Oldish: From WTF? to Contentment, Even Joy- The Presidential Election

Gregg: [00:00:00] When I was a couple of weeks short of my 70th birthday, I started thinking about my mother's mother who lived to be a hundred and her mother who lived to be 102, and my father who lived to be 90 longer than anyone we had ever heard of in his family. I began to think that maybe our generation could be the first to routinely live to be 100.

When I talked about this at family dinner, one night, my granddaughter, who was five said,

Ellie: What are you going to do for the next 30 years, grandpa

Janet: Hello, I'm Dr. Janet Price.

Gregg: and I'm Gregg Kaloust

And we are oldish and this is our podcast Oldish

Janet: If you're oldish or know

Gregg: someone who is

please join us

Janet: every week for conversations amongst ourselves

Gregg: And our special guests

Janet: about what it means to be oldish in the 21st century.

Gregg: If you ever wonder whether you're getting old you're oldish, what are you going to do for the next 30 minutes?

Hi, I'm [00:01:00] Greg and I'm oldish.

Janet: Hi, I'm Janet and I'm Oldish. Welcome to this episode of our podcast, Oldish, conversations on aging in the 21st century. Greg.

Gregg: Hi, Janet. How are you today?

Janet: Well, I'm coming to you with lots of feelings. We just had an election less than a month ago Seemed like a good time for us to check in with each other and see how we're doing, how we're surviving, what this time has been like, what it's like to imagine the future, and the future is tomorrow, next week, next year.

So what do you think? Do you want to spend a little bit of time talking about something that's hard to talk about?

Gregg: Yeah, I think we should. I certainly have been spending a lot of time, thinking about the election for several months. everybody that I talked to, [00:02:00] that's one of the main topics of conversation. Almost everybody that I talked to, says, do we have to talk about it? I, Like everybody else our age have long since Selected out of my friend group the people that I don't agree with because I think that's how people do right so I've solidified my bubble around The political questions in particular, because more so than at any other time in my life, there is a really stark issue with the, political party and the person who just won the election.

And it's just hard for me to talk or even to find anybody in my social circle who doesn't agree with me that the. Person and the political party who just won the election bear almost no resemblance at all to what I [00:03:00] think. Our country is supposed to look like whichever side of that question you come down on, whoever you voted for, there's a very high likelihood that people that you care about and are related to.

Have very different feelings about it, so I'm spending a fair amount of time dealing with that, but, we talked a little bit earlier about, I used to think I wanted to keep politics out of our podcast, because it's not really anybody's business, whether I'm a liberal or a conservative.

But I don't feel that way right at the moment. I feel like, um, uh, I am liberal. I'm probably way more liberal than almost anybody, anybody knows. Some days it feels like I'm even more liberal than I am. Um, but, and that's, um, you know, that's how I grew up and that's, that's how I feel and I feel a great deal of dismay.

I grew up [00:04:00] finding Republicans way more conservative than I was. I had always had difficulties with some Republican issues. Eisenhower was a Republican and what I thought about him growing up in the fifties was the worst thing about Eisenhower was that as a young kid, I just thought he was boring, he wanted to play golf and so on and so forth.

But, when I look back, and I've been doing that a lot in the last ten years, ever since we started hearing this Make America Great Again thing, I figured, yeah, you want to go back to the 1950s. But when I look at the 1950s, Eisenhower continued on the New Deal. He continued on the, the policies.

In which the Republican Party agreed with the Democratic Party that the best way to bring our country forward was to bring everybody with it. So there was a huge economic boom. People coming back from World War Two and from Korea, we [00:05:00] built the highway system, which is for better or for worse, just this enormous project and, in the country and its infrastructure got all modernized and it got paid for.

By people, even wealthy people paying taxes and, people didn't scream about that, people forget that under Eisenhower and right through at least the middle of the 1960s, I don't remember when this shifted exactly, but under Eisenhower, the marginal tax rate for the highest income earners was 97%.

I forget what the threshold was, but over X number of dollars of income every year. Everything above that, they paid 97 percent on it. I'm sure people complained about it, but it built the highway system and it built the school system and it put a man on the moon and all of that good stuff.

And it wasn't until Ronald Reagan came in that the supply side replaced that idea and that if you cut the taxes on the wealthy [00:06:00] people, their wealth will filter down and everybody else will come up. Which was always a lie and never worked. But anyway, I don't want to talk about that the rest of the day.

But, I do want to say, in case I forget this, that one of the scariest things that I've seen about all of what happened three weeks ago in the election was Trump posted something about his new pick for the Attorney General, after his first pick, was thrown out, in which he said, Make America safe again.

