Why Has The Media Not Trumped Trump?

Donald Trump, in the words of conservative Washington Post columnist  Michael Gerson, “is unfit to be President of the United States.” What led Gerson to voice this view of Trump?  On the world stage for all to see, Trump’s vile, ruthless, mocking, racist, misogynous, xenophobic, ignorance laden, scene stealing, freakish reality show assertions might be, in part, what Gerson is referring to. Trump is also a major source of concern for others, as well, including members of the G.O.P.

The crudeness with which Trump speaks of women’s bodily processes and physical appearances, the vulgarity inferred references he makes about his hand size in relation to his penis size all have to do with this perception of Trumps unworthiness to have his finger on the button that, if pressed, could lead to the existingtion large swaths of the human race. His defense of his sparing with Sen. Marco Rubio about the relationship between hand and penis size was that “ Rubio started it.”

Such behavior and assertions on Trump’s part have led to the conclusion of one linguist that Trump is functioning on the level of a fifth grader in the manner in which he expresses himself both in word usage and in his thought processing.  And from the perspective of this mental health practitioner, Trump is functioning at the fifth grade level in emotional maturity.  Certainly his reaction to “Rubio started it”…confirms this observation. Such is the state of conservative Republican Presidential Politics in 2016.

Then again, we have numerous psychiatrists asserting that Trump, is a classic narcissist.  What is a narcissist and how appropriate is it to have a narcissist in the Oval Office?  Narcissism is defined by the Mayo Clinic as a “a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others.  But, behind this mask of ultra-confidence, lies a fragile self esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism.”  Again we have seen that when Trump is criticized, his response is to attack his critic mercilessly.

In one tellingly painful interview with the Washington Post Editorial Staff, Trump in addition to often times demonstrating fragmented thinking, all but pleaded that he is an intelligent person.  He stated that his uncle was smart, and that he got good grades in school, so he must be smart. 

In this same interview he pleaded that his hands are not small and went on to give examples of how normal his hands are.  Reading these statements and listening to the audio from the interview with this human being brought about a sense of sadness and compassion on my part. He seems like someone who, while aware of what he is doing in order to get the attention he craves, he is like the emperor without clothes in terms of how his behavior is perceived by others. His instinctive response is about winning and the conquest. Should he win, his “trust me, I’m good at that…” won’t be good enough and he will have to put up with policies and others who will frustrate him to no end. In the larger scheme of things, his fragile self-esteem and his immaturity are something that cannot be glossed over in his quest to the Presidency.

So, who would support this person?  There are, those who are frustrated because of the game playing gridlock in the Congress.  There are those who are mad that their needs are not being addressed.  There are those who are angered by the financial disparity between those on Wall Street and those on Main Street, or the feigned appropriateness to be politically correct.  And yet, in many instances, these are the very same people who have elected those to Congress who have done nothing, who have supported opposing everything the Obama Administration has proposed. This cadre of voters are, sadly, reaping what they have sown.

Many of Trump’s supporters seem to be functioning on a fifth grade level, themselves.  For many, Trump’s appeal is an expression of the shadow side of the American consciousness, that he is not politically correct, and that he will say and do anything.  Some of his supporters believe that this kind of unscripted unpredictability might actually lead to some kind of worthwhile change in what is going on in Washington and in our interactions with others around the world. This “thought process,” if it can be called that, seems to be what would happen if…  For the fifth grade child, let’s see how long it takes for the fire department to respond to a false alarm?  Or, as adults functioning on a fifth grade level, what would happen if Trump threatened Putin with bombing Moscow if the two were to get into a peeing contest with one another?  The emergence of ignorance on the political stage, allows for and encourages the emergence of ignorance on the part of people who are attracted to such a spectacle. 

And who has relished in this unreal candidacy?  Donald Trump’s candidacy would be seen as the freak show that it is, had it not been for the likes of NPR, and other news and media outlets not showcasing, often as a nightly lead story his every crude, vile, sexist, unpredictable utterance and behavior. Our Fourth Estate has provided this fifth grader with the world stage that has allowed for his emergence as a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. 

