Progressive Perspectives on the Election of Donald Trump as President of the United States

Above: President Obama shakes hands with President-elect Donald Trump, November 10, 2016. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

I don't know about you but I'm still trying to get my head around events of last week.

I'm referring not only to the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States but to what this says about the U.S. and its people and what it bodes for the future of this country and the planet. I'm also struggling with the related news that less than fifty percent of registered voters actually bothered to vote and that there has been a disturbing spike in reported hate crimes and incidences following Trump's election.

Much has been written about all of these events and developments, and following is a compilation of excerpts from some of the more erudite and insightful articles and commentaries that I've come across in the last week. For me, and perhaps for you, these excerpts offer words of insight, challenge and, in the case of author Charles Eisenstein, even hope.

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From Barack Obama, the first African-American president, the pendulum has ominously swung to the Ku Klux Klan’s choice, Donald Trump. Just elected the 45th president of the United States, Trump opened his campaign calling Mexicans “rapists,” and promised to build a wall along the border with Mexico (and to make Mexico pay for it). He vowed to ban Muslims from entering the country, insulted people with disabilities, bragged about committing sexual assault, denied climate change and said he would jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton. It is important to note that Clinton won the popular vote, but Donald Trump prevailed in the Electoral College. Ironically, on election night 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Trump will assume the most powerful position in the world, the presidency of the United States, with the House of Representatives and the Senate remaining in Republican control. His power could be almost entirely unchecked.

– Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
Excerpted from "Trumped: When the Loser Wins"
Democracy Now!
November 10, 2016

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President – a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit – and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.

– David Remnick
Excerpted from "An American Tragedy"
The New Yorker
November 9, 2016

Who do we blame?

The Democrats, who picked a flawed candidate in Hillary Clinton?

The Clintons, who have acted like the White House is their birthright?

The Republican party, which lost control of its base?

The media, which created a false equivalence between a former secretary of state and a reality TV star?

Wall Street, which comprehensively screwed ordinary Americans out of their homes and their jobs?

Political leaders, who have failed to manage the negative impacts of [corporate-led] globalisation and the “new economy”?

James Comey, the FBI director who intervened in a most dramatic fashion in the election campaign?

The Russians, for hacking and releasing the Democratic party’s emails?

Donald Trump, who lied, insulted and bullied his way into office?

The millions of Americans who let fear and hate trump optimism?

Frankly, all of the above.

– Kristina Keneally
Excerpted from "Who’s to Blame for America’s
First Megalomaniac, Celebrity President?"
The Guardian
November 9, 2016

Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids – all while the very rich become much richer.

– Bernie Sanders
Senator Bernie Sanders' Official Response
to Donald Trump's Election as President of the United States
November 9, 2016

Kathy Cramer’s book [The Politics of Resentment] offers an important way to think about politics in the era of Trump. Many have pointed out that American politics have become increasingly tribal; Cramer takes that idea a step further, showing how these tribal identities shape our perspectives on reality. It will not be enough, in the coming months, to say that Trump voters were simply angry. Cramer shows that there are nuances to political rage. To understand Trump's success, she argues, we have to understand how he tapped into people's sense of self.

– Jeff Guo
Excerpted from "A New Theory for Why Trump Voters
Are So Angry – That Actually Makes Sense"
The Washington Post
November 8, 2016

What I was hearing [when research for my book The Politics of Resentment] was this general sense of being on the short end of the stick. Rural people felt like they not getting their fair share.

That feeling is primarily composed of three things. First, people felt that they were not getting their fair share of decision-making power. For example, people would say: All the decisions are made in Madison and Milwaukee and nobody’s listening to us. Nobody’s paying attention, nobody’s coming out here and asking us what we think. Decisions are made in the cities, and we have to abide by them.

Second, people would complain that they weren’t getting their fair share of stuff, that they weren’t getting their fair share of public resources. That often came up in perceptions of taxation. People had this sense that all the money is sucked in by Madison, but never spent on places like theirs.

And third, people felt that they weren’t getting respect. They would say: The real kicker is that people in the city don’t understand us. They don’t understand what rural life is like, what’s important to us and what challenges that we’re facing. They think we’re a bunch of redneck racists.

So it’s all three of these things – the power, the money, the respect. People are feeling like they’re not getting their fair share of any of that.

. . . Look at all the graphs showing how economic inequality has been increasing for decades. Many of the stories that people would tell about the trajectories of their own lives map onto those graphs, which show that since the mid-'70s, something has increasingly been going wrong.

It’s just been harder and harder for the vast majority of people to make ends meet. So I think that’s part of this story. It’s been this slow burn.

Resentment is like that. It builds and builds and builds until something happens. Some confluence of things makes people notice: I am so pissed off. I am really the victim of injustice here.

– Kathy Cramer
Quoted in Jeff Guo's article, "A New Theory for Why
Trump Voters Are So Angry – That Actually Makes Sense"
The Washington Post
November 8, 2016

Trump’s election is going to be the biggest “fuck you” ever recorded in human history – and it will feel good. . . . Whether Trump means it or not is kind of irrelevant because he’s saying the things to people who are hurting, and that’s why every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves Trump. He is the human Molotov cocktail that they’ve been waiting for, the human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.

– Michael Moore
via Facebook
November 9, 2016

They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.

But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?

Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.

At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.

For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.

Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of the rising far-right parties in Europe. They answer it with nostalgic nationalism and anger at remote economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Trade Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women. Elite neoliberalism has nothing to offer that pain, because neoliberalism unleashed the Davos class. People such as Hillary and Bill Clinton are the toast of the Davos party. In truth, they threw the party.

Trump’s message was: “All is hell.” Clinton answered: “All is well.” But it’s not well – far from it.

– Naomi Klein
Excerpted from "It Was the Democrats'
Embrace of Neoliberalism That Won It for Trump
The Guardian
November 9, 2016

If ever there was a repudiation of "The Establishment," this was it.

