[Oe List ...] Any one heard of the DMA syndrome?

Mon Nov 9 12:03:15 PST 2020

I ran into this term working with 2 partners from Austria who were engaged in trying to mediate the Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka.  DMA stands for dichotomy - manicheeism - Armageddon.  It is a phenomenon that can emerge out of a protracted experience trying to deal with a conflict or contradiction.  Sometimes it happens that the conflict resolves down to 2 perspectives, 2 parties, 2 sets of goals and the situation gets perceived as a dichotomy -- either this way or that way, becomes my way or your way -- This is starts to happen deep within.  As it grows, the stymiedness in the experience of the contradiction / conflict becomes more and more the focus -- the actual stuff to be dealt with takes a back seat to the experience of being blocked.  This experience of conflictedness, contradictedness becomes the focus.  Manicheeism is the stage where the situation is seen as 2 sided -- a good side (mine) and a bad side (yours), this goes to sort of global perception -- the world is divided into 2 camps -- good and evil -- the prince of light, the prince of darkness -- and then the only remaining solution becomes Armageddon, the final war in which Good (our side) triumphs over evil or Evil (your side) defeats and humiliates the Good (our side) 
So, from the first day in office we restart the campaigning, no matter who wins, because we are really no longer focussed on the complicatedness of moving forward on sticky and painful issues (plus, to those of us who are mostly spectators the moving forward is tedious and frankly boring)  We stop thinking about that, our news sources report what is thrilling -- the coming final battle.  Everything becomes a final battle.  Every moment is reported breathlessly.  Our glorious champions, however bloodied, never give in.
I don't know -- just seems somehow relevant.  No, I don't have an answer.  Here is a link.
https://www.galtung-institut.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/RETHINKING-CONFLICT-THE-CULTURAL-APPROACH.pdf

Jim Wiegel  

Theunknown is what is.  And to be frightened of it is what sends everybodyscurrying around chasing dreams, illusions, wars, peace, love, hate, allthat.  Unknown is what is.  Accept that it's unknown, and it's plainsailing.    John Lennon

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    On Monday, November 9, 2020, 11:53:33 AM MST, Milan Hamilton via OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:  

 Well I hesitate to weigh in after Marshall’s eloquent, penetrating, or at least articulate diatribal attempt at trans-establishment speak, which I have to say I found myself resonating with. I agree we need to listen to the pain, the grievances, and whatever else drew nearly half of us to push the T-button for a second time. And I add my fearful and tentative hopes for a Biden/Harris administration that can restore some civility to the discourse going forward. But my concern has been with the great divide in the Congress, especially the Senate. What was it that allowed Mitch McConnell to begin with in Barack Obama’s very first day in office “I will make it my mission to make sure he is a one-term President” and carry on for eight more years with the same stance, symbolized in the refusal to even allow Obama’s Supreme Court nominee to get a fair consideration. Now, will he take the same stance with a Biden presidency? And Lindsey and the other sheep follow along bleating the same tone for four or eight more years? This may take a full eight years to even get the conversation established on a new basis, and do we really have time, given the social collapse on all the other fronts, cultural, economic, as well as political. Where do we think this trans-establishment perspective is going to come from? How many of us are willing to stay present to the dark night of the national soul that we are finally becoming aware we are in? Will the Biden/Harris team even be willing to acknowledge the depth of the swirling cesspool that they are about to dive into? My only hopefulness is in the conversations going on at the local levels of our society that I’ve seen happening, mostly among the young ones and the old ones. With the climate crisis looming ever more daily in our awareness, will we have time enough for the grieving process to get to the national consciousness. And that doesn’t even touch dealing with the global crises, the “cascading catastrophes” as my friend and mentor, Bob Vance used to talk about twenty years ago. How long can we tread water doesn’t even apply as a metaphor when we can see the coming multiple tsunamis approaching. Do we have time to build the ark? Wait! What’s an ark? Time for a total spirit re-set. Where are the poets and song-writers? Send in the Clowns. Maybe next year! MM 

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 9, 2020, at 10:03 AM, W. J. via OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:

Thoughts on TrEXIT

Much as I totally detest her surreal political biases, I say that we NEED to pay attention to Susan’s voice. While I disagree with her stance that Mr. Biden is not (yet) President-elect, Susan HAS pointed out the obvious: that almost fifty percent of the voting electorate is ALL FOR continuing the mirage of Trumpworld. More or less. 

Or maybe they’re just stuck in their little time-warped bubble of political illusion and reductionistic, fear-filled defensiveness.

