Month: August 2020

(This is the text of the speech that I gave at the Vermont Democratic Party’s Unity Rally on Thursday, August 13th in Montpelier.)

Good morning! I stand here as the Majority Leader in the Vermont Senate. But more importantly, I stand here as a citizen. Because under our system of government, we all wield the same power in the voting booth.

Many of you remember U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone who tragically died in a plane crash in 2002. Wellstone is well known for his stirring quote: “We all do better when we all do better.” 

But there’s another Wellstone quote that’s become my personal motto: “This is no time for timidity.” 

This line focuses my attention and my commitment as I reflect upon the excruciating years of the Trump presidency. We’ve witnessed terrific dysfunction and a tremendous meanness of spirit and strategy.   

This is no time for timidity

This line guides me as I contemplate the horrible twists and turns sure to come in this election. And it helps me to stave off feelings of doom and paralysis. It points me towards usefulness and away from feeling useless, and it awakens a hopefulness that fitfully slumbers.

This is no time for timidity

To counteract creeping despondency, my brother-in-law has decided to focus his energy since Trump’s ascendancy. Fighting racism in America has become his most important issue, and he’s spending his time and money to get more people of color elected to higher office. He’s backing a Democratic congressional candidate in his home district and following many other House races across the country. 

A former coach, he’s not content to merely watch the court from the sidelines. He’s become absolutely FULLY engaged in the process of changing the face of politics in this country.

He believes, as I do, that we all have a part to play in the great struggle for a more just, a more gentle world. And as we head into the general election, I’ll plan my concrete actions to bring about that change. We all must do the same.

How will we each become more fully engaged in transforming the world? What can we each bring to this all-important task? Will you offer a sharp mind? Time? A meeting space? Money? Communication skills? Energy and positivity? Fierce loyalty or compassion?

Are you a connector? An excellent researcher? Are you an artist? A performer? A great organizer of people? Do you move people with your music, your art, your words? Do you have a big heart that’s searching for a landing place? Or do you have a healthy skepticism that can coax us all towards greatness?

My call to action is expansive, inclusive, and absolutely urgent. It’s well past time for all of us to put down our insecurities; they are serving no good master. Push yourself beyond simply caring (and worrying); it’s time to do. 

I know “the doing” feels pointless at times. The world is immense and complicated and often feels like a great mess. What impact do our relatively small actions truly have on anything at all? 

But maybe this is actually the wrong question—the wrong frame entirely—for understanding our predicament.

The actions themselves, regardless of grand outcomes, are the point. The process of meaning-making—of crafting culture and creating connections— THAT is the heart of it all. 

We’re all living through a deeply troubling time in history, and many of us feel trapped in someone else’s narrative. But the meaning-makers, the history shapers, are not the people at the top. It’s all of us as citizens– engaged, powerful citizens.  As a historian, I know this to be true. 

The sycophants—and the “yes” men and women—grab the headlines. But historians will look to the rest of us and our response to the insanity. 

This is no time for timidity. Or for acrimony among us.

Not because we can’t have legitimate points of disagreement. But because this horrible moment in time is not just about us. It’s about our children and the generations that come after who will want to know: What did you do to fight the darkness? 

For those of you who’ve never ridden a motorcycle, the thing that keeps you upright is–just like on a bicycle–forward motion. The big difference, of course, is that bicycles don’t weigh hundreds of pounds. My little Honda Rebel weighs just over 300 lbs., which is really pretty light for a motorcycle but doesn’t feel light at all to this small gal. Sometimes I feel like the “Mouse on the Motorcycle” from the old Beverly Cleary children’s books.

When I ride my bike regularly, I get a really good workout for my ab muscles because I need to balance that 300 lbs. whenever I stop at a stop sign or red light or when I’m pushing it out of my garage to get it ready to ride. Sometimes one small change in incline, or an unexpected slippery surface, can cause the bike to overbalance in one direction or another. In those anxious moments, I have a split second to determine if I can muscle it back up to equilibrium or whether I need to admit defeat and try to leap out of the way before it falls on me.

Yesterday on a lovely ride on the back roads of southern Vermont, I came to a stop sign, and a pickup truck pulled up way too closely behind me. I felt pressured to move quickly, and in my haste, I stalled out the bike. I felt my motorcycle start to list to the left, and I had to concentrate all my strength and attention on muscling it back up to stability. I was successful, and I let out a deep “Whew!” I then waved the truck around me so I could take a few more moments to collect myself. As I revved the engine and started for home, I realized that this experience was a good metaphor for how I’ve felt the past few weeks: out of equilibrium. No matter how much I tried to get myself back in balance, I just seemed to careen further into disequilibrium. 

When I feel this way it usually means that I’m living part of my life out of sync with my values. It sounds pretty straightforward. Figure out where some action or thought is out of alignment with my values, and then, well…just STOP doing that thing, or saying that thing, or thinking that thing. Simple! Except that sometimes our values collide or at least bump up against each other. Which value to honor in those moments? Different situations obviously call on different values, but it isn’t always easy to sort out which value to turn the spotlight on and which to leave in the shadows.

