CTFD

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

I confess to not having paid attention to the news lately, although it’s hard to miss our national preoccupation with “enemies” — Snowden, Tsarnaev, Zimmerman — when their pictures grace the covers of magazines and front pages of newspapers, pushing our paranoia buttons and making us long for sane conversation. We can hardly deny that this has been called the “summer of hate” for good reason, but I have been otherwise occupied with life matters, or, as my son commented recently, “How did things go from crawling like molasses to speeding like a moving train in just a matter of weeks?”

A good question, and poised on Mercury’s welcome change of direction, even more direct trajectory is just ahead (to which I add my profound relief: this has been one of the most difficult and frustrating personal retros in my recent memory).

I’m just back from two days assisting an elderly cousin winnow down a lifetime collection of belongings as he prepares to move from the 4000 square foot home he’d built in the ’60s to a small condo in a retirement village. Very little of the household has changed since his wife, a dear spiritual mentor, passed two years ago after a protracted illness, so I spent time throwing away old food from the pantry, going through her copious stores of vitamins and supplements identifying usefulness, and loading volumes into boxes from one of the most complete metaphysical libraries I’ve had the pleasure to plunder.

It was both poignant and bittersweet as she was not there, but, of course, her energy was still palpable in all the important ways, so we talked of her as if she were present, enjoyed one another’s company, and made a dent in an otherwise overwhelming project. Still, I drove away aware that it was a solemn goodbye to one of the last remaining family homesteads dear to my clan.

A week earlier, the July Fourth period, my California kids joined my son and me, here in the Pea Patch, for the first time since before the grandkids were born. Their four dear faces were only to be present for a few days, so I had carefully orchestrated that slim slice of time to include both their projected desires and mine, all of which quickly fell apart as we lost the cooling function on the heat pump (and close to a grand later, still have not recovered it) during the hottest days of the year. We picnicked outside rather than sweltering indoors, gave up day trips in favor of cooling dips in the lake, and postponed to a later time much that we’d hoped to accomplish in establishing a family inventory. If personally confounding, it proved a joyous visit, nonetheless.

My daughter was, I knew, looking for signs of her beloved grandparents, as the Pea Patch had been their retirement home and the last of our personal family homesteads. Since my father remarried in his mid-70s and moved an hour or two away, she found fewer signs of him than of her grandmother, who had been keeper of the family treasures and photos, many still in place. Dad had taken most of his personal items with him — family records, jewelry, mementos, whatnot — which, thanks to the sensibilities of the second wife, we never saw again.

In fact, days before the kids arrived I got a registered letter telling me that her health was fine and that, without notice, she’d sold land adjoining ours along with the dearly loved (and prized) family dock, all of which was legally if not morally hers to do with as she pleased in a community property state. While friends, family and neighbors all projected emotion ranging from outrage to grief over this loss, she herself remains, I presume, completely unruffled and has, in fact, sold her own family homestead, having disposed of personal property (hers AND his) and moved into the spare room at her granddaughter’s home.

Alas, change is often, shall we agree, something of a bitch, with someone inevitably getting the short end, our “best laid plans” and expectations echoing like residual ghosts in the empty space they’d previously occupied. That is both why we fear it and why it liberates us, reluctant though we may be for freedom accompanied by loss.

And, as with such challenges, change shocks the body while piquing the personality, putting the soul on high alert and readied for action. So it was with me — processing the somewhat erosive changes of the last few months — and last night, having driven several hours to return to a par-broiled bedroom and a period of sleep only possible sans clothes or cover and under fan-blades, I fretted over what of that experience I might connect to politics today.

I needn’t have worried. A quick cruise through Huffington provided me with exactly what I was looking for: CTFD.

CTFD is a proposed way of parenting, close on the heels of the many parenting styles we anguish over in this 21st century. Back in the 1970s, I was one of the first to teach a system called Positive Parenting, which filled a void born out of the clumsy social transition from Mrs. Cleaver to hippy communes to disco dance-clubs. It was based on respect for family members and their mutual team effort, as well as individual responsibility and logical consequences. It undercut the old Father Knows Best authoritarianism and met the challenges of the moment, but it wasn’t too psychologically heavy-handed, which I approved.

