On communication, professional and otherwise.
Seen on near the doorway of a massive, windowless building near my house, a sign that doesn’t make any sense unless you’re a substation worker. Or, unless you interpret it as sound counsel about emotional intelligence, and maintaining boundaries in the workplace.
Okay, it’s been about a month now since the election. I don’t know what Trump voters have been doing, but if I were them, I’d get a lot of enjoyment out of doing exactly what Harris voters are doing: listening to endless chewing of bitter cud on MSNBC and CNN, about what the Democratic Party has to do to become the party of the people once again.
If you were handed a mile-high stack of transcripts from all those soul-searching shows and told to create an executive summary, you could do a lot worse than this quote, from another presidential candidate, eight very, very (very) long fucking years ago.
You know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people—now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of these folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket—and I know this because I see friends from all over America here—I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas—as well as, you know, New York and California—but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
What progress we’ve all made!
After seeing it as a very young man, I’ve been looking for a streaming version of the famous 1968 Frederick Wiseman documentary High School for many years—sensing I needed to see it again, to contemplate the change (and lack of it) in my country, during my lifetime. I found it last night, just when I needed most. Here’s but one of several dozen scenes that will help you, will force you to, think about what our half-century has meant for American adults and American children—and what the next half century might mean then, too.
E-MAIL READERS, CLICK THE LINK AT BOTTOM TO VIEW VIDEO.
Postscript, written the afternoon after the original post: After a day of reverie, I think I know what’s most profound about many of these scenes (though not the excerpt posted here): It’s mostly People in Charge determinedly but hopelessly trying to maintain their grip on things—sort of the other side of “make America great again,” which is an even more hopeless (but just as determined) attempt to get that grip back, more than a half century later. God help me, I’m going to watch the goddamned thing again tonight.