BEYOND DOGE: Is there a way through the current raging political and cultural divide?

Even though I very much appreciate Trump/Elon DOGE efforts to massively, transform the economy before the extreme U.S. debt comes due, and before corrupt people and systems can catch up with their extreme efforts; even though I appreciate them both as hugely successful business people who are quite used to taking huge risks, I’m still, like everyone else who is both paying attention and maintaining an open heart, feeling distinctly ill at ease by the extreme stress it’s causing regular folks, especially the economically vulnerable (that’s most of us) who lose jobs, see prices hiking way up, and so on.

On my morning walk last Friday, I was going past the post office (Hmmm: is it about to be turned over to private hands?) on a street lined with dark skinned young children, very precious, innocent, waiting for the bus to take them to school. Many likely foreign parents waiting with them, looking shy and scared — of me, until my smile caught their eyes, all of them having come out of multistory housing in back of them, their rents likely financed in some way through the federal government (USAID?). What about them? I thought to myself. What happens to them? Are the parents immigrants? Obviously. Are they illegal immigrants? I have no idea. But they sure look scared.

The sudden and extreme human cost of all this fast-acting cost cutting to expose undeniable waste, fraud and abuse is undeniable.

Yesterday, I came across a new substack by Charles Eisenstein. Predictably (and thank goodness!) he has thought his way through the current raging political and cultural divide to rise above the melee for a perspective on the (usually) unconscious mental frame (paradigm) which holds both sides and their predictably— given the nature of this war game mentality—feverish for-or-against opinions; choosing not to dwell on either side being right or wrong, good or evil, he instead imagines the new paradigm that enough of us must embrace, sooner or later (and likely sooner) if we wish to continue to exist as a species on this planet. Given the current and increasingly fractious divide, he’s not hopeful about the outcome, but still, he continues to speak the larger truth that he is known for.

When Politics Becomes War

If you read the above first (please do), and only then pursue his recent conversation with Bret Weinstein, you will know why Eisenstein says he’s likely not to want to do a follow-up conversation with him. Weinstein, who loves the mental game of debate, is still caught within the frame, and doesn’t really grok Eisenstein’s more spacious attitude.