Water is emotion. It is the sea we swim in, often while falsely believing we are standing on dry land, on reason, on fact. Self evidently, the Left thinks it stands on reason, on fact, but it is in fact deeply, deeply submerged in a never ending eddy of primal and generally ugly emotion it lies about, to itself, and to others. They call hatred compassion, intolerance tolerance.
Last night I was dreaming I was in a dream urban landscape. Everything was ruined and covered in water. There were bullets everywhere, and I found a half broken gun I was afraid might still fire, and I could not figure out how to open up the chamber to look, so I fired it underwater. It shot. Twice, then a third time.
Now, in my style of dream interpretation all dreams are first highly personal, but also sometimes transpersonal, collective. I think this was one such dream.
In my own case, of course, there is a strong emotional residue of conflict, of battles fought long ago (like in Lord of the Rings and the swamps, which is a highly mythic and interesting image when applied to practical psychodynamics, how many of us are surrounded by ghosts ready and able to come back to life if we touch the water, the emotional space, they live in, and how fear of this prevents many people from on-going growth, and traps them in an emotional swamp), and discharging the gun was likely discharging unreleased aggressions and fears. The feeling was one of the after-math of the battle. Everyone was in shock, but the fighting was over.
But on a higher level, I would submit that this image describes many of our inner cities, and perhaps even our national political landscape. Refuse from violence is everywhere. There is a lingering field of latent emotion on the landscape (obviously if I tell the outer truth, that emotion is quite present, quite ubiquitous and very much expressed).
In any event, to make a short story long, in tandem with another dream I had I don’t want to share, here is what I would supposed: Trump needs to go on a charm offensive with his enemies. But he should start by expressing caring for our inner cities that Obama NEVER DID.
I read some Chicago gangs have expressed a desire to talk with Trump about how to end the violence. I say he should convene a conference of sorts, where he brings in gang members from a variety of cities, and allows and encourages open discussion about their problems, and what they need. As a general rule “blacks” have been represented by people like Jesse Jackson who couldn’t care less about concrete accomplishments, as long as he gets to lead the march, and gets his cut of the shake-down money.
Not unreasonably, these people feel neglected, abandoned, and that nobody does, or ever will, give a flying fuck about them. So why not engage in self destructive, even suicidal behavior? What good could the future possibly hold? At least continual violence makes life interesting, and sometimes you win a battle here and there, which you can celebrate with your actual family, your brothers and sisters of the gang tribe, the people who have your back, and who you cover for. This seems emotionally logical to me.
And I honestly would not presume to say what the answers are, prior to listening to what they have to say. I assume what they say will make sense to them. It may not be practical, but it would represent a starting point for planning and acting in coherent ways to eliminate these emotional swamps where so much bad happens, and far too little good.
And to the extent he can, I think Trump should reach out to all the groups which feel threatened. He should reach out to gay rights groups (since they keep adding letters, I’m just going to stick with Peking, Bombay, and the Koran, figuratively speaking), to Hispanic groups, perhaps even to the “anti-fascist” groups. It is much easier to demonize and hate people you don’t know, haven’t humanized, can’t relate to.
And at some point he should invite in Hollywood, to help them understand that he is human, that he isn’t crazy, that he is not trying to do anything but PROTECT America from fascism, and that they don’t have to agree with everything he does and says in order to accept that they will get another shot in two years at altering the balance of power, but that in the meantime, he intends to help as many people as he can. He will win a few converts, in all likelihood.
The core psychological reality is that most Leftists have the same emotionally rooted assumptions about conservatives that the KKK does about blacks, the Nazis did about Jews, the Soviets did about the bourgeoisie, kulaks, the Cossacks, and others, and that the Cambodian fascists did about anyone who seemed educated in any way in the old system. They dehumanize them, depersonalize them, dissociate from them emotionally, and these acts open up the emotional logic of physical and emotional violence.
Trump is a normal human being. He has flaws, like everyone, but if there is one group on this planet that commits and condones particularly sexual sins of all sorts, it is Hollywood. Trump is vastly better than Roman Polanski, or Woody Allen, who MARRIED his own daughter, more or less. Nobody cares in Hollywood.
Hollywood is in no place to judge these things. And what SHOULD matter is whether or not Trump is fixing real problems.
Now, many of these people are lunatics. That can’t be fixed. But not all of them are. This is cause for hope.
The thing about a healthy morality is it is the by-product of emotional health. Healthy morality is flexible, but clear about the dominant principle of making the world a more peaceful, happier, healthier place. It recognizes the world is ambiguous, and that the right answer in one place may not be in another. Every day is a new day. Every moral decision must be based on an effort to understand the totality of the situation at hand, and must include both the present moment and the future, and not just those immediately affected, but to the extent possible predict who else may be affected in the future. It is easy to do something good for one person, that hurts many other people down the line. This is not morality, in my view. This is what Obamacare did. It clearly helped some, but at the expense of most. Mainly it was congenial to the egos of emotionally superficial people.
Few ideas.