Special Political Series – Part 6: Converting Our Anger into a Passion for Justice

The Missing Conversation. Special Political Series, Part Six.

We have to see ourselves as warriors for the whole country that your citizenship means you are a part of this country and you need to get pumped up not only for these next elections but for the rest of your life.

In this podcast, we will propose critical new strategies to address world issues, including homelessness, immigration, amongst several others, and making a connection to how our individual psychology contributes and can help transform the dangers that we face. We will break from traditional thinking, as we look at our challenges from a freer and more independent point of view, your host Robert Strock has had 45 years of experience as a psychotherapist, author, and humanitarian, and has developed a unique approach to communication, contemplation, and inquiry born from working on his own challenges.

A very warm welcome back to The Missing Conversation and we’re gonna continue and wrap up our series about the importance of voting and getting much more involved in saving our democracy. And I wanna emphasize that this is about saving our democracy. That is not an overstatement. And whether you are a Democrat that is involved and is clear and thinks you know what you’re gonna do, this is asking you to reconsider and get more involved. Or if you’re a Republican and you’re not a MAGA Republican and you’re debating, listen to the volume and the clarity and the severity of the issues that are being presented cohesively. And I would ask all of you to please hear that when there’s a lot of passion being expressed that please don’t hear me as just a lunatic, try to assume that this is a plea to you because that’s what it is.

(02:04)
And we’ve seen so many violations that it’s hard to know where to even bring it up in a introduction. You know, I look at the midterm election and I look at the prior elections and poll watchers being threatened, innocent people with their life, they have to move out of their house because they’re so threatened that they’re gonna get killed. But that’s where we’re living. That could be you or your child. Trump inciting violence on a regular basis. The big lie being something that’s changing all of our lives in our country forever. We’re going to be in a world and or in a country where violence has been condoned and a party by being passive, have allowed those voices to take over. Kids are being exposed to these threats and encouraged to be macho, to go back to the days of being cowboys. And worse, yes, in the nuclear age.

(03:12)
So, we are right now infected with something where the truth doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter that Republican judges saw that the elections were fair. It doesn’t matter that there was an attempt to have a coup on the government that killed police officers. It doesn’t matter that we may very well be losing our right to vote unless you get involved even more than you’re thinking right now. So, this podcast is my attempt, Dave’s attempt, to put out something in the world to support you, to do your attempts. It’s not the only thing we’re doing, volunteering, supporting volunteer agencies. This is a time like no other where we have a purpose in life, which is to save our democracy. And please do not clone us as Democrats because we are democracy advocates. And that’s as far as I’m concerned. Yes, the Democratic Party is the only party right now that is stably fighting for the truth, for fair elections, for fair voting and a lot of things that support democracy. But that doesn’t mean that they are the same, it just means that it makes it a relatively easy choice to either be a Democrat or to be an independent right now. And if you wanna stay true to the principles of being a Republican, fair enough, but then look at the truth, cuz certainly the Republican party has dealt with the truth throughout the years. So before we get more deeply into it, I’d like to introduce Dave, my partner at The Global Bridge Foundation and my dearest, dearest friend from over 50 years.

Robert, thank you. And truly I can’t think of a more important series than this one right now in our times. Uh, and the kind of emotional responses and the things w’ve been talking about. And you will continue to talk about the fear, the anger, the frustrations, the buying into things that are just lies and never a time like this. I’m not young and never a time like this in my lifetime.

That’s for sure. Never in mine either. So to briefly review some of our lectured episodes, which will be totally inadequate because there’s 40 different aspects that we’ve covered, you know, that have been all either lies, distortions, conspiracy theories, policies, statements that were made that were so dramatic that if you took any one or two out of the 40, it would’ve been a conflict in any era of our lifetime. We started by illuminating the slowly eroding march our country is taking away from democracy, taking away the right to vote, threatening that very deeply threatening that even when we do vote, declaring it as false, declaring it as false ahead of time. It is hard to conceive when you see so many players say they’re going to declare the election fraudulent before it’s even happened and not to be ashamed of themselves.

Of course, unless they win.

