When I read the diatribes launched by my Republican friends against the Occupy movement - the smug, delegitimizing comments about the trash, the way they snarl traffic, that the crowd is crawling with transients - it seems to me they are trying to de-cool the whole street movement thing. Under all that I sense a subsurface vibe, a fear that the cool factor might transform Occupy into something that matters, something that will cause our congressional folk to shiver a little. The terms "occupy" and "cool" need to be decoupled at all costs.
My R friends may argue that what I'm sensing is more akin to nausea than fear of cool, but me thinks they protest overly much. One wonders whether some of this fear stems from the fact that these same detractors did, in fact, think the sit-ins and what Bill McKibben calls "body movements," or using our selves as political tools, were way cool once upon a time. Way back then, in the 1960s and 1970s. I know for a fact that some of these same complainers were at Woodstock. And proud of it. Sh...
Personally, I welcomed with open arms both the Occupy movement and it's predecessor, the Tea Party. I've worried for many moons - more technically since we sat by without comment as hanging chads in Florida decided our presidential election for the man with fewer votes - that Americans have simply stopped caring. When I think about our historically low voter turn-out, the general paucity of public debate over our latest round of wars, the gradual but significant progression away from hard journalistic news, toward "infotainment" in the only sources the public has for becoming educated on matters of public policy, I can't help but worry.
It seems to me that we are too complacent, too content with powering our individual hamster wheels, going round and round just trying to move our financial lives forward far enough to own the latest toy, or take the kids to Disneyland. So complacent that we've foregone our duty to participate in shaping the public debate - a duty that our Founding Fathers insisted be the cornerstone of a democracy that serves the people. A whole lot of us have begged off.
While perhaps the Tea Party has taken a turn toward the religious right, and the Occupy folks cannot seem to figure out how to leverage their presence politically, still, it warms the cockles of my heart to see people off their couches and out in the streets. I don't know how mad they are, ala Howard Beale, but they at least have decided they don't want to take it anymore - at least not the way it's being dished out now.
This morning's whole little conversation has its beginnings in an article by Bill McKibben, founder of 360.org, a climate change advocacy group, entitled The Art of Civil Disobedience. Here's a little quote from it:
"As surely as the scientific method has worked, that’s how badly the political method has failed, and at root money is the cause.
So we need a different currency in which to work if we’re going to have a chance. And right at the moment we’re experimenting a good deal with one: our bodies. I’ve just finished helping coordinate the biggest spate of civil disobedience in several decades in this country, two weeks of daily sit-ins at the White House that ended up with 1253 people in jail for urging Barack Obama to block a proposed pipeline from the tarsands of Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. (Short course: those tarsands are the second-largest pool of carbon on the planet. If we burn them in a big way, according to Jim Hansen at NASA, it’s ‘essentially game over for the climate.’)
Now, civil disobedience is a technology like any other, and people have been experimenting with it for a long time, at least since Thoreau. There have been real experts—Gandhi, Martin Luther King, some of the folks who pushed the Arab spring this past year. But we don’t really know that much about it—we haven’t studied it with the same systematic diligence that, say, West Point or Sandhurst applies to the arts of war.
So it was fascinating to try and figure out what would work best. One thing we tried to avoid was the usual suspects: we asked old people to come, not college kids. We didn’t ask participants their age (that’s rude) but we did ask them who was president when they were born. And the biggest cohorts came from the Truman and FDR administrations.
We also told everyone that they had to wear a dress, or a coat and tie, if they wanted to take part. Why? Because we wanted to make crystal clear who the radicals in this scenario were. Not us. Radicals work for Chevron and Shell—radicals are people who are willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere. That’s the most radical scheme anyone ever thought up. We’re…conservatives, trying hard to preserve the planet in something like the shape it was when we were born."
I will skip over his comment about money being the root cause of political failure. That's a post for another day. Instead, I will focus you on McKibben's attempt to strategically unnerve the very arguments (trash, traffic, transients) made by my Republican friends by manipulating his crowd.
My students who are reading this will right away notice that I've used the word "manipulate," a loaded word that signals I perhaps don't approve. Yes, I'm really struggling with this. I'm trying to decide how I feel about McKibben putting a conservative, older face on his crowd. On the one hand, those well-dressed older voters he brings out are real. Empowering their visibility is both exciting and a lesson for conservatives about who, really, is the "other side."
