2016 Sucked. The fact we lost so many artists, friends and icons really sucked. The results of the election super-sucked. What we are looking forward to in the future of our country is, for a great many of us, truly a nightmare scenario. Hard-right Republicans have control of both houses of Congress with an agenda to destroy healthcare coverage for 30 million Americans, to privatize the Veterans Administration and Medicare with vouchers that will provide less care at higher costs, to gut environmental protections, consumer and worker-safety regulations, reverse our hard-fought gains on climate change and to put Social Security in the hands of Wall Street hedge funds.
And then you have the President-Elect who can’t stop tweeting — with his tiny sausage fingers — nonsense arguments defending and deflecting the influence of the Kremlin-sponsored hacking and white nationalist propaganda on our democracy while plotting a mass deportation plan along with some type of “extreme vetting” for immigrants, Muslims in a database, mosques under surveillance, and our urban centers squeezed under the jack-boot of a nationwide stop-and-frisk regime as he himself makes money hand over fist while continuing to own his D.C. hotel and expanding projects in dozens of nations whose heads of state he’s now going to be having over at Mar-A-Lago on the weekends and New Years at $500 a head.
There’s no way this story turns out well. Many of us already know that, but many are in blatant denial. That situation can not be allowed to go on without being challenged, without being changed. And it may be unfortunate, but also true, that this won’t change until some people are forced out of their denial by having the absolute worst-case scenario shoved right into their face. Some people just won’t get it until they see things finally hitting rock bottom.
We may already be closer to that point than some of us already clanking the bells of warning might believe.
Here are just a few things that hitting rock bottom can do for you.
1. At the bottom, you realise just how far off course you were and that your life choices were simply not sustainable. It’s in those dark moments of despair that your anger and frustration become so great, you declare once and for all, never to accept such mediocrity from yourself or from others ever again.
2. At the bottom, all your dysfunctional behaviours are finally revealed. If you never hit your lowest point, the dysfunctions continue to go unnoticed and unchecked, playing out under the denial radar and inevitably creating bigger dysfunctions and a harder fall down the track. Until the bubble bursts, you cleverly delude yourself into thinking everything is juuuuust great and your life ends up being built on a big fat false foundation.
3. Hitting rock bottom is the beginning of questioning EVERYTHING that you’ve ever thought to be true. You question your motives, other people’s motives, your beliefs, your fears, why you did things, why you didn’t do things, why you attracted certain people and circumstances, why you succeeded, why you failed. The very fabric of your life is turned upside down and examined in raw detail. It’s from this point that you build again, from the ground up, with a fresh perspective based on your renewed sense of clarity.
Rebuilding from the ground up with a fresh perspective and new sense of clarity seems like exactly what America needs right now.
It’s only when you hit bottom do you look at things anew. And when I say this I’m not just talking about Republicans finally coming to the light, or Trump supporters coming to the thunder-struck realization that they’ve been massively duped. This also means Democrats, in both Congress and in the grassroots, who may now start looking at things with new eyes. Starting with new Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer who is looking at what has occurred this election as an opportunity that he’s excited to face.
Schumer: I see myself as someone who will fight really hard for the middle class and working people. I am not afraid of Donald Trump, I am not afraid of the Republicans. I am actually excited about this opportunity. There are so many contradictions in this administration. 1) We’re going after their nominees. McConnell wanted to let all of them go through with these little two-hour hearings, get all of them done in two weeks, we’re saying “no way.”
Price. The guy for HHS. Donald Trump said when he campaigned that he wouldn’t cut Medicaid and Social Security. He turns around and nominates as his HHS secretary a man who made his career on cutting Medicare and Medicaid. We’re going to slam them on these things.
He said he’s going to clear the swamp. Who’s in his cabinet? Billionaires. People who own huge businesses, people who’ve been part of that swamp for a very long time.
There was a certain populism to him. You can say a lot of things about Donald Trump, and I worked really hard against him, but he had certain populism to him. A false populism. He now has sold out to the hard right. The pro-business, pro-corporate, pro-elite group, and I think we can really nail him on this. We can be very strong, and unflinching and hold his feet to the fire. The theme of the speech I gave today was: We’re going to hold him accountable.
Much of what Chuck is saying here is like what I wrote two weeks ago arguing that Trump needs to be totally blocked and stopped. He even goes on to say that not only his agenda and nominees need to be hammered but even his Supreme Court nominees should be filibustered —not simply because they are coming from Trump, but because they’re far too ideological to be seated on the court. There are things he said Democrats might agree with Trump on such as trade or on carried interest. But ultimately the new president’s larger problem will be getting support on those items from Republicans. In short, Schumer says that he told Trump that if he takes a hard-right tack, which he has so far, his presidency would fail under ideological gridlock that is as bad if not worse than we’ve seen in recent years.
So it seems that having failed in the election has lit a fire under Schumer, and hopefully the other Democrats in the Senate. Particularly Senator Bernie Sanders who has now been chosen as the chair of Outreach for Senate Democrats.
Sanders: Chuck [Schumer] is off to a good start. He’s brought together some very good people and he understands something, which is that at the end of the day the way we’re going to bring about change, the way we’re going to stop Trump is you need an outside the Beltway strategy.
Maddow: What does that mean?
