Stars and Bars

 

Jacob grew up in town, was circumcised proper American, by a doctor in the city. Daddy taught him to shoot, like his daddy done, said “your gun is Freedom, boy; never let ‘em take it.”

Jacob painted a rebel flag on his first car, because mama told him “only hate those who hate freedom;” he thought he knew what that meant from TV.

But Rachel would point to the night from their bed on his hood at stars uncaptured by bars, but they winked too fast and far, so he wrestled with God till he knew which protesting city to point his Freedom at.

Dictators and their ships

 

I’ve studied history enough to recognize some patterns when I see them.  Here’s what I learned about dictatorships by studying others who have historically misused their political power:

• Dictators use their power to attempt to discredit or completely undermine any criticism of them, often attacking journalism that critiques their policies or exposes their mistakes.
• Dictators use their power to circumvent the law in order to excuse their cronies, for example, commuting the sentences of duly convicted criminals who show the dictator loyalty. 
• Dictators use secret police forces to circumvent the regional authority of political rivals in the name of “security”; these secret police often don’t identify themselves, gather citizens up who express dissent and hold them without clear charge or notification of families.
• Dictators use divisive rhetoric, implying—or stating outright—that those who side with him are the “good guys” while those who criticize him or are members of the opposing party are “radicals.”
• When there are elections present in the dictator’s country, Dictators make sure to cast doubt on the legitimacy of elections they expect to lose (or have lost), such as calling them “rigged.”
• FASCIST dictators use classic propaganda techniques, such as repeating simple phrases that demean their opponents (ex., “crooked Hilary,” “Sleepy Joe,” “Lying Ted”) without bothering to substantiate them with evidence.  Using simple, emotional appeals and repeating them often to reach “the least intelligent among the masses” is a technique straight out of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. (I’ll show you the passage if you’d like to read it.)
• FASCIST dictators make themselves appear larger than life and use savior rhetoric in order to portray themselves as the only solution to the country’s problems.  (The term fascism, as a political ideology, was coined by Benito Mussolini when he refined these methods to gain control of Italy in the 1920s).
• FASCIST dictators use a combination of nationalistic identity and scapegoating techniques to vilify a foreign enemy (or minority segments of their own population), creating some “Other” against whom the dictator can then generate hatred and mobilize violence.

These are pretty easily verifiable facts. If you study any dictator in history, anywhere in the world, you will probably find most of these techniques.  And it takes only a simple exercise of deductive logic to say “Political leaders who exhibit these behaviors are dictators; So-and-So exhibits these behaviors: therefore So-and-So is a Dictator (Fill in the name)." 

Here’s what’s baffling to me: the United States has historically fought wars against dictators abroad and has always held itself to be the champion of democracy and freedom in the world.  Yet I hear people (family and friends whom I respect) claiming to love these ideals while simultaneously ignoring—if not actively supporting—the techniques of dictatorship happening right here.  I don’t think I’m an alarmist, but I’m deeply worried that the US is tilting sharply toward dictatorship if not outright fascism.  

I’m happy to be transparent here: my bias (my leaning) is toward kindness, forgiveness, inclusivity, patient dialogue, and for these leanings I might be labelled a “liberal,” though I’m not sure what that means these days, any more than I know what “conservative” means.  To me, freedom isn’t something I hoard for myself.  My freedom is greater when it increases the freedom of others, and it is limited when it limits that of others.  It only has value when I’m exercising it to support the freedom of others, and therefore it’s as much about responsibility as it is about being able to do whatever the hell I want.  Democracy is about making sure that as many people as possible are well educated and informed and have as few barriers to their participation as possible.  (That’s also the theory of government historically referred to as “liberal democracy.”)

For these reasons, I offer up this brief reflection, in the hopes that we can increase our dialogues, and get to the heart of our values and real needs, both great and small.  Let me know if you disagree.

Some Inoculations Against the Thought-Virus

I’ve been thinking a lot about viruses lately.  Such tiny things, simple clumps of DNA or RNA—nothing more or less than fragments of the same material that makes all of life on this planet possible.  The same four nucleotide building blocks that, in almost infinite permutations, build the twisted ladder of our basic human identities.  This is almost certainly an over-simplification, but one of the ways viruses are so effective at propagating is that they can insinuate themselves into our cells, convince them that it’s okay that they’re there, it’s perfectly natural, maybe even necessary, and thus turn US into THEM.

All this we learn in 9^th grade Biology class, but recently I’ve started to think about them differently:  viruses are like ideas—little fragments of a larger identity, perhaps, or a not-yet concluded chain of logic unchecked for validity by observation or time.  Ideas, like viruses, have a way of wriggling into our psyches, into our identities, co-opting parts of our thought-processes so that we become sure, over time, that the idea is our own, a part of us. 

I’m an observer by nature (or perhaps I’ve been convinced of that by some infectious idea in my past).  As I’ve watched this Covid-19 pandemic unfold over the past months, I’ve noticed how fearful people have become, even panicked—and understandably, please!  I have grief and hope to spare for those hardest hit, the vulnerable Elders on the reservations and in care centers and crowded homes.  Death and loss walk the streets of the world freely this year.  But I can’t help but notice how even the idea of the virus has changed people’s behavior in unexpected ways.  Social distancing just makes good sense, as do hand-washing and masks, but sometimes as I walk through a sparsely-stocked grocery store I see folks who seem afraid to say hello from behind a mask, or even make eye contact, as if Covid might be transmitted this way: through the most innocuous and benign forms of human contact.  

I notice this in myself too, as I avert my gaze or give lots of extra space—it’s amazing how easy it is to feel somehow tainted.  And I wonder what the long-term consequences of this infection might be on our identities when so much of what makes us is human is contact: a pat on the back, a handshake, a hug.

I have long seen notions like racism and sexism, political and religious bigotry as thought-viruses—strange little incomplete fragments of consciousness that can only reproduce in a viable host, that slip in and start muttering instructions with the sound of our own voice, casting feverish Thems and Usses, and centuries of culturally transmitted diseases ensue.  Especially when our defenses are down, when we’ve been wronged or hurt or scared, when we’re young and impressionable, old and intractable, just plain run-down or—perhaps most often—we inherit a thought-virus from a parent, we become more readily susceptible and sickness takes root.

Alas, I’m not remotely wise enough to offer a cure—either for racism or this new, covidious fear of infection by glance—though perhaps there are inoculations. 

A healthy dose of humility is good medicine, I think.  We’re not nearly as in control of our surroundings (or ourselves) as we like to believe and we’re almost never right.  About anything.  Not completely anyway.  Also, since so many thought-viruses reproduce by convincing us that they’re a part of us, part of our genetic identity even, a fit and trimmed down ego is a much less hospitable host. 

And finally love, or if you prefer, compassion (which I think of as the act of broadening your identity to include others).  Like garlic, it’s a good immune-booster and great for your heart.

Democracy is Losing

I’ve been reading up a bit on the Founders, especially Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton.  I’ve been considering again some of their ideas that were so radical for white Europeans of the time, ideas like self-determination, inalienable rights and the experiment of a democratic state.  I enjoy trying to put myself into a mindset of the time: coming from the monolithic British Empire which held an unquestioning value that people who were born into money and title and privilege were inherently superior to those who were born peasants—even ordained by God to govern.  Remembering this context helps to remind me how radical it was at the time to propose that the common people could be trusted to govern themselves.  (Radical for white Europeans, that is—indigenous people all over the place generally had much more egalitarian views about individuals’ ability to manage their own affairs, though within the framework of a communal, rather than individualistic, culture. It's important to remember that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy had a well-functioning system that informed Ben Franklin's thinking in particular.)  And although I’m deeply critical of European culture, maybe because I’m critical of it, I’m also deeply grateful for this long experiment in democracy.  It was an attempt to thumb the collective nose at the Divine Right of Kings, at the millennia-old idea that there are simply those elite few who are fit to govern, and the rest are only fit to follow or feed those elite. 

