I am vaccinated and still wear a mask indoors. I am aware of political and personal controversies around what seems to me to be a simple act of public safety. A little self-reflection of my decision resulted in nine factors leading to this seemingly “personal” decision. I list them here first, and then unpack each one a bit.

1. Care for others and honoring my community connection
2. Statistics of my environment
3. Understanding how viruses spread and mutate
4. Strengths and limitations of immune system
5. Risks of vaccines, as well as this virus
6. Influence of conflicts of interest (in research, in big pharma, in the anti-vax industry)
7. How science works
8. Propaganda engines, political forces, and role of media
9. Human behavior and its irrationalities

1. Care and Connection

I care deeply about the well-being of the people around me, and humanity in general. Thus, the first and foremost reason for my vax-and-mask behavior is care for my loved ones. I will do whatever I can to protect precious children and vulnerable elders from harm. A free vaccine and inexpensive mask are paltry prices to pay compared to the value of any reduction of potential harm to those I care about.

This care for my loved ones and communities is not an abstract idea but a motivation worthy of implementation for the sake of something beyond myself. Even as a vaccinated person I know that I could carry a viral load that might infect another, hence the mask.

This reason (care for others) prevails over all others. This Is not based on arguments, propaganda or having to prove anything but on the care for those I love. Data tells me what actions will allow me to fulfil this intent.

2. Environmental Awareness

I know what the statistics are of transmission in my county and the percentage of vaccinated individuals (and I know where to find credible data). In my area, every other person I encounter is likely to be unvaccinated and, therefore, more likely to be a carrier or vulnerable – whether they know it or not.

3. Viruses and their Mutations

This virus spreads primarily through the air, which is how it gets into the lungs. Specific behaviors facilitate its spread, and identifiable populations foster the variants. The longer the virus lives in any population, the more likely it is to develop mutations that may or may not be worse than the original.

4. The Immune System

I understand something of the immune system, some of its strengths and limitations, and how it responds to viruses and vaccines. Natural alternatives can boost immune functioning, to be sure. (I taught about this when I was a wellness coordinator for a school district.) The immune system learns from previous infection and vaccines to better prepare for the next viral intrusion – if it is similar enough to the last one, which makes variants so dangerous.

5. Risk Management

Everything has risks. All that we do or don’t do, all that we take into our bodies or reject, and all that we allow into our soil, air and water carries a risk relative to its benefit. I’ve always had a good response to vaccines with little discomfort. This is not true for everyone, of course. However, the odds of getting seriously ill from a vaccine is miniscule when compared to the rate of illness and death from COVID-19 and its variants. To me, it is a small risk in light of the protection I may provide for my loved ones.

6. Conflicts of Interest

Our modern capitalist free-market economic realities make profit margins a dominant factor for big pharma – and they use those market forces to their advantage. They created their empire like all large businesses – by lobbyists’ contributions and political manipulation. This is no different from any other corporate entity living out the capitalist’s dream. This is a social issue, not a medical one. That said, the critics of vaccines are subject to the same conflicts of interest, economic investments, and manipulative advertising to maximize their profits.They profit from sowing distrust.

For both big pharma and their alternatives, funding sources for research become part of the equation (as we’ve seen with propaganda around dismissing dangers of smoking, acid rain, and climate change). Funding bias can show up in the means of data collection, focus, data processing, hypothesis, and conclusion. This is why peer-reviewed, double-blind, control-group research is far superior to anyone’s “research” through YouTube and the opinions social media and the rumor mill.

7. Science

Educated as a psychologist, I realize how real science and research work in collecting and evaluating data, testing hypotheses, and coming to conclusions in order to build a defensible, testable, reality-based theory. This takes time, rigor, testing and retesting. What’s more, conclusions change as the evidence changes and data evolves. This is a scientific method, not an ideological stance. With a little thought, it’s easy to distinguish between actual research and bogus anecdotal claims not supported by anything other than opinion amplified by hysteria or social media attention.

What’s more, science is inherently conservative. It moves forward slowly, and it progresses gradually with evolving theories based on available data. In genuine science, we expect changing conclusions and recommendations because of data updates – not political policies or economic interests.

