You. Don't. Have. To. React.
Politics alone are no longer adequate for our advancing awareness. As our top-down power structure grows increasingly absurd, maybe it's telling us to look elsewhere.
I was at a backyard barbecue with my daughter, aged 6, when I heard the news that Donald Trump had been shot. I happened to be sitting next to one of the other dads in our small circle of parents, when he looked at his phone and turned to me with a grave expression. With the happy squeals of our children splashing and trampoline-bouncing in the background, he said “Trump has been shot.” I then pulled out my phone, as countless others must have done right around that same moment, to find a string of texts from other friends. I hadn’t looked at my phone for hours, and the sudden pull into my screen felt like an unwelcome intrusion.
Soon, of course, the news spread from person to person in a low murmur, like an electrical current jumping from one open wire to the next. It made for a great conversation-starter, and I was immediately aware of how incendiary an event like this is likely to be within the already-volatile, supercharged political atmosphere that has engulfed the USA for years on end. At a time when the very air Americans breathe has a taste of dry timber to it, I couldn’t help but receive the news with a palpable shudder of dread.
For a moment, as I watched my daughter and her friends jump up and down on the trampoline, blissfully unaware of what the grownups were furrowing our brows over, I was struck with a pang: What exactly will our kids inherit now? Is this, I wondered, the moment that we’ll look back on as the shattering of their innocence, so perfectly preserved in the sun-soaked idyll of a lazy summer afternoon? Is this, in fact, the final crack in the dam or breach to the hull that unleashes currents too strong for the country to hold up?
Americans, after all, have been bracing en masse for a shoe to drop for long enough that we no longer notice how clenched we are—yet we know in our bones that there’s something seriously wrong. And we wait with bated breath as the structure under our feet continues to heave…
That said, what I felt most was indifference. Coming mere days after it suddenly dawned on a sizable chunk of the U.S. population that President Biden is no longer cognitively fit for the job—a point I’d been harping on since Biden was still battling within his own party to secure the nomination—the ever-heightening absurdity of American politics no longer raises my temperature. The setting I was in certainly helped: there I was, savoring kinship with real people, with the bottom line of what’s most important to me—my child—doing flips on the trampoline a few feet away.
The dad next to me read another headline out loud: Trump pumps fist in the air.
Of course he did, I thought…
When I got home and saw the instantly-iconic photo of Trump raising his fist—with blood streaking across his face, the American flag dangling overhead, and a steely Secret Service agent gazing blankly into the camera through black sunglasses—I burst into laughter. The image just looks so theatrical. It might as well be a movie poster, but if it were a movie poster, it would be cheesy and over-the-top. Likewise, if we were watching our current socio-political circumstances unfold onscreen as part of a satirical film—say the 1976 Sidney Lumet/Paddy Chayefsky classic Network—we’d be laughing our asses off.
As it is, though, we’re not watching a satire but living inside of one. Which is all the more reason, I’d wager, to do our best to remain as dispassionate about it as we can—maybe even to laugh harder. I don’t mean to make light of the fact that one member of Trump’s audience was killed in front of his family in a most gruesome fashion, while two others were critically injured, according to reports. What I think we must make light of—almost as a survival skill—is the way that our responses to events within the political arena are stoked and massaged.
The fact is: you don’t have to react.
Regardless of how you feel about Trump—from his biggest supporters to his biggest detractors and everyone in-between—there are now millions of sources clamoring for you to join them in their high-pitched emotional reactivity. What happens if you choose instead to take a deep breath and take a step back? What happens if you take a broader view and try to understand the tug of war for the Presidency in the context of the U.S. President’s actual powers, which have been hamstrung for decades?
What is it, exactly, that’s so much at-stake here? And, if there’s that much at stake, why would the political process cough-up two of the least-qualified candidates for the job? Why are we being swept into fits of hysteria? How much do presidential politics actually engage us as functioning citizens? When we participate in the spectacle of these presidential campaigns, what are the tangible, on-the-ground effects that ensue when the person we voted for either wins or loses the election?
The news of Trump’s assassination attempt was, predictably, met with an immediate wave of speculation: that the whole thing was staged, that it was a false flag, etc. That speculation was, just as predictably, met by another wave of speculation dismissing the speculators as dunces. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised either way. Frankly, though, I don’t care. Because at the end of the day, the end result is the same: whatever actually happened yesterday, it’s going to be filtered through multiple prisms of narrative manipulation. Which means: it might as well be fake. To paraphrase longtime New York Times film critic A.O. Scott’s analysis of Network, it’s not that the truth doesn’t matter, it’s that its presentation matters just as much.
About a decade ago, I was venting to a theologian friend about some grim headline-du-jour. I can’t even remember what it was, but it had gotten under my skin enough to sufficiently pique my fear. In response, my friend casually tossed-off five words that have rung in my head ever since: don’t trip-out on it. She was right. I can still hear her in my head, the way she so effectively shrugged-off whatever it was that had seemed so daunting to me at the time, and her words have become a prescription for my own emotional self-preservation.
Yes, the Trump assassination portends a darkening future for American politics. As does the Democratic party’s insistence that a dementia patient stay in the race. But it’s imperative that we draw circles around ourselves now, and that we give the bulk of our attention to what’s most sustainable around us. What is the soil of human connection you can get your hands into right now? And what can you do to water and nourish that instead of feeding into the noise?
To be clear: I’m not suggesting that we dis-engage from politics. I’m saying instead that: 1) politics alone are not going to be enough to get us through whatever we’re headed for and that 2) politics as we know them—as a top-down structure where we focus our attention on the highest levels of office—is clearly no longer adequate to meet our needs. I mean that, by tipping over into the realm of tragi-comic surrealism, the political process is broadcasting its own inadequacy. Maybe it’s time we listen to what that process is telling us.
It’s true that American politics have been suffuse with a steady ramping-up of mutual enmity across a span of multiple election cycles. Americans have been mired in what essentially amounts to a psychological war footing for a good 30-plus years. Even if we can’t pinpoint the moment where that enmity tipped over into abject hatred, we know enough to know that it’s been a long time—and that it’s getting worse, inching closer to some kind of breaking point. This is obviously not healthy. Ostensibly, the events at Trump’s July 13th rally are evidence that the constant drumbeat of polarization inevitably paves the way to a frightening place.
If partisan fanaticism is your bag, there’s certainly no shortage of outlets—innumerable cable, radio, print, and online voices—at the ready to scratch your itch by making it worse with the poison-ivy rage-bait they traffic in. On the other hand, it’s getting to the point where you can throw a rock and hit someone whose views no longer align with the left-right / progressive-conservative dichotomy. There is, I would argue, a burgeoning awareness—of not just politics, but of civic engagement—that requires a more nuanced, textured approach.
What we need now—and what we’re actually getting more and more of by the day—is a complex integration of perspectives that grows ever more discordant with the monotonous drone of tribal war chants. Maybe the political system keeps yielding more cartoonish results not because it’s done with us, but because we’re starting to be done with it. Maybe, in fact, we’ve already moved onto something else and just don’t know it yet.
Wherever you happen to be standing, though, it pays to remember: you don’t have to react. Allowing our buttons to get pushed burns up vital energy we’re going to need to conserve, regardless of what happens from here on out.
<3 With love,
SRK
Thanks, that's an amazing article.