I’m thinking of all this, of course, in the context of the United States of America circa 2020, in the midst of the most preposterous presidency I’ve seen in my lifetime, watching a diagnosable narcissist and apparently pathological liar take the reins of the experiment.  My point here is not to get bogged down in specific policies or agendas, but rather to look at the longer arc of history and give some voice to my deep concern that, in our current position in that long arc, democracy seems to be losing.

My first bit of evidence for this assessment is the failure of the Electoral College. Twice in my lifetime I’ve seen a President elected who did not win the majority of the popular votes, the most recent losing by more than 3 MILLION.  I’ve written about this before (SEE HERE), but as a brief recap, the electoral college was originally instituted as a means of preventing a mass of uneducated voters from being taken in by a smooth-talking populist who wasn’t really qualified to do the job.  Take, for example, this section from Alexander Hamilton’s argument for establishing the Electoral College in Federalist Papers 68:

“… the immediate election [of the President] should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station… A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.”

Essentially, the U.S. Founders, the greatest Euro-descended champions of democracy and self-determination at the time, still didn’t trust the people 100%.  Sure, arguments could be made—were made, and still are—that the Electoral College is a necessary ballast for the fact that large population centers tend to vote in a similar way, and often differently from the rural areas.  With the advent of mass media, however, and WIDELY diverse views within modern cities, this argument simply doesn’t stand up to the numbers anymore.  What’s worse, gerrymandering, the manipulation of voting districts by whatever party is in power at the moment, has become so rampant, so intricate and so corrupt, that it can literally change a district’s majority vote from one term to the next simply by remapping it.  This tactic has only come about because of the Electoral College.  If real democracy is to have a shot, this anachronistic system needs a serious overhaul.  Ironically, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently tweeted “I’m so glad the President and I agree that the Electoral College has got to go,” citing a 2012 tweet from Donald Trump in which he called the Electoral College “a disaster for a democracy.” (@AOC Aug 27, 2019).  I think that's funny, and telling.

Like many Americans my age, 9/11 inspired a whole new level of outrage at the state of our politics. While the attack itself was shocking and scary and sobering, it was the national response to it that freaked me out even more.  The sweeping additions to Executive power that ensued with Bush Jr.’s Trifecta of the Patriot Acts 1 and 2 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 caused an amount of power to shift into the hands of the Executive branch that was previously unprecedented in american history.  Essentially, they allow the President to name anyone or any organization a “terrorist” and therefore a military combatant and, with no evidence necessary, imprison them without charge or sentencing for an indefinite amount of time.  This is scary, it’s a direct outgrowth of the increasing power of the military-industrial complex and I worry that it’s only a matter of time before such power will be truly put to use by a despotic President.   However, as concerning as this is, for me it’s actually less alarming to me than the current state of media literacy among the average voter.

We are already surrounded by a cacophony of voices pointing to the schism that the U.S. finds itself in today, and many point to the media as one source of the split.  I don’t believe this stems from media outlets being more clearly split along ideological lines than before.  “The Media” is not, of course, a single entity or voice or even community, and I don’t buy into the too-easy binary of biases that separate Fox News from CNN, for example.  Those biases may be there, may have been there for a long time, and it certainly doesn’t help that we have a President now who is actively slandering news sources that criticize him and reinforcing his supporters’ beliefs that any report that doesn’t view him favorably must be fake or biased or inaccurate. But I don’t think even that, in itself, is the problem.  The problem is that Americans are getting dumber.  We have grown so intellectually lazy, have been so poorly educated in the concrete skills needed to critically read media sources, that we have become a nation of ideological lemmings only too eager to be led off a cliff.  So many voters can’t even give a clear definition of the word bias, much less identify their own.  If we don’t institute—and quickly—a massive effort to provide even basic media literacy skills, to deconstruct bias, assess reliability and seek out multiple sources to find the truth, we may be lost.

The bit of evidence for democracy’s endangerment that compels me the most is a less quantifiable one.  I hear it in conversations; I see it in social media comments more and more.  When I hear others like me lament the decline of democracy, I often see the counter—often from conservatives—that goes something like this: “Well, remember that the US isn’t really a democracy, it’s a republic.”  Many rural Republicans even campaigned during the 2018 midterms by consistently referring the "American Republic," clearly choosing the word  Republic as a sort of concerted rhetorical move.  The fact that this excuse has become so pervasive worries me a great deal.  It’s as if, with this oversimplified and facile distinction, people are giving up on the whole experiment the country’s founders embarked upon. Yes, of course, the U.S. was established as a (Democratic) Republic, in order to balance the need for practiced and expedient passing of laws, with the vigilant governance of the voting public who elect those law-makers.  But that was a compromise from Day 1.  Jefferson argued long and hard to have a true and full democracy, while others cautioned that the people were not quite ready for so much freedom and self-discipline.  And even with that historical context aside, this country has, for its entire existence, held itself up and been held up as an exemplar of democracy and individual rights around the world.  We have invaded unoffending sovereign nations—recently—on the pretext of establishing DEMOCRACY.  I would argue that the very purpose of this national experiment has all along been an attempt to keep nudging aside the barriers to the informed and engaged self-determination of the people, not to meekly turn away from them for the sake of semantics.

At this momentous point along the long arc of history, I think democracy is in pretty dire straits.  The middle class is getting strangled, and it’s difficult to ask people to do much more when they’re living without healthcare and working two and three jobs to pay their inflated mortgages.  At the same time, massive corporations and multi-billionaires have garnered more influence in Washington, more control of those very media outlets of deepening reds and blues, and more control over our educational institutions than ever before.  The Divide and Conquer strategy has always been a winning one for those with the wealth and the power, but if we are to keep this national experiment alive, if we are to prevent the hope of democracy from becoming lost, we really need to read critically and more, and get clear on what all this self-governing was supposed to be for.

Trimming Back the Alphabet

I've decided I've got a bone to pick with the alphabet.  The English language as a whole is due for a tune-up if you ask me, but I figure why not start with the building blocks and work out from there?

It's not English's fault really.  Any language is just a vessel humans use to communicate their ideas and their cute little aspirations toward meaning, and every vessel needs an overhaul from time to time.  Language evolves and changes with the humans who speak it, and as with most things human-- it generally does so totally unconsciously.  Since English has undergone so many mutations through migration, occupation, and conquest, it's picked up a lot of dust and modification along the way.  It's lost a lot too, probably for the better, like the informal 2nd person thou and thee-- that's right, those used to be the informal.  Most native English speakers seem to think that, just because they're archaic, they must have been formal.  Not so.  "You are" used to be formal and "thou art" what you might say to your kids and close friends. I'm not sure if it's for the best that we dropped the conjugated endings for most of our verbs ("Dost thou hear me?"), but it hath definitely simplified the grammar and madeth the language one of the easiest in the world to learn in that regard. Overall though, having been born a Germanic language as Anglo-Saxon, occupied by the Normans and picked up a lot of French, and therefore Latin, I'm afraid all of that muttery has resulted in a pretty slipshod alphabet and some totally whack spelling conventions and I think it's high time we made some adjustments.

Therefore, in order to streamline English for a new era, I propose the following:

The letter C is hereby expelled.  There's no use for the C.  I mean, sure, it's got a nice sexy curve to it, and it looks nice on the page, but it serves absolutely no function in the alphabet, except to complicate things unnecessarily.  It either makes the S sound or the K sound, can't seem to make up its mind, which confuses the crap out of little kids trying to learn to spell, and since we already have both an S and K doing their jobs, I say C has got to go.

