Author: reillymgray

While the majority of Americans are struggling to make ends meet in the current economy with one in five children living in households described as food insecure, the President is altering NOAA weather maps with a sharpie to cover his misstatements.  The point is a balanced economy is more important than covering a simple mistake that nobody cared about.

According to Steven Brill in his recent book Tailspin (2018), America depends on the “…balance between the energizing inequality of achievement in a competitive economy and the liberating, conmmunity-binding equality of power promised by democracy.”  The problem is the former has co-opted the government and implemented legislation that favors themselves at the expense of the latter.  They pursue their personal fortunes without regulation or accountability.  Their focus is on short term gains and profits for shareholders which includes reducing labor costs to bare mininums.

Our democracy is meant to balance the power of all citizens, but this class of “overachievers” as Brill calls them has taken over our economy through aggressive deep-pocketed lobbying to buy and manipulate our government in their favor.  Guess what?  It is not immigrants or minorities or poor people taking your money or good-paying jobs!  It’s these “overachievers” who are only interested in short-term investment to increase their personal wealth!  They are not investing in infrastructure and the labor needed to maintain it.  They are the destructors of American Exceptionalism.  American Exceptionalism is founded in a strong and prosperous middle class.

Without food workers, infrastructure workers, transportation workers, healthcare workers, educators, fire, police, EMTs and the military, just to name a few of the hard working occupations that make America great, there would be nothing for the “overachievers” to rob and exploit!  They are NOT more deserving than the rest of us.  We need campaign finance regulation and an end to lobbyists.  All are required to be represented, not just the powerful few!

There have been 255 mass shootings in the United States so far this year (August 2019).  It is an epidemic!  Most mass shooters are young, white men.  But according to Ramani Durvasula, Ph.D. professor of psychology California State University, Los Angles in Insecurity, Narcissism and the Culture of Victimhood, (psychologytoday.com 8/6/2019), there are other commonalities of mass shooters including “…anger, resentment, their victimhood, entitlement, the vilification of the ‘other,’ contempt, alienation, disenchantment, the inability to manage or appropriately articulate their feelings, frustration, and utter rage.”

The author continues that we are experiencing “…scourges of narcissism.”  She calls it a “…covert, vulnerable narcissism… that is less showy and grandiose, and more sullen and resentful.”   She further states that “These are men who are contemptuous of working in jobs they perceive as being beneath them, who are prone to hostile sexism, who spend hours on laptops and devices surfing the back alleys of hate, who are incapable of tolerating frustration, disappointment, or responsibility, who deride intimacy, who bristle at the ideas of having to be adults, but expect the perks of adulthood.”

We live in a culture of unrealistic examples of adult manhood that are portrayed on TV, in movies, video games, novels and graphic novels.  Additionally, we live in a culture where working class jobs are devalued.  So these young men are faced with not being able to live up to these unrealistic examples of adult manhood or working at jobs that are undervalued by the culture.  The larger culture makes it impossible for them to succeed and the micro culture is not teaching them the true meaning of a real and productive life.

Durvasula states that as a culture we need to teach and enforce “…teaching children self-regulation, getting kids off devices, adults modeling healthy communication, building empathy, fostering discussions about meaning and purpose, integrating emotional awareness and self-regulation into K-12 curricula, de-stigmatizing mental health services, ceasing the glamorization of violence and dominance, and moderating a media environment that glorifies incivility and polarizing discourse.”

We need to return to civility and to value all people in order to stop creating mass shooters!

How does this happen? Apparently, some teenage boys and young men are vulnerable to racist ideology. According to author and former white supremacist Christian Picciolini, white supremacists groups offer these impressionable and disconnected young people identity, community and purpose. Somehow this was not provided by family, school, community and church.

Single parent families and parents forced to work extended hours or more than one job to make ends meet, huge schools and overcrowded classrooms, increased tendencies to engage in individual activities rather than group activities and decreased church attendance, have left huge gaps in some young people’s sense of identity, community and purpose. Bullying, exclusion from some groups and social skills deficits may also be factors.

What can we do? This is a huge question that requires putting people before money and investing in family. At this time, I don’t have any specific solutions, but I know that initially it will require stating loudly that there is no place in the United States of America for racism and it needs to start at the top!

America has been multicultural from day one.  Native, indigenous people have populated the Americas for 10,000 years.  The first European explorers included people of African descent and African conquistadors who worked the land side by side with their white European counterparts to develop permanent living conditions in this new land.

The first British colonists would not have survived without the help of the Powhatan tribe for food and the Africans enslaved to work the tobacco fields.  Tobacco was the cash crop that was essential to the survival of the colony.

