A recent article published in the New York Times tells the story of a crisis within the Democratic Party: They have no money. Part of the reason seems to be that there are too many different ideas about where the party should go.

Sure, there are people such as Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York City, but his way represents only one option in a deeply divided party. He may do well in managing the city, but there is little chance of someone like him unifying the nation.

Despite his popularity, it is not possible to scale up any particular economic system, be it socialism, capitalism, or anything else, and expect it to still function effectively. When institutions get big enough, changing them fundamentally becomes nearly impossible. The only way is to replace them with smaller ones.

Meanwhile the Republican Party is bankrupt in a different way. They have lots of money, but their moral compass has been shattered into multiple fragments for some time by now. The apparent unity under President Trump is a false one, based on the fear that the Trump administration will destroy the career of anyone who opposes it. So, the factions are definitely there, but remain invisible as most of those who oppose him remain silent for now.

Even more silent are the millions of people who no longer vote. I don’t believe them to be lazy, but rather disgusted with the current bickering and negative campaigning in which the two parties are increasingly engaged. If the message repeated on both sides is “Don’t vote for my opponent, he (or she) is an incompetent, corrupt, evil person!” then the overarching message ends up being “don’t vote.” If both candidates are seen as unfit for office, then there is no sense in voting for either of them.

§ § §

I take two things from this. First, the two dominant parties are no longer viable, on the national level. Second, they have lasted this long because few people can agree on what to do without them.

Everyone alive today grew up with this political system. Republicans and Democrats. That was it. This duopoly of national political power was as ever present as the air we breathe.

Now, we must face their abject and colossal failure without ever having experienced any alternatives! No third or fourth party has ever gained any real traction, mostly because our system of voting, including primaries, caucuses, and general elections, is riddled with biases that favor having only two parties. Trying to use our existing flawed voting system to substantially change the voting system itself is extremely unlikely to succeed. You might as well try to rebuild the jet engine of a plane while it is in mid flight.

Some people claim that if the Democrats win majorities in Congress this fall, they will save the day by blocking or ejecting the Trump Administration wholesale and bring peace to the land.

But the problem is, the Trump administration is not the main cause of our malaise, but merely the result of a collection of much more vast and deep problems that we are facing as a nation. These problems have grown more complex and intense for decades by now. Blaming everything on Trump, or the Republicans, is distracting us from working to create a new vision for the future.

When we as humans feel hurt by something, it’s natural to feel angry and seek someone or something tangible to blame. We evolved this way in order to protect ourselves from immediate harm by a present danger.
But what if no one person or group of people is actually to blame? What if it’s a set of assumptions or cultural traditions that are the true source of our pain instead? You can’t win a fist fight against a meme. There’s nothing to hit.

We cannot proceed by continuing to fight with each other. It’s extremely tempting to try, but in the long run, it’s just a waste of our energy. We must now admit that our existing political system has run its course and will not continue. Trying to fix it or prop it up will do no good.

And yet, admitting that something we’ve depended on for our whole lives is now over is quite challenging! Our tendency is to maintain the fantasy that things will somehow be fixed up and “get back to normal.” But there is no way that that will happen. Too many things have changed by now for any such “normal” to exist anymore. We are at the threshold of creating an entirely new normal and it’s going to be awhile before it takes shape.

In times of rapid change, patience may seem nearly impossible, but that is exactly what we need at this moment. This is certainly not the first time in history where the present is unsustainable, and yet the future is shrouded in the fog of uncertainty. Humanity survived then, and it will again now.

§ § §

Notice that I said, “on the national level,” above. If it seems that the “highest levels” of government are failing, then we must turn to the “lower levels,” such as the states, the cities, and even local community groups, for resilience. It may seem counterintuitive that a local neighborhood group, for example, could do much to solve today’s problems, but there is plenty of positive change that can take place on the local level. And plenty of examples that you can find just by searching the web or talking with people where you live.

For example, I give as much financial support to my local food pantry as I can afford. They use that money to buy food to serve anyone who shows up. I don’t care which political party the people who need food support, and it doesn’t matter to the folks who run the pantry, either. Families are hungry and we are able to give them the food they need.

The same thing goes for people in a rescue boat, approaching a house surrounded by floodwaters. No one asks the flood victims who they voted for. They just help them step into the boat and take them to safety on dry land.

When someone calls 911, the EMTs who arrive never inquire of the caller’s opinion on the economy or the President, they just perform life saving measures without question.

You see, on a personal level, when the need is obvious, hyper partisanship goes out the window. There are no political factions when people are in need. There is, instead, the basic human value of “help thy neighbor.”

It is on this foundation that we will build our lives, going forward. On the ground. Face to face. Heart to heart.

It may seem unlikely, but by helping each other in this way, we foster a trend to reduce our reliance on the giant institutions that are now failing. We have the ability to share information and resources among ourselves and with other groups, without giant bureaucracies or other intermediaries.

The long term trend is to get more things done in smaller groups that can then network with each other without “going to the top” anymore.

In the comments, I’d love to hear stories of how efforts on the local level have made a difference where you live.

§ § §

(Note 1: I had to make this an image, as Substack puts too much leading between lines when there is a carriage return.)

(Note 2: As some stanzas have a first line that doubles as a fifth line of the stanza before it, it may be tricky to read this out loud; the pauses must be just right. I have not practiced it enough to know exactly, as I’m alone with no one to read it for; everyone else has gone to bed.)

Anyway, I felt very sad while listening to it. It seems that, at the extremes of the spectrum, if we can call it a spectrum, there are women who want nothing to do with men (and thus only wish to associate with other women), and men who wish to completely avoid women, or, alternatively, wish to be the masters of women in all aspects.

I felt sad because, it seems that these groups of people are essentially hurt, fearful, and angry and are lashing out at each other. How could all this animosity lead to any kind of resolution? Each public statement from one side seems to invoke a more extreme reaction from the other side.

I guess I can understand perhaps how this situation has come about, I just wish we could all get along and find love in this world. And let me be clear, I mean love in the universal sense, not just the romantic or sexual sense. That is, to feel love for oneself and love for all others, as much as possible, regardless of what group or category we may think we or they fall into (sex, race, cultural group, etc.).

I started to wonder, would perhaps folks like me do well to form our own group and start issuing press releases? A group to speak up to recommend a loving collaboration and support between all, instead of “going to our corners and coming out swinging” (to use the prizefight metaphor).

It seems to me that this despising of “the other” stems not so much from our basic human nature, but has something to do with organizational power. By that I mean power exerted by groups or organizations, against other groups or organizations. Without these structures, perhaps there would not be much left to fight about?

Our societies are riddled with traditions and expectations regarding how people should behave, based on what categories we assign each other to. Men should be one way, whereas women should be some other way.

OK, yes, biology is significant, especially when it comes to reproduction and certain other less dramatic physical factors. But beyond these obvious physical differences, we have much in common as human beings.

I think part of the current situation comes from a history trauma and grief, and a lack of outlets to express these feelings in a safe place. By safe, I mean in the presence of others who are committed to being supportive, rather than judgmental or overly critical.

Perhaps this extreme polarization is the last gasp of patriarchy, a set of standards and assumptions that are based on the idea that men are superior beings, compared to women. I happen to think that is nonsense, and I’m not afraid to say so. But such traditions, which have been embedded in culture for centuries by now, are not so easy to dispense with!

I remember back in the early 1990s, John Gray published a book entitled “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.” It made quite a splash at the time. But even though it was a bestseller, other researchers soon found significant fault with the research he referenced and the assumptions he made in the book.1

By 2004, another book came out, entitled, “Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs” by Rosalind C. Barnett and Caryl Rivers.2 It was not a bestseller, which I think is too bad. These two women dug deeply into the research cited by Gray and found much of it to be unreliable and of poor quality. They went on to review many more studies and concluded that the idea of an impossible divide in communication between men and women was largely a myth. The apparent differences were more due to social constructs and traditions rather than any inherent inabilities of men and women to communicate on a basic level.

Sadly, most people have heard of the first book, but not the second one.

By now, this “war between the sexes” seems to have reached a fevered pitch.

Or, has it?

It’s hard to determine exactly why the current extreme divide has come to pass, but I believe that our impression of how bad things are is inaccurate, to say the least. I think one of the main reasons is the relationship between news organizations and we, the public, who watch, listen to, or read what they have to offer. The most watched or read news seems to be focused on the most disturbing or distressing stories.

The result is, we hear much more about extreme views than we do about people being tolerant or accepting one another. Each day, millions of couples find ways to communicate, resolve differences, and collaborate on various tasks in life, such as parenting, managing a household, or engaging in other activities together.

Meanwhile, this steady stream of “bad news,” now delivered to digital screens in our pockets, at all hours, easily distorts our view of the world, leaving us in a greater state of worry, fear, and despair than we might otherwise have.

My recommendation is this: The next time you hear of some men saying horrible things about women, or women saying they have given up on men, remember, that you’re only hearing the last desperate voices of patriarchy as it slowly sinks into a puddle of eventual oblivion.