The letter X-- also expelled.  For much the same reason as C, X is a totally unnecessary letter.  It even uses the same two letters as C but at the same time!  So, why not just use KS and shave another freeloader from the alphabet.  Granted, it would make signing legal documents even harder for the illiterate, but by making English easier to spell, I figure we can cut down on illiteracy and strike the problem at its heart.  We'll also have to find another way to mark things on a map, but that's really a small price to pay, and there's no reason X can't stick around as its own symbol, in maps and algebra, I just say stop befuddling the alphabet.  I mean, think of all those books for teaching toddlers how to read: with pictures of things that start with each letter-- they only have tired old X-Ray and Xylophone to choose from.  I think they'll be relieved.

W-- also cut.  I mean, it's bad enough that we seem determined to make U feel inadequate, that it's not good enough or strong enough to do its job in some uords and needs to be doubled.  . Uhat's more, we drau it as if it uere a Double V, uhich just adds body shaming to the hole abuse of U and I uon't stand for it anymore.  There's nouhere in the language that U can't do the job as a single, empowered letter, undoubled and proud. It just needs some solidarity from those of us who see the problem. And if ever it does need a little break, double O can serve just as ooell ooithout adding more klutter to the alphabet.

Limit the power of G.  On its own, I have no truk with G.  It's a fine letter, all kute and squiggly when it's small and growing up into a fine, stately sort of kapital letter with great kurves and buttresses.  But it has gained a bit too much freedom and power in the language and needs to be reined in a bit.  (Probably egged on by H-- see beloe).  Freedom, after all, is a fine and noble quality until it begins to infringe upon the freedoms and rights of others, and that's presisely uhat G had done to J.  I kan see no reason at all oohy any letter should make more than one sound.  Isn't the hole point of a letter that it is, like an atom, the most fundamental building block of a languaje?  And sinse the "juh" sound is perfektly well represented by the J, I demand that G immediately and forthuith be prohibited from the kind of kopyrite infrinjement that it has been engajed uith for so long.  Again, think of the children!  Please note, that also means we'll need to chanje the uay uee pronounse the very letter in the alphabet song.  Just think of the klarified butter, and it uill be fine.

Finally, Abolish GH.  This one is less about the alphabet and more about the languaje itself, but bear ooith me. For far too long, the GH konglomerate has held a komplete monopoly over all the unnesessary sounds in the languaje, overkomplikating simple sounds and konfounding the brightest young learners.  In the spirit of trust-busting, I say no more!  I mean, when you take into konsideration that "ough" alone kan make siks totally different sounds (rough, cough, thought, though, through, and bough) I think my point is made.  Sure, OU needs some work too, but, like EI, it's really that lurking GH konglomerate throwing its weit around that's the real problem, making things more difficult than they need to be.

It's true, such changes will not come easy.  No revolution of thot or kustom is born uithout its detraktors, and there uill most sertainly be some hoo kling to the oppressive imperialism of tradition.  It's also true that the changes I propose will ripple out and require a great deal more adjustments.  (I still haven't figured out how to spell the "chuh" sound without a C). But think of potential!  The hole "I before E" rule just got a lot simpler, sinse uee got rid of C, and "neighbor" and "weigh" won't have to be mere ekseptions anymore.  That konfounding EI will work itself out.  I'm sure of it.

It's also possible that more changes may bekome nesessary onse uee embrase such a radically self-adjusting mentality.  (The letter Y should probably think about updating its resume.)  As uee begin to trim auay all of the ekstra hangers-on from the alphabet, uee mite also konsider just going all the uay bak to the orijinal Anglo-Sakson runes. It uas so great and simple bakk then; the letters even meant something! Plus uee could purje the languaje of all the foreign influense it's pikked up along the uay.

Yes I say it's time not for progress but regress, bakkooard change to rekover some of the sense that's been lost in the konfusing press of time and globalism. And if these arguments don't konvinse you, think of it this uay: moving down to 23 letters uill save a fortune on those early reader Letter Books I mentioned earlier.  

Rumi's Chickpea to Cook

This is one of my favorites from the great 13th Century Persian poet and Sufi mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks, an outstanding poet in his own right.  When I read this, I reflect on the deepest challenges of living that polish our spirits, of the fires that burn away the parts of us that no longer serve our deep selves, and of the mysterious workings of the hidden world that are constantly calling us into greater heights of presence and awareness.


CHICKPEA TO COOK

A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot

where it’s being boiled.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

The cook knocks him down with the ladle.

“Don’t you try to jump out.
You think I’m torturing you.
I’m giving you flavor,
so you can mix with spices and rice
and be the lovely vitality of a human being.

Remember when you drank rain in the garden.
That was for this.”

Grace first. Sexual pleasure,
then a boiling new life begins,
and the Friend has something good to eat.

Eventually the chickpea
will say to the cook,
“Boil me some more.
Hit me with the skimming spoon.
I can’t do this by myself.

I’m like an elephant that dreams of gardens
back in Hindustan and doesn’t pay attention
to his driver. You’re my cook, my driver,
my way into existence. I love your cooking.”

The cook says,
“ I was once like you,
fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time
and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings.

My animal soul grew powerful.
I controlled it with practices.
and boiled some more, and boiled
once beyond that,
and became your teacher.”

~Rumi

Waking

I'm visiting my birthplace in Phoenix, AZ with my daughter Cybela.  She's 17 now, newly graduated from high school and possessed of a depth and earnestness that always leaves me proud and teary. We're looking at the summer stars under an inimitable desert night sky and at her request I'm pointing out stars and constellations, some of which she remembers from past nights like this.  Some are new.

I tell her the Tlingit story of how the lights of the Big Dipper got caught in the sky when the people used long poles to push it up above the earth from the four corners and we trip over the topic of Native wisdom and European colonialism.  She tells me "Sometimes I picture the old villages and how they used to live, without the modern world touching them or knowing about them.  It's sad that's gone." 

I tell her that there are still some left.  I tell her about the Kogi people in the Sierra Madres, who rolled up their bridges and pulled back into the mountains when they saw the Spanish coming.  They've lived the last 500 years as they always have, unknown and untouched by the mental illness of greed and environmental opportunism the Europeans brought with them.  Elder brother, as they call themselves, came down from the mountains in the 80's to urge their Younger Brother to wake from this illness, to take better care of the earth and the water and the air.  Younger Brother is what they call people of European descent and all those who live like them.  The Kogi, I tell Cybela, choose their medicine people at age 7, and train them for 7 years in caves to learn how to dream clearly.  7 years of darkness so they can learn how to See.  Like aboriginal Australians, they believe that the dreaming world is the real world, and this world is the dream.

I'm filled with gratitude in these moments I share with my smart, caring, shiny daughter.  My mom gets teary watching me pass on teachings of the constellations that I received from my dad, and I'm overflowing, too, with this precious gift of finding my place in the long chain of generations, of anchoring my existence in Love and Duty and Relationship.

Looking up again and listening, with Cybela's eyes looking parallel to mine, somewhere in the black fabric between the stars I think I see the Kogi dreamers looking back at us.  She feels it too, and comments about how much time we spend in our little bubbles of awareness and self-centeredness, how much of our lives we spend focusing only on taking what we can for ourselves, while we can.  In that moment, we share the realization that, when we step out of that little bubble, our awareness expands and we feel the fragile gift of this life, the gravity of responsibility we have to take care of each other and the world, the water and the air.  

For that moment at least, I wake from the dream and I know without doubt that the Kogi are right.

A Modern Proposal: some thoughts on Arms and the 2nd Amendment

I’ve listened to a lot of different kinds of people lately, since the latest really big mass shooting in America.  (We have to qualify them now, since we have varying degrees of “mass shooting” happening on the regular in this, the  Gravest Country on Earth.) 