Sanders: That means that on January 15, for the first time in the modern history of the Democratic Party, Democrats are going to be organizing rallies all across this country in opposition to the Republican budget which calls for throwing 30 Million people off of healthcare. Throwing their insurance away. Privatizing Medicaid while giving tax breaks to the wealthy. Chuck understands, and Democrats increasingly understand is that you can’t just go to fundraisers with wealthy people. You have to get out in the real world, mobilize people, educate people, you got to listen to people that is the transformation you need, which by the way, is why I’m supporting Keith Ellison to be the new chair of the DNC.
Maddow: You feel that he has that same organizing model?
Sanders: Absolutely.
Again, as I wrote last week, we should be learning from the successes of the Tea Party. This is a change in direction for Democrats in addition to Sanders’ Our Revolution organization, which puts the focus on the grassroots and builds a stronger relationship between constituents and representatives by increasing communication and involvment. Just as they describe themselves.
Our Revolution will reclaim democracy for the working people of our country by harnessing the transformative energy of the “political revolution.” Through supporting a new generation of progressive leaders, empowering millions to fight for progressive change and elevating the political consciousness, Our Revolution will transform American politics to make our political and economic systems once again responsive to the needs of working families.
So hitting rock bottom, losing the presidency, the House and Senate — again — seems to be making congressional Democrats rebound with new vigor. That’s a good thing. Hopefully, that new energy will make its way out into the grassroots through the efforts of Sanders and others.
This seems to be more and more of a trend.
But beyond Democrats fighting back, what will it take for Republicans and Trump voters to hit rock bottom and change direction? Will it take the actual repeal of Obamacare and all its negative consequences become real to wake them up? Will it take more and more revelations about the Russian hacking or as some reports allege the five-year effort by the Kremlin to cultivate Trump as an asset, which would explain his resistance to both the private-sector and Intelligence communities reports on their involvement?
I’m not sure what that’s going to take. I’m not expecting it to be very pretty. It might require an intervention similar to those used to deprogram people who have been enticed into a cult.
Ross’ anti-cult “interventions” typically begin with a request from a family member, who requests help deprogramming their loved one. During an intervention, which can take three or four days and is always a surprise, the cult member is isolated in a room along with concerned friends and family members, and guided through a series of conversations. (Ross says he “wouldn’t suggest something quite [as] drastic and formal” for Trump supporters, but he tells me that the general principles of intervention could still be helpful.)
In the first part of the intervention, Ross says, he educates the subject about the traditional definition of a “destructive cult,” and tries to get them to see the ways in which their membership in a group has been harmful. Then, Ross attempts to explain the principles of thought reform, and how it operates in various group settings. Lastly, he asks the subject why they think their family is so concerned, and went so far as to stage an intervention.
Framing an intervention as an act of personal care and compassion is important, Ross says. Otherwise, it’s just viewed as an ambush, and the subject starts off on the defensive. He tells me about a recent attempt at an intervention that lasted all of two minutes because the subject had been coached and felt persecuted, causing them to literally flee the room. One of the questions Ross asks subjects is: “What behavior have you exhibited, and what has happened to cause [your friends and family] to be so concerned that they brought me in?”
This might soon become a thing that people start actively pursuing with members of their family who’ve fallen under the spell of Trump. It might need to be a more general thing where we have some type of serious diversion with some of the country. I’m not exactly sure how that would work unless something truly catastrophic occurs as a result of a Trump policy blunder, but I do know we can’t go on forever in these alternation dimensions of facts and not facts clashing with each other over and over.
But this week the public did something amazing. They stopped the Congress cold and forced them to do an about-face in less than 24 hours on the issue of disbanding their independent ethnics board.
This all happened after few women in Roanoke went to Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s office, the author of the Ethnics change, and confronted him after reading “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.”
So that was something, and then there’s the Women’s March on Washington that is scheduled for Jan 21, the day after the inauguration, which has exploded, all based on one person’s Facebook events post.
A history of protesting is not required to be an influential activist — and a retired attorney and grandmother in her 60s is proving just that. The night after Donald Trump was elected, Rebecca Shook, who lives in Hawaii, composed a Facebook post expressing her frustration and pondered if women could march on Washington during Inauguration Day.
Assisted by her friends, Shook created an event page for the march, which was shared on the popular Facebook group Pantsuit Nation. Within less than 24 hours, 10,000 people had confirmed their attendance, according to a report in The Washington Post. Now, over 160,000 people will join Shook to march on Washington the day after the inauguration.
Shook told Reuters that she launched the event with no plan or belief that it would materialize. "I was in such shock and disbelief that this type of sentiment could win," she said. "We had to let people know that is not who [we] are."
One person did this. One person can make a difference. Many people who come together and speak up, and reach out, can make a difference.
After you hit rock bottom, you start to bounce back. I don’t know how far or how high we will eventually bounce, but it just might be higher than we’re able to even see from where we are right now.
Now that’s something, isn’t it?
Democrats seem to already been bouncing back. How long will it take — and what level of shock will be required — for Republicans and Trumpsters to finally shake their deluded fever dream and begin to do the same?
Sometimes a movement begins to coalesce as soon as it can be named and identified, I’m not claiming to be coining this name, I think it’s already there, but what I think we are now seeing is the birth and growth of the Indivisibles.