Once upon a time I lived for years in a spiritual community in India. Most of the people there were in their twenties and thirties.  Hugging was the most common way to greet each other. When you hug hundreds of people, both men and women, for years, you learn a lot about each person from the way they hug.

Are they tentative, enthusiastic, sensitive, perfunctory, present or absent? Do they lean in and wrap their arms around you? Do they keep their pelvis well back from the encounter?  Do they linger or break off quickly? Is their touch light as a leaf or solid like a bear’s? As you hug more and more, you start to get quick reads on people’s attitude to life: you see how they feel about themselves and how they usually interact with others.  Sometimes you feel recharged from a hug and sometimes you feel as if something was taken from you. There are givers and there are takers. There are those who are playful and those who want to give you all their pain.

Today I started to look at our Presidential candidates through the lens of hugging. How would it feel to hug each of them?  If you tune in to all that you have seen them do and say, you (or at least, I) get an instinctive sense of how each of them would hug.  Let’s imagine a simple scenario where you walk into a living room with only two or three people present whom you already know, and you are introduced to…

Donald Trump.  He is the easiest to read. Poor Donald does not like to be touched.  I’m not making this up. It’s well known. He tolerates shaking hands because he has to do that these days as a political candidate.  But he or an aide carries a hand sanitizer spray that he uses frequently. He has a thing about germs, you see.  So poor Donald is not a hugger – unless you are perhaps Miss Bolivia or a starlet, or high-fashion model.  If you are, Donald will probably enjoy the hug.  If you are not a pretty young woman, you might get a pat on the back or a nod of the head.

Bernie Sanders. Bernie is a sweetheart. But he is not connected to his body very much.  He lives from the head, and expresses from the heart.  His body is just the vehicle to carry his head and heart around. He has a bony, wiry physique. When Bernie hugs you, he bends over and leans in so that you mainly contact his shoulders. He puts his hands a little awkwardly on your upper arms or pats your back two or three times.  It’s all over in about four seconds.  Then he’s ready to tell you more about corruption in big banks. He likes to look you in the eyes. And he does not notice particularly if you are a man or a woman.

Hillary Clinton. She is the hardest to fathom. She does immediately respond differently if you are a woman or if you are a man.  With women she is touchy-feely. She will give you what feels like an affectionate squeeze, and she’ll speak while she is hugging you – a few words of compliment or a phrase to bond with you. This isn’t fake. She is at ease and knows she can find a way to identify with you as a mother, or single parent, or girl, or successful person.

If you are a man, she’ll probably not hug you but give you a warm handshake where she puts both her hands around your hand. She’ll hold the contact for a few beats to emphasize she sees you as a person, and she will also utter a few words to create what feels like a personal connection. She is much more cautious in touching men. She has had to live and succeed in a man-dominated world for so long that she has learned to be more reserved and formal if she wants to be viewed as an equal.

This is the kind of  male-centered setting she has had to work in – here, in the White house Situation Room, waiting to learn if Osama Bin Laden had been captured or killed .

But when she meets a woman, there’s a very different look.

Meanwhile, back in New York, Donald Trump hugs Sarah Palin. Read the body language.

Most of the television and press commentary on the U.S. Presidential elections comes from loquacious, overly educated, older white guys (rather like me) with the occasional loquacious, highly educated white woman such as Maureen Dowd of the New York Times or Megyn Kelly of Fox News thrown in for diversity. We are all pretty good at marshaling facts, analysis, theories, arguments and other traditional elements of reasoned debate.

But there are other ways to understand the bigger picture of what is evolving in this election through other (non-mental) perspectives that arise from intuitive insights into evolutionary consciousness.

A few days ago a friend sent me a You Tube video called “2016 Psychic Presidential  Prediction”.  If you are like me, you may not spend a lot of time reading or viewing psychic predictions. But this video opened my mind, and other levels of awareness, to the many, many valuable ways that we humans have to perceive our universe.

Imagine it is the last days of winter and the sun is staying a little longer in the sky each day. Underneath the surface of your garden, last year’s daffodil bulbs are extending their root systems and the first hard shoot of this year’s flower begins to pierce the bulb and head upward to the light.  It’s still not visible to your eye.  But if you are a professional gardener who is attuned to the seasons and to the plant world, you may sense that this growth process has already begun even though it is still invisible.  You just “know” it is time to add some fertilizer to the soil or to rake back the remaining leaves from the fall so that the earth is ready for these early shoots to break through.