The most patently unqualified, the most offensive, personally odious presidential candidate in American history has just been elected president. The Groper in Chief.

This is not so much an embrace of Donald Trump – his negatives were even higher than Hillary Clinton's – as it is a repudiation of everything Establishment for the past two decades, especially Clinton, the living embodiment of Everything Establishment.

. . . Racism. Nationalism. Misogyny. Anti-Intellectualism. Authoritarianism. Those are Trump's unapologetic stocks in trade. The only thing we know is that we have experienced a tectonic shift of Rooseveltian proportions, only this time to the right, rather than to the left.

We’ve seen two of those in the past century. One was in 1933, in Germany, which is to say, Hitler. The other was in 1980 in the U.S., which is to say Reagan. We honestly don’t know enough about Trump to know which he will be, or whether he will be something entirely different. Only time will tell.

– Robert Freeman
Excerpted from "President Donald Trump
and the Great Repudiation"
Common Dreams
November 9, 2016

The media played a critical role in creating President-elect Donald Trump. The Tyndall Report, which tracks how much airtime different issues and candidates receive on the major news networks, summarized media coverage of the candidates in 2015. Donald Trump received 327 minutes, or close to one-third of all the campaign coverage, at a time when he had 16 Republican challengers. ABC World News Tonight aired 81 minutes of reports on Donald Trump, compared with just 20 seconds for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, according to Tyndall. On March 15, 2016, after the primary day dubbed “Super Tuesday 3,” the networks played all the candidates’ speeches, except for the speech by Sanders. The networks actually spent more time showing Trump’s empty podium, filling the time until he spoke, than playing any words of Sanders’, who addressed the largest crowd that night.

Earlier this year, CBS CEO Les Moonves told a Morgan Stanley-hosted media-industry conference, speaking about the volume of political advertising that the “circus” of Trump’s campaign was attracting: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. . . . The money’s rolling in.” As world-renowned linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky says, “The media manufacture consent.”

– Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
Excerpted from "Trumped: When the Loser Wins"
Democracy Now!
November 10, 2016

Decades from now, when the election of 2016 is distilled to its essence, what will that essence be? Many hoped the central lesson would be a shattered glass ceiling and a continuation of the Obama legacy. An expansion of rights and tolerance.

Instead, a razor-thin electoral majority chose a candidate who openly embraced a platform of bigotry, who slurred war heroes and the disabled, who was accused of sexual assault, who said he'd roll back the protections of a free press, who was cheered on by white supremacists, who said he'd upend our alliances and the world's long-overdue climate deal, and who seemed ignorant and cavalier about the basics of safeguarding a nuclear arsenal.

There is no way to sugarcoat it. This election is a brutal affront to women, people of color, Jews and Muslims, and all who value kindness and tolerance. Paranoia and divisiveness have won the day. If we feared that the lesson of the Trump campaign would give white nationalists and other political predators a road map for a lasting presence as a disruptive opposition, we have instead handed them the keys to the Oval Office, and the nuclear codes.

In these last horrible months, there were moments we all crossed our fingers and hoped the Trump campaign's ability to inflame bigotry might, ultimately, improve the health of the body politic. Maybe he represented a high fever that, once broken, would leave us more immune to old hatreds. Maybe, just as videos of police shootings shoved the most heinous forms of structural racism into the feeds of white America, so would the actions of Trump and his most virulent supporters cast a light on an ugliness that needed to be confronted to be overcome.

Except, it seems it was also far, far more pervasive than we could let ourselves imagine.

– Clara Jeffrey
Excerpted from "Don't Mourn, Fight Like Hell"
Mother Jones
November 9, 2016

And so, the so-called “unthinkable” has happened. Donald Trump, the racist, sexist, xenophobic candidate of the Republican alt-right, has been elected President of the United States.

Across social media, white anti-Trumpers are expressing shock and disbelief, unable to recognize the America they thought they knew.

Well, wake up. This is the America people of color have always known. This is the America that has always existed.

. . . The election of Donald Trump is painfully consistent with how America historically has reacted to the racial tide turning in the past. From the 13th Amendment, the seeds of mass incarceration were sewn. The hope of Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow. The first black president has given way to Donald Trump. . . . It’s been so easy for white liberals to turn a blind eye to the deep-seated nature of racism in the past – especially after eight years of being able to cling to their vote for a black president. But Tuesday was a wake up call, a stark reminder that there is more for you to do. It will be the job of those Americans who do not agree with Trump and his surrogates, now more than ever, to combat the deluge of bigotry that’s been left in the wake of his ridiculous campaign trail. There are no more excuses.

– Zeba Blay
Excerpted from "Don’t Be Surprised.
This is the America You Have Always Lived In"
The Huffington Post
November 9, 2016

To insist Trump’s backers are good people is to treat their inner lives with more weight than the actual lives on the line under a Trump administration. At best, it’s myopic and solipsistic. At worst, it’s morally grotesque.

Between 1882 and 1964, nearly 3,500 black Americans were lynched. At the peak of this era, from 1890 to 1910, hundreds were killed in huge public spectacles of violence. The men who organized lynchings – who gathered conspirators, who made arrangements with law enforcement, who purchased rope, who found the right spot – weren’t ghouls or monsters. They were ordinary. The Forsyth County, Georgia, sheriff who looked the other way while mobs lynched Rob Edwards, a young man scapegoated for a crime he did not commit, was a well-liked and popular figure of authority, as described by Patrick Phillips in his book Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America.

And the people who watched these events, who brought their families to gawk and smile, were the very model of decent, law-abiding Americana. Hate and racism have always been the province of 'good people.' To treat Trump voters as presumptively innocent – even as they hand power to a demagogic movement of ignorance and racism – is to clear them of moral responsibility for whatever happens next, even if it’s violence against communities of color. Even if, despite the patina of law, it is essentially criminal. It is to absolve Trump’s supporters of any blame or any fault. Yes, they put a white nationalist in power. But the consequences? Well, it’s not what they wanted.

