History, heart... whiplash

Greetings, and a Forrest Gump film-style box of chocolates this multi-holiday weekend.

In Forrest’s life, as with this 27-day-old Donald Trump 2.0 presidency unfolding in lightning-speed chaos, you never know what you’re going to get.

Nationally, globally and locally, this is a time of such enormous volatility — from a depth perspective much of it unconscious, projected and therefore intensely powerful and uncontrolled. Just in my lifetime, this is perhaps even more so than with the extremes of violence, racism, sexism, the Vietnam War, overt government corruption with Watergate of my generation’s coming-of-age.

This presidency and the news-environment it fosters has more deeply grounded newShrink’s basic purpose: To systematically track, reflect on and choose intentional responses to news, news-figures and events of the day:

• more like journalists,

• more like scholars, lawyers and other masters of their fields, and

• more like psychologists —in both the depth (soul/unconscious) and the mental health/wellness perspectives.

For sources, on days when time or tolerance-level is limited, I’m finding both Heather Cox Richardson and Robert Hubbell are doing remarkably thorough and well-reported paragraph by paragraph summary of main news with sources and quotes accessible. Hubbell is a career-lawyer not a therapist, but he also provides good tips on staying centered, healthy and sane.

The PBS News Hour, NPR All Things Considered, The Wall Street Journal (for more conservative take) if you don’t mind the high digital price, The Atlantic, NYT, New Yorker (assuming past the paywall). Many readers have quit the WAPO over Bezos issue. But within their 10-free stories a month I recommend the deep-dive reporting they have done with specifics on exactly how, when, and at whom DOGE planned and is executing the mass layoffs and cuts of federal functions.

The newShrink approach, method — more of a calling and worldview — emerged from my PhD dissertation-research in depth psychology a little over a decade ago. That happened to coincide with the emerging Tea Party movement and subsequent entry of Trump into politics.

In such highly charged times, newShrink-ing involves more selective reading and viewing, a couple of relevant ongoing community-focused activities or services, and less in-depth or less-frequent writing.

In that spirit, today’s post is a couple of postcards… or valentines.

heart

The one above at top center depicts what turned out to be the most unexpectedly satisfying way to spend the heart-holiday on Friday. At the naturalization swearing-in ceremony for 73 new American citizens from 30 countries — who have successfully completed the minimum 5-year, demanding legal process — as nonpartisan volunteers we help new citizens register to vote.

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Black history month

Similarly dear and especially important to honor this year, as with the Martin Luther King holiday coinciding with the January Inauguration, it’s been meaningful and apt attending services at a Charlotte church that over about 15 years has literally/tangibly merged a historic white church named for enslavers with its sister church, long-vibrant Black Seigle Avenue Presbyterian. The voices, traditions and new contributions of both are well-displayed in services and community of today’s thriving, diversity-celebrating Caldwell.

Meanwhile, this and Black history month are in jolting contradiction and contrast to the Trump administration’s many anti-”DEI” diatribes and executive orders. Posters announcing the month were ordered removed from federal buildings. One of the first orders of the newly appointed, controversial Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was to ban mention or observation of Black history month in the US armed forces. (The annual February honoring and learning about Black history has been designated by Congress since 1986.)

Affinity for history has many personal dimensions for me, too.

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from stumbled-upon family archives

On personal front with expanding household to include Charlotte condo, there’s been more sorting, culling and donating my late parents’ things that had been packed away. Last week finally preparing to part with my dad’s stack of vintage Arizona Highways photo-rich magazines, by chance these and other commemorative editions from Life and Time surfaced. (I may later revisit two discovered 1968 Charlotte bicentennial Souvenir editions published jointly by The Charlotte News and The Charlotte Observer. There are astonishing then-&-even-further-back-then photos of my hometown.)

In the JFK Inaugural Souvenir edition pictured below, in very light pencil at top left of the gold cover, in cursive the 8-year-old me had written “This is Tish’s book.” (The handwriting is a whole lot better than mine has been since I was a notes-scribbling reporter.)

