Personal Status

of Cahal Pech in San Ignacio, Belize.

There is a lot of speculation as to why this city was abandoned after thriving for 1000 years.

I’m looking at the quality of the construction–the dressing of the stones, how carefully and masterfully they are laid up–and I’m wondering about the way these beautiful spaces were used. I’m thinking about what energy, what organization, it must have taken to build the city, to continually add on to it, to maintain it.

It must have taken an enormous division of labor–meaning an enormous exploitation of, and ranking among, the people who lived here.

One possible explanation of what happened is that the people who were doing the labor, who embodied the craft, decided they no longer needed to be exploited in that way. Maybe they just decided to stop building, maintaining, and serving. And once they decided to stop being exploited, there was no way the city could continue.

I continue my walk around the plaza. I look at the monuments.

Why is that possible explanation–that a refusal by laborers and craftspeople, a social evolution toward equality, brought down this city–why is this explanation not offered up? Why is it left unsaid?

Why not suggest, to today’s visitors, the idea that when the whole edifice of a civilization depends on social division and exploitation, the civilization itself is vulnerable to the eventuality that people will decide they don’t need to put up with that social division and exploitation anymore, and absent a solution for it, will let the city and the civilization decay into ruins.

I walk under the arches, stand on a wall and look down at an open plaza.

Maybe there’s another explanation. Maybe the laborers and craftspeople and elites lived in this city, worshipped here, maintained it, and after 1000 years everybody got so good at building and maintaining it that they just didn’t need the ranking and the exploitation as much. Maybe the conscious experience of being one of the laborers and craftspeople who built, maintained, and served–maybe the character of that conscious experience changed.

And maybe the ruling elite, sensing the change in that experience, tried to ensure the social ranking nonetheless stayed more or less the same by giving the workers technical training, promised them the imminent return of manufacturing jobs, promised to maintain for them the secure feeling of a familiar social order in the face of advancing skills, knowledge, technology.

And maybe that didn’t work, couldn’t work. because the real glory of the civilization they had built wasn’t in the technology, wasn’t in the achievement of building the city, the glory was in human imagination and human ability to dream and to manifest dreams.

And the dreams of the people who had been workers were larger than the city itself, those dreams rose above figuring out better and faster ways to replicate and expand the existing order.

Retirement, career change, aging, call it what you will. I’m experiencing those changes, I’m feeling addled, or wiser. Call that what you will, too.

This morning, an article in the Washington Post. I so admire Deb Haaland, and I admire Joe Biden for appointing her. She’s sitting in long public meetings, taking testimony about the collective trauma suffered by indigenous people.

On this Saturday in June, Haaland rarely spoke for hours, listening deep into the afternoon, thanking everyone for sharing their stories of brutality and grief. The tour is essential to her department’s mission; healing a constant in her conversation.

“In a way, we’re also healing our country. That history is American history,” she said a few days later in her Interior Department office, down a wide hall lined with portraits of past secretaries, almost all of them White men, almost all curiously painted indoors and devoid of sunlight. “It affects every single American. It affects you whether you realize it or not.”

My own life experience with trauma taught me: The trauma is bad, but you know what’s worse? The denial that follows, the covering up. As in: It didn’t happen, wasn’t that bad, shouldn’t be dwelled upon. Move on.

Because that denial follows up the trauma with othering, as in: This is your problem, this what makes you different from us, this is what makes you less than. Keep it to yourself.

Which makes much of social life, and especially social media, an immersion in a toxic stew of inauthentic positivity.

As I experience these changes, this mid-60s time of life, more and more I’m OK with not being OK. I’m kind of settling into it. I’m learning that healing is not at all about moving on, or returning to “normal,” it’s about coming to terms with what has been and what is.

And what I see in the culture at large is mindless frenzy, the collectively enforced positivity locking all of our faces in the same hideous grin.

Last May I applied for admission to San Francisco State University’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program. I started in mid-August and completed my first four courses in mid-December.

In 15 weeks I wrote three short stories, a dozen poems, and an evening-length play.

Grades are posted, and I’ve established that I can be a top-notch Creative Writing student. I’m aware that isn’t the same as being a writer.

