Cassandra Voices

Category: Comment

  • What Lies Behind Ireland’s Abortion Referendum

    Is it cynical to suggest that Ireland’s ruling Fine Gael party is using the referendum to repeal the eighth amendment to the Constitution – which equates the life of a pregnant mother with the unborn – to deflect criticism from its hands-off approach to governance? One of the worst housing crises in the history of the state, a failing two-tier health system and a shameful environmental record all recede from view amidst the commotion.

    The end result will come at little cost, either way, to a government, some of whom, including the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, have expressed contradictory views on the subject. That lack of enthusiasm is apparent from the Fine Gael party’s decision not to put up posters to support a ‘yes’ vote. Win or lose, the government will say: ‘we have listened to the will of the people’.

    Leo Varadkar’s belated conversion to abortion rights might also reflect an appreciation of the makeover his predecessor Enda Kenny received after coming out in favour of gay marriage in the Marriage Equality Referendum of 2015. Keeping debate focused on the private lives of individuals, rather than the performance of state institutions, appears to be an excellent political strategy in twenty-first century Ireland.

    Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney’s own volte-face from principled opposition to acceptance of a need for reform also bears an imprint of political calculation. Such flip-flopping is not surprising considering he once claimed that what he knew about the science of climate change sent shivers down his spine, before displaying no scruples about expanding Ireland’s dairy sector while Minister for Agriculture.

    Since arriving as the dominant centre-right party after the Economic Crash of 2008, Fine Gael has steered a course between a traditional rural power base, and an urban middle class that lost faith in its predecessor Fianna Fail, as the establishment’s self-fulfilling ‘natural party of government’.

    Fine Gael is now in a ‘confidence and supply’ parliamentary alliance with its erstwhile foe, which has moved to the left after recovering a social conscience; Fianna Fail’s is on a familiar ideological journey for one of Ireland’s crooked, main political parties, for whom commitment to social equality generally depends on distance from power.

    The government’s continued policy of agricultural expansion, despite the sector generating one third of all national emissions, keeps the farming industry on side, while a propertied metropolitan bourgeoisie benefits from low taxation on their assets, especially property. This formula is doused with liberal doses of virtue-signalling ‘tolerance’, personified in the half-Indian and gay Taoiseach Leo Varadkar himself.

    Varadkar unapologetically courts a thrusting middle class constituency. His tenure as Minister for Social Welfare saw him take out advertisements against ‘welfare cheats‘; as Minister for Health he effectively endorsed a two-tier health system in boasting publicly that he had taken out private health insurance; while as Minister for Transport, to the undoubted delighted of the motor car lobby, he dismissed rail transport as being for ‘romantics’. But an increasing class divide may be an unacknowledged factor in the forthcoming plebiscite.

    Taoiseach Leo Varadkar

    The referendum pits conservative, rural Ireland against the generally liberal, Dublin metropolis. But opposition to abortion may be a proxy for the insecurity felt by those living in dying small towns removed from the capital, or renters impoverished by another explosion in property prices. Holding a Pro Life position might be a transgressive reaction to the perceived success of elites, who appear ‘shameless’ in their exultant sexuality. The sight of bright young women wearing the popular black jumper emblazoned with the word Repeal could only serve to stiffen the resolve of resentful opponents.

    The long-standing failure of the state to develop a functioning transport system has brought the isolation of car dependency across Ireland, and small businesses fail as multinationals dominate the retail landscape. Distance from the fruits of Ireland’s uneven recovery explains a simmering resentment among the ‘silent majority’, as much as the residual influence of the Catholic Church. It’s a tale of two countries, where those who take their dinner in the middle of the day do not sit down with urban brunchers.

    The run on bread and other staple foodstuffs before the onset of the ‘Beast from the East’ snow storm in late February betrayed a deep sense of unease among the population. It assumed that neither the state nor the wider community could be relied on, leaving the individual to bowl alone.

    The issue of abortion in Ireland is now a full-blown fiasco, stemming from the eighth amendment to the constitution in 1983, which proved unconscionable once it encountered social realities. Enshrining the life of an unborn as equal to a mother’s is a fine-sounding principle until you meet a suicidal minor impregnated through rape, who sees an abortion as the only way out of her predicament.

    The Supreme Court in the 1992 X Case met such circumstances and overturned the High Court’s earlier decision to detain the young girl in the state. The court overlooked the provision’s explicit statement on equality of consideration, treating it as inconsistent with natural justice.

