Nelson Mandela, Racism, Rage, Brexit, Donald Trump & Having Genuine Goodness WIN

Today is International Mandela Day.  Hold that thought for a bit.

This week we discover that 65% of people who voted for Britain to leave the European Union either didn’t realize the vote was “serious” or, having come down from their emotional state, want a second vote so they can say Stay.  What’s with all the rage?   I call it being Drunk on Dudgeon.  Just like drunk on alcohol variety, if you are drunk on dudgeon, you are not capable of making decisions in YOUR long-term, real best interest.  You are so overwrought (drunk) on how badly you’ve been treated by [someone, some group of people, some organization or just The World in general], that you are supremely easy to manipulate in ways that shoot you in the head [really harm YOU in a serious way] and give someone else power.  Or that give you a short-term feeling of power at the expense of actually having power.  That last is really important: feeling something isn’t the same as having that something be actual reality.

In the British case, a wide swath of English working-class folks, especially “white” English, believed the nonsense of Boris Johnson and others who just flat out lied with the intention of making a bid for Prime Minister/power themselves [the manipulation] because they were angry about their declining economic prospects and subsequent economic safety and power.  And those dingbats in Brussels were acting imperious and not compromising or respectful.  All the details are irrelevant.  People felt a loss of power and turned to the short-term pumping up that rage gives you in place of cold, strategic, implacable planning.  I know that when you “feel” powerless [it’s in quotes for a reason; voting strategically gives you real power], rage is the easiest neural pathway to take.  I know.  But it is also exactly – exactly – equivalent to destroying your goals and dreams.  Why wait for your Nemesis to do it?  Do it to yourself. 

Aristotle said that you can be angry – but make sure that you are angry at the right time, in the right way, with the right person.  The Brexit voters who were manipulated by (really, really easily-checked) lies were not Done To By The Man.  They did it to themselves, by letting themselves get Drunk on Dudgeon.

In the Star Trek universe, a wonderful quote by an actual human whose name I’ve forgotten has been mis-attributed to the Klingons.  Revenge is a dish best served cold.  That means: don’t get Drunk on Dudgeon!  Think, cold and calm and analytical.  Do ONLY what actually advances your long-term agenda, not your short-term emotions. 

This is a universal human problem.  Every culture on every continent, of every skin color and sex has this same problem because it happens in the human brain.

In the USA right now,  groups of people are squaring off with each other, all Drunk on Dudgeon.  Socially conservative white working class Americans, along with quite a few black working class folks, have settled on racist demagogue Donald Trump as the “alcohol” to get drunk on.  Some Black Lives Matter activists have responded to a string on highly-publicized police killings of black men and women to use hateful rhetoric against all police officers, demonizing all white cops as killer racists.  It is completely predictable that demonizing rhetoric will resonate in a mentally-unhinged black military veteran (or two) who will get Drunk on Dudgeon in their turn and become mass killers of well-intentioned, innocent police officers.  There are legitimate grievances all around, as President Obama has so eloquently reminded us.

He also reminds us, so beautifully, and without using my exact verbiage, that becoming Drunk on Dudgeon instead of being strategic does not serve the long-term best interests of any genuinely harmed parties.  Unstrategic hate and rage only burns the world down.  It has never, in all ten thousand years of human civilization, led to justice.     

In my book, Take Back Your Lost Heart, I analyzed why the Montgomery Bus Boycott was so successful.  Remember: successful.  The keys were going after the strategic issue and targeting the bus company’s revenues; being strategic and keeping tempers cold [remember the Klingons] so that the boycott had a lot of allies among business owners, among progressive and humanistic white civilians and even among some police.  Polarizing the city exclusively along color lines didn’t happen.  A significant percentage of the cars picking up non-bus-riding black folks needing to get to work were white-driven.  Good was battling Evil all right, but the organizers were not stupid enough to make every white person in town their enemy by labeling them as such.  THAT, my friends, is why they won. 

Contrast that with screaming and taking over the podium so that the thousands of people of all colors who came to hear a candidate talk can’t do so…. A super-leftist candidate at that.  Sound strategic to you?

Giving up Drunk on Dudgeon and getting very, very cool always wins.  Always.  Nelson Mandela, whose birthday we celebrate today, had a cold and analytical soul.  He could take his righteous rage and stop it dead, then channel it into cold, analytical thinking.  When things were at their worst, there was little he could do but endure. His last 12 years in prison, though, he played the white power structure like a Stradivarius violin.  He never lumped his jailers (mostly working-class, politically-powerless guys) in the same bag as the rich pukes who ran the country. His narrow-thinking, Drunk on Dudgeon fellow prisoners were appalled, and criticized him as a “collaborator” but he was right and they were stupid.  The jailers (cops), as bad as some of them were, were just products of the same crazy system as the thousands of black men and women killed by the security services or local cops.  And some of them were decent guys stuck in a bad situation.  

So, this Mandela Day, let’s ALL start thinking like Madiba.  Strategic.  Cool.  Calculating.  And when someone of any color, of any sex, on any issue tries to play us like a Strad, manipulating our emotions, let’s stop, take a deep breath and think about the bigger picture, the long-term real goals and really, clearly think it all through, as both President Obama and Mr. Nelson Mandela remind us to.  If Madiba could take down apartheid with cool, analytical, strategic thinking, why on earth are we using stupid confrontational tactics (on all sides) and expecting to win? 

Giving up Drunk on Dudgeon is hard.  It’s hard to give up the easy path.  But we’re not in this to go down the stupid, easy path.  We can represent the finest behavior humanity is capable of – and the smartest.  Like the end of apartheid, like the bus boycott, we good people of this country and this world will win, but only if we are cool, analytical, strategic.  The best way to honor Nelson Mandela today, and every day, is to emulate his smarts, his courage and his violin-playing.  He won.  When the urge to spew self-righteous anger and hate starts getting too much to hold back, remember – HE WON.

