Disingenuousness

Issue 57

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I have overdosed, people, on political disingenuousness. That six-syllable word has been reverberating in my mind for weeks and I’m seeing it on full display these days virtually any time I hear a House or Senate Republican form words. Disingenuousness in politics, of course, is nothing new. And while I do not have think-tank resources to study this right now, it seems that a certain amount of disingenuousness is something our republic can withstand. It cannot, however, I dare say, withstand incessant, blatant disingenuousness executed as a matter of course and sustained at every level of federal, state, county, and city/town governments throughout the nation by those from one political party with cameras and microphones trained on them and by those who amplify it all via friendly media, broadcast and social, professional and amateur.

Disingenuousness is acting in bad faith. As one with a few decades of experience being an American under my belt, it seems that it didn’t used to be this way. Not quite this way. People might say and do things to get elected, sure. They might take a particularly narrow, novel view of an issue to contort their position into something that sounds palatable to people who may not know better. But at the end of the day, even in my own lifetime, most federal officeholders trusted one another to act in good faith, then they’d vehemently disagree on policy. The way it should be. All that trusting and all that acting in good faith is the glue that fills the nooks and crannies of the behemoth that is the United States federal government — to make it function.

Take abortion. Please! This always-hot topic is a pristine example of political disingenuousness as evidenced by how it is always a hot topic — year after year, decade after decade. If, as its ardent supporters claim, the issue was about the imperative of valuing innocent human life or, in keeping with the theme, valuing the lives of millions of innocent American children who are alive and not well, everything in America would be different. Everything.

By not getting sucked in, we practice holding our energy, as it were, contributing something of value to the ethers. We can take seriously how we are living in the swirl of what’s dying and what’s being born. We can marvel, as if watching a performance in a theater, at just how hard that old, dying consciousness is clinging to dear life.

No children would live in poverty the way about one in six do now, most of them children of color. Every child would be housed and fed. Every child would have health care. Every child would be enrolled in pre-K education. A suite of gun violence prevention legislation would be the law of the land to assuage the profoundly deleterious long-term effects of gun violence on America’s innocent children. Children who commit punishable offenses would be met with age- and culturally-appropriate interventions that aim to rehabilitate and reduce or eliminate recidivism instead of criminalizing them when they are still not fully formed as humans. Black, brown, Native, AAPI and all non-White children would be treated the same as (not-poor) White children across the board. We are scratching the surface here, as you well know. And we haven’t even talked about how we would not put migrating children in cages or how we would not ever go to war because we know that war kills innocent children every single time.¹

For people who care about the rights of innocent children — whether or not that life has yet been born or is already living — there is a lot more to do than ban or severely restrict a pregnant woman’s right to choose to have an abortion if that’s what she chooses to do for whatever reason she chooses to do it. But doing any of those things, which enrich and improve the lives of innocent children, is not the objective. It never was the objective and the abortion issue lives on and on and on because it’s not about what the people who perpetuate the issue say it is about. And in keeping with what disingenuousness is about, there is no way these champion embodiers of the old consciousness will ever say the abortion issue is about raw political power or suppresssing women’s rights or championing minority rule or anything near what it really is about for them.

So it may not be the most satisfying or highfalutin of things for us to do or think about today, conscious politics practitioner, if you are similarly experiencing the ill effects super-sized political disingneousness. Because in this time of transition, often the job of the new consciousness pratitioner is, you guessed it, to practice. It can start with choosing not to react, not to get sucked in. Also, if disingenuousness dilutes and derails functioning government, it’s on us, law of attraction- and intention-wise, alone or in cahoots with others (even better), to visualize, imagine, and talk about enjoying a functioning government populated by trusted people acting in good faith. We can do that all day long and it helps everything. We can look for and magnify examples of acting in good political faith when we see them. We can refuse to normalize stratospheric levels of disingenuousness as “something politicians do” by calling it out whenever we see and hear it. We can take seriously how we are living in the swirl of what’s dying and what’s being born. We can marvel, as if watching a performance in a theater, at just how hard that old, dying consciousness is clinging to dear life. We can bear witness to premium-grade shamelessness and wave it goodbye as we cultivate trust and good faith anywhere and everywhere. We can watch obfuscation, obstruction, and opacity make their best cases knowing full well they are dead behaviors walking.

In true new-consciousness fashion, let’s just be with all of this. Let’s revel in what we know to be true. Let’s exude calm. Let’s be unfuckwithable.

1. The Children’s Defense Fund, which I referred to for this piece, is among many excellent resources on this subject.