Into the mystic

LISTEN. Margaret Renkl, as usual, offers an artfully crafted and sobering reality-check.

Yes, Joe Biden won, but the 71 million people who voted for Donald Drumpf aren’t going anywhere.

...People have had four years now to find out just how truly terrible Mr. Drumpf is. How indifferent he is to the norms of civil discourse and to the responsibilities of democracy itself. How transparently racist he is, how divisive, how selfish. We know he’s a chronic liar who, when caught out, simply doubles down on the lie. We know that he is using the levers of government to enrich himself. We know he delights in and urges on the most violent impulses of his most dangerous followers. We know he has let 237,000 Americans die on his watch and still has no plan for saving the rest of us.

The numbers as of Sunday revealed that more than 71 million people voted for him anyway — eight million more than voted for him in 2016... nyt

She's as grief-stricken by this appalling number as she is joy-struck by the fact that millions more voted for truth, integrity, and normalcy. I'm feeling less grief than consternation, myself. 

And I'm feeling like I'll have to really push myself to do my part, as Robert Talisse advises in Overdoing Democracy (which we'll read next semester in our MALA course "Democracy in America"),  to restore democratic health by seeking and finding common ground with at least a few of those lesser millions in arenas that have nothing to do with politics. 

A thriving democracy needs citizens to reserve space in their social lives for collective activities that are not structured by political allegiances. To ensure the health and the future of democracy, we need to forge civic friendships by working together in social contexts in which political affiliations and party loyalties are not merely suppressed, but utterly beside the point. g'r

I caught the end of Krista Tippett's On Being yesterday on the radio, just in time to hear a seconding of this motion. Karen Murphy, advocate of peaceful coexistence and reconciliation, says we should "get to know each other... across all these divisions and categories that don’t utterly define us," finding common ground via (for instance) music. Van Morrison, maybe?

I used to listen to a lot of Van. I'll dust off the old CDs. Can't hurt. At the very least it will provide a needed distraction from the pervasive poison of polarized politics... if not from excessive alliteration.

Postscript. Maybe not. "Sir Van Morrison has accused the government of "taking our freedom" in three new songs that protest against the coronavirus lockdown..." bbc