Unless they win. Sorry, I forgot that one. And we look at the incredible danger, which to me is the biggest danger of all, of not setting the stage to do everything we can to get these elections and have the House and the Senate be ruled by Democrats and Independents or Republicans that are not election deniers. That what if the obvious, what if Trump really won and he really did support Russia against Ukraine. What is the likelihood that our world is going to survive? And as I mentioned last time, and as Dave mentioned the time before, if every country believed their satellites or their original land was able to be reoccupied, we’d have a world that was permanently in war until it killed itself. And so reviewing these very broad situations and seeing that the MAGA Republicans are saying America First, but it’s really me first, it’s my power first.

(07:55)
It really is, fuck you people, fuck you people, whether you think you have a right to vote, fuck you people, whether you voted and you voted a certain way, we’re gonna declare a lie. We’re gonna go after the military to support invalidating the election. We’re gonna go after the attorney general to invalidate the election. We’re gonna go after the courts to invalidate the election, we’re gonna recount. And all of it failed. And the vast majority of it was Republicans. How can that not be obvious? And as Democrats, hopefully that brings the fire in your belly to do more than you thought you were gonna do besides vote. Hopefully that really, really brings out the spirit of going for, joining organizations, supporting organizations in this last crucial period and push. And again, we really go out of our way to distinguish between the Republicans that are election deniers, hardcore election deniers and have gone along with all the lies that have been clear lies, public lies, validated by Republicans.

(09:07)
I want to keep saying that over and over again. This is not a democratic presentation; this is a democratic presentation of Republicans because there are plenty that were witnesses that were the closest people to Trump and these are the candidates. A lot of these people are the candidates that are supporting election denial, that are supporting corrupt policies that are supporting, basically taking over the State Department, taking over departments that are the core root of our democracy, the FBI, the CIA, the police and the absurdity of being able to declare being pro-police when you don’t care about the police that are protecting the capital, whether they’re killed. It’s such a travesty. So one of the things this leads us toward is something that has been the dominant part of my life, which is an understanding of a core psychology behind these political actions and actions and divisions and dangers that I’d like to again briefly elaborate on so that in addition to just the facts of what you see, you can understand why this sort of thing happens.

(10:19)
So I’m gonna start with the anger and I’m gonna start with something broader and come back to our country. That unresolved anger and believing that the anger is really another group that’s responsible for our own anger or us holding onto anger because of prior generations has been the source of war in killing and murder. Believing that this person or this country deserves to die is us not resolving our own anger. And so it’s so easy to have a scapegoat in another country. The same thing that’s happening in our country where our group anger as a country believing that our needs haven’t been taken care of, has led to a tyrannical power seeming like a good power to a number of people. Let’s shake things up, let’s shake things up and start over. And I can empathize with why that feeling is there, because the political representatives have not really represented a “we the people are for the people.”

(11:30)
We are gonna take care of, not only the middle class but the poor class. And frankly, neither party has done a good job of taking care of the poor class. So, I can easily identify with the anger. The problem is when it’s not made aware that I’m angry, I’m dangerous. When you’re not aware, you’re angry, you’re dangerous cuz you’ll project this onto your wife or your husband or another party or you’ll project it on to the whole political realm of our country and then you’ll be so exhausted because you can’t stand feeling helpless in anger and vacillating between those two things. Can you see that the anger is the root of white nationalists? Can you see that the anger is the root of MAGA Republicans? Can you see that anger is the root of war? Unresolved anger, not anger itself.

(12:22)
Anger can be channeled into I need to feel safe. I need the world to be fair, I need our country or our space or our party to be fair, the root of anger is an unresolved need. All of us need to be able to survive, to be able to have housing, to be able to have food, and to be able to have medical care. It’s a universal need. And when that is not supported because we were born into a an area of the country where we didn’t have a chance to get work opportunities, we’re gonna be angry when we believe our country is, has not service in a certain way, we’re gonna be angry. And if we recognize we’re angry and we can pause and hit a pause button and feel the anger and say, I still wanna go to what I need, what the country needs, what my family needs, what my grandkids are gonna need, which is a country that’s gonna stay democratic, a world that’s going to survive global warming and terrorism and nuclear dangers.