Then slavery became the building block of American economic success.  According to How Slavery Became America’s First Big Business by P.D. Lockhart (8/16/19 vox.com),  “The profits from cotton propelled the US into a position as one of the leading economies in the world.”  The American economy was built on the backs of slaves for 250 years until it ended with the American Civil War.  Then it took another 100 years for civil rights to be legislated.

America has always been ethnically and culturally pluralistic, even though some believe that America should be a single homogenized culture, it has never ever been.  Sadly, America’s white population’s success was based on exploitation.  According to vocabulary.com, “…an exploiter is a user, someone who takes advantage of other people or things for their own gain.  Being an exploiter is selfish and unethical, to exploit someone is to use them in a way that’s wrong, like an employer who pays low wages but demands long hours.”

I believed that our society had evolved socially and morally in regards to ethnicity, culture and exploitation as a result of time, study and civil rights laws.  However, it is difficult for some to relinquish their white privilege.  We live in an ever shrinking world in which we are becoming evermore interdependent.  We need to learn how to work together for the betterment of the world.  We need to stop exploiting others like the immigrant food workers in America and the Pacific Rim garment workers who are both greatly underpaid and forced to work under horrid conditions.  And we need to protect the rights of all American citizens regardless of their heritage and all those who work in our country.

Now we have a white nationalist president who has given permission for those with racist inclinations to act out in dangerous and deadly ways.  True knowledge of our national beginnings needs to be known by all.  America is and always has been a multicultural nation!

Russia wants us divided!  A divided America is weakened leaving Russia to wield greater power in the world, a world that would be ruled by ruthless oligarchs.  They find our divisions online and then magnify them to the nth degree fueling greater division causing each side to dig in deeper and become highly susceptible to fake memes that deride the other.

The extent of this created division became flagrantly apparent when a reader sent me a Wikipedia link, with no other discussion, to “antifa” (an extreme left group) in response to my blog called “Why do Conservatives Hate Liberals?”  That would be like me saying that all conservatives are like Timothy McVeigh or David Duke!  This response leaves no middle ground for productive discourse.  Pushing perceptions of all liberals and all conservatives to the radical ends offers no hope of resolution and compromise.

According to Hidden Tribes by More in Common, the far left is made up of about 8% of Americans while the far right is about 6%.  However, “…a less ridged still dogmatic right…” make up about 19%.  That leaves the moderates at about 67% which Hidden Tribes refers to as the “exhausted majority.”  So the reader mentioned above is grouping 67% of Americans with the radical left 8%.

Conservative media is perpetuating this binary thinking for those on the right.  They’re led to believe you’re either a conservative like them or a left-wing violent radical.  And anything that counters this belief is fake news created by the liberal media and the deep state.  The sixty-seven percent are waiting to have reality-based discussions.  We are not radical or violent.  We are just stuck in the middle between extremist opposing views.  The good news is that between anarchy (left) and tyranny (right) is democracy.  Democracy requires that we come together and stop pointing to the small extreme minorities on either end of the political spectrum as excuses for not engaging in rational discourse.  We need to embrace and save our democracy from Russian intervention.  We do this by working together!  Meet in the middle.  We have more in common than we are led to believe in these divisive times.  Let’s talk!

Trump’s character on “The Apprentice” does not reflect who he really is.  He is not some clever businessman, he’s a spoiled rich kid who inherited a lot of money.  He wasted his time and his family’s money as he seemingly got nothing from his Ivy League education (his “fixer” worked to keep his transcripts secret).  It is documented that he lost his fortune several times and his father bailed him out at every turn.  Trump declared bankruptcy six times.  Some think this is a smart business technique, but it is shown that the bankruptcies were caused my impulsivity and overpaying.  He was not a good deal maker.  In order to keep his head above water, he stiffed contractors and used the courts to delay or deny restitution.  He lacks decency, morality and integrity.

Yet, he has adorning fans who think he’s the best president ever.  They cite tax cuts, deregulation, tariffs, and the appointment of conservative judges as evidence.  They believe the Mueller report is a hoax and accept the idea of a deep state undermining Trump’s presidency.  They dress up in Trump gear and go to rallies chanting in unison with their fellow true believers.  Their minds are made up and they refuse to discuss anything slightly contradictory to their beliefs.

They can’t see the threats to democracy, the rule of law and our standing in the world.  They can’t see the ineptness, the dismantling of expertise in government and the dangerous impulsivity.  They welcome authoritarianism and are blind to its unAmerican nature.  They are fearful of a changing America and want an authoritarian father-figure to protect or restore their way of life.

