On the surface Al Franken and Roy Moore have a lot in common. Both are white men. Both are politicians who have recently been accused of sexual assault. Indeed, both may soon appear before the same Senate Ethics Committee.

But they are different in a way that may be difficult to see because of other superficial differences. Some may say the difference is that Moore is from the South and Franken from the North. Or that they are from different parties, or that one is a pedophile and the other is not. Or that one admits his offences and the other does not. These are not trivial differences but they are not the essential one that I hope we can more and more as a society come to see and to appreciate.

I share some important attributes with them. I am also a straight white property owning male who enjoys good health and a comfortable life. While I am not a politician I have some social status that I enjoy and wish to protect. I am pretty sure that the essential distinction that differentiates them would be one that would be invisible to me were it not for my association with Brothers in Change.

In the late 1970’s I became aware of an organization in St. Louis that was doing some fascinating work around the issues facing men and how we are shaped by our culture. It grew out of a national conference on Men and Masculinity held in St. Louis a couple years earlier. The community of men that had produced the conference determined to continue the work they had started.

I was quite powerfully drawn to this community of men. I was in a fraternity in college that gave me a sense of community but with it an identity that I wore like an ill-fitting suit. Brothers in Change was a group of men I admired doing work I found valuable. They hosted a film series on sexual politics followed by discussion. A cadre of the men volunteered to do childcare for local women’s events. They examined men’s use of pornography and they tried to understand the root causes of men’s violence against women. And they offered a very comprehensive training program for men who wanted to join the effort. It required attending a 40-hour training in a small group which extended over several weekends. I signed up.

The training process included reading articles and viewing films and discussing the implications of this material on our personal lives. We were expected to talk about our feelings. I had never been in a community of men which had this level of self-examination and self-disclosure. Among the many benefits of completing the training, the most visible was that it allowed one to join the volunteer staff of the organization.

But completing the training was not just about warming the seat for 40 hours. There was something else that was required of us…and this is the core point to my story. In order to complete the training and join the staff we each had to acknowledge our own abuse. Not the abuse done to us. The abuse we do to others, especially to women.

Most of the men had not done things that could be considered criminal abuse, though some had. But all of us were privileged by our education and our class but especially by our sex. Whether or not we had personally used physical violence in a relationship with a women, we all benefited by the presence of domestic violence. We were all, in some sense, the perpetrators of abuse.

In the years since my participation with that progressive fraternity I have come to see some things a bit differently. We were then more attentive to maleness as a source of oppression than we were to whiteness. But the question of what constitutes abuse has remained central for me.

I went on to work as a psychotherapist with offenders in the fields of sexual abuse and domestic violence intervention. The question of what we mean by abuse is quite crucial to helping men and women change how we construct our most primary of relationships. Even today there is not a clear consensus of what that word means.

Words are tools and the tool you select is tailored to the task at hand. If the task is to determine whether the state has the right to intervene in a family or to arrest someone because of their behavior, you will chose a different meaning than if you are trying to support development of healthy relationships. For the purposes of my work, we looked for a way to name what we do when we are harming others, the relationship, and even ourselves.

When we use the power we have over another to satisfy our own desires at the expense of another we are committing “abuse.”

I sometimes get disagreement from my colleagues about this definition so I don’t want to imply that it is accepted in the field. The major problem most people have with this way of understanding abuse is that it fails to differentiate between abusers and non-abusers. We very much want to believe that there are good people and bad people… and we are the good people.

Those of us who have clarity about our own behavior know we act in ways that use our power over others to satisfy some wish we have and in the process do harm. I never understood child abuse until I had children.

So the difference between Roy Moore and Al Franken is not that Al knows what he did and Roy does not. It is not that one is an abuser and the other is not. None of us is “an abuser.” We are all people who are capable of abuse. There are no bad people. But all people are capable of bad action. “All sin and fall short…”

No, the crucial, the essential difference is in how Mr. Moore and Mr. Franken see themselves. Roy insists he is incapable of bad action. Al knows he is. And in that is all the difference. Roy has nothing to atone for and thus nothing to fix. Al is now and for some time has been working to address the injustices that befall the victims of abuse… criminal abuse. He knows his feet are made of clay.

The list of powerful men who have sexually abused women grows longer each day and we wonder if there are any men who don’t belong on it. If we are honest with ourselves, we all do. Not that we all have women in our lives who will rise to publicly confront us. But we have all used the power that we have as men, and that certainly includes sexual power, to satisfy our desires and, in the process done harm to women. The essential difference is that some of us know that and some of us don’t.

We didn’t elect Donald Trump as our President because we thought he would fix things. We elected him because we knew he would break things. At some point that task will be completed and we will have to start rebuilding. We will have to remove him.

It may take four years when we elect someone else. It may only take until the 2018 elections when we have reconstituted the Congress such that we can impeach him. Or it may come to the awareness of the Republican Party that they cannot allow him to remain in office without doing fatal damage to the party. Indeed, they may have no hope for re-establishing credibility with the American people unless they are willing to protect us from him.

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Each person has the option of choosing to feel better or to better feel. The more mature option is to allow our pain to teach us about what we need and to motivate us to improve our lives. We use the anxiety to bring our attention to an issue and to explore it until we understand how to address it and then fix it and get pleasure from a sense of mastery and the absence of the pain we were in.

But from time to time we are so overwhelmed by the anxiety and have so little hope that we can address it that we say, “screw it,” and just grab a beer or a donut or some porn. Instead of struggling to “better feel” we just do what will make us “feel better.”

That is what we did when we elected Donald Trump. Coal miners in West Virginia didn’t think that Trump would bring back their jobs, but they liked the fact that he was expressing outrage over the loss of them. They just wanted someone to “drain the swamp.” By now it is very clear that he has no intention of draining the swamp. Rather he is importing the alligators.

But these alligators will break the system. They will quickly and effectively make the system so dramatically dysfunctional that we will have to scrap it and start over. It will be beyond repair. At that point we will, as the person who has “acted out,” discover that we have “hit bottom,” in the parlance of addition recovery. We will marshal our resources to the point that we no longer take the easy out and instead do the hard work of rebuilding.

The tasks of rebuilding are not going to be possible in the presence of a corrupt system. By no objective definition of corruption can one argue that Hillary Clinton is more corrupt than Donald Trump. That is going to be even more apparent as soon as he is sworn in [in five days as I write this].

Corruption is when one uses the power one is entrusted with for the benefit of another to benefit oneself instead. Accepting bribes is a prime example. But so is when elected officials use the power of their office in ways that benefit the party over the interests of the people. So, yes, we have a corrupt federal government.

The promise of a Trump Presidency is that it will make the corruption so evident that we cannot ignore it any longer and will finally act to change the system. We will begin to demand that our political parties actually serve the people over their own petty interests. We will actually drain the swamp.

I am quite confident this will happen at some point. We cannot continue to damage our internal organs with our dependency on intoxicants like promises we know cannot be kept and which are ultimately unjust. At some point we will grow up and realize that we each have a responsibility to the all that requires that we pay taxes and care for each other and no longer expect the community to do more for us than we are willing to do for it. That day will come and it will come sooner for the folly that is our election of Donald Trump.