And because make America great again, everybody now says MAGA. My brain looked at that and immediately said Massa. So, holy crap. That's possibly the most naked acknowledgement of sheer racism that I can think of from a, Big political figure was Kallus [00:07:00] Massa, it's clear to me that you know that the what won the election was white nationalism and Christian nationalism and white supremacy and that most of the people involved in it are Racists in a very strong sense, and it's all about white racial superiority, and you look at his cabinet picks, all about white male superiority, I have no idea whether Trump is smart enough to know that that's what he did, but certainly his subconscious knew what he was doing, and to have that be a slogan, Massa?

Holy crap. So anyway, that's how I'm feeling. I think people can probably glean from that how I'm feeling about it. I'm really in shock and very upset.

Janet: Yes. Well, one of the words that you said, the word dismay, I feel like describes, how many of us are [00:08:00]feeling right now, from the moment we realized the direction the elections were going on election night. And it makes me think that the title to this, podcast could be from WTF. We all know what that means.

WTF to contentment. So I hope that during this time together, we can talk a little bit about both, what's going on for us around grieving, even what are the stages of grief and is there a way both in our bubble, as you were talking about, and also as in the larger community, how can we, who are feeling all of this, find a way to be grounded in our deeper beliefs.

So that we can take care of ourselves and each other in our community in our bubble and also move from that anger, partisanship, being [00:09:00] destructive towards other to, embracing us, each other as humans, as Americans. So I wanted to just mention at the beginning of this episode, the stages of grief, and we can weave that in as we want.

So there's denial. I just can't even believe this happened. It didn't happen. I went through that, the night of the election, anger. A lot of us are there, anger, rage, bargaining. If only we could do this, it would be better. It would go away. Maybe if, he gets thrown into jail, then we'll do better somehow, but some kind of bargaining that can sometimes lead to depression as we go through those stages.

The loss is still there and the after effects of it. can lead to depression and eventually it can go through that tunnel of, grief and loss and come out with acceptance, which is part of [00:10:00] that title moving to contentment or maybe even moments of joy. And just to also say that in that model, it's not a linear model, we can float back and forth between oh, I think I'm okay.

No, no, no, I'm still really angry. Well, I'm kind of feeling depressed. But maybe if I just, if the world, if the country could just do this, you know, the bargaining piece. So where do you think you are in that process, Greg?

Gregg: I think I'm hitting all of them at the same time, Janet. As you said, the night of the election, I was like, I can't believe this. And at the time that I went to bed, Election night, harris had moved closer in the Electoral College, and at that point, even though, the pundits and the analysts and everybody else was saying, it was an insurmountable lead at this point, or it looked very much like, numbers wise, it was close enough and there were still some, states left to be counted that if those people had come to [00:11:00] their senses at the last minute, then, there was still a chance.

So I went to bed hopeful, but also feeling some denial that this can't be real. There's no way that this happened. It's just not possible. And when I woke up in the morning, it was such a jolt that, and I was prepared for, you know, everybody said, well, we might not even know for a few days.

But by the time I woke up the next morning, it was like, yep, that's the way it is. And I became, and I could clearly see where the anger was coming from. Cause it was such a jolt out of the way that I thought my life was into this new reality that it's just really pissed me off.

What's wrong with people? Okay. And I'm still feeling a lot of that. what's wrong with people? How can people not see through the lies and the BS and the ego and the craziness, the absolute craziness. And I'm still feeling a lot of that. It's still, as you can tell [00:12:00] from my tone of voice, I'm still feeling a lot of that.

But I also started bargaining, by the end of that first day, I was saying to people really. Bad stuff that we're all thinking is going to happen is really still in the future because, Trump is not president yet. He got elected to be the next president, but we still have three months to go before he's actually the president.

So although it's very likely that some really horrible stuff is going to happen right away, it's not happening right this very minute. So maybe things will turn out for the best. Or, maybe it'll, maybe, back in the old days, people used to run on the right or their left and then after they won, they'd come back to the middle because it was really hard to govern from the right or the left.

And now it's impossible to govern, but that's the way it is. It's been kind of impossible to govern, although, Biden did accomplish a lot [00:13:00] of stuff in his term. He really did get, even some bipartisan stuff. You can see it out on the roads everywhere you go.

There's construction projects going on. There's some bargaining. Is depression was the next one? So I'm feeling kind of, I'm feeling, you know, I'm feeling a little bit depressed about it. But I've, I've done such a good job over the last several years at eliminating my natural tendencies toward depression.

