Now

A time to remember:

Whatever happens I will create no more problems; I will create no more pain for myself.    The Power of Now
   Eckhart Tolle

If we don’t look into hope and fear, seeing a thought arise, seeing the chain reaction that follows, if we don’t train ourselves to sit with that energy without getting snared by the drama, then we are always going to be afraid.
   When Things Fall Apart
   Pema Chodron

Practicing mindfulness I can recognize what is happening in the present without grasping or aversion. I can practice mere recognition of what is going on within me and around me without judgment or reactions. This helps me to keep stability and freedom alive within myself.
Touching the Earth
   Thich Nhat Hanh

The goal of psychoanalysis is to make unconscious process conscious.
Sigmund Freud

Never give up
No matter what is going on
Never give up
Develop the heart
. . .
Be compassionate
Not just to your friends but
to everyone, be compassionate
Work for peace in your heart and in
the world
Work for peace, and I say again
Never give up
His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama

 

1,000,000

Despite over two months’ warnings, on Feb. 28 President Trump famously announced, “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” This inexplicable refusal to face reality accounts, in large measure, for the fact that today, April 28, America shattered the world record with 1,000,000 cases and over 55,000  COVID 19 deaths!

We can’t survive four more years of this man.

The Madness of King Donald Revisited

Reports to the contrary, there is no King Donald!

At campaign rallies: Mexico will pay for his Wall. Carry ‘em “out on stretcher.” Would consider paying legal fees for a supporter who punched out a protester.

As President, refused to condemn white supremacists and Neo-Nazis

Despite agreement to the contrary among his own Intelligence Community, takes Vladimir Putin’s word Russia did not and does not meddled in our elections,

Taunts, insults and name-calling like a sixth grade Bully.

Thousands of lies and misstatements.

Finally, COVID 19: Despite daily briefings over three month, did nothing but quarantine China. Predicted it would vanish by a “miracle.” Supports treatment with untested hydrooxychloroquine, potentially “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine”—now add a touch of zinc. (Where does he get these notions?) Called for packed churches and a country rearing to go by Easter. Latest counts: 605,390 known infected, 24,582 deaths! And the disaster rolls on!

And now he’ll Rule the States through Royal Decree!  Good luck with that.

Some still believe and support him! What am I missing?

Kill the Messenger

There he goes again, dodging the question by questioning the source and insulting the questioner.

At an April 6 White House briefing ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked President Trump to comment on Health and Human Services Deputy Inspector General Christi Grimm’s report that 323 hospitals experience supply shortages and testing delays in responding to the COVID 19 pandemic. Questioning the report’s validity and attacking the journalist, Trump’s response is a textbook example of the “If you don’t like the message kill the messenger” fallacy.

Seeming to imply the report is a hatchet job and, as always, without citing evidence, Trump called the report “just wrong.”

A twenty-year HHS executive under Republican and Democrat administrations, the report’s Principle Deputy Inspector General, Ms Grimm receives across-the-board accolades from supervisors and Awards for Excellence. Given the work of collecting and complexity of compiling the data and the multiple eyes and minds involved proofing, correcting, revising and publishing the report, to imply that Ms Grimm or someone skewed the findings to hurt Trump is patently absurd!

After implying the report is bogus, President Trump lit into the questioner, calling Jonathan Karl a “third-rate reporter” who “will never make it” (i.e., not on Fox?). In a March 27 exchange, Karl asked the President if every American who needed a ventilator would get one. Trump’s cryptic and unfathomable response, “Look, don’t’ be a cutie pie. OK?”

According to Wikipedia Jonathan Karl has covered “the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the state Department, and has reported from more than 30 countries” covering U.S politics, foreign policy, the military and has been ABC’s White House Correspondent since 2012. Over thirty years in journalism Karl has been received the Joan Shorenstein Barone Award, the Walter Cronkite Award, an Emmy Award, and the National Press Foundation’s Everett McKinley Dirksen Award.

