Author: Becca Balint

It’s the middle of the night. I wish I could say that it’s close to dawn, but it’s nowhere near. The darkness is complete, and I’m sitting in it. 

I’m thinking about the state of our nation, and I’m worried. What pulled me out of sleep–again–like on so many other recent nights? Was it the death of Congressman John Lewis and the images of his casket being carried by horse and wagon across the Edmund Pettus Bridge? Was it the horrifying scenes from Portland, OR of peaceful demonstrators being tear gassed by our own government? Was it the 146,000 Americans who’ve died from COVID-19 while the president lies, blames others, and plays another round of golf? Or could it be the absurd emails I receive about how wearing a mask is actually really harmful to your health? Or maybe it’s just the simple, astounding fact that somewhere around 45% of American voters tell pollsters they approve of the job that Trump’s doing. That last bit is certainly more than enough to disrupt sleep. 

How can anyone watch a speech by our president and conclude that: 1.) he’s in his right mind 2.) is not a complete narcissist 3.) gives a damn about us  AND 4.) should be reelected? His “press” conferences have been a national embarrassment for years, but they’ve recently reached a new level of absurdity. If you missed the stupid truck stunt of last week in the Rose Garden or didn’t hear his bizarro speech about shower heads, well, count yourself as really lucky. Because that was some seriously strange stuff. This was not a mattress salesman from the Bronx or some dude from Yonkers hawking cheap electronics. This was our president. 

How did we get here?

We talk a lot about politics in our house, and my children want to understand how so many Americans can’t see through this huckster. Our recent dinner conversations have me wondering: How does propaganda work? Why are some people more susceptible to disinformation and propaganda? Who are these people? And how do I make sure that I don’t ever become one of these sorry souls?

What I’ve learned so far is that there are essentially two camps of thinking on this issue. One believes that what prevents people from seeing through propaganda is that our ability to reason takes a backseat to our partisan convictions. In other words, we rationalize and we see what we want to see in the information provided. The other camp believes that what’s really at play is that people who are more susceptible to propaganda fail to use their critical thinking skills. Said another way, they are mentally lazy.

In a 2019 op-ed in the New York Times, psychologists Gordon Pennycook and David Rand argue that although they generally fall into the second camp, they believe that those who fall for propaganda are usually impacted by both phenomena. So, we must be aware of our political bias and cultivate excellent critical thinking skills.

What do I mean by that? Pennycook and Rand ran studies in which people of various political persuasions weighed in on whether they believed news stories simply by looking at the headlines. Before having the participants run through the headline exercise, they asked participants to take a cognitive reflection test–one that is often used in psychology and behavioral economics. This test indicates if a participant engages in careful reasoning or simply “goes with their gut.” They found that people who have a tendency to do more reflective reasoning were less likely to be swayed by disinformation–even if the headline reinforces their underlying political views.

So, there’s hope. As Pennycook and Rand say, “Reason is not always, or even typically, held captive by our partisan biases. In many cases, it seems, reason does promote the formation of accurate beliefs.” Cultivating our reasoning abilities must be part of the work we all do as citizens, and we need to promote this critical work in our families and communities.

My first modest goals in the service of this ideal is to stop sharing articles I’ve only skimmed and to stop indicating my support for an article after I’ve only read the headline or merely glanced at the article or its pictures. Reflective reasoning takes time, yes. But I’m starting to feel like our democracy literally depends on working these muscles with diligence and fervor.

It’s not easy being a woman in comedy. Just writing that sentence makes me exhausted. Sexism is so very tiring, tedious and omnipresent. So, I’ll just shorthand my point: Louis CK, constant penis jokes, rape jokes, being propositioned on the regular, being called “bitch” by audience members, being told that one woman on the bill is (more than) enough and, that at our core, women just aren’t funny. Also, there’s the joy of being introduced in one of two ways at comedy festivals: “The woman who slept with one of the judges” or “We’re so glad she’s not raped and dead in an alley.”

But, this is not a blog post about all that depressing stuff. This is about the genius and triumph of Sarah Cooper, who I’ve started referring to as “the best thing about this horrible pandemic.” If you haven’t yet seen her work, go looking for it on the web. She’s got a steady stream of work on Twitter, FB and TikTok. One upside of not being able to perform in front of a live audience (due to Covid-19) is that performers can get their work directly to fans. They don’t have to deal with bookings, snarky audience members or the aforementioned sexism. Cooper can churn out videos from her home in Brooklyn and easily blast them out to millions of fans. I’m one of her devotees, and I hope you’ll check out her work, too. She’s an amazingly effective truth-teller about our current president. More on that in a moment.