That it's like I'm floating above the depression a little bit. And depression certainly isn't going to do any good at this point, the only person who me being depressed about the election would have a negative effect on is me. It's not going to change anything, so I know that. Um, not up to acceptance yet.

I'm not up to acceptance, I'm taking some solace in the clown show of who is being nominated for the most important positions in our government, but I'm [00:14:00] also angry because it's clear that the purpose to nominating those people is primarily to break the agencies that they're put in charge of.

Because I know that the white supremacists and the white nationalists and the Christian nationalists know that the only way to get to a white Christian nation from the America that we grew up in was to break it. Nobody's going to actually vote for that. So, the only way to get there is to break it, and it looks to me from the early appointments.

The idea there is to break it. And the fact that, the first one to go was Gates. I'm certain that Gates made a deal and they made a deal with him that we're going to nominate you for attorney general, but only so that we can un nominate you so that we can, in the course of negotiations, Donald Trump.

I actually, um, um, one of the few liberals that may be in was, was [00:15:00] Positively influenced by Trump's first book, The Art of the Deal, I was in the real estate business in the 80s, and I was convinced that I could make a whole ton of money in the real estate business. And I read The Art of the Deal, and I, I didn't know yet that it was horrible.

But one of the things that Trump says in The Art of the Deal is going into a negotiation, always have something to give up. So you go in with a demand that you know. They're not going to accept and then you can give that up in exchange for you know So if he went in first with this, um, I forget her name already But the woman that he just nominated for the attorney general people would have said no She's not too much baggage.

You can't have her but if he went in with a complete lunatic horrible person and they said No, you can't have that person. He can [00:16:00] give that up easily because even he knew that was nuts. Then it's easier to get the next one by, see, oh, she's much better than he was. So you can't object her cause she didn't do any of the horrible stuff that he did.

All she did was accept a bribe. I'm sure they made a deal with Gates because he was going to lose his position in the Congress anyway. And he, if that report came out in the course of the. Confirmation hearings, his life was going to be completely ruined. Well, maybe not, but his reputation certainly was going to be completely ruined.

So he agreed. He said, yeah, you can use me for that. If you get me out of this corner, I'm in. So, I look at that and, but there's this clown show thing, a woman who was one of the founders of the Worldwide Wrestling Federation in charge of the Department of Education. The only reason to do that is to have her take it apart is to have it break and maybe not even on purpose But there's so much incompetence there that things would just [00:17:00] come apart because there was nobody running the show So now everything in ruins you can have the white Nationalist Christian supremacists, whatever the terms are Sweep in and set up the government that they want and tell everybody that they're making the trains run on time the way that Mussolini did

Janet: Yeah, so it, it leaves us with, finding our community, finding our bubble, doing what we're just doing right now, which is finding people like minded, caring friends and family that we can, Be in whatever stage of grief we're in and that that's okay. And then at the same time, we can know that we're going to help each other through, and I feel like, we're all people, we're all humans, and for whatever reason, which I don't understand, there's a large group of people in our country who are so disgruntled and so [00:18:00] unhappy, and so, with fear and, I can understand where that might come from, but to let that take over.

I'm kind of feeling like we have a responsibility to, do our own work, and take care of ourselves around our grieving and also to At some point, maybe when we get to acceptance, but since this is a fluid process, as we're in and out of acceptance before we're fully in the acceptance mode and this part of our experience is fully, captured in our tapestry as you were mentioning earlier before we started recording, That we can then be and model that we first of all could experience in the midst of all of this Some contentment in the sense of what you just said about where are we right now?

You know right now he's not even president we have three more months and then after he becomes president How much of what he's saying he's going to do [00:19:00] will he be able to do? I don't know and he's there for four years and that's it four years at the most. It's kind of like fastening my seatbelt, knowing this is going to be bumpy, scary, probably horrible at times.

And then, we're left with also, are there moments of joy? That we can find in our lives, possibly, probably not related to politics, but the joy of being in contentment of being alive, of knowing that, we can make it through together.

Gregg: yeah, I agree with some of that, but one of the groups of people that I imagine having real difficulty with that is, families of immigrants it's going to be very, very real for them very fast. Because I'm pretty sure that even without congressional authority, [00:20:00] people get nominated to the cabinet.