I am firmly convinced that we are inevitably leaving all that “gender superiority” nonsense behind. Our goal is to build a better world from whatever ashes of turmoil are left from what we are experiencing in the present one. I say we will need an “all hands on deck,” attitude. That is, people working not under the command of some “higher ups” but in groups built from mutual respect and dignity for all involved, gathered together not by some outside authority, but by their own collective initiative.

It’s also very common to see other people posting critiques or complaints about what he’s doing or even vilifying him as a person. Of course, this just adds to his notoriety because it keeps him in the center of attention even more. And it sure is tempting to criticize him and his administration because of how threatening, cruel, and heartless many of his statements and actions have been.

The trap is this: If you mention him in any context, you’re helping to spread his name even more, no matter what you have to say about him. The focus remains on him. If you don’t say anything about him, then you may feel complicit in what he’s doing instead.

If you try to fight him directly, then you’re playing his game. He loves to fight, based on his own statements. And he’s an expert at using any means necessary to win, even if he or his staff have to break the law to do so.

I remember reading reports of the memorial for Charlie Kirk, back in September, “That young man… I forgive him,” Erika Kirk said, drawing a standing ovation. “I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it’s what Charlie would do.”1

However, when it was Donald Trump’s turn to speak, he said, in part, “[Charlie] did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”2 For that, he also got significant applause as well, but perhaps not from all the same people in the room.

So, if Donald Trump is against forgiveness and is all about hate instead, what can be done? How do we get out of this trap?

We could try to ignore him as much as possible. If enough people ignore him, perhaps he’ll get really upset, given that he places such a high priority on being the center of attention. But why bother? We have much more important work to do.

First, we need to continue to speak out in opposition to each act of cruelty being perpetrated by the current administration, … or by anyone else, for that matter.

But perhaps even more importantly, I highly recommend that we focus on creating a better world to prepare for when he and his administration are no longer in office.

And that day is coming very soon.

Earlier this year, just after inauguration day, a woman I know said to me, “I can’t imagine having to live thorough four more years of this!” Without even thinking, I said, “Well, you won’t have to. Donald Trump won’t be president by the end of 2025.” She replied, “Well, I hope so,” but she didn’t seem that convinced.

Sometimes I get definite premonitions like this. Not very often, but there it was. I pictured the next four years like this:

The dark shading represents how likely it will be that Donald Trump will still be in office.

When my friend asked me how he would leave, I could not say. My premonitions don’t work that way. It could be any of a number of things, either by means under speculation by many people right now, such as impeachment, or something to do with the Epstein papers. But it also be due to some completely unexpected event or shift. Regardless, I want to emphasize that I certainly don’t wish harm or pain or death to anyone, no matter who, but naturally I don’t have control over that.

I’m not relating this story here just to secure “I told you so” bragging rights if this happens. Whether I’m right or wrong doesn’t really matter in the long run.

But what does matter is that we start thinking about what may happen next and how we might prepare for it, starting right away, even though he’s hasn’t left office yet.

First, my advice is to prepare ourselves for a period of political turmoil and chaos for at least a little while, as I described in my very first essay here on Substack “Surviving the Flood,”3 My sense of this happening is not due to the same kind of premonition that I had earler this year, but when I look at what’s changing in government, politics, technology, and the world economy these days, it seems very likely.

Second, and perhaps more important, this means doing everything we can to stop fighting with each other and work on collaborating instead, especially on the local level. In other words, replace hate and disparagement with love and respect wherever possible.

I know a number of people who refer to “the Democrats” or “the Republicans” as if the party they favor is reasonable, whereas the “other” party is a monolith, fully united behind a single set of goals. But that is definitely not the case! The audience response at the memorial for Charlie Kirk that I mentioned above is one example. Some applauded Donald Trump’s message of hate, but others supported forgiveness, instead.

Perhaps this is not the best example, but it indicates to me that we are not doomed to stand apart from each other forever. Instead, I think some doors are open where we may be able to find common ground with each other. Perhaps forgiveness is one of those common themes shared by many people, regardless of party affiliation.

In practice, I see our job as working on listening to each other without judgement, as often as we can. I’m reminded of the quote, “All human behavior is either an act of love or a cry for love.”4

Our “act of love,” in this case, is to see if we make room for the expression of the “cry for love” that’s hiding within others, because it’s almost always in there, somewhere. When someone says something that seems wrong or aggressive, the idea is to stay open to that emotional place they may be acting from, a “where it hurts inside,” place that is likely deep within.5

At first this may seem to be very challenging, or even impossible. But the truth is, most people are desperately hoping to be heard. While listening to someone, the idea is to take each provocative thing they say and do three things:

1. Check out how you feel inside about what they say. Does it make you angry? Do you feel the urge to contradict it? Or, do you agree with part of it but disagree with the rest?

2. Take each statement they make, and your reaction to it, and put it on a “mental shelf” in your mind, off to one side. You can always get back to it later.

3. Go back to listening.

What you’re trying to do is be calm enough and kind enough toward the other person so that they can reach a place of vulnerability and trust with you. If they’re going to be open to reveal what’s truly upsetting to them, they have to trust that you won’t end up judging them for their feelings. A person’s feelings are always genuine, even if they are based on something that’s perhaps questionable.

Perhaps they or you are afraid of something that you might think is untrue. Try setting your concerns aside for a moment and let them explain just how afraid or hurt they might be.

This may take a lot of practice for some folks, so you might try starting out with someone you know relatively well, where your differences may not be that profound. There are also courses and workshops that you can try, in order to strengthen your listening skills.

There is a 4th part, as it turns out.

4. Check in with yourself. Ask, “How am I doing? How is my energy right now? Am I starting to feel hopeless or sunk, emotionally, based on how this conversation is going?

If things aren’t going well, or if you find it difficult to keep listening, you may not want to continue. Perhaps your “mental shelf” has become too crowded with statements or feelings that you found upsetting.

If so, then perhaps it’s time to gently bring the conversation to a close, thank the person for confiding in you, and part as amicably as possible. There is nothing wrong with doing this. It’s all for the best not to try to force yourself to continue.

Now, it may seem that listening to just one person at a time won’t change much. But I assure you that it can literally move mountains before long. The key is to let other people know what you are doing, in order to help spread the word. See if you can find time with a friend to talk about how your “listening project” is going. What seemed to go well? What were the challenges?

My point is, doing this is actually creating the kind of world we want, instead of just reacting to the one that’s going on now.

I strongly disagree with this assessment. Sadly, it serves to increase our sense of fear and hopelessness. But instead, I say that we need the resolve and optimism to get through these difficult times, rather than recoil with fear, depression, or despondency.

There are many significant differences between the United States in the world today and the situation in Europe 90 years ago. The United States is not under the oppression of a treaty imposed on it by the rest of the world, as Germany was after World War I.1 This is one of the most important factors, in that it destroyed the entire economy of Germany and humiliated its people under the treaty’s “War Guilt Clause.” This essentially backed the entire nation into a corner, out of which it came fighting back, starting World War II. Remember, the most dangerous people are often those who have nothing left to lose.

The United States is in an entirely different position. We suffer from no such oppression. Indeed, if anything, we have amassed immense power in the world since the fall of the Soviet Union, our only true adversary in the decades since the end of World War II.2

Our population and culture are much more diverse than that of Germany back then. We now have over a third of a billion people, with countless different cultural backgrounds. Our country covers almost an entire continent and has multiple climates.

World communication media are much more decentralized and network based by now, compared to the hierarchy of radio and movie film in the 1930s. Now, we carry powerful computers and communication devices around in our pockets! We have tools to organize ourselves that weren’t even imagined back then.

I could go on and give much more detail, but I don’t want to take the time to do so here. All I ask is that you please think about the radical differences between now and then.

My point is that a descent into a totalitarian morass is definitely not inevitable! As scary as the current administration in Washington may appear to be, it is vulnerable to its own ineptitude as well as to the power of the states, the cities, and various citizen groups, now working together more and more.

As I said above, we need to recognize our true power and resolve, not just to fight back but to work diligently to build a new culture of generosity and collaboration to replace the rapacious and divisive one we are struggling with now. I firmly believe that we can do this if we set our minds to it and recognize the progress we’re already making toward this goal

.

Finally, it got to a point this summer when I realized that all that chocolate and sugar were leaving me feeling jittery and uneasy. I really didn’t like how my body was feeling. I knew I had to stop. So I just quit buying it. On occasion I’ll have some for dessert at a restaurant, but that’s it.

Now, I’m old enough to know that most addictions serve as a band-aid to cover our deeper feelings, typically about things we don’t want to face, or have no idea how to handle. So I was a bit trepidatious. But I journal a lot, keep regular counseling appointments, and have deep conversations with my partner and occasionally with a friend.

So, that was one addiction I managed to leave behind.

But soon, I noticed another shift in my habits. When I’ve needed a break from working or completing some daily task, I have routinely resorted to playing games on my cell phone. Over the last few years, I have slowly become bored with first one game, then another. Eventually, I stopped playing a few of them altogether. As I have done that, I’ve been left with a moment of nothingness, here and there.

Nothingness indeed. It’s as if I’m leading myself to actually sit in quiet time, without constant distraction or information input. Sometimes I read news stories on my phone instead of playing a game, but even then, once I have been reading awhile, there is nothing left that I want to read about, so I close the apps.