A “third rate reporter (who’ll) never make it” Mr. President? Unlike you Jonathan Karl has!

Comfort

Three days after tying up at Manhattan’s Pier 90 with1000 beds and 1200 medical personnel USNS Comfort had received 20 patients. On learning this, an FDR or Harry Truman would dial up the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Secretary of the Navy, and Governor Cuomo, “Gentlemen, in twenty-four hours I expect to see a column of ambulances delivering patients to that ship. When I visit in seventy-two hours, I expect to see every bed occupied. If anyone frustrates you in this effort send them to me. The buck stops here!”

Impossible? Hell no! Damn the red tape and regulations! In times of crisis Presidents make things happen! It’s what they do.

Fear

When in danger or in doubt,
Run in circles, scream and shout!
Anon.

March 4, 1933, at the heart of the Great Depression President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address. Almost nine decades down the road, the prescience of his admonitions is stunning,

“I am certain that my fellow Americans expect . . . I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured will revive and will prosper. So, first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days . . .

Our common difficulties . . . concern, thank God, only material things.

Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.”

(My emphasis.)

March 20, 2020, as America’s numbers of OCVID 19 infections and deaths ramped up, NBC’s Peter Alexander asked President Donald Trump, “What do you say to Americans right now who are scared?” Our leader responded,

“I say you are a terrible reporter. That‘s what I say, and I say that it’s a very bad signal you are putting out to the American people. The American people are looking for answers and they’re looking for hope.”

Right Mr. President, answers and hope, not insult and bluster! You were handed a gilt-framed opportunity and you blew it, Big-Time!

In 1933 Americans’ fear focused on loss of jobs and income, of sleeping on the sidewalk, of standing in soup and welfare lines. Today’s fear revolves around suffering and death from a physical disease. Whether from of loss of income or pain and death, President Roosevelt articulated a crucial fact: our emotional reaction to fear can paralyze our capacity for rational corrective action. Never surrender to “fear itself!” Amid England’s “darkest hour,” Roosevelt’s ally Winston Churchill admonished, “Never, never, never give up!”

Failing to act on COVID 19 warnings in January and ignoring the virus through February, in March President Trump predicted it would vanish by “magic,” attacked a “terrible reporter” for raising the specter of fear, anticipated packed April Easter services
and, the latest, hatched a moronic notion to assess the risk of contagion by county.

Thankfully, as diagnosed COVID 19 cases rocket past one hundred thousand, Americans may rely on state Governors to value their constituents’ health over economics. In March, to mitigate spread of disease Governors asked citizens to stay home and maintain public physical separation, businesses elected or were compelled to close their doors, sporting events large and small have been postponed or cancelled. Even birthday parties, memorial services and funerals are curtailed.

Rather than appreciate the wisdom in these actions, characteristically, President Trump predicted out-of-work, out-of-paycheck Americans would give up in mass suicide. This slap-on-the-face and “terrible” assessment of Americans’ mettle, reveals the values of a man conceived and raised amid the bare-knuckled, back-alley brawling over New York City Real Estate, of business, where return-on-investment, profit-and-loss and stock portfolios measure all things.

No doubt the Great Depression drove a few to the ultimate act of despair. From our President’s perspective, it may be instructive that suicides making 1929’s “News” were men in three-piece-suits leaping from Wall Street windows.

Fear seems to paralyze and incapacitate our President’s capacity for rational, constructive action. Rather than manage the crisis—the job we hired and pay him for—Donald Trump predicts miracles and hopes COVID 19 will go away by “magic.”

Captain Queeg comes to mind. Alone in his wheelhouse, a run amok skipper steers hard to port, then starboard. On and below deck his crew scrambles, shifts cargo and ballast to keep the vessel from turning keel-up.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” “A terrible reporter.” The difference in focus, personality, articulation, emotion and thinking is stunning! One based in ignorance and fear, the other in wisdom and courage.