8. Propaganda, Political Stances, and Social Forces

What might be somewhat of a respectable discussion about effects, limitations, and risks has been poisoned by the politics of the Authoritarian Right (political and religious) that has a long history going back to the Dark Ages of being antagonistic to the findings of science because it threatens their authority, social control, and economic interests.

Media, of course, has had a significant role in all this. Those who thrive on distrust, anger, and fear have been keen to oppose the science and to foment rejection of public safety because sensationalism sells. As science changes to incorporate evolving data, disingenuous “news” media portray this evolution as dishonest – as if it were more honest to hold to a no-longer-valid conclusion from previous limited data. But there is profit in fomenting hysteria.

That said, it’s pretty easy to find stable, reality-based news sources, if one is willing to look beyond the need for affirmation of predetermined conclusions.

9. Human Behavior

This has been the most difficult section to write because there are so many rabbit holes into which we could jump. Perhaps it’s an occupational hazard but my interest is always peaked when I see irrationality, evidence of psycho-social dysfunction, or the dynamics of manufactured controversy. In writing this, I repeatedly fell into the temptation to follow symptoms toward various diagnoses in both establishment and anti-establishment positions and all the issues of loyalty and belonging, distrust and betrayal, ideology, denial, shame, authority issues, and various kinds of social trance resulting from a hyper-focus on a few variables that bely the larger perspective. “Personal choice” sounds noble and honorable, except when others pay the price.

At the moment, I think it best to keep my focus on my motivation and save psycho-social analyses for another time. Whatever other dynamics may be in play, it seems to come down to which authority one trusts, how accurate are the data of that authority, and who is applying the best analysis of that data.

I have nothing to prove, no one to please, and no social group to which I need to conform. I can make my decision based on items 1 through 8.

Conclusion (Maybe)

With nothing to prove or enemy to target, I make my choice for the protection of my family and loved ones. It’s not that I don’t want to be close to those who make other choices, nor do I like them less, but I will not allow their personal choices to endanger my loved ones.

Let me conclude by saying that I don’t expect to convince anyone by what I’ve written here. It was just an interesting self-reflection I thought I’d share. I’m hardly a “true believer” even in my own conclusions, but I’d need verifiable data from a credible source that meets my standards of analysis to consider abandoning my efforts to protect those whose welfare is important to me. If I am to err, it will be on the side of caution. Ignorance is not innocence.

The terms “medium” and “media” have strangely evolved. A medium could be chemical or electronic – transmitting or holding some force the way air transmits sound or wires electricity; or a psychic medium who channels an invisible spirit’s message. Early people knew the air and winds as media for communication from nature or from the gods. “Something in the air” might tell of weather changes, animal activity, or a portent of something approaching. The smoke of sacrifices and pipes was sent into the air to carry prayers and petitions to the Otherworld. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, (as Abram notes in The Spell of the Sensuous), our smoke offerings to the sky have been chemical wastes. “It was as though after the demise of the ancestral, pagan gods, Western civilization’s burnt offerings had become ever more constant, more extravagant, more acrid – as though we were petitioning some unknown and slumbering power, trying to stir some vast dragon, striving to invoke some unknown or long-forgotten power that, awakening, might call us back into relation with something other than ourselves and our own designs.” It’s tempting to see multiple climate crises and pandemics as an answer from those not-so-slumbering Powers.

Intelligence was once a property of the natural and supernatural worlds in which humanity could participate in a dynamic interchange that was then given meaning through the stories and myths of oral traditions. This seemed to change with the introduction of increasingly abstract media. First came writing and printed alphabets. (Again, see Abram) The first letters were pictographic and referred to the natural world. But pictographic alphabets became increasingly divorced from nature, and thereby abstract, so that the books we read today come through an alphabetic medium related solely to the phonetics of a human voice carrying human-generated ideas of other people’s scientific, social, or fantasy revelations. The intelligence of the world was reduced to marks on a page and our relationship with nature crippled, if not broken.

Today, when we think of media, it’s a television, computer, or phone screen. We are divorced from nature as a medium or as a source of intelligence. Intelligence is now confined to a human constructed device that offers us human-created content. Even this news medium over the decades has devolved to separate itself not only from nature but, for many media outlets, divorced from anything related to truth as well.

