How to come out of a punch drunk moment

Erudite Partner is out with a new essay for this moment, here available, among many outlets, from Professor Juan Cole's Informed Comment. 

Half of us got kicked in our heads and guts by the re-election of Donnie the dimwitted and his merry band of cowards and grifters. We're going to have to figure out how to live through and beyond this unmitigated disaster for the American republic.

Survival and hope will depend on learning to see and live in the gaps ...

Finding Hope in the Negative Spaces of the Trump Era

... What’s missing from the Trumpian program is something human beings require as much as we need food to eat and air to breathe: respect for human dignity. Don’t mistake my meaning. Respect is not acquiescence to another person’s racism or woman-hatred. Respect for human dignity requires evoking — calling out — what’s best in ourselves and each other. That means avoiding both cowardice in the face of conflict and any kind of arrogant belief in our own superiority.

In some ways, this fight is about who our society counts as human, who deserves dignity. Over seven decades, I’ve fought alongside millions of other people to widen that circle — reducing the negative space around it — to include, among others, myself, as a woman, a lesbian, and a working person. Now, we have to figure out how to hold — and expand — the perimeter of that circle of personhood.

Go read it all.  

For myself, I'm coming out of the numbed phase and reconnecting with appropriate rage at the injustice, cruelty, greed and foolishness that characterize what appears to be on offer from the new regime. Let's figure out how to kick these dopes where it hurts -- in their bank accounts and in their over-valued balls (figuratively of course).