Sarah Cooper was born in Jamaica and moved to the U.S. when she was a toddler. She knew at an early age that she wanted to pursue a career in show business, but her parents strongly encouraged her to earn degrees outside of the performing arts. Cooper has a degree in Economics from the University of Maryland and one in Digital Design from the Georgia Institute of Technology, but she never abandoned her desire to be onstage. She started writing and performing stand-up comedy in Atlanta and wrote a humorous blog, including a post that went viral in 2014 called “10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings.”

Her 2018 book “How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings” is hilarious, spot-on and chock full of handy tips like: “How much should you smile during your job interview? The answer is: not too much and definitely not too little. Try practicing a smile that’s somewhere in between, even if it makes you look like you’re having a stroke. This is your best option.” And this gem on describing your accomplishments: “…you need to strike a balance between tooting your own horn and hiding your horn behind the shed.” Yes. This is the tightrope I walk in politics, too.

Cooper’s latest project is so damn clever in its simplicity. She takes snippets of Trump’s speeches and carefully memorizes them. She nails all the pauses and inflections, and then she dubs herself giving these same speeches. She adds expressions, hand gestures, and sometimes another silent, observant Sarah Cooper as a “straight woman” or foil. Without adding any words of commentary, Cooper is able to strip the emperor naked. The format is simple but the execution requires her to be painstakingly exact. Her most recent one entitled, “How to person woman man camera tv,” is a devastating reenactment of Trump’s recent insistence that he “aced” a “very difficult” cognitive test. Cooper is an American hero. I mean it.

We need these truth-tellers, these brilliant social and political commentators. I adore the work of Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Myers. It’s not hyperbole to say they have helped me survive the Trump years. But Sarah Cooper owns pandemic comedy right now. I eagerly await each video and then revel in her comedic genius when they hit Twitter. She is the right comedian for this dystopian time; she points out the horror while making us laugh. We need this constant reminder of our resilience.

Government, not individuals, segregated America. That is the awful truth.

I’ve been engrossed in Richard Rothstein’s book, “The Color of Law.” Rothstein–a fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and a senior fellow at the Haas Institute at the University of California, Berkeley–wrote a devastating account of how state, national, and local governments segregated America. We should all read it or listen to it on Audible. I have a master’s in history, including a concentration in Post-Reconstruction African American history, and I still learned new things from this powerful book. I know you will, too. And you’ll never look at our nation the same way again.

For many of my constituents, it’s easy to see that some people are racist. They’ve seen it in their communities, in their workplaces, and in their own life experiences. There’s always that icky guy who tells the inappropriate joke at the office party. Or yet another “Karen” on the news who’s calling the police on a wholly innocent Black man who’s just trying to live his life.  What’s harder for a lot of folks to accept and understand is that institutional racism has been ever present in our nation. This book lays out how mechanisms of institutional racism–fully intentional mechanisms–segregated our towns, cities and neighborhoods.

If you took a 20th century history class in high school, you probably learned about FDR’s New Deal and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which was created to bring jobs and an economic boost to a region hit hard by the Depression. What you probably didn’t hear about was that African Americans who worked for the TVA were not allowed to live in the village created in Norris, TN to house employees. These houses were for white workers only. African American employees had to live in a rundown barracks a distance away.

This was not the only New Deal agency that strictly segregated its housing. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) work camps for jobless youth and adults were also segregated–not just in the South but in the North as well. Governor Harold Hoffman of New Jersey refused to allow any work camp housing to be integrated because, he said, there would be “local resentment.” President Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration (PWA) also strictly instituted and enforced housing segregation. As did the U.S. Housing Authority (USHA). And the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). And housing authorities in cities across the country.

Rothstein also masterfully documents how racial zoning reversed progress that had been made after the Civil War. Then he turns his attention to systemic barriers that African Americans confronted in securing mortgages. The Federal Home Loan Bank, which chartered, insured, and regulated savings and loan associations did not oppose the denial of mortgages to African Americans until 1961. And the IRS routinely granted tax exempt status to churches, hospitals, schools and other organizations that clearly continued to promote racial segregation in their neighborhoods.