A psychic works somewhat in this way. They are attuned to energetic movements that may not yet have surfaced openly or publicly.  They have a slightly more sensitive sensory capacity, just as dogs may smell things we are unaware of or cats may hear sounds that are inaudible to us. Many artists experience the world in different ways from the average person, and their use of color or form or perspective changes our own way of seeing reality.

Let me introduce now you to Danielle Egnew, the creator of this video. I love her aliveness, her different slant, her refreshing common sense – and her pyjamas! She is worth 9 minutes of your time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0ppS0UlYY0

I called this post Trumpets, Heralds and Transitional Objects because, after listening to Danielle, I started looking at each of the three Presidential candidates as people playing parts in a great drama.

Trumpets for Donald, so full of sound and bluster and masculine, martial pride. The old order that is passing.  It still has some brassy vitality but, like old soldiers remembering younger days, that strength is waning.

Heralds for Bernie. He is the herald of new energies and the voice of those who have been dis-possessed or left stranded by the old order.

And Transitional Objects for Hillary.  Danielle Egnew calls her a “bridge” between the old masculine-dominated systems and the emerging feminine-oriented world. I see her as the transitional vehicle: the one who has to embody some of the old masculine qualities of power and authority with the feminine aspects of empathy, compassion and the knowing that we, every single one of us, no one excluded, are all equally important, interrelated and indispensable cells in this amazing world we inhabit.

 

Brian Gibb   May 28, 2016

 

 

Those old stodgy white guys in suits are fighting another losing battle: this time over what toilets transgender people may use.

According to the New York Times, ‘Eleven states, including Alabama, Georgia, Texas and Wisconsin, brought a case in a Federal District Court in North Texas and said that the Obama administration had “conspired to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process and running roughshod over common sense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights.”’

The challenge by the states, most of which are led by Republican governors, came 12 days after civil rights lawyers from the Department of Education and the Justice Department issued what they described as “significant guidance” about how schools should accommodate transgender students to remain in compliance with federal law. A school, the Obama administration lawyers wrote, “must not treat a transgender student differently from the way it treats other students of the same gender identity.”

It’s time to get real about what is really being said and not said in this debate. The Republican Governors say that the issue is about protecting children. The unvoiced subtext is that children are at risk from transgender people.  You know, deviants, perverts, pedophiles, they’ re all in the same boat here. You can almost feel the distaste the Governors have for transgenders.

There is, of course, no evidence or any known court case in which a transgender person has harmed or threatened a child in a toilet. The inconvenient truth is that it is those adult straight men and women who feel disgust for people who look and act differently that want to force transgender people to use the toilet that corresponds to their sex at birth.

So, let’s say a transgender woman (once Saul, now Sally) walks into a Ladies room.  Sally goes into a stall like any other woman, does her business, washes her hands, perhaps checks her makeup, and leaves.  But WAIT, yell the Governors, even if  Sally uses a stall and causes no fuss, what’s to stop voyeur Steve from dressing like a woman too and entering the women’s toilet and spying with mirrors or cameras on what women are doing in the stalls?

Well, voyeur Steve can behave this way already. Nothing stops him from snooping in disguise today– except the law.  The new federal rules only protect Sally’s right to be the woman she now is.  Steve is still a criminal.

So, next we find a transgender man (once Belinda, now Ben) walking into a Mens room. If Ben has not had sex change surgery, he will use a stall and do his business in private.  If Ben has had surgery and only needs to pee, he walks up to the urinal and relieves himself. But WAIT, say those uncomfortable white guys, this is still a woman really, even if she has a penis now. He/she might look at my junk!  Oh, Jesus!

In many countries of the world women attendants take care of cleaning and maintaining public toilets for a small user fee, maybe 25 cents or 50 cents. They bustle around inside the mens’ toilets, mopping the floors and keeping the sinks clean.  Men are using the urinals while this happens. No one thinks anything of it.  So, this anxiety some Americans have about transgender men is not just natural embarrassment. It is actually coming from the same kind of  prejudice that once showed up as separate toilets and drinking fountains for blacks and whites.

So, these conservatives say, let’s just keep those trannies in the right toilets.  OK?

Well… if I understand you, Mr. Governor, Ben with his new penis, should go back into the Ladies toilet, and Sally, now without a penis, should be walking into the Mens’ room in her skirt and heels. Right?  Everyone will feel so much more comfortable.

We know, don’t we, what will happen in many parts of Georgia and Alabama when Sally goes into the Gents? She may be leaving in an ambulance. She may be assaulted or raped.

And those fine Southern ladies, how will they feel when Ben, in his suit and tie, wanders into their powder room?