(13:25)
And so anger and distrust is something that we can, as psychology would say, lead us to project it onto other groups. And that is why we are where we are is because we have not learned how to tame our own anger and move it toward what we all universally need and have a process of doing that. For those that you wanna look more into that I would encourage you to go to the Awareness That Heals series on Transforming Anger and Resistant Emotions into Intimacy and Strength and into How We Can Find Our Core Needs. And then there’s denial. The only way we can allow as a country a party to have 70% of people that believe the elections were unfair when their own parties judges proved in their own evaluations that there was not election fraud that was at all relevant. Only when we see that we’re in denial, that we’re in personal danger.

(14:30)
You are in personal danger of losing the democracy. This is not a casual thing. This means that we may be living with a tyrant running our country. We may have no departments except the head of our country. As Trump has said, he’s better than the generals, he’s better than the CIA, he’s better than the FBI. That’s not a quirk that is a tyrant. MAGA Republicans are not quirky, they are tyrants and they’re angry and they haven’t resolved the anger and they actually believe their idealists, they’ve converted their anger to believe that they are saving the world, just like Hitler did. And then finally we have fear. And fear is the third psychological element that’s so important to understand that the vast majority of the Republican party is in fear that they will be absolutely out of the public eye if they in any way say that the election was fair.

(15:30)
We’ve seen what’s happened that that cult has basically made it impossible to state openly that the election was totally fair and that the Republicans have validated that because they will be ostracized and there’s a threat of murder of them, of their kids. And that thread is becoming more and more real. So if we understand the core psychology, we’re going to wake ourselves up to the exact opposite of that, which is instead of fear, we have courage, instead of anger, we have a need to have peace and universal fairness. Instead of denial, we face the reality that we’re in, in the 21st century and we are active and we feel a sense of purpose and we joined a group like Indivisible. We do what we can with our time. We do what we can with our money. And so all of us that are Democrats, this is a time that we get to have a sense of purpose.

(16:33)
We get to be in a sense of unity for democracy. Hopefully, we need to be more tolerant of opposite views that are different policies as to how to deal with abortion. We probably need to, we unquestionably need to come to some kind of compromise. We need to find a way to unite with a sane Republican party or Independent views or centerest views. But the important thing is seeing the great distorts, the great killers are fear, anger, distrust, and denial. Not being seen and not finding the courage, the facing of the truth and the peace or the need for peace and opportunity for everyone in our country and everyone on our planet to survive. Anger is a blind force that’s narcissistic when it’s not dealt with to discover what you really need. So, I ask you look at things as a Democrat. Let’s say that you’re furious with the MAGA Republicans, don’t let your fury run you.

(17:39)
Let the needs for a peaceful country and a democracy flower, let those needs run you. And do it with strength, I’m not saying be wimpy, but not with blind anger toward blind anger. That’s the source of war, that’s the source of killing, that’s the source of tyranny. So speaking for a moment to Republicans that are not MAGA Republicans and Independents is it really okay with you that the right to vote is being compromised, that the Republicans are doing what they can to make that less and less viable. Whether it’s through electoral fraud, whether it’s through redistricting, whether it’s through laws that are there to make it more and more difficult to vote. Is it really okay? And if it’s not okay, can you see that is the root of democracy, we will lose it. Don’t be in denial, have courage. See that we all have down deep a need to give everybody an opportunity.

(18:49)
See that our constitution to give everybody an opportunity even though it didn’t and they had slaves, that the premise was really sacred. The same as all the great teachers have said, everyone deserves an equal right to work for themselves and for their families to be able to survive. That That’s the appeal here. Democracy in its best form, which we haven’t seen yet, is not only individual freedom but also a collective responsibility to give everyone the right to work, the right to live. And we’re moving in that direction. One party is starting to move in that direction by giving those opportunities but still not all the way dowMAGA n to the horrors of the poor. So I can understand why there’s animosity in our country because the poor really haven’t been dealt with by either party in a significant way. So there’s gonna be alienation, there’s gonna be anger, all that’s gonna be swirling around psychologically.