– Jamelle Bouie
Excerpted from "There’s No Such Thing
as a Good Trump Voter"
Slate
November 15, 2016

Between Barack Obama’s 2008 election and 2016, America has transformed from being a majority white Christian nation (54 percent) to a minority white Christian nation (43 percent).

But on Election Day, paradoxically, this anxious minority swarmed to the polls to elect as president the candidate who promised to “make America great again” and warned that he was its “last chance” to turn back the tide of cultural and economic change.

One clue to the power of this racial and religious identity can be seen in the striking similarity of a map of white Christian population density by state to the red and blue election night map. While the similarity of those maps in Kentucky and West Virginia might not be a surprise, the same similarity in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania goes a long way to explaining why Hillary Clinton’s Midwestern firewall did not hold on election night.

The choice before the country was starkly clear. Donald J. Trump’s Republican Party looked back wistfully to a monochromatic vision of 1950s America, while the major party fronting the first female presidential candidate celebrated the pluralistic future of 2050, when the Census Bureau first projected the United States would become a majority nonwhite nation.

. . . The waning numbers of white Christians in the country today may not have time on their side, but as the sun is slowly setting on the cultural world of white Christian America, they’ve managed, at least in this election, to rage against the dying of the light.

– Robert P. Jones
Excerpted from "The Rage of White, Christian America"
The New York Times
November 10, 2016

Low-information voters have given us a low-information president. Trump’s lack of sophistication and his apparent disinterest in doing the hard work it takes to understand the complexities of economics, international relations and military strategy is the most alarming aspect of his looming presidency. His character flaws and reactionary tendencies are hardly insignificant, but his willful ignorance of vital knowledge is what may make him the world’s most dangerous man.

– David Horsey
Excerpted from "Trump’s Careless Ignorance
Could Make Him the World’s Most Dangerous Man"
The Los Angeles Times
November 10, 2016

Donald Trump said so many things in so many different ways during the course of his 17-month campaign for the presidency – about building walls, banning Muslims, tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, abandoning climate agreements, and scrapping the Trans-Pacific Partnership – that it is easy to imagine that he might take the country in any of a number of difficult directions.

But that is the same nonsense that has allowed Trump to get this far. We know enough about Trump and the party he leads.

Make no mistake, Trump now leads the Republican Party. And that party has in recent years developed an approach to power. When it does not control the executive branch, the GOP obstructs the Democrat who is in charge. When it has the executive and legislative branches in its grip, the GOP acts. Quickly.

Despite the whining of “Never Trump” conservatives that the Republican nominee was politically impure, Trump accepted the nomination of a socially and economically conservative party that spelled out its agenda in a platform that People for the American Way’s Right-Wing Watch recognized as a more extreme version of the party’s previous programs: “a far-right fever dream, a compilation of pouting, posturing, and policies to meet just about every demand from the overlapping Religious Right, Tea Party, corporate, and neo-conservative wings of the GOP.”

. . .  Trump will stumble quickly. He will not deliver on the promises that he should keep, and he will keep the promises that should be abandoned. Americans will come to realize his election as a profound error of judgement, just as the voters of Great Britain quickly recognized the folly of this year’s Brexit vote.

Trump has secured an Electoral College majority. But he was not the choice of the majority of Americans who cast ballots for the presidency. And the popular vote, which should elect presidents, will ultimately favor Clinton. This is the place of beginning. Donald Trump has won the presidency. But he has no great mandate. Indeed, the great mandate is with those who can and must oppose not just a Trump presidency but the cruel hoax that is Trumpism.

– John Nichols
Excerpted from "It Really Is That Bad"
The Nation
November 9, 2016

Donald Trump and his surrogates have declared that the country has given them a mandate. But when you lose the popular vote by more than 200,000, it's pretty hard to claim that the public has given you its blessing.

Ironically enough, back on Election Day in 2012, Donald Trump tweeted: "The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy."

For once, he and I agree.

Yet it's amazing how fast such criticisms went away after Trump eked out his Electoral College victory.

Instead, we heard nonsense claims about a "popular wave," which, sadly enough, the news media immediately embraced. This is not much of a surprise, considering that that same media has often embraced the Trump lexicon – e.g., inserting the word "temporary" in front of Trump's proposed Muslim ban, even though it was not at all temporary in nature; using the tepid-sounding "locker-room talk" as opposed to "boasts about sexual assault"; never using terms such as "bigot" or "white nationalist," which would've accurately characterized Trump and his surrogates; or, as Mike Pesca has frequently pointed out, employing the term "pivot" when they should've been saying "lie" or "contradiction."

Now our language is once again being subjected to the same sort of Orwellian torture, stretching the term "mandate" so that it somehow means what it doesn't actually mean.

Can you imagine if this situation were reversed – if Hillary Clinton had clawed out an Electoral College victory while losing the popular vote?

We know from his debate response to Chris Wallace that Trump himself likely would've refused to concede, but what about other Republicans?

Do you think they would agree that she had a mandate for her proposals?

Somehow, I doubt it. They'd be screaming bloody murder about the Electoral College and the "rigged" system.

– Ross Rosenfeld
Excerpted from "Let's Not Pretend
There's a Trump Mandate"
The Hill
November 10, 2016

What is happening in America right now is not normal.

It is not normal that a presidential candidate with no prior government or military experience, who unambiguously and repeatedly vowed to violate the Constitution should he be elected president, will soon become commander in chief of the nation’s armed forces.

It is not normal that an individual helming a vast family business empire with holdings domestic and international will soon be in a position to use the instruments of the world’s most powerful government to enrich himself and his kin.