So Susan is the canary in our coal mine.

Let us pay very careful attention to the thrashing, dying throes of this political Monster.

And to the unnamed grief of seeing their longed-for political messiah slumping off the stage and, likely, going to jail.

I, for one, have struggled with co-existing with my Trump-voter siblings in my family of origin.

But their reality is that they’ve never even tried to understand me and/or my weltanschauung, let alone the former Order:Ecumenical. 

Instead, they went for the obvious Evangelical Jesus-y version of Trumpworld. All to get a conservative Supreme Court majority, mostly. And to reverse everything from Roe v. Wade to Obergefell v. Hodges. 

So they winced at the pussy-grabbing and still pushed the Trump button.

If I have just ONE insight after four years of living in Trump Hell, here it is:

MOST Trump voters WERE--and some still ARE--somewhere between naïve and innocent.

They innocently voted for the Monster (as he turned out to be) who promised them their version of Heaven in America.

What I fail to understand is why they voted for him twice!

Especially considering the incredible pile of more than a quarter million corpses of those who died because of his malfeasance—and worse.

We need to make room for our national grieving process. 

We have ALL lost a major war with a virus that resisted our half-hearted, scatterbrained, self-sabotaging attempts at containment. 

And it WILL get way worse before January 20.

Our grieving needs to include grief over realizing our complicity in letting all this come down on us. Divided as we are politically, we are ALL in this together, and ALL of us need to take on the burden of social reconstruction.

What we must face is like nothing since the aftermath of the Civil War. 

And it’s WAY BEYOND the aftermath of the Viet Nam War that still continues as we fail to reckon the human cost of that political disaster in body bags and ruined lives.

And it’s NOT as simple and easy as making a political course correction “back to normal“ after a short four-year side trip to the edge of the Abyss.

It ain’t over until those on both sides of our polarized body politic can engage in a healing process.

So let’s get over our exuberant partying and horn-honking in the streets. After four years of Hell, it’s a wonderful moment! But enough already!

We are witnessing the slow, painful, final hours of the Monster as Trumpworld gradually disintegrates into a steaming, slimy pile of fetid lies and frivolous court cases designed to poison the American electorate with mountains of disinformation and Trumped-up conspiracy theories.

It's a direct assault on democracy that seeks to plant the seeds of disillusionment and support targeted attacks on American institutions and marginalized groups of scapegoated people.

And the Monster of creeping Trump-tocracy is just now entering the breakthrough stage.

To quote The New Yorker:

"When it is no longer possible to reverse autocracy peacefully, the autocratic breakthrough has occurred, because the very structures of government have been transformed and can no longer protect themselves. These changes usually include packing the constitutional court (the Supreme Court, in the case of the U.S.) with judges loyal to the autocrat; packing and weakening the courts in general; appointing a chief prosecutor (the Attorney General) who is loyal to the autocrat and will enforce the law selectively on his behalf; changing the rules on the appointment of civil servants; weakening local governments; unilaterally changing electoral rules (to accommodate gerrymandering, for instance); and changing the Constitution to expand the powers of the executive.

"For all the apparent flailing and incompetence of the Trump Administration, his autocratic attempt checks most of the boxes."

And then, it gets WAY worse:

". . . if he is elected, Biden will likely proceed as if politics as normal has been restored, because he and the Democratic Party treat Trump as an aberration—cured simply by being voted out of office.

"The last two days have, once again, shown that Trump is neither an aberration nor the product of Russian interference, but rather the conscious choice of roughly half of the voters, or some sixty-five million Americans. This is a giant and, now, aggrieved movement, capable of carrying Trump or, more likely, one of his children, back into office in 2024 or 2028. . . . . If, upon his Inauguration, a President Biden acts as though our national nightmare is over—if he attempts to build bridges and fetishizes bipartisanship in order to pass some watered-down legislation, rather than, say, even acknowledging the necessary and probably impossible task of unpacking the federal judiciary—then the autocratic attempt can return, and it will be stronger."

I’m almost done, and this is more like a Rant than a Witness.

But my truth is: I’m finally eighty years old, and I’m finally clear that I’m no longer Mister Nice Guy. Avoidance of truth-telling may have looked like a good idea in the past, but just LOOK at where that got us!

So I’m going for our Painful Reality, rather than trying to make Nice, Meaningful Transestablishment-type Comments to try to make us feel a little better.

And thank you, Susan, for alerting us to the internal reality of those who voted for Donald Trump.

Marshall

By Declaring Victory, Donald Trump Is Attempting an Autocratic Breakthrough
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