Eighty Percent Of The Time

~ Ann Policelli Cronin ~ Leave a comment

If Anne Lamott can do it, so can I. 80% of the time.  Here’s what Anne Lamott writes:

                                                        A Note From Anne Lamott

Every so often, I mention a book I’ve always thought about writing, called All The People I Still Hate: A Christian Perspective. Half the people responding roar with laughter and say, “I’d read that,” and half are sort of horrified, by either the word “hate” or “Christian.”

You’re not supposed to hate, because hate is ugly and diminishes the soul of the hater. But if I were to be honest. I’d admit that I could still write the book, about some of our leaders and one really special ex-boyfriend. But I got the miracle.

There is an entire chapter in the new book titled, “Don’t Let Them Get You to Hate Them,” about the steps I took to reduce my crazed fever dream hatred of certain people, whom I am too polite to name. I do not have the book in front of me (I am on a plane). And I have lost an enormous amount of cognitive function since this book tour began, so cannot give you a synopsis. But I seem to remember something about how all willingness to change and heal from anything addictive, whether alcoholism, dieting, binging, or hatred, begins with the pain of staying the same.

A sober relative once told me that he and his friends, working the 12 Step program, all reached Step Zero before they did Step One (which involves admitting that they were powerless over their drinking and that their lives had become unmanageable.) But before that, they had to arrive at Step Zero: they woke up one morning, sick and tired, and said to themselves, “This shit has GOT to stop.”

I did the hate for a full year after the election. It was kind of exhilarating, definitely mood-altering—I could go from despair and hopelessness, to adrenalized, not quite on fire but hot. I was so stuck, so clenched, my mind filled with tiny rats; I didn’t even know who I would be without my hate.

I felt that if I gave it up, they would win, in the paranoid sense of the word They. I would become a mealy-outhed blob of fear and indecision, like, well, right off the top of my head, Susan Collins. I mean that nicely.

Who, very recently, I was loathing. And now, through the miracle of Step Zero, prayer, radical self-care, and looking in the mirror for the source of the problem—at own fear, my inner blowhard Donald Trump, I am not hating her—very often, or nearly as much.

There’s a story in Almost Everything about one of my 8- year-old Sunday School students, to whom I asked this question one day: “Do you believe that God, and Goodness, are always with us, within us, around us, to comfort or guide, to gentle our hearts and help us get our sense of humor back?”

He thought about this a minute, and then said, “About Eighty percent”

I love this so much. Eighty percent And the great writer and speaker David Roche happens to be the pastor of the Church of 80% Sincerity, which posits that 80% of anything is a small miracle—sincerity, faithfulness, healthy eating, truth-telling (“Darling, I will love you all the way through dinner.”)

So after I reached critical mass with my hatred last year, and realized I had lost myself, felt toxic and rashy, imprisoned and steamrolled, and was becoming them, and that this was what they wanted, I did the most amazing thing. I stopped in my tracks. I asked myself, “What if you have a year left on this vale of tears, this world of wonders. This funny blue marble. Is this how you choose to live?”

Of course not. I want to be a Love Bug, because if you want to have loving feelings, you need to do loving things: We take the action, the kind action, and the insight follows. Wonder and service fill us, and help us pink up, like babies. Revenge empties our reserves, sickens us, and makes our skin look like hell.

My insight is that we are a dangerous species. Cain is still killing Abel, and at the same time, paradoxically, we are as vulnerable as kittens.(There is also a chapter in the hope book I wrote about how all truth is paradox.) So yeah, we get scared, and we blame, and we judge, and we bask in our self-righteous victimization. And we are all, even Dick Cheney, and EVEN (I think) Ted Cruz, precious children of God, with equal standing in the family of mankind and womankind. God loves Mitch McConnell exactly as much as he loves my little grandson. That’s called the mystery of grace.

So if I were to have written a book called All the People I Hate: A Christian Perspective, I should have done so a year ago. It’s all been sort of ruined by the work of the last year. If I were to be honest, I do hate Trump, or at least every single thing he does and says. But less.

Twenty percent of me remembers that he is a man who has never once been loved, never once, except maybe by his kids. His brother was destroyed by the lack of love and committed suicide. Twenty percent of me aches for the total barbaric ruins of his inner life. Twenty percent. That is a miracle. And on top of that, I’ve realized that God looks at Trump and sees His own suffering son, never leaves him and aches for him, too, pulls for him to be transformed by Love, loves him as a mother does her child. Love is WAY beyond what I am personally comfortable or familiar with, tending as I do toward thoughts of perp walks and commissary cheese snacks.