    This led to further constitutional referenda guaranteeing a right to travel, and to information on abortion legally available elsewhere: ‘an Irish solution to an Irish problem’, which exported the problem to another jurisdiction.

    Also in the wake of the judgment, some conservatives claimed Ireland had among the most liberal abortion regimes in the world, as there was no theoretical limits on abortions in the event of a threat to the life of the mother.

    The issue simmered along for another two decades with thousands of women taking the trip across to the UK in that time. It took the death of Indian woman Savita Halappanavar in 2012 from a septic miscarriage after having her request for an abortion turned down in an Irish hospital to re-ignite the debate.

    The Protection of Life in Pregnancy Act 2013 legislated for the decision in the X Case, but far from closing down discussion it preserved the ambiguity around what constitutes a threat to the life of the mother sufficient to justify an abortion. Finally this year, Varadkar’s government accepted the recommendations of a Citizens’ Assembly and a parliamentary committee, and announced the referendum to repeal the provision, to allow for the state to legislate for terminations on demand. It’s been a slow burn ever since.

    It is unclear whether the number of those seeking abortions will actually increase if it is available on demand in Ireland. That is not to say the ethics of the matter are irrelevant – as some suggest who seek to portray it as simply a medical question – or that the associated cost of travel and medical care are unimportant, but the context is relevant.

    Just as the marriage equality referendum was not as much about gay marriage per se but about attitudes towards homosexuality, this referendum also concerns respecting the right of women to choose. To describe abortion as ‘a licence to kill‘ is a grave affront to the thousands of Irish women who have already had abortions.

    Unfortunately the issue is now so divisive that meaningful discussion hardly occurs around what right, if any, the unborn should enjoys subject to the countervailing right of a woman to her bodily integrity.

    This referendum could be Ireland’s Brexit or Trump moment, when the forces of reaction stand up and are counted against a complacent liberal elite. Yet only by progressives engaging constructively with the arguments of their opponents, and understanding the origins of so much of their ire can a toxic political chasm be bridged. Unfortunately with each side adopting Machiavellian marketing strategies, any recognition of opposing arguments becomes impossible.

    There are serious ethical questions to be addressed around the genetic profiling of the unborn, and to describe ‘No’ voters as simply misogynists does not advance the discussion at all. It is a culture war that serves the interests of the government, and a press which sells opposing sides in print, claiming this to be in the interest of balance.

    On one point at least, the ‘No’ and ‘Yes’ campaigns should agree: no woman should feel obliged by economic circumstances to terminate a pregnancy. We should focus on building a more caring society for the living, where women are offered adequate support by the state in rearing their children.

    A simple alteration to the constitution that would instantly compel any governments to pay heed to the material welfare of all Irish citizens would be to make Article 45 containing ‘The Directive Principles on Social Policy’ cognizable by the courts. As it stand socio-economic rights, such as a right to housing, are not provided for under the Irish constitution. The article is merely for the consideration of the Oireachtas, which is as good as worthless.

    Unfortunately there is fat chance the ‘natural party of government’, whichever one that is, will sponsor a referendum to make a basic standard of living in Ireland a constitutional right, which would be an incentive to motherhood.

    The eighth amendment brought a toxic ingredient into the constitution that proved unworkable once confronted by the social realities of rape and medical necessity. It concedes nothing to a woman’s right to bodily integrity, especially if she is in dire financial straits, treating her as a passive incubator. It must go. Let us then consider the origins of the discontent, and address socio-economic causes.

    Frank Armstrong is the content editor of Cassandra Voices. An archive of his writing is available on www.frankarmstrong.ie

  • Defiant Compassion

    On yoga teacher training courses among the heartening questions I receive are ones that readers of my previous piece have also posed: how can I be compassionate towards what I consider wrong, or evil, and still fight it? And, does an excess of compassion diminish a capacity to affect change?

    The short answer is the second question is ‘no’, while the first question invites you to take some simple steps, assuming you have arrived at a place of compassion.

    In that article I advocated compassion towards Donald Trump, because feelings of hatred will (a) not change his behaviour, and (b) make you miserable. Extending compassion to someone so obviously tortured by vanity maintains sanity, and acknowledges a shared humanity.

    By adopting this approach we bring calm to our own lives, and thereby make the world around us a marginally better place. Getting angry at Trump solves nothing.