We will, too.  I have faith.  

Tubman's Glory is Our Hour of Glory as Well

 I admit it, when the news first broke about Harriet Tubman being chosen for the new $20 bill, I was disappointed.  For about 30 seconds, I mourned the loss by my top choice from the short-list.  Eleanor Roosevelt has always been one of my heroines, with her tireless advocacy for the homeless and dispossessed of the Great Depression, and all the courage that took, to allow herself to be so hated by the big-money interests, what we would call the 1% today.  She cared about women, about children, about animals and natural resources, about infrastructure and about the power of the vote.  Members of the 1% who break ranks and stand for economic and social justice - a country that lives up to its hype - deserve great praise.  Eleanor worked monster days to get fractious enemies to collaborate on the initial UN documents.  The fact that the UN isn’t as effective as she/we all hoped it would be doesn’t change the glory of her dedication to that hope.

But it was only 30 seconds.  I’ve always admired and adored Harriet Tubman also, another woman of enormous personal courage, who maintained a sharp tell-it-like-it-is tongue for those who needed a swift kick and a kind heart for those in affliction – that difficult combination.  Contrary to what some of her admirers have been saying, she was not a one-issue woman.  She didn’t just care about ending slavery.  She didn’t just care about the economic and social plight of newly-freed but resource-destitute black farmers, and the urban black poor.  She also championed women of all colors, who were no more powerful than slaves in the mid-19^th century, who were beaten and killed with impunity, who had no power to obtain a divorce or retain custody of their children if they were dumped by a husband wanting a younger model, or even travel as they chose.   She cared about factory workers who signed contracts forbidding them to quit or complain of abuse and ill treatment, and who also could be killed by goon squads with impunity if they tried to organize or blow the whistle.  She annoyed abolitionists who sanctimoniously condemned black slavery while making a fortune on this factory-slavery, by calling them on their hypocrisy.  She cared about the treatment of animals, horses in transportation and on farms, and pets in the cities.  No one is perfect, and she had plenty of human blindness and flaws, but she tried hard to make the world a better place for us, her spiritual descendants, and for that, she absolutely deserves the place of honor on America’s most popular bill. 

Jackson will be gone soon, although not entirely; he will be on the flip side of the bill.  Perhaps the next generation can get rid of him entirely.  Much ink has been spent on his racist, genocidal actions against the native people of the south.  He was also an awful president, per se.  His spoils system fit the backwoods money-grubbing mentality of his peers on the frontier, but as a responsible principle to run the government of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious supposedly-better-than a child’s view of “fairness,” it’s appalling.  The fact that historians are reluctantly, and not whole-heartedly stating the obvious – He was an awful President; any one of the other candidates would have been a genuine statesman in comparison; OMG - is a belated step in the right direction. 

And a big shout-out to the writers who have managed to discuss all the various candidates for the new face of the bill without resorting to cheap racial reasoning.  Soapbox commences:  No, everyone who says that Harriet was their original #1 choice isn’t a better human being than people who originally had a different candidate in mind, even if they are telling the truth.  All the potentials were wonderful, admirable people who would honor our country’s currency and ourselves for recognizing their value.  No, people who had a warmer spot for a different woman aren’t racists.  If we used that word sparingly, and for people who are truly and provably motivated by hate, then the real tribulations of my sister and two brothers, and my black friends, would not risk being trivialized by over-use.  I don’t want to see the word “racist” trivialized.  The pain that true creeps like Donald Trump cause is too serious.  End of soapbox.

Everyone’s favorite bill is getting a face to be proud of.  Glory, glory, hallelujah!  One giant leap for all of us….

Digging Deeper Into the Terror Attacks, A Brilliant, Simple Explanation for American Disengagement

What We Miss When We Jump….

One of the key teachings of all the wisdom traditions concerns the dangers of jumping to conclusions on the basis of inadequate information.  Our limbic systems, bless them, never, ever think that they have inadequate information.  What we call a capacity for critical thinking is merely a limbic system that has been trained to stop, loop in the prefrontal cortex, and then and only then step lightly to a not-deeply-held conclusion.  Everyone who has taken the training with me is glad they did. 

I’ve felt for some time that the answer to “why didn’t Americans get emotionally involved with the East African embassy bombings?” wasn’t simple racism.  I knew that the knee-jerk “they’re all racists” explanation for why there hasn’t been a Je suis Ankara movement to complement the solidarity Americans felt with Parisians after the terrorist attack, was missing a core truth.  But simply knowing that someone else is engaging in simplistic thinking isn’t the same as being brilliant oneself. 

Then I read an article in APU Insider [In Homeland Security contributor Sylvia Longmire] that supplied the brilliant missing link. [I got my 2nd MA at APUS, great school.]  The reason why Americans are emotionally wrought about Paris is because we either have been there, someone close to us has been there and connected us to it vicariously or we dream of going there (mostly because – again – it is someplace that others we know have been).  Few Americans have been to, or wish they could go to, Dar es Salaam or Ankara.  Psych research clearly shows that a huge part of emotional connection is familiarity.  When something is just a point on a map, we humans don’t feel connected.  But places that feel “familiar,” we care about.  [Advertisers understand this: even if you rationally don’t want to, your limbic system, where decisions are made, feels more positive about products you have heard about repeatedly.  The familiar has a positive vibe to it.]  

** My earlier post misattributed the brilliant idea.  Pls forgive my error.

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