I’ve listened carefully to the young people organizing en masse and walking out of their schools, staging sit-ins outside the chambers of stuffy old Senate Majority Leaders.  I’ve listened carefully to red-faced, right-handed apocalypticals who’ve been convinced in their very guts that any kind of gun-control legislation is the next phase of the Liberal-Elite Government’s takeover of Freedom.  I’ve even listened to well-researched podcasts that carefully trace the relatively recent rise of the NRA and its obsessively narrow reading of the 2^nd Amendment—an obsession which began, ironically, not with White Rednecks but Black Panthers claiming the right to arm themselves for their own protection.

For any readers unfamiliar with the Second Amendment to the American Constitution, it reads, bad commas and all:  

“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the Security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

As short as it is, it’s a doozy, not the least because clear people see it as loaded, while loaded people see it as clear.  

Let’s ignore for a moment the whole “well-regulated militia” part; regulation is a dirty, liberal word, so let’s focus on the arms part.

I think one reason even our well-meaning, red-faced, right-handed apocalypticals have become so mobilized, so patriotically inflamed about this particular Amendment in recent years is this: as the instruments of political power have grown more and more, well, powerful, it becomes more and more difficult to believe that We the People have any control at all over our own politics.  Information, media and education: out of our hands.  The economy, jobs, foreign trade and interest rates: out of our hands.   Voting, gerrymandering, the electoral college and runaway campaign finance: out of our hands.  These are important instruments of power, it’s true, but let’s face it: when Americans want to feel powerful, especially when we start to fear that we’re not, the first form of power we grab for—instinctively, you might say—is the armament. 

After all, how is the average, increasingly uncritical American citizen supposed to feel powerful when the Black folks are getting shot in the streets, the White folks are losing their unquestionable majority privileges, the Brown folks are threatened with deportation, the Red folks are getting even more of their grounds poisoned and dug through with pipelines, all the while some Yellow folks across the ocean are building nuclear missiles, and not a one of us can honestly believe that our teeny, tiny vote makes a damn bit of difference?  Of course we need assault rifles!  How are we supposed to defend ourselves against our own military and police forces, King George and the Liberal-Elite if they have them, and we don’t?  In fact, I think we need to go all the way with this argument.

Therefore, in the fairly recent but still somehow hallowed tradition of the 2^nd Amendment, in order that the People shall feel empowered and secure in their person (which after all is why we have a Constitution in the first place), here is my proposal: 

I propose that, immediately and forthwith, every man, woman and child in these United States of America be armed with a tactical nuclear weapon. 

It is the best and only way, in this crazy Age and this crazy Day, to insure the security of a Free State. And that's what we're after isn't it?  Security?  Or was it Freedom? Note that I include children in this demand.  Age-limits are a slippery slope and where will it end?  Any limitation is logically the same as total limitation, I’m sure the NRA will agree.  The second Amendment gives us no limits on the size of the arms we have the right to keep and bear—Madison even capitalized the word!—and yet time and again, the Government has given literally trillions of our hard-earned tax dollars to private contractors to build itself Stealth bombers and Raptors and Smart Bombs and Blackhawks and subs and tanks and depleted uranium rounds while We the People quibble over bump-stocks and clip-sizes and age limits.  Why shouldn’t every American have access to that wealth of technology, being necessary for the Security of a free state?

I say: No more! 

Put a nuke in the hands of every citizen and I guarantee we will have all the Freedom we can stand, once and for all!  And if it brings about the Apocalypse, well, isn't that our God-given right too?. 

My red-faced, right-handed friends are sick of waiting for it anyway.

Paid in Full: Reconceiving the Currencies of our Life-Salaries

For years I have been working for nonprofits, consulting, creating, directing.  The first nonprofit organization I helped to launch was a tiny one dedicated to creating curriculum and programming for children’s peace education.  As you may imagine, I volunteered an enormous amount of time to see it grow and even when I did manage to raise the money to get paid a salary, it was a pittance compared to what my two M.A.s might command elsewhere.  At the time, though, I was a single dad raising a young daughter, and my time with her was so precious to me, the ability to participate in her school and play so valuable, that I considered it a fair bargain.  Certainly, there were months when rent was tough to meet and I grew used to level of poverty that many know far more intimately. I also experienced a kind of shame in that poverty that, I think, is particularly acute here in the US where the Myth of the Self-made Man so dominates the thinking of the people.  That Myth I speak of, that opportunity is equally and justly distributed among all, and if you’re poor it’s your own damn fault, is a complex and powerful one, of course, and I will not get too deeply into it here.  You will draw your own conclusions by the end of this piece, hopefully with some new ways to think about it. 

My real purpose here is to offer some thoughts about the way we conceive of money and payment for the work we do.  As a poet and a writer, I am of course, passionate about language, and I revel in the act of swinging from words and exploring their roots and branches.  Let’s consider, then, the word “salary.”  We use it so often in modern English and, particularly because of its modern connotation, we spend a great deal of energy hunting the larger members of the species.  Isn’t a large salary, after all, why we spend so much time and money going to the right college for degrees,  why we spend so much time and energy getting good grades in high school?  Isn’t a large salary why we so readily change the place we live when its demanded of us, or why we spend so much time away from our loved ones, and over-stressing our minds and bodies, and placating the egos of superiors, whether we respect them or not?  

The word salary comes from the Latin sale, meaning “salt.”  The word is a descendant from the Roman Empire, which would reimburse its soldiers with portions of salt, if they were worth theirs, of course.  At the time, before refrigerators or Ziploc baggies, salt was extremely valuable as the primary resource for preserving meat and therefore feeding one’s family over long periods of time.  It’s a good reminder, I think, particularly since salt is so cheap and readily available now, of two important facts: a) symbolic currencies have never been more than a means to the ultimate end of providing security, health, and happiness to ourselves and our families, and b) when those currencies are no longer useful to that purpose, it becomes time to consider them in a different way.

If you listen to elders on their deathbeds, you will find what many researchers and interviewers find when they ask dying people what, if anything, they regret about their lives.  Very often, people who are dying don’t really regret not having made more money or spending more time at work.  People usually regret spending so much time pursuing money, at the expense of time with their loved ones, or in pursuit of their deep dreams.

Consider then, the idea that it is not actually a greater salary that we are all interested in—at least in the monetary sense of the word.  It is rather what we believe money provides, which is security, happiness, ease, and freedom, all of which taken together become synonymous with a Healthy Life.  The problem is a very old one, and one that many wisdom traditions speak about at great length, which is mistaking the symbol of something for the thing the symbol represents.  In the Old Testament, for example, one of the first commandments specifically warns of worshipping graven images, precisely because when we give too much attention to the representation of something, especially of the Divine, we begin to think that the representation is the thing itself.  This notion of idolatry was so deeply ingrained that it included not just literal graven images, but even verbal ones, which is why it was forbidden to speak the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God.  It is also why usury was expressly forbidden in both the old testament and the new.  Usury, though it’s often believed to refer to charging excessive interest on a loan, originally referred to charging any interest on a loan.  The reason for this is that money is by definition a symbol.  It is the representation of the value of a thing.  I want a goat and you have a goat, so we agree on the value of it and exchange a piece of metal or paper that represents that value.  That’s all fine and it makes practical sense for trading merchandise; however, as soon as I treat that symbolic representation as a Thing in its own right, something that can generate more of itself through interest, I have committed the sin of usury.   In fact, I have gone even further and created a symbol of a symbol.  This is also why, in the New Testament, Yeshua famously threw the money-lenders out of the Temple, for profaning a place of direct connection with the Divine with graven image-worship. (For a deeper trip down that Rabbit Hole, think about the stock market, which creates symbols of symbols of symbols.)