These past few weeks I’ve struggled with frustration, anger and disillusionment. Someone really disappointed me, and this sent me spinning out of balance. I guess the more honest thing to say is that I let it send me out of whack. It made me so irritated and indignant that it impacted my ability to focus on my work or quiet my mind. There were critical moments when I chose to value the qualities of candor, integrity, and authenticity over the principles of kindness and understanding. I stood squarely in righteousness but lost sight of the fact that part of decency is compassion. And I forgot that belittling statements don’t just harm the subject of the backbiting; they always make me feel smaller.

How did I know that it was time for deeper reflection and course correction? I started to journal about my complicated feelings. I am not a big journaler, so when I reach for my planner in order to spill my thoughts and emotions out, well, I know that I am feeling out of balance.

As many of you know, after being a teacher and before I ran for office, I was trained as a personal coach. One of the tenents of my particular style of coaching is: That which you can’t be with will ride you.  What that means is that if there is something that’s irking you about someone else, there is probably some part of that quality that’s highlighting your own shortcomings. That which you can’t be with will ride you.

I journaled about my insecurities, my shortcomings, and my own flaws. I then shared this information with a few trusted friends and advisers. They witnessed and acknowledged my feelings and thoughts. I then asked them to make a promise to me that they’d reflect back to me—gently but firmly—when I’m straying from my values. Essentially, I asked them to bring me back to equilibrium.

This pandemic is contributing to most of us feeling out of balance. Now is a good time to identify what are the few components of your disequilibrium that you can actually can control. Then identify a prompt, a signal, that will indicate to you that you’re not in line with your values. It doesn’t have to be a 300 lbs. motorcycle.

On our vacation in South Hero several weeks ago, we’d spend most evenings on the deck playing Pictionary. We shared many laughs—and some arguments—as we drew quick sketches to elicit guesses from our teammates. We’d played this game on several other occasions with some success, but this was the first time I noticed the way in which my son built his drawings. This simple observation has given me unexpected insight into how he, as someone on the autism spectrum, interprets his world.

It was his turn to draw. His task was to sketch a kitchen spatula. (Not the rubbery kind used to scrape bowls, but the stiff kind used to flip pancakes. I have since learned that some folks call this a “turner.” But in my house we call it a spatula.) He started his picture by drawing a tiny circle to indicate the hole in the handle by which it can be hung by a hook. Around the hole, he drew a handle. Next came the flat head. He said to me, “Hold on. Wait for it.” Then he carefully drew the slats. I yelled, “Spatula!” as he drew the last slat. 

It was rather an unremarkable moment, and it would’ve been so easy for me to miss the importance. I’m certain I’m given other opportunities for insight into my son each day and miss them. Perhaps because I’m distracted. Maybe because I’m harried or impatient. Or it could be that I simply have a difficult time understanding and accepting that he views the world quite differently.

I keep thinking about how he revealed his drawing bit by bit. He built the entire drawing starting from a small hole in the handle. I know I never would have started my own drawing in that way. This is an important reminder to me that people on the Autism Spectrum view the world and process information differently than neurotypical folks. I’ve read excerpts from some of Temple Grandin’s books and have heard her speak about what it’s like to “think in pictures.” But until I saw my son’s sketches this information never fully landed.

Since the spatula drawing, I’ve learned about a study that tracked the eye movements of people as they looked at hundreds of different images. Half of the participants were officially diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum; the other half were “neurotypical.” 

Previous research has shown that people on the spectrum typically don’t look at faces closely, can be overwhelmed by too much stimuli, and have a tendency to fixate intensely on one image or idea at a time. But this study, published in 2017, helps us to actually see the world how many people on the autism spectrum might.

Co-author Ralph Adolphs, a neuroscientist at CalTech, said about the research, “Among other findings, our work shows that the story is not as simple as saying ‘people with ASD don’t look normally at faces.’ They don’t look at most things in a typical way.” 

You can view the images yourself in this article as they appeared in Business Insider Australia: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/how-autistic-people-see-the-world-2015-10-/amp The images show what participants’ eyes gravitated toward. People with autism tended to focus on the center of each of the images, even when other relevant objects or people were visible. They also looked at the edges of objects and patterns in the images rather than the faces that “neurotypical” participants focused on.

What a revelation this has been for me! That which I accept as being the most important information my eyes and brain take in each moment are almost certainly not the same things that my son sorts as important and worthy of his attention. I wish I’d learned this years ago. I would’ve parented quite differently. I would have understood him so much better. It’s difficult to let go of this heartache, but I’m so grateful for the insight given to me by his spatula drawing.

If we zoom out from this particular topic and consider this idea in a more expansive way, what frustrations do you harbor because someone in your family does not see things quite the same way as you do? How does this play out in your work life? How can you use this new information about autism to be more understanding and more forgiving of those who see something differently? I’ve found it to be a very useful prompt for me to help me consider other perspectives and to truly accept that my view is usually not the only way to look at something.