What’s left? Stare out the window? I remember being in elementary school and told not to stare out the window and pay attention to the teacher or focus on the work on my desk. But staring out the window was not necessarily to examine what I could see out there but more to give my eyes something familiar to look at while I let my thoughts wander. These days, I know I need to ponder and mentally digest what I have been doing without more constant input. I want to open my mind to the non sequitur thoughts and images that seem to spontaneously drop into my awareness from unknown origins.

I’m fascinated by this link between the relentless demand to pay attention in school and today’s onslaught of information feeds. The only difference is that today’s media feeds demand our attention by enticement rather than enforced by the discipline of an authority.

But the result is the same. Constant mental clutter with little time to step back and evaluate what it all means to me. Is there no value in my pondering my own thoughts rather than thoughts dumped into my mind wholesale? What about time to get in touch with my emotional reactions to all this? Am I happy or disturbed? Do I enjoy learning something new, or just feel overwhelmed? Do I have a chance to dream about the future or am I stuck enduring an unending racket of scrambled noise in today’s multichannel world?

I will try sitting with a bit more nothingness, not because there is nothing left to do (or read or watch) but because it’s probably the best way to find me in these quiet moments. The me that would enjoy and be nourished by getting to know myself better.

I wrote this this morning, as a “Note” here on Substack by accident (I’m still figuring out how Substack works) after being inspired by what I was reading elsewhere here on Substack, but also after my partner and I both ended up in tears within the last 24 hours, at separate times, over miscommunication, frustration with things (some of them minor), and so forth.

Later, we chatted on the phone as she was heading to work. We reflected on a favorite quote of mine:

All human behavior is either an act of love or a cry for love.

(from Stan Dale)

She remarked that perhaps the most irate of the MAGA crowd are people who don’t recognize that they are hurting deep within. I added that perhaps some people do sense their own grief, but were taught that expressions of grief represent weakness, so they hide from those feelings out of fear of shame or disparagement from others.

(this may be due to the impact of patriarchy on men, in general, as I describe in more detail in my previous post:

https://substack.com/home/post/p-173874562 )

So, when someone comes at you all aflame with extreme opinions or attack on your character, what can you do? A fight response would be to push back. A freeze response would be to get stuck and do nothing. A flight response would be to walk away somehow. You get the idea.

So perhaps the most useful response may also be the most difficult. That is, recognize that the person is in fight mode (against you) because they are actually in deep pain inside, but either don’t know they are, or are suppressing it because they’re afraid you or someone who will take advantage of them in their moment of vulnerability.

There may not be any opportunity to invite them to go to that vulnerable place at the moment, but my point is more to ask, how can we all, in general, build a culture that responds to emotional daggers thrown at us with some sufficiently protective armor and a pillow. The angry “fight” oriented person thrives on someone fighting back so that they can keep expressing their anger, back and forth. What they’re really looking for is someone to just listen to them, ask a few truly open ended questions, and then keep listening.

Now, I know some people reading this may think, “Hey, it’s not my responsibility to be a therapist for every nasty person who heads my way!” You’re right. It’s not your responsibility. But, at the same time, for anyone who happens to have the peaceful inner strength to do this, it sure works better than arguing back at them!

In the long run, I think what we want is to spread the meme that most people just want to be heard, understood, and have their pain acknowledged. Can we apologize to someone for how they were wronged, perhaps, without blaming ourselves for what happened to them? Can we sympathize with their struggles, even though they aren’t the same as our struggles?

Can we work to shift our culture, in general, toward the qualities we all would like to live with ourselves? Promote the aspects I’ve listed in left column in this list, and help shift away from the aspects shown in column on the right?

I know, it’s a tough list to look at. Reading it, I still get a lot of feelings and I’m the one who created it! It came out of an exercise I participated in where we were asked to list characteristics of Grace on one side of a piece of paper, and the opposite of those on the other side.

This column on the left is common to most religious faiths and non-religious philosophies in the world. The right side is a list that may be interpreted as “acting out” by people who live in fear that if they don’t do those things, then they themselves will be swallowed up by the world and fade into nothingness.

The time for fighting is over. The time for disparagement of people with whom we disagree with is over. Those things just make it all worse. The time is now to express love wherever we can find a way to do that. And to be honest about our cries for love and seek out how to bring love into our lives.

(Note: This post edited around 3:15 PM to correct some errors and fix some wording. In the opening line, I said “everyone is” so now it says, “many people are,” instead. Thanks to those who commented on my choice of words, which spurred me to rephrase that.)

We are not bad people for attempting to do this, we have just become overwhelmed by a situation that we weren’t prepared for. Specifically, the scale of world population, coupled with rapid developments in technology have swamped our minds.

Consider that democracy, which means “the people hold the power” can’t work if “the people” are immersed in a world that’s incomprehensible to most of them. How can someone decide how to vote if the issues on which they’re voting are so vast and complex that there’s no way to cover all the background to make a reasonable choice? There aren’t enough hours in the day, especially if you work full time or have to raise kids!

And this is not primarily due to a lack of intelligence on our parts. It’s due to the challenge of wrapping our minds around the scope and complexity of what we’re supposed to be managing. Yet our desire to understand is so intense that we end up grasping for simple answers to complex questions, because it feels better than to sit with no answers at all.

Most of us went through school where the questions and answers were all prepared ahead of time. It was a game of “Guess what the teacher [or the textbook writers] were thinking.” The authorities (school system) told us to trust them and either we did, and got ahead, or didn’t, and were blamed for doing poorly.

Now, we live in a world that has shot way ahead of any such arrangement. This desire to have simple answers has made us vulnerable to accepting information from people who either don’t know what they’re talking about, or people who have an agenda to secure their own power, and to hell with everyone else (or both!)

Let’s start with Congress as an example. Most people who run for office do so with good intentions. But the job of representing their districts has become nearly impossible.

Right now, we have 342 million people in the US, but only 435 representatives in the House. Divide 342 million by 435 and you get 786,000 people, on average. Each representative is supposed to represent 3/4 of a million people? That’s an incomprehensible number.

Perhaps I can provide a way to get a grasp on this. Here is a picture of Michigan Stadium, the largest in the US (and 4th largest in the world). it has an official seating capacity of 107,000 people.

If we do one more bit of arithmetic, divide 786,000 by 107,000, it turns out that each representative in Congress represents over 7 Michigan stadiums full of people! How can one person, a representative in Congress, represent that many people? They have to reach out to that many to understand their needs? They have to set up a campaign to reach that many, every two years, to get reelected?

This ratio has become way beyond anything practical. I say, it’s impossible. We have unintentionally broken democracy, regardless of which party is in power.

We have scaled up many other things in life, well beyond comprehension. This container ship, for example, holds over 24,000 twenty-foot containers, able to carry an incomprehensible number of items within them. And that’s just one of many such ships!

Or this computer chip with its microscopic transistors.

And that’s just the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004 introduced in 1971! At least you can still make out the details. The Motorola 68000, which was used in the very first Macintosh Computer in 1984, already had too many transistors on it to identify individually in this photograph. Instead they form regions where they blend together into a gray blur.

I can’t even show you an image of today’s super processor chips (used in A.I. data centers) that would give you any idea of their immense scale because they just look like a shiny multicolored surface with no discernible features. Some of the most dense chips now have over 208 billion transistors, definitely an incomprehensible number!

Closer to daily life, there are 3 billion monthly active users on Facebook. Three billion? How can anyone conceive of that many? That’s nearly half the world’s population!

My contention is that our government, institutions, and other organizations have become Too Big To Manage (TBTM) and Too Complex To Comprehend (TCTC).

So, if we’ve become overwhelmed with the immense scale of these things (and many others) where do we go from here? We can’t just shift into reverse and have fewer people on the planet or forget what we’ve already invented, right?

Part of the answer is to let go of trying to fix the biggest organizations, such as central governments, corporations, etc. We are already finding new ways to live without them. As we divert our spending away from them, their power will subside because their life blood is money. How we spend our funds and resources is ultimately more powerful than any government regulation or stockholder revolt. For example, generosity, in the form of volunteering, does not require a subscription fee and is not taxable.

We are already shifting our focus and daily lives to a more human scale. If the federal government is broken, we’re thinking more about relying upon smaller groupings. The various states are starting to fend for themselves and collaborate with other nearby states to take care of their populations. They don’t have to secede from the union officially, just do what they need to do in ways that are perfectly legal.

Meanwhile, we are participating more and more in local volunteer efforts and in-person gatherings to support each other through these trying times. It’s not just the basics, such as food, clothing, shelter, or transportation. This is also for our social needs and mental health.

More people are starting to close out their online accounts and shop locally, even though there may not be quite as many products to choose from. Others are scrolling down web pages to find a specific vendor to buy from, rather than order from the few giant “general store” vendors, such as Amazon or Walmart. Still others are attending more local entertainment events instead of streaming movies and TV shows.

There’s an old quote, “If things go wrong, you don’t have to go with them.” At the moment, it may seem impossible to avoid news of things going wrong or scary prospects for the future. But let’s remember that prospects for the future can change in an instant. Surprises are always coming at us, but once they happen, we easily forget how much they have changed our lives. It’s easy to say, “Phew, glad that’s over!” or just stop worrying about something that’s no longer a threat.