There’s a lot in this book that makes me furious. One passage in particular had me cursing out loud. Because African Americans could not secure FHA mortgages, they were often forced to purchase their homes through installment plans. These “contract sales” required payment every month, like a mortgage. But unlike a mortgage, these buyers built up no equity. If they missed even one installment, they could be evicted and would lose all the money they’d paid in to the house. Think about that. A family that had paid years and years on a house could be evicted and not have any money to show for their investment.

And we wonder why we’ve had a persistent gap in wealth between whites and non-whites in America? The system was quite literally set up to keep African Americans less wealthy.

I’m only a third of the way through the book, but with each page I gain a much more complete sense of how exactly we arrived at this place of racial and economic injustice. It is much more complicated than the “one bad apple” arguments that often take center stage when we try to have conversations about racism and its impact on Americans. It’s not just about individual actions. The real story is about the systems that have been in place for a very long time. It is going to take a lot of work to undo them. The first step is understanding the oppressive system well enough to fully dismantle it.

It’s the weekend, so I like to enjoy a little light reading while I sip my coffee. Today’s fare? “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons for the Twentieth Century” by Yale University historian Timothy Snyder. Okay, so, it’s not light, but it is short. It’s literally a pocket-sized book—a very quick read. I highly recommend it to all of us who are worried about the health and stability of our democracy. Which, I very much hope, is most of us.

Its chapters are succinct and punchy and are organized around the premise that we need actionable strategies to prevent tyranny. They include: “Listen for dangerous words” and “Do not obey in advance.” The chapter I’m focused on this morning is called “Take responsibility for the face of the world.” Snyder reminds us, “The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow,” so we must be vigilant in identifying, naming, and publicly rejecting signs of hate. His instructions are straightforward: “Do not look away, and do not get used to them.”

One of the reasons Snyder’s work resonates so deeply with me is that his instructions for rejecting and dismantling tyranny are completely in line with the trainings that I do on authentic leadership. I remind participants in my trainings that trust is built in thousands of tiny moments of interaction. Good leadership is rarely about grand gestures. It’s found in the day in/day out conversations we have and decisions we make.

Snyder writes, “The minor choices we make are themselves a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. In the politics of everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.” Yes! Whether its Stalin using proganda posters portraying prosperous farmers as pigs, or Trump telling us that immigrants are rapists and murders, these messages are meant to signal to us that it’s okay to dehumanize others. Snyder: “A neighbor portrayed as a pig is someone whose land you can take.” So, too, an immigrant who you’re taught to fear is someone you can attack physically.

He ends this chapter by reminding us of Czech dissident Vaclav Havel’s words about complicity and propping up a regime. Under tyrannous governments, citizens are asked to display signs of loyalty. Some citizens will choose to adopt them—not because they believe in them or the regime—but because they want to be left alone. They want to carry on life as before, and if the price is to post some propaganda slogan in the window of their shops, they will do it so they can steer clear of the authorities. But this desire to be left alone, to not fight or stand up against tyranny, allows the regime to dig its roots deeper.

“[B]y accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game, [it makes it possible] for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place,” said Havel. Snyder reminds us that we don’t need to play the game.

Havel gave the commencement address for one of my graduate degrees in 1995. Snyder’s book reminded me to go back and re-read the speech. He ruminated on the task for politicians in the modern age: “Their responsibility is to think ahead boldly, not to fear the disfavor of the crowd, to imbue their actions with a spiritual dimension…to explain again and again—both to the public and their colleagues—that politics must do far more than reflect the interests of particular groups or lobbies. After all, politics is a matter of servicing the community, which means it is morality in practice.”

Both citizens and politicians bear the responsibility of fighting tyranny. Use the power we each have for justice, for good, for the very future of our democracy.

This morning I did something I should have done years ago: I took my run in just my jog bra and shorts. How revealing that I waited until middle age to do this. It’s true what my friends have said about claiming middle age–you can become more fierce, fearless, and free. 

It was just too damn hot and sticky and my high-tech wicking shirt couldn’t keep up with my perspiration. I felt like I’d been covered up in Saran Wrap. The discomfort was finally enough for me to overcome my lingering body insecurity. In a fit of desperation, I whipped off the shirt and tucked it behind me in my waistband like a fox tale. My skin instantly felt better, and it isn’t hyperbole to say my spirit felt like it was starting to soar.

Like a lot of people, I have long held “issues” with my body. I was a chubby, asthmatic kid who was called “heavy hitter” in middle school because I was an excellent batter but was on the thicker side. It wasn’t until my late 20s when I finally settled into the body I now inhabit. But despite having plenty of time to make peace with this body, lingering insecurity remains.

