Bridging the political divide [PODCAST]

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“Where do we go from here? Conventional wisdom suggests that we can only transform ourselves. This is why I propose that we attempt to recognize the Trump that lies within each of us and to heal him. We are plagued not just by the pandemic but by the human condition—and no part of us should be left behind. We often persuade ourselves we have outsmarted the Leviathan by traveling to a far-off land, only to find that the beast followed by sea, swimming clumsily but steadily along in our wake.”

Beck Ballentine is an internal medicine physician.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “Recognize the Trump that lies within each of us and try to heal him.”

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show we have Beck Ballentine. She is an internal medicine chief resident, and she wrote the KevinMD article “Recognize the Trump that lies within each of us and try to heal him.” Beck, welcome to the show.

Beck Ballentine: Thank you so much for having me.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into your article in a little bit, but first off, can you share your story and journey to where you are today?

Beck Ballentine: So I grew up in an intentional community dedicated to yoga science and philosophy in rural Pennsylvania. Later we moved to New York. I left high school when I was about 16 and never went back, but I did go to college. I went to St. John’s College out in Santa Fe. It’s a great books program. I became sort of fascinated with everything at that point. And after that, I did a master’s in education, which I did part of in Pennsylvania and another part in Guadalajara, where I learned a little bit of Spanish. And then eventually I ended up going to medical school in Cuba, where I had a very fascinating six years.

When I returned from Cuba, I had some trouble getting a medical residency. As you know, it’s difficult for international medical graduates. So I started a little nonprofit organization and created a learning center in my hometown, and I was just doing kind of a social justice curriculum for young kids, like 9 to 14 years old. After that, I was living in an eco village in North Carolina for a while, studying sustainability and permaculture, things like that. And I decided at that point, after having applied to the Match several times, “Well, if I’m not going to match, then I’ll go back to school.” I went to San Francisco and started a PhD program in philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness at the California Institute for Integral Studies.

I was just finished with the basic requirements, and I was beginning to start to write my comprehensive exams when Trump got elected. At that point I felt like, “OK, I really need to get more involved. I need to get out of the sort of thinking and philosophizing realm and into the action realm.” So I applied to be an administrator at the university, and the chair of my department, Robert McDermott, who has been a great mentor to me, said, “I really don’t think you should do this. I think you should go back to medicine, because even for us,” meaning the people at the top of the academic world, “medicine is really the max. It’s the absolute best thing you can do.”

So at that point I reached out to the hospital that I’m at now as a resident, and I was lucky enough to finally be accepted into residency, and it was a big deal for me. Getting back into the medical practice, I realized it was really a vocation for me, and I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to return to it.

Kevin Pho: Now, you just described such a rich and long journey to where you are today as a physician. You mentioned a few times your background in philosophy. Can you explain how that background has influenced who you are as a physician?

Beck Ballentine: Well, I think for me, because philosophy is such a big part of who I am, or my study of philosophy, I’m maybe more likely to sort of stop and consider what I’m doing in a different way. So the ethics of medicine are very important to me. I’ve been doing some study of bioethics. There’s an institute for bioethics here, which is a collaboration between Einstein and Cardozo Law School, and I’ve been studying with Dr. Tia Powell, who’s really a superstar in that area.

And I guess what brought me back to medicine finally was that medicine, in a way, for me, is the most integrative discipline, and I really hope to do a sort of transdisciplinary project at some point. I think that medicine is a really good medium for that, because medicine can contain anything that relates to the human being, and that’s a lot of things. So between the ethics and the opportunity to do more transdisciplinary work in communities, I think that philosophy is at the core of my medical practice, for sure.

Kevin Pho: You mentioned that bioethics certainly is an area of interest, and during the pandemic there is no shortage of bioethical quandaries. Now, over the past year, what would you say is the biggest ethical quandary that the pandemic has brought on the medical profession in general?

