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Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible – sounds like “displayal”]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

— David Foster Wallace, 2005

I see a lot of people getting upset by how Trump is clueless about how the presidency works and that his transition team appears to the cluster fuck of the century.

What did you expect? That the orange fella would suddenly figure out how to actually run things properly?

He’s 70 years old and while he has a few talents none of them have anything to do with being President of the United States. His entire business career has largely been about selling people things that FAIL. He enriches himself along the way and people around him get burned. How many failed businesses does it take for people to realize that he’s crap at it?

Along the way he learned how to sell himself in front of cameras better than anyone. He figures out what his audience wants to hear and says it to them. That’s how he won this thing. Mind you, it’s quite easy to do that if you can just make up a bunch of stuff.

Hunker down for more of this ridiculousness. It’s not going to stop. He’s not going to figure it out. The next four years will set America back decades.
All we can do right now is make sure we do everything we can to minimize the damage (accept that there will be damage).

More importantly, we HAVE to make sure this NEVER happens again. That doesn’t mean we start banning things or shunning his supporters. It means we have to address and solve the problems that got us here. Learn and teach everyone how to respect each other and understand why they’re in the place they are. We have to make the effort to not see this Blue or Red. Both sides have to stop treating this as a zero sum game.

Someone said during the campaign that you don’t have to be a hateful bigot to support Trump but you have to be OK with hate and bigotry.

Words matter. They are our thoughts. Ideas. Emotions. They express who we are and what we believe in.

Like many people I’m very overwhelmed by the amount of hatred we’ve seen. Maybe this is who we are fundamentally as humans.

But thankfully so is the battle against it.

Today I found myself struggling with the things we are all taught and that we teach children. Playing the game with fairness and respect. That there are no short cuts. Not be full of shit. That if you live that life, you can be proud of it because doing the right things are important. That goodness prevails from doing the right things regardless if the outcome is in your favor.

I find it hard to believe that anything we saw from that campaign holds up against that test.

This isn’t about winning and losing. This is about who we are and what we aspire to be as humans.

If you want respect, you have to do the things necessary to earn it each and every single day. There are no short cuts and no exceptions.

Respect cannot be compelled.

Respect cannot be bought.

Respect cannot be inherited.

Respect cannot be demanded at the muzzle of a gun or by beating it into somebody or by shaming them into it. Can not. You might get what you think is respect, but it’s not. It’s only the appearance of respect. It’s fear, it’s groveling, it’s not respect. Far, far too many people both in and out of the military, people who should emphatically know better, do not understand this simple fact: there is an enormous difference between fear and respect.

Respect has to be earned.

Respect. Has. To. Be. Earned.

Respect has to be earned every day, by every word, by every action.

It takes a lifetime of words and deeds to earn respect.

It takes only one careless word, one thoughtless action, to lose it.

You have to be worthy of respect. You have to live up to, or at least do your best to live up to, those high ideals – the ones America supposedly embodies, that shining city on the hill, that exceptional nation we talk about, yes, that one. To earn respect you have to be fair. You have to have courage. You must embrace reason. You have to know when to hold the line and when to compromise. You have to take responsibility and hold yourself accountable. You have to keep your word. You have to give respect, true respect, to get it back.

There are no short cuts. None.

— Jim Wright