Now is the time to build our relationships on a personal and small group level as much as we can, through whatever means we can find. In my previous essays, starting with the very first one, “Surviving the Flood,” I wrote more about finding peace within ourselves and calming the fears that the surrounding information environment keeps throwing at us.

Go down to the river and watch the water flowing. Look up at the sky for just a little while. Find someone with whom you can share a hug. Sit for awhile in a natural environment if you can find a good place to do that. Take as good care of yourself as you can. Nurture your spirit. There are plenty of people with whom to share love, we just have to open ourselves up to it.

What follows are a few photographs of the work, followed by the “Artist’s Statement and Bio” that I submitted to the gallery. The gallery is managed by the non-profit organization, ArtSpace, in Maynard, Massachusetts, where I live.1 I’m an artist member of the organization. The current show, “Debut” will be open until November 10th, 2025.

The piece “All Screwed Up” is a metaphor for the plight of men in today’s society, under patriarchy. It is designed to be intentionally rough, crude, angular, and somewhat disorganized on the outside, as men are often taught and expected to be.

The screws at various angles and the phrase “all screwed up” mean to represent the impact of patriarchy on men, resulting in the feelings, confusion, and low self esteem that many men experience. These feelings often arise from time spent in school, in dangerous and stressful jobs, incarcerated, and in combat during war.

The piece can be opened, although with some difficulty, to represent the difficulty in accessing the true inner being of most men. The heart charm deep within the cavity stands for the tender human being that exists within all of us, regardless of sex assigned at birth or gender identity.

About the artist:

Glenn C. Koenig was born and grew up in Connecticut. At age 25, he settled in the Boston Area. He has worked as a software engineer, database designer, video producer, photographer, writer, poet, publisher, journalist, discussion host and panelist, as well as a community organizer, volunteer, elected town meeting representative, and non-profit organization board member.

He has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Goddard College and is otherwise self taught. He was awarded Eagle Scout in his teens, and is a veteran of the US Army, having served during the Viet Nam era.

One of Glenn’s favorite quotes is from Stan Dale, “All human behavior is either an act of love or a cry for love.”2

I don’t usually write about sudden news events. I prefer to step back to look at the big picture and take a long term view. After Charlie Kirk was assassinated on September 10th, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to say anything. So, I took some time to read what some other people had written, instead.

Now, a week later, I’ve gained a bit more perspective.

I want to be clear that I don’t condone violence for any reason. This is a strong spiritual conviction of mine, above all. And, on a practical level, violence typically just begets more violence, which almost always makes things worse in the long run. I am specifically against assassinations because they easily lead to catastrophic results.1

I strongly disagree with people who have implied that Mr. Kirk got what he deserved. Advocating the killing of someone with whom we might disagree, brings us down to an even lower level of contempt than the one who was killed.

The other thing is, violence almost never solves the problems that we wish it would solve. Sure, the allies defeated the Nazis in World War II, for example, a decisive military victory. However, racial and cultural hatred were certainly not eliminated. There is still plenty of evidence that they persist today, 80 years later.

There are two foundations of violence, access to weapons and an environment of extreme animosity between people.

Our efforts to prevent access to even the worst of weapons, such as automatic rifles or home made bombs has continued to fail, as a consensus on how to accomplish this remains out of reach, at least on the government level.

Likewise, there are many reasons for a high level of animosity these days. For one, fomenting animosity has become more and more of a tool of political parties to amass power. The latest efforts to increase partisan gerrymandering here in the United States is just one example of what I’ll call a “race to the bottom” in today’s hyper partisan political environment.

So, as I see it, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, along with other political violence in recent years are, to me, a sign of increasing rage and desperation nation wide.2

If anything, Charlie Kirk may have contributed to this polarization with his rhetoric. But his death has not lead to the end of his talking points. On the contrary, there seems to be a renewed effort on behalf of his supporters to push some of the issues he expounded upon.

Back some months ago, I stumbled across a video where Charlie was debating with students on whether or not college is a scam.3 At the time, I didn’t even know who he was and I was not aware of his positions on other issues. I thought his debating style was rather aggressive and confrontational, but I could see merit to some of his points.

But I didn’t hate him, and I certainly didn’t wish him dead!

Now that I know more about his other positions on current issues, I realize that, although I strongly differed with him on most things, I was more sympathetic in two specific areas: The plight of young men, and problems with the education establishment. These are both complex topics, so I’ll choose the one I feel is more relevant here, about young men, and write about education later, in another post.

As far as I’m concerned, both of the two major political parties stand at the threshold of complete collapse. The Republicans are split between one side which is committed to a traditional bipartisan approach, versus the other side, which seems to have followed a course of extreme disparagement of all other opinions.

Meanwhile, the Democrats lost the election in November of 2024 because their party leaders failed to understand and connect with young men (as well as people who live in rural areas). Other commentators have remarked on this failure, and some have even enumerated ways in which the Democrats can win in the future, but here I want to dig deeper into the root causes of their failure instead.4

As I see it, their failure to understand these populations stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of “intersectionality,” while hanging on to the basic oppression model from what I call the “old left.” This concept stems from power imbalances that date back to the mid 1800s, once the industrial revolution was in full swing.

This older model casts populations into two opposing groups: the oppressors and the oppressed. The oppressors are seen as the “bad people” and the oppressed are the “good” ones. The problem is, that as soon as the oppressed gain sufficient power to tip the balance, then they become the new oppressors! This back and forth never really gets to the heart of the matter, focusing on fighting and struggle rather than reconciliation and cooperation.

To me, this is a false binary, because it is not the people who are “bad” or “wrong,” but the cultural memes, such as patriarchy, that are the problem. There are many ways this plays out, but one of the most damaging in current times is confusing men with patriarchy. Men in positions of great power are often cited as examples of the tyranny granted by patriarchy, while the fact is, most men live further down in those same hierarchies, often trapped in jobs with few options, or left unemployed.

The problems of sexism and racism are not zero sum games! We do not have to oppress one group in order to bring respect and opportunity to another. Instead, I recommend that we focus on the problem at its source: The incorrect assumptions we have about each other.

Classically, intersectionality is one way to describe how a person may face obstacles in life from occupying multiple demographic groups, including race, gender, and class, among others. The word was coined in a paper about how black women face two kinds of oppression that must be considered together to fully understand their plight in society.5

But patriarchy, specifically, offers both harm and advantage to both men and women.6 Traditionally, women were restricted from respect and decision making power in government, business, and even in their own households. And yet they were spared from many of the risks and sacrifices expected of men.

As society and technology have evolved over the last 60 years or so, we have paid great attention to the groups traditionally seen as oppressed, particularly women or racial minorities. This attention has been so great that we have largely forgotten (or perhaps haven’t even considered) how these same cultural traditions have oppressed men as well, although in different ways.

Men have been expected to suppress all emotions except anger whereas for women anger is the main emotion deemed shameful.

Men have been taught to settle differences or respond to shaming with physical violence. Men have been told their very value as a man comes from being physically and emotionally “tough.” Participation in military combat has been encouraged or even enforced, implying that men are the “disposable” sex; the phrase “women and children first” implies that men’s very lives are less valuable.

When war is over, the veterans are either dead, or wounded physically or psychologically. When those who survive malfunction under the strain, and perhaps lash out at others, they are often labeled dangerous or criminals and reviled.

Even mutual tenderness and deep emotional support among men is fraught with the risk of homophobia. Asking for help is considered a sign of weakness, and thus shameful. These and other factors cause many men to sit alone with their inner pain.

I could go into more detail, but there are whole books devoted to the plight of men.7 Recently, the On Point Radio program ran a five part series, “Falling Behind,” which describes how the education industry is failing to understand and serve the needs of boys and young men today.8

It is human nature to seek to blame something tangible or some person or group when we experience harm of some kind. Human evolution has left us with the basic emotion of anger because we have needed it to react quickly in the face of danger. In primitive times, if a snake enters your cave and approaches your baby, there is only time to react immediately: Grab an available rock and kill the snake.

But it’s much harder to know what to do with our anger when the thing that’s causing harm is a meme, a tradition, or a point of view held by a large number of other people. How can you smash a meme with a rock? Well, we’ve tried, I guess. That’s called war. Although wars are often believed to be politically, ideologically, or religiously motivated, war is actualy more often about economics, and thus survival itself. By economics, I mean access to the basics, such as water, food, shelter, mobility, and rest.

Thus it’s tempting to blame men for patriarchy because men are tangible, not ethereal. Further, the benefits of patriarchy for men are often seen as external, in the form of control of institutions, wealth, and physical power. Thus, women have struggled openly to oppose this power to attain power in these same areas for themselves.

I have no problem with women having done this. My point is rather that where men have been oppressed has remained much less visible. The reasoning goes, that, as men supposedly have the reigns on power in society, then any complaint they have is disingenuous or merely manipulative. I have seen numerous arguments that men should just go “fix themselves” and leave women out of it.

But the tragedy is that patriarchy is a society wide social tradition that has been carried forward by both men and women. We are all responsible to right the wrongs it represents. Isolating men to solve their problems alone just makes matters worse, for isolation is one of the main damaging effects patriarchy has on men in the first place.

