Elections and the organ grinder’s monkey

0

On Martha’s Vineyard, last week’s elections continued a tradition of civil contests, satisfying outcomes, and the deserved flush of pride that dignified, ordinary, democratic governance brings. Including a first-time early voting initiative, a complex operation consuming hundreds of hours of volunteer time seems to have come off smoothly and with great good will.

The local contests attracted highly competent and appealing candidates, many notably new to elected office. Two young but experienced and energetic candidates vied for the state representative slot. In the state senate race, newcomers offered a choice between military and management experience on the one hand and policy and public-process experience on the other. In Island-wide races, two lifelong Vineyarders with considerable law enforcement experience competed for our votes for Dukes County Sheriff, and two young but experienced Islanders — each an immigrant now deeply enmeshed in the Island community (one from Brazil and one from the Czech Republic) — presented both strong credentials and the positive life stories we think political office should recognize. And we voters exercised our franchise without rancor, insult, vulgarity or disrespect.

Which brings us, with disappointment, fear, and sadness, to the presidential vote. There’s much to study and think about here, at its heart our collective abdication of responsibility for tending and advancing the social contract holding American society together in the face of great structural stress and partisan recalcitrance.

At the least, underestimating Donald Trump’s support was a massive failure of imagination. We were trapped by our culture-bound expectations of substance and logic and presumed self-interest, which in hindsight couldn’t stand up to the theatrics and the ballot box catharsis embodied in the Trump vote.

All of us, Democrats as well as Republicans, were easily conned; we watched the monkey when we should have been watching the organ grinder. As the votes poured in and the curtain was pulled back, we got to see what a vote mobilized around illusion, indifference, racism, and marginalization, and perhaps most of all a vote for revenge — for the simple pleasure of blowing things up — looks like.

Rebuilding a useful national political apparatus and a hopeful electorate will be daunting, to say the least. Apart from normalizing hate and payback, it isn’t at all clear how the offer to make America great and the fractured Republican majorities will come together. But whatever a divided, anchorless, and unsympathetic federal government might visit on us, there’s much we can and will need to do as a community on our own.

Novelist Richard Ford, writing in the Guardian about moving forward after the election last week, quoted William Blake, saying, “He who would do good for another must do it in minute particulars … General good is the plea of the scoundrel, the hypocrite and the flatterer.”

We Vineyarders, and all Massachusetts residents, should redouble our focus on our “particulars” at risk — not the monkey or the organ grinder, but the actual programs, services, and protections, the paths to social progress that define the communities in which we’re fortunate enough to live, that are perversely imperiled by a vote to somehow be great again. We may not see a way to reconcile ourselves with national politics right now, but we certainly can focus on the local services and institutions which define the healthy and caring community in which we live.

We need to make sure that essential local programs like the Vineyard Health Care Access Program, Community Services, and Island Health Care continue to get the resources they need to secure the safety-net services Islanders need, with a particular emphasis on primary care, mental health, and addiction services.

We need to both prize and protect the access to health insurance and vital health services afforded us under Massachusetts law, and make sure that the state’s regulatory apparatus is steadfastly focused on preserving services as it calculates and manipulates institutional reimbursement, even at the expense of provider and insurer bottom lines. To be clear: Maintaining access requires managing cost, and if the penalty of assaults on the Affordable Healthcare Act escapes the state’s providers and insurers, most assuredly their ambition, it will rain health care misery on the community.

We need to anticipate redoubled congressional and court efforts to attack Roe v. Wade, and perhaps for it to be at least partially struck down. We’d better be prepared to underpin women’s health services and reproductive counseling and education on the Island.

We need to understand what diminished federal funding for education, perhaps myopically sacrificed to pay for infrastructure investment without tax increases, might really amount to for our children and our economy, and make sure that state funding formulas, and local tax levies, do their jobs.

With federal subsidies for affordable housing already diminished and at risk of complete elimination, pressure to increase housing supply — still far and away the key to addressing our housing crisis — will fall much more squarely on zoning to allow reasonable density and on transfer taxes, similar to Land Bank fees to support needed development.

And in an era of activist philanthropists and substantial and generous giving, we need to revisit and communicate the Vineyard’s philanthropic priorities to assure that the highest human values Vineyarders cherish are attended to.

With our shock and emotional disorientation so close in our rear view mirrors, and our national political aspirations so uncertain and threatened, generalized anxiety and disengagement are understandable. What we as a community can and need to do quickly and optimistically, though, is to engage locally the huge and hugely important issues and causes on which we do largely agree: inclusivity, healthcare, the rights and standing of women and minorities and the powerless.

Perhaps our societal insensitivity and our carelessness have earned us a huge black eye, but our values and our thoughtfulness are still the right prescription. What an opportunity: to be challenged to step over the status quo and actually make for differences in people’s lives.

______________________________________________

And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t already have one… I’m out of here.

—Kurt Vonnegut, quoted in Letters, 2011