And even when I am still working on the eighty percent part where I have so much rage about some people, I know that God in her infinite divine weirdness still loves hateful revengeful me as much as She loves the perfect baby we played with in Austin.

How can these things be true? You got me; but I know that my belovedness and inclusion in this precious community of All Of Us are due to God having such low standards. (As my son Sam’s aging and barely mobile but joyous dad says, every time he successfully lurches to the next stabilizing counter or tabletop, “Yay God!”) I have absolute hope that we are, and will continue to be okay (well…eighty percent of the time.)

I believe, against all odds, that if we stick together, take care of the poor and the very old, get thirsty people water, including our own worried self-obsessed selves, we can dramatically reduce our viral load. We can be Love with skin on. We can be present in barbaric times, and at the same time be nourished by the gorgeous and inspiring things all around us.

We can be free.

The Message For The 2018 Election

~ Ann Policelli Cronin ~ 1 Comment

I am very disappointed in what the Democrats are doing to regain the House and Senate as well as in their efforts to claim some governorships. As the only political party that can return sanity to our current national life, they don’t have a big enough message.  I finally realized what that message should be when I read David Brooks’ analysis of the 2018 campaign season recently in The New York Times.

He critiques the Democratic Party for being inadequate to the current moment because it offers no counter-narrative to the immorality of Trump’s behavior and no unifying argument against ethnic nationalism.

I get that the slogan “Make America Great Again” attracts some people. I can buy that many Americans feel threatened by cultural changes and economic insecurity and feel that the solution to their fears is to bring back the past, whether that past ever really existed or not.  It is true that we are living in an oligarchy in which those with the most money, those in the top 1%, prosper, and the rest of us struggle. It is true that our neighbors and fellow citizens are increasingly people of color. It is true that racial and ethnic diversity is becoming the fabric of our nation. It is true that a married couple is not limited to being a man and a woman. It is true that more of our neighbors are doing their grocery shopping on Sunday rather than going to church. So the past looks simpler and neater to many people.

However, that past, at its best, was based on principles of kindness and fairness. In that past, we welcomed strangers and made them feel at home in our neighborhoods. We would never publicly make fun of people and scream “lock her up” as a solution to a disagreement. We wouldn’t call people names and let our children watch us doing it. We valued the truth and worked to find out the facts before making a decision or taking a side. We respected the commitments we made to the person we married and didn’t take lightly marital infidelity. We stood for something.

Those values are what the Democratic Party should put up next to the values espoused at Trump rallies. The message of the Democratic Party candidates should be: LET’S MOVE THE COUNTRY FORWARD WITH THE BEST VALUES OF THE PAST.

It is not the best of our past that Trump heralds and to what he wants us to return. He offers a past that is racist, closed, and full of fear.

It is up to the Democratic Party to remind the country that in this election of 2018, it is to the values of kindness, inclusion, moral leadership, honesty, and commitment that we must return. And we can’t return to them by voting for Republicans. We can return to them only by voting for those who oppose lying, name-calling, unkindness, unfaithfulness and racism. We must vote Democratic as our best hope for the present and as our only hope for our children’s future.

A Ray Of Light For The Country

~ Ann Policelli Cronin ~ 1 Comment

If for some strange reason you are one of those people who has been feeling down lately because you have a Justice of the Supreme Court who lied under oath about what he wrote in his prep school yearbook and what he did about judicial appointments and knew about stolen emails while working in the White House, and you have a Senate that did not do its job, and you have a President who ordered a FBI cover-up, watch this video. It will restore your confidence in innocence and will remind you of nobler days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iImiGDeRBQA

Kavanaugh Will Not Have The Last Word

~ Ann Policelli Cronin ~ Leave a comment

For those of us who have been too distressed to watch the news since the confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice who lied under oath to the U.S. Senate, Bill Blum, who is an experienced lawyer and judge, wrote a good summary of what that confirmation has given us as a country. Here are  his five take-aways:

  1. The Kavanaugh confirmation proves once again that the courts, especially the Supreme Court is political.
  2. Kavanaugh’s confirmation signals the triumph of a judicial counterrevolution.
  3. For the time being, white male privilege has triumphed over the rights of women.
  4. Elections matter.
  5.  If Democrats take the House, Kavanaugh will face further investigations and possible impeachment.

Of most importance to me is #3. Blum writes:

” The very fact that the nomination was ever thrown into doubt is a testament to the growing power of women. Eventually, that power will prevail, and we will have no more Kavanaughs or Thomases on the court, or in any other prominent position of government.

This time, however, the power of hypermasculinity and white privilege won out, in keeping with the president’s omnipresent neofascist slogan—“Make America Great Again”—and the false promise it offers to return the country to a fictional past, when successful white Christian men held all posts of authority, and women and racial minorities happily accepted their second-class citizenship.