So, along came people like Charlie Kirk. As a young white man, he inherently understood the pain that young men feel from being trapped in a society that seems to blame and vilify them for their problems. It was relatively straightforward for him to appeal to them with promises of love, respect, and better control over the forces that have oppressed them in the last few decades. And why not?

However, some of his message was to advocate for a return to a society where the benefits of patriarchy for men were more pronounced and women were more heavily subjugated by denying them political and economic power.

To me, that is backwards compared to what I strongly believe we must do instead. I don’t care if the Democratic Party learns this or not. The lesson here is not to win elections and continue the bitter bickering that our two party system has stooped to.

Our work now is to recognize men, women, and people of all gender identities as human beings with more in common that the old patriarchal model represents. Everyone has a heart and the potential to experience the full range of human emotions, more or less. We must let people of all genders define their own roles in society, as much as possible.

If anything, we must break down the taboos on emotional expression and growth that have persisted for centuries. Here is my chart that summarizes a few:

Patriarchy has also dictated our status and value in various situations or when engaging in various behaviors:

When I look at these (admittedly incomplete) lists, it seems clear that it has been rough going for both men and women, in different ways. I also realize something else: We are already well on our way to move away from these old “gender binary” standards, and, of course, we still have much more work to do.

I do not mean to imply that all genders are the same, far from it. But the variations between one individual and the next is often greater than the generalizations we have made in the past, based solely on sex or gender. If anything our job is to give every individual the power and support to be truly who they want to be, as much as possible, regardless of any categories to which we might assign them.

To me, trying to go back to reinvigorate patriarchy is not only hurtful to everyone, it is ultimately unsustainable. If young men are feeling forgotten or worse, then we must find new ways to support and love not only them, but everyone, as much as we can.

Sadly, our two political parties are still trying to impose their inherently binary framework on everyone in hopes to gain and maintain power. Each party is in fear that they will lose out, so the leaders of both work harder and harder to defeat the other.

I have news for you. Both parties are about to lose out, anyway, because we no longer want the awful state of hyper partisanship we now have as a result of all this fighting.

It is time to cease fire (literally!), climb out of our trenches, and bring about a new culture where we recognize diversity as an asset, manage ourselves in smaller and more decentralized groups, and share information and experiences through networks, rather than in hierarchies. Our mission is to use love as our fundamental means to relate with one another.

I read the post “Does Your Vote Matter?” here on Substack a few days ago.1 My first impression was that it was well written and the statistics seem to have been thoroughly researched. While reading it, I felt a sense of hopelessness and despair, at first, which I imagine is a typical reaction.

When I got to the end, where it says, “The question isn't whether elections still matter. It's whether Americans will participate in the ones that do,” I had an immediate reaction, almost as if I was the first one in class to respond to a teacher’s question: Raise my hand and say “I know! I know!” out loud. That’s because I already had a pretty good idea as to why voters don’t flock to local elections!

I’m not an academic researcher, but rather someone who has had a keen interest in community affairs for decades, including in local government. While living in a suburb of Boston, back in the 1980s, I was elected to Town Meeting2 and served consecutive terms for 16 years. In all that time, I saw first hand the great disparity between voter turnouts in various elections.

For example, in the town where I live now, voter turnout was 75% in the November 2024 election (typical for a Presidential race). The following May, turnout was only 2.7% for the annual town election. In a special town election for a tax increase later that month (for the schools and a senior center), the turnout was a whopping 16%.

These people are not lazy or apathetic. Clearly, when so motivated, they get themselves to the polls and vote in substantial numbers. So what’s going on?

Two years ago, I wrote a couple of essays on the factors I had identified, but only posted them on a web site of my own.3 As those essays were specifically written for residents in my town, I’ll provide a more generalized summary here.

For democracy to work, voters have to have some essential things:

• access to information

• time to avail themselves of that information, and the patience to understand it

• a reasonable choice of candidates

• and opportunity register and to vote in elections

• a sense that voting is worthwhile

Traditionally, most of these things were supported by:

• the press along with some non-profits (such as the League of Women Voters)

• the political parties

• government election policy

• government committee reports and documents

But long after the structure of our democratic process was first implemented, life has changed dramatically! Here are some of the factors I’ve identified:

1. The local press is largely gone. We pulled the financial rug out from under it by changing where we shop and how we sell things to each other.4 Instead, our sources of news are dominated by regional and national reporting.5 On social media, there is almost no geographic separation; we mostly live in one big soup of posts and comments. Trying to search social media for posts regarding local affairs is largely futile.

2. Government at all levels has become increasingly complex as it has had to respond to the increasingly complex demands placed on it and the complex resources it needs to function. It takes a lot more work to understand enough detail about local issues to feel well enough informed. Most responsible voters would rather not vote if they don’t feel confident enough about the issues or know the candidates well enough.

3. Much of local government functions are dictated by state and federal law. Many boards and committees are relatively powerless, left to discuss details while many major issues are out of their hands. Giant businesses, such as medical insurance, dictate fees and conditions, leaving many cities and towns with rising costs but few if any options. On the other side, employee unions and competition for staff in the region frequently leave local officials stuck in the middle. Pay enough wages or lose good people as they leave to go work elsewhere.

4. Having only two political parties has ruined public discourse, dragging many issues down to a binary choice, red or blue, good or evil. This has even infused local politics, bringing partisan bickering into local committee and board meetings. Elected officials often feel burned out and resign, rather than face such rancor.

5. Fewer people decide to run for local seats in the first place (because of factors 2, 3, and 4, above), so more and more seats are uncontested or have no one running at all. Voters, viewing sample ballots online, conclude that it’s not worth the effort to vote because there are so few choices left.6

6. Our lives have become much busier and hectic. Most adults have to work throughout the year, putting in long hours (sometimes on more than one job), run a household, manage finances, care for children or elderly relatives, and still try to get enough sleep! This is very different from hundreds of years ago, where our largely agricultural population had more time for local affairs in the off seasons (between planting and harvesting).

7. Many local governments have odd traditions or quirks that confuse residents, especially newcomers. In some places, local elections are held separately from state and national elections, and sometimes in other parts of the year.7 Without press coverage or candidate budgets big enough to pay for mass mailings, web site designs, or e-mail blasts to grab the attention of voters, it’s easy just to miss them altogether.

8. If the roads aren’t too bad, the water still comes out of the tap, and the fire department comes when you call them, many people are satisfied to “let somebody else” take care of the details. In a way, the dedicated public officials and volunteers who keep local government running are their own worst enemy. The better they do their jobs, the more people ignore them and their needs. That’s not to say that a crisis of a particular government function is a good time to invite civic engagement! The hard thing is to find a balance - to ask citizens to pay attention to some aspect of government before it is about to crash.

9. The turmoil on the federal level, with the elimination of departments, cuts in funding, and frequent policy shifts has been cited in the press as being bad for business and the economy. That’s because planning is now much more difficult. But it’s also bad for planning by state and local governments! For decades, federal funding has reached down to benefit states, cities, and towns . Now, suddenly, nobody can be really sure of what’s going to happen next. How can one plan to avoid a crisis, when you are not sure where the next crisis will be coming from? Add climate change and rapid technological change, and local government is even more burdened than ever before.

We often forget that being a responsible voter takes work! You don’t just walk into the polls on election day and make random choices! All the signs and messages that urge people to vote, or the little lapel stickers they give you to wear that say “I voted!” really don’t help much; by the time you see them, it’s already too late.

In other words, berating people for not voting or calling them apathetic just adds to their feelings of guilt. Many of the reasons they aren’t voting, as I’ve listed above, are “invisible.” That is, they are not talked about, not well understood, nor given much credibility. Instead, blame is more common. As I have said in other essays, posted here on Substack, blame is largely useless. There are often plenty of good reasons why people “malfunction” and it’s our duty to find out what they are before we start complaining.

Today, we often hear that some candidate or political party is a “threat to democracy.” I have to ask, “What democracy? Do you mean what’s left of the democracy we once supposedly had?” Based on what I see, the biggest threat to democracy is of our own making, just by having changed how we live and work.

In a sense, there is a giant fracture between how government was designed to work and our lives today. Government is supposed to move slowly and deliberately, carefully weighing all points of view before taking action. It was based largely on in-person meetings and paperwork. Meanwhile, we live in a whirlwind of instant global communications, vast networks of global trade and supply chains, all under an increasingly chaotic climate.

There is really no way for government to keep up, yet we keep expecting it to function about as well as it has in the past. The whole idea of voting once a year (or every two years or four) is hopelessly antiquated. Our true “votes” these days are how we spend every dollar we have and spend every minute we engage in social media. Each and every thing you buy or do online is a “vote” for something, and each thing you neglect or avoid is a vote against something. You might as well get used to thinking of it that way.

We, in fact, have great power, but we often don’t understand what power we have or how to use it. We may think we are being “controlled” by giant corporations, but it is we who have the power to pull the financial and informational rug out from under them, just by shifting how we live.

The federal government is falling apart not just because of what President Trump or the Republicans in Congress are doing (or not doing), but because the entire country has long since become too large (population wise) and too diverse and complex to manage from one central institution anymore.