    Have you ever wanted to impress someone so badly on the first date that you went out of your way to make it perfect in every way? So ideal you expected to sweep her off her feet? And then she never called you back?  Yeah, me too. The mistake we made was to have a preordained plan rather than focusing on the person when we actually met them, and being authentically ourselves. It’s a case of wanting something so badly that you are blind to the reality of what is needed to make it work.

    Yogis have a name for this: ‘Avidya’, loosely translated as ‘ignorance or blindness’. While its root is habit, it branches into ego, attachment, aversion, and fear. When we give into hate or anger (towards Trump or whoever), or fear (failing to make the right impression on our date) we are blinded by that mindset. We won’t get what we want, no matter how hard we try, because we have lost all perspective.

    By clearing our minds through compassion, and stepping back from our fear or anger we begin to see more clearly. Then we find fresh avenues of thought that were previously hidden. Now we are ready to act with awareness instead of rage. When this occurs, according to yogis, there is nothing you can’t change because you see a situation as it really is, instead of idealising it

    This leads to the second question as to whether excessive compassion leads to crippling passivity. I would start by saying it is almost impossible to affect change without compassion. But compassion shouldn’t imply passivity. Compassion is a mindset, and passivity is an action (that is, the decision to do nothing, which is an action in itself).

    Through growing awareness you develop compassion; then you resist anger and see the world more clearly. You find ways to resist that are born of reflection and rooted in reality, not impulsive responses based on distorted outlooks. Now is your time to act: with total clarity, knowledge, purpose, and a drive that will never run out of fuel, because it is rooted in truth instead of fear. Welcome to compassionate defiance.

    But this is only halfway towards a solution we are still working on within ourselves. The second part is the action. Once you have decided to act, what then?

    There are many great examples of compassionate defiance through history. Not least in Gandhi’s campaign that brought down an Empire. His approach was based on yogic wisdom, especially drawn from the Bhagavad Gita. Like Descartes’ Discourse on Method, it is the kind of book you can read in a day. Its influence is still felt in every corner of the globe. From it we glean a simple key to unlock action out of compassion:

    You have the right to work but never the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a man established within himself – without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat. For yoga is the perfect evenness of mind.

    Take refuge in an attitude of detachment and you will amass a wealth of spiritual awareness. Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action grow miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the rewards they believe they are entitled to.

    This is the bedrock of Karma yoga: the use of yoga in the world. By detaching ourselves (or being compassionate towards ourselves) from emotional responses to the outcomes of our actions we retain our composure. We have already seen what anger and hate can do when we allow ego, attachment, aversion, fear to cloud our judgment. Now we must stay the course to prevent our actions from leading to more Avidya.

    The kernel of the passage is to act with the clarity of truth, and to be content with that. For we cannot predict the outcome of our actions, and trying to do so only leads to suffering. Act because it is right and let the result take care of itself. To do otherwise is to live a life of constant resentment, not grounded in reality, but based on what we desire in any given moment, just like the failed date experience.

    To affect change one must be willing to let others make changes in themselves. Truth must be uncovered individually for it be lasting. That is the genius of the Gita, and the genius of compassionate defiance. In other words, ‘Speaking Truth to Power’ starts with compassion for others, and ends with compassion for yourself.

    When we can do these things, change can take place all around us. We stop being Trolls on our own emotions and start being effective.

  • My Social Media Shame

    I went in my first chatroom when I was 12. My name was ‘Phoebe’ – she was my favourite friend – and every day after school I rushed to the computer to chat to the other liars in the chatroom who were probably aged 38. It was like stepping into Narnia. One evening I dialled up the Internet, let off some steam (or trolled people) and left the chatroom. I set up a new identity – possibly ‘Rachel’ –  and told everyone that I had terrible news. Phoebe had jumped out the window.

    It was fun when the sympathies came in, with people so shocked and sorry for the loss of my friend (myself). Rachel left the chatroom, and we never returned, me or myselves. The chatroom was, like Narcos episodes or Easter eggs, too much of a good thing. My life since then has been one chatroom disappearance after another, though the chatrooms have the more benign shape of ‘social media’ and the disappearances are not so dramatic, just the absences you don’t notice when the algorithm wipes people out.