(19:49)
But we need to stay with what our basic needs are, which is to give these opportunities to everyone in the country and to have the truth be the truth. Have the Republican judges be honored because they had the courage to stay true to what was needed for us to have a democracy, for us to see that science is a foundation of a healthy society. To see that there’s no debate about whether there’s really a truth. There was a truth about the election. There is a truth about whether there was a fraudulent effort to take over the election through electoral fraudulent votes. There is a truth as to whether there was an interaction, there is a truth as to whether the Trump forces forced a line of peaceful protestors and said that they were not peaceful protestors. There are so many truths that we wanna focus more on the truth.

(20:46)
We wanna focus more on the healing. We wanna focus more on the please as Democrats, how we can optimize our efforts. We have to see ourselves as warriors, as warriors for the whole country. Even ultimately, as long as the MAGA Republicans aren’t violent, they deserve a right to work. They didn’t deserve a right to survive as long as they’re not killing. And if they’re killing, they need to be boundaried and the Democrats need to develop some balls and set some laws. And with immigration we need to set some boundaries and set some laws. There’s reason to be upset because there’s so many areas in our country that are not perfect, but the anger mustn’t be out of control and the denial of the truth mustn’t be allowed. The truth must be revered, equality must be revered. We need to stay focused on the core needs that our country has and the world has to survive.

(21:54)
One of the things that we haven’t really focused on is how much Donald Trump tried to break up NATO and how committed he is to be much harder on our allies and lose our allies or risk losing our allies and chumming up with the dictators. Now we can look at that as like a little movie screen and act like it’s just a fantasy. But no, he actually is pumped up with his beloved friend Kim Jong Un, with his beloved friend Putin, with him going to Saudi Arabia as his first action as a president. Do you really want to have a president or a Congress that’s going to be voting in election deniers? Do you not see that if both parties move toward election denying that we’re dead as a democracy? Do you not see that in the Supreme Court when the Congress says they won’t elect a Supreme Court Justice in the final year of a presidential election and then the very next time they have an opportunity of a Republican, they sneak them in fast in the last month and the utter hypocrisy.

(23:15)
And I do blame the Democrats for not adding two more justices. I do. I feel like it’s a complete injustice. It’s, it’s a weakness and the Democrats need to be stronger. So, I’m pointing this out that there’s plenty of reasons to be angry. There’s plenty of reasons to feel helpless. And we need to convert that into a passion for equality, a passion for justice, a passion for fairness. And if one party is going to do things that are absolutely morally bankrupt and are undemocratic and breaking all ethical rules, the other party has to consider how do we equalize. The Democrats in that area have been wimps and they need to wake up and we need to be stronger and we need to help the Democratic Party as citizens and we need to help the Republican as citizens and we need to help the Independents as citizens to do the exact opposite of denial, which is face the truth.

(24:21)
We also need to look at the sources of war throughout life and realize that we can’t let our anger be out of control. We can’t let lives that come out of the anger be the information that we’re using as our source of information. We can’t let fear and I’m now speaking largely to Republicans, we can’t let fear ruin your whole life purpose. So many of you have had a life purpose that mattered, that was sincere. You just take any one person and you see how many times they’ve changed their positions, whether it’s Lindsay Graham or Mitch McConnell. It’s insane. If you look at right after the insurrection, how many people were telling Trump he was crazy and then within a month they were praising it and then within another year or two they were believing the, the election was unfair even more than they did a year earlier.

(25:21)
So you, whatever you are, need to take this in to recognize that your citizenship means you are a part of this country and you need to get pumped up not only for these next elections, but for the rest of your life. We are in a fight for our lives in our country and in our world, and we all have the capacity to see, you know what? I could have a sense of purpose if I recognize the needs to give everybody a fair chance to go all the way down to the poor class, to recognize that part of the reason why both parties are hated is cuz both parties, the leaders hang onto their own money, they aren’t committed to the poor, they aren’t setting examples of being committed to the poor. That alone is enough to create a distrust within a country, even a democratic country.

