Epiphany About Politics, Society and Nature

Before the 2016 election, I had never been too interested in politics. When Obama won, and then won again, I thought this is it! We’ve defeated racism!

I knew that people of color have been systemically oppressed for hundreds of years and that redlining, Jim Crow and white supremacy continue to impact on black communities, but I naively assumed that for the most part, racism was on it’s way out of existence. Like 8-tracks.

Turns out it’s never gotten better, it just got better at organizing hidden in the dark corners of the internet. And police brutality has’t gotten worse, we just have video recording devices in our pockets all the time and for the most part, body cams on cops.

The day after the 2016 election was one of the toughest of my life. I almost called off a huge meeting and probably should have. I wound up crying talking to the client about the election results and we didn’t get the account anyway.

Later that afternoon, my wife found me at home in the kitchen disassociating.

Not only had we not gotten our first woman president as I believed in my core was inevitable, but that this was the will of the people — that he actually won (not the popular vote, but with the electoral college).

I think the most surprising thing for me to learn was how much of the country was deeply unhappy with the ‘status quo’ before Tr-mpism. Their lives were getting worse, jobs were being eliminated, loved ones dying of additions and none of us in our “liberal bubbles” had bothered to notice.

I’ve spent the past four years immersing myself into C-span and trying to understand how we got here.

I’ve learned:

I wasted a lot of time and energy a lot of energy thinking I could change the nature of why people are the way they are.

That even if I invited someone over for dinner to talk about our differences, we’re not necessarily going to walk away seeing eye to eye. I’ve tried many iterations of that approach. It’s time-consuming, emotionally taxing and rarely effective.

If you domesticate a wolf from birth, you can live with it peacefully. Otherwise, the nature of the wolf is to eat you. Nothing bad or wrong with that— as far as the wolf is concerned, eating you is key to it’s existence.

One day a couple of months ago, while looking at the monarchs we’ve attracted by planting milkweed, I had a personal epiphany.

Us humans exist in the natural realm. And in nature, there are predators.

My job in life is to protect my loved ones, and draw as many butterflies into my garden as possible.

That’s it.

All that being said I want to be clear about where I’ve landed politically and here are some of my favorite Political memes that sum up the past four years;