How freeing, then, to fully embrace the strength and power of my body and full self and to run down the road feeling sun and wind on my chest and stomach.

I am not a fast runner. My spouse and I always joke that in long distance road races we finish “at the front of the middle at the back of the pack.” So, the feeling of freedom was not about speed or grace. It was about declaring a brief reprieve from self-criticism. It was about saying, “I’m enough. Just as I am.”

In a week in which radio “personality” Rush Limbaugh said Americans had gone soft in regard to the pandemic and should become more like the infamous Donner Party of 1846-1847, I shouldn’t be surprised by anything–ever–anymore. For those who have forgotten this grisly chapter of U.S. history, members of the Donner Party resorted to cannibalism when they got trapped by deep snows in the Sierra Nevadas. This gasbag wants us to “adapt” more to the pandemic. Agreed! Let’s be mildly inconvenienced and wear masks and wash our hands. I don’t think I need to resort to eating my parents.

The highlighting of the Donner party’s, er, “adaptations” by Limbaugh was not the only utterly absurd move by Team Trump this week. In an unprecedented, shocking move (How many more times are we going to have to say that during this administration?), Trump used the White House Rose Garden for a campaign speech. Please close your eyes and imagine what would have happened if President Obama had made such a move. Okay, never mind. Silly exercise. Obama and his team would never have cheapened that setting–a place were President Kennedy welcomed home the Project Mercury astronauts and where presidents since Herbert Hoover have held actual press conferences.

It was billed as a “press conference.” But Trump actually took only a handful of questions over the course of nearly an hour in which he rambled–truly incoherently at times–and attacked his opponent, Joe Biden. He turned a supposed news conference on China into a campaign event. Trump and his aides were clearly disheartened by needing to cancel the NH rally scheduled for this week due to fear of poor attendance.

Here’s a bit of Trump’s drivel so that you can get a feel for the vibe in the Rose Garden yesterday:

He said: “Sign new immigrants up for welfare immediately. This is Joe Biden. So they walk off and they come in and they put a foot into our land, and we sign up new immigrants up for welfare. We sign them up immediately. They get welfare benefits. United States citizens. Don’t get what they’re looking to give illegal immigrants. Think of that. Sign up. It’s hard to believe I’m even reading that, new immigrants for welfare immediately. Not to mention the cost of this which is incalculable. The cost of this is so crazy. End requirement for immigrant self-sufficiency and maximize their welfare. Now, this is us writing this. Who’s not coming to the United States? Every person from South America is going to pour in. Every person from other countries, they’re going to be pouring in. End requirement, think of that, for immigrant self-sufficiency and remember to maximize welfare. So we give it a maximum. Then we have massively expand immigration during a global pandemic, taking jobs from unemployed Americans. End all travel bans including from Jihadist regions. So now we have travel bans. A lot of you said I didn’t get the travel ban and you were wrong. We got the travel ban. We lost in the Ninth Circuit. We lost again in the Ninth Circuit. And then we won in the Supreme Court. We have a very strong travel ban, and we don’t want people that are going to come in and blow up our cities, do things.”

What. The. Actual. Hell.

But I think my favorite part was when Trump said Biden was hellbent on eliminating…windows! Trump tore into Team Biden’s climate action plan that had been released earlier in the day. He asserted that Biden’s plan for reaching net-zero carbon emissions for all new building construction by 2030 “basically means no windows, no nothing.”

I love/hate that CNN needed to put this disclaimer at the bottom of this quote in its analysis of the speech: “That is also nonsense. Buildings with a whole bunch of windows can have net-zero emissions, which means they produce as much renewable energy as the energy they consume. And the task force’s proposal wouldn’t mandate net-zero buildings; rather, this would simply be a “national goal.”

I think we’re past time when the press should simply walk out on the president’s “press conferences.” This event was absolutely not news. It was a crappy campaign speech and a visious diatribe against a perceived enemy. We’ve reached the point at which the free press is being held captive by the Trump cult. The longer reporters stay to watch this theater of the absurd, they stop being our eyes and ears and start serving as an unwitting arm of the president’s propaganda machine.

This morning a friend sent me a comment she’d posted in response to a nasty post on her FB page about me. It was in response to a recent VTDigger article about my intention to run for Pro Tem of the Senate. The reader said I was selfish and disingenuous. (Keep in mind that he’s never actually met me.) So, what’s he basing this on? Apparently, my LGBTQ identity means I’m both selfish and disingenuous. Also, I’m “an affront to creation and family” and somehow–by the very fact of my identity–I’m not a critical thinker. Huh.

