BLOG COMMENTS

I have been a little surprised that there have been no comments on any of my posts on this blog. Then some friends told me they had commented, but their comments never showed up on the blog. So, I tried commenting myself to try to find out what the problem was.

Here is what you have to do in order to comment on a post.

1) Click on  the words No Comments at the bottom of the post, or on Comments if there is already a comment on the post.

2) That will take you to the Comment Page.

3) Enter your comment in the box marked Enter Your Comment.

4) Then identify yourself where it says Comment as:  Use the drop down menu to choose how you want to identify yourself. You can click on Name/URL and use your name (actually any name) or your URL (you don't need both). You can also just click on Anonymous if you don't want to be identified. Then click on Continue.

5) Finally click on Publish.

6) You have to click on Comments to actually see the comments.

I realize this is a lttle complicated, but I have no control over it. That's the way the blog site works and it's free, so I really can't complain.

I am truly sorry if your have tried to comment on a post and your comments didn't get published. I followed the steps above myself several times and my Test Comments did appear under the blog. You won't see these tests because I deleted them. Please feel free to go back and comment on any of the posts. If you read any of  my posts and have something to say, I really do want to hear it. As I've said several times, my hope is this blog will become a dialog.

Thanks.

THE ENEMY WITHIN

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”  Pogo

It’s very hard to talk about people behaving badly without talking about Donald Trump when his antics dominate the news cycle and the Internet all day every day. It’s as if the whole country, and much of the rest of the world, is glued to the Donald Trump Show on their televisions, I-pads and smart phones. The problem I have with all the attention Donald Trump is getting is he is not what is wrong with the United States of America. He is just the entertainment – a distraction. The real damage is being done by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who are hell bent on erasing every trace of the black guy who lived in the White House for 8 years. They are also intent on making it clear to everyone that rich, white men of European ancestry, like those who founded this country and have run it ever since, are back in charge. But they are not what is wrong with the United States, either. They are just the symptom. What is wrong with this country is the 63 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump and enough other Republicans to control both houses of Congress, both chambers in 32 state legislatures and 33 Governor’s mansions. They are getting exactly what they voted for and they are as happy about it as a flea with a whole dog to itself.

I said in an earlier post that the United States is morally bankrupt. You know who else said that? Osama bin Laden. Only he said it almost two decades ago. He also said that if the United States was pushed out of its smug, self-righteous, nobody-can-touch-us comfort zone our true national character would reveal itself and that would quickly lead to our demise as the Leader of the Free World. I hate to say this, but I have to give credit where credit is due. Osama bin Laden was right. The 63 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump and the Republican ticket voted their values, not their politics, and I‘m pretty sure those values are not the values they were taught while they were growing up in this country. They are certainly not the values the United States has stood for and defended throughout its history.

Impeach Mr. Trump and we get Mr. Pence. Impeach him and we get Mr. Ryan. By then the next presidential election will be here and those same 63 million people who elected Donald Trump will elect someone else just like him who shares their values, with or without the Russian’s help. Real Americans, Americans who believe in the principles upon which this nation was founded, are in a war and we are fighting for those very principles. And we won’t win that war by cutting off the head. The monster will just grow another one. We have to take the battle to the trenches, to the 63 million Americans who have decided that the moral imperative that has guided and characterized this nation throughout its history - Do the Right Thing - is no longer relevant. And we have to convince them that the principles upon which our nation was founded and the values we were taught growing up in this country are worth holding on to.

How do we do that? Anyone have any ideas? These are our family members, our friends and neighbors, our co-workers. How do we show them the error of their ways? I don’t have all the answers, but I know one thing for certain, treating them like nothing has changed is not going to do the trick. 

I know what you’re saying. “But they’re really "good people" at heart.” No, they are not. If they are defending Donald Trump’s behavior and supporting the cruel, draconian legislation the Republicans are pushing in Congress, they are not "good people". They may have been at one time, or they never were and had us fooled all these years, but they are not "good people" now. We have to face that fact.  

