To the Bottom of Wherever

It has been quite a while (about 3 1/2 years) since my last post.  That has had to do with many things, including finding ways to act politically that were not just blogging.   It has also had to do with the ways in which life got extraordinarily busy.

Early in November Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, and yesterday, January 20, he was inaugurated.  The advent of this presidency feels like a grave crisis for our country and for the world.   This crisis has alternately thrown me into rage, despair, helplessness and bewilderment, and it became clear to me shortly following the election that I needed to find a way to intentionally and constructively act in response to this crisis.

Immediately following the election I had raged and vented and spat via Facebook posts.   This raging drew Amens from many of my friends but also anger, especially from people in the very small Eastern Washington town where I grew up.   One of these people unfriended me, but later messaged me that she was re-friending me, that she loved me, and that she didn't want Facebook politics to get in the way of that.

This person has known me since before I started grade school, and the interaction reminded me of what was unique about that town:  there were people of widely varying points of view and those views sometimes clashed, but we didn't become enemies over such clashes;  we knew each other too well.   We had babysat or been babysat by each other, we had attended church together, rooted at basketball games together, changed and showered in the same locker rooms together, and that being together overrode political differences however deeply felt.  The unfriending and refriending reminded me of that, and it has made me much less likely to simply vent on Facebook now.

I am less sure than  I once was of the value of attempting to persuade a right wing skeptic of the truth of my left wing values.   It's as if we're from different planets and there is no persuading that is going to happen.   If I am honest with myself, I don't really know why I hold the values I do, nor why they happen to constitute such a standard left-liberal bouquet:   pro-choice, socialist, climate change (is real), embrace of diversity:  not to say I don't hold these position staunchly and fervently, but I can't say from where that fervency actually stems.

When I started this blog in 2013 I set out themes and topics, but I'm changing what I'm doing for this re-launch.   My goal, perhaps unattainable, is to get to the bottom of wherever right and/or left wing values spring.   Not just "perhaps unattainable,"  it's really not clear to me what the correct way of proceeding might be.   In lieu of that knowledge, I am setting myself the following task:  To undertake a leisurely and painstaking review, in very small bites, of the written work of R. Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, and John Cage.  After this thought had come to me it felt like a confirmation when I remembered that Norman O. Brown, under similarly perplexing political circumstances in the early 50's had undertaken the project to critically and systematically read the work of Sigmund Freud.

To begin with, the plan is to read, in parallel, Fuller's Synergetics, McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy, Brown's Life Against Death and Cage's Silence.   If I can manage to post once a week, it is hoped to cycle through a brief passage from each book, with reflections connecting to our present situation, over the course of one month, returning to the beginning of the cycle at the beginning of the next month.