We must make a concerted effort to decentralize as much as possible. We must support diversity as opposed to uniformity, and learn to manage by networking and collaboration instead of continuing to try to squeeze ourselves into the little boxes demanded by hierarchies and go through channels.

I believe that we are in such a situation in the world today. But perhaps what has fallen doesn’t actually need to be restored. Indeed, maybe, we’ll all be better off in the long run if we don’t waste our energy trying.

OK, enough with the analogy, here. Here’s what’s really falling apart and should perhaps not be put back together again.2

In my most recent essay, I referred to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.3 Of course, that’s the official year when it was declared over and done with, but the process of dissolution had begun at least a few decades prior to that. The most obvious evidence that the end was near was the destruction of the Berlin Wall, in 1989.4

After the Soviet Union dissolved,5 I remember thinking two distinct things. One, a world with only one remaining superpower was inherently unstable. Two, “As went the Soviet Union, so will go we” (meaning the US).

A decade later, in the summer of 2001, I had a vague but distinct feeling of unease. I was not actually in need of medical attention; it seemed to be more of a sense of dread of some kind. I could not put my finger on the cause, but I didn’t try that hard. I thought maybe it would eventually go away on its own.

On the morning of September 11th, my wife and I had just finished breakfast when we received a phone call from a friend of ours. He asked if we had seen what had just happened in New York City. We put the TV on right away, just before 9 AM.

As we watched the fire burn in the first tower, and listen to the commentary of the news anchors, we saw the next plane slam into the second tower. At that instant, everyone watching anywhere in the world knew that the first plane crash could no longer be considered an accident. This was something done on purpose.6

Later, I remember thinking, perhaps this was what I had been dreading during the previous month or so. In spite of the tragic loss of life and destruction of the twin towers, I felt an odd sense of relief.

As with any tragedy, I had a collision of multiple feelings inside, one of which was denial. It seemed as I had just watched some kind of disaster movie, an over-the-top spectacular event designed to draw our attention, instead of something real. The popularity of disaster movies with similar themes in the 1970s, such as “The Towering Inferno” or later, in the 1990s, with “Independence Day,” may have contributed to this.

But what I thought soon after that was something else. Finally, someone was fighting back against the US which had been dominating the world economically for quite some time. The era of colonialism that had peaked before World War II had since waned, but only in terms of some countries imposing governments on other countries.

I grew up with terms such as, “The Belgian Congo” and “Rhodesia” in common speech.7 The textbooks in my school and the atlases in the library all mentioned these colonial names as if they were normal and accepted. The colonizing countries were said to have brought better technology and a “higher standard of living” to these otherwise “backward” nations and their people.

But as these official government arrangements declined, another kind of colonialism still survived: The exploitation of various countries by covert industry-government collaborations.

Over many decades, we in the U.S. had become more and more accustomed to a ready supply of bananas, coffee beans, and, most importantly, crude oil. These things were brought to us by what I’ll call our “government industrial complex” which dominated the governments, economies, and labor forces of other countries for our benefit.

I want to stop here and emphasize something very important. That is, unlike many people, I don’t seek to place blame on any one person, industry, or country. To me, blame is pretty much a useless concept. All this happens because of various aspects of human nature and the immense scale of global trade.

The more vast and complex something is, the less likely any common person will have the capacity to fully understand the details of how it works. We seldom think much about it in our daily lives. Low prices are often the highest priority. We shop for sales at the grocery store. We have smartphone apps to find the cheapest place to buy gasoline.

We probably have a vague idea of where all this stuff comes from, but we seldom get down to specifics. We’re not necessarily too stupid, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. It’s virtually impossible to understand the entire complex supply chain, even for a single product.8

The point is, as these many stages of production have increased, the impact of what we buy has become more and more remote from us. Because of this, many things are produced in ways that would upset us, if we actually knew the full story.9 Who made the ink to print the label on this can of peaches at the supermarket? Are they exploiting their workers or dumping toxins into nearby rivers?

Again, I do not believe that this is due primarily to evil intent by any one corporation, group or individual. Rather it is due to a situation that has grown out of control because we have been unable to reach agreement on how to address it! It’s our human nature to save time and money and effort. We evolved to pick ripe fruit hanging from a tree and just eat it, no label to read, and no worry about how the tree produced it.

It is we, the “consumers,” who empower entire industries because we keep buying what they are selling. Pull the economic rug out from under them and they would collapse. But at the same time, we would have to develop alternative sources for the things we need. And we would have to find new jobs for the vast number of people they employ!

When I hear people rail against “The Big Corporations,” and “The Oligarchs,” I don’t see them as the cause of our problems so much, but rather more as the result of our entire culture of consumption and waste. They do not run our lives so much as they are the mere “middle men” who profit from fulfilling our every desire and finding new ones to tempt us.

Fighting them directly will do little to change things. Trying to expand government regulation will always be a day late and a dollar short. Changing how we run the economy from the bottom, up, … that will accomplish the overall changes we need much more effectively.

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, the word from official sources was that “The terrorists hate our freedoms.” Nonsense. If anything, they hate our power over their lives! To them, they are the “freedom fighters” who developed a new means of warfare that we had not yet conceived of.

Now, it’s almost 25 years later. We have finally reached the point where my premonition about “… so will go we.” has finally arrived. President Trump is finally doing something about dismantling the one remaining economic super power in the world, the United States, even as he claims to be strengthening it. How?

The unexpected twists and turns of the tariffs are motivating other countries to “reach past and around” us to trade with each other and leave the U.S. out. Many other countries are continuing to shift energy production to renewable energy sources while our current administration chants, “Drill, baby, drill!” in hopes to return to more reliance on coal, crude oil, and natural gas. That will drag us into an unsustainable economic past while the rest of the world is already moving forward into a future of clean energy.

Many of our largest industries, including energy, automobiles, and others in the U.S. economy have a long history of digging in their heels to maintain their market power in the face of progress. While we build more internal combustion engine vehicles, industries in other countries are already well on their way to making more efficient, less polluting, and less expensive alternatives.

Why is this happening? It’s based on an inherent conflict of interest experienced by all organizations. That is, original mission versus self preservation. The goal is to maintain some kind of balance.

If an organization puts too much emphasis on their mission and neglects self preservation, they risk collapse, in which case they are no longer there to serve the mission!

On the other hand, if an organization puts too much emphasis on self preservation, their original mission is likely to take a back seat or perhaps be neglected altogether.

The larger an organization becomes the greater tendency it has to focus on self preservation. After all, it has built up an infrastructure, a labor force, funding sources and other means of support, including favorable government policies, etc. Even non-profit organizations that grow very large tend to fall victim to this tendency.

People naturally avoid major changes that would risk losing all or part of what they’ve accumulated. This is why the fossil fuel industry appears to be “evil” to some folks. It is not just company presidents, boards of directors, or marketing departments, it is also the employees, suppliers, stock holders, and even many of their customers who are all invested in maintaining the status quo. No one wants to lose their job or watch their retirement portfolio lose value. As with any organism, each entity acts to stay alive and protect itself.

However, most of our biggest and oldest corporations will either have to get moving more aggressively into the brighter future ahead or end up as dust. It may seem like some “dream of a green future” but I assure you, it’s hard nosed economic sense. Neither is this a “left wing” versus “right wing” struggle; that’s just more window dressing. The real process we’re witnessing is a wake up call to create a future more in harmony with nature and beneficial to our own human health as we go forward, all in collaboration with other people, world wide.

Am I saying we shouldn’t make “America Great Again?” No. We are still great and have been great all along! But as with anything “great” true greatness comes from admitting our shortcomings, past mistakes, and blunders. Apology is a much better sign of greatness than denial and bluster. Collaboration is stronger than bickering.

The current administration is also bringing about the dissolution of the United States at the federal level, as we have known it, or at least have expected it to function. But this process has been coming for a very long time. The level of federal debt has increased exponentially, regardless of which political party was in power.10 In the past two or three decades, it has clearly become unsustainable.11

We have avoided facing major change like this, again not because we are inherently flawed, but only because we could not agree on how to proceed with the radical changes needed. Most of us have at least some fear of disturbing the status quo.

It has now reached a point where our current “bull in the china shop” president, his administration, and their political allies are doing the job that was needed to be done for a long time, just not in a way that I had hoped. Indeed, their emphasis on divisiveness, vilification, and outright cruelty seems both frightening and unnecessary. But, as upsetting as it might be, their actions are actually bringing about what some are calling a “Soft Secession” of the states.12

As they dismantle one federal government agency after another, make direct threats to various state and city governments, and impact the lives of individual people (such as with I.C.E. deportations, or lost access to Medicaid) the states are now forced to form alliances with each other to sidestep federal control and develop new resources as fast as possible. Everyone now needs to find other means to do what the federal government has become too bankrupt to do.

As awful as it may seem to many people at the moment, the resulting turmoil will eventually be over. Change as major as this will take some time and patience. Some big and well established programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, are likely to continue for awhile.

But just as the Soviet Union dissolved with very little or no violence, our process will likely be equally non violent. And despite the Russian government’s attempt to rebuild the Soviet Union, that effort will ultimately fail. There will be more independent countries, not fewer.