Beck Ballentine: Well, I actually wrote a much lengthier paper on the subject of the surge and the different ethical quandaries that we ran into at that time. There were so many of them, as you said. It’s hard to pick one. But I think there was a moment there where everyone was dying no matter what we did, and we were running back and forth, just trying to get the very minimal things done, just to try to keep people alive, just to try to maintain the status quo. And then still, I was working, at one point, seven days a week, and I still couldn’t. And I remember calling my mom at one point, and I was crying, and I said, “Mom, I don’t know what to do. There’s nothing I can do. They’re just dying, and there’s nothing I can do.”

And I think that it speaks to what ZDogg kind of calls moral injury, which is that when you’re faced with this kind of really overpowering situation, where all these things are happening which create these ethical conflicts inside of you, you start to feel this despair. And my mother said, “If there’s nothing else you can do, just call their families and talk to their families.” And that’s what I ended up doing, and I think that was the most powerful thing that I did, because to this day I still hear from those families. People who have lost family members, it was such a difficult time for them. It was such a difficult time for us. And they still reach out to me, and they say, “I’m so grateful for everything that you did.” And for me that’s so moving, because even though I wasn’t able to save their family members, I think that it still came through to them, the love that we were putting into our work.

Kevin Pho: So let’s transition now into your KevinMD article, and it’s titled “Recognize the Trump that lies within each of us and try to heal him.” One of the aspects of the pandemic, of course, is that so many areas of it have been politicized, and just a mention of the former president’s name is going to elicit a reaction on both sides of the political spectrum. Now, for those who didn’t read the article, can you just walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it?

Beck Ballentine: I first started to feel the desire to speak up about this shortly after the election. At that time I was still in San Francisco, and I noticed that the people around me were people who believed themselves to be very kind and compassionate, and I also felt that I was surrounded by a community of kind, compassionate, loving people who were trying to sort of transcend divisions and heal conflicts and so on and so forth. I think that the election of Trump took a lot of those people who were in a sort of loving and compassionate place and threw them into this place of feeling like they were in opposition to something in such a strong way that they kind of became possessed by anger, and even, in some cases, what I would almost call hatred.

And when I saw that happening, and even felt that to some degree happening inside of myself, I just started saying in my classes, I would say to people, “No, no, stop. We have to love Trump. We must love Trump.” And they were like, “Look, you’re crazy. We can’t love Trump. He’s a despicable, disgusting human being.” And nevertheless I felt like, because we have that feeling, it’s exactly because of that revulsion and disgust that it’s imperative that we find a way to re-center ourselves in a place of love.

And it brought to mind this quote that my PhD advisor, Sean Kelly, had shared with us, and which I put at the beginning of the paper, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from “The Gulag Archipelago”: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

I always found that quote very powerful, because it really sort of describes how there are not good guys and bad guys. We are all good guys and bad guys at one moment or another. When this election took place, it polarized us so much. And I guess as a physician, one of the most important things, as I had said, is ethics, and part of that is you don’t discriminate against anyone: your religion, the color of your skin, your belief system, your politics. All of that is really relevant to me. When I go to treat a patient, I do it with love. And sure, maybe there are some times where you get into a situation where you’re like, “Oh, OK, how do I navigate this?” But you do it. You try to do it with an open heart.

And I think the point I was trying to make in this article was really that we owe it to each other as a society, not just as a U.S. society but as an international society, to kind of transcend these conflicts and learn how to treat each other with love. Because ultimately this kind of position that we take against each other, it’s not furthering, it’s not benefiting us, and it’s not benefiting the more helpless people in the world who are kind of falling victim to the consequences of our conflicts.

Kevin Pho: One of the trends over the past five years, even before President Trump, was that each side of the political spectrum saw each other more as the enemy, where if one side gained, the other side would lose, and that message of unity in the middle often was getting lost. And of course now, with the advent of social media, and of course with President Trump, those divisions, as you said, have been getting further and further apart. Against that backdrop, you said that we should love the other side, or progressives should love Trump. How do you go about doing that? How would you be able to sell that to someone who was fervently anti-Trump?

