Not to sound like a grouchy old coot – though I have to admit to being part of that, anyway – but I miss those Upstate winters of deep snow and crystalline flakes cascading from the sky. It’s cold now, yes, but climate change has made wintertime beauty only a sporadic thing – a fact that I’m working on accepting, since spiritual leaders often counsel that acceptance will bring us peace. In the words of the New York-born Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”
Got it. I’m learning whatever the new reality of winter has to teach me.
Yet the path of acceptance seems to go only so far. Weather is one thing, but to accept the way things are in so much of American life these days seems like surrender to an avoidable ugliness. Storm systems come and go, presenting blizzards or cold rains whether we welcome them or not, but the dysfunction gripping our political system in the era of Donald Trump isn’t an outcome that’s likewise outside our control. It seems wrong to embrace Chodron’s notion that “we don’t have to transform anything,” because an obstacle is mainly useful “to see what we do when we’re squeezed,” as she wrote.
I don’t think acceptance is the same as giving up. For many of us, peace of mind may lie in recognizing that our new normal is an ongoing but essential struggle against norm-shattering misbehavior. We need to get comfortable with the fight, because the threat to American values and the nation’s stability isn’t going to disappear anytime soon. That’s what we need to learn and lean into right now, even if it seems antithetical to our hope for inner peace.
That is, we don’t necessarily find peace in retreat.
This has a lot to do with norms. Sociologists tell us that norms are expectations of behavior that are enforced socially. They’re not like laws, which are enforced by the threat of punishment. Norms are more informal, and they tend to reflect a society’s values. And lately we’ve witnessed the trampling and then abandonment of some norms of public service that are both traditional and essential in a democracy.
You know, like Trump’s claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the 2020 election wasn’t fair – which polls say two-thirds of registered Republicans actually believed by the time they went back to vote again last year. And there’s his habitual lying – a lie every 12 seconds in one Fox News interview last year, for example. And his nomination to high office of so many people of dubious character and scant professional qualification – people accused of sexual and financial misconduct, of inflating their resumes.
Count these, then, as norms that are falling away: Trust in our democracy. The expectation of truth in political discourse. The notion that people in high office ought to be worthy of our respect.
You may consider this reality of broken norms tragic, as I do. So you may be thinking, as I’ve heard some folks say, that to avoid continual anxiety over what lies ahead, we need to embrace intentional apathy. You know, maybe we could overcome the pain of the ugliness in politics by giving up on it all.
But anxiety doesn’t diminish by avoiding reality. Psychologists tell us just what the Buddhist teachers do: that we grow less anxious by openly accepting and confronting what is.
We don’t know how or when today’s political fever will break, or what pain it will surely cause before that happens. But the solution isn’t to flee that reality, but to accept it, and then do our best to stand up for the values and norms that matter most to us.
Let’s go back to what Pema Chodron wrote a couple of decades ago, because it stands out for me in these difficult days. She wrote, “Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears. Only with equanimity,” she wrote, “can we see that everything that comes into our circle has come to teach us what we need to know.”
That’s useful guidance in so many areas of our lives, including the decline of our political culture – and, yes, Upstate America’s disappointing winters in a time of global warming. It’s reality, and we need to approach reality with equanimity: learning as we go, doing just what we can — but, for true peace of mind, no less than that.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.