Blue Notes

At Joshu’s monastery, a new monk came before the master and bowed low.

“Master,” he said, “I have just entered this monastery. Please teach me.”

Joshu looked at him and asked, “Have you had your breakfast?”

“Yes, Master,” the monk said.

“Then wash your bowl,” Joshu replied.

I’m cribbing a koan from an online talk that David Dae An Rynick, the rōshi at Boundless Way Zen sangha in Worcester, MA, gave this morning, because it’s Election Day here in the United States, and not just any Election Day but without question the most consequential Election Day of my life. Your life, too, even if you don’t live in America, because the sins of this administration have rolled out on a global scale. (I cannot tell you how many of us are furious abut that.) What happens today is the start of reclaiming what people like me once thought of as normal life, normal civic discourse. Either that, or it'll be a further step into chaos and decline. And I feel particularly helpless at this juncture, because what is going to happen now is simply going to happen, and it’s past the point where I personally – just another schmo with a newsletter – can do anything about it beyond voting (which I’ve done) and urging my children and friends to vote (which I’ve done) and phone banking or knocking on doors (which I am ashamed to admit I haven’t had time or made time for this cycle, and that’s on me; if you have, you're a better citizen than I).

I say it’s the start of reclaiming a normal civic life, because even if the vaunted “blue tsunami” does take place and the MAGA minions are swept from power on the national, state and municipal levels across the country, you and I know that there will be fuckery and attempted fuckery across the board. Some of these people – I won’t say all – will not be willing to give up power, because they know that if they do they will finally have to face the consequences from which our legal system and our national media have by and large recused them, for reasons that run from politeness to cowardice to secret or overt alliance. They will not go willingly. We may have to carry them out. Physically. By force. I am not sure what exactly that may entail and what I or even you might be willing to do about it. At what point do you – by which I mean me – put yourself physically on the line? Has that point passed? Is it still to come? Is it here? Discuss.

So today is not really about kicking the bums out the door but telling them there is a door and reminding them that the rules we’ve established in this country mean it’s time for them to exit through it. Problem: Many of these people – I won’t say all – don’t play by the rules, and why would they? Their leader has shown them time and again that there are no consequences for the worst sort of behavior – venality, corruption, rapine, betrayal. Why would they accept the will of the electorate? This is how bullies function, until someone realizes that some of the bully’s tactics need to be adopted if they're ever to stop the bullying – what Karl Popper famously called the Paradox of Tolerance.

Today will be the start of testing how far we are willing to go to live the paradox in the interests of returning to normal life. But let’s talk about that idea for a moment – a “normal life.” What the last decade has forcefully reminded me and many others like me is that there is no such thing as a “normal life,” and that we have been fools to believe otherwise. Understandable fools – fools who have grown up in a post-WWII America that was a model of political stability if you were lucky to have been born with a decent poker hand of privileges, which I certainly have been, as well as a lot of the people I grew up with and live around. Those privileges have blinded us – me – to the fact that the history of the human animal is one of aspiration wrestling with entropy, and entropy has a tendency to win. We tell ourselves the long arc of time bends toward justice, but it also bends away, and, anyway, the problem with that cliché is that it’s a passive one – that we just have to sit back and the bending will eventually happen. Which is nonsense. The bending is my job and yours. The bending is us.

Maybe we're at the start of a great bending today, but I’m not pretending it’s all going to go back to what we had before. That's just gone. The normal we grew up with and thought was a constitutional bulwark until 2016 (or 1980, or 9/11, or whenever you want to say the dam of civility started to break) will probably be looked back on by history as an interregnum – a Pax Americana – that worked well for certain classes and castes and less well for other classes and castes but at least gave a sizable majority the illusory reliablilities of a steady life: Food, shelter, means of transportation and movement, a chance at better health and longer years and more possibilities for oneself and one's children, and, most important, a promise of security – that it all might not be taken away at any moment, and even if it were, that there were nets to catch us before we smashed into the ground.

Again, I can only stress that those reliabilities have never been available to all, but they were, for the better part of the 20th century, available to a lower middle class and above, and that, I think, has been the historical anomaly. It's why people came here from places where those reliabilities had been taken away or never existed; it's why they still come, despite everything our government can do to punish them for it. But how do we get back to that when the vast majority of our children can no longer afford a place to live? When today might be the start of a further chaos instead of the start of its resolution?

Perhaps those two are the same and have always been. In which case, all I can do is proceed moment by moment, vote by vote, connection by connection, action by action, trusting in what I think of as simple human decency to point me in the right direction. You too, I hope. Only when individual actions acquire mass momentum do things start to change. That's what the first Tuesday in November has always symbolized – a reminder that it needs to be more than just a symbol.

It's Election Day. Have you had your breakfast? Then wash your bowl.

Apologies, but that's just what's on my mind this morning. Thanks for listening. If you have thoughts of your own – and I bet you do – feel free to chime in.

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