In turn, we – our human selves – have been progressively narrowed to an abstracted, closed-loop, intellectual bubble of human-generated, human-content organs of commercial exploitation and political propaganda (with a few exceptions). Even if the content is true and reliable, the structure of our dependence on a human device and human-defined information has all but replaced our ability to trust our own senses, intuitions, and information processing, not mention to be able to engage in relationship with the greater-than-human natural world for its intelligence, its companionship, and its messages.

With my recent shamanic offerings I’ve hoped to re-awaken our senses, intelligence, intuition, receptivity and engagement in relationship with the landscapes within us and outside of us. This may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not. This is my mission these days: to attempt to restore the sacred through our integrated relationship with visible nature and with the invisible Otherworld. In retrospect, it was there in my psychotherapy work and in my books about reincarnation and karma, ghost investigations, and the evolution of religions.

If I had any general advice, I’d say, “Turn this device off and go outside. Listen for the sounds of nature. Smell the air. Feel the Earth beneath your feet. Feel on your skin the warmth of the Sun, coolness of the air, or wetness of rain. And then stop and listen some more.” I think I’ll do the same.

Grief can be hard, and it hurts. I’d like to set aside the usual explanations about what can make grief difficult – things like unfinished business, unspoken words, guilt, or outright loss. Even in the presence of these “psychological” factors, there is a tenderness beyond them that transcends one grieving person’s psyche because it reflects our sensitivities as human agents of consciousness.

I’ve thought about grief a lot over the years. I’ve lost people I loved. I’ve counseled grieving people. I’ve watched loved ones struggle with grief. There are also 40 years of doing past-life therapy during which I’d lead people through death experiences and unresolved relationships. And there’s the collective grief we can see resulting from war, genocide, slavery, displacement, and epidemics to name a few.

Our Western culture, steeped in its individuality and conceit of endless achievement, does not do well with grief for long. Grief not only slows down production, but it also makes other people feel uncomfortable things. Perhaps they think about the uncertainty in the world, or doubts about their own beliefs, or some unfinished business of their own. We are not taught how to feel, or even to know what we feel. What’s more, we are not isolated individuals disconnected from the rest of humanity. Whether we admit it or not, we’ve all had those “coincidental” happenings that tell us we are connected in some mysterious way. And, regardless of whatever we’ve been told about what happens after death, the grief, loss, and empty place in the survivors’ world are very real.

When an open-hearted person loses someone dear, I think they feel more than their own grief – although that would be enough. After all, they have lost a cherished presence: the sound of a voice, a body’s image, a touch; reminders of their mutual interests; the things they inspired and provoked from each other. Again, one would think that would be enough.

I often think, though, that the departed also have grief about what they’ve left behind in this world. And I also think the love they’ve felt for us is not just between bodies but is also a bridge from soul to soul. Thus, for a time, they also feel the loss of the sensory world as they’ve known it with its sounds and music, beauty, and touch. And of course they feel the loss in their departure from those they love. The sensitive survivor will – in addition to their own – feel the grief that the departed one feels. After sharing lives, experiences, thoughts, and emotions, two bonded individuals continue – at least for a while – to experience this shared grief of their separating. It’s a departure for both of them. This grief is not just some hormonal reaction of the body. The grief has its own existence (“energy”, if you will) and, like any emotion, we can feel our own as well as another’s.

In addition to this shared grief among people living and departed, I also imagine that the Earth herself misses those footsteps on the ground, misses that body leaning against her trees, misses this individual’s movement through the air, and misses that breath that feeds her plant life. We are all companions to the other creatures on our Earth, and the sensitive survivor may sense the Earth’s grief as well, even as Mother Earth welcomes the body’s elements back to her. Thus, when we grieve, we are sharing a loss that touches other hearts – including the one that is going on.

What to do about all this? Nothing, really. It may be enough to know that, in addition to our own very real loss and grief, we are also carrying the grief of the one we lost, along with the grief of the others – visible and invisible – who have been touched by that one precious life.

Easter is a marvelously multi-layered holiday. Its prominence in modern Christian celebration overshadows the diverse roots of its origins and customs.

Its movable timing should tell us there is something unusual going on here and not just the anniversary of a historical event. Indeed, Easter is annually set not on a date in time, but depends on the seasonal cycles of Sun, Moon, and Earth – coming on the first Sunday, after the first Full Moon, after the Vernal Equinox. In the Christian story, it occurs in the context of the Jewish Passover. But Passover is a similarly moving feast. As I note in Shadows in the Light of God, the “. . . newly united tribes-as-Hebrews used an ancient Semitic festival of spring related to the full moon and the spring equinox to commemorate their escape from Egypt and renamed it ‘Passover’.”

