“The fundamental problem with politicians is that they’ve looked in the mirror and said, do you know what’s wrong with society? I’m not in charge!”
— Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show
In case you’re living in a cave even more remote than mine, you’re well aware that it is an election year. Tensions are high, patience is low, and few people can stop bringing their marshmallows to the dumpster fire. As the journalist and cool-hair guy Anand Giridharadas writes, we live in a Write-Off culture — perhaps more so than ever. Every day we are more and more willing to dismiss each other based on political opinions, preferred candidates, and demographics. Let’s party!
George Carlin, Life is Worth Losing
Ram Dass famously quipped, “If you think you are enlightened, go home for Thanksgiving.” Why is it so difficult to stay grounded, centered, and in our higher selves when we’re with the ones we love most? One reason is because the family is a microcosm of the body politic.
Calling a nation our Motherland or Fatherland is apt because politics begins at home (the word “economy” comes from the Greek meaning “household management”). There are matriarchs, patriarchs, and divisions of labor as Karl Marx articulated to near perfection in his book The German Communist Capital Manifesto Ideology (in German it’s just one big long word). We all enter the world as children embedded in a family and a nation, and the memoirist Mary Karr has the best description of childhood I’ve ever heard: “you’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate.” (My former Twitter bio.) In other words, we enter the political space under another’s care and rule, and the political sphere takes us back, however unconsciously, to this powerless place.
Monty Python, Life of Brian
For this and other reasons, political disagreement is a fast-track into our egos, our deepest needs and wants, into the place of “I’m right and you’re… an idiot.” It’s nearly impossible to connect with the part of us that’s generous and compassionate when we see and hear politicians inside Washington and out of integrity, and when we encounter others who just don’t see things the way we do (the right way!). Often it’s because we’re faced with the shadows of our childhood impotence. We can’t control how others think and feel, and when faced with their disagreeable perspectives, we fail to control our own thoughts and feelings. Sometimes toddler-style. Oh yeah.
Spiritually, politics is a lens. We are subjective creatures experiencing the world via the consciousness of others. Because others see us in the bodies we inhabit and the way we inhabit them, the human experiment is, by definition, limited. We just can’t be all people and have the experience of someone who isn’t us. This is the value of empathy and collective healing (and memoir and the novel).
In the sacred medicine world, we endeavor to practice the art of noticing when we feel resistance, to create internal space that allows us to respond rather than react, to make the choice to remain open and curious when we really want to shut down and block out. This is difficult when we’re on the defensive. And we can get defensive we take something personally, or sense that something impacts us directly. Someone thinks gays should be cancelled, guns should be banned, abortion illegal, vaccines mandated. How am I supposed to feel in this moment?! I feel very attacked! (wigs included).
Rupaul’s Drag Race Untucked, Season 6
Sometimes things are easier to see in animal cartoons.
Rupaul’s Drag Race Untucked, Season 6 (animated critters)
When someone expresses their political beliefs, they’re offering us their spiritual landscape: their inner contradictions, fears, worldview, and deep, profound suffering. They’re telling us who they think they are, from the outside in. They’re asking to be understood, to be seen, to be felt. They’re asking us for grace in a profane world.
They’re also telling us what they value, how they take in information, what their dreams are, how the world needs to look for them to feel like they have a place in it. They’re telling us their story and the story they believe about the world.
Humans are complex. They are more than the person they’re voting for, the person they present to us, the views they hold. It’s when we reduce people to something we can judge that we spin out of the eye of the storm. Everyone is unique, imprisoned, and light-filled in different and surprising ways. If we let them.
Here’s a weird and interesting conversation between Megyn Kelly and a military vet talking about this very thing. While I’m not a huge fan of pundits generally, I find that this exchange illustrates how we can find our humanity in the midst of political disagreement.
Megyn Kelly and Military Veteran Talk Transcending Politics
I know. It may sound weird to some of you that an adopted Korean queer who prays to plants also catches Megyn Kelly sometimes. But that’s the thing, I dip into all kinds of media from time to time — Rachel Maddow, Tucker Carlson, Anderson Cooper, etc — in an attempt to stay open and receive and challenge myself and my views. And sometimes, like with the clip above, I’m surprised. Like when Megyn interviewed Marianne Williamson, or Tucker Carlson “debated” Gabor Maté, or Anderson Cooper shared amazing familial insights and ancestral wisdom with Andy Cohen.