Saturday, November 25, 2017

Can We “Accept” or “Get Over” Trump?

Last night I watched the film Wind River. A wildlife officer and hunter counsels Martin, whose 18 year old daughter has been raped and killed. The wildlife officer had lost his daughter to a similar fate. He says that a grief counselor had told him:

"I got good news and bad news. Bad news is you'll never be the same. You'll never be whole. Ever. What was taken from you can't be replaced. You're daughter's gone. Now the good news, as soon as you accept that, as soon as you let yourself suffer, allow yourself to grieve, You'll be able to visit her in your mind, and remember all the joy she gave you. All the love she knew. Right now, you don't even have that, do you? That's what not accepting this will rob from you. If you shy from the pain of it, then you rob yourself of every memory of her, my friend. Every one. From her first step to her last smile. You'll kill 'em all. Take the pain, Take the pain, Martin. It's the only way to keep her with you.”

The day after Thanksgiving Donald Trump re-tweeted advice from two black women in Milwaukee. Diamond and Silk are among his supporters and recommend that if anyone wanted to fight about Trump at Thanksgiving dinner,“He is your president. Deal with it. Or get over it. Build yourself a little bridge and climb up and get over it,”

I heard this on the radio and at first I couldn’t find it on the web. I wanted to know how to "get over" Trump. Searching for the story I stumbled on advice from psychologists and spiritual directors on how to “get over” the loss of a lover or the death of a loved one. Their advice all centered on acceptance, although I didn’t think that the advice was as good as what I heard in Wind River.

Christine Hassler was the first such counselor of my search. She advises us to accept our losses and if we cannot do that, it is because “we are still judging what happened.... Until you accept what happened with zero judgment of it being bad or wrong in any way, you continue to keep it alive inside you. What happened, happened. It’s in the past. Your judgments about it continue to keep it present and impact your future.... Let go of your opinions and victim stories – they are not serving you. As you do, you empower yourself to free yourself of anything you may have been carrying around like a heavy backpack. Take off the backpack so that you are free to fully embrace all the great stuff that is available to you in the here and now.”

Seems like good advice, but there is a difference between a loss that happens once and one that continues on and on. Trump daily assaults us with bluster, lies, and decisions reversing decades of efforts to make life better for millions of Americans. This is a loss that is “unacceptable,” as Charles Blow reminds us. If we accept these losses, if we accept Trump as our president (who lost the popular vote and won by a quirk in three states), we will have surrendered who and what we are and whatever truth there is in our national life. We can’t “get over” or “accept” the loss of democracy and government that exchanges the desire "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” for the agrandizement of corporate billionaires and those who think they must ally with them.

John Pavlovitz, a Christian minister, writes I Think I Hate This President—and I Think I’m Okay With That. John struggles not to hate anyone as he had been taught, but then lists all of things and people he loves, opposed by Trump. So he hates what is hateful. “And because of the deep love that I have for this country, for its Constitution, and for it’s beautifully radiant diversity—yes, I hate this President. I hate what he and those alongside him are doing to good, loving, decent human beings who call this place home, and I’m going to keep hating such things because that is simply the other side of caring for the least. Silence in the face of oppression isn’t love it’s compliance, it’s participation. Opposing it is how I show who and what I am for. Hatred of injustice is a redemptive way of loving people most threatened by it.” Our anger is righteous.

We have already lost a lot. Long standing values and practices have been trashed. Parts of our government are gone or dissolving, so that we are unrepresented in important parts of the world and unprotected from those who advance themselves and even provide jobs by polluting our water and air and earth. Many aspects of representative democracy are crumbling. We have many reasons to fear unintended consequences of actions being taken that no sensible person would consider.

Acceptance as surrender will not do, but we must find a way to find peace within ourselves while we resist. We can “get over” Trump by surpassing and transcending his every word and action with good, letting nothing go by, letting no one think that he is normal or acceptable. When we have done that, we can claim peace for ourselves, at least until we must rise in resistance again, perhaps tomorrow.