So consider again what we so doggedly pursue in our careers, that Holy Grail of a great salary.  Think of how fiercely we fight and lie and cheat—or even just how hard we work—all to obtain more and more symbolic representations of what it is we are really after, meaning and happiness and freedom.  Think of the bankers and businessmen who threw themselves off of tall buildings, or committed equally tragic forms of suicide during the various stock market crashes, when the symbols they worshipped revealed themselves to be hollow and they felt they had lost everything.  The good news in all of this is of course that if we are clear what the symbol is, the graven image if you will, and what it is we are truly pursuing, then we can renegotiate our salaries, so to speak.  We can include other forms of currency to symbolize meaning and happiness and healthy lives.

During the time that I worked part-time in the nonprofit sector and refused to compromise my time with my young daughter, it became clear to me that I was being compensated in non-monetary ways for the work I was doing.  Not only did my position pay me in units of Freedom, which I used to pick up my daughter from school and volunteer occasionally in her classroom, it also paid me in units of Meaning.  I believed absolutely in what I was doing.  Developing curriculum and educations programs for young people to learn about historical peacemakers, and to develop skills in conflict resolution that could last for many generations into the future—this was work that fit in perfect congruence with my values as a human being.  When I add these units of Meaning and Freedom to the relatively small sum of monetary currency I was paid, my salary was huge indeed.

How many people make great monetary salaries but hate their work, or worse, feel morally compromised by it?  In such cases, I think we should subtract units of Meaning or units of Freedom from that monetary salary to get a more accurate calculation.  You’ll notice I’m not saying that the monetary currency has no value at all—of course it does, but we have to remember that it a currency—which is to say a flow of energy that we measure in symbolic units, and the point here is that it’s not the only one.

What I’m proposing, then, is a new kind of formula for calculating the salaries of our lives and work, to see whether our labor is worth its salt, so to speak.  I will not presume to tell you how to value your own Freedom, or the sense of fulfillment (ie. Meaning) you get from the work you do, but I will ask you to assign some kind of symbolic value to these universal life Goals.  Call them Life-Chips or Freedom-Francs or Meaning-Dollars if you like.  Then add those into your calculations when you decide how much your job is worth to you.  Of course, you might say “You can’t pay a mortgage with Meaning-Dollars” and that’s true.  (Though I would also point out that in Latin, “mortgage” translates to “death-grip.”)  And it may also be true, after a fashion, that you can’t put a kid through college with Life-chips, but you can leave your children a considerable inheritance of them—and Meaning-Dollars, if you gather them wisely.  And with College Debt taking its own kind of death grip on our young ones these days, which is a wiser investment? 

As a final thought, I think it’s important to mention the power of our minds to shape our realities by the way we perceive them.  There are many worthwhile conversations to be had in response to my arguments here—about the privilege that my white maleness and education afford me to talk this way, for example, or about the realities of oppressive systems which have been deliberately created to keep working-class people chasing money in a sort of indentured servitude.  These are both valid points which I acknowledge humbly and honestly.  However I will also submit that the great gift—the Divine Gift, if you will—of being conscious human beings with at least some measure of Free Will, is that we get to choose where to invest our time, our beliefs and our life-force.  In this small regard at least, I think that the Myth of the Self-Made Person is not totally off-base.  And I hope that, as you consider how to evaluate the profit and loss of your own Life, the Freedom of Time, the Meaning and the Happiness—the true goals of a healthy salary—will factor in as much as the paper and metal symbols of Money.

Educating Global Citizens

Over the course of human affairs, as societies have steadily increased in size and complexity, it has become more and more important to question.  Particularly, as humanity become globalized in its economy and information sharing, and as the number of media messages bombarding our brains grows each year, it becomes ever more important for individual citizens to stay sharp.  In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, “Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.”  

The education of everyone is not a privilege bestowed upon the people by a democratic institution; it is a necessary condition of a democratic institution.

We simply don’t spend enough time in public dialogue about what education is, or what qualifies as a good education.  Sure, we spend a great deal of time and money evaluating whether a student can solve basic algebra, or name the causes and consequences of World War I, and of course, content is important.  I agree that we need some basic standards by which we judge whether someone has actually been educated or not.  However, with the takeover of profit-driven standardized testing in recent years, two issues in education have become painfully clear: 1) no one method of assessing content knowledge is complete, and 2) we must be diverse in deciding what that content is, and who decides it.    

Especially given the current mental health crisis in this country as evidenced by the recent rise in mass shootings and other pervasive violence, basic coping skills and conflict resolution seem like a high priority to me, yet there are almost no content standards for the one subject that literally everyone deals with from cradle to grave: conflict.

There is much to say about testing, and a great deal more to discuss about the narrowing of curriculum that has resulted from corporatized testing.  My point here, though, is that real education is not something that can be measured like a long jump or scored like a soccer match.  Real learning doesn’t only happen in a classroom, but in the world, at home, with friends, and, if you’re doing it right, for the rest of your life.  I believe that a full education requires not just knowledge but wisdom.  We need to learn the critical tools for processing information relevant to the world and an understanding of our power to influence it.  I work for an educational program combining conflict resolution and social-emotional skills with community project design, social justice education and a survey of the work of recent Nobel Peace Prize winners.  PeaceJam was developed with the help of the Dalai Lama and 13 other Nobel Laureates to inspire young people to learn concrete skills by creating real projects in their communities addressing global issues at a local level, issues like understanding racism and poverty and resource conflicts.  I have seen firsthand the way that such an education engages students in the world.

A class working on a water catchment project, for example, will incorporate geometry, chemistry, algebra, planning and budgeting, and, if the project is done well, the social and legal context of water rights and access to building materials, to name but a few.  Students’ progress can be assessed (by the actual teacher working with them) by measures of work ethic, project completion or even self-assessment.  Granted, this requires flexibility for teachers in conducting their own classrooms, and there is no profit in this model for Pearson, the global testing conglomerate, but a great deal of profit for students and for the society they will certainly be shaping.

Even better, when students have input into creating a project that is meaningful to them and even fun, addressing a pressing issue, they become engaged citizens, invested in the workings of their communities.  And if education is not about preparing and empowering young people to be informed and engaged citizens, what is it about at all?  In the current flood of false information, polarizing political identities and thinning budgets, can even a fake democracy afford not to invest in such an insurance policy?

Sink or Swim: thoughts on philosophies and dogmas

I think a lot about beliefs. Amd I enjoy talking about beliefs, especially with people whose beliefs are different than mine. Though they're often held up as opposites, I think that understanding belief is a vital part of the pursuit of truth.  When the Jahovas Witnesses come to my door, for example, I often ask questions like “How much of your beliefs come from the Bible and how much from a direct relationship with god?” or “Why do you feel that the Bible is an accurate representation of God’s word?”  I’m not as confrontational with these well-meaning folks as I used to be, but I do still like to ask what I see as the core, challenging questions. I think it's important for all of us to be clear on the roots of our beliefs, since those same beliefs cause so much of our biggest conflicts.

Through all of this thinking and such conversations, I have come, I think,  to a useful distinction between holding a philosophy and a dogma.  I find that many people hold dogmas, beliefs that they have inherited from some other, often written source.  Particularly in the case of text-based religions like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and even Buddhism in some cases, these beliefs never come from the text alone, but are further framed by the clergy of that religion, who select the passages they find most important and endorse a specific interpretation of those passages.  There are also the kind of folkloristic,  metatextual influences on religions that shape the way groups of people in certain places think about their religions.  (The common Christian notion of Mary Magdalen being a prostitute, for example, appears nowhere in the Bible.)  The point here is that a dogma is a relatively fixed and rigid set of beliefs that people hold to that are based more on obedience to an authority than independent thought, whether that authority is a priest, imam, rabbi, a parent or even a book.