We all need to do some soul searching and decide just how serious we are about preserving the values Americans have fought and died for over the past 241 years. I say that because, if we are really serious about preserving those values, we are going to have to start holding people accountable for abandoning them. How about unfriending that Facebook friend who goes off on Hillary’s e-mails and Benghazi every time you express a concern about something Donald Trump has done, or not lending your lawnmower to the guy with the Make America Great Again hat down the street, or not inviting your Trump-defending sister to your birthday party - and telling them exactly why you are cutting them off. Do you think that might get their attention? They may not think they are behaving badly, but based on the values upon which the United States was founded, and most of us were raised with, they are. And they need to hear that from each of us, the people they suposedly care about. This is not about need. The people I am talking about have made a choice to behave the way they are behaving. I don't know why they made that choice, but I do know that unless we start imposing some very serious consequences on their behavior they are going to keep behaving badly until none of has any choices left.

WHEN WAS AGAIN?

“It’s like déjà vu all over again.” Yogi Berra

I never understood what period in American history Donald Trump was referring to with his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”. When was “again”? Some people suggested it was the Reagan ‘80s. Others thought it might be the Eisenhower ‘50s. I lived through both those periods and they didn’t bear much resemblance to the America Mr. Trump seems to be talking about. Except for the paranoia and abuse of power, even the Nixon years didn’t look much like Trump’s America. Nixon did, after all, normalize diplomatic relations with China and create the Environmental Protection Agency, both of which accomplishments Mr. Trump seems determined to reverse.

So I did some research. I looked at Mr. Trump’s tweets and the Executive Orders he signed. I also looked at the backgrounds of the people he appointed to run the federal government and at the legislative proposals being put forth by his Republican cronies in Congress. Then I compared this composite picture of Trump’s America to various periods in American history. I had to go back more than a century to find a match - the late1880s to early 1900s.  Mark Twain called it the Gilded Age (glittering on the outside but corrupt underneath). It is more commonly known as the Era of the Robber Barons (i.e., Rockefeller, Carnegie, Astor, Mellon, Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan, Hearst, etc.) – an era of unbridled, unhindered, unobstructed, rapacious capitalism with no liberal, “bleeding-heart”, social issues to get in the way of progress and profit.

There were no racial issues in the Gilded Age. “Negroes” lived under Jim Crow laws, which essentially neutralized the freedoms and opportunities that were given to them by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and confirmed with the blood of the Civil War (it’s called the War of Northern Aggression in the South). There were also no women’s issues. Women had very few rights until they got married and then they became their husbands’ property and had no rights at all. Children didn’t have any rights either, but then they didn’t have to go to school so they could start working 10-18 hour days for the Robber Barons when they were 10 years old.

The Gilded Age also saw the final solution to the “Indian” problem that had been a thorn in the side of westward expansion. They put all the Native Americans they hadn’t already killed on reservations and then broke all the treaties they had signed granting the tribes the power of sovereign nations, which is what persuaded the Native Americans to move to the reservations in the first place. They also resurrected the concept of indentured servitude from its medieval origins with “The Company Store”. There was no health insurance. The rich hired physicians to treat them when they got sick or injured and everyone else just used some narcotic based elixir (think Snake Oil) to numb their pain so they could keep working for the Robber Barons. The average working male in the Gilded Age could only expect to live to 48, but that wasn’t a problem because the Robber Barons threw open the doors to the country and that produced an endless flow of immigrants coming to America from all over the world who were more than willing to do the Robber Barons’ bidding for the promise of the American Dream, which turned out for most them to be an empty promise.

There were no labor laws, no occupational safety laws, no environmental protection laws (and no National Parks), no product safety laws, no enforceable anti-trust laws or banking regulations, no truth in advertising laws, and no social safety net (no social security, unemployment insurance or food stamps.) The Robber Barons owned the ships, the railroads, the mines, the mills, the factories, the banks, the newspapers, the cops, the courts, and most of the government officials at the local, state and national levels. So, basically, they could do whatever they wanted to do. If workers tried to resist the Robber Barons or organize to improve their working or living conditions, they were immediately and violently crushed. As a result, the Robber Barons had everything and everybody else had nothing.

The ultimate conceit of the Robber Barons was convincing historians that they were American heroes whose vision and fierce determination transformed the United States of America from the backwoods novelty it had been into the world power it would become. Unfortunately, the reality is the Robber Barons were selfish, greedy, corrupt, ruthless, racist, misogynistic, narcissistic, egomaniacs and it has taken us more than 100 years to only partially undo the damage they did to our “inalienable rights”, our representative democracy and our planet.  Now, Donald Trump and his new breed of Robber Barons want to take America back to the Gilded Age, an age when rampant bad behavior dominated every aspect of American life.

