitting to the criminals who maintain and abuse power by routinely committing crimes against their own citizens.

It’s not a matter of wagering, well he will or he won’t really go through with it

if you keep giving the keys of the kingdom to a man who continues to attack the legitimacy of our shared reality and the norms, laws, and standards of our shared democracy,

if you continue to give the keys of the kingdom to that man even after he has managed to silence those within his own party who would speak the truth about what he is doing, as he elevates those who find ways to sugarcoat or outright echo his lies

at some point

he, or someone who has floated into power on his coattails and with his ethos, will really go through with it

That’s why
a free people in a free nation
give an automatic
“Go home and don’t come back” card
to people
who behave
like
Donald Trump
has behaved
and
is behaving
even now

Please wake up, America.
I know it is hard.
I know you are sleepy and grumpy
And you don’t think the government is doing enough for you you you you always you

The truth is there are structural problems
Our representative democracy is not very responsive to the will of the people
It needs work
But fixing a representative democracy requires work, coordination, communication, honesty
A good first step could be together watching this man do and say the things he has said and done
and together
drawing the obvious conclusions:

Donald Trump should not be given more power,
and those who have found a way to make peace with and coddle and raise up him — complete with all he has brought us and continues to bring us: his anti-democratic and mean-spirited lies; his attacks on the peaceful, democratic transfer of power; his rule and dishonest rhetoric; his open abuser-makes-his-way-down-victims-shirt-in-front-of-everyone-to-test-how-far-he-can-go-today-and-get-everyone-ready-for-how-far-he-will-go-tomorrow hints about staying in power forever, fixing elections, and using the federal government to persecute political and media foes —
should be told

NO

THAT DOES NOT WORK HERE!

What works here are protecting those values without which none of our worldviews are meaningful to any of us:
Aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing

What works here is a government of good-will and integrity that governs for all the people, because in a representative government we all rise or fail together — we commit to working with each other and our leadership to find a way forward for everyone. This is not weakness or giving in to “bad people”. This is another fundamental spiritual insight: the Love without which nothing is Okay and with which everything is Okay: That spiritual Love chooses everyone.

We don’t have to agree with everybody on everything; it is enough to agree that our government should remain responsive to the will of the people so that we can together find win-wins: a way forward together.

I will not impose my hippie-dippie

“The Truth is prior to all human ideas and feelings; although some ideas and feelings do a better job of orientating humans within the Love that shines through everything; and because we humans have a tendency to confuse our ideas and feelings about the Truth for the Truth, we should err on the side of minimal dogmatism, and take Jesus at his word when said what the greatest commandment was: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” To my mind, that is a recipe for a mystical religion, based on the never-ending work of trying to stand up better and better within oneself; of trying over and over again to keep yourself centered not on your ideas and feelings — which of course of necessity must translate and therefore to some degree lie about the Love that chooses everyone –, but on that Love Itself; of working every moment to revise the poetry of living the Love that is prior to human feeling, thinking, and acting (that’s why living that Love has to be poetry and not an exact 1:1 science: We humans will not capture the Absolute with our finite tools of thinking, feeling, and acting; and pretending we can is the cause of no end of trouble, of cruelty, of hard hearts, of ready self-satisfied lies, of junk junk the same old boring junk).”

But please don’t impose your notions on me. They aren’t as true as you think they are. And even if they are, in practice they have to be interpreted by mere humans.

We share the universal values. We share the sense that we must think, feel, and act aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind and joyfully sharing. We share the knowledge that to the sense we fail to think/feel/act in this way, we will not make sense to ourselves and cannot travel with ourselves to our own thoughts and actions. And from this shared knowledge, we can all together see that forcing ideas onto feelings of certainty while purposely muddying our thought so as to not have to notice that we are not able to understand, believe in, or even care about these forced idea-feeling pairs that we desperately demand keep us forever safe and forever loved: Well, we can all see that that process amounts to clutching more and more tightly onto notions that mean less and less to us.

Anyway,

We share the universal values.

And we share the sense that a human life can only mean anything to any of us to the degree that that life is centered on and flows off of the spiritual Love that alone Knows what is really going on, what is really preferable, and how we can move with Reality towards the True Good.

And we share the sense that such a Love — well, sometimes we think we find it within and shining through all things, and sometimes we aren’t so sure we find anything but rags of desperate hopes and fears; but always we know that except to the degree we connect our feeling/thinking/acting with such a Love, they are foreign, boring, meaningless, and dead to us; always we know that we can only live in our own lives to the degree we are centered on the Love that choose everyone —

Anyway, what I was saying was that we all share the sense that we need a spiritual Love, but also that we are not a spiritual Love; we are people: we can we hope and work to realize span the spiritual and the mundane; but our ideas and feelings are not Absolute, and making Gods out of our own ideas and feelings is a spiritual, emotional, mental, and practical mistake.

We share the universal values. We share the fundamental sense of a need for a Love that choose everyone and has a place for everyone and helps everyone and does not ever ever tell anyone they aren’t good enough they can get lost they can go to hell. And we share the fundamental humility of knowing that we are not going to be perfect vessels for that Love, even as we know we must work every moment to become better vessels of that Love: we know that that work is the direction of more internal coherency, more internal meaning, more of a starting place from which we can meaningfully steer and travel with our own feeling, thinking and acting.

We share enough common ground to share a government of by and for the people.

But this government needs the people to anchor it in the rules, norms, laws, practices, and standards that make representative government possible: Limits on individual powers, honesty and clarity in debate, openness in government, procedures to deter and limit corruption, regular fair and universally acknowledged elections, freedom of speech and freedom from persecution from the government (I’m talking about real persecution here, not somebody said something that hurt somebody’s feelings or made things kind of awkward; I’m talking about somebody used their power to destroy the fortunes, safety, and peace of those who criticized them).

A liberal democratic republican government is a spiritual good because its public virtues align well with the private virtues we humans need to be meaningful to ourselves. This form of government protects and rewards aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing thinking, feeling, and acting. It supports governing well for all. It supports seeking win-wins. The opposite of a liberal democratic republican government is a tyranny. In a tyranny the government is committed to crime and so to succeed in public life, one must participate in or at least be complicit in the big lie that the fearless leader(s) can do no wrong, as well as the many related lies and crimes that keep the great master(s) in charge of the government they mismanage (because they aren’t even trying to govern well in the sense of finding what’s best for the governed and creating a country where people can thrive) and the government resources they abuse (funneling them, as they must to maintain forever-power, to themselves and their cronies).

There’s no perfection. No government is perfect. But we’re lucky to still have enough power over our government to have a say in what happens here and now. I say let’s use it: Say No, to Donald Trump and those who would put him and his criminal intent in charge of our shared government; and work together to educate ourselves about how we can best organize ourselves and our government better — not make it perfect, but make it more responsive to the will of the people while also making us all better stewards of our government through learning, thinking, sharing, working together.

It is not too late.

It would be good to seize this moment.

Signed,

The same old flunkies
Yeah they never got it right
Yeah they fall apart all over the place
But still
they are humans
creatures of the Light
even them
even these tired fools
who would sign this bold declaration
even they should be loved
and respected
and remembered
in prayers that twinkle like the stars over the water the shakes in the breeze

Editor: BW
Production: AW
Copyright: AMW