Thus, its placement after the Vernal Equinox reflects the relationship of Sun and Earth and would seem to be enough to celebrate spring’s renewal. But there is also the Full Moon which, of course, recognizes the relationship among Sun, Moon, and Earth. And the Moon has its own cycle of disappearance and return, renewing itself every month – not to mention a long history of its own worship, divinities, and customs.

But what about Sunday? Sunday was not the original day of worship for Christians. Coming from Jewish tradition, the seventh day – Saturday – was the Sabbath. Today, only a minority of Christians celebrate on the Sabbath.

This is where religion and politics came together to shape Christian tradition and doctrine. It happened this way: in the year 274, Aurelian declared Sol Invictus – the Unconquerable Sun – to be the supreme god of the Roman Empire, and a Mithraic cult (that had elements similar to later Christian traditions) grew to be a strong movement, especially among Roman soldiers. Then came Constantine. In order to establish unity in his country and consolidate his power, he blurred the boundaries among the most prominent groups of Christians, Mithraicists, and follows of Sol Invictus. In 321 he ordered Sunday to be the day of rest – as was the custom among Mithraicists. And so, to please a Roman emperor who wanted to honor both Roman and Christian gods, Christians have been paying homage to a pre-Christian god on Sunday – the Day of the Sun.

To add yet another ecumenical feature to this holiday. The name “Easter” seems to be derived from Eostre – the name of a pre-Christian goddess in England who was celebrated at the beginning of Spring. Of course, we are familiar with all the fertility associations as well, such as rabbits and eggs.

Some may be disturbed by these historical connections, religious parallels, and pious myths, but I believe they can deepen whatever faith we follow. So, I say this: out of whatever tradition you may be celebrating at this time, may it be blessed. And may this history not point to sectarian competition but the recognition of humanity’s shared yearning for renewal and rebirth – the hope and reality that something beautiful and life-giving can arise out of the depths of chaos and decay.

A couple of years ago, I traveled to Canada for a wedding. My aural feast began on the plane with dual language announcements in both French and English.

The bride and groom met while working in Singapore. One is from Canada and the other from Australia. At a gathering of the families on the day before the wedding, I listened to the richness of dialects: Australian, Canadian, French, British English and American English. In the hotel at breakfast could be heard African accents and, in the taxis, Afghani and Pakistani. I was touched at the efforts made by those for whom English was a second language to find the words to communicate with me.

It was evident, too, that many of the people were multilingual. There were those that spoke Polish, Japanese, one of the Chinese languages, Spanish and more. There was something pleasing in this variety of sounds, and no one thought anything of it. People were just being people, going about their play and work, living together in community, serving one another.

Then, the day after my return to my white American world, I attended an event that included men and women from a nearby mosque who came from Senegal, Pakistan and other places.

In this strange time of manufactured rage, we’ve all seen the video clips of “true Americans” berating someone for speaking a language they don’t understand. They appear threatened by their exposed inability to understand another’s language, and there have been calls to make English the official language of this country – a language that did not even originate here. (Ironically, many of these advocates would fail a basic grammar test.)

Since language shapes thought, I bristle at the idea that someone would want to confine us to one language, and one perspective of the world. The American intellect is already deflated by the coarse, often incoherent, ramblings of some political leaders. We need more options for understanding, not less.

I try to hold on to the pleasure of all those languages I heard in those days – the various sounds, rhythms, and turns of phrase – as evidence of a world that is enriched by its diversity. In that linguistic diversity we find the poetry of communication. And if we listen with the heart, the language becomes less and less relevant. It’s the language of humanity we all need to learn.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the election by a healthy seven million votes, but the 74 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump are not going away, nor do some of them want to be a part of our civil society.

Some portion of those 74 million people carried such an irrational identification with their Dear Leader and his words that they believed the 30,000 lies he told over his tenure. They genuinely believed in the fraud that he won the election, that the election was “stolen,” that their vote was denied. They were whole-heartedly invested in a savior complex that Donald Trump could not be wrong, that he would prevail against all enemies and pull off a second term of office. Believing their false prophets, they believed their Dear Leader when he said to “Come to Washington” and stop the certification of his election loss – an overtly illegal act.