As a queer woman, I’ve been called a lot of nasty things in my life, but “not a critical thinker?” Them’s fighting words!

It’s funny what remarks get under my skin. The homophobia is so very old hat that it feels hackneyed and pathetic. And the sexism, well, that’s part of every day life for every woman in this country. If I let that get me down, I’d never leave my house or go onto the internet. But having someone challenge my ability to reason and hold multiple perspectives–that really angered me.

What I’m working on this morning is to use this absurd criticism–by someone who is a complete stranger to me–to my best advantage. What we can’t live with (what we can’t examine) is the thing that will ride us. So today, I am going to shine a light on my ability to reflect, to question, and to entertain the thought that I might be wrong about something. It’s actually a really fun exercise. And although I’m not too excited about the messenger or the very public nature of his unfounded criticism of me, I can repurpose his anger and intolerance to suit MY needs.

This post came on the same day that a good friend of mine, who is also an elected official, reached out to me in anguish and anxiety about the nastiness of her current run for re-election. This woman is smart as a whip, is kind and altruistic, and is a hard worker–the kind of Vermonter we want in public service. She is seriously considering leaving public office after this term because she hates the unfounded public attacks about her personally–not about her political stances or policies.

She’s feeling debilitated by these attacks, and some friends and colleagues want her to get “a thicker skin.” I know they are well-meaning, but I don’t think she needs a thicker skin. I know I don’t want a thicker skin. I don’t want to stop feeling. I don’t want to become numb or inured. I want to keep my big heart open to the world most of the time and only “armor up” when I absolutely need to. It’s not easy to do this. But it’s the only way I can do this work and maintain a sense of self. It’s the only way I WANT to do this work.

We are now watching the horrible sight of Trump lackeys who’ve truly lost all shame. I keep thinking about that famous quote from attorney Joseph Welch during the McCarthy Hearings concerning the U.S. Army and whether it had been infiltrated by Communists. Welch said to Senator Joseph McCarthy, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

This is exactly how I felt when I watched Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson hurl pathetic, outrageous insults at Senator Tammy Duckworth last week. Duckworth, a decorated veteran who lost both her legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq, was accused by Carlson of “hating America.” Why? Because she simply said a national dialogue would be appropriate for discussing whether or not to take down statues of slave-owning Founding Fathers. He called her a fraud, a callous hack, a moron, deeply silly, unimpressive, and likened her to a child. But the most eyebrow-raising insult was when he called her “a coward.” That’s rich, Tuck. You, who never served in the military, is calling Duckworth a coward?

Duckworth’s response was pure gold: “These titanium legs don’t buckle.” She also pointed out the sort of people that seem to be making these vicious attacks. They’re made by “self-serving, insecure men who can’t tell the difference between true patriotism and hateful nationalism.” She continued, “[They] will never diminish my love for this country–or my willingness to sacrifice for it so they don’t have to.” Tucker Carlson is the perfect unapologetic mouthpiece for an administration headed by the consummate chickenhawk.

I am not a first-time blogger. And I’m not new to published writing. I’ve written an op-ed column for over eight years in one of the newspapers in my senatorial district in Vermont. I estimate that the words in all my columns total up to nearly a quarter of a million words. That’s a lot of ideas and opinions! But the thing is, when I first started writing my column, I REALLY feared that I wouldn’t be able to come up with a new idea every single week.

Turns out, I’m very opinionated.

So, this beginning is not a beginning as a writer. It’s also not a beginning for me as a public figure. I’m currently running for my 4th term in the Vermont Senate, and–as Majority Leader–I’m in the press fairly often. I’ve had to work through the discomfort of being so very public and of being a target of criticism by complete strangers–some of whom say nasty things about me or my ideas. That hasn’t stopped me. And it hasn’t turned me into a bitter, hardened person. I’m strong, but my skin is not thick.

I still believe in the power of authentic, vulnerable leadership.

This blog is about merging all the different parts of Becca Balint: historian, politician, coach, writer, activist, mom, and leadership trainer. It’s about YES/AND, not EITHER/OR. I’m a fiercely loving leader who believes we all are flawed and incredibly talented. The tension between the two is the very stuff of life.

I’ll share my thoughts, strategies, opinions and perspectives. And I give you full permission to do the same. Let’s see where this all leads, together.