Dumb Billionaires Are People Too

What were those heavenly thoughts??

From Mary Gartside’s New Theory of Color (1808), via Public Domain Review

I think Transcendental Meditation (TM) epiphanies come faster when you have a fever. For over a month I’ve been meditating for 40 minutes a day, 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes late afternoon, and I wasn’t noticing any improvement in my character at all. But then, one night last week I was lying in bed with a fever of 101, and some of the lessons of the meditation melted into my fevered thinking.

I realized that I have total control of my thoughts! If I don’t want to think anything, I can either think nothing or think “Think nothing, think nothing, think nothing.” Why should I walk around cogitating?

And third, I realized that I could choose to think only heavenly, happy thoughts, which would make my feelings become joyful and hopeful, even fun and exciting. So then I started thinking these heavenly thoughts and I was shown that I always, always, always have access to that. Behind my eyes, which were closed now, I was shimmering colors in shades of yellow, gold, silver, and peach. And I vowed then to keep at it and to leave my moody, searching, sort of automatic and negative (and ultimately unproductive) thinking in the past. If I really missed it, I could always go back to it.

A few hours later, I woke up thinking, and my thoughts weren’t purely positive, but with every sentence, I corrected myself to make whatever I’d thought more positive. Like, if I thought, “I think I still have a fever,” I would change it to “These bed covers are comfortable.” Shoot, I realized, maybe it wasn’t going to be automatic.

I told Marshall that story and he asked me what the heavenly thoughts had been before I drifted to sleep.

“I cannot remember!” I said. He laughed ruefully.

And now, I write to you just back from two brief days in a lakeside airbnb in Canada with friends. Recovering from the flu, we thought it might be good for us to go sit in an outdoor hot tub overlooking Lake Ontario and do nothing, read no news, and just stare at the scenery.

The porch was covered in snow and ice. A few Doritos were trapped beneath the ice, dropped by previous renters. There was a dramatic splatter of what I thought was blood on the snowy porch until Marshall pointed out it was more likely red wine. The shore beyond the porch was mounded with snow and ice, too, but then there was the lake, the lights of Toronto visible at night across the water. In the daytime, the lake was navy and calm and covered by ice floes and dozens of ducks (Mallards, Wood Ducks, Mergansers, and Loons), the odd gull, and some big geese. We saw a Bald Eagle several times chasing prey in the sky, disappearing behind our roof.

But when we crossed back into the United States at Niagara Falls yesterday, I felt an unexpected sense of relief. It may be going through a very hard time right now, but it’s or ours, this country. And I think I understand it.

I think of our country as a frayed but still impressive artifact of lots of hard work and investment by Americans, including our ancestors (slaves and slavers) and donkeys and horses and inventors long dead. And it’s been recently junked up by unchecked corporations that don’t care how ugly the towns get or how fat and distracted/misinformed they make us for a profit. (I recently read a book, Magic Pill, that explained how the obesity epidemic is the result of pernicious processed foods made to override our natural sense of when to stop eating and that the new class of weight loss drugs, which I myself take, work by killing off our natural appetite and also increasing our brain’s aversion reactions, and that these drugs are of course making drug companies billions of dollars. So again, we are mere puppets for cash.) And our country is being kept afloat by machinery that includes an appropriately sized government, investment in research and education, capitalism, and neighborliness. But it’s under attack now by powerfully bad ideas: that the inherited machinery is worthless and wasteful, that the unchecked corporations are impressive and should have their way with us and our public good, and that unelected corporations and billionaires are more trustworthy than fellow American people inside and outside of the government.

A friend of a friend with a government job recently told her mother how bad the atmosphere at work had become because of rude termination letters from DOGE (which is pronounced “dodgy”), and her own mother replied: “Well, I approve of these cuts and you’ll just have to find a new job, won’t you?” OMG, Mom!

But life’s like that: sometimes the bull kicks through the fence, a six-year-old drives a car down the driveway, dogs try poker, and peasants break into the palace — Musk and Trump are the peasants in the palace of our democracy.

My friend who says she’s devoting her life to the eightfold path (right thinking, right intention, right speech, right action, etc.) reminded me the other day in response to my salty text denigrating MAGA that she doesn’t want to hate or disrespect any person. Harumph, I thought, what about villains? And anyway, I don’t hate, but I sure do disrespect. Then, over the course of a few days wrestling with it, I realized that my outrage feels bad and encourages me to notice more of what I don’t like. It is not in line with my heavenly thoughts, that’s for sure, whatever they were.

Also it’s very hard to find any insult ever hurled by Martin Luther King Jr. He put down bad ideas and dishonest arguments mercilessly, coolly, calmly. But he didn’t call people names. His unflappability and grace were pretty inspiring. And since he’d never sneered or insulted anyone, you were always free to abandon your earlier stance and come join his team.

How can we be like that about leaders who have sold out free Ukraine to our enemy, who have disrespected the government that is by and for us?

If my friend is right and my recent meditation epiphany is true, we have to switch the talk from the crime to the ideal:

A strong and fair nation is like a strong and fair person, loyal to friends and willing to stand up to a bully on a friend’s behalf. It might be easier to do the opposite and it might win us cheap, instant points, but in the long run, it’s better to be truly good and it’s better to be admired and loved by our friends. Americans pride ourselves on being strong and fair, which is what we will remind our congressional representatives of this week.

The best kind of leaders respect people doing work on behalf of the public, because they know that to belittle that one person’s efforts is like belittling the cause they are working for, be it resilient crops or good foreign intelligence or secure nuclear warheads. Leaders and managers alike should strive to support and inspire staff, not frighten and insult. Why? Because inspired, supported staff work harder and better. And even if they didn’t, who the hell wants to be at a workplace filled with trembling, twitchy, indignant coworkers? Not us.

This newsletter of mine used to be funnier.

OK, I’m off to work. My thoughts today, when I think them, are going to be all about how much I love the people I work with and how sweet my cats are and how grateful I am for my return to health. This won’t be annoying because no one but you and I will know it.