Beck Ballentine: Well, if you read the comments that were written about my article, both on KevinMD and on MedPage Today, where it was subsequently republished, it was a difficult argument to make, and there were a lot of people who were very deeply offended by it. I guess my feeling is we’re all responsible for part of this apparition that is Trump. I know he’s a real person, but there’s a whole kind of magical, dynamic image that has evolved through the media and through this sort of collective mind that we have that isn’t really him. It’s really made up of the parts of us that we don’t want to look at. So we’re putting them out there so that we can point the finger at them and we don’t have to take responsibility for them. But if we do that, it’s kind of impossible to heal.

So I think it has to do with, and I haven’t perfected the art by any means, but I think it has to do with just sort of honestly sitting back and saying, “OK, what part of this apparition can I reclaim and take responsibility for and try to come to peace with within myself? What part of this thing that I’m pointing the finger at is really me? And can I just forgive myself and try to take a different approach?”

I think Martin Luther King has a lot to say on this subject, and he’s been a big part of what’s going on lately. He’s been quoted by so many people. But this idea of transcendence, it requires a kind of humility and an acceptance that we’re really all part of the same being, and Trump is part of that being too. And so, if nothing else, at least I can begin to say, “This is what I want to do,” and then start walking toward it. And if I don’t get all the way there, then at least I was moving in that direction.

Kevin Pho: Now, about 40 percent of the country supports President Trump, and of course healing those divisions also needs to be applied to both sides. So what will your message to Trump supporters be in order to help heal that divide?

Beck Ballentine: So that’s at the end of my article. I say, “Trump, I love you. There’s a place for you at my table.” As I say that, it’s difficult to say that, right? And a lot of people, when they read that, became very upset by it. But this idea that there needs to be a place at the table for everyone, you can’t leave anybody behind. This splitting between the good guys and the bad, as you know, is a defense mechanism, and it’s not the most mature defense mechanism. What I would say to those people is, “There’s a place for you at my table. Let’s sit down. Let’s talk. Let’s learn about each other.” We’re all part of the same community and the same family, and I think that compassion and kindness and love are really the way to go about this. Because the more violent, aggressive kind of energy we put into this situation, the more polarized it becomes. And we’re going to have to learn to live together, because we’re a family. That’s the bottom line.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Beck Ballentine. She is an internal medicine chief resident, and she wrote the KevinMD article “Recognize the Trump that lies within each of us and try to heal him.” Beck, I think what you’re saying sometimes is difficult, as you can tell from the comments, for a lot of people to hear. Now, for those clinicians and non-clinicians who may be listening to this podcast, what would you say are some actionable tips on how we can handle people who don’t agree with us, people on the opposite side of the political spectrum from us? What were some actionable tips that you could recommend to my audience?

Beck Ballentine: So if I’m approaching somebody who isn’t with the program, as it were, especially in my practice in the hospital, I guess what I try to do is I try to feel my way into how they’re feeling and get into that space with them, and kind of reflect it a little bit, use the same kind of language that they’re using, the same talk, basically, on the same level with them, and then try to find our way out of it together.

Yeah, I think, in a way, as a physician, there is a shamanic element to it, where you’re helping people navigate. How do you move across the line between life and death? How do you, all these different things. But you have to be courageous enough to step into the place where they are in order to help figure out how to get out of that place. So if you’re too kind of cut off from what’s going on with them, it makes it difficult to get into that space and help them navigate it. And it is scary, because maybe you feel like you might lose yourself. But I think there’s a way to be centered in yourself, and not to lose your center, but also to sort of have that generosity of spirit that allows you to enter into the place where someone else is, emotionally and mentally, and then help guide them into a slightly different place. That’s what I would try to do.

Kevin Pho: And my final question: What’s your take-home message that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Beck Ballentine: I thought a lot about that, and I guess I’ve already said it several times, but for me the take-home message is love. It’s a really simple thing. It sounds kind of like a simpleton’s approach, but I think that sometimes the simpleton’s approach is the best one. Just try to come from a place of love, and maybe we can get out of this mess together.

Kevin Pho: Beck, thank you so much for sharing our time and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

Beck Ballentine: Thank you.

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