Along with passion and discipline, writing requires an individual voice, and that requires (for me, anyway) some deep digging into my own psyche—a search for self, for authenticity.

I spent the holiday with my kid and her mom, road tripping in California, and during that time I read The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate (just out late last year). I’ve been helped by much of what he has to say. In particular I’ve benefitted particularly from his framework posing a tension, in the course of childhood development, between attachment and authenticity—and how this plays out throughout our lives when the Self becomes lost or buried as we struggle to ensure our safety and survival.

I picked up Zoe from her day camp. She could have walked, but I was feeling kind of parental after taking her to a doctor’s appointment this morning, and so when I dropped her off, I agreed I’d be there at the end of her day.

On the way back home, she was showing me various fashion looks on her phone. I parked in the driveway, and we were having a nice conversation, but soon I noticed I had a work email and another email about planning an upcoming trip. Then I got antsy and felt I needed to get back to what I felt I needed to be doing.

She wasn’t feeling what I was feeling, and kept talking and not getting out the car, the way teenagers do, and finally I told her: Look, I have responsibilities, and you’re keeping me from getting to what I need to do.

As I was headed inside, I was musing about what Freud said, or might have said, about love and work being the cornerstone of our humanness, and it occurred to me: The man probably didn’t do much caregiving. And if he had, our whole understanding of human psychology might be different.

Because our humanness is really about taking care of babies and old people, and this applies to most of humanity over its entire history–with the notable exception of well-to-do men in Freud’s circumstances.

Caregiving, which has been the cornerstone of my own developing humanness, has its own satisfactions and frustrations, and these are different from Love (in the genital sense I think Freud was referring to, even if the quote itself is apocryphal).

And, as I found today, as I have found many times before, caregiving is antithetical to Work.

I’m ready to let 2021 go, with some sadness and some gratitude. It’s been a season of loss and a time of revelation.

I’m thinking first of all of January 6, 2021, a date which now signifies the attempted coup against democracy that started well before that date and is continuing.

The important revelation of January 6 is not about the former guy or his minions—the important revelation is that a majority of white Americans seek to end democracy and support an authoritarian dictatorship, as long as that dictatorship guarantees their white privilege.

I don’t buy it that these same white Americans are fooled or misinformed about the integrity of the 2020 election. I’ve spent a lifetime among white Americans, and I know that among them, Truth and belief are fungible. Group acceptance and belonging alone are sacred. Within the group, individuals use their mental energies to recast and retell their group narrative. They know the narrative is untrue. And they know the group dynamic rewards them for lying, because lying is a demonstration of loyalty to the group.

Lying is the basis of white identity, and the stronger the need for that identity, the more unhinged and extreme the lies become.

This lying has both inventiveness and continuity, so that it is entirely possible for white Americans to passionately advocate things that make no sense or are contradictory to each other—guns, abortion, social welfare, etc.—because the actual content of the purported beliefs don’t matter,. It is the group advocacy of the beliefs that matters. A thing can be argued today, and the opposite thing argued tomorrow, as long as the act of arguing serves the cohesiveness of white identity.

Again, this is my experience of living among white Americans. Those who support democracy, which is to say multiracial democracy, will do well to consider this dynamic of lying and belief. Our side should be focused on getting and maintaining democratic power. Once we crush the institutional and economic power of white supremacy, hearts and minds of white people will follow in time. But we shouldn’t waste time trying to make sense of their beliefs, or arguing with them.

I am grateful that 2021 kicked off with a powerful lesson regarding this dynamic, as professional agitators carefully organized the January 6 attempt based on an obvious lie, and the vast majority of Republican elected officials then endorsed the lie, and a substantial majority of white Americans, as we enter 2022, say they believe the lie and are ready to act violently to support the lie. Could we ask for a more clear revelation of what being white in America is all about?

On a personal level, I started 2021 in a different place from where I find myself now.

I was deeply in love, in a relationship then seven months old, and had few if any dissatisfactions in it. I thought the barriers to our intimacy and closeness—and they were clearly present—would be overcome as we slowly intertwined our lives.

