Seven "C's" of Effective Communication

 In a webinar that I recently attended, the speaker listed "Seven C's of Effective Communication."  I thought it was a good list.  Here they are: 

1. Clear
2. Concise
3. Concrete
4. Correct
5. Coherent
6. Complete
7. Courteous

What do you think?  

Pandemic as Opportunity?

The pandemic is tragic.  Nothing good can be said for it.  Nevertheless, it does give pause.  Pause, in itself, creates an unusual opportunity.  

The Emperor's Clothing Looks Deplorable

It's fair to say this pandemic is revealing the emperor's true clothing. Not just Trump's. Yours and mine, too. 

Just this very week, I saw a quote from someone who said, "We don't like Trump, but we like his policies." Trump does represent the policy of the Republican party, which obviously a large percentage of voters chose in the last election. So, now we all get to experience Trump's policies when the tire meets the road in pandemicland. 

For those who were comfortable and voted for Trump because they wanted to shake things up in Washington, the chickens are now coming home to roost. You wanted less government, you got it. It's readily apparent in the obvious lack of preparedness across the United States to respond to the pandemic. 

The stripping away of the ability of the federal government to deal with a pandemic did not happen by accident. 

HERE is an article from early 2018, describing the abrupt departure of the head of the White House Team in charge of USA pandemic response.  He "resigned" after having his department eliminated, and was forced out of his job by John Bolton. Trump, in closing this office, was doing exactly what you -- the Trump voters -- wanted. He shook things up! He "drained the swamp" (of expertise and career public servants). He "reduced the size of government!"

What the linked article shows is that Trump directly took action that deprived the federal government of its ability to anticipate, manage, and respond to a pandemic. (Yep, so STFU about blaming it on Obama, who is widely perceived outside the USA of having been instrumental in stopping the pandemic threat of Ebola in Africa, a move Trump tweeted wildly in opposition to when Obama was taking the anti-pandemic action.) This same general scenario, of stripping the power of government to protect human beings, has been played out by Trump and his cronies in every one of the United States federal administrative agencies. 

So, Trump supporter, this is why you voted for him, is it not?  You've been happy to see a concerted, deliberate strategy of stripping expertise and crippling agencies and emasculating the power of federal agencies whose regulations were pesky to business and libertarians. 

The Republican philosophy is to let mega corporations have whatever they want. Give them tax cuts, get rid of regulations, in order to enable them to profit their shareholders. Don't even mention what happened in protecting democracy from Russian meddling, in foreign policy, in the Justice Department, the FBI, the State Department. Beginning with Watergate and continuing through today, the Republican party has made a decision that it will do anything to stay in power, at any cost, even if keeping power means sacrificing the integrity of the electoral process.  

The goal has been to open the door to unfettered corporate control and activity in many areas: environmental protections, banking regulations, health and safety protection for workers, educational resources for students, disability rights (within weeks of Trump's election, guidance for parents of special ed students was wiped off the US Department of Education web sites), research on climate change (decades of climate data was literally wiped off federal computers). Governmental protections for human beings got in the way of that goal, and so became targets for deregulation. 

In almost every agency, the fox has been put in charge of the henhouse under the Trump administration. For example, Trump's present chief administrator of EPA is a climate denier who is a past vice president of the Washington, D.C. "Coal Club." Trump's chief administrator of the US Department of Education is a woman who has no credentials in education, who sent her own children to private school, and whose "charter school" policies she championed in her home state are associated with educational decline there. Career diplomats who have spent their lives becoming subject matter experts and who speak several languages are fired and replaced with political appointees. Every federal agency repeats this theme.

Trump supporters, you voted for this, did you not? You liked it! You felt you won something. Power! Vindication over the left-wing, snobby liberals who thought they knew everything and were trying to tell you what to do. To heck with the fact that maybe they do have expertise. 

In contrast to your exhilaration over your power, the experience for "liberals" who have been forced to watch this process unfold has been compared to feeling as if one were tied into a chair with their hands behind their back, in the same room with a toddler who was wielding a loaded gun. 

When you declared that you were deplorable and proud of it, you voted for the political party that supports cutting the social safety net out from under hungry children. You wanted drug testing for recipients, even though drug testing cost way more than the estimated cost of fraud, on account of the fact that you wanted to make sure  that not one undeserving person received one single penny. 

You might not have liked the idea of putting unaccompanied refugee children in cages, but you held your nose and thought it was justified. You might not have liked pulling the rug out from the Kurds as they fought our war on the battlefield, but hey, that's a long way away from here, and it cost a lot of money. (No matter that no ally will ever feel able to trust the USA again.) When our very own intelligence agencies said there had been foreign interference in our elections, you decided that overlooking it was an acceptable trade-off for having your candidate "win" the election.

Instead of investigating the meddlers, you supported demonization of career law enforcement officials at the FBI.
When evidence was produced that Trump conditioned aid for Ukraine on the shakedown of his personal political rival, you claimed it was fake news and (calling the investigation merely political grandstanding) put on blindfolds to make sure you didn't see it. When the US Supreme Court ruled that corporations had the same rights as people and could put unlimited slush fund "dark money" into political campaigns, you looked the other way and said the only litmus test for a Supreme Court Justice should be whether they would vote your way on the abortion debate.