We must accept the reality of our losses, and absorb the pain of it all, but this is not the case of accepting the death of someone who will never return. We will see reason return because the seeds of destruction lie within everything Trump and the Congress are now doing. But the dangers are real. Is it possible that those who lived in Nazi Germany thought it best to "accept" and "get over" Hitler? Resistance is good. 

Trump likes to enrage us by his tweets and by his every stupefying statement, so don't bother listening to him. Just keep an eye on the analysis and reviews of the policies and votes that come from the swamp they have created. Share the good ones. Yeah, he tweets that stuff. Yeah, he says stupid and outrageous things. So what? We resist and we fight for justice and a better day. Remind yourself and others what we love, which is why we resist and do not "accept."

Monday, November 13, 2017

Our Veterans' Day Band Concert -- Hearing the Gettysburg Address Again for the First Time

Two things redeemed our Veterans’ Day concert by the Lake George Community Band from the deep, dark well of false patriotism and militarism into which we easily could have fallen.

First was a contemporary composition from 2003 commissioned by the NM Military Institute Regimental Bands of Roswell, NM. Each Time you Tell Their Story is a reading accompanied by concert band by Samuel R. Hazo:

No soldiers choose to die. It's what they risk being who and where they are. It's what they dare while saving someone else whose life means suddenly as much to them as theirs. Or more. To honor them, why speak of duty or the will of governments? Think first of love each time you tell their story. It gives their sacrifice a name and takes from war its glory.

This seemed a new way to express patriotism. Sacrifice is still the theme, but loss and grief are given larger status.

Second, we played a concert band piece which I assumed was old, but was published in 2009, was Lincoln at Gettysburg, a simple music setting for the great address. Lincoln’s speech seemed eerily current, and important for today because of the thoughts expressed about our nation, our values, and the internal war that continues to consume us. The first line is striking:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Liberty is claimed by all sides of current disputes, and oddly, we are more divided today than recently about the equality of people. Jefferson had not explicitly included colored slaves, native Americans, or Spanish residents of the thirteen colonies, and few who heard or read the Declaration of Independence would have thought of them. But when Lincoln was speaking of “all men” he was thinking of Negro slaves. Today when we hear “all men” most all of us hear it to be inclusive of women, gays and lesbians, transgendered people, as well as those of other races, ethnic backgrounds, and religions. That tells us how much we have changed! But Lincoln went on:

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

Yes we are so engaged, and while we are not yet again killing each other, our hold on liberties and equality are being challenged and tested. This reading seemed so modern and not of history but of today.

Lincoln was asked to dedicate a great burial ground, which still reeked of human putrefaction at the time of the speeches, four months after the battle. But Lincoln declined to glorify the dead or the battle they fought, instead saying that the dead had dedicated the field themselves.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

This speaks of my America, which is not about the worship of guns, the revival of racial nationalism and the flag of the Confederacy, the acceptance of misogyny and sexual harassment, the increasing distance between not only rich and poor, but rich and the middle-class, the stupefying incompetence and false values of our Congress and Senate, and a man in the White House, unelected by the popular will of the people, who frightens children and makes women cry. All these things make us wonder if the deaths at Gettysburg were in vain.

Other works the band performed in addition to standard marches, included one that honored the death in battle of one of the first soldiers to die in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. I quote Walter Cronkite who explained once, that

Two forces drive war: National pride and human loss.  The first starts wars. The second sustains them. The first casualty creates an investment in blood that retreat would seem to dishonor.

No one wants to be first to die in a war, few will admit that a war was wrong when someone they loved died in it. and as John Kerry told Congress about the war in Vietnam, that no one wants to be the last soldier to die in a war.

My question is, "How can we glorify in any way the death of soldiers in a war so ill-conceived and false as our war in Iraq?" Is there a way to write music to express shame and regret? Composers today seem more inclined to express the power and destruction of war, and the loss of loved, real people.

