Monthly Archives: August 2022

Filibuster again protects democracy

Yesterday, after the Senate parliamentarian did her thing, it was put to a vote whether private insurance companies would also be required to cap insulin payments at $35 a month (and presumably lose a mountain of money). 43 Republicans voted no, effectively a filibuster.

When the entire Inflation Reduction Act, the skinny, almost unrecognizable, reconciliation-ready version of Build Back Better ( filibustered quite effectively with the assistance of two rogue Democrats), came up for a vote, those same seven bipartisan Republican senators voted with the other 43 against the entire bill. That’s called party discipline and loyalty to an angry base.

So we wound up with a fraction of what the vast majority of Americans actually want, but it is much better than zilch. Until we can fix it, that’s democracy in the age of Koch, Trump, Barr and the likes of Ginni Thomas and friends like Mark Meadows and fervent midievalist [1] Snarlin’ Sam Alito.

That said, congratulations to us all and to this poor, magnificent earth we have long been such negligent stewards of.

[1] To save you a click on Google: One who sympathizes with the spirit and principles of the middle ages: often with the sense of one who is antiquated or behind the times.

How do I make it stop?

When you are in a brutal conflict that will not stop, when every move anybody makes (or doesn’t make) to try to solve it twists the knot tighter and tighter, and the standoff seems increasingly hopeless, how do you begin to resolve a mutually painful and desperate impasse?

Fuck if I know, though one thing I’ve learned is that no solution to any painful interpersonal battle comes from the application of logic. I’ve also learned that Reason, once everybody’s pain is inflamed, is sometimes entirely irrelevant.

Paradoxically, the more reason is on your side, sometimes, the harder the other party, now accused of being unreasonable on top of everything else, will have to resist and the worse it will go for you, for everyone.

Sometimes you will turn an emotional corner for reasons you can’t completely understand in that moment but your emotions will tell you something true and important that you need to do immediately and you can do that, and sometimes that may help.

It will certainly help more than being stuck on the senselessness of placing all blame on one person, alone responsible for putting a world of trauma on loved ones. The exact reason for your emotional pivot may be revealed to you afterwards, if you puzzle over it long enough, though that reason also doesn’t matter.

Fucking humans, man, no wonder this planet is always at war.

Nothing whatsoever to see, or smell, here

From a recent Washington Bezos exclusive:

Prospective jurors in [Roger] Stone’s trial had completed confidential questionnaires that asked for their views on Trump, Stone and others caught up in Mueller’s investigation. Stone’s lawyers agreed to keep the responses confidential, and no details had been disclosed publicly. Questionnaires completed by those selected as jurors were later leaked to right-wing operatives, prompting an FBI investigation. No findings were ever publicly disclosed.

https://wapo.st/3bDVo1p

Striving, belatedly, to be a mensch

The Yiddish word mensch, (a word European Jews took from the German word for “man” [1]) refers to a person who acts the way we all recognize everybody should act.   A world populated by mensches, with mensches in charge of governments and communities, would be much different, and much fairer, than the one we live in now.

When a mensch makes a mistake she doesn’t justify it, or blame someone else, she rectifies it as quickly as she can.   When a mensch sees somebody being attacked, she steps in to try to prevent harm.   When a mensch sees you’re hurt, she comforts you.  You can be confident taking a mensch’s word they will do what they say, knowing they’ll do everything they can to keep a promise.   Here’s google’s first hit when you ask for a definition of mensch:

mensch

  1. A person of integrity and honor.
  2. Alternative spelling of mentch.
  3. a decent responsible person with admirable characteristics

It is my experience that most people consciously try to be a mensch, challenging though it is in many situations.   We all do what we believe is right, we try to treat others in ways that wouldn’t be hurtful to ourselves, we try to extend understanding to loved ones who hurt us. 

The hardest part of being a mensch is when we are hurt, especially if we are blamed for being hurt.  In that situation it can suddenly be impossible to act according to your better nature, your pain blocks the way.  You can find yourself isolated in an emotional dead-end with no way out, unless your hurt is acknowledged by the person who hurt you.  That situation can be a mensch-trap, since hurt caused accidentally is very hard to take responsibility for.  Hurt you actually, objectively, didn’t cause, though insistently blamed for it, is almost impossible to acknowledge or seek forgiveness for, because, truthfully, what am I expected to apologize for?

I put somebody I love in this position recently, for a long time, blamed her for an impossible, almost year-long stand-off and couldn’t see the unfairness of my position until yesterday, when I finally wrote a chronology that helped me see her role in a very difficult situation differently.  She is not to blame for any of this ugly shit, she and I actually worked out what we needed to on the phone almost a year ago.   

I feel awful for blaming her and will try my best to get her to accept my apology, express my understanding of why she had every right to be upset with me,  why it was wrong of me to demand an apology for her doing the best she could under circumstances so emotionally tangled that right now I can’t imagine how to explain them to her at the moment without making things worse.   I’ll stick to making amends. She would be perfectly within her rights to still be mad at me, but I hope she won’t be.

Trying my best to belatedly fix things with somebody I hurt doesn’t make me a mensch, but it hopefully makes me less of a schmuck.    If I can manage to reassure her of my love without bringing in too much of the impossible tangle (not her fault) that may need a professional’s help to untangle, I will have done the best day’s work in a long time.  I hope she’ll be able to forgive me.

[1] A certain generation of Germans refined this term to classify menschen by category, there were menschen, regular guys, ubermenschen — supermen — and üntermentschen, subhuman, contemptible excuses for humans that needed to be dealt with as harshly as possible to avoid contamination of the rest of the population.

I hope this doesn’t sound judgmental

You deserve friends who make you laugh, feel loved, comfort you when you need comforting, accept your limitations and quickly work out any problems with you when they see you are unhappy.   

You deserve friends who always give you the benefit of the doubt, who accept when they’ve hurt you and always do their best to make amends and not let you sit in pain. 

You deserve friends who return your best efforts at kindness and friendship with their own best efforts.   We all deserve that. 

We are lucky when we find real friendship and should remember to be grateful for every day of it.  Friendship should never be taken for granted, it is mortal, just like us.

Complainer

My best advice to you when times are tough for you — and what I’m going to say might seem like very, very tough love — never, ever lose your patience with people who hurt you, no matter what.

Once you lose patience, and the ability to hold pain inside, forever, if necessary, you become the problem and the focus of everyone else’s defensiveness. How can you be worthy of friendship when you make people who hurt you feel so defensive?

Think about it like this, my constantly complaining friend, giving in to frustration is like inconsolably protesting that it’s wrong for the corpse you loved so much in life to keep lying there like it’s dead and not getting up to hug you.

I may not be able to take this advice about endless, limitless patience myself, you understand, but if you don’t, you are going to have big problems. Trust me on that one.