A tranquil election is of course unlikely. There have been continuous nationwide protests over racism and police conduct since May. While most have been peaceful, there have been some violent confrontations, assaults on federal property, and looting. Extremists at both ends of the political spectrum have sought to provoke violence. Exhausted, apprehensive, and angry police have on occasion overreacted. It is hard to imagine that this turmoil will suddenly end on Election Day.
The will be protests after Election Day. The question is: how will they change us?
With either outcome [to the upcoming U.S. presenting election], dangerous myths about American political culture will remain unchallenged, left as assumed truths and conventional wisdom created by throwing uncomfortable facts down the memory hole.
Should Biden win, it is imperative that we use the four-year-window his election provides as an opportunity to lock in systemic change.
Do something that most people think is hard. When you tell someone what you’re starting, their reaction should be, “Are you sure you want to do that? That’s too hard.”
That’s exactly what people said when we started Nubank, and it turned out to be a good thing. If you try something easy, there will be five other companies doing the same thing two months later. But if you try something that’s difficult at first, everything gets much easier as soon as you make it through those initial challenges. Competition will be lower, because everyone else thought it was too hard. Recruiting good people will be easier, because good people like doing hard things. And when you have better people and less competition, raising capital gets easier, too.
I had a colleague who talked about running toward the hard thing. I love that idea.
According to Friday reporting by the New York Times, high-ranking military leaders have vowed to keep the armed forces out of the electoral process and its potentially chaotic aftermath, with Defense Department officials saying top generals could resign if the commander in chief tries to deploy them to U.S. streets.
I worry that “keeping the armed forces out of the electoral process” requires a unified stance by military leadership. If the general's just resign then we've given the military to these leaders unwilling to take that stance. And then things start to look more like a civil war.
“We can slow it down, perhaps a matter of hours, maybe days at the most, but we can't stop the outcome. What we should do is to address this now respectfully,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said.
Why? Why must this happen respectfully? If they can't stop it, why not disrupt? Make a statement and leave the committee? Leave the senate and stand outside? Ask their colleagues in Congress to protest?
And I am singing along, couch dancing, to Garth Brooks. I saw him at the Miramar Air Base in San Diego with the Judds. I listened to Thunder Rolls on a home recorded tape, driving back from Las Vegas. Poorer coming home than we were leaving. Everyone else in the car asleep. The A side ends and there is a long gap; I'm looking at what there is to look at on the road between Las Vegas and San Diego which is not a lot. Thunder Rolls starts and terrifies me. I jerk the steering wheel hard and everyone wakes up. And we laughed about it because no one was on the road with us and we didn't get into an accident.
I checked on him before I wrote this post. I know that I danced to him, the Tahoe Touch and the Texas Two-Step because he said things that made us believe, women dancing with women, men dancing with men, that he saw us and he was willing to stand up for the love he saw.
I was hungry for results, something to wow my friends up North, and fell into my worst habits — becoming the quiet, determined perfectionist who wouldn’t settle for anything less than ideal.
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The longer I spent at Campbell, accepting my flaws and limitations, along with the importance of asking for help, the more my old attitude began to fade. I signed up for another woodturning class and, thanks to my new sense of patience, created a set of kitchen utensils that, while not perfect, work well enough for me. I took a blacksmithing course, satisfied that I ended up with three finely-shaped hooks even though my studio mate forged an entire fireplace toolset in the span of two days.
Distraction has become the norm. We’re blessed with pocket-sized supercomputers that connect us to anyone and everyone, and a buffet of information. But there’s a dark side: those same gadgets distract us, often at the moments that matter most.
As often as not, distraction is your brain ducking challenging feelings such as boredom, loneliness, insecurity, fatigue and uncertainty. These are the internal triggers – the root causes – that prompt you to find the comfort of distraction and open a browser tab, Twitter or email, instead of focusing on the matter at hand. Once you identify these internal triggers, you can decide to respond in a more advantageous manner. You won’t always be able to control how you feel – but you can learn to control how you react to the way you feel. A trigger that once sent you to Twitter can perhaps lead instead to 10 deep breaths.
Here’s one strategy: I found the fun in whatever I was doing. Yes, I know, this is where you roll your eyes, but hear me out. I learned to stay focused on the tedious work of writing books by looking for and finding the mystery embedded in my work. I wasn’t ‘writing’, I was ‘exploring’. I wasn’t Ernest Hemingway; I was Scooby-Doo. Research indicates that even the simple act of thinking of something that you don’t enjoy as fun can have a powerful and real effect on your brain’s interpretation of it. ‘Fun,’ writes the game designer Ian Bogost in his book Play Anything (2016), ‘turns out to be fun even if it doesn’t involve much (or any) enjoyment.’
Critics argue that these digital platforms are capturing our attention, wrecking our relationships and hijacking our brains. However, there’s little scientific proof that social media ‘permanently reduces attention span’ – that claim and many of the other wilder accusations about social media are founded on little more than opinion. One of the most interesting contributions related to this topic that I read this past year was from the British psychologist Amy Orben, who took a deep look at the other studies published on the links between social media use, digital technology and wellbeing. To my surprise, and to the surprise of many others, she found unreliable research methods, exaggerated claims and bad data throughout this research field.
Tiffany Trump is not the most prominent or politically adept of the President’s children, but her speech at the Republican National Convention last week served as a succinct summation of the event’s key messages. Donald Trump is a giant among Presidents, protecting the country and keeping his promises. His reëlection is a contest between freedom and oppression. Yet he’s subject to hatred, Tiffany said, because so many people have been “manipulated and visibly coerced” by the media and tech companies that present a “biased and fabricated” version of reality. “Ask yourselves, why are we prevented from seeing certain information?” she urged viewers. The answer is “control.”
She was far from the only speaker to have discerned a connection between attempts to deceive the American people and efforts to subdue them. On Thursday night, when her father accepted his party’s nomination, he did the same, saying, “They are coming after me, because I am fighting for you!” Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox News journalist who is Donald Trump, Jr.,’s partner, loudly warned about “cosmopolitan élites” who “want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live.” Richard Grenell, the former acting director of National Intelligence, said that Trump’s opponents “never want the American people to know who’s actually calling the shots.”
I don’t think it’s the lies we have to fight against, rather it’s the narrative that gives people an excuse to vote in a way that protects their interests (or what they see as their interests) at the expense of democracy, fairness, and inclusion.
I believe this means we have to provide a counter narrative that is equally attractive and let’s people change, save face, and join together. Not be in opposition.