There may turn out to be some people of courage in the Republican party to block some of those nominations and make him turn to better people. But I'm pretty sure that he can start doing his deportation stuff as soon as he wants to, and he feels like he has to do that and wants to do that. There's a huge number of people who are. In the country, supposedly illegally and are undocumented, there's a whole bunch of people like the Haitians who are in Springfield, Ohio, not at all eating our cats and dogs. Those people are here legally, but under a program that Trump says is not legal.

So those folks get deported also. People who are really a big part of our community and have been for years.

It must be really scary for them. And, you know, I'm, [00:21:00] I'm an old white guy, so I'm not going to, I don't think I'm going to get deported. Although sometimes I wonder, you podcast, will they round me up and deport me anyway?

One of our options is going to be, and I think this is the first time we're going to have a chance to do it, is when the deportation effort starts. People of conscience are going to stand up against that one way or another. And I hope that I find myself standing there too.

Standing up against that, and there's a fear of that, that, we might get rounded up and, who knows what happens to us, but I'm not too worried about that, but I would hope that I would be standing up for those folks. And other than that, my life hasn't changed yet, so I'm still able to find moments of joy.

Janet: One of the things you're raising is I'm thinking about what are the strategies that we can hold on to, including being in our community, having our [00:22:00] bubble, what you're just talking about, the piece of activism, find where we can try to make a difference, all of the areas that.

This new administration is going to try to destroy, I think that this is a really important time for all of us who are lucky enough to be comfortable and whether it's a, being a white male or, , whatever category you find yourself in that. Is less attacked, less focus. I'm thinking about something Michelle Obama used to say about when they go low, we go high.

And so I think this is an important time, to again, not be trapped in fear. We have fear. It's a very scary time. It's a very, unpredictable time. And to be able to. Try to go high, and that [00:23:00] doesn't mean oh, everything's fine It means whatever it is that we are active in making a difference And then the part about contentment and even moments of joy, you know, one of my biggest heroes in my life Has been nelson mandela spending all those years in this little cell and how he came out of that time a changed person and focused and driven by contentment and joy and acceptance and fighting with activism for the wrongs and the Hurts, but that idea of, as we are like now, I feel I'm, I am already in a minority in so many ways, being a woman, being, biracial, oldish, there's so many ways that I'm not in the mainstream.

this is definitely another area when he won, I felt so much of the [00:24:00] minority. I felt like even though I'm living in a state where, it's more liberal, just that sense that I'm surrounded in the country, by many people who don't think the way I do many people and, In a way I can't even understand, and so I feel a personal internal responsibility to find internally a place of contentment and notice moments of joy in the midst of this chaos and this very evil, cloud over us.

Gregg: I want to wrap up by saying something actually hopeful and positive, which is the way that it looks like it's turned out, that, Trump, in terms of the popular vote, Trump got less than 50 percent of the popular vote, which means that of all the people who voted, more than half of the people who voted, [00:25:00] voted against Trump.

So that gives me some hope. That, that other 50 plus percent of people are people who are thoughtful and kind and strong and willing to stand up for their beliefs and have open hearts and open minds, and in my world, very high in the list of those people is you. And so I'm very hopeful that you and I will continue to strengthen our relationship and perhaps be called on to use the strength of our relationship to help things spin around to a more positive direction for a while.

And so, as always, it's been great to have this conversation with you, even though it's not a, the subject matter doesn't make me happy. [00:26:00] The fact that you're in the world and I get to have this conversation with you does.

Janet: I agree. That was beautifully said, Greg. I don't even need to repeat any of it. It's just beautiful and I feel the same and thank you for being in my life.

Gregg: You're welcome. It's my great pleasure. So, thanks Janet, and, enjoy your next couple of weeks, I know you're going on a big trip, and you'll be all right.

Janet: Well, I'm wondering if I look American and if anybody's going to say something to me about the state of our country, but I'm ready for it.

Gregg: Whoa. You look like America to me.

Janet: Okay, good.

Gregg: Okay. Goodbye, Janet.

Janet: Bye, Greg.

Gregg (2): That's it for now. Thanks for listening.

This is a difficult conversation to have, and we imagine there are versions of it going on [00:27:00] all over the country. We hope you have a happy Thanksgiving and can find ways to be thankful. Including for those friends and family members, you may disagree with. Please try to remember the miracle of America. Is that we know we are all in this together. Coming up soon.

We'll be the next installment of oldest book club. We're reading. It's not all downhill from here. By ward winning author, Terry McMillan. It's a fine novel about an oldest woman. We're surprised by life. And finds a way forward with the help of her friends. Chances are, you'll see yourself in this book.

Please join us for what shore to be a lively conversation.

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