Trump and his enablers will eventually pay a heavy price for placing Kavanaugh on the court and, more generally, demeaning women and scapegoating minorities. The only question is when.”

May the “when” that Blum anticipates come very, very soon.

And may Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh come to see that the ominous words that the new Justice of the Supreme Court spoke at the September 27th hearing do, indeed, come true: What goes around comes around.

 

Donald Trump As 7th Grader

~ Ann Policelli Cronin ~ 1 Comment

Every 7th grade English class that I taught needed to hear the same story; now, sadly,  the country needs to hear that story. Hear it or perish as a great nation.

The story is:

After the Civil War, one of the outstanding Union generals, General Joseph Hooker, was called upon to testify at court-martials of other Union officers who had not distinguished themselves during the war. He refused. He said, “I refuse to build myself up by tearing other men down.”

At least once a year in the 7th grade English class, some of those 13 year-olds, usually boys, would try to build themselves up by tearing another student down. They would laugh at, insult, or bully another student. Most of all, they would let that student know that they were the “in” group, and the other student was not. When that happened, I would tell them the General Joseph Hooker story and point out that tearing another person down was a crumby way to feel good about yourself. That story seemed to stick with them.

Now we see the President of the United Sates of America and his followers in need of that story.  At a recent rally,  he laughed at, insulted, and bullied Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and those in attendance laughed along with him. An excellent article in The Atlantic describes that cruelty in detail.

What have we sunk to as a nation, as a people? Thirteen year olds are just beginning to grow into adults. We can forgive them and mold them. But a man in his 8th decade and his adult followers? What do we do with them?

Vote out of office all those who think it’s OK to laugh at, insult, and bully someone else. Anyone who thinks it’s OK to not treat Christine Blasey Ford, whom everyone spoke of as credible, with respect and support does not deserve to be in political office…..and does not deserve to be promoted to 8th grade.

Emboldened By October 6, 2018

~ Ann Policelli Cronin ~ 1 Comment

I am more emboldened today than yesterday. I agree with those Senators who called yesterday the darkest day in the history of the United States Senate and the White House’s FBI (non) investigation a cover -up.

Check out my To-Do list on yesterday’s posting, which is below.

Please suggest what else we can do together. Join me. Let’s create a future and a new history of which we and our children and grandchildren can be proud.

 YESTERDAY

Shame On You, Susan Collins

Shame on you, Susan Collins for voting for someone who lied under oath to the Supreme Court. Shame on you for not telling us that you know that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath. Even if he cannot remember his assault on Christine Blasey Ford or even if it never happened, he lied about his drinking, lied about known terms referring to sexual exploits, and lied about his attack on the reputation of a contemporaneous 18 year old young woman.  In your long, obfuscating speech in which you announced your vote, you did not mention those verified facts.

The 2400 law school professors who opposed his confirmation know that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath.

The American Bar Association opposed his confirmation because they know that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath.

John Paul Stevens, a former Justice of the Supreme Court, opposed Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation because he knows that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath and does not conduct himself with the judiciousness of a Justice of the Supreme Court. I bet the current Supreme Court Justices as well know that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath.

James Comey, former Director of the FBI who said it was significant when someone lies in the present time about what he wrote in his high school yearbook, knows Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath.

Twenty million people who watched the Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, September 27th know that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath, some of whom are now  appalled that someone who perjured himself will sit on the Supreme Court and others who are exhilarated that he got away with it.

And I know that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath.

So what will I do about it?

  1. I will today send sizable (for my budget) donations to Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly who are in tight Senate races in states in Trump country where it was risky to vote NO on Kavanaugh. They, however, followed their consciences and voted NO. The deserve whatever I can do to help them.  DONE
  2. I will contact the website called Crowdpac, which was set up in Maine to gather support for whoever will run against Susan Collins in 2020. Their website crashed yesterday after Susan Collins gave her speech announcing her support for Brett Kavanaugh because it was  inundated with donations for her future opponent. WILL DO TODAY
  3. I will phone bank in my own state next week for Beto O’Rourke in a get out the vote effort in Texas because he is man of integrity and his victory will get rid of a Senator on the Judiciary Committee who voted for Brett Kavanaugh. Also, his victory  will help to create a Democratic majority in the Senate. SCHEDULED FOR OCTOBER 16
  4. I will continue to support Stacey Abrams in her race for Governor of Georgia. She is someone who can change our political culture because she knows what it is to not be allowed a voice by the dominant culture, to not be an elite AND knows how to become a leader with integrity and compassion anyway and uplift our national discourse.  DONE
  5. I will do all I can as a private citizen to urge the Democratic Party to stand for inclusion, for integrity, and for giving voice to the voiceless and to reject money as the controlling influence in politics. I will urge the Democratic Party, which has been my heritage, to create itself anew and give us all a  future with promise. HAVEN’T FIGURED OUT HOW TO DO THIS YET. ANY IDEAS?
  6. ( Added Today)Call the offices of Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly and offer to do what I can for their campaigns from Connecticut, maybe gather people to do a phone bank or send out a mailing. TOMORROW

     

Shame on you, Susan Collins. But we will overcome.