Five months into the year that relationship ended suddenly, unexpectedly. I got thin and conflicting explanations as to why. I’m still working through it.

What I’m left with is an appreciation of how difficult it really is, in this time, to completely feel one’s feelings—in a word, to be authentic. Yet authenticity is what we need and crave. I started dating again, perhaps too soon, with this notion of authenticity in mind, both for myself and for my dating partners. I redoubled my introspection and my search for insight through meditation. After a while, I stopped looking at authenticity as a prerequisite and qualification in my search for a new partner, and began to look at authenticity instead as something precious, difficult to attain, and to be celebrated when it appears. And I have high hopes.

It’s a long, cold, and rainy solstice night. It’s late, and I’ve got the blinds open in case some passerby might notice our Christmas tree in the window and be warmed by the sight.

I love darkness. It is sacred and beautiful; it’s the fount of mystery and creativity and newness.

And confusion.

I’m thinking of the difference between acceptance and ambivalence.

Accepting the darkness is a path to peacefulness, to appreciation of who we are and what we are in this moment. It’s been a long season of loss, with more loss likely to come, and loss is part of life.

But we mustn’t be ambivalent. Everything isn’t all the same, and we have to give a damn and choose sides.

I’m thinking about Joe Manchin, and the Joe Manchin in all of us.

Because what I see in Joe Manchin is ambivalence, an un-commitment. He’s a politician; he reflects some gestalt of what he feels by communicating with his constituents.

Joe Manchin is in a position to tip the balance among greater forces, forces arising on an historical scale. None of us asked to have to choose, in this moment, in these dark months, between two paths, both of which are abrupt and consequential. The first path is toward multiracial democracy. The other path is toward authoritarianism, perhaps outright fascism.

Joe Manchin can’t make up his mind, but a lot of white Americans can’t make up their mind either. It’s dark, and they are confused.

The confusion, the ambivalence, among white people generally, in this moment, comes from what feels like an abrupt shift, a shift from the presumption that advancing social equality would feel easy, that it would be along the lines of opening doors, that it would be akin to having more people allowed in to the party, but with the music and refreshments staying pretty much the same.

It’s not working out that way.

Part of it is demographics: we are marching inexorably toward an America in which whites are a minority among other minorities. But more than that, globalization and technological change have already undermined the economic basis of whiteness—undermined the whole purpose of the privilege, the protection, the not-so-secret favoritism that white people enjoy. The parochialism of America’s native white culture is simply outmoded; it has been superseded by a cosmopolitan culture that leaves us, perhaps all of us, less sure of our place in the world.

In consequence, the music has changed, the culture has changed. Every aspect of white privilege, and especially white male privilege, is suddenly subject to harsh reappraisal, not because of the rise of radicalism or division, but because it no longer fits in to a changed world.

What might it take to maintain and restore white supremacy even in the face of the overwhelming forces undermining it? Republicans—from party leaders down to registered members—have long known what it would take, and have dedicated themselves to the task. When it was adequate to use the built-in anti-democratic bias of the system (the Senate and Electoral College, just for starters), main line Republicans were satisfied with that. As democracy itself has come to threaten white supremacy, Republicans—all Republicans—have just as happy to dispense with democracy and resort to gerrymandering, voter suppression, packing the Supreme Court, and now, tacit support for physical threats and attacks against their political adversaries. For Republicans of all stripes, white supremacy is the end that justifies the means.

Given the stark choice, Joe Manchin is firmly in the middle, and shifting with the breeze. When he meets with President Biden—formerly Barack Obama’s Vice President—Manchin is committed to democratic social uplift, but when he’s on Fox News the next day, he’s blowing the age-old racist dog whistle about becoming an “entitlement society.”

Although Manchin is no doubt keeping his coal investments in mind as he speaks, he’s not really so different from most white people. When it comes to the battle for multiracial democracy vs. a harsh and racist authoritarianism, he’s bipartisan and a moderate. We see the same equivocation in pundits like George Packer, David Brooks, and James Carville, all of who tut-tut the slide toward fascism, but also feel impelled to trash “wokeness.” They may want their democracy, but they want their white privilege too.