The issue becomes political, because many went to fight in Iraq not for oil or even glory, but in revenge for 9/11. Revenge is famously unrewarding. We are more inclined to music that is inspiring, invigorating, exuberant, solemn and hymn-like, with emotional lyric lines, and crashing cymbals, with a lively and defiant finish. These are the words publishers used to describe the compositions we played for Veterans’ Day.

The problem of military music partly lies with the music publishers and the music education establishment. All protest music from the ‘60's has disappeared from the publishers’ lists. Patriotism and militarism sell. Remembrance and the hope of glory sell. The bands can draw crowds of veterans. Politicians applaud and give funds for music programs. Veterans organizations give money to community bands who agree to honor them! The military loves the assistance in recruiting new, young soldiers, who will be veterans soon enough, or among those honored fallen. And the music is written for other purposes: to provide music for a certain "grade" of performance, to provide examples and "studies" requiring difficult or unusual instrument fingerings and rhythms, to cut another notch on a composer's conducting baton and resume.

The sister of a bandmate won’t attend our concerts because she believes such music and performances glorify war. I agree. Those who attend are inspired and encouraged to feel that they now “support our troops.” Government policy is forgotten or never to be thought about. Martial music makes you want to march, but someone else tells you in what direction to go.

Thursday, November 9, 2017

Don’t Politicize Veterans’ Day!

Betty Little, our NY Dist. 45 State Senator , spoke Nov. 3 at a breakfast event honoring our veterans, sponsored by the Glens Falls Senior Center. She was the first speaker and in her first few minutes, she commented on how good it was to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, how important the flag is, and how protests surrounding the flag and the National Anthem are wrong.

I reacted so angrily that I left the event because I hadn’t understood until that moment how an issue becomes politicized and how twisted our national life has become. Politicization takes something that belongs to everyone and divides us by suggesting that the issue belongs to one political view or party. Politicians love to speak to and for veterans because the appeal is emotional, because so many of us have personal ties to one or more of the 380,000 who died in battle or from battle injuries since 1941. Mostly veterans are attractive to politicians because they constitute 22% of our population, a sizable voting bloc.

But Americans who have served or died in war included Republicans, Democrats, and Socialists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists, and were of all colors. Such service and losses are not political. We hope that our soldiers fought and died for liberty and justice for all, for the values in our Constitution, including our freedom to protest against every sort of injustice. Our first amendment protects dissent and protest against our nation, flag, anthem and pledge. To be against protest is to be against freedom of speech, and threatens our democracy with tyranny.

Citizens tend to support politicians in time of war, even when our national response to world problems with military solutions is unwise. Patriotism is love of country and pride in our values and many accomplishments, which mostly are not military. Criticism of the NFL and other protesters may gain a politician some votes, but not honestly. Senator Little is entitled to her views about the flag and the NFL, but they have nothing to do with honoring veterans.

Since the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon, the Republican party has claimed that opposing the use of military force for any purpose, is to oppose the United States and be against all who serve and have served. This has always been a lie. To want our nation to have a just and rational foreign policy is the highest kind of patriotism. Instead, we have had too much patriotism of the sort that encourages military service in support of bad policy, profiteering, and political gain.

Some in the military understand this, perhaps better than those of us who do not serve. A few years ago I heard the head of a local American Legion unit say, “Americans are willing to serve, but we want the cause to be just and the use of the military sensible.”

Once we enter a war, we cannot easily get out, so that wars perpetuate themselves. Walter Cronkite explained this once: “Two forces drive war: National pride and human loss.  The first starts wars. The second sustains them. The first casualty creates an investment in blood that retreat would seem to dishonor.” Few will admit that a war was wrong when someone they loved died in it.

(A portion of this post was sent to The Chronicle, a weekly newspaper in Glens Falls NY.)