We are being conditioned to chaos by Trump. Thank God he’s not caring for my grandchildren.
My daily joy is found in the stillness of repeated tender moments. If you understand children you know that the new is the enemy of joy. Change must be incrementally introduced amidst calm and confidence– new food items as it were added unobtrusively to old favorites and seamlessly folded into trusted secure routines.
Children crave the security of a routine. “We always do this!” is a favorite phrase. “We always cook with Ba!” (I’m “Ba” to my 3 youngest grandchildren, ages 8, 6 and 3.)
Inner stillness and stability is what a child craves. And smart adults who understand life look for that too in grownup routines. I laughed recently when a study “discovered” that sex is “more satisfying” between people who have a committed relationship than in “one night stands.” So it took a study to tell us that bonds of trust and love matter?
My grandchildren count on me for providing the inner stillness of repeated activities… “We always draw at the kitchen table… We always cook together… Ba, always takes us skating…”
Trump provides the rest of us a rolling trauma. His “presidency” is exhausting… and unrelenting.
Trump’s firing of the F.B.I. director, James Comey — in Trump’s last ditch effort to stave off the day of reckoning for his sordid connection to Russia — is just one of those moments of self-created instability. Trump doesn’t even care if he appears to be trustworthy. He’s not even pretending that he’s doing more than looking out for himself as his lifetime habit of scamming those around him catches up.
Trump is the nightmare childcare giver so to speak who brings the kids home bruised and always has an excuse: “They just keep falling down the stairs!” Trump is an abuser of the truth and thus an abuser of the entire American family.
Children crave truth. I told my granddaughter we’d cook risotto together so we did. I told my grandson I’d buy him a fidget spinner because his friend had one, and I did.
Trump’s incessant lying and the intricate machine he built in the White House — to bend reality to meet his lies — means that nothing he says is to be believed. If he was a child’s care giver he’d leave his charge shaken, disorientated and fearful. There would be tears.
Trump’s message to his American family is: “I’m going to tell you a lie that is so outrageous that you’ll want to believe that some part of it is true, just to preserve your faith in the natural order of things.”
He knows that his “children” do not want to have their world turned upside-down every single day.
We the American family want to imagine that maybe our “Ba” will be at school to actually pick us up on time so we pretend he did… and when each and every day he fails us again we pretend to believe his “reasons.” We don’t do this because we trust him but because our souls crave the inner peace and stillness of order and accountability. Like children we WANT to believe.
Trump is using our basic human-primate nature of being pattern seekers who crave order, meaning and beauty in order to survive and be happy against us.
We want to believe that the people we count on have a natural default toward truth and our good. We NEED to believe this.
Children are transparent in their needs but though we “grownups” sometimes pretend we are less vulnerable we still crave the peace that only comes with trusting those who say they are looking out for us.
The alternative type of chaotic existence where nothing is trustworthy and our versions of parents and grandparents lie again and are never there when they say they’ll be is untenable.
Alternative reality based on “alt-facts” is moral and spiritual anarchy.
In Trump’s utter UN-trustworthiness and sadistic and gleeful embrace of lying- that alternative is upon us.
Here’s the simple question I’ll bet even Trump’s most diehard white evangelical supporters might choke when answering. Hand on heart, tell me this: if Trump was your uncle would you ever ask him to care for your little child or grandchild alone and unsupervised for a weekend?
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Perfect question, Frank! It has the power to jerk us out of fantasy and into reality!
Trump and those like him KNOW what they are doing. The chaos they are creating is part of their sociopathic strategy. Keeping us knocked off balance makes us easier to control. The late Alice Miller explained that our brain needs truth! Living with lies and liars make us both mentally and phusically ill.
I raised a similar question many months ago to several intractable 45 supporters and was met with an eerie moment of silence followed by the usual fuming, stammering and feeble attempts at changing the subject. Would you allow him to escort your Mother, Wife, Daughter etc. unsupervised?