Think about that very carefully. If you still support Mr. Trump, are you sure his vision of America is the America you want – where the Robber Barons have everything and everybody else has nothing? Because, if you are reading this, I can almost guarantee you are not going to be one of the “have everythings”. If Donald Trump is allowed to carry out his agenda and take us back to the time he believes America was at its greatest, the Gilded Age, you can bet the farm that you, your children, your grandchildren and their children are going to suffer unimaginable hardships along with the rest of us ‘have nothings.” That assumes, of course, that the human race doesn’t make itself extinct, which, with nuclear weapons in our arsenal, climate change at our doorstep, and the new Robber Barons in control of everything, is entirely possible. Of course, the new Robber Barons will become extinct along with the rest of us, but they’ll die with the most toys, so they win.

WHATEVER WORKS!

The political pendulum has been swinging back and forth in the United States between the conservative right and the liberal left for as long as I can remember, and probably long before that. Despite these fluctuations, while nations rose and fell, economic systems flourished and failed, and political ideologies came and went all around us, we continued to move forward and closer to the ideals upon which our nation was founded – freedom and justice for all. But something has changed. Something is different about the United States - something unnerving and unsettling. The long arc of the moral universe is no longer bending toward justice. The moral imperative that both guided and characterized our nation through most of the 20^th Century – DO THE RIGHT THING – has been replaced with a new, amoral, pragmatic and fatalistic imperative - WHATEVER WORKS. This new imperative reflects a new set of core values and those values have already started and will continue to have a huge impact on our norms, rules and laws.

There was a time, not too long ago, when the vast majority of Americans, myself included, truly believed it was our responsibility as citizens to “Do the Right Thing,” and we expected our leaders to be our role models. In fact, we weren’t very tolerant of them when they came up short. For example:

In 1972, George McGovern , the Democratic candidate for President running against incumbent Republican President Richard Nixon, selected Thomas Eagleton, the former Lieutenant Governor of Missouri, as his running mate for Vice President. That was until it was rumored shortly after the Democratic Convention, and later confirmed, that Eagleton had been hospitalized and treated several times for clinical depression and had not told McGovern about his illness prior to his selection as McGovern’s running mate. Eighteen days after the convention, concerned about Eagleton’s fitness for the office and how the public would view his history of mental illness, McGovern dropped Eagleton from the ticket. McGovern was soundly defeated in a landslide election by voters who felt he had shown poor judgment, judgment unbefitting a President, by not vetting Eagleton properly before selecting him as his running mate in the first place.

In 1974, President Richard Nixon, half way through his second term, was forced to resign (the first and only President to have to do so) and several of his top aides were sent to prison after it was revealed by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and eventually confirmed by a lengthy investigation, that Nixon and his aides had orchestrated the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters located in the Watergate building in Washington, DC, for the purpose of bugging their phones.

In 1988, Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, a Kennedy-like figure, was the front runner in the Democratic Primary for the office of President of the United States and was leading George H.W. Bush, the sitting Vice President and presumed Republican nominee, by 13 points in the polls. Then the Miami Herald ran a story accusing Hart of taking a cruise on a yacht in the Caribbean with a woman who wasn’t his wife and published a photo of her sitting on his lap near the water. The public outcry was so great that Hart was forced to suspend his campaign and withdraw his candidacy the very next week.

Clearly, that was not the same United States that elected Donald Trump in 2016.

I know there are millions of Americans who, like me, still believe we have a responsibility as citizens to “Do the right thing.” We may even still be a majority. But if we are, we have unquestionably been out-maneuvered and out-played by our fellow Americans who have come to believe that whatever you do is OK as long as it works and you can get away with it. And they now have the upper hand.

How this change came about is really irrelevant right now. The important question is, what can we do about it? The answer to that question is dependent upon our first accepting that the United States of America is morally bankrupt. Our norms are no longer being respected, our rules are being ignored with impunity by our own leaders and the current President and Republican controlled Congress are doing everything they can to change our laws in ways that will allow them, and the new generation of Robber Barons they serve, to do whatever they want without consequences.

Say what you want, think what you want, but the fact is - we are no longer the “Good Guys” and the whole world knows it, even if some of us choose to ignore that reality. 

