Friends, we've just swallowed a giant gulp of darkness...

Friends, we've just swallowed a giant gulp of darkness... 

Sometimes we wake to a morning when the world seems to have changed. We feel bewildered, and stunned.  How could this have happened here? Now that it has, the world can feel far stranger, more alien than before.

Clearly, we have to reorient. But in what ways? And what can we count on-- moving forward--now that many feel they've suffered a gut-punch? Though the warning signs were omnipresent, we didn't see the likely enormity of what we're facing now.

Perhaps that's a sure sign we're still in the Kali Yuga, and that my generation's touting an Aquarian Age was but a premature, and literal pipe dream. It's still too early to have all the answers we need.  Searching for them now finds us spinning our wheels, a desperate kind of cognitive clutching. Were our former pundits not prescient enough? Or, were we collectively inadequate in heeding them? (We search for someone to blame). But that doesn't help.

The early indicators suggest a need to make peace with, and dwell in uncertainty now, a time of not knowing--which turns out to have been the case all along. We've fallen off our horse, and lost our former course. This is humbling--to say the least. While humility--not exactly a triumphal steed-- now seems a needed companion.

For better or worse, these are extraordinary times. But they are also times in which we still have each other. The faithful sun still rises. And the refuge of our being is as available as ever; even with an ultra conservative regime-change in Washington. We may wish that the latter weren't so.

But wishes are irrelevant now. The only immediate calvary coming our way is not to our rescue, nor to the suffering in Ukraine, Gaza, or the environmental degradations to our planet. And I see no Deus ex machina remedy waiting in the wings. However, there are two hopeful things to consider. And the first also better explains Trump's second ascendency to the White House.

As cogently argued by Derek Thompson in his November 6 article published in The Atlantic, Trump's 2024 victory is a reverberation of trends set in motion in 2020: "The pandemic was a health emergency, followed by an economic emergency. Both trends were global. But only the former was widely seen as international and directly caused by the pandemic. Although Americans understood that millions of people were dying in Europe and Asia and South America, they did not have an equally clear sense that supply-chain disruptions, combined with an increase in spending, sent prices surging around the world."

Thompson points out that the resulting global inflation proved as contagious as the coronavirus. However, there was one difference. Most voters didn't blame their leaders for the existence of a global virus--but they did come to blame their leaders for the economic hardships inflicted by the global inflation. With the kicker being that the global rise in prices had created "a nightmare for incumbent parties around the world."  

While the Harris campaign was simply not able to counteract the nightmare, by correctly pointing out that America, under her party's economic leadership, managed to recover faster from the twin impacts of the pandemic and global inflation than any other country in the world, and now has a booming economy by every economic indicator.

That didn't register. What seemed indisputable to a majority of Americans was that they were still paying more at the pump and for groceries, and held Harris and her party to blame. Plus, the political amnesia rampant in America didn't recall that Trump--the man now favored over Harris for his business acumen--in truth had suffered from six bankruptcies, bailed out only by a rich father. While his own company had been successfully prosecuted for multiple forms of business fraud.

Thompson concludes: "If there is cold comfort for Democrats, it is this: We are in an age of politics when every victory is Pyrrhic, because to gain office is to become the very thing—the establishment, the incumbent—that a part of your citizenry will inevitably want to replace. Democrats have been temporarily banished to the wilderness by a counterrevolution, but if the trends of the 21st century hold, then the very anti-incumbent mechanisms that brought them defeat this year will eventually bring them back to power."

While the second hopeful thing to consider is this: The preservation of Basic Trust, and a deeper sanity lies always, closer than we know. That's our restorative task one now--even if it won't come from the next White House, Senate, or Supreme Court; nor will it be even mentioned on the Evening News (seldom the best source for wisdom).

Friends, we've just swallowed a giant gulp of darkness. Digesting it won't be easy. Yet whatever light, whatever collective tipping point--might begin now--each of us, and one moment at a time. In times like these, that's what we firsthave to work with. And if you have a spiritual practice, how could it not be good --to trust--and lean into it now?