Hope is on the Clock

Photoshop treatment of original art by Ayça Alkoç

Daughter Gillian sent me a link to an NPR TED Talks podcast on the subject of Dialog and Exchange, a driving obsession of hers. It’s full of the paradigm shifting insights we come to expect from TED and well-worth a listen. It starts with the granddaughter of the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps telling how she came to reject her family’s hateful mission after getting into a dialog with someone on Twitter...of all places. Then a Stanford University researcher reports on how by simply reframing issues to accommodate the moral view of people can change their minds on certain political issues (for example, there’s evidence that stressing the pursuit of purity in discussing environmental policy actually moves climate change deniers to acceptance). Finally, a rabbi recounts a career of seeking out encounters with people with opposing views for the sake of both teaching them and learning from them. 
Coincidental to the title of this blog post, the rabbi, Jonathan Sacks of Great Britain, ends his talk on his distinction between optimism and hope. Optimism, he says, is the belief that things will get better; hope is the belief that we can make things better by working together. That very belief is what’s on the clock here. I think we’re likely in the 59th second of the 11th hour of any hope we have of coming together and saving our country from falling irrevocably into an authoritarian state. And I say this as someone who often draws his optimism from history…as in: we endured the Civil War; we beat back Hitler; we won the Cold War. How bad can this be?
This is how bad it be: what we face today combines the worst elements of all those devastating national trials-- sharp, irreconcilable division as in the Civil War; the emergence of an irrational autocrat as in World War II; the imposition of totalitarian rule over our freedoms of press, speech, assembly, due process, voting rights, as well as justice and equality before the law as practiced in the Soviet Union during the Cold War…and since.  
In the TED talk Gillian linked me to most of the focus is on the importance of dialog between those who disagree with each other in order to reach compromises to avoid social disaster. Pollyanna, however, is not a Ted talker. One who is, the researcher who advocated the moral reframing approach, admits that there are times when the other side does not have a moral leg to stand on and it’s necessary take a firm stand and flat out call them on theirs. We have clearly reached that stage in regards to Donald Trump. As much print space as the New York Times has invested this past year in trying to understand Trump supporters, the fact is that these people have wholly embraced his well-documented vulgarity, flimflammery, dishonesty, incompetence, racism, nativism, corruption,  boorishness, ignorance, narcissism, and authoritarianism. Normally I would take time to link to the evidence that abounds on all those scores, but really? After two years of having him flaunt his trespasses in plain sight, those who can see them, do. Those who can’t, don’t want to. There is no seeing eye-to-eye with such people. There is no moral middle ground between us. These are people who have as little regard for the traditions, institutions, responsibilities, and legacy of this country as the man they elected to uproot and trash it all. It’s time to move past dialog and exchange (and this includes you, batty Old Grey Lady).  
When the first celebrity to support him, Tom Brady, calls him “divisive”, when one of the first national politicians to support him calls him unfit for office, when a Republican Senator who voted with him 85% of the time says nine months of him is enough, when an army of bona fide conservative champions such as Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Charlie Sykes, Rick Wilson and George Will forcefully and persistently call for the Republican Party to separate from him, we know that all the persuadables who are coming aboard are on board. All the people with the conscience, intelligence, and patriotic fervor to see what’s at stake are now gathered together on this hallowed common ground. This is the alliance.
Of the 37% who tell pollsters they still support him, another 10% will probably turn after all the indictments come out (even Richard Nixon left office with 24% approval…and this was afterthe tapes, the courts and his party went against him). That 10% will be meaningless to the struggle ahead to save the country, except to the degree that it pushes the craven Republican leadership to assume its Constitutional duty.
It will be for the rest of us to stay strong, focused and committed to taking our support for Special Counsel (Republican) Robert Mueller to the streets. This will be our High Noon ; RepublicanMueller will be our Gary Cooper. But unlike the cowardly citizens of Hadleyville in that classic American Western, we cannot remain huddled and quaking behind closed doors. At this point it’s at best a 50-50 proposition that when the Trump indictments come down Republican leaders Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will at long last put country above party. It’s probably less than 50% that Democrats will be in charge at any time soon to make a difference. And we can pretty much count on the extreme right and left to go after Republican Mueller with a renewed and vicious vengeance…the right because of its vested interest in authoritarianism…the left because of its interest in pulling all vestiges of the establishment down.
So it will be up to the reluctant patriots among us to join those not so reluctant who marched multiple times in 2017 in political and moral outrage at what’s being done to our country. It’ll be up to all of us to strike with a ferocity not seen since the Vietnam War protest era when Republican Mueller walks down that dusty, dirty main street alone with his indictments in hand. High Noon famously ends with Cooper’s Marshall Will Kane throwing his badge into the street in disgust. If Republican Mueller is put in the same position because his brave, diligent, honest work is ignored or dismissed or perverted, this country will have faced its high noon and died a coward’s death.


The Mueller time we don't want to see