This was a week that seemed to get to a lot of people. It’s Trump’s nature to puff himself up to look as big and scary as possible, and his acquittal by the Senate blew some more air into him. So he’s out there making threats and kicking better men (like Colonel Vindman) to the curb. At the same time, the Democrats had a PR disaster in Iowa, which got a lot of folks thinking “What if we don’t beat this guy?”
The point of Trump puffing himself up is to scare people into giving up or giving in. Like mice, we’ll freeze and make ourselves small and maybe we’ll survive. That strategy is deep down there in our mammal DNA, and at times like this it pops up and almost sounds reasonable. Why we’re in this sorry position now is that dozens of Republican senators froze and made themselves small.
But that strategy is the reason why there’s no Mouse Republic. Democracy is about envisioning what could happen if we all came together, and then all coming together around that vision. It’s a fundamentally courageous way of approaching the world, and it’s precisely what the Trumps and Hitlers and Caligulas have tried to scare us out of all through history. That’s what FDR was on about when he said, “We have nothing to fear but Fear itself.”
We need to come together and get big, not stay separate and get small.
So anyway, I decided that the best thing we could all do for each other today is try to talk ourselves down. That’s the point of the featured post “Let’s Talk Each Other Down”. It should be out shortly.
The weekly summary, though, has to cover all the scary things that make us want to curl into a ball, so it does: the acquittal, the revenge tour, the mess in Iowa, the virus, the State of the Union, and a lot more. Then I close with a reference to my favorite Star Trek episode. That should be out before noon.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
Thanks for all your amazing writing! I hope you will title the next post “Let’s talk ourselves UP!” instead of “… Down”. We all need that UP energy, and there is so very much of it when we come together, as you said. Thanks again!
I believe that the phrase “talk him down” originates with getting someone who’s suicidal to back away from the ledge rather than jump.
Sadly, all the Democratic candidates are flawed in some basic way that will prevent too many of the electorate from voting for them, except for one. Sentimentality aside, only Bloomberg can bump Trump out of the White House. Bloomberg is smart, principled, committed, capable, experienced, and a Democrat beholding to no one. He has my vote.