Conversely, a philosophy is a belief system that a person comes to from their own logic or experience (usually both).  While a philosophy can still be rigid, depending on how much of the person’s identity has been formed around it, it is inherently more flexible because it is based on personal values, perceptions and conclusions.  It is idiosyncratic, subjective and therefore something that can be discussed and argued.  Where dogmas tend to be mooring posts that people cling to in the stormy seas of doubt, fear and intellectual laziness, personal philosophies tend to be skills and practices that people develop that allows them to tread water, or even swim, on their own.  Though I understand the need many feel for dogmas, since it is far easier and seemingly safer to let others in authority do the thinking for us, I clearly favor philosophy as an ideological construct by which we steer our lives.  Not only do dogmas require us to abdicate our own critical thinking, they anchor us to a fixed line of belief that may be and probably is wrong. And when the seas of changing knowledge rise, as they always do, I would rather be free to swim than stuck to a dogmatic mooring post and sink.

Democracy and Education: the Inextricable Bond

As an American, I often ponder over the nature of democracy.  As a student of history, philosophy and theories of politics, I regularly find myself coming back to central questions like "What is the essential purpose of government?"  This question I find ever more pressing in the current age of complex nations and massive populations of people with apparently competing interests (perceived conflicts like that between environmental security and easily accessible employment come to mind).  As I write this, on the anniversary of the birth of my nation, of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, that great testimony to progressive ideals, I find myself in Athens, where ideals of democracy (demokratia) began to take root.

Human history is characterized, across many national and cultural boundaries, by the fundamental question of whether people are (or can be) responsible, clear-minded and wise enough to govern themselves, or whether we need an ostensibly wiser, more responsible, more clear-headed ruler to tell us what to do so we don't destroy ourselves.  In the Republic, for example, Plato argued that the ideal republic is led by a "philosopher king," wise, beneficent and well-educated, but with clear authority,.

Underneath this question are of course other questions like "Is there a population or geographic size limit that affects how efficiently people can govern themselves?"  Or "Do we need to create fail safes to guard against rash decisions on the part of a general public which may not be privy to all of the facts or potential consequences of one course of action or another?"  (This consideration, by the way, was exactly what led the Founders of the US to include the Electoral College into our otherwise democratic process of choosing a President: the fear that a poorly informed public might choose an unqualified candidate out of sheer popularity-- the process which this past November achieved precisely that result, ironically).  So even the Founders of the United States, which is so often heralded (mainly by us, recently) as the paragon of Democracy and Individual Liberty, had some reservations about the extent to which the general public could govern themselves.  They did, after all, refer to the enterprise of founding a nation based on the will of the people as an "Experiment."  At least, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are both cited as having referred to their new Republic as experimental.  Let's also leave off the table for now the obvious caveat that they excluded women and non-whites and non land-owning whites in the parameters for this experiment.  The point here is that it was a work in progress and there was some faith that the essential ingredients were being put in place to form a "more perfect union."

And this brings me to my central question here:  Where the hell ARE we with this experiment, exactly?

I see our Congress members embroiled in cronyism and bought off at unprecedented rates by private interests (thanks to a Citizens United decision that has Divided Citizens from the governmental process like never before.)

I see an electorate that is easily convinced by patently fabricated news stories to accept as fact anything that reinforces our pre-existing prejudices.  (What? Not me...)

I see an increasingly rigid set of cultural and political identities that allow people a deep and dangerous kind of self-righteousness, creating a kind of Football Team party loyalty.  The level of dialogue concerning the real issues-- and more importantly our common values-- degrades rapidly when the conversation becomes "My team is better than your team."

So what are the solutions to these deep issues?  What are the saving graces of democracy that might yet make the experiment result in that more perfect union?  If you ask me, it comes down to education.

In 1820, in a letter to William Jarvis, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

"I know no safe depositary[sic] of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education."

A democratic institution, even an imperfect democratic republic, is only as good as the education of the people who choose their representatives.  In an earlier letter in 1805, he went further to say: "I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree." It is thus more critical than ever that we double our best efforts to offer ourselves an education that is real, critical-thinking, culturally inclusive, which requires funding and in which trust in our teachers and accountability for good practices are not mutually exclusive. I would also suggest a couple specific subject areas that are not included nearly enough in the regular curriculum:

1)  Conflict Resolution:  we must deepen our ability to have dialogue about the ideas we disagree on, without storming off or unfriending each other or beating the crap out of each other (or worse).  This requires a fair amount of humility, by the way, to hold to a curiosity in order to understand a different point of view rather than immediately trying to defend our own position.
2)  Media Literacy: we must develop better skills for critically examining who is trying to convince us of what and why, and which assumptions we might be starting from.
3)  Social and Environmental Justice:  we don't all have access to the same resources, we don't play on a level field, and some groups haven't even been able to get into the ball park.  But if Truth and Justice really are the American Way, then we need to be scathingly honest with ourselves about our own biases and work toward real justice for all.  Did I mention humility?
4)  Service Learning:  service to a cause greater than ourselves is so often held up as one of the great character-building benefits of military service, and I think it can also be applied to many more peaceful kinds of service to our larger world.
5)  Travel:  nothing gives us a clearer perspective of where we come from than to travel some distance away from it and look back.  To see that people think differently from us, and are still people.  Our ways are not the only ways.  These insights don't have to be threatening, but they can help us to refine what is good about our own customs, and throw away the things that aren't working.

Lastly, I will say this, on this 4th of July:  I love my country (and by that I mean the land and my other relatives living on it), and I choose to continue to believe, against any odds, that the great Democratic-Republican experiment can some day become what it set out to be.  But if perchance it doesn't, I'm also a citizen of the world.  And so, at last, are you.

Rainbows and Bathwater

maintaining old metaphysics in a new world

In the human apprehension of the world, there are many layers, many membranes through which the raw information is processed, categorized, contextualized and judged for value, that by the time we as humans perceive anything at all—be it the visual image of a tree, an unfamiliar sound in the darkness of the night, the intentions of another being—the information itself may indeed hardly be considered the same.  It is for this reason that philosophers through the ages, from Plato to even Baudrillard, have urged us to use reason to temper our perceptions.  And yet, as Baudrillard has argued most recently, we have become so enraptured by our illusions in the modern world that those illusions have come to contain as much reality as any reality that may (or may not) be objectively provable.

In that same vein, I assert that our eye is as much the projector of reality as it is the perceiver of it (as long as we include within our definition of reality the beliefs, opinions and perspectives of others) and in such case we must conclude that reality is not a static but a co-created artifact. 

I have argued elsewhere for a model of the universe that includes five dimensions (the 3 dimensions of physical space, the 4^th dimension of Time, and the 5^th dimension of Consciousness), and I wish to offer here some further texture to that model, as well as some anticipation of resistance from what I like to call the Cult of Rational Nihilism—that modern edifice of positivism, that has been born of the scientific paradigm and has come to dominate Academia.  I call it a cult because it bears at its root a metaphysical assumption that if a thing cannot be explained by reason and replicated in a lab it cannot possibly exist.  This is perhaps a misperception or even a prejudice of mine, but more and more I find within the halls of the Ivory Palace that the requirement for externalized evidence and replicability, the foundations of good science, which are perfectly appropriate within that field, have become the judiciary even for fields which attempt to reach beyond the physical world.  Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, I might quote, and thus the innate human desire to exceed our previous bounds of perception becomes sicklied o’er with presumptions of a void that may be filled with new worlds.