Why would these folks do this?  Media folks would say that Trump is necessary to report about because his candidacy is what is happening.  It is also necessary because such outrageousness brings eyes to the newsprint and the television screens. The only mature media group in the this regard was Huffington Post who stated that if you want to follow the Trump Parade, look for it in the Entertainment section. 

 It is imperative that our Fourth Estate functions to preserve our political process with integrity, educated insight and the courage to speak truth to power and to call a fraud a fraud.  How would Edward R. Morrow, the legendary C.B.S. newsman who took on and dismantled Joseph McCarty in the 1950s, respond to a Donald Trump?  What about Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw or McNeal and Lehrer and others of their ilk say about the way the media has been conducting itself in relation to a freakish reality show like Trump’s candidacy to become President of the United States?

Sadly, today, the media often creates misleading narratives in the United States.  We deserve better than what we have been getting from those entrusted with providing us with the facts, perspective and truthful dialogue about what’s what.

Jim Farwell

farwelljs@yahoo.com

The Loneliness of Prejudice

Seeing through the lens of ignorance

and the fear of the unknown…

Unable to view someone with a different

skin color, language, religious belief

or sexual orientation as a fellow

member of the human family…

Someone who also bruises and bleeds,

who has similar needs for love,

security and acceptance…

Someone who also experiences doubts,

shame, anger, guilt and tears…

Someone who, like each one of us,

was born and will, someday, die…

Prejudice, living in an ignorance based

self inflicted exile, fearful, alone, missing

        the opportunity of sharing another’s special essence…

And, be transformed by such a meeting into a wholeness that is otherwise not possible to experience.

A Beginner's Mind: From Pain and Suffering to Compassion and Lovingkindness

We have all experienced emotional pain in one form or another.  A five year old concludes that his mother and father are arguing because he has done something wrong.  A nine year old is told that she is fat and ugly.  An eleven year old is told, that if he would only change, his family would be a happy place.

How many of us have been made to feel stupid by someone’s attitude or comments toward us, or by the fact that, in school, reading, writing, math or P.E. did not come easily to us? How many of us have been abused verbally, physically, or sexually while in the care of someone who we were supposed to be able to trust?  How many of us have lost a significant person or pet in our lives and have somehow felt responsible for those losses?

How many of us have felt shame about having freckles or red hair or being over weight or too skinny, for wearing glasses or braces or for having asthma or skin problems? How many of us felt that our brother or sister was the more favored in the family.  How many of us felt that we were never able to emotionally connect with our mother or father and felt that the distance we felt had something to do with who we were?  All such experiences create pain in our lives as we travel through our childhood into adolescence and onto adulthood.

So, how do we move from experiencing the pain of such experiences to suffering? We suffer by attempting to make sense out of our experiences.  We create story lines and come to conclusions about ourselves. The little boy who felt that he was responsible for his mother and father arguing was doing what a five year old does.  The world of the five year old is very “me” centered.  It never occurs to him that there might be something else going on between mom and dad about which he is unaware. He has concluded that he has done something wrong and feels responsible for mom and dad's upset, when in fact, his parents were arguing because his father had bounced a check and their mortgage payment did not clear the bank.   

Our road to suffering is the result of our having created storylines that are our attempts to make sense out of our life experiences and relationships. We all have them in our lives and they are all, for the most part, negative in their depiction of how we view ourselves. Our inner critic serves as a testimonial to this process.  How many of us have experienced this inner critic? The impact of such story lines will linger long into our adulthood and will follow us to our grave, if we do not become aware that such a process has been a part of our lives.

How do we begin to become aware that we have been creating such storylines? We first need to begin to recognize that this has been what we have been doing.  We need to begin to observe our inner conversations that we have with ourselves about what ever it is that we find ourselves reacting to in the moment. We need to begin to observe our thoughts and emotional reactions as they occur, moment by moment.

