“Keep them busy!”
What Trump says and does has kept a lot of the public and government distracted and busy in recent years. On January 28, Trump kicked off his 2024 presidential campaign, alerting us that apparently this “weapon of mass distraction” is to be continued.
Like a lot of people, I wonder how things got so messed up, when we could have much better lives and a healthier planet with more beauty, joy, health, meaning and fulfillment, and even more love, laughter and fun.
What’s my theory? “Keep them busy!” I used to think it was “divide and conquer,” especially along identity lines of ethnicity, gender, religion, immigrant or not, and hundreds of other divisions including political affiliation. I’ve come to think that although divide and conquer is a major tactic, the overarching strategy is to keep them busy. That includes worrying about how we earn money, stay out of trouble, entertain ourselves, how we look, and what we focus on.
Who is keeping us busy? It seems that in any grouping — organization, tribe, nation, world — there are people who want to concentrate power in their own hands. I’m not talking about leadership that helps a group move toward what the group wants; I’m talking about the self-serving power-grabbers who keep us busy and try to keep us powerless.
Trump is a great example. Whether promoted by himself, the media, government officials, his supporters, or his opponents, the topic of Trump keeps a lot of people busy, distracted from the good work we could do together toward a happier and healthier planet.
THE POSSIBILITY — A BIG SECRET
The best kept secret is how much common ground we might find in places we wouldn’t ordinarily expect, like in the supposed divide between the strong supporters and strong opposers of Trump. Many of us have people we love who supported the presidential candidate(s) we opposed.
This common ground was a conclusion reached by Joe Simitian, a long-time politician who is now an elected Supervisor in Santa Clara County, California. An internet search for “joe simitian trump election” will provide many articles worth reading, including this article by Kevin Kelly in the Mercury News of San Jose.
WHY DID SO MANY OBAMA VOTERS SWITCH TO TRUMP?
Joe Simitian was shocked in 2016 when Trump was declared America’s new president-elect. Afterward, Simitian said, “A lot of people said (Trump supporters) are racist, sexist. … I said, ‘Really? I don’t think that describes 46 percent of the electorate.’”
So Joe went to three counties, in Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where the majority voted for Obama once if not twice, and then “flipped” to Trump in 2016.
What he found was that after eight years of “hope and change”, they still weren’t able to provide their children the opportunities they had themselves, and certainly not the better opportunities they were hoping for. To some, Trump stood for a new possibility, the chance to be proud of living in a great country with opportunity and options “for all.” He was a non-Washington insider, a strong man who tells it like it is.
“Basically, they ran out of patience … and they were not about to cast a vote for what they saw as business as usual,” Joe Simitian said. “This was a recurring theme in every county I visited and almost every conversation I had. … Desperate people make desperate choices.”
“Every time President Trump acted in a way we might characterize as outrageous,” he added, “people thought that was follow-through on shaking up the system and getting rid of business as usual. … All it did was reinforce that the establishment wasn’t going to make it easy for him.”
WOULDN’T IT BE WONDERFUL?
We could learn the challenging job of organizing ourselves and becoming the powerful force for change that united people can be.
Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate in 2012 and 2016, frequently quotes Alice Walker to remind us, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we used more of our resources — time, energy, money — not toward Trump, but collectively organizing ourselves toward what we want in our world?