It is not normal that the preferred candidate of conspiracy theorists like radio host Alex Jones will soon have access to the nation’s top secrets. Eight years ago, the only presidential candidate willing to talk to Jones was Ron Paul, whose wacky and paranoid newsletters now seem quaint considering that America just elected as president a man who claimed that his predecessor is not a natural-born U.S. citizen and “founded” ISIS.

And yet here we are being told to act like all of this is normal. That the voters who willed this unmitigated disaster into being have legitimate grievances and that their collective decision must be respected. While the democratic expression of the American people should of course be respected, that does not make it respectable. To use an analogy to which our insult-strewing president-elect can relate: I refuse to put lipstick on this pig.

– James Kirchick
Excerpted from "Nothing About President-Elect
Donald Trump’s America is Normal"
The Daily Beast
November 14, 2016

America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.

Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on Nov. 7. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently. We are likely to be a pariah country. And we are lost for it. As I surveyed the ruin of that country this gray Wednesday morning, I found weary consolation in W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939, which concludes:

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

I hunt for that affirming flame.

This generally has been called the “hate election” because everyone professed to hate both candidates. It turned out to be the hate election because, and let’s not mince words, of the hatefulness of the electorate. In the years to come, we will brace for the violence, the anger, the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the nativism, the white sense of grievance that will undoubtedly be unleashed now that we have destroyed the values that have bound us.

We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone. In its absence, we may realize just how imperative that politesse was. It is the way we managed to coexist.

. . . Many years from now, future generations will need to know what happened to us and how it happened. They will need to know how disgruntled white Americans, full of self-righteous indignation, found a way to take back a country they felt they were entitled to and which they believed had been lost. They will need to know about the ugliness and evil that destroyed us as a nation after great men like Lincoln and Roosevelt guided us through previous crises and kept our values intact. They will need to know, and they will need a vigorous, engaged, moral media to tell them. They will also need us.

We are not living for ourselves anymore in this country. Now we are living for history.

– Neal Gabler
Excerpted from "Farewell, America"
BillMoyers.com
November 10, 2016

We are exiting an old story that explained to us the way of the world and our place in it. Some may cling to it all the more desperately as it dissolves, looking perhaps to Donald Trump to restore it, but their savior has not the power to bring back the dead. Neither would Clinton have been able to preserve America as we’d known it for too much longer. We as a society are entering a space between stories, in which everything that had seemed so real, true, right, and permanent comes into doubt. For a while, segments of society have remained insulated from this breakdown (whether by fortune, talent, or privilege), living in a bubble as the containing economic and ecological systems deteriorate. But not for much longer. Not even the elites are immune to this doubt. They grasp at straws of past glories and obsolete strategies; they create perfunctory and unconvincing shibboleths (Putin!), wandering aimlessly from “doctrine” to “doctrine” – and they have no idea what to do. Their haplessness and half-heartedness was plain to see in this election, their disbelief in their own propaganda, their cynicism. When even the custodians of the story no longer believe the story, you know its days are numbered. It is a shell with no engine, running on habit and momentum.

We are entering a space between stories. After various retrograde versions of a new story rise and fall and we enter a period of true unknowing, an authentic next story will emerge. What would it take for it to embody love, compassion, and interbeing? I see its lineaments in those marginal structures and practices that we call holistic, alternative, regenerative, and restorative. All of them source from empathy, the result of the compassionate inquiry: What is it like to be you?

It is time now to bring this question and the empathy it arouses into our political discourse as a new animating force. If you are appalled at the election outcome and feel the call of hate, perhaps try asking yourself, “What is it like to be a Trump supporter?” Ask it not with a patronizing condescension, but for real, looking underneath the caricature of misogynist and bigot to find the real person.

Even if the person you face IS a misogynist or bigot, ask, “Is this who they are, really?” Ask what confluence of circumstances, social, economic, and biographical, may have brought them there. You may still not know how to engage them, but at least you will not be on the warpath automatically. We hate what we fear, and we fear what we do not know. So let’s stop making our opponents invisible behind a caricature of evil.

We’ve got to stop acting out hate. I see no less of it in the liberal media than I do in the right-wing. It is just better disguised, hiding beneath pseudo-psychological epithets and dehumanizing ideological labels. Exercising it, we create more of it. What is beneath the hate? My acupuncturist Sarah Fields wrote to me, “Hate is just a bodyguard for grief. When people lose the hate, they are forced to deal with the pain beneath.”

I think the pain beneath is fundamentally the same pain that animates misogyny and racism – hate in a different form. Please stop thinking you are better than these people! We are all victims of the same world-dominating machine, suffering different mutations of the same wound of separation. Something hurts in there. We live in a civilization that has robbed nearly all of us of deep community, intimate connection with nature, unconditional love, freedom to explore the kingdom of childhood, and so much more. The acute trauma endured by the incarcerated, the abused, the raped, the trafficked, the starved, the murdered, and the dispossessed does not exempt the perpetrators. They feel it in mirror image, adding damage to their souls atop the damage that compels them to violence. Thus it is that suicide is the leading cause of death in the U.S. military. Thus it is that addiction is rampant among the police. Thus it is that depression is epidemic in the upper middle class. We are all in this together.

Something hurts in there. Can you feel it? We are all in this together. One earth, one tribe, one people.