THE CATCH IN THE CONSEQUENCE

It is probably obvious that the key to stopping people from behaving badly lies in the consequences that are imposed on them when they do what we don’t want them to do – not conform to a Norm, break a Rule or violate the Law. The general consensus on the subject is that consequences need to be severe enough to have a deterrent effect on the behavior we want to stop. The only debate is about how severe is severe enough. But there is a catch.

Behaving badly is willful. It is a choice people make and they make that choice because their bad behavior gets them something they want or need. There’s the catch. Want and need are not the same thing. Want is desire and is negotiable. Nobody gets everything they want and certainly not exactly when they want it. Most of us learn that lesson as infants and find ways to cope with our disappointment. Need, on the other hand, is necessity. It is something we must have and is not negotiable. Brooklyn born psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs (below), developed in 1943, is still the most insightful and useful description of human needs, at least for the purpose of this discussion.

As you can see, needs are not things we can do without, especially the Basic Needs. We will die if we don’t meet our Basic Needs and will live a pretty miserable life if we don’t meet our Psychological and Self-fulfillment Needs.

Here’s how the catch works. People who choose to behave badly because it gets them something they want can be deterred from that behavior by the prospect of having to face severe consequences. For example, if a wife and mother wants to have sex with a man who is not her husband, knowing that if she gets caught her husband could divorce her and she could lose custody of her children can deter her from doing so. Her knowledge of the consequences provides her an opportunity to weigh the benefits of her bad behavior against its potential costs. In this example, the woman may very well decide that the pleasure she might derive from having sex with this other man is not worth the pain and suffering she would have to endure if she were divorced and lost custody of her children.

In contrast, people who choose to behave badly because it gets them something they need will not be deterred from that behavior by the prospect of having to face severe consequences. Here is another example. If a man is out of work, broke and needs to rob a convenience store to get the money to buy food to feed his family, knowing that he could go to jail if he gets caught will not stop him. His knowledge of the consequences, no matter how severe they may be, doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have a choice. If he doesn’t get the money to buy food he and his family starve to death. The only latitude he has is to try to not get caught.

That’s the catch. Consequences only have a deterrent effect when the bad behavior they are intended to control is motivated by want (desire). Consequences have no deterrent effect when the bad behavior they are intended to control is motivated by need (necessity). When bad behavior is motivated by need, consequences only serve to punish the person who has behaved badly or eliminate that person from the social context in which the bad behavior occurred. For example, when someone is physically addicted to an illegal drug, getting more of that drug is no longer a want. It is a need. Therefore, imposing longer and longer mandatory prison sentences on people who possess illegal drugs is never going to deter drug addicts from using drugs. All it will do is fill up our prisons, which is exactly what has happened. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the developed world and 20% of all incarcerations in the U.S. are for non-violent drug offences. 

Unfortunately, most people, and in particular most policy makers in the United States, aren’t aware of this catch. They keep increasing the severity of the consequences for bad behavior hoping to achieve a deterrent effect that will stop that behavior. When that doesn't work, and it never does if the behavior is motivaed by need, they get frustrated and look for someone to blame. In the example above, the case of drug addicts continuing to use drugs despite increasingly severe consequences, the policy makers blamed the drug dealers and started a War on Drugs aimed at them. That was never going to work, and hasn't, because drug addiction is a demand side problem, not a supply side problem. People don't use drugs because they are available. They use drugs because they need to feel better.

How do we stop people from behaving badly when their behavior is motivated by need? The answer is, we do that by teaching them acceptable ways to meet their needs and, at the same time, give them what they need while they're  learning.

The U.S. Department of Labor's Job Corps program is a perfect example of this approach in action. In case you are not familiar with Job Corps, it is a comprehensive, residential, education and job training program for economically disadvantaged youth ages 16 through 24. It was created by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 as part of his War on Poverty. There are currently 125 Job Corps centers in the United States with at least one center in every state and Puerto Rico serving over 50,000 young adults a year. Job Corps teaches its students acceptable ways to get what they need and, at the same time, gives them what they need while they're learning, including food, clothing, shelter, medical and dental care, recreational opportunities and a small bi-weekly stipend. Job Corps’ unprecedented success is why it has lasted for more than 50 years and why it is one of only a handful of federal social programs that still has strong bi-partisan support in Congress. Liberals like Job Corps because it gives economically disadvantaged young people, who are not in school and don't have the skills to get a job, a second chance. Conservatives like it because it turns people who would be liabilities into employable, productive, responsible, tax paying citizens who then become assets.

