November 12, 2016: The Season of Great Bullshit

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is never acceptable. Hoo-nōs

Okay, Donald Trump is our President-elect. Whatever we believe, whomever we believe, that’s what has happened (short of some unknown issue in the verification process). Time to get over it.

Yes, this political season has been a rough one, rife with nonsense and division, and almost nothing to feel good about. Like the Brexit vote last summer, I personally think a great mistake has happened. Of course I think it has happen before around here—and more than once. Did we survive it, so like before there is nothing to truly be concerned about? That is also a great mistake. We continue to pay for these mistakes, some mistakes much more than others and some people pay more than others.

If the buy-steel-from-China boy whilst giving a narrative to folks in the “Rust Belt” about how jobs and trade deals have made their lives second class doesn’t go a bit mainstream, so many people in America will be so much worse off they’ll long for other days and feel the tarnish—and rust—in ways that have not been imagined or realized since the Great Depression and WWII.

And if Trump does lean back towards the middle, does that mean he’s a genius? Well, certainly an interpretation that he’ll say anything and do anything to get his way would not be an off-the-wall spin. The means justifies the end is not genius, it’s disingenuous. While it’s hard to trust Clinton, can we trust Trump’s kind of behavior either? Would we have been better off with Hillary Clinton? We won’t know. Certainly there is lots of tarnish and bungling to go around in her camp as well. Are either Trump or Clinton great devils? C’mon! They’re not saints either! So what? Like all families, we’ve got some relationship work to do. The season of Great Bullshit is not just about those two.

While we continue (I hope) to figure out how to separate the cognitive/emotional/behavioral chaff from the wheat, we’ll have to rely on our diversity (which we certainly have) and our civility (which is questionable) to not make the season of Great Bullshit even worse. We simply cannot continue to frame our problems in an “us versus them” scenario.

Perhaps the season of Great Bullshit will transform into the season of Great Learning. I certainly hope so. Process and product, order and diversity, substance and change (attributed to psychologist Gordon Allport).