– Charles Eisenstein
Excerpted from "The Election:
Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story"
CharlesEisenstein.net
November 10, 2016

Related Off-site Links:
The Nightmare President – Alex Emmons (The Intercept, November 9, 2016).
Why the White Working Class Rebelled: Neoliberalism is Killing Them (Literally) – Juan Cole (TruthDig, November 9, 2016).
Donald Trump is Moving to the White House, and Liberals Put Him There – Thomas Frank (The Guardian, November 9, 2016).
A Series of Strategic Mistakes Likely Sealed Clinton’s Fate – Abby Phillip, John Wagner and Anne Gearan (The Washington Post, November 12, 2016).
White Evangelicals Voted Overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, Exit Polls Show – Sarah Pulliam Bailey (The Washington Post, November 9, 2016).
Trump Voters Will Not Like What Happens Next – Garrison Keillor (The Washington Post, November 9, 2016).
The Hubris of Democratic Elites and the Clinton Campaign Gave Us President Trump – Kevin Gosztola (Common Dreams, November 5, 2016).
Donald Trump's Shock Victory Sparks Protests Across America – Sam Levin, Zach Stafford and Scott Bixby (The Guardian, November 10, 2016).
Will Trump Destroy America? – Jonathan Freedland (The Guardian, November 10, 2016).
As Trump Transitions to Power, "Cabinet of Horrors" Takes Shape – Lauren McCauley (Common Dreams, November 10, 2016).
The Trump Administration Hasn’t Even Started Yet, and It’s Already a Fiasco – Paul Waldman (The Washington Post, November 14, 2016).
Vice-President Mike Pence Will Be the Most Powerful Christian Supremacist in U.S. History – Jeremy Scahill (The Intercept, November 15, 2016).
The Mike Pence (Donald Trump) Assault on LGBTQ Equality is Already Underway – Michelangelo Signorile (HuffPost Queer Voices, November 12, 2016).
Ethics Authorities Raise Corruption Concerns Over Trump’s Children Running His Businesses and Transition – Zachary Pleat (Media Matters, November 14, 2016).
"The Racist, Fascist Extreme Right is Represented Footsteps from the Oval Office": Republicans Warn of Trump Presidency – Ben Norton (Salon, November 15, 2016).
Bernie Sanders Takes On Trump: "We're Going to Stand Together and Fight" – Matt Wilstein (The Daily Beastt, November 14, 2016).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Election Eve Thoughts
• Quote of the Day – November 9, 2016
• In the Wake of Trump's "Catastrophic" Election, Phillip Clark on the Spiritual Truths That Will Carry Us Forward
• Carrying It On
• Hope, History and Bernie Sanders
• Progressive Perspectives on the Rise of Donald Trump

The Path Ahead . . .

. . . is clear despite the chaos.
It is always clear.

That path is to do what we can,
to control our focus,
responses, and actions
so that we honor our values
and serve as a positive light for others.

In uncertainty you find grounding
by living an intentional and kind life.

– Brendon Burchard

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Quote of the Day – November 16, 2011
• Be Just in My Heart
• The Most Sacred Mystery of All

Image: Nebojsa Zdravkovic.

Photo of the Day

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Autumn . . . Within and Beyond
• O Sacred Season of Autumn
• "Thou Hast Thy Music Too"
• Photo of the Day – September 22, 2016
• Autumn Hues
• The Last of Autumn Hues
• The Beauty of Autumn in Minnesota

Related Off-site Link:
Autumn Beauty – The Leveret (November 15, 2008).

Image: Michael J. Bayly.

In the Wake of Trump's "Catastrophic" Election, Phillip Clark on the Spiritual Truths That Will Carry Us Forward

Phillip Clark is a young gay man who lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Over the years he has contributed a number of erudite and insightful articles to the Catholic online forum, The Open Tabernacle (see, for instance, here and here).

We've never actually met, but I'm honored to say that Phillip has been a long-time supporter of The Wild Reed. I'm also happy to say that, through Facebook, we have become friends.

In response to Donald Trump's election on Tuesday to the office of President of the United States, Phillip shared the following inspiring words via Facebook. With his permission I share them today at The Wild Reed.

_________________________

I'm done grieving. As catastrophic as this election is on so many levels, we must remember some spiritual truths that will carry us forward in the coming days, weeks, months, and years:

• All ideological and political divisions are manufactured by the human ego. In terms of biology and DNA, we are truly ALL connected. Political structures, while oriented towards the benefit and functioning of society, are externally conditioned systems that define our identity on mentally-composed ideologies; rather than the truth that we all share a common humanity. Acknowledging this reality does not deny the numerous disturbing implications this year's election will have upon countless lives. Yet (until we reach the consciousness necessary to change the paradigms that allowed this result to happen) the result of the election is now beyond our control.

• We are all divine manifestations of humanity. By owning this limitless spiritual power, we can focus our energies on harnessing the pain, suffering, torment, and dread before us by CREATING new political realities, solutions, and possibilities for ourselves and the United States as a whole. Yes, grim prospects are indeed on the horizon. However, confronting fearful policies with positively-driven activism, advocacy, coordination, and action will elevate the consciousness of our political conversations; ensuring justice, human rights, and the inherent dignity of all citizens remain can remain key foundations of our national conscience.

• Nothing is permanent. Hinduism, Buddhism, and many other Eastern spiritual traditions teach us that time is cyclical in nature – repeating patterns, lessons, and trends until the collective consciousness of humanity has comprehensively learned and healed from its failures and egotistical delusions. The United States of America has been reticent, for over a century, to admit that slavery and institutionalized racism (in addition to the genocide of First Nation peoples) has caused complex and insurmountable emotional, psychological and social pain for peoples of color throughout the nation. The fact that the American public could elect a xenophobic, racist, fascist merely demonstrates that we have not healed – or sincerely addressed – the underlying wound that is the original sin of the United States; which has never been allowed to fully heal. President Trump is a karmic symbol that we cannot run away from the pain and injustice that continues to plague us as a people until racism, misogyny, homo/transphobia, and xenophobia are confronted head-on – in legal policy and in daily practice.

The future is really in our hands. Believe it, and discern for yourself how to be a catalyst of positive change and cosmic evolution. Our growth as a nation and a collective family of citizens depends upon it.

– Phillip Clark
via Facebook
November 9, 2016

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Carrying It On
• Something to Remember
• Quote of the Day – November 9, 2016
• Election Eve Thoughts
• Hope, History and Bernie Sanders
• Progressive Perspectives on the Rise of Donald Trump
• And As We Dance . . .
• Divine Connection

Related Off-site Links:
Feeling Helpless After Trump’s Win? Here Are 10 Organizations You Can Support – Yara Simón (Remezcla.com/, November 10, 2016).
Now, Can We Talk About the End of Business As Usual? – Carolyn Baker (CarolynBaker.net, November 9, 2016).

