things this election has taught me

We're going to blame each other right into a riot. I am not kidding - I seriously worry about real trouble in Denver (or inspired by Denver, if security is what I suspect it will be). It seems that extremists on all sides like the idea, and the money machines know from experience how profitable (operation) chaos can be.

Wow. I so do not like how it all sounds.

And, no - telling one side or the other to simply submit instead of blaming right back is not an answer. It is structural and it is leadership that causes the problem, and only there can it be fixed.

Blame is necessary for identifying problems. For persuading others that problems exist, that things should be changed. Blame is good for identifying what, exactly, needs to be changed. It is important. It plays a role. Anger tells us when something is wrong, and blame is part of the process of identifying the nature of the threat.

But blame is counterproductive when it comes time to actually fix things. Blame polarizes. It hardens people into us and them, victims and perpetrators, right (us) and wrong (them).

You can't work together. You can't even speak to each other. You stop thinking of the other as even being a human being. Instead come words suggesting the bestial and the monstrous and the grotesque.

Blame is both necessary and good for writers, musicians, spiritual leaders - for people who target and define and point the way. I don't like it so much for political leaders - those people who are supposed to actually take what we've learned and make the necessary adjustments based on that information.

This is maybe what makes me so uncomfortable around real liberal liberals. They want their political leaders to be writers and musician and spiritual leaders, not politicians. They want to experiment on us - (what would John Lennon's world look like?) - instead of just getting to work.

I just want a politician who'll get to work and make things right. Better still if that politician actually knows how to fix things. That's what I look for in a leader.

But the rest is important too - I see what is going wrong now as the natural outcome of starving our arts education programs. The arts are the rightful place for self-expression, explorations of the human spirit, and grand questions of what it means to be alive - literature, not the political stage, is the place to put experimental questions about what our future could look like if we got daring. Perhaps that is because literature, not the political stage, is where just words are enough to change entire worlds?