Trump fans seemingly only consume news that supports their views whether these are based in fact or not.  They are caught up in an information bubble or echo chamber that does not allow in new or correcting facts.  I am baffled by this blind allegiance.  What supporters see as plain talking, I see as word salad meant to distract attention from the truth.  The truth of inexperience, inability and wrongdoing.  We have become a laughing stock in the liberal democracy world and a useful idiot in the authoritarian world.

We need to come together and invest in America.  We need to invest in infrastructure, healthcare, education and innovation to maintain our number one standing in the world.  Divided we fall, united we rise!  If we’re filled with fear and hatred of others, we are diminished and unable to reach our full potential.  This president isn’t as great as you think, and I hope is not as bad and dangerous as I think.  Fact check and search for the truth.  Our status and survival depends on an informed citizenry.

The term Emotional Intelligence (A.K.A EQ-Emotional Quotient) was created by researchers Peter Salavoy and John Mayer, and then popularized by Daniel Goleman in his 1996 book called Emotional Intelligence.   EQ means being aware that emotions can drive behavior and impact people (positively and negatively), and learning how to manage those emotions, both our own and others.  EQ is more important than we may realize.  According to Harvard Business School, research has determined that EQ counts twice as much as IQ and technical skills combined in determining who will be successful.

I posit that the decline of emotional intelligence in the United States is evidenced in our current extreme political divisions.  Did this decline start in the populous or with today’s cultural and political influencers?  At times our airwaves seem to be filled by adults who were emotionally damaged children that have not done the self-work needed to be a decent, productive (rather than destructive) human being in our precious democracy.  They seem to be upset that all their emotional needs were not met as children and their answer to this emotional pain is to punish or criticize everyone else.  How juvenile, grow up, be a man or woman!  See a therapist, do the work.  You’re need to blame someone else for your shortcomings is destructive to our country.  I jotted down a list of about 10 influencers that in my mind fit this description.  One early influencer of this decline has passed, one has not been heard from in awhile, but the rest are heard from nearly daily.  I don’t think it is proper for me to lists them here, because I am not a professional psychologist/psychiatrist and have not met any of them personally.

Historian Jon Meacham said on MSNBC that “…politicians are often mirrors of who we are rather than the molders.”  I believe that low EQ is present in the populace, but it is being magnified and perpetuated by the politicians.  The politicians have chosen to be leaders, they need to step up and lead not follow.    Sadly, they have lowered their personal EQ in order to get elected as division and tribalism have become the new norm.  When the populace sees our leaders act in low EQ ways, their low EQ behavior is normalized.  A successful democracy requires a high level of emotional intelligence and must start at the top.  Let’s vote for candidates that exhibit decency and integrity!!!  Let’s raise our national EQ!

You may or may not have seen shirts and signs adorned with the letter Q at Trump rallies or counter-protests.  Apparently, those displaying Q want us to know that they are in possession of secret knowledge.  Q is short for QAnon which according to Wikipedia “…is a far-right conspiracy theory social media platform detailing a supposed secret plot by an alleged ‘deep state’ against U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters.”  It actually “…began with an October 2017 post on the anonymous imageboard 4chan by someone using the tripcode Q claiming to have access to classified information involving the Trump administration and its opponents in the United States.”  Q “…has falsely accused numerous liberal Hollywood actors, politicians, and high-raniking officials of engaging in an international child sex trafficking ring, and has claimed that Donald Trump feigned collusion with Russians in order to enlist Robert Mueller to join him in exposing the ring, and preventing a coup d’etat by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and George Soros.”  The letter “…Q is a reference to top-secret Q clearance.”

Wikipedia continues, “The conspiracy theory, mainly disseminated by supporters of President Trump under the names The Storm and The Great Awakening, has been characterized as ‘baseless’, ‘unhinged’ and ‘evidence-free.’  Its proponents have been called ‘a deranged conspiracy cult’ and ‘some of the Internets most outré Trump fans.”

Q conspiracy theorists cannot be reasoned with.  They have accepted lies as facts without researching sources or fact checking.  Some experts have attributed the appeal of QAnon to the same factors as that of religious cults.  Followers are enticed by the ever deepening secret knowledge and move further and further away from reality and social connections.

Some of the QAnon claims include, Pizzagate, Hillary Clinton’s imminent arrest, Kim Jong-un is a puppet ruler installed by the CIA, Debbie Wasserman Schultz hired a MS-13 gang member to murder Seth Rich, Angela Merkel is the granddaughter of Adolf Hitler,  mass shootings in the U.S. are organized by the cabal (of Hollywood elites and Jewish people), and the Rothschild family are the leaders of a satanic cult.  Some QAnon related incidents include the Hoover Dam incident, QDrops, the targeting of Michael Avenatti, the harassment of Jim Acosta, and the Grass Valley Charter School fundraiser.