Which brings me to the ambivalence I perceive within my own tribe.

The now-stymied Build Back Better bill represents, to a significant degree, the values and aims for which I’ve long advocated: Free universal preschool. Cut child poverty. Expand access to health care. Most of all, push technology and economic development forward as fast as we can—to alleviate suffering, achieve more equity, and save the planet.

The same goes for the Freedom to Vote Act, and even most aspects of Biden’s foreign policy, including the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Sure, there have been some missteps, and some compromises I didn’t see the need for, but the direction has been very much where I’ve long thought the country should go.

Yet I’m feeling a lack of energy, an ambivalence, among friends and allies. It concerns me. Not just because there is an urgent need to get behind the Democratic Party and try to keep the House and Senate next year. There is such a need.

It’s that I’m feeling that many of us aren’t deeply examining the changes before us and our gut reactions to those changes.

The changes of globalization, technological advancement, and social equity go hand-in-hand. What unfolds is all of a piece, and that whole is, in its very nature, disruptive and confusing. And when we experienced our own resistance to those changes, and look at that resistance, we often see that we fear a loss of our own privilege, including our security that we’ll keep on living in the old ways that are familiar to us. Sometimes, in our professional or political work, we experience challenges that are embarrassing and threatening to our egos.

I’m feeling that this discomfort with rapid change translates into a less-than-wholehearted support for the progressive initiatives Biden and the Democratic Party have on the table now, today. We should challenge ourselves to better understand the scope and impact of those initiatives. Moreover, we must understand that what is being put forward responds, in large part, to the needs and demands of a younger, ethnically diverse majority—a majority that disrupts everything we thought we knew since the time we’ve grown up.

We can embrace the loss of the old way of doing things and revel in the darkness, which gives birth to the new. We can drop our ambivalence, which arises from defensiveness, and commit to a practice of helping.

A month ago, I suffered a serious setback in my personal life, as a year-long relationship came to an abrupt and unexpected end.

Today, on a morning walk, my heart still heavy with grief, I passed this lovely anachronism, and it set me to thinking more broadly about defeat, and loss.

This was the 1984 election. After the 1980 debacle, many of us hadn’t accepted “there is no alternative” to Reaganism and Thatcherism. We held out hope that white working-class people, led by women, would return to the Democratic fold and re-establish the New Deal consensus that had been fractured by the Vietnam war and the social upheaval of the 60s.

The election results crushed those hopes, as the GOP’s tax cuts and deficit spending powered a well-timed economic boom, and whites of all classes responded enthusiastically to the President’s anti-intellectualism and race baiting.

Time goes in only one direction. As time does its awful work, we can be helped, at least a little, if we open to the present moment, and feel the humor that resides in what is. Relaxing the mind, we might come to awareness of how little we know about what comes next.

Amongst progressives, most of us were completely wrong, back in 1984, about how our country might move forward. We couldn’t foresee the halting progress under Clinton nor the deep cynicism and criminality under Bush II. But most of all, we couldn’t foresee the flowering of freedom as one barrier after another came down—nor the deliberate organization of the present fascist movement in response to that freedom.

The other night I got together with my friend and co-parent Melanie Mintz, and we watched Saturday Night Fever (1977). We thought we’d vet it before offering it as entertainment for our 12-year-old daughter. Watching scene after scene, we howled with laughter at how inappropriate that would be. After 34 years, we’d forgotten almost everything that’s in the movie, except the dancing. The stereotypes. The racism. The debasement of the female characters. The darkness and cruelty and hopelessness in every aspect of the characters’ lives.

All that didn’t seem so extraordinary or so awful when the movie first came out. Now it does, and I am so happy and amazed to look at the change.

We didn’t get what we wanted in the 1984 election, and we were at a loss about how to move our national politics forward. But the country did move forward—stunningly, in retrospect—toward a kinder and more decent society, and the politics have moved and continue to move with it.

I’m still plenty scared by the fascists trying to undermine democracy. And I’m still really sad about losing that relationship. But I’m buoyed by my renewed awareness of how waves of change carry us onward—despite grief, despite loss, and despite hope.