    I never cared for networking sites, and Bebo and MySpace seemed to be just culchie hang-outs. Then one day people started using this Orwellian surveillance technique called Facebook. Now, I thought Facebook was the laughing stock of everyone. The Irish, enemies of narcissism, seemed to particularly hate it. Imagine having an online diary all about yourself, putting pictures of yourself online for all the world to see. Imagine being seen to think thoughts about yourself. People jeered, with the glazed look of the captive just before they enter the cult. In around Summer 2007, my friend Francis told me that within twelve months, everyone we knew would have a Facebook page. He eyed me. Everyone. Everyone except me, I promised.

    Then you move abroad and Facebook sounds like a good way of keeping in touch with old friends. Also I had the selfie application on my Apple Mac that took gorgeous pictures of the beholder (myself). So I handed Facebook all my personal details and took some gorgeous pictures of me and my flatmate in our new London pad, and posted the hell out of them one restless night. Friend requests came pumping in – it was viral, a friend disease, a cholera outbreak of camaraderie and everyone I’d ever met was stricken. I sat in bed enthralled by kite surfing conventions and weddings in Capri, envy infiltrating my shivering soul so quietly I didn’t even know it was there.

    The next night my flatmate knocked on my door.

    ‘You put pictures of us online in our pajamas.’

    It was all about learning, but it was all still very compelling, and I kept stalking people, kept infecting new friends. The picture slideshows were like a beautiful sedative. Evenings, mornings, were thrown away gazing at edited lives and it really didn’t matter. Facebook had rooted out an obsessive strain in my character and I wanted to click and click until I could be absorbed into the screen, indistinct from the digitised friends whose own friends’ lives I was preying on, and then I would just fall asleep. The friends which, by the way, were incongruously arranged. What was Bianca from Spain doing with those idiots from primary school, and my mum’s friend and that new girl at work who seems nice but boring. The whole thing was a fiasco.

    I stayed on Facebook about three weeks before trying to disappear. (‘Are you sure?’ They asked when I begged them to unchain me. What makes you so sure? What is your real reason for wanting to leave us? Would you like us to keep your personal information? It doesn’t matter, we’re going to keep your personal information anyway, and have it ready for the moment you come crawling back to us.’) The exit was labyrinthine, I recall, and even after I’d got away one of their men was crouched there waiting to intercept me.

    Many humorous articles were written at the time, parodying Facebook and taking issue with what these Californian kids were asking us to do with our ‘friends’. The ‘poke’ was a great source of naughty excitement. Privacy was a real talking point. Anonymity was much pondered as a modern belief system. Trolling, bullying and abuse were not okay. And over the years, Facebook listened to its critics, had some glossy AGMs, cleaned up its act, and created a more softly controlled ‘tool-kit’ for its ‘community’. Even when it recently got caught publishing fake news written by Russian teenagers, Facebook was terribly remorseful. Top nerd Mark Zuckerberg has been compared to Lennie, the giant in Of Mice and Men, for his helplessness in the face of his own power. Doesn’t he hate himself? I don’t know. I am way above Facebook now (aside from borrowing my mum’s password if I need to prey on someone). I went on Twitter.

    In an old diary, on ‘June 11th, or 12th, or 13th, probably 13th’, there is written in an angered hand: ‘Miseries, miseries. Today I entered Twitter, or it entered me, penetrating my thoughts and [illegible] and perceptions and thrusting onto me all the familiar friends and famous people I could ever hope to meet in Lillies [Bordello]. Oh the grimness. Most of the evening spent uploading a thumbnail image – what kind of [illegible] crackpot keeps thumbnail images of themselves on computers. Kafkaesque. Like introducing yourself at a dinner party you know you will never get out the door of.’

    That was 2012, when there were still names for people who used Twitter, like ‘Twitterati’. Now Twitterati are just people. All of us. There is no special tribe. My first season on Twitter wasn’t a success. I didn’t know how to tweet, or even what a tweet was. Then one day, early in my unprolific and ongoing career in journalism, I wrote an article that struck a goldmine. It must have been about beautiful women or something. Everybody retweeted the hell out of it that fine, salubrious day. I watched my numbers build. Watched that tweet balloon. I was getting fans, influencers on my side. Like the gambler, flush from her first winning horse, I bet higher – wrote more daring tweets, with opinions. And nobody retweeted those. I disappeared, let my Twitter profile die of natural causes and returned to friendlessness.