QAnon has about 200,000 adherents and could be considered fringe, but their claims can be heard in conservative news sources and QAnon representatives have been invited to the Whitehouse.  Also, Trump himself has repeatedly claimed that Hillary Clinton is a criminal, that Barack Obama wired-tapped Trump tower and that the “deep state” is out to get him.

Ironically, some believe the first Q post was a prank to fuel reaction and it turned into a cult in which some are becoming wealthy selling Q merchandise to patsies.  What is more disturbing is our conspiracy loving President’s use of these QAnon lies.  The search for truth is a never ending endeavor!

The religious-right overwhelmingly supports the current administration and is willing to overlook the multitude of inappropriate behaviors and the ineptitude presented by this president.  Most are supportive because conservative judges are being appointed, reproductive rights are being challenged and immigrants are being threatened, removed, detained and separated from their families.  Many are accepting of a straight, white, male dominated culture that is blind to the human, civil and equal rights that is at the heart of our American democracy, and many are anti-intellectual science deniers.  These factors preclude the rational discussion needed to see things as they really are.

Bobby Azarian Ph.D. writes in Mind In The Machine:  How Religious Fundamentalism Hijacks the Brain,  (Posted Oct 10, 2018 on psychologytoday.com) that “We also know that in the United States, Christian fundamentalism is linked to science denial. Since science is nothing more than a method of determining truth using empirical measurement and hypothesis testing, denial of science equates to the denial of objective truth and tangible evidence. In other words, the denial of reality. Not only does fundamentalism promote delusional thinking, it also discourages followers from exposing themselves to any different ideas, which acts to protect the delusions that are essential to the ideology.”

Some religious moderates and those on the religious-left have left organized religion due to the negative views of Christianity created by the right.  The narrow and literal interpretations of the scriptures and the blind adherence to doctrine and dogma with complete disregard for advancements in human knowledge have made Christianity seem intolerant, antiquated and out of touch with real life.  Is this religious divide the basis of tribalism?  I don’t know, but I think its a factor.

There are thousands of Christian denominations and they all don’t believe the same things.  In Methodism, John Wesley created a quadrilateral illustration to help interpret theology.  It included using scripture, tradition, reason and experience to internalize our beliefs.  This allows for new knowledge and understanding.

Religious science deniers with narrow social definitions have coopted our government.  We were once at the forefront of scientific advancement and in the protection of human rights on the world scale.  Now we are moving backwards and we are divided into globalists and the isolationists.  And right now the isolationists are winning.  It seems that this divide may have its roots in religious tribalism.  What do you think?

While I’ve been living my life over the last 60 years or so, our country has been dividing in to two distinct camps fueled by the expanse of cable TV and social media.  During my early life most everyone I knew was pretty much on the same page.  My first knowledge of this dichotomy was Al Franken’s book Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and a Tea Party reveler at my job.  I wasn’t a big follower of politics during this time, but several of the claims made by the reveler were highly contradictory to my worldview.  Now that this divide is part of my awareness, I am struggling to understand it.

In The Second Mountain:  The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks (Random Books, NY 2019), the author outlines the causes behind this move toward tribalism.  Brooks posits, that since the 60s, Americans have adopted a “…hyper-individualistic way of life,” resulting in a “….a great disembedding” from community, a loss of purpose, a sense of “…moral directionlessness”  which together has caused “…common life to decay.”  People are leaving “…tight communities with prescribed social norms.”  They are “living further apart from one another – socially, emotionally and physically.”

According to Brooks, this has all resulted in a loneliness crisis characterized by “general detachment” and being “unaffiliated” which has taken a “…psychological, social and moral toll.”  After loneliness comes distrust as trust in reciprocity with neighbors disappears and faith in the institutions of public life becomes nonexistent.  Next is the crisis of meaning where there is “…no common moral order” and where they have lost “faith in faith.”  “People do not feel they are part of some larger story that they can believe in and dedicate their lives to.”  These three crises have given rise to tribalism.

The author concludes that “Individualism taken too, far, leads to tribalism.”  So this is where we are now.  What can we do to heal as a nation?  How can we find a common purpose?  Who are we?  We can’t determine who “we” are if we are in a constant state of “us vs them.”  People who are individually searching for meaning are easily drawn to world-views that counter the common good.  I will delve further into this topic for next week as it seems a bit overwhelming at this moment.  Comments are welcomed.