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A woman I admire just told me her ingenius method of early voting. Disgusted by how women have been treated in this election…leading off with the policial persecution of Hillary Clinton (if she had been a Rebuplican man during a Republican-controlled Congress, she would not be continually investigated for doing her job. Certainly Colin Powell was not investigated for using personal email to communicate), and capped off by the way Trump supporters shrug off his hateful and degrading comments about women… she decided that she does indeed want change in Washington.

Her solution? She voted for every female candidate on the ballot. This offended my son who argues that it is dangerous to vote blindly. Yes, indeed, however many people are blindly following Trump for the mere want of change in Washington. If everyone voted in women, up and down the ballot on November 8th, we would definitely see a change in Washington, and it would not be half as reckless as voting for Trump.

This week I was in fear for my sister’s life as she underwent labor and delivery of twins under life-threatening medical complications. After a troubling couple of days, the twin babies were healthy, mom finally pulled through, and I headed to the airport with the added baggage of emotional exhaustion, mental distraction, and muscle tension to rival a piano in my backpack.

Just when I thought nothing could snap me out of the emotional and physical processing of the previous days, not even the airport massage I adventured in the hallway when they announced my flight was delayed, I was jolted into a different state of being by fear of terrorist attack. It started just as all passengers were buckled up and the plane was readying to disengage from the gangway. The man sitting next to me in camo gear snapped a pic, selfie-style but grim-faced, of the airport generators outside the airport window, then abruptly left his seat in favor of one further back, and then, while I consoled myself that he was still on board and thus not likely to have planted a bomb, he just as abruptly walked up the aisle and slipped off the plane.

My nerves were already shot from the week, so after crouching down to check under the seats and while the flight attendants began to check overhead bins for what he might have left behind, I swiftly departed the plane in favor of the next flight to my destination. For some passengers this might not have been an easy decision. But I had momentary mental clarity of an accute kind. Apparently the simple and immediate fear of a terrorist act crowds out other, more complex or ambiguous emotions that are gripping and almost unresolvable. My sister’s dilemmas, my own labor flashbacks, my aching back, all were forgotten in my haste for the exit.

I suspect that fear of terrorism in our country does the same thing for a lot of people; it provides a comforting clarity of purpose that clears our mind of more complex daily troubles.  Gridlock in Washington, like pregnancy complications,  is hard to understand, let alone resolve. But pure fear that can be attributed to a single cause…this is like meditation, “ohm”.  Mindfulness is all the rage now in business circles (I actually heard this former prisoner/monk speak)  I wonder if certain kinds of fear can mimic the “be here now” effect of mindfulness. Fear is both toxic and intoxicating.  Many leaders have leveraged fear as far as it would take them. But ultimately fear’s  hold, or even its simple clarion call, is shortlived.

My underlying tension resurfaced before I crossed the threshold of my home. And there I found more tension as my family was rivetted to the 7th game of the World Series. This tension was different though from airport secuirty or terrorism threat. Here was fear of loss, yes, but also hope, prayer and expectation of something wonderful. With a newfound relaxation and simple clarity of mind, somehow I knew the Cubs would win, just as the twins were born safe and sound. In the end, the power of fear is not greater than the triumph of hope.

 

I was lambasted by my kids for going to see the critically unacclaimed Batman vs. Superman this year. Didn’t I know it only received 27% on Rotten Tomatoes? Well I was able to enjoy it by mentally correcting for the editor’s mistakes in a couple places; a dream scene that should have been more clearly a dream, a sequence of scenes that ought to have been rearranged, and a character whose vendetta ought to have been more feelingly explained. But one thing I couldn’t ignore was the silliness of their misunderstanding and miscommunication, before fighting broke out. Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War was hardly much better in this regard.

Silly plots. Unrealistic scenarios. Or, are they? Did these comic movie writers predict the 2016 presidential election?

In the reality show we know as America’s UnCivil War: Trump vs Clinton we see the same level of misunderstanding as Americns rely on different sets of facts (and disagree about which issues are most important) to form their opinions. Similarly to comicbook universes, our enemies watch with baited breath hoping we will destroy ourselves from the inside out with hatred and mistrust based on the seeds they have cleverly planted.

