Parenting in 2020: Using Donald Trump as a moral object lesson

Before bedtime, discussion with my son turned to talk of morals and ethics. I want him to aspire to both justice and compassion -- and sometimes (according to my Mennonite understanding of how the world should work) that means having compassion for people who act unjustly.*

*I don't expect other people, especially victims of injustice, to do this. It's how I roll.

Talk turned to Donald Trump, of course.

How do you have compassion for Donald Trump?

My usual approach -- when I am the person I want to be -- is to look for redeeming qualities in the person I find frustrating. Most people are a mix! Even many genuinely terrible people have some redeeming quality.

I cannot discern a redeeming quality in Donald Trump. Not as a public man. Not as a private person, at least from what I know of him that way. (Which is too much.)

Which means I don't know how to have compassion for Donald Trump. 

It's not a matter of him deserving it. It's a matter of me practicing an ethic that I aspire to. And he defies my understanding of how to implement my ethic.

So my answer to my son is: This is where I fall short of my values. I don't know how to have compassion for Donald Trump. All I can tell you is to aspire to justice, and try not to let your anger at injustice -- however justified that anger may be -- warp your soul.

Mostly, I would like not to have to have Donald Trump be an object lesson in my parenting.

If in Trump's America, "l'état, c'est moi," l'état might allegedly be a rapist

 AP:

The U.S. Justice Department is seeking to take over President Donald Trump’s defense in a defamation lawsuit from a writer who accused him of rape, and federal lawyers asked a court Tuesday to allow a move that could put the American people on the hook for any money she might be awarded.

After New York state courts turned down Trump’s request to delay E. Jean Carroll’s suit, Justice Department lawyers filed court papers Tuesday aiming to shift the case into federal court and to substitute the U.S. for Trump as the defendant. That means the federal government, rather than Trump himself, might have to pay damages if any are awarded.

Again: Trump is putting the US government on the hook to defend him from allegations about activities that allegedly occurred long before his presidency. Perhaps there's some bizarre legal theory that can justify this. But most people will justifiably understand this as further confirmation that Trump sees no distinction between is personal interest and that of the country. 

Racists going to do what racists do

 In his biography of Frederick Douglass, David Blight relays the following story about racist conspiracymongering as the Civil War came to an end.

What's the saying? History may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme.

You should read the new Adam Serwer piece in The Atlantic

Right here. 

There has never been an anti-racist majority in American history; there may be one today in the racially and socioeconomically diverse coalition of voters radicalized by the abrupt transition from the hope of the Obama era to the cruelty of the Trump age. All political coalitions are eventually torn apart by their contradictions, but America has never seen a coalition quite like this.

This is the most hopeful thing I've read by Serwer -- which is to say, it's hopeful but very cautious about what is possible -- and it is frankly a relief to read somebody aiming for what's possible instead of what is coming undone. Even better, Serwer roots that hope (and the caution) in a deep reading of history. I do a lot of lamenting. And not without reason. But maybe we can make things better for people who need it to be better?

My son just came to me, teary-eyed, because the link he needs to get into his afternoon class wasn't working

 It might be a long school year.

A different first day of school

My son started the seventh grade today. He got up, ate breakfast, puttered around a little -- and then, at 8 am, went to his room, turned on his school-issued iPad, and settled into a video chat with his science teacher.

I'm not enamored of distance learning, but that's still kind of an extraordinary thing, isn't it? And then I remember: He's 12. He doesn't remember a world without iPads, or without live video calling.

My own seventh grade experience was somewhat different. My family wasn't poor, exactly, but we weren't comfortable, either. I didn't have a Trapper Keeper. Instead, I had to carry a cheaper, more industrial three-ring binder. (I wonder who invented that locking mechanism those binders have.) It made me feel like I looked poor, and I felt the humiliation keenly. I have to remember that when you're 12, the smallest slights feel huge.

"At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror"

Good lord, the damage we do in the name of our own safety:

“This has been one of the major forms of damage, of course along with the deaths and injuries, that have been caused by these wars,” said David Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University and the lead author of the report. “It tells us that U.S. involvement in these countries has been horrifically catastrophic, horrifically damaging in ways that I don’t think that most people in the United States, in many ways myself included, have grappled with or reckoned with in even the slightest terms.”

While the United States is not the sole cause for the migration from these countries, the authors say it has played either a dominant or contributing role in these conflicts.

Vine says that while having these numbers is helpful, it does not offer any insight into what kinds of lives displaced people are living. “Every day you live in a refugee camp is a day it’s been degraded compared to what it once was,” he said. “It’s another day you’re separated from your home and your home land.”

I will always believe that the War on Terror has created a lot of enemies the United States might not otherwise have had. In the name of national security, we have made ourselves less safe. Dumb.