Missing in all of this invective from the Governors and the Righteous Right is any sense of empathy for transgenders.  They give no consideration to the pain, the shame, the awkwardness, the radical surgeries, the difficult hormonal changes and all the other difficult steps that transgenders go through to become who they know themselves to be.  There is no attempt to include them as human beings going through a fundamental change in identity.  Instead, the politicians heed only the moral indignation and the discomfort of straight-laced people faced with the unfamiliar.

This is simply the continuation of the long struggle for gay and lesbian rights. It is the same actors and the same old arguments trying to preserve an imaginary status quo that existed briefly in the 1950s and 1960s. The conservatives lost the battle on gay marriage and now they have focused their wrath on the smallest part of the LGBT movement: the T’s.

What does it take to accept that the transgenders  have the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as the Governor of Alabama?  There is a wonderful children’s  book, “Everybody Poops”, that I used to read with my daughter when she was little.  Pooping is natural. Pooping is necessary. We all do it. This lawsuit by the Governors is introducing shame back into toileting. Their concern for children is a red herring. If they look into their hearts, they will find moral judgments, disgust perhaps, and probably a lot of anger.

I challenge them to answer the question: What would Jesus do?

A urinal in a restaurant in Paris has the last word.

May 26, 2016

Brian Gibb

I saw a television interview with Bernie Sanders yesterday. He was asked what he thought about  a significant group of his supporters who call themselves “Bernie Or Bust” and who state that if Bernie is not the Democratic candidate for President or if he does not run as an Independent, they will not vote for another candidate. The interviewer asked if he would tell these supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton if she is chosen over him.

Bernie answered like a politician. He said that he is focused completely on being the Democratic nominee, and that is all that matters to him for now. But by his answer he left open the possibility, at least in the minds of  his supporters, that he might either tell them not to vote for Hillary if she is chosen or that he might still consider a run as an Independent if he is not.

I have spent a lot of time recently reading the Facebook posts on Bernie’s supporters’ pages.  They are filled with an endless stream of insults, curses, denigration and hate for Hillary. And their views of Bernie are quite amazing idealizations, fantasies and projections, giving him an almost messianic stature that bears no reality to the man himself or even to the powers of being President.

Trump fans manifest similar but different idealizations of their candidate. Both groups want their man to change the world – albeit very different worlds – and vest him with the power to make all the changes that are promised.

The Bernie Or Bust people don’t care that splitting the progressive vote would almost certainly lead to Trump’s election. Nor do most of them seem to ask themselves why Hillary supporters would vote for Bernie if he ran as an Independent and flouted the very party that he has been trying so hard to lead. Those who do ask themselves the question say that, what the hell, the system is screwed up anyway. So why not just let it fall to pieces – as it might do if Trump takes office? Maybe something better would arise out of the ashes. It’s a new kind of nihilism.

I suspect that many of these followers are young people who do not depend on that “system” for Medicaid or Medicare coverage, Social Security pensions that arrive on time, disability income payments, unemployment insurance money, Veterans benefits, or the many other parts of the government that millions of people rely on to be stable and predictable.

Bernie says that he is a different kind of politician. I know that he knows what would happen if he does not get the nomination and runs as a third party candidate. I also see that, even though he knows what that result would be, the massive support and admiration he has been receiving may be tempting him to play to his fan base.  I can almost visualize a Bernie cartoon with an angel in one bubble above his head and a devil in another: the angel urging him to listen to his own knowledge and experience, and the devil telling him to listen to the clamor of voices and go for it.

Our politics have become divorced from ethics.  To my mind, if you run as a candidate to represent a party in a democratic election, you make an implicit promise that you will accept the results of the election, and you have a right to expect the same from the other candidates. If you are not willing to accept the results, you are in effect asserting that your personal victory is more important than the collective decision of all the voters.

So it is ironic that after many months of complaining about the role of super delegates at the Democratic National Convention in July, the Sanders campaign – now lagging well behind Hillary in both pledged delegates and in the popular vote – is hoping that these same super delegates will suddenly ignore the choice of the majority of Democrats and vote for Bernie. And their rationale is: “Don’t look at the result of all the primaries and caucuses – look at how well Bernie is polling against Trump.  Please, dear Party leaders and super delegates, slap the voters in the face and proclaim Bernie our leader.”   And all this with no sense of irony or paradox.

They claimed that Hillary could only get the nomination by the votes of this group of party insiders (and that would be so unjust) but also now want that same group to vote for Bernie, regardless of the majority of votes cast in the primary elections.

It’s time for Senator Sanders to clean up this deliberate confusion. A simple statement that he urges his supporters to back whoever wins the Democratic nomination is all that it would take.

May 25, 2016