I am not suggesting Job Corps is the only or the best approach to stopping bad behavior. It is far from perfect, although most of its flaws are administrative, not programmatic. What I am suggesting is that our public schools, criminal justice system, religious institutions and community organizations could learn a lot from Job Corps because its consistent success over half a century on an enormous scale (more than two million students served) is proof that we can not only stop people from behaving badly, but prevent people from behaving badly before they need to do so.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

It seems foolish to start a discussion about people behaving badly and not acknowledge the elephant in the room - the elephant being Donald Trump and the room being the Oval Office. So, let’s talk about Mr. Trump.

For someone like me who has spent a lifetime studying bad behavior, Donald Trump is the mother-lode. He behaves badly on all levels in every imaginable social context. We know he learned to behave badly from his father and has always behaved badly. We also know that his bad behavior gets him what he wants and needs the most, which, being a narcissist, is more attention. What we don’t know is, is his bad behavior willful or is it the uncontrollable behavior of someone who is mentally ill.

In January of 2017 a petition by author and psychologist John Gartner, PhD, signed by more than 26,000 psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental-health professionals and published in Psychology Today, declared that Mr. Trump has “a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States.” I agree with the last part of that statement, that he is incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States, but I’m not sure I agree with the mental illness part. 

If the implication is Mr. Trump is neurotic or has personality disorders that may explain his inappropriate behavior, I'd have to agree. The same thing could be said about any of us. We’re all a little crazy. On the other hand, if Dr. Gartner and his colleagues are suggesting that Mr. Trump is suffering from a condition that produces behavior he cannot control (i.e., PTSD, Schizophrenia, Turret’s Syndrome, etc.), I strongly disagree.

I’ve worked with mentally ill people who truly could not control their behavior and I can tell you their uncontrollable bad behavior was seldom in their own self-interest. In fact, most of their uncontrollable bad behavior was self-destructive. In contrast, Mr. Trump’s bad behavior always seems to get him exactly what he wants and needs... more attention. That fact alone leads me to suspect that he is not as out of touch and out of control as Dr. Gartner, his colleagues, and many others may think. Then there is the timing of Mr. Trump’s bad behavior. Have you noticed how his worst behavior seems to occur at exactly the right moment to distract the media and the rest of us from looking into something more important that he wants us to ignore? That’s happened far too many times for it to be coincidence or just plain dumb luck. I am not prepared to let him off the hook that easily and excuse his bad behavior as a symptom of mental illness. I believe his bad behavior is calculated, more reactive than planned, but definitely deliberate. He knows exactly what he is doing and he is going to keep doing it because it works for him and always has.

One might argue, or at least hope, that Mr. Trump’s behaving badly will ultimately be his downfall. That may ultimately prove to be true, but it hasn’t been the case so far. In fact, the opposite is true - the more outrageous his behavior, the more his supporters rally to his defense. Donald Trump has never had to suffer the consequences of his bad behavior and that is a big part of the problem. He has had to pay some fines and settle several law suits, but punishing wealthy people by requiring them to spend money is like throwing Br’er Rabbit into the briar patch. Mr. Trump can easily afford paying a fine or settling a law suit. What he can’t afford is being ignored. I believe he understands that and has very cleverly gotten himself, possibly with foreign assistance, into a position where, as President of the United States, he cannot be ignored. And he is using that position to feed his cravings for attention as well as to line his pockets, because in addition to being a narcissist, he is also greedy.

So, how do we stop Donald Trump from behaving badly? Many Americans are calling for his impeachment. That might be worth doing because the world would certainly be a lot safer place if he was no longer the President of the United States, but it won’t stop him from behaving badly. He will continue lying, cheating, manipulating, spewing hate and feeding the divisiveness that is preventing us from working together as Americans to solve our problems and move forward as a nation. And the media will give him the platform to do so by continuing their non-stop coverage of everything he says and does, like they did during the campaign, because it is in their financial interest to do so. No, the only thing that will shut Donald Trump down is locking him up for the crimes he has already committed.... and closing his Twitter account.