In creating story lines, we stockpile one story line on top of the next.  We begin to look at life based on what we have concluded about our experiences in relationships with others.  We relate to a new experience based on our previous painful experience. This creates anxiety in our lives.  Anxiety is often defined as anticipating that we are going to meet something we are afraid of in the future.  The painful experience we have had with our father or classroom teacher is what we anticipate we will re-experience with our new boss.  The pain we experienced in not having our emotional needs met will be what we anticipate our experience will be in relation to someone with whom we might find ourselves becoming close.  In doing this we are looking at the life from the past and are not experiencing the present moment. We also tend to mind read others behavior and anticipate the worse. This is what our suffering is made of.

 Adyashanti has written:  “Suffering occurs when you believe in a thought that is at odds with what is, what was or what might be.”  

The way we begin to change this pattern is to begin to realize that 85 % of our lives has been spent reliving the past or in anticipating the future, believing things about our selves that are not true, essentially living a lie. As we are able to come to this awareness we begin to see how our reactive thinking has created our view of ourselves, others and the world, in which, we have experienced life.

 It is important to realize that we share this life process with every other human being on the planet.  And we all share this need to move from rehashing the past and rehearsing for the future to being in the present moment, in the now. This is true regardless of whether we are women, men, regardless of our racial or religious background, regardless of our sexual orientation, regardless of what language we speak, whether we are rich or poor, young or old.

How do we move from the past and future into the present moment?  It is difficult shaking ourselves free from our ways of habitual thinking.  We first need to realize that we are not our thoughts. It is our thoughts that cause us to feel as we do about ourselves and other people. Instead, we need to realize that we are the witnessing, observing awareness that views our thoughts, our reactions, fears, anxieties, anger, depression that creates our suffering.  Eckhart Tolle has written:  “We are awareness disguised as people.”

How do we get in touch with this awareness? We can access this awareness by being in the present moment, in the now, by being in touch with our next breath, our next heartbeat.  Without our next breath,  or heart beat, we would cease to be.  Jon Kabat-Zinn has written:  “The past and future are only concepts…we only have the now.”

Anytime we find ourselves reacting to something or someone, anytime we are reliving something from our past or anticipating something in the future, to realize that, at that instant, we are not in the present moment.  Once we acknowledge this, we are in the present moment.

 This is the beginning of a new way to differentiate our unconscious reactive mind from who we really are.  We are the awareness that is able to witness and observe and be aware of what our unconscious reactive mind is doing.

This process of being in touch with the present moment and our awareness takes some getting use to.  Usually we simply react according to our story lines.  So, to stop this habit, we need to PAUSE and check in with ourselves, to periodically stop and ask ourselves what is going on inside of me, now?  We need to ask ourselves what am I thinking, what am I feeling? How does my body feel, how is my body reacting?”  As we begin to get used to this checking in with ourselves, it becomes more of a natural process, more a regular part of our daily life experience.

We can also take some time each day and allow ourselves to just sit and get in touch with our breathing.  Our breath can serve as an anchor point in our getting in touch with the present moment.  When we do this our reactive mind often goes wild.  Our thoughts may go everywhere.  This is often referred to as experiencing our  “monkey mind.” Each time we catch ourselves being caught up with our “monkey mind” we can acknowledge that this is what is happening, and we return to being in the present moment.

Having thoughts is a natural aspect of the sitting and getting in touch with our breath.  We will also experience feelings and physical sensations.  The worst thing to do is to fight against or make judgments about our thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations.  What we resist, persists.  Instead, we need to simply acknowledge them, allow them to be what they are and return to our next breath.  This process is a simple description of what a meditation experience is all about.  It is a process of bringing our awareness into the present moment, without judgment and by being in touch with our breath.

Another way to get in touch with the present moment is to bring our awareness to the next step that we take, while walking, or to be aware of the washing of our hands, the temperature of the water, the feeling of the soap as it touches the skin of our hands. We can bring this degree of awareness to any of our daily activities and by so doing, we return to the present moment.