In the meanwhile, you joked about me and other citizens who, in another era, you would have considered to be someone with whom you had a friendly political disagreement. Instead of making any effort to understand my concern, you decided to view me as some sort of a cartoon character demon who must be morally bankrupt or stupid, or both. You called me names like "libtard." You claimed that I was un-American and unpatriotic. You lied and claimed that I believe in killing babies (on account of the fact that I believe there are two lives at stake and that abortion decisions should not be dictated by men in suits and state capitols). You claimed that abortion was the same as genocide and that taking a morning-after pill was the same thing as killing a baby, and you claimed I supported killing babies. While deliberately misrepresenting my views, you claimed that abortion was singular, sole issue you cared about. 

In actuality, It appears to me, you could care less about the life of the woman who is pregnant. Why do I think this? Because it's obvious through the policies you support. You don't care whether she receives food or medical care or support to raise a child, or whether her child receives food or medical care or the things it needs for a healthy life. When you proclaim bright line views that all abortion should be prohibited, you indicate that you don't even care whether a woman lives or dies as a result of the pregnancy. And then, you have the gall, the unmitigated gall, to claim that you are "pro life." 

All of this, topped off with the icing on the cake: 

You lie and claim that everything I object to about these policies, and all my concern, arises merely because I have a personal hatred for Trump.

You have the gall to claim that  -- because I care about the life of the woman, because I care about voting rights, because I care about the environment, because I care about education, because I want all people to have access to medical care, because I want a social safety net -- that makes me a "hater."

You went even further than calling me, individually, a "hater," however.  You went so far as to say that news outlets that spoke the truth were engaging in "fake news," that they hated Trump, too. That somehow after decades and sometimes even centuries of being venerable, respected news outlets, that suddenly all the "mainstream news media" (you know, the ones that actually fact check) were part of a vast, left-wing conspiracy to undermine poor little Trump. Fox entertainment and its blowhard talking heads became the expert. (It's too bad you also believed it when FOX told you that this virus was fake, as well, because it's not, and that disinformation might cost someone their life.)

The fact is, I can't understand for the life of me why you aren't as concerned as I am to protect this government "of the people, by the people, for the people" that we have worked so hard to attain. Why do you not cherish our government, including the federal administrative agencies that conduct research and implement policy to keep us safe? Why do you not cherish the neutrality of the federal courts? Why do you not cherish the integrity of judicial, executive and administrative, and legislative processes? Why did you not care about the integrity of the voting process? I'm not claiming they're perfect (I'm not a fool), but this is the best we have. Our goal should be to make it better, not destroy the foundation that supports our free society. The integrity of our governmental system was hard won, fought for with blood. We protect it because we as a nation believe government should be "for" the people and protect people rather than for and by corporations. We protect voting rights and democratic processes because we believe that representation should not be corrupted by the powerful and privileged. 

Why do we value this? We value it because the bottom line is that when we provide equality under the law and meet human needs, we are treating others as we would want to be treated.

It is inescapable that public policy is a matter of morality. The way we vote is a direct expression of our values. 

But now the time of reckoning has come. The chickens have come home to roost, with regard to the morality of our social policy. The moral and practical consequence of how you voted is about to be directly turned back around to you. Congratulations! You won!

Through gerrymandering and voter suppression, Republicans have made it so in some places it takes as many as two Libtards to cancel out the vote of one Deplorable. Since you won in the gerrymandering department, you successfully elected Senators and Congressmen who have no concern for the vulnerable, who have no concern for the marginalized, who don't care about those who go hungry, who don't care about those who will die for lack of access to medical care, who don't care about those who will become homeless if they lose their job. Charity and GoFundMe work just fine for them, thank you. Go beg for some charity somewhere, you lowlife. 

Rah rah! Corporations got tax cuts. The social safety net got cut. Obamacare got gutted. Food stamps got cut. The Supreme Court got packed with ideologues. ( I'm not even going to go into the multi-decade consequences of that with regard to many aspects of human rights vs the rights of corporations and monied parties.) Even during this pandemic, the relief package passed by the Republican Senate included $500 billion dollars for corporate bailouts, while providing a one-time payment for ordinary people (who when they lose their jobs are also losing medical insurance) of maybe one month's average rent. 

You were happy to cut the social safety net for someone you cast aside disparagingly as a "moocher" -- someone down on their luck who needed medical care, who needed housing, who needed food. You didn't mind for hunger, lack of medical care, or homelessness to happen to someone else! You just never imagined that someone else would be you. Well, guess what. Now it might be you. Or your brother or sister or your parent or your child. Or your economy or your health care system. All of us are going to know someone soon who has no job, no income, no medical insurance, no way to pay for medical treatment, and no adequate response to the pandemic before us.

It has been said that judgment takes many forms. Sometimes judgment comes in the form of consequences for our actions. Reap as you have sown. 

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“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’"

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It's quite a paradox that the "least of these" that you were willing to ignore, just may be YOU, yourself, or your brother or your parent or your child, or your best friend. The time of reckoning has arrived.