Quote of the Day

Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids – all while the very rich become much richer.

To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him.

– Bernie Sanders
Senator Bernie Sanders' Official Response
to Donald Trump's Election as President of the United States
November 9, 2016

Related Off-site Links and Updates:
Bernie Sanders Has A Strong Warning For Donald Trump – Paige Lavender (The Huffington Post, November 9, 2016).
Sanders: I'll Be Trump's "Worst Nightmare" If He Goes After Minorities – Rebecca Savransky (The Hill, November 10, 2016).
Trump Won Because Democratic Party Failed Working People, Says Sanders – Lauren McCauley (Common Dreams, November 10, 2016).
Polls Showed Sanders Had a Better Shot of Beating Trump – but Pundits Told You to Ignore Them – Adam Johnson (FAIR, November 11, 2016).
Bernie Sanders and Other Progressives Plan Democratic Party Comeback – Joanna Walters (The Guardian, November 13, 2016).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Election Eve Thoughts
• Carrying It On
• Hope, History and Bernie Sanders
• Progressive Perspectives on the Rise of Donald Trump

Image: Jake Danna Stevens/The Times & Tribune via AP

Something to Remember . . .

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Something We Dare Call Hope
• Clarity and Hope
• Questions "as the Light Shifts and Wanes"
• Active Waiting: A Radical Attitude Toward Life

Progressive Perspectives on the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

.
. . . shared in a spirit of hope,
awareness and love

There's just one thing I'll whole-heartedly be able to celebrate tomorrow evening: the defeat of Donald Trump.

Obviously such a defeat can only result from the election of Hillary Clinton as the 45th president of the United States. From everything I've read in the last 48 hours, a Clinton victory seems pretty much a sure thing. For one thing, she is leading in a greater portion of polls than Barack Obama was in the last two elections.

UPDATE:
Trump Beats Clinton to Take White House
BBC World News, November 9, 2016

Yet I can't honestly say that I welcome a Clinton presidency. For reasons that I've documented previously (see here and here), I believe Hillary Clinton is a deeply flawed and inadequate candidate, one who for reasons – some legitimate, some not – simply does not engender trust or enthusiasm. From the perspective of many she is too "establishment," too hawkish, and too tied to Wall Street and the neoliberal ideology to move the country in the direction it needs to go for the engendering of justice, peace, and environmental sustainability.

Michael Gerson sums it up well: "There has been a massive failure of the presidential nomination process in both parties; one candidate stale and tainted, the other vapid and vile. . . . America has two bad choices, but not equally bad."

No, Hillary Clinton is not as bad as the "vapid and vile" Donald Trump. But she's still a poor choice for president.

And if by some chance she loses to Trump? . . . Well, that would certainly be a great disaster for the U.S. and indeed the world. But make no mistake: if Clinton loses then blame lies squarely at the door of the Democratic National Committee which unfairly supported and promoted her at the expense of a genuinely progressive (and popular) candidate, one who consistently defeated Trump by wide margins in the polls. I'm talking, of course, about Bernie Sanders.


Voting Green

Sanders, to his credit, accepted his (unfair) defeat to Clinton with grace and generosity. He has tirelessly campaigned for her and insists that anything but a vote for her would be a vote for Donald Trump. He's partially right. Anything but a vote for Clinton in a swing state would be a vote for Trump. There are states, "safe states," where it is possible, even in this election, to vote for a third party candidate. Minnesota is one such state. Indeed, if my citizenship application process was complete, I'd probably vote tomorrow for either the Socialist Workers Party presidential candidate, Alyson Kennedy, or the Green Party presidential candidate, Jill Stein (along with every other Green Party candidate on the ballot that I'd be eligible to vote for).

A friend recently challenged me on voting Green, saying: "The time to build the movement for a third party is not during an election season, especially one that's close and where one of the candidates wants to move us back fifty years." I responded by noting that, actually, the only way for a third party to gain "major political party" status and thus help build a viable movement is during an election season . . . by securing a certain percent of the vote. Wherever that is possible, and there are areas of the country where it's safe to vote third party, even in this election, I think it's more than okay to do so. Some have even argued that it's actually the moral thing to do, given the level of corruption and dysfunction of the two-party system.

Another friend insisted that if the Green Party gets enough momentum to gain major party status during this election then "it will deliver the presidency and the Supreme Court into the hands of Donald Trump." Yet no one is anticipating a third party, including the Green Party, getting 5% nationally (Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party is currently polling at just 4.4%, and Jill Stein doesn't even register at all nationally, according to Nate Silver's stats). I'm not talking nationally but locally . . . state by state . . . and in particular those states where it's quite safe for, say the Green Party, to win 5% of the vote without handing the election to Trump, Minnesota is one of those states. As my Green Party friend Seth Kuhl-Stennes* reminds us, "Minnesota is not a swing state this year, and hasn't been for a really long time (if at all). We haven't voted GOP since 1972, and since 1996 the Democrat has won by anywhere from 2.4 to 16.1%. In two recent Minnesota polls Clinton is up by 11 and 9 points, respectively. [This] is why we should be supporting an independent candidate in 2016."

Sanders insists that such a vote is a "protest vote." I respectfully disagree. The people I know voting for Jill Stein aren't doing so as a form of "protest." They genuinely believe in the Green Party platform and recognize that "winning" doesn't have to mean Stein as president (which we all know can't happen) but that the Green party secures major political party status and thus additional funding for its ongoing efforts to challenge the dysfunctional two-party system. I respect that. I admire Sanders immensely, but disagree with his blanket statement about not voting third party and his blanket way of describing such a vote.