And here, then, is the point I wish to make: in the post-Enlightenment world, in which the dangerous fundamentalisms of religion have terrified most reasonable folks, in which the pragmatism of science has provided us with such profound and luxurious command over our immediate physical surroundings, we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, and are busily forsaking the magnificent potential to bridge the two.  Religion—at least the mystical religions I have always held the most fondness for—explores the deeper senses of the human being in an effort to better perceive firsthand the subtler forces of cause and effect that work through the interstitial space between particles, as it were.  Religion is fundamentally unprovable because it relies upon idiosyncratic experience.  For instance, I could tell you that god speaks to me all the time, and she generally does so with the voice of a Southern Black Grandma.  I could tell you that I have had visions in shamanic journeys that have led me directly to resources in the waking world and to answers for some of my most challenging puzzles.  I could describe in great detail the vast worlds that unfold in my inner universe (and yours) and the numinous blanket of loving presence that exists there.  But if you have not experienced that reality yourself, it is quite easy and reasonable for you to say that it does not exist.  You could describe a rainbow to me in great detail, but if I have always been blind, it would be quite simple for me to argue that the whole thing is your imagination. 

But I ask you this: what is the imagination in the first place?  We often think of the imaginary as the opposite of the real.  And yet, just as Plato argued so long ago, the world of Ideas is the very source for so much of what is now real, if not all of it.  This paper that I am writing now.  It has existed only in my mind, in my imagination, you might say, up until this very moment.  And yet, does the simple act of transcribing my thoughts into digital form that you can then read and share in—does that act confer upon this treatise more reality than it had before?  Or does it simply change the nature of its reality, bringing it to a lower branch upon the Kabbalistic Tree of Life from crown toward kingdom?  In the mystical traditions, there has never been any doubt that the Imagination, the realm of Kether, the world of Platonic Forms, inheres to its own brand of Reality.  The Aboriginal Australians even go so far as to say that the Dream world is the real world, and the waking world the Dream and how can you contradict this assertion without making a metaphysical claim?  Many eyes have gazed upon this rainbow, and describe it in such similar terms, and yet the blind continue to refuse even to humor an attempt to explain.

Perhaps in my blindness, I could be convinced that rainbows do in fact exist if enough people tell me about and describe them in similar, replicable ways, or offer me a reasonable explanation for the refraction of the light spectrum through water.  But only because I am willing to remain open to considering such possibilities.  In other words, only because my inner universe is receptive to the perspectives of others am I able to use the scientific method well.

This then, is my final conclusion:  The Cult of Rational Nihilism has its place in the pantheon of Earthly religions. Science is a profoundly important and useful tool and it has enabled us to cast off at least in theory the old gods of Dogma and Religious Imperialism.  But I hold that consciousness, the experience of being aware, is a dimension unto itself.  It is an a-priori, already-existing universe that we, as conscious beings can access, but only idiosyncratically, only by peering back behind our own eyes.  And because of this fundamental nature, it is inherently unmeasurable and (at least superficially) unreplicable and therefore represents an entire sector of the cosmos that is by definition unapprehendable by science.  There are of course practical dangers in drafting public policy according to idiosyncratic experience.  We have to let the old gods remain dead.  If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him, say the Buddhists.  If I try to convince you that Jesus was white and he told me personally that white supremacy is god’s plan for humanity, please feel free to shoot me.    However, there is a baby in that bathwater.  There is a conscious spirit that animates each of us, and it is participating in a vast universe that is knowable, but not in the rational, replicable ways of knowing.  We must turn our backs to that bathwater raining down, turn our faces again to the Sun of our imagination, and a rainbow awaits. 

Mater Sancta

Imagine Darkness.

Utter, tangible, swaddling Darkness.

Perhaps there was an Otherplace before (I believe); perhaps not. 
Perhaps that darkness is salted with memories that out-bubbled 
Cerridwen’s Cauldron, outswam the currents of Lethe.

But even so at best those images lost their light
and swim now in a Darkness that rushes on ears not yet formed
but listening, always listening.  And out of that Darkness,
the first sound of a lifetime, a sound not heard but felt…

Thum-thump.  Thum-thump.  Thum-thump.

It’s a cadence that you’ll match your deepest rhythms to,
the master metronome for the symphony that is to be a Life. 

Sacred Texts have told us much about the Father, about hands that shaped clay and into it breathed life, about a bearded mouth that smiled for It Was Good.  And blessed be the fathers, for their gritty hands have hewn out homes from solid rock and chiseled language on Eternity.  But slowly, surely, as trembling and determined as a foal’s first steps, we’re remembering the Sacred Space that circles Holy Mother, Mater Sancta  For when we look for clay, we find it not in books but in the Earth, and not so deep that our spades raise blisters on hands that seek the stuff of life.  And while the sperm may offer sparks, the stem-cell clay that forms our Form is fashioned by maternal hands.  

Blessed be the mothers, for they are the Shapers of the Future.

Imagine Darkness.

Warm, inviting darkness—not the darkness of oblivion, for that is cold and empty as Terror.  Imagine the darkness of becoming, the darkness that fills a kettle before the water spills in to brim it.  The darkness of a cave where bears and groundhogs sleep.  The darkness of the Womb.

And in that darkness drums a drum, thum-thumping a rhythm of comfort and love, making promises whispered and sung.  In the darkness hums a Voice.  A voice that explains, from the earliest inklings of Knowing, in the sturdiest depths of Foundation, that you are not alone.  Before the world is round, or gravity found, before hot is ouch or milk is yum, there is “You are not alone.”

And that is Everything.

Blessed be the mothers, for they are the Hummers of the Sacred Truth.

Blessed be the mothers, for they are the Voices in the Darkness of Becoming.

Blessed be the mothers

Darren Reiley, 2004.

Particles and Waves, Stars and Galaxies, Forests and Trees

If you've read any of my posts on this site before, you have heard me harp on the notion of Identity.  While I feel inclined to apologize for repeating myself, I feel equally impelled to keep harping.  I am convinced that looking closely at our notions of Identity is a crucial step forward from this tribalist, nationalist, whatever-ist quagmire we seem stuck in.  Today, however, I have a slightly different chord to play as I harp on the issue.

The old idiom that accuses us of "not being able to see the forest for the trees" is a good one.  And I ask you to consider its meaning for a moment.

For long stretches in the history of human consciousness, people have been stuck in particularity—in focusing on the small disparate particles, rather than the whole.  Instead of looking at the vast network of connections between us, people often choose to look more often at separateness.  In measuring time, for example, we tend to focus at hours and minutes and markers, like ticks on a clock, rather than a seamless wave of interwoven cause and consequence.  

In social relations, people often focus only on those who participate in the same social group identity, whether that be race, religion, political affiliation, township, sports team, neighborhood or nation.  The particle (the small self) is easier to perceive, and therefore it dominates the viewpoint.  In medicine, chemistry and physics, scientists have attempted to understand the whole by understanding the constituent parts, and so they have broken down the fundamental relationships between all that is into tissues and then cells and then nucleotides, molecules and then atoms and then particles.  And meanwhile, the whole of the greater system is often ignored.  (Quantum Theory gives us a beautiful opportunity to reconcile this, though, with its clear demonstration that at the sub-amotic level, particles are indistinguishable from waves.) 

But the issue, of course, is that we cannot understand the whole by looking at the parts alone for a number of reasons.  First, the most obvious, that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.  We cannot understand the spirit of a dog companion, the value of its friendship, the relationships that it has with others, by chopping it up and studying its organs and hormones, or even its DNA-- not completely.  We cannot understand the mysteries of human consciousness by looking at individual neurons in the brain as if they were stars in a constellation-- we can't even say for certain that consciousness exists in the brain.

Particularity is a fact of reality, no question: the things of the world are made of smaller constituent parts,  but allowing one’s consciousness to become limited by those smaller parts is incredibly dangerous, both metaphysically and socially, especially as long as humans continue to keep their sense of identity small.  If we only identify with the particular groups that share obvious traits with us, our perception becomes stunted, we create conflict with or even vilify the Other, but worse, we become so focused on the individual pixels that we cannot see with resolution the vast spiral galaxy of our shared life together. 

