As individuals, things occasionally go awry. Our life tosses us a lemon and the making of lemonade out of it does not seem possible. We encounter loss, or a career setback, marital conflict, “acting out” children, or an illness and it seems like impending doom is near. Something akin to this was underway with Emily Dickinson when she coined that expression, “a splinter in our brain” which I use so often. In my clinical background I worked with clients who could be described as having one of those “splinters” wreaking havoc, or at least some distress in their life. They, or their parents, or the school, or the legal system noted something awry and referred them to me for counseling. But what would often stand in the way of any resolution was an unwillingness to acknowledge, “Houston, we have a problem here.” For, blaming someone else for our woes is a common human response; in some sense our culture teaches our children to resort to this avoidance mechanism.

“Houston,” my country “has a problem.” I could then immediately blame Trump and his disciples but I recognize he is but a symptom. Here I will not focus on the Republican Party, for which he is the mouthpiece of all they refuse to acknowledge; but, this can also be said about our entire country. Our country has allowed a “cancer to grow in the White House” just as in the Nixon era but we are stymied from a simple extirpation of the cancer. In the Nixon Watergate drama, it was Nixon’s own Republican Party who had the courage and patriotism to go to Nixon and tell him, “You gotta go.” There is no one in the GOP that has the courage to confront this tyrant though, and the GOP acts as a deterrent for any Democratic intervention. Consequently Trump is doing as his niece recently said he would do after losing the election, spending his time “breaking things.” That is a common response for any two-year old who is being denied any of his baubles, especially the comfort of thinking, “the world is my oyster.”

This tragedy has helped me to realize that my country’s narcissism and arrogance is being put on display for the entire world. This is not to trash my beloved country, but simply to recognize the very human-ness of our history and the present-moment we are living out. We humans have a tendency to think “it is all about me” even if this arrogance might be camouflaged in religious piety, aka “hypocrisy.” It is very challenging to allow this truth to sink into one’s heart, especially if piety has been his modus operandi most of his life–“c’est moi,” I confess! I am currently reading Barak Obama’s marvelous new book, “The Promised Land” and he is very open in sharing about the dark side of his ascendency to the world stage. This is because he has the humility to permit “internal dialogue” with himself, that quality which Hannah Arendt in “Life of the Mind” explains was egregiously absent in people like Adolph Eichmann. This “internal dialogue” with oneself makes it possible to engage in dialogue with other people, even those with a different perspective on life, and seek common ground. A brickbat is thereby thrown at the tyranny of certainty. And those of us who have to confront one of those “splinters” in our brain will often live through the experience of “brickbatting.”