by Dr. Denise R. Ames
Why can’t we just get along? This is a question that I have been working on in my forthcoming book (January 2020), Divided: Five Colliding Worldviews and How to Navigate Them. I would like to share with you some ideas that I have been exploring.
Join me in this 7 part blog series in discovering how I came to studying, researching, teaching, and writing about the divide. See the divide play out in your life as well!
The Ethos of Progress
Even though I was in the throes of helping my daughter and son-in-law care for premature twins just home from the hospital, I continued to think about the fierce divisions in this country that have intensified over the decades. In between diaper changes, I contemplated the divisions that had always simmered between different constituencies in the U.S.
Progress vs. Preservation
But despite differences, the key uniting story that has knitted this country together is the ethos of progress. We could all get ahead economically if we worked hard and played by the rules.
This ethos has worked in the United States since its founding. Americans needed this guiding purpose to conquer the frontier, vanquish native people, and build the concrete jungle that is our current way of life.
American Progress by John Gast
We did so without thought of the consequences or our own well-being, let alone the environmental consequence. In fact, Americans have found this ethos is so wonderful that we have exported it around the world to some who have eagerly embraced, while others have been more skeptical.
This ethos of progress is enticing but dangerous, since the chances of it continuing unabated is slim. Also, the meaning of progress has been changing, especially among rural/urban, college/non-college educated, white/people of color, and religious/non-religious citizenry. Yet, our political leaders (on right and left) continued to preach the same ethos, but it was not resonating with a large chuck of voters.
Trump was able to speak to the disaffected voters, the white, rural, working class, and non-college educated voters in ways the college-educated citizenry were unable to understand. Instead, they wrote him off as ignorant, racist, misogynist, homophobic, and other judgmental attacks that fed into more divisiveness. The spiral of anger, distrust, and misunderstanding entered a whole more divisive level.
About the Author:
Dr. Denise R. Ames is a long-time educator, grade 7-university, author of seven books, and president of an educational non-profit, Center for Global Awareness, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. CGA provides books, resources, and services with a holistic, global- focused, and perspective-taking approach for their three programs: Global Awareness for Educators, books and resources for educators and students grade 9-university; Gather, Global Awareness Through Engaged Reflection, a self-organizing study and conversation program for adults focusing on seeing different perspectives of pressing global issues; and their most recent program Turn, Transformative Understanding and Reflection Network, which encourages lifelong and transformative learning to help us arrive at a place of personal and global well-being using a seven “path” approach.
Please email info@global-awareness.org or visit www.global-awareness.org for more information.
For more about worldviews see Dr. Ames’ book Five Worldviews: How We See the World. $9.95
With no sleep, I stumbled through the cruise ship’s farewell breakfast buffet. Everything seemed to be normal. Even the breakfast server seemed unfazed and a bit baffled by my passionate declaration of dire consequences awaiting the world and the cruise industry because of the election.
o realize that I had missed, along with many other people, an important trend in American culture: an intense dissatisfaction with the prevailing powers by a large swath of the American public. I was fascinated with this shift and was committed to understanding more about it.
Election Day, November 8, 2016, dawned bright and sunny. The promise of electing the first female U.S. President emitted an optimistic feeling floating through the air. I even got wind of it in middle of the Adriatic Sea, where I was just finishing a cruise ship lecture series. I arranged my evening to watch all the election returns in my cozy cabin, room service at my fingertips, as the cruise ship steamed its way to its final docking port in Venice, Italy.
I could not believe what was happening. The MSNBC commentators were equally stunned, with a pained look of disbelief etched into their tired faces. The Fox News channel journalists (I could only get two news channels on the ship) were equally stunned, but understandably jubilant at the prospect of President Trump.
uniting the nation would not happen under her watch. Trump’s acceptance speech was equally surreal, as the stunned family perhaps wondered a bit what they got themselves into. My beliefs and hopes were collapsing around me. I was eager for a woman around my age to be President of the United States. This was not going to happen.
the business elites. I have been an educator in various capacities since my first teaching job in 1972, and Democrats usually supported public education and teachers more than Republicans. In the 2016 presidential election, I was firmly in the Hillary Clinton camp.
Just presenting a laundry-list of inappropriate behaviors that Trump committed only seemed to spark a collective yawn among supporters. There was a deeper connection that Trump was able to make with his base that transcended inappropriate behavior and unethical business practices. What was it? I still couldn’t figure it out.
Beware of the Trickster
From a historical perspective, the Trickster is an agent of change, often when a society (global, national or organizational) has gone far in one direction and discontent has begun to accumulate.
We are living in uncertain times. Our divisions seem to be intractable. It is a time for us to be attuned to strange occurrences and alert to messages from questionable leaders. Tricksters are most visible when people are in conflict and trauma, whether on an individual, national or local level. Now is such a time!
The trickster serves as a mirror of our country in some ways. But with the election of Trump these darker elements were exposed by his actions and behaviors, laid bare for all to see and witness. Emerging from the shadow are the darker elements of our country—exploitation, greed, deceit, and discrimination—employed to build this country, just as Trump used these elements to build his personal financial empire.
call and a warning as to what is going on in the shadow lands of the American and global psyche.
Trump’s ascendance is a call for the nation to take a long, hard look at what the trickster is mirroring to us. When we glance in the mirror we see an idealized version of who we are but when the trickster holds up the mirror that image is different. We see the reality but the ideal, but hopefully we all will gear up to improve the real image to one that is more the ideal.