A portion of those people obeyed his command to go with him to the Capital building to try to stop our constitutionally mandated election process. Some had weapons, body armor, zip ties, and they erected a gallows. Hundreds of them engaged in varying degrees of violent actions against boundaries, property, and police – killing one. They trespassed, destroyed, and stole government property, hunted after legislators, chanting murderous chants – and their Dear Leader said he loved them and then told them to go home – after having incited his failed coup/insurrection/sedition. Some of these criminals believed in their hearts they were following their leader’s legitimate commands and felt betrayed when they did not receive pardons. Their hope was broken after having been fed the lies of their leader, various senators, legislators, and propaganda machines. This, combined with the tacit complicity of nearly all republicans and their baseless legal challenges (supported by our own Tom Emmer), their anger and manufactured victimization had nowhere else to go but, for the moment, to turn on one another.

But the cabal of pseudo-conservatives that have no respect for the Constitution are regrouping out of their devotion to a delusional leader, to unhinged conspiracy fantasies, and with the hope of regaining power at any cost.

As I noted in previous Cult 45 posts, they have been groomed for this, and a large part of that grooming has been a real or imagined victimization that they now use to justify their violation of laws, along with social and democratic norms in their efforts to extract “justice,” if not revenge. Thus, they have been twice victims – first the victim of their Dear Leader’s grooming, and now the victim of their political loss and illegal actions. What’s more, some felt like victims prior to all this, feeling their country was being invaded by foreign, non-white, non-Christian aliens. Some were victims of economic forces that were the direct result of their representatives’ policies. Most of them have been victims of an inadequate education in civil constitutional government, and a lack of critical thinking. Many have been victims of religious institutions that taught them hatred, judgmentalism, an imagined right of dominion, and a fantasied conceit of superiority.

Under the grandeur, inspiration, normality of patriotic displays, and the civil ritual of the inauguration hides pockets of fear, hatred, self-justification, false religiosity, propaganda mills, and a corrupt lobbying system that brought us to this place of violent division. These malcontents have not gone away, nor has their most visible leader.

Some portion of those 74 million Americans do not want anything to do with a civil transfer of power. They want justification, victory, and domination. The cult remains. It may appear to be headless at the moment, but this gives other demagogic wannabe leaders the opportunity to have their day in the sun and to continue serving the swamp they claim to oppose. It also allows Donald Trump to manipulate from the sidelines those who believe they can share in his power and influence. They will become another class of victims.

The danger we face is not just from the violent rabble seeking civil war or trying to overthrow an elected government, but in the legislators who fed the propaganda and lie machines, who are willing to continue doing so, and who want to exonerate their Dear Leader of his crimes and insurrection. The American people have expressed their disapproval of Trump’s regime, but we now need to expose the propaganda machines and financial backers that these anti-constitutional power-greedy civilians and legislators depend on.

There has been big money behind this insurrection. Some of the seditious rioters had the means to travel long distances – even on private planes – to be a part of their Dear Leader’s call to action. Many large businesses have been major contributors to those legislators who spread the lies and fomented doubt in the election process. To their credit, some of these usually amoral corporations are reconsidering their support for seditious lawmakers.

This new administration has but two years to show good faith and improve the lives of everyone – not just the majority who voted for them. Perhaps most important of all, we have no time to lose in attempting to restore the norms of a civil society: respect for one another, a devotion to truth, a relentless investment in reality, and bold action to address the profoundly serious climatic, economic, and social problems facing us. Meanwhile, those who lost must be heard and engaged with, even while their criminal behaviors are contained and prosecuted. All legitimate grievances should be addressed, and false ones exposed for what they are lest we all become victims of delusional chaos.

We can live lives of reaction and impulse, compulsion and complex, or we can live thoughtfully, purposefully. We all try to survive, and most of us try to find meaning and pleasure in that survival. However we live, we are faced with three fundamental questions – whether we address them or not. They are:

Who are we?
What is the nature of the world in which we live?
What is our relationship with that world?

Who we are is not defined by social, occupational, gender, familial, or similar titles. It’s the set of core values that motivate us and the deep yearning of the heart that tell us who we are. As depth psychology has shown us, who we are runs from our limited ego consciousness, through our personal unconscious, into a collective consciousness from which we are never separated, always a recipient of its movement, and always contributing to it.