    My late and unlamented LinkedIn presence must have emerged around then, too. I’d been having requests from all my mates – Vincent Browne, David McWilliams, Rosanna Davison, everyone really – to connect with me on LinkedIn. (It took time before I realized that the LinkedIn nerds and losers had a kind of hari-kari click, whereby with one slip of the hand you’d asked everyone you’d ever written an email, including that guy from the hostel in Buenos Aires, to be your peer in business.) So I thought I should make the career move. I spent an afternoon setting up a LinkedIn profile, publishing my work CV, which would surely be fascinating reading for people, and, thus whored to the Western elite, waited for something to happen. I wasn’t head-hunted instantly. The odd message came in, from an old real-life friend, who laughed with me about meeting like this. I never once used LinkedIn. I tried to disappear from it, tried hard to remember old passwords that would let me disappear forever, but LinkedIn is still loafing around the unwanted ‘Social’ section of my Gmail account, sending daily spams, together with its creepy sister Pinterest. Apparently I’m still ‘on’ LinkedIn. I haven’t used it in six years. Bit of a long-shot, eh, LinkedIn losers? Though it regularly tells me that so and so has been admiring my profile and I do get a little bit excited.

    Around 2013 I went back on Twitter for a second shot, keen to make it now. The years I spent in shared office spaces, where there were signs in the bathrooms asking office mates to kindly not steal toilet paper, I remember without fondness. Each morning, I would get a coffee and a double chocolate chip muffin and sit at my lair with a bleary kind of ambition. I was going to have a great day. I knew people who forced themselves to write 2000 words before they could open their Twitter machines, but not me, I was way above Twitter. I would go directly, nonchalantly, on Twitter, first thing in the morning, just to show how little it meant to me.

    And so I scrolled through the Neoliberally sorted parcels of news. And scrolled, and clicked, and engorged myself with other people’s success, until envy’s poison seeped into my veins again. I felt awed, embittered, and then, something I couldn’t put a finger on, something uncomfortable. Something that made me want to throw a few hardbacks out the window, or worse. Anger. I felt a great, blood-letting anger. And by the time the double chocolate chip muffin and the coffee had worn off and my little Twitter profile was still little, I felt as good as dead.

    Depression usually enters a person through an unconventional route. Not directly through consciousness, more through the back of the heart, and in around the stomach, through the legs, gently paralyzing them. I watched an old friend become ultra-famous on Twitter, and I think in real life – there’s no difference now. I conversed with him publicly on Twitter thinking – I’m not doing this for show, not to gain followers, not me. I watched as media storms blew up, over terrorist attacks or sexism or people captured and tortured by terrorist groups themselves formed by Twitter and Facebook; threw in some hashtags and lent support to causes that made me look pretty good, as a bonus. I watched as my ultra-famous friend wiped out thousands of followers one night. Just deleted us. Apparently it’s something you do when you get ‘there’, so that more people are following you than you are them, and I was lost in his genocide.

    It came to me one day. The backslapping lie of the whole thing. People only say nice things about other people with their names in the tweet, in order to get a mega retweet out of it and an orgiastic public massage. (@famousfriend. I can’t thank @famousjournalist enough for her amazing article about me in which I talk about @influentialfamousfriend. I love you all so much. #mybook. Blah.) It looks nice to be nice. Who doesn’t like niceness, when there are all those terrible trolls to contend with! And it also wins you retweets, when the person retweets the nice thing said about them. Niceness makes you a really big deal. So I said nice things about other people with their names linked into the tweet, in order to get a mega retweet out of it and an orgiastic public massage.

    How then do you even write an incredibly successful tweet? This was the next great challenge of my career. There were just 140 characters to hang your reputation on, those days. I’m sure they teach that at journalism college now but I had to learn it alone.

    When there was an article to plug, a ware to sell, that was easy. You just sent the link out to do your dirty work. But when I just wanted to tweet about something on an ordinary day – when I just wanted to be a natural, loveable wit. That could take hours. No matter how ingenious the idea, how hysterically funny the sentiment, how neat the observation, how succinct my little aphorism really sounded, it always ran over those 140 characters into the dead zone of untweetable words. (‘Your Tweet is too long. You have to be smarter,’ Twitter told me once. I think they’ve changed that auto setting – like Facebook, they’ve grown up, become nice young men.) Sometimes, seeing my tweet sit there unliked, or seeing one or two charity likes under it, I simply had to delete the wretched thing –  had to proverbially ball up the opus that hadn’t gone beyond the first draft. There were all too many of those. The ignominy of my tweets! My career was not blossoming, my articles not grandly shared – and by the way, every year I got hit by the mother and father of a tax bill. Journalism, on Twitter, was a stupid existence.