Very real concerns

I should say that I not only have concerns about what a potential Trump presidency will mean for the U.S. and the world, but also what a Trump loss may mean. By this I mean I have very real concerns about how his supporters will respond to the defeat of their candidate. For as journalist and author Jeremy Scahill notes, "Whether Trump wins, loses or loses big, he has empowered fascists, racists and bigots. He did not create them, but he has legitimized them by becoming the nominee and openly expressing their heinous, hateful beliefs."

Trump has, without doubt, been inciting violence at his rallies. I'm therefore concerned about the safety of Hillary Clinton and her family and of regular citizens who may be caught up in any violence instigated by disgruntled Trump supporters in the days and weeks following the election.

There is also the very real concern about Republicans, led by Trump, engaging in what Paul Waldman of The Washington Post describes as a "kind of termite-level assault on American democracy, one that looks on the surface as though it’s just aimed at Hillary Clinton, but in fact is undermining our entire system." Here are just three examples of what Waldman is talking about:

• State and local Republican officials are engaged in widespread and systematic efforts to suppress the votes of African-Americans and other groups likely to vote disproportionately Democratic; in many cases officials have been ordered by courts to stop their suppression efforts and they have simply ignored the court orders.

• High-ranking Republican officeholders are now suggesting that they may impeach Clinton as soon as she takes office. These are not just backbench nut-bars of the Louie Gohmert variety, but people with genuine power, including Ron Johnson, the senator from Wisconsin, Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and veteran legislators like James Sensenbrenner and Peter King. The message is being echoed by top Trump surrogates like Rudy Giuliani.

• There is a growing movement among Republicans in the Senate to simply refuse to approve any nominee appointed by a Democratic president to the Supreme Court, leaving open any and all vacancies until a Republican can be elected to fill them.

• Republican elected officials increasingly feel emboldened to openly suggest violence against Clinton should she be elected.

Yes, real concerns, indeed.


Carrying it on

I've shared previously how, in the words of Buffy Sainte-Marie, I'm going to keep "saying, playing and praying" as I "carry it on."

And what exactly is this "it"?

I see it as our passionate embodiment of hope, awareness and love in a world dominated by political and economic systems that far too often heap contempt on such qualities and their embodiment through individuals and communities.

As we prepare to face tomorrow's U.S. presidential election and, no doubt, its tumultuous outcome regardless of who wins, I am very mindful of the need to embody hope, awareness and love. It is in this spirit that I share this evening a selection of progressive perspectives on tomorrow's election, its candidates, and its possible outcomes. Many of these perspectives either affirm or helped shape the thoughts I've shared in this post.

____________________________

It's the presidential race the Democratic Party establishment wanted – Donald Trump v. Hillary Clinton. They couldn't invent a better match-up – a sexist, xenophobic billionaire bigot Republican versus the rational, experienced, status quo Democrat. . . . Throughout the long primary process, Clinton had a difficult time taking on [Bernie] Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist and was far more comfortable taking on Trump, an outspoken racist with little grasp of the world beyond real estate speculation.

The Sanders campaign helped inject into the debate progressive issues that are rarely heard during US presidential elections – single payer health care, a $15 minimum wage, a taxing the rich, for example – and gave voice to some of the concerns of a growing number of people who are being radicalized by the inequality in American society. Even while Sanders has said from the beginning that he would support Clinton if she were the Democratic nominee, her campaign still had to contend with his message, one that raised many people's political expectations.

But now that Clinton is facing Trump, the Democratic Party establishment hopes that all these expectations will be swept away and replaced with a determination to beat the monstrous Republican candidate, which means supporting the Democrat, no matter what you think of her past record or her police stances.

The politics of the "lesser evil" – the imperative to vote for something less awful than the right-wing alternatives – is at the heart of the US political system. Two parties that both represent US capital – Democratic and Republican – dominate the electoral process. Any attempt to break through the two-party stranglehold and put forward an independent left-wing alternative is met with fierce resistance. Green Party candidate Ralph Nader's 2000 presidential campaign, which won some 2.7 percent of the vote (almost three million voted for him, leading many to blame him for spoiling the election for Al Gore), is only the most recent example.

Sanders posed no such independent political alternative to the Democratic Party and didn't intend to, aiming instead to inspire progressive voters to fight for a "political revolution" within the Democratic Party. And even while he promised he would support Clinton if she were nominated and his campaign likely helped draw younger voters toward the party, he was a thorn in Clinton's side.

In a choice limited between Clinton and Trump, the decision for many people will be voting for Clinton to keep Trump out of the White House. But the questions remain. Is Hillary Clinton the candidate we deserve? What has the Democratic Party done to deserve this support? And what does it mean for leftists to compromise on the things they believe in order to keep the Republican out?

– Elizabeth Schulte
Excerpted from "Lesser and Evil:
The Inconvenient Truth About Hillary Clinton"
International Socialist Review
Issue 102, Fall 2016

The 2016 presidential election is widely regarded as a contest between the two most unpopular candidates in a generation, if not all time. The lion’s share of the attention has focused on the spectacle of Donald Trump, the wealthy real-estate mogul and television personality who has succeeded in capturing the Republican Party nomination in large part due to his capacity to manipulate a mass media system that has long favored sensation over substance.

In doing so, Trump has contributed to an unprecedented debasement of the national political discourse. His incoherent ramblings and lack of substantive knowledge, along with his predilection for explicitly sexist and racist appeals, outright lies, scathing personal insults and threats directed against his opponents and their supporters, and not least, sexual assault, have brought the bar to a new low. Yet, remarkably, his core supporters remain undaunted. They have bought the spin from the Trump campaign hook, line, and sinker and rationalized their decision to vote for him.

Clinton supporters like to believe that they are above such spin. However, this is not the case. On the one hand, Trump has been a dream come true for the Clinton campaign, which has happily focused the bulk of its efforts on the self-destructive Republican in an attempt to distract attention from Clinton’s serious flaws.