I’ve always come down on the let-kids-be-kids side of the spectrum, on the prospect that failure at 7 and 14 and 21 (Saturn squares and opposition) is vital to a rounded experience of growth to adulthood, that self-esteem is not about avoiding hurtful challenge but about overcoming it. I will, however, admit that life has become increasingly dangerous and the population so self-absorbed that it has brought child-rearing to a pretty pass, explanation for which I’ll leave to the broad strokes of George Carlin, from his final stand-up routine. These days, parenting includes a maze of social and educational complexity that leaves me exhausted just thinking about.

As well, CTFD is tongue-in-cheek, campy to the point of comedy, but most of what is funny rings with truth. CTFD — as proposed by David Vienna, father of twin boys and their older sister at thedaddycomplex.com blog — stands for Calm The Fuck Down. Yes, an apt statement, obviously meant for parents and not their children, but also applicable commentary for our times and not just our parenting style. Tell me which circumstance in our personal lives, politics, or work experience would not be best served with a little dose of CTFD?

Here is what the author — who tells us there are only two rules: 1] Calm The Fuck Down and 2] There is no second step — cites as examples of when this parenting trend might come in handy:

Scared you’re not imparting the wisdom your child will need to survive in school and beyond? Calm the f*ck down.

Concerned that you’re not the type of parent you thought you’d be? Calm the f*ck down.

Upset that your child doesn’t show interest in certain areas of learning? Calm the f*ck down.

Stressed that your child exhibits behavior in public you find embarrassing? Calm the f*ck down.

Now, forget about kids for the moment, and think of a population that behaves like children much of the time. In recent years, it seems our mentality grew without accompanying awareness, limiting our understanding of context. Seems we substituted issues of control — political correctness, for instance — for matters of actual security. Seems we let others think for us, and we pay the price today.

As long as life “looks” okay, it is, we decided. As long as we could identify those in the black hats, we could depend on the white ones to rescue us and make us feel safe. As often as we were able to insulate ourselves with a glut of stuff, the more substantial our hold on a secure future. And as so much we’ve depended on has slipped away, we’ve comforted ourselves with meaningless declarations and social agreements not all of us can either share or relate to.

The rationales we’ve used to protect our psyches against life’s slings and arrows — the anachronistic assurance that there is still a homestead, for instance, where we’re both known and welcome — are falling away now. Our culture no longer sustains such long-term stability, and running faster to try to replace it with something similar is a fool’s errand. That’s traditional Cancerian territory, the nurturing center that relies on self-protection along with rejection of the unknown. For me, our recent stellium in Cancer planets seemed to crystallize in the Zimmerman trial when the mothers of both young men identified the recorded voice crying for help as that of their son. The remaining influence of culture and tribe, here in our decidedly NOT post-racial world, dictates which mother you believed.

We can only liberate ourselves from our deepest anxiety when we acknowledge that it is the tribal experiences of our family identity — individual, collective and by race and nationality — that offer us assurances of our personal safety, and that is what needs healing in a world polarized by shifting values. We will have to grow past our dependency on these old contracts with the familiar if we’re to release the spirit of denial that refuses to listen to or acknowledge the rights of others.

Even as I selected CTFD as my muse, wondering how that might play out in the course of the news day, I didn’t worry because examples show up as frequently as a scheduled bus arrives in the neighborhood. The most impressive of the day, I think, is the gone-hysterical over-the-top Republican response to Obama’s extraordinary remarks on race relations, initiation to a long-needed conversation we seem unwilling to have about the Martin/Zimmerman case.

Obama has long been criticized for avoiding taking a stand as a progressive and/or black man on this case, although his early commentary that Trayvon could have been his son seemed specific enough to me. Now, his heart-felt comment that Trayvon could have been him 35 years ago, that this is something all black men must deal with and something we as a nation MUST begin to address, has become the long-awaited declaration of racial identity the right has anticipated for years.