    I quit the Twitter machine in December 2016. That’s when I went heavy on WhatsApp.

    WhatsApp led me back to something like the good old days in the chatrooms. It was just hanging out, with your closest friends instead of bots and strangers. And, you could post cute pictures for free. You could barrage close friends with cute pictures. Nobody would not find these pictures cute. Nobody would desert their friends. (‘X left’ in small font was your shame to live with if you tried.) You could keep in touch with your friends abroad, for free. You could make a plan for a night out together, and then change the plan, for a night out that never happened, then comment convivially on the night that never happened, then set up another group for a night that will never happen, as the group ‘Nite on the Tiles!’ sinks lower and lower into the graveyard of groups – down with ‘Table Quiz Larks’ and ‘Summer Swims’ and ‘Trip to Tayto Park?’

    I liked WhatsApp. Liked how the popularity contest wasn’t numerically driven, how we were all equals. Liked the dopamine punch-up when you threw something really successful, and nobody didn’t comment. Liked the crying-laughing emoji, the dancing girl emoji, pressing my finger on the crying-laughing emoji so you got a whole paragraph of them, just to show how heartbreakingly LOL all this was. I liked to see that such and such was ‘typing’ – I was glued to that. With one friend, we were both ‘typing’ so much, so cleverly, I felt sure our dialogues would be optioned for a major motion picture. I loved to share pictures. Any pictures, of any of the fabulous things I was doing in this efflorescence of my digital life – Campari cocktails at home, the beaches of Santorini, my little newborn’s first bath. WhatsApp was so safe. There were protocols, but of course. Some memes were not acceptable in the wider WhatsApp community, and silence was the loudest comment of all. But WhatsApp was a wonderful place to spend the evenings. I had events to look forward to: birthdays of people I didn’t like; Christmas parties planned years in advance; expensive lunches. I felt what I had been missing all that time on Twitter. I felt massaged. WhatsApp brought me and my friends so much closer together.

    And every waking minute was dedicated to catching up with the latest hilarious chat. There was a feel of unreality to the ever warm, congratulatory tones of WhatsApp. There were no trolls here, just the opposite of trolls – friends. Who, despite all the groups that kept multiplying, I didn’t actually ever see. I wanted something real. I wanted at least a good trolling. It was sitting by the fire one night with my family, shooting off sneaky WhatsApp replies between Snakes and Ladders moves, that I saw how antisocial social media is. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, barbaric dating sites – they’re all free but we’re prisoners. Like the fawns of Narnia, they gave us the sweets, then had us frozen in pretendy-world.

    One day on the bus I was about to catch up with the latest hilarious WhatsApp chat but instead I pressed delete on the WhatsApp icon. Now everyone is gone.

    I still check my emails 248 times a day, so that’s social. And the Internet keeps my pancake brain nice and flat, so I want for nothing in terms of intellectual decline and death. As for personal validation, I can always be Peeping Tom via my mum’s Facebook password. So when this article goes out, it better be liked.

    Maggie Armstrong is the fiction editor of Cassandra Voices. Her short story ‘My Space‘ appeared in the last edition. 

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Compassion for Trump

    We are a little more than a year into the Trump Administration, and the US President shows no sign of slowing down. His behavior – erratic to some, predicable to others – and character (vanity fueled by obsession with, well, what is he not obsessed with?) have propelled a global audience into a compulsive cycle of: ‘He said what?’; followed by either withering criticism, or loud guffaws. And guess what. Trump wouldn’t have it any other way.

    If you love him, great, be happy for him and grateful he became President. But try to avoid insulting immigrants, harassing women, or bragging about the size of your guns, car, private golf club, or male member, you know, all the things you laugh about when Trump says them, but would never say yourself, right? But what if you don’t like the President, or his policies? What then?

    Compassion is the answer. Seriously. Show compassion towards Donald Trump. Before you dismiss the idea out of hand, consider how you have reacted to him over the past year. Have those responses made you any healthier or happier, or helped you sleep at night? Have you instead grown more bitter and angry? Donald Trump isn’t going to change, but your reactivity towards him can. And by altering this you will make the world a better place.