What is special about each one of us is that, in addition to our being the awareness that is able to witness our thoughts and reactions, we, each are also a source of compassion.  Compassion has been defined by Shawna Shapiro as “the ability to feel empathy for suffering of the self or other, along with the wish to act on these feelings to alleviate the suffering.”    

Typically we are critical about ourselves, our thoughts, our actions, our abilities our bodies and the list goes on.  By continuing to be critical of ourselves, by judging ourselves as not being okay, we are doomed to relive our suffering. Instead of bringing judgment to what we have been thinking and feeling, we have the capacity to bring this compassion, this ability to feel empathy for our suffering, along with the wish to act on these feelings to alleviate the suffering.  

Tara Brach has written: “ Our suffering becomes a gateway to the compassion that frees our heart.  When we become the holder of our own sorrows, our old roles as judge, adversary or victim are no longer being fueled.  In their place, we find not a new role, but a courageous openness and a capacity for genuine tenderness, not only for ourselves but for others, as well.”  Our compassion is the antidote to our judgments and our suffering.

We have within us the capacity to hold our suffering as a mother would hold an uncomfortable, distressed infant. For us to be able to acknowledge what is going on within ourselves, to allow for what we are going through, without judgment, for our suffering to be held in an embrace of empathy and compassion, is what “frees our heart.” In this, we are able to move on and to begin to heal from the suffering that has kept us stuck in living with fear, anxiety, shame, guilt, anger, and with a sense of not being good enough.   

Part of getting beyond judgment, is to realize that we have done the best we can with what we have had to work with.  As a child we thought and made the interpretations that a child would make.  As an adult, we have the option to continue on with the storylines of our childhood or to, instead, embrace our true nature, our awareness to observe our suffering with compassion and human kindness and to embrace our suffering.  This allows us to be one with our experience and over time, by doing this, the suffering diminishes and we begin to heal.  We begin to no longer react to what we experience as we once did.  We move from living in the past to living in the present moment.

Another realization that is available to us is to view others behavior as being their attempt to do the best that they can do with what they have had to work with.  If they had more to work with, they would have responded differently to us and, maybe, would not have caused us the pain that we have experienced.  Why would a father tell his son that if he would only change, the family would be a happy place?  What would possess a parent to refer to their child as ugly or stupid or fat or dumb?

All such expressions, on the part of adults in our lives, reflect the pain and suffering that these individuals were experiencing, or they would not have behaved as they have. That does not excuse their behavior, but it puts their behavior into a perspective that says, in fact, we were not the problem; instead it was their suffering that was our problem. In truth, their behavior really had nothing to do with us, it had to do with their issues and them.  

The gift that we are able to experience by living in the present moment with awareness and compassion is present on two levels:  By bringing our awareness and compassion to embrace our suffering, we are able to truly be present with ourselves.  “As our trust in our basic goodness deepens, we are able to express our love and creativity more fully in the world.  Rather than second-guessing ourselves, rather than being paralyzed by self doubt, we can honor and respond to the promptings that arise from that goodness.”  Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance   

On another level, by being present with ourselves we are also less reactive in relation to those with whom we come into contact. By reducing the conflict within ourselves, we are able to reduce the conflict between ourselves and others.   Outer peace in the world begins with our achieving peace within ourselves.  

Tara Brach goes on to say:  “When we are not consumed by blaming and turning on ourselves or others, we are free to cultivate our talents and gifts together, to contribute them to the world in service.  We are free to love each other and the whole of life, without holding back.”   

This approach to addressing our suffering was deeply influenced by the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts General Hospital. He has brought about the integration of Buddhist psychology with western medicine.  His work with Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction has been implemented in hospital programs, corporations, school districts, and health education programs all through out the United States and the world.  

Corporations such as Google have seen the power of this bringing of awareness into the present moment without judgment and have adopted Mindfulness as an integral part of the their creative decision making process as a corporate community.  

Medical facilities like Kaiser have incorporated the bringing of awareness into the present without judgment into their Health Education Program in addressing the suffering that is inherent in anxiety, depression, anger, stress, and couples communication courses for Kaiser Members.