To look seriously at the nature of the world, we easily see its sensory, material aspects, and we are told of energetic and vibrational dimensions explored by physicists and philosophers. The nature of our personal world is also reflected in the nature of the people with which we surround ourselves, for they are part of our environment, part of nature, part of the world in which we live. Is everything alive and conscious as shamanists (and maybe some physicists) tell us? Is it the dream of a god? Is it a mindless mechanism running according to accidental “laws?” What we truly believe about the nature of the world shapes our relationship with it – consciously or unconsciously.

The question about our relationship with the world has most often been a domain claimed by theology, philosophy, morality, law, and spirituality. With an increasing awareness of ecological threats, scientists have become a part of this discussion about our collective and individual relationship with the world.

Eventually, we all decide for ourselves what our relationship is with the world. Those decisions tell us a lot about who we are or who we’ve been shaped to be by outside forces. So, we might do well to ask the questions:

What is my relationship with the world?
What do I really believe about the world? Is it hostile and threatening, supportive and kind, or neutral, or something else?
What is my responsibility as a citizen of the world, as a creature of the earth, as an element of collective humanity, as defined by my spiritual experiences and beliefs?
How much of packaged theological, political, familial, or social ideologies have I taken in without due examination?
Where is my heart in all this?

And this takes us back to the first question: who am I?

In these times of social and political upheaval, I think it behooves us all to carefully contemplate who we are, what we believe, and what we most deeply desire for this world and for those that come after us. Our children will live in our collective and individual answers to these questions.

Reality testing is an element often used when a psychologist evaluates the mental status of an individual. A person in a psychotic state is often unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy, mistaking things happening within the mind for external events. And so we see everything from hallucinations to delusions and paranoid ideation. Most of us have a touch of this at times but it doesn’t interfere with our ability to navigate the world or our relationships. They are simply an element of our character. Few of us may know someone who sees and hears things no one else does (psychics notwithstanding), but most of us know people with a fixed set of questionable beliefs they hold onto as though they were realities – paranoia and beliefs in conspiracies being the most debilitating.

For ordinary people, wishful thinking can be creative and motivating. It is not a problem unless it overtakes the rest of the personality – or the person is in a position of power over those who have a better orientation toward reality. Unfortunately, over the last four years, wishful thinking has been made the measure of “reality.” This is a sign of mental instability. We all have our fantasies, of course, along with those blurred areas where we distort our perception of things out of some emotional charge, but most of us can adequately discern the difference. We can avoid most of life’s hazards, maintain some degree of stability and healthy relationships, and work constructively toward our goals.

This president and his propagandists have been successful in uprooting their minions from any grounding in reality, leaving them prey to rumor, innuendo, and a persistent stream of lies and disinformation fed to them by opportunists. They have been reduced to copies of their leader’s whims.

If a reality violated the president’s fantasy, it was ignored, dismissed, minimized, or decried as fake news. People who attempted to assert reality were criticized, exiled, or fired. People of his party stood by silently, taking advantage of the far-right mind control.

His followers largely adopted the same defenses: if it did not match their wishful fantasy, they dismissed it as fake. Because he said he would win and because he said he did win, his followers have fallen in line, sharing the same fantasy. And now we see armed groups, screaming women and men, and mindless talking heads repeating the party-line propaganda that the election was stolen. And we saw the consequences as armed, violent groups stormed the U.S. Capitol like some invading army.

This is essentially a social psychosis that threatens not only the mental health of those under its thrall but anyone who might be in their way. They suffer sufficiently from manufactured but very real feelings of anger, betrayal, and persecution that they can justify their violations of legal and social norms. They are sincere and cannot see outside the bubble created for them by propagandists. They fear invasions of all kinds, and that fear has been used as a motivator by unscrupulous manipulators. Prosecution of their crimes will be framed as persecution because persecution is their method of control. This fantasy condition with its fixed delusions is not very responsive to reasoning.

It’s clear that the educational and mental health needs of a large part of our population has gone unmet for decades. White supremacy, misogyny, theocracy, predatory economics, and social oppression have been unleashed upon us all, partly because we – the majority – have been in denial of these festering forces operating in plain sight in everyday life. We may have thought (fantasized) that we were safely beyond such things, but we’ve had a rude awakening over the last few years and, especially, the events in D.C.