    Let’s conduct a thought experiment for a moment (one grounded in centuries of Yoga and modern cognitive science). At first Trump was a mild annoyance as a Presidential candidate. Then he won the election and became your nightmare. Now you spend at least 30 minutes a day complaining about his policies, and hating his tweets. You’ll do this again and again, and again, for the next 3 years: complaint followed by hate, followed by hate and more complaint. A habit will form, without you even being aware of it.

    After 3 years you may get your wish if Donald Trump is defeated and is no longer President. Then you will celebrate like never before. That will last exactly a week, after which you feel an emptiness. The complaining starts again, the hating is back. Only this time it is directed against your mayor, or your Congressional representative, or your mailman. And it feels wonderful. You haven’t noticed that the habit has become an obsession, not with Donald Trump but with anger. Now you are addicted. Without putting too fine point on it, you have become similar to the man you so loath.

    Don’t believe me? Can’t happen to you right? Just look at the number of Republicans who have decided against running in the next electoral cycle, just two years after the man they complained about and hated, Barack Obama, has been defeated and left office. You’d think they would be ecstatic! Republicans got what they wanted: ‘Ding dong! The witch is dead’. But the reason many of them have given for not seeking re-election is some form of excuse from: ‘Washington is broken’/’we cant get anything done’/’I don’t like my job’.

    What about people that voted for Donald Trump, are they happy? You wouldn’t know it, since all the world’s problems can no longer be laid at Obama’s door (although many do still blame him). The fault now now lies with Fake Media, and government regulations, even though the Republicans are now running it. This could be exactly the mindset you’ll have after three years have passed. You’ll look for something else to complain about, and hate. Unfortunately, anger and hatred are fast acting drugs that give you a brief feeling of elation, but corrupt the spirit and lead to emptiness in the long term.

    So what to do? Try compassion. Trump is a man filled with self-doubt, who uses vanity and anger to cover his insecurities, over and over again. Instead of falling into that trap yourself, recognize Trump and those like him as people deserving of compassion rather than hate. Why? Because the only person who can change Trump is Trump. By hating him we fuel his vanity and anger. By feeling compassion we give him a chance to change. More importantly, we become better people instead of angrier ones, who are more compassionate and less frustrated. And since the world is composed of billions of us, not just the US President, the more compassionate we become as a group, the better the world we live in becomes, despite the Donald Trumps.

    This answer is gleaned from one of the oldest treatises on spirituality: the Yoga Sutras by Patanjali.  Compiled about 2000 years ago, it offers a glimpse at how to maintain a healthy mindset, and simultaneously change the world around you.

    1.33 In relationships, the mind becomes purified by cultivating feelings of friendliness towards those who are happy, compassion for those who are suffering, goodwill towards those who are virtuous, and indifference or neutrality towards those we perceive as wicked or evil.

    Act on it – just for a day even – and observe how you feel when next you go to sleep. We already know what the alternative is.

    Here is the other half of the equation, if you happen to love Trump. Not a problem right? Wrong. You probably still hate Obama and Big Government, and now you are bound as Trump supporter to hate the media, universal health care, minorities and anyone else who doesn’t agree with Donald Trump.

    Sure, every once in a while, like Trump, you look back and feel a little pride at having beaten Hilary, but basically you have seen how complaining and hating can raise someone to the Oval Office, and you think that might work for you too. It won’t. Need proof? Do you actually feel better now that Obama is no longer in office? If so, why are you still complaining? Maybe you are just as addicted to it too. So what to do?

    See 1.33 above. You get to feel goodwill towards Trump and indifference to all others. You can try and feel friendliness to Trump, but honestly, does he seem like a happy guy? Anger and hate might win you the Presidency, but it won’t make you happy. In the end, love or hate him, you can only make choices about your own mindset, and what your reactions to Trump will lead to.

    One only needs to look back on the life and Presidency of Richard Nixon for an example of someone who became the world’s most powerful person, and yet felt completely alone with his regret, his anger, and his complaints. And how do we feel about him now? Love him or hate him, it’s hard not to feel compassion, even pity, for the embittered man he became. My point is, you will come to compassion when you are done hating anyway. Why not start today instead of waiting 30 years?

    Chris Parkison is a recovering lawyer and full time yoga and pilates Instructor.  He lives in Washington DC.

    Featured Image by Daniele idini.