Playing in the Band

Elephant Orchestras

During Trump's first presidency, the kids attended a birthday party which featured a Trump effigy as a pinata. I didn't hear about it until afterwards. While I didn't consider Donald Trump to be a particularly appealing person, something felt profoundly wrong about that to me, on multiple levels.

I still think, often, about the fact that I never spoke up about that. Just because I didn't know what to say, just because I knew that it might lead to an uncomfortable interaction, just because I didn't want to make things weird for my kids, and just because I wasn't there, I let it slide.

Earlier this year, my professional coach asked me if I had any specific intentions for myself. I told her, "I already don't lie. But I realize I don't always tell the truth. And I am committing to telling the truth." And, of course, there are degrees of truth and not all of them are always appropriate to express in any given moment, but how often have I stayed silent and swallowed my discomfort over touchy topics, because I lacked the courage to open up that can?

Just because the other parties might not even see the elephant doesn't mean I should pretend not to. That it might result in anything from an awkward evening to the end of a friendship, or worse, these days, should not be my fear or focus. Because it might also result in a deepening of relationship and connection, with another, but, most importantly, with myself.

If we learned anything last week with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, it's that the peaceful exchange of ideas represents an existential threat to people who would do evil. Yes, when people feel threatened and unbalanced, they can become violent, and that is scary, but am I not creating that violence where it doesn't yet exist by fearing it? And do I really fear that, or is it something more internally scary that I fear?

I think it is. I think I fear that, if I speak the truth, and am shouted down, or abandoned, I will have to reckon with the reality that I haven't been speaking it already, for, if I had been, that cat would have been long ago out of the bag and hardly a source of new scratches. If you never live a lie, you never need to apologize, or face the consequences, for doing so.

This past weekend, I participated in an incredible event at Polyface Farm in Swoope, VA, put on by the Brownstone Institute (when I have the video of the panel I was on, I will share it). There are few places where I can speak as openly as I can when I among that community. I pondered, in an earlier post, what to call such a meeting of the minds.

What to call a group that is gathered together around the central idea that something that has happened is not right, and, more importantly, to figure out what can happen that IS right, is one that often becomes bound up in the search for the bulletproof combination of nouns that will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And yet, of course, what an impossible challenge that would be, to encompass the truth while limiting the ability of others to misconstrue or co-opt it.

It is not possible to control the way somebody else hears your words. The idea of coming up with a definition that is both broad enough and fine enough to contain all of you, but nothing else is, is both futile and a distraction. What you are will be what you do.

But what is that? One of my teachers, Jeremy Sherr, speaks, in the context of homeopathic thinking, about the verb as the most important aspect of an individual description of a disease state.

If we scale out that concept to apply to any larger organization, we understand that the verb is the dynamic, the animating, the activating aspect of the narrative. It is where we are in motion towards what we mean to become. If we are gathering as a meeting of minds, if we are acting as individuals, if we are functioning as a society, we should be in motion towards being better than we were a moment before.

Bad guys love a target. As soon as you define yourself as something, people who hate you will find a way to contort the definition and set themselves up as the heroic antithesis of whatever straw man they find it easiest to abuse. They will lie, and smear, and maybe even attempt (and sometimes succeed in the attempt) to kill you.

How do you become impermeable to the tiger’s claws, an alert and moving target for the stalking beast?

You tell the truth, and you live it.

On the drive home, I asked myself, “What are we doing, up on that stage?” What are we doing, bouncing ideas back and forth, riffing on each other’s comments, holding forth and then passing the mic?

We’re having a jam session, with Jeffrey Tucker, president of the organization, leading the band. We’re thinking about what’s true, and talking about thinking about what’s true, and trying to figure out if we’re wrong so we can get closer to what is true, and extemporizing on what seems true, right now.

If it is giant, gray, and wrinkly, with tusks and giant ears and a really long snouty thing called a trunk, we’re going to keep playing until it has a name, and then we’re going to play some more.

Jam on.