(26:17)
So we need to break out of the denial and recognize that truth matters, our participation matters, your participation matters that we mustn’t let fear rule our loyalty and our life purpose. Another area that we haven’t covered a lot is climate change. We need to focus on the fact that this party is also a climate change denier. And if they rule, the world is gonna have a death sentence to hurricanes, to forest fires, to droughts, to floods. And this is your responsibility to wake up. It’s joyous not to be in denial. It’s hell to be in denial. It’s hell to be caught up in unresolved anger. And I promise you, you have unresolved unconscious anger. We all do. I do. I try daily to bring out my anger, my frustration, not only at our country, but our world, in our whole history. But there’s a way of taking in that anger and saying, what do I really need?

(27:31)
What do we really need? What is really needed? And what’s needed is this longing to be a warrior for peace, a warrior for voting, a warrior to educate, a warrior to join organizations that are really fighting for a world and a country that can be a democracy that cares about everyone. There have been no pure countries. And that leads us to anger. It’s understandable why we’re all angry. I think it needs to be popular to recognize that we’re angry and that we need to convert it to find out what are the core needs underneath it. My view as a psychotherapist all these years is that underneath the anger, underneath the denial, underneath the fear is a deep longing to have a democracy that takes care of everyone in our country and beyond. And that’s the root. And because humanity has not psychologically grown up enough, we’re caught in this web where close to half of us, not only in our country, but in the world, are caught in unresolved anger, unresolved denial, and unresolved fear.

(28:48)
And if we take that on either psychologically or if you’re somebody that would rather do it through actions, do it through actions. If you’d rather do it through communicating with your friends, do it through that. But we cannot afford to be passive in a world that’s on the verge of killing itself. We are either going to murder ourselves unwittingly, or we’re going to transform into a country that realizes we need to fight for all of us. And we need to do it by facing the truth, having courage, and not letting fear rule our lives. We can see how fear rules our lives with avoiding doctor’s appointments, avoiding health issues, avoiding conversations with people. It’s the same with politics. It’s the same with our country. It’s the same with poverty. It’s the same with global warming. It’s the same with MAGA Republicans. We need to face the truth as the way we live our lives if we wanna have any chance for our country to be a beacon of light.

(29:56)
And I believe that all of you listening want our country to be a beacon of light, but it needs to reside in facing the truth, having courage and being run by the best parts of ourselves that are honest, that are committed, and are not spoiled in our wealth if we have it. And that we care for more and more people and we’ve come a more awake democracy that includes more and more people within our country and ultimately in our world. So thank you very much for listening to this series and I hope that you’ll stay with us because we’re gonna have something similar on the whole world that’s gonna be a another series that’s gonna come down the line. But most importantly, please get out to vote, get involved, and get a passion in your belly that has a sense of purpose. Because democracy is a quality inside you.

(30:56)
And if you don’t energize that quality inside you, you are a deadbeat. And if you do energize that quality inside you, you are alive. You are a contributor, You are going to leave yourself proud when you die and leave this world, you’re gonna leave a legacy that gives your kids and your grandkids and your friends’ kids and grandkids a chance to live in a world that is better than our wildest dreams from the source of the nightmare. And lastly, I would say that when we look at history, there are many times where right when things look the very worst, when things are most catastrophic, there are a group of people that come and find their best selves and a whole new level of awareness. I truly believe that’s possible, but it’s gonna have to reside with all of the you’s and all of the me’s out there that are gonna recognize that we haven’t ever been pure yet as a wealthy society.

(31:57)
And that we need to see that that wealth and that commitment and that time and that energy needs to go into a democracy that can maintain a democracy, a court that can maintain a sane court, a system of organizational agencies that are gonna support democracy. But we can’t do that if we stay passive. We can’t do that if we don’t resolve our anger and we can’t do that if we’re run by fear. So I wish this for all of us that we can see that this could be the relative enlightening moment right in the middle of the worst chaos that we’ve ever faced. And I know well that there are millions and millions of people who are heroically living right now in a way they’ve never done before, and that we aren’t seeing it on the news. But you be one of those people, even if it’s in your locale, you live as a local hero by standing up for the principles of truth and equality for all in our country and beyond.

So get out and vote.