The states, cities, and communities that embrace diversity and support decentralized decision making will bring about a better quality of life for their citizens, when compared to those that focus on uniformity and central control.

Eventually, uniformity and central control will lose out. That’s not just some left wing theory, it’s a principle of nature. Intersectionality must expand to include everyone, even white men. No one is the enemy. The only enemy is a set of broken memes that we no longer need. Our way forward is to support each other with love and understanding, as much as possible.

But one story caught my eye the other day, right after the meeting in Alaska last weekend. “Putin Sees Ukraine Through a Lens of Grievance Over Lost Glory,” by Andrew Higgins, The New York Times, 17 August 20251

After reading it, I thought, perhaps it’s not so much “Glory” that’s the issue here. Perhaps it is fear instead.

Most of the news today focuses on a few “evil” dictators (or wannabe dictators), such as Putin, Netanyahu, or Trump. But these men would not be where they are without at least a significant minority of the people in their countries who want them to be there, doing what they are doing.

After all, ousting a powerful leader may change things for the moment, but in the long run, if support for his tactics remains, then the problem isn’t really solved at all. There is a significant risk that another despotic leader will come along to take his place.

Perhaps the key is to better understand the people who support these leaders, why they support them, and what we might do to change that.

I saw a map of Eurasia a year or so ago, where the view was turned around from the usual “North is up South is down” alignment.2 Instead, it was from the point of view of Moscow, looking west, toward Europe just beyond the Caucus Mountains and the Alps. What if I was standing there, looking over at Europe, with the United States off in the distance, way across the Atlantic?

I thought back to how Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. Think of standing in Russia with Napoleon’s huge army coming right at you. In order to defeat him, the Russian people who got word of Napoleon’s approach decided to use a “scorched earth” tactic in their defense.3

Rather than stay and fight, they withdrew in such a way as to leave nothing behind. No crops, no food, no water, nothing but barren land and a few empty buildings.4

Can you imagine having to pack up whatever you could into your car or truck, and then burn your own house down, along with any outbuildings, vegetable gardens, etc., as your best defense against an invading force? This is exactly what they did (but with horse drawn vehicles).

And it worked. Napoleon’s army was defeated by starvation, disease, and freezing cold temperatures. But at what cost? True, no one is left alive today who lived through that, so it’s mostly a story in history books. But the trauma of living through crises like these filters down through the generations of survivors nonetheless.

But that’s not the last time the Russian people suffered such a catastrophic invasion from Europe. At the start of World War II, Russia’s population was approximately 197 million people. By the time World War II was over, Russia had nearly 27 million casualties.5 That’s one person out of every seven, or about the ratio of one death per family! Contrast that to the United States, which lost about 400,000 people out of a population of 133 million or about one out of every 328 people. That’s approximately one death per community. A completely different experience!

That was only 80 years ago, so there are people alive today who do remember what happened because they lived through it. There are people who were children back then who can still visit the graves of their family members who died. Those who are younger have heard the stories from their parents and grandparents about the incredible devastation they suffered.

After World War II, NATO was formed, and the western world was essentially divided between two interests, the U.S. and western Europe on the one hand, and Russia and Eastern Europe on the other.

Again, I ask you how you might feel as a citizen of the Soviet Union in this arrangement? Weapons pointed at you and your country, and your country pointing weapons back at them. President Ronald Reagan referred to you and your people as “the evil empire” in a speech in 1983.6

Then, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The former republics stepped away from Russian domination and went their own ways. The buffer zone these countries had formed between Russia and NATO disappeared. Over time, NATO countries ended up right at Russia’s border. There are very few geographic features to block such an invasion.7 Imagine the fear that motivated Russia, as a nation, to bolster up defenses and try to reacquire some of the land that was lost.

Especially worrisome is Ukraine. If it were to become part of NATO, that would mean the possibility of a substantial invading force much closer to Moscow than ever.

So, is it “Glory” that Putin wants to reestablish? Or is it more likely protection from invasion? When I did a search online today for “barriers to invasion of Russia from Europe,” almost every reference was turned around the other way, referring to Europe as being afraid of an invasion from Russia! Finally, after scrolling way down, I found an article on Wikipedia entitled “Invasion of Russia.”8

So what’s the point, here? I’m not an apologist for military aggression by anyone. I don’t have Russian ancestors that I’m aware of. I’m interested in ending war, not taking sides. I want to see both Russia and Ukraine free from the fear of continued violence.

But if you want to end war, you can’t end it by winning fights, but by winning hearts. And I don’t mean winning hearts by trying to get people to “join your side” against some other side. I mean by understanding how people living in fear will do whatever they can to protect themselves. The more terrified they get, the more desperate their measures and actions are likely to become.

So the point is this: Understand the fear: Why do people feel it, and can we help assure them that what they have been afraid of is no longer a threat?9 And then, of course, make sure we’re telling them the truth by actually reducing that threat.

In a sense we not only have people, here in the US who want to “Make America Great Again,” but we have other people (perhaps some of the same ones) living by the maxim, “Bring back the Cold War.” That’s what NATO was for. NATO is still there also because of fear. So, in a way, the Cold War hasn’t actually ended. At least not yet.

Expanding NATO is furthering the philosophy of the cold war. From the point of view of the United States and many in Europe, Russia is still the evil empire and must be vanquished. Meanwhile, Putin and those who control Russia’s military are doing a pretty effective job of preventing that and there’s no immediate sign that they will stop trying.

I’m not saying that the rest of the world should just hand Ukraine over to Russia and wipe our hands of it. No. As I see it, the entire world is in the process of decentralizing. If anything, Ukraine deserves to remain a country and not be assimilated back into Russia.

I see the independence of Ukraine as part of a world wide trend. In 1920, there were 50 independent countries in the world, whereas today there are almost 200, four times as many! Colonies have declared their independence, countries have split into two or more countries (Yugoslavia for example) and some territories of existing countries have formed their own governments.10

Even within each country the population is not a monolith. Vast countries with millions of people are by their very nature diverse. People have different backgrounds, interests, and opinions regarding current policy. There is a great turmoil in many countries these days as a result. Political parties are shifting or falling apart. New ones are forming.

Citizens of Israel are opposed to the war in Gaza or expanded settlements, even as their government continues. In the US, citizens are opposed to mass deportations, even though the government continues. Citizens in Russia are opposed to the war in Ukraine, even though the government continues. Eventually, all of these governments will reach a point where there is too much resistance to go any further.

Even here in the United States, individual states are more and more asserting their differences and acting contrary to policies of the federal government in Washington, D.C. Sure, there are bumps in the road, but this trend seems bound to continue.

Massive populations are too big to manage from a central authority anymore. Huge bureaucracies are too complex to comprehend,11 thus citizens are less and less able to wrap their minds around what they are supposed to be voting on when it comes to elections. Since democracy depends on an informed public, this means that democracy gets weaker and weaker. Voting becomes more and more of a guessing game or matter of loyalty over practicality.

The only solution is not to go on tinkering with these huge institutions in an attempt to fix them. We must let go of trying to manage huge populations from a central source, but instead manage ourselves in smaller groups with simpler more easily understood means and policies. We have the networks now to share information in a “level playing field” arrangement. We don’t need hierarchies to tell us what to do or how to behave anymore. As we learn from others, we can gather new information from elsewhere, then customize it to suit our particular circumstances, locally.

Sure, all this evolution of human society and culture will take time, but right now, rapid changes in technology and natural systems (of which atmospheric chaos is only one) are pushing us ahead urgently.

It’s very important to remember that the ending of anything old is always followed by the creation of something new. Indeed, often the new thing has already started to grow well before the old thing has ended. To me, this is a universal principle of nature. And it’s one of the reasons I remain optimistic that, no matter how dire things seem at the moment, they will change yet again to provide new opportunities to live more in harmony, world wide.

What I realized was that the world around them had changed. The group had clung to the same formula for their events and publicity all that time. So I decided to turn the familiar quote on its head. I said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting the same results.” There was nervous laughter.

This, I think, is where we are in the United States as a whole. We are trying to make the same governmental structure work as it always has. Sure, it seemed to work pretty well for awhile, back 250 years ago. But as time has gone by, the world has changed, and in some very significant ways.

These changes are not just political, or social. Technology has changed, world population has grown exponentially (as well as population in the U.S.), and other countries have changed in many ways as well.

Near the start of the movie “The Matrix” there’s a scene where a group of police cars are parked outside a small inner city hotel at night. An unmarked car pulls up and a group of men, all wearing black suits, get out. They appear to be some kind of secret government agents. One of them steps forward and warns the officer in charge, a lieutenant, that he’s not following the specific orders he was given.

The officer replies, “I think we can handle one little girl.” As the agent turns away, the lieutenant adds, “I sent two units. They’re bringing her down, now.” The agent turns back and replies, “No, lieutenant, your men are already dead.”2

I think of this scene as a metaphor between two theories regarding how to proceed in today’s world. The lieutenant represents the traditional way to handle challenges. Use pretty much the same tried and true tactics we’ve always used. Meanwhile, the agent represents an understanding that none of that will work anymore.3

Our world is now a radically new place compared to what it has been. I cannot emphasize this enough. We must stop pretending that traditional approaches and gradual change will work anymore. Brand new thinking is not only possible, it is now required.