On the other hand, the campaign and its supporters have produced an impressive array of bite-sized, disingenuous, and specious claims designed to silence their leftist critics, guilt possible waverers, and win over Bernie Sanders supporters. Propaganda and misdirection have been deployed to great effect in 2016.

– Patrick Barrett and Deepa Kumar
Excerpted from "The Art of Spin: How Hillary Clinton Backers
Deployed Faux Feminism and Privilege Politics
to Divert Attention from Her Destructive Policies"
Jacobin
November 6, 2016

No social or revolutionary movement succeeds without a core of people who will not betray their vision and their principles. They are the building blocks of social change. They are our only hope for a viable socialism. They are willing to spend their lives as political outcasts. They are willing to endure repression. They will not sell out the oppressed and the poor. They know that you stand with all of the oppressed – people of color in our prisons and marginal communities, the poor, unemployed workers, our LGBT community, undocumented workers, the mentally ill and the Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans whom we terrorize and murder – or you stand with none of the oppressed. They know when you fight for the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed. They know this is the cost of the moral life, a life that is not abandoned even if means you are destined to spend generations wandering in the wilderness, even if you are destined to fail.

. . . Our only chance to overthrow corporate power comes from those who will not surrender to it, who will hold fast to the causes of the oppressed no matter what the price, who are willing to be dismissed and reviled by a bankrupt liberal establishment, who have found within themselves the courage to say no, to refuse to cooperate. The most important issue in this election does not revolve around the personal traits of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. It revolves around the destructive dynamic of unfettered and unregulated global capitalism, the crimes of imperialism and the security and surveillance apparatus. These forces are where real power lies. Trump and Clinton will do nothing to restrict them.

It is up to us to resist. We must refuse to be complicit, even in the act of voting, with the fossil fuel industry’s savaging of our ecosystem, endless wars, oppression of the poor, including the one in five children in this country who is hungry, the evisceration of constitutional rights and civil liberties, the cruel and inhumane system of mass incarceration and the state-sponsored execution of unarmed poor people of color in our marginal communities.

Julien Benda reminds us that we can serve two sets of principles. Privilege and power or justice and truth. The more we make compromises with those who serve privilege and power the more we diminish the capacity for justice and truth. Our strength comes from our steadfastness to justice and truth, a steadfastness that accepts that the corporate forces arrayed against us may crush us, but that the more we make compromises with those whose ends are privilege and power the more we diminish our capacity to effect change.

– Chris Hedges
Excerpted from "Defying the Politics of Fear"
TruthDig
November 6, 2016

Liberals in the media, academia, political circles, and on social media who support Clinton act as if your one vote – out of the more than one hundred million cast – determines the fate of the republic. If you vote for Stein (whether in a safe state or not), you are personally responsible for Trump’s inauguration.

These voices are often the very same people who, when challenged about Clinton’s voting record in the Senate or Obama’s policies, will say: Clinton was only one voice in a Senate, out of a hundred voices. Obama was one lonely man arrayed against three veto points.

– Corey Robin
Excerpted from "The Ruling-Class Circus"
Jacobin
November 7, 2016

[Hillary Clinton] is what we have to work with. I have no choice at this point, especially considering who the other candidate is. The best candidate to run against Trump was called Bernie Sanders. I think this wouldn’t be so close, and we wouldn’t be so nervous, were he the candidate. . . . I think and I hope that [Clinton] is a different person. She says she is, she’s adopted two-thirds of Bernie’s platform. [I] believe she is going to follow through. And if she doesn’t . . . I’m going to be her worst nightmare, as are millions of other people who voted for Bernie Sanders. The revolution isn’t going away.

– Michael Moore
Excerpted from "Michael Moore: 'If Hillary Doesn’t Follow Through,
I’m Going to Be Her Worst Nightmare'"
The Ring of Fire Network
November 4, 2016

* Wrote Seth earlier today on Facebook: "I'm voting for peace. I'm voting for justice. I'm voting for restoring democracy. I'm voting for sweeping climate action. I'm voting for Jill Stein because 'She's with Me'" (which is a play on Hillary Clinton's campaign slogan "I'm with Her").


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Carrying It On
• Hope, History and Bernie Sanders

Related Off-site Links:
On Eve of Election, Progressives Ready to "Transform American Politics" – Lauren McCauley and Jon Queally (Common Dreams, November 7, 2016).
Bernie Sanders is Still Inspiring Voters to Find Truth – Reno Berkeley (Inquisitr, November 6, 2016).
Sanders Voters Get Behind Clinton With Varied Levels of Enthusiasm – Arit John (Bloomberg Politics, November 7, 2016).
I've Finally Had It with Trump – Charles P. Pierce (Esquire, November 5, 2016).
How Neoliberal Economics Created Donald Trump – John Komlos (Evonomics, August 14, 2016).
Robert Reich: Don't Panic. Stay Active. Clinton Should Win. But the Aftermath Will Be Very Difficult – Don Hazen (AlterNet, November 6, 2016).
Whether Trump or Clinton Wins the US Election, What Follows is Up to Us – Rebecca Solnit (The Guardian, November 7, 2016).

Opening image: Eric Gay/Associated Press.

Autumn . . . Within and Beyond

.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• O Sacred Season of Autumn
• "Thou Hast Thy Music Too"
• Autumn Beauty
• Autumn Leaves
• Autumn Hues
• The Last of Autumn Hues
• From the Falls to the River
• An Autumn Walk Along Minnehaha Creek
• Photo of the Day – September 29, 2016
• Photo of the Day – September 22, 2016
• Autumn Dance
• "Window, Mind, Thought, Air and Love"
• I Caught a Glimpse of a God . . .
• The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
• Integrating Cernunnos, "Archetype of Sensuality and the Instinctual World"

Images: Michael J. Bayly.