Although we can look forward to changes with the inauguration of a new administration, and the potential cleansing of a corrupt self-serving regime, we must be aware of two things. First, corruption comes with power and is not limited to any party. Second, our own fantasy that would imagine that new leaders will make these changes for us is only a partial reality. In reality, it is up to all of us to maintain the vision of what we are for (not just against). The social ills, from which these cult members’ insidious fantasies come, must be addressed, and the walls held fast by bigotry broken down not only through law, but by education and understanding. Our own hearts must also be cleansed of the rancor of these years, and a better fantasy created that helps us be of genuine service to one another in the context of the social and scientific realities of our world. This is just the beginning of the work.

So, we had an election. The presidential loser is having his predictable temper tantrum, spouting lies and fraudulently claiming fraud. As we’ve seen of his personal psychology, he will even more desperately seek the attention and adulation of his followers, retribution against his “enemies,” and new streams of cash. He seems quite aware that social media attention is garnered by controversy rather than reality, so he will continue to sow doubt about the election and foment unrest. It may be the only way he can claim (in his own mind) relevance and significance. Service and the common welfare are alien to his considerations.

Followers of this authoritarian loser are in disbelief, having believed the self-aggrandizement of their Dear Leader, and appalled that Republicans’ egregious jerrymandering and voter suppression did not work as well as planned. Devoted haters of the Democratic Party have joined Russian trolls in their attacks on anything Democratic. The Republican machine of the reactionary right is fomenting disinformation and hoaxes, which are eagerly believed by groomed minions. Meanwhile, the majority of people of not only this country but of democratic countries of the world have breathed a sigh of relief that America can re-join efforts at facing serious problems under which we will all suffer if unaddressed, and that the aristocratic oligarchic kleptocracy has loosened its death grip on our politics. These are generalities, to be sure, but they are, nevertheless, generally true.

The losing president and his base, however, will continue to engage in their incestuous dance, each amplifying the self-serving obsessions of the other. Trump will try to be what he thinks his base wants – to reflect and amplify their fear, distrust, ignorance – justifying their amoral and anti-social inclinations with more justifications of hatred, greed, retribution, and even violence.

Unfortunately, some portion of our relieved citizenry will fall back into complacency, thinking that things have been set right, that a few powerful people on their side will make things OK, and that America has returned to its senses. This is the complacency that led to the last four years’ adventure into our chaos, global decline, and the corporate swamp.

The Democratic Party and its new regime are certainly preferable to what we’ve had over the last few years but it will, nevertheless, have to prove its worthiness. Promises and vision are not enough. And they will face the automatic obstruction that reactionary forces have had on meaningful service to ordinary citizens while the economic elite gathers yet more wealth.

As for me, it’s disappointing that we came as close as we did to a further descent into fascist authoritarianism fueled by fear, anger, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, religious bigotry, and anti-science ignorance. A significant battle has been won, but big money still profits from social injustice. Theocratic authoritarianism still lurks around the edges of “conservative” efforts at obstruction and control. These malevolent forces are, at the moment, defeated but remain unabated.

Vigilance, education, transparency, and honesty are the price of our freedom, along with prosecution of those who would seek power and wealth in violation of common social values and law.

The Biden-Harris win, as significant as it is in so many ways, like Obama’s, is likely to create yet another backlash of the gullible, fearful, angry citizenry that is easily manipulated by propaganda machines. They must be dealt with firmly, without demonizing them. Legitimate grievances must be heard. Malevolent sources of disinformation must be disempowered – not by force but by the power of truth and by the efforts of people of sound mind and good heart.

Ignorance can be educated; mistakes can be forgiven; but malevolence must be called out, contained, and disempowered.

One side of the political divide has been shaken and its beliefs challenged. The other side’s world appears to have been restored. Both are illusions that call for serious conversation, honesty and a restoration of science, reality, and hard work to hammer out solutions that will benefit us all in the long run. The decisions and solutions of this time will have consequences far into the future.

As Vice-President-Elect Harris said, this is a nation of possibilities. We saw how close we came to some of the worst of those possibilities in the dying regime’s unbridled ambition to serve Wall Street, corporate greed, and religious extremists.