Trump, Brexit, and the Limits of Nationalist Identity

In 1916, the so-called “War to end all wars” was throwing its tantrum across Europe.  It was a war that came about largely, as are all wars, due to vast disparities between nations who were wealthy and those who were not.  But, to an equally large extent, it was a massive tangle of allegiances between the members of Empires that resulted in one of the most terrifying eras of nationalism the world has ever seen.  The rise of fascism in Spain, Italy, Germany, of militant expansionism in Japan, and the Cold War imperialist pissing contest between the Soviet Union and the US, have provided lessons in human nature for all of us to reckon deeply with if we are to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

 

And here we are in 2016.  The last two decades have seen the disastrous fallout of financial feudalism resulting in a handful of market crashes and trillions of dollars handed out to the institutions that caused them.  We have witnessed, in the EU, an unprecedented collaboration between European nations that was conceived in order to intentionally generate the kind of interdependence in trade, travel and civil liberties whose absence makes war far more likely.  (Said another way: the EU was conceived and was purposefully established to create a more peaceful future for Europe; with trade barriers gone, with more fluid travel between member states, and with consistent rights and privileges across borders, many of the conflicts that arise between those states are pre-empted before they begin. 

And yet, this kind of Federalism has its downsides.  Here in the US, the phenomenon which is being called “coercive federalism,” or more colloquially "Big Government," where the federal government forces States to comply with national mandates or risk losing funding, has grown in the last two decades.  (Ironically, the biggest perpetrator of this philosophy in recent years has been staunch Republican George W Bush with his No Child Left Behind Act and the trifecta of Patriot 1, 2 and the Military Commissions Act; stick that in your Big Government pipe and smoke it, Republicans).  In Oregon last year, a group of half-cocked, half-educated ranchers decided to stage an armed occupation of a Federally run wildlife refuge to protest federal control of grazing land that was making things difficult for them.  To be fair to the occupiers, I think there is certainly something to be said for local ranchers having a voice in the decision making process of federal grazing rights-- no taxation without representation, so to speak, however the issues underlying federal control were, I think, lost on them, like important protections of endangered species and the broader perspectives that federalism affords.  Add the fact that the main supporters who turned out for this protest were largely white supremacist separatists and the whole righty revolution lost any validity for me, except ethnographically.. 

Across the Atlantic, in the wake of Great Britain’s narrow vote to exit the European Union, we are seeing another kind of response to federalism—or in the case of the EU, more of a confederalism (a treaty-based contract where member states receive rights, securities and privileges of the larger body in exchange for the supremacy of the Union's laws if they ever conflict with their own.)  The issues that are moving people to reject what the EU represents have lot to do with fear: fear of the threat that ISIL poses to open borders; fear of scarcity when migrants and refugees flood into your area, fleeing war-torn places like Syria; but also the plain old xenophobic kind of fear that so often characterizes a racial majority. 

Underneath all of these fears and conflicts, lurks the specter of identity.  If we identify ourselves too narrowly in our groups—if I see myself primarily as British, rather than European, as an uneducated rancher rather than a member of an interstate republic, as Christian rather than spiritual, as white rather than human, then I will grow fearful and more likely violent when those smaller identities become threatened.  And even worse, I am more likely to threaten with violence those whom I identify as Other in order to maintain the righteousness of my identity.

The Brits who have pushed through the Brexit vote and Donald Trump who is the mouthpiece for similar fears in the US—these are the exemplars of a super-narrowed nationalist identity that is a dangerous precursor to Fascism.  Xenophobia, racism, discriminatory reactions, all of these are the direct results when some misbegotten notion of national pride becomes threatened by a broader identity.

If these are the things we have to lose by widening our sense of who we are, a loss that doesn’t have to include some kind of blanching homogenization of your own unique culture, is that really a loss you will grieve?

Thank You Mr. Trump for Outing Conservative Racism

There is a sort of identity crisis going on in the Republican party this election year.  Many have seen it; many are commenting on it, and though I'm reluctant to rehash the punditry bombarding us in from the mainstream media, I do have a few things to say about this identity crisis.

Identity is fundamental construct in the human psyche.  Our sense of who we are and our identification with particular social groups give us a sense of place and they allow us to form reference points in the development of our moral structure.  However, when our identities (particularly our social identities) become too rigid, they become attached to a core part of ourselves that gets very defensive when threatened.  It's a phenomenon called "Identity Quake" in psychology and conflict studies-- the notion that, when one part of our identity is challenged, such as a religious belief or a racial identity or a national membership, it shakes other core parts of who we are and triggers a violent defense response deep in the psyche.  See for cross reference: "American bipartisan politics."

Because of the dangers of too rigid an identity structure, it is profoundly vital that we occasionally revisit our memberships, even challenge the precepts of of the groups we participate in, question our own beliefs.  It is healthy, and it is a main feature of what allows us to continue to make spiritual and intellectual progress throughout our lives.    During this 2016 election year, many staunch members of the Republican party are undergoing just such a revision.

I should say here that I do not self-identify as a conservative, especially in the social sense.  But, as someone dedicated to human progress for the sake of the rest of the world, I am invested in understanding the underpinnings of conservative thinking, even if I don't agree with those precepts.  

One of the fundamental mainstays in traditional American conservatism seems to be the notion that "big government," or indeed government in general, is something to be watched closely and checked for its incursions into the power of the populus. The rights of the States to manage their own affairs without being told what to do by far-away bureaucrats, the "Don't Tread On Me" ethic, is a pretty consistent value.  Strangely, I notice simultaneously among many modern American conservatives  this blind obedience to patriotism, a sort of nationalist forgiveness towards the wrongs of History committed in the name of that same government.  I'm picturing the guy who drives truck around my home town with two huge flags flying up from the bed-- one Confederate and the other American.  Nationalist pride coupled with federalist suspicion.  That's an identify crisis if ever I saw one.

Another disconnect in the current state of the American Republican Party is this perennial ambivalence towards racism and a national identity that is profoundly Christian. The very same people who red-facedly argue in support of the First Amendment freedom of religion will in the very next sentence try to enforce Christian values and Christian teachings in the public domain, at the expense of the freedom of other religions. This contradiction is so blatant to those of us in the secular public and yet forms a sort of pathological denial and persecution complex in many conservative Christians in this country. The notion that, to set a limit on Christian doctrine in public education, which violates the very basis of the First Amendment in favoring one religion over another, is somehow a limit on the freedom of Christians to practice their religion, seems pretty absurd to me. 

Moreover, the racial components of conservative Identity confusion are becoming more and more apparent in the current political race in 2016.  The vitriol of Donald Trump and his ilk, proposing walls between the US and Mexico, proposing to forcibly deport tens of thousands of Americans of questionable citizenship, is revealing the ugly racist underbelly that abounds in this country, especially in light of how much support Trump is receiving from the right. 

While I can understand and even share certain conservative values, such as expecting individuals to do their level best to contribute to society, wanting to preserve certain traditions that are central to the identity of the American dream against rapid and profound change, these values have become lost in a xenophobic and dangerous nationalism that more and more resembles the Fascism of the European 1930s.   The arc of history in this country paints a very grim picture of exactly whom the American dream favors and if the inheritors of that privilege, white males like myself, white folks in general, fail to look courageously into history's eye, we slip inexorably toward the violence that is ignorance's only power. 

The good news in all of this is that fascists like Donald Trump are calling attention to this deep identity split in the Republican party, which I believe is the reason so many more moderate conservatives are feeling this unease in the course of this election.  And if Trump can force conservatives in this country to refresh their consideration of what those conservative values are, disentangled from racism and blind nationalism, then maybe his charge onto the election stage isn't such a bad thing.