Others who have been profoundly influential in the introduction and practice of this approach to awareness include the following with a listing of some of their writing on the subject:

·      Jon Kabat-Zinn: Wherever You Go, There You Are / Arriving At Your Own Door /        Full Catastrophe Living

·      Jack Kornfield:  Follow the Path with Heart / The Wise Heart

·      Thich Nhat Hanh:  The Miracle of Mindfulness / No Death, No Fear

·      Rick Hanson:  Buddha’s Brain

·      Eckhart Tolle:  The Power of Now / Stillness Speaks / A New Earth

·      Bob Stahl:  A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook

·      Bob Stahl and Steve Flowers:  Living with Your Heart Wide Open

·      Adyashanti:  True Meditation / The Way of Liberation

·      Saki Santorelli:  Heal Thy Self

·      Tara Brach:  Radical Acceptance / True Refuge

·      Shawna Shapiro:  The Art and Science of Mindfulness

·      Anam Thubten:  The Magic of Awareness

Jim Farwell M.A. / M.F.T

farwelljs@yahoo.com

City College of San Francisco: "Education Experts" Don't Always Know What's Best

I began my work in public education in 1970.  Over the course of my career, I have experienced the impact that poor educational policy decisions have had on the lives of our children and communities.

 In the 1960’s California’s education program was the envy of the country.  We knew how to teach reading, writing, arithmetic, history, science, languages and critical thinking.  We taught civics and required that all 8^th graders pass a Constitution Test in order to go onto high school.  We had two achievement tests that were given each year that were related to the state mandated curriculum. We offered an affordable, high quality community college system along with an affordable high quality college and university system.  We provided educational opportunity for all.

Then, in the 1970’s educational “experts” supported by “research” promoted a series of ill fated policy changes.  Their belief in “Relevant Education” led to supporting students taking only courses that they enjoyed taking.  The result was students were ill prepared for college.

Next, these “experts” changed the reading curriculum so that phonemic awareness and phonics were done away with.  The result, generations of students’ had difficulty learning to read and write.

Then, research indicated that children could learn more, earlier.  As a result, second grade was down loaded into first and first grade was down loaded into kindergarten. The result was that boys suffered from the heavily loaded language curriculum, became frustrated and dropped out of school. Today we wonder why there are so few men graduate from colleges. So much for the “research” and wisdom of “experts.”

Which brings us to today’s City College of San Francisco threatened loss of accreditation. Again, “experts” are asserting that today’s community colleges are not meeting the needs of society.  There are the “traditional students” who are on a course leading to a degree and the “non-traditional student” who attends classes of interest or specific career certifying courses of study.  Since 2008, California’s education budget has been cut by 1.3 billion dollars.  Today “experts” are looking for ways to cut corners. The redefinition of community college’s role in society has become their target. They want to support “traditional students” and not “non-traditional” student programs.  “Non-traditional students make up more than half of the 85,000 students who attend CCSF.

How do these “experts” propose to do this?  They plan to cut programs for the hard of hearing, those who are coping with recovery from strokes, those who have a difficulty with reading, writing or math, and those who cannot speak English well enough to survive in society.  They want to cut programs that prepare students for positions in medicine, emergency services, police services, horticulture, culinary and hospitality services, to mention just a few.  They are also willing to cut support services to our service personnel who are attempting to normalize their lives after experiencing the trauma of war. CCSF is one of three schools in the country that provides a successful model for such a support program.

What is remarkable about this new policy thrust is that it is the complete opposite of what is needed.  In today’s economy, with jobs being hard to find, these “experts” are supporting students going into debt to graduate from a Baccalaureate programs, only to be unable to find work.

What is needed are the resources that CCSF offers San Franciscans that provide programs which support and prepare people of all ages in  attaining skills that will allow them to improve their lives. In this, CCSF is meeting the needs of society.

Jim Farwell M.A / M.F.T

farwelljs@yahoo.com