The president spent a good part of his press conference — some twenty minutes or so — talking about the color of skin vs. the content of character, proposing possible changes we can make in our communities and local government, speaking of our better angels and addressing the dynamics of our racial differences that MUST be discussed rationally if we are to put this “summer of hate” behind us.

The response exceeded my expectations. I figured on outcry, not conservative shit-storm. The kind of denial that’s being brought to this opportunity for honesty is simply astounding, representing a black hole of repressed emotion and unexamined negativity within the conservative movement. We will, this week, identify our tribal limitations and either allow the conversation to rise above them or spin in them without the benefit of an authority figure capable of issuing a CTFD command, because the one person who has the power to make that moot is the very person being pointed to as illegitimate to take authority because of his skin tone.

We have waited such a long time for this moment, since our very beginnings. Stop and consider just how healing the possibilities of this moment are. Still, this is only the opening shot: I heard a CNN anchor sigh loudly, trying to moderate a conservative pundit who held forth in a breathless stream of accusation and criticism, unable to interrupt even for a question. I recognized that sigh and met it with my own. This would be a VERY good place for CTFD, but I think the only way she could have gotten him to stop babbling would have included use of a dart gun.

Shortly after that segment, CNN anchor Don Lemon spoke candidly about his own African-American experience with profiling and police harassment. His voice shook with emotion as he spoke of what he’d had to overcome as a black man, and I thought how very productive it was for Obama to risk this position, today. We have connected to our emotions: the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly.

Because it can’t be much more obvious, allow me to state the truth that the adult voice today was the black president of the United States, giving us a very clear heads up that we are not post-racial in any way. That is important for us to both hear and respond to because this is a powerful moment to cut through the sludge of denial: I don’t see a clear path for the Justice Department to make a case against Zimmerman, given the Florida decision and the “he said, she said” problems with witnesses. And it should also be obvious to any progressive watching that this comes on the heels of an activist Supreme Court decision limiting voting rights, and prompting several states to rush ahead with laws that almost gleefully violate the democratic principles of “one person, one vote.”

The white community may have fears that they will be branded racist no matter how mild their push-back, while others will be thrilled to have opportunity to vent their fears and hatreds. The black community may have concerns that there will be further white backlash against them, while others will chide Obama for putting forth such a loaded national conversation on the bones of a polarized legal case. The many reasons why it “should never have happened” will be analyzed and discussed, while the bus to Calm The Fuck Down will continue to pick up and let off, finally arriving in a neighborhood near you.

If we were able to see this more clearly, we might discover that our safety has to do not with our tribalism, our isolation, but with our commonality. The disappearance of our various homesteads, our tightly knit families and underserved communities, can offer us an opportunity to recapture our local identity as rebuilders of that community, as citizens dependent upon one another for solidarity and commonwealth. Our flawed justice system, a society plagued by escalating violence, cries out for the kind of stability that can only happen when we join together under Rule of Law. That does not happen by accident.

Neither, I think, do the moments occur by accident when something extraordinary erupts, begging our attention. Nor do these anxious moments of intellectual change that prod us forward into decision-making, like it or not. It is no accident that here, in the fledgling months of a new age, we find ourselves once again plunged into the signature energies of racism, elitist capitalism and enduring notions of patriarchy that defined this nation’s beginnings. It’s a powerful moment, of which we are mostly unaware.

In truth, many of us have lost family, lost “homesteads,” lost old friends and loved ones as our personal and political differences have divided us in the last decade and beyond. The years since the turn of the century have taken their toll. What was once dependable is gone, what has yet to prove solid remains to make us wary. We have every right to want to lick our wounds, simmering in our hurts and pains, but every reason to get on with the healing curve instead.

The way forward is going to challenge us to get past our extremism and “reason together.” It will require us to choose to focus on commonality rather than differences, but if we’re going to heal the past and seize the future, it’s time to get on the bus marked Calm The Fuck Down. This is the perfect time to drain the wound of this color thing, a context that our younger generations have already moved beyond. This is our opportunity to travel, together, to the next level, where our future awaits.