Shame On You, Susan Collins

~ Ann Policelli Cronin ~ 1 Comment

Shame on you, Susan Collins for voting for someone who lied under oath to the Supreme Court. Shame on you for not telling us that you know that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath. Even if he cannot remember his assault on Christine Blasey Ford or even if it never happened, he lied about his drinking, lied about known terms referring to sexual exploits, and lied about his attack on the reputation of a contemporaneous 18 year old young woman.  In your long, obfuscating speech in which you announced your vote, you did not mention those verified facts.

The 2400 law school professors who opposed his confirmation know that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath.

The American Bar Association opposed his confirmation because they know that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath.

John Paul Stevens, a former Justice of the Supreme Court, opposed Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation because he knows that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath and does not conduct himself with the judiciousness of a Justice of the Supreme Court. I bet the current Supreme Court Justices as well know that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath.

James Comey, former Director of the FBI who said it was significant when someone lies in the present time about what he wrote in his high school yearbook, knows Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath.

Twenty million people who watched the Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, September 27th know that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath, some of whom are now  appalled that someone who perjured himself will sit on the Supreme Court and others who are exhilarated that he got away with it.

And I know that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath.

So what will I do about it?

  1. I will today send sizable (for my budget) donations to Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly who are in tight Senate races in states in Trump country where it was risky to vote NO on Kavanaugh. They, however, followed their consciences and voted NO. The deserve whatever I can do to help them.  DONE
  2. I will contact the website called Crowdpac, which was set up in Maine to gather support for whoever will run against Susan Collins in 2020. Their website crashed yesterday after Susan Collins gave her speech announcing her support for Brett Kavanaugh because it was  inundated with donations for her future opponent. WILL DO TODAY
  3. I will phone bank in my own state next week for Beto O’Rourke in a get out the vote effort in Texas because he is man of integrity and his victory will get rid of a Senator on the Judiciary Committee who voted for Brett Kavanaugh. Also, his victory  will help to create a Democratic majority in the Senate. SCHEDULED FOR OCTOBER 16
  4. I will continue to support Stacey Abrams in her race for Governor of Georgia. She is someone who can change our political culture because she knows what it is to not be allowed a voice by the dominant culture, to not be an elite AND knows how to become a leader with integrity and compassion anyway and uplift our national discourse.  DONE
  5. I will do all I can as a private citizen to urge the Democratic Party to stand for inclusion, for integrity, and for giving voice to the voiceless and to reject money as the controlling influence in politics. I will urge the Democratic Party, which has been my heritage, to create itself anew and give us all a  future with promise. HAVEN’T FIGURED OUT HOW TO DO THIS YET. ANY IDEAS?

Shame on you, Susan Collins. But we will overcome.

 

 

 

Read And Weep

~ Ann Policelli Cronin ~ Leave a comment

Read this NYT editorial and weep. 

We will “join our solitudes in the communion of struggle” as the poet Denise Levertov advocates. We will invite new voices to work with us to give our country a future of decency and integrity.  We will not give up.

But first we will read the above editorial and weep. We will weep for what might have been right now.

 

Do Not Be Defined By Loss But By Hope

~ Ann Policelli Cronin ~ 2 Comments
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As people of integrity who respect our Constitution and the Supreme Court, we seem to have lost the seat on the Supreme Court. That’s for now.

Let us “join our solitudes in the communion of struggle” and begin to know our power to unfold a new world that is now only in bud form.  Let’s build a country based on truth-telling, respect, and empathy for one another. Let’s mark today not as the end of a struggle for the Supreme Court but the beginning of our struggle to build a more just society.

If you want to let Christine Blasey Ford know of your support and appreciation, you can send her a postcard at the following address. Postcards are suggested because, for security reasons, all envelopes are opened prior to her receiving them.

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford
Paolo Alto University
1791 Arastradero Rd
Paolo Alto, CA 94304

Above is a copy of the front of my postcard. Feel free to use the quote from Denise Levertov. I also wrote my own message of support and gratitude on the flip side.