Meanwhile, just yesterday Donald Trump visited Gettysburg and pundits considered the civil war about to ensue within the Republican Party. I worry about greater than that. When a candidate states that he may not accept the results of the election, that he will “keep us in suspense” about it, we have to wonder about how much he is bolstering his angry-branded-followers to misbehave, revolt and worse on the heels of election day. Clinton’s debate response is correct: “Horrifying”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the second Presidential debate,  Donald Trump excused his tape-recorded conversation boasting of sexual aggression toward women as “locker room talk”, and stated that his “words” were nothing compared with Bill Clinton’s action. Since then many women have come forward to share about his acts against them, more than mere words.

But let’s focus just on the words for a moment and consider if lewd talk of this nature is okay because it is just talk. If we should dimsiss Trump’s lewd comments as just words, well then, the debate is just words, so why did they continue talking after that. Sexual harasmment laws? Just words. Heck, even the Constituion and the Bible are just words. In fact, why lambast Clinton about her lost personal emails; they were just words too.

In fact, a president’s first and most powerful weapon is words. Winning hearts and minds starts with words, followed shortly by deeds.

I have been very impressed with Hillary Clinton’s words in this presidential contest. In the first debate she said words matter and asked world leaders to hear her now, that our country would stand by its word. Thank you Hillary for deescalating Donald’s reckless rhetoric right there on the debate floor.

 

 

 

So I may have been half joking about my desire to drift into auto-pilot parenting in a previous post. And yet, a whole generation of children were raised on  Sesame Street by moms and caregivers who sat them down in front of the TV, to everyone’s advantage. Who am I to call that wrong?

So let’s embrace what the internet can do for us parents…even as we scratch our heads over internet safety with our kids.

• When kids persistently ask you, why is the sun yellow? Send them to VSauce (our favorite!), or Minute Earth.
• When kids get too hyper, and sending them outside to run it off isn’t an option, have them visit Deepak Chopra (even for a good giggle if they can’t take it seriously), or turn on the Calm app.
• They can even have the internet read to them if they say they are too tired to read the homework texts.
• No need to squabble about age appropriateness of movies when you can see common sense movie reviews from parents.

If it takes a village to raise a child, then the internet is fair game.

What are your favorite sites?

 

Any superhero movie junky can tell you that movie superheros need well developed supervillains to pit against. This makes for gripping  stories and, more importantly, stark contrast to help set off virtuous values of the good guys who are fighting for things like…truth, justice and the American way.

National politics do not always offer a stark contrast in good or evil. When bills are titled something so positively good, such as “No Child Left Behind Act” (who can disagree with that premise?), it is hard to argue about the details of policy within the bill which help some people while hurting others, and may ultimately leave whole communities behind. Or the recent override of President Obama’s veto against allowing Americans to sue Saudi Arabia in relation to 9/11. What sounds good may actually have undesired consequences. Politics are muddy. Political work is hard work that does not easily fit into a soundbite, a 2-hour feature film, or even a one-year election cycle.

For several decades Democrats have raised alarms and fought against the issues plaguing positive progress in our country which are now so clearly voiced in the Trump candidacy for president: unchecked greed, racism, sexism, xenophobism, etc. Trump has crystalized, in the form of a single perosnality, a host of issues and ills. For Democrats, he is their well defined supervillain: mean, greedy, and yet captivatingly caustic, a bully so confident in his power that he states explicitly those things that lie underneath the surface of Republican rhetoric.

Well, Democrats, this is your moment to have national attention on these issues. Because  as soon as Trump fades from public life, it may be the likes of Mike Pence, his running mate, who take us back to a path of complacency by his pretty face, calm persona, how smoothly he lies and how he deflects answering questions, as we saw in “undecided’s” response to his performance in the vice-presidential debate. Pence is simply not a Supervillain who can colorfully help us see in clear relief the need to fight for truth, justice and the American way, because it requires extra steps on our part to fact check and actually pay attention to the details of what he is saying over time. And the other likely candidates for Supervillain, such as Fox News’ Murdoch, the Koch Brothers and others may require too much exposition to fit into the soundbites and You Tube videos Americans squeeze into their busy lives and limited attention.