My first trip inside the voting booth was with my maternal granddad, whom I’ve written about several times. I can recall his holding me up so I could see as he voted for Kennedy.

I vividly recall the Life Magazine feature story on Caroline and young John-John Kennedy. For a long time I had a color photo of Caroline taped to the ceiling over my bed! (My very tall dad must have had a hand in that.)

The history passion, as with reading, watching, listening and paying close attention to news every day, was a multi-generation family thing — on both sides, for my dad’s parents were educators. So I suppose my intense personal care and attention to the presidency, not just this or that president or one party or the other, is no surprise. I pulled these few silhouetted samples from each party up for reflection.

I most sincerely hope there will be different, democratically elected American presidents, who may be from one party or the other, after Donald Trump leaves office or dies

(The above silhouettes in the lede illustration, counterclockwise starting at top left are: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Barack Obama, and John Kennedy.)

The focus below is on Ronald Reagan (left) and of course Donald Trump at right.

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bookends

I’ve been hit with personal deja vu-type flashback to Ronald Reagan, especially during the Trump indoor inauguration — which the former speechwriter and communicator in me just couldn’t miss completely. This came up with Trump’s indoor setting, like Reagan’s, due to the cold along with several of the rhetorical flourishes when he stuck to the more tightly scripted speech.

While not as intense, or enormous in depth and scope as Trump 2.0, with Reagan I do recall clearly: Waking up in January 1981, to Ronald Reagan as president was a jolt as well as some kind of deeper sub-surface shift.

As may be the case with many of you, childhood and coming-of-age was during decades of both the most progressive, equality-and-justice advancing and violent reactivity in the 20th Century.

Then college for me was as a journalism major at UNC-Chapel Hill — during the Watergate crimes, the Washington Post’s investigative role in uncovering them, and the subsequent hearings, Nixon’s resignation, etc. Journalism wasn’t just a job or career, but a profession specified in the Constitution, with an implicit checks-and-balances “4th estate” role.

By the time Reagan was inaugurated in 1981 (amid a wave of Republicans intent on revenge for Watergate), I had worked a few years as a Charlotte News reporter and at 28 was newly promoted to cover the court beat. It would be years before the full impact of “the Reagan/conservative Revolution” — which sounded like hyperbole — and strange union with the Christian right-wing Moral Majority.

Studies and reading in American history since the Civil War have woven together the much more complete tapestry here, including dark and light shadings of both sides — and leaps forward followed by backward loops. Over the past 5-7 years, Heather Cox Richardson’s monumental task — daily, 6-7 days a week — Letters from an American, plus her excellent open-ended video chats have been an excellent, scholarly weaving-holding-of-the-both.

Richardson’s daily reports now, since the Trump inauguration, have for me become essential — maybe even better in these insanely eventful news days.

And as it happened, her Saturday post, as I was compiling and writing about these eerily “bookended” presidents, focuses similarly on the same period of the last 40-some years. Her summary grafs are here. I highly recommend the entire piece. I especially value the several specific, quantified data points on key issues, well sourced as usual.

Heather Cox Richardson Letters from an American/February 15th

“…For forty years, Republican politicians could win elections by insisting that government spending redistributed wealth from hardworking taxpayers to the undeserving because they did not entirely purge the federal programs that their own voters liked. Now Trump, Musk, and the Republicans are purging funds for cancer research, family farms, national parks, food, nuclear security, and medical care—all programs his supporters care about—and threatening to throw the country into an economic tailspin that will badly hurt Republican-dominated states.

A January AP/NORC poll found that only 12% of U.S. adults thought it would be good for billionaires to advise presidents, while 60% thought it would be bad.

Forty years of ideology is under pressure now from reality, and the outcome remains uncertain.”

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Now today’s sweetheart-day-themed, closing note of levity is thanks to Phil Whitesell, my fellow newspaper journalist, PR colleague and friend of some 40 years:

“when only the best will do for your sweetie…”

And, that is all I have for now.

🦋💙 tish

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… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”

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