Now, I’m not referring to basic principles such as the Bill of Rights here. I’m talking about the structure and procedures we’re still using. The world has grown around us while our government and political two-party system has not changed along with it nearly enough. This has gone on so long that, by now, the situation has become tragically unstable.

The Matrix is the same movie that also gave us the metaphor of the “red pill” versus the “blue pill.” Take the blue pill and you opt for a safe, traditional approach. Your choice is to go back to “normal life” and remain ignorant of what’s happening. The red pill represents a great risk. Take it and hidden truths will be revealed to you. But once you take that route, there is no going back. You cannot “unlearn” what you will see.

This is where we are now. There is definitely no going back. There are plenty of people who want to go back, but the harder they try, the more frustrated they are likely to get. One group wears the red hat that says Make America Great Again. The other group wears the blue hat that says Bring Back FDR.4 Then there is a third group, bigger than either of those two. They know that going back is impossible, but at the same time, they are very worried because they remain unsure of how to go forward.

This is why I don’t blame anyone for where we are. Trying to completely overhaul something like a government or an industry that has become very big by now is both risky and scary. There is great disagreement about what to do. After much discussion that seems to go in circles and get nowhere, the effort is tabled and people fall back on familiar ways.

When I walk out the front door of my house, I can see a house built 100 years or so ago, just down the block. The streets here were laid out back then. Houses such as these have the same features as my newer house: a living room, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms, peak roofs, shingles, sash windows, and front doors.

Looking at all this, it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that things are pretty much the same as they were back then. But what has changed is what we do, how we live in these houses, what we do to relax, and what we think about. What we do for work, how we communicate, how we travel, and the world economy itself have all changed radically.

In 100 years, world population has grown from 2 billion to over 8 billion, a four fold increase! All these people need to have a place to live, food to eat, and work to do. People who work in other places around the world compete with our work here in the U.S., even though we can’t see them and have never met them.

All of this is invisible when I look down my street. And yet, it has changed life dramatically over that time. What will happen next? Indeed, that is the big question many people are asking right now.

I want to emphasize, that when anything seems to be drawing to a close, something new is already coming along to replace it. You just have to know where to look. I’m an optimist. I strongly believe that we are already in the process of building a new culture; we are just being overwhelmed by the flood of today’s disturbing headlines and news stories.

We are working on replacing our emphasis on exploitation and fighting with a movement to bring about harmony. Our desire is to live in harmony with each other, harmony deep within ourselves, and harmony with the natural world that surrounds us, and of which we are an integral part. I know we can do this and I believe that we are already working on it.

I’m writing this to challenge the idea that our future is shrouded in a fog of uncertainty and worry. I want us to work together to forge a future we truly want, in our hearts.

In my next few essays, I plan to lay out some ideas on where I think we’re going.

The answer is, yes, I am the same person who, for the past few years, has been posting news for Maynard residents on my web site, Town Wide Mall ( townwidemall.com)1

So, why might they think to ask this? Well, I have scrupulously kept posts on Town Wide Mall focused on “hyper local” news and affairs. I’ve also been very careful to keep those stories as non-partisan as possible.2

But I wanted to branch out and post about issues concerning society at large, as well as reach a wider audience. I have researched and recorded my thoughts on social, economic, and political issues for decades, stretching back into the mid 1990s and before. In 2004, I gave a public lecture to share my views on where I think we are headed for the future.3

When I published my first book, “a man wearing a dress” (221 pages; Message Rain) in 2017, I included a number of essays pertaining to my analysis and predictions for the future of society here in the US and around the world.

However, I didn’t want to suddenly start posting such material on the Town Wide Mall web site because I wanted to keep the very local flavor I have maintained there so far. So it was time for a completely separate feed. And here it is.

Now, you have a choice:

- Read stories about Maynard on Town Wide Mall

- Read my perspectives about, the nation, society, and the world, here on Substack.

- Or do both.

Oh, and one more thing. I have other web sites, as well as YouTube and Vimeo channels. One web site, Energy Stories ( energystories.org ) is particularly important, although I have not updated it recently. I plan to add more material there soon.

OK, why don’t I just jump right in. I can do the introduction stuff later.

Right now, I know many people who have decided to turn away from the news these days. They just can’t stomach it. Well, frankly, I don’t blame them. There are some days when I feel the same way. It just seems like a barrage stories about bad things going on.

Most news is about big organizations or big events, such as politics or wars or climate change, so it’s easy to end up with a sense of powerlessness. After all, what can one individual do? Many people seem to be wondering, “How can I have any impact on any of this? I’m just one person!”

I happen to think that most of us are actually very powerful, just not in the old conventional ways. Traditionally, power has been defined as the influence wielded by people “at the top.” Government officials, heads of industries, or the very rich, for example.

For us ordinary folk, our power has typically consisted of voting on election day, writing to representatives in government, or donating to political campaigns or non-profit groups. Some of us have also participated in public marches and demonstrations or organized boycotts of various business.

But in recent years, it seems that these means to express power have become less and less effective. This has lead to a sense of despair among many people. And I certainly don’t blame you if you have felt this way, recently.

I have often said, “If it seems like things can’t keep going on like this, then they probably won’t.” By that, I mean, it’s easy to get caught up in the current moment and sink into it, without remembering that we are going through a period of rapid change. What’s going on right now won’t last; it can’t. It must and it will change, as it always has.

But if that doesn’t leave you feeling much better, I get it. After all, this time of rapid change and uncertainty has got to be at least a little upsetting, in and of itself, right? When you get up in the morning for work or school, you assume the electricity will still be on, water will still come out of the tap to make coffee and brush your teeth, your car will start or the bus will come (eventually?), and so forth. It’s this kind of familiarity that helps keep us feeling as if life is somewhat stable, dependable, and relatively secure.

With all the upheaval going on right now, our faith in those familiar aspects life is being shaken. In order to get through this, it helps to build a strong emotional foundation for ourselves, as much as possible. I think of white water rafting as a metaphor. The more rugged the boat or raft, and the more skill in guiding it you have, the better prepared you are to get through without capsizing. It also helps to have enough people paddling when the effort is needed.

In today’s world, when it seems like we’re caught in the rapids of uncertainty, going it alone is not recommended! Instead, acquiring the skills to build your own emotional foundation is. Reaching out to others who are doing the same and networking with them is a good place to start. A network can be “virtual,” but the more you can meet with other people in person, the better. Frequent in-person connections with others can become your “boat” to help navigate the rapids of today’s world.

Admittedly, not everyone is in a position to do these things easily. Some people live out in very rural areas so it may be hard to visit others in person. Other folks who live in densely populated cities may find it difficult to connect with others in the midst of crowds of anonymous people.

This illustrates the problem with general advice, such as I’m providing here. I cannot profess to have answers for every challenge. I wish I could do more, but at least this is a start.

One way that I’ve found to help connect with others is to volunteer with a local group that directly helps other people in need, if you have any time to spare. For those working two or three jobs and suffering from lack of sleep, this won’t be much of an option, unfortunately. Until we find ways to improve conditions, those of us with some time to spare will have to take the lead to ultimately benefit others who can’t.

I know there are groups where discussions focus on bitterness, anger, and blame. Spending too much time there is not likely to help much. In my life, I’ve learned that wherever there is anger, there is always a reservoir of grief and pain lying beneath, within. Unfortunately, our culture has discouraged admitting grief or pain, confusing that with a sign of weakness. On the contrary, admitting to one’s pain and grief takes courage. If anything, it’s a sign of strength.

What’s needed is a connection with others who can both understand this principle (expressions of grief are ok), and have the patience to just hang in there with each other, listen patiently, and avoid trying to fix anything.

I’ve learned that a good way to create a positive atmosphere is to start with each person remarking on at least one thing that’s going well for them, rather than launching into their troubles right away. Another thing that helps is to take a moment to find something to be grateful for and speak about that. There’s no need to be religious or even think of yourself as spiritual. Just doing these things can often help.

Yes, this may take courage and practice. But the truth is, most people in this world are hurting for the simple reason that they don’t expect that anyone will ever truly listen to them, free of blame or criticism. The more we can learn to do that for each other the better off we’ll all be.

The other day, I imagined a scene with a house in a major flood, surrounded by water. A rescue boat comes along and they say, “We’re here to take you to dry land and we have enough seats for you, let us help you.” I’ll bet the rescuers never ask what political party the people in the house belong to or who they voted for in the last election. It doesn’t matter. They’re just there to help, regardless.

This is a fundamental aspect of human nature. When the chips are down, we are, for the most part, decent people willing to help our fellow humans if we can. So, when I encourage us all to listen to each other without judgement or suggestions, then I mean to avoid partisan or political talk or any blame as much as possible. The goal is to find what we have in common and connect with that.

We are the rescue boats for each other. The flood is in the form of disturbing news these days. Instead of going to dry land, our questions might be, “Are you lonely?” “Do you have enough to eat?” “What do you need?” This is the power we have to help each other get through these times.

The point is, if we who have the time and opportunity to do these things decide to go ahead and do them, then the result will spread out to lift the spirits of everyone, going forward. The whole point is not to let acts of violence or cruelty bring us down without ways to stand up for our own human goodness.