What depresses me is not that an offensive, incompetent man has chosen to run for the highest and most important position in our democracy.
They've been doing that for decades and until we tell them to stop, at the ballot box, they will continue.
It's that almost 50% of the public are willing to support such men, their words, and their behaviors.
Help me out here, friends.
Where have we failed as a country so that, for so many, ethical behavior -- right speech and right action, words and actions that show generosity, empathy, and compassion for others -- no longer matters?
As a people, instead of rising toward an ever more inclusive and caring society that spreads prosperity for all, we degrade ourselves and our children.
As a culture, mainstream white america seems to insist on the cheap. We insist cost is all that matters. We pursue money over quality of life. We reduce life to money. In our myopic focus, we are willing to sacrifice each other and the planet to pursue what we feel entitled to. We do not hold life, including the food we eat, sacred. We will eat whatever cheap food to which our bodies have become addicted, no matter how bad it might be for us, no matter how the creation of this fake food itself is killing our planet.
We are struggling with addictions we do not name and for which we do not care. And still, there remain those who are food insecure.
Fewer and fewer of us go to church to lift ourselves above the daily grind, to help us practice putting others before ourselves. And even for some who do go to church, the "prosperity gospel" encourages those people to put themselves and financial gain above others. Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan recently sat beside candidate Trump and laughed while he used profanity to demean others. WTF.
Our families have been broken -- not by women's insistence on working and having our own lives, but on men's inability to handle that and on their subsequent absence. Fact: not enough men show up for their children. This is not a single mother problem. It is an absent men problem.
Our schools can't tell the difference between separation of church and state and values-based education. Teachers are like salmon swimming upstream to their deaths from exhaustion, fighting a battle no one of them individually can win.
Our problems in this country are systemic, and cultural. They are deeply rooted in this nation's violent history and the cultures of our progenitors. When we solve our problems, we do it together, not as individuals.
At the end of the day, how can we convince those who are so afraid -- afraid they will lose the little power they have, afraid of those who do not look like them or speak their language, afraid of what real education might bring to the lives of their children and to the world they will then create, afraid of our own accountability for destruction of the planet -- that if we choose, we have an abundance in which we can hold each other, without exceptions, with tenderness, care, protection?
I am and will always vote for those who know that politics, and good government, are about setting models for behavior. The polis is and always has been a common area in the middle where we come together from our different perspectives to jointly solve our problems. And yes, we are all flawed. We all make mistakes. How we handle those mistakes is a big part of leadership.
We can never each get all that we individually want and we need to stop trying because it is those attempts -- based on a belief each of us is deserving to have life exactly as WE want it -- that are killing us, and our planet.
Leadership is a sacred trust: stop defaming it. Stop cheapening it.
Most of all, stop supporting those who do.
End of October rant. Thank you to those who listened!
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