On the other hand, George Lakoff would tell you McKibben is playing right into the Republican frame. By insisting on an older, more conservative face to deliver his message, he is helping his opponent marginalize the rest of his base and keeping their voices, the voices of actual citizens of our country, if younger, scruffier, tattoo'd & pierced - even, sometimes, hungrier, homeless - away from the discussion table as surely as the Republicans are.
Using the "right tools" is something I understand deeply as a lobbyist. In fact, I just proposed something of the sort the other day that a group of us who have run up against a wall in our fight to get the human trafficking of minors law in our state to cover girls between 13 and 17, and not just girls under 13. The chair of our judiciary committee has refused to hear this bill. I suggested we pull his campaign contribution records and find a sympathetic someone from among his own donors to put some pressure on him.
So, I understand pragmatics.
And yet, I'd like to propose an alternative vision. What if, instead of trying to neuter the crowds, we work to enhance the cool factor in body movements? What if, instead of playing to the Republican frame, we play on their fear and turn street movements into the biggest, coolest new cool of all? What if street movements became popular, and we orchestrate them more like fairs and festivals so that they attracted people and people came out to learn, talk, hear, play political music together, make political art and just become the new gig where the cool people want to be? Festivals with planning and stages and port-a-potties and food vendors. Festivals even Republicans can love.
Ok, so I'm suggesting we use entertainment and the streets and the good weather to bring people back into politics. All kinds of people. Young, old, conservative, liberal alike. Let's get artsy about it. Let's get some passion going. Let's revive the public discussion. Republicans and Democrats and Independents together.
Be the Party you want to attend. Take it to the streets!
"It wasn't always this way. The NRA supported the 1934 National Firearms Act, which taxed the ownership of automatic weapons, and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which created a licensing system for dealers. And the NRA was not alone in its logical support of gun control. The governor of Texas -- yes, Texas -- said in 1893, that the "mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder."
Thought I'd share a Huffington Post op ed on gun control, written by teen blogger, Jess Coleman. He really did his homework. Regardless of what you think of his conclusion, the history of NRA's shift in stance on gun control is fascinating. Here's more:
"What happened? Jill Lepore writes in"Battleground America"that the gun debate as we know it began with the murder of President John F. Kennedy. When the news broke that Kennedy's murderer, Lee Harvey Oswald, ordered his gun from a magazine and received it in the mail, Congress started to get tough on guns. The Gun Control Act was passed, which barred so-called "high-risk" people from buying guns. The NRA supported it, but they felt the threat coming. Over the next few decades, the NRA began arguing that the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects an individual's right to own a gun, andthe Supreme Court agreed. However, as Chief Justice Warren Burgersaidof this interpretation, it is 'one of the greatest pieces of fraud ... by special interests groups I have ever seen in my lifetime.'"
I ran down the full quote from Chief Justice Burger, which he apparently said in January of 1990, in an interview with Parade Magazine, rather than from the bench: "If I were writing the Bill of Rights now there wouldn't be any such thing as the Second Amendment... This has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word 'fraud', on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies - the militia - would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kink of weapon he or she desires."
Do read Jess Coleman's article. It's very informative!
Two nights ago I had a troubling, premonitory dream:
I was at a funeral and there was a strange burial ritual. The pall
bearers lifted the coffin. Then they did something odd. They
turned the coffin onto its side, then turned it again to an upside down
position, then once again turned the coffin onto its other side, and finally,
back to the coffin's proper, upright position.
Yesterday evening, my natural father passed away.
Today I got it.
The burial ritual represented the difficult journey of my father's life:
My father first got sideways with life when his own father died.
My father was just a young boy, and life became difficult for him after
that, with many disappointments and lost opportunities. I probably don't
know the half of it. By my childhood memories of him, he already held so
much anger.
My father turned his life completely upside down during his years of
marriage to my mother, when he did unspeakable things and then paid
unspeakable consequences. During his later years, my father struggled
toward a better path, helping my brother's family and working to help children
like my nephew, Ryan, who has a Jewish genetic disorder. In this way he
partially righted his life in God's and my family's eyes.
For me, in my father's death there is finally safety. I may now untether
myself from my deep-seated childhood fear of him, and see my father instead as
a man who wrestled with many internal demons through the course of his life
and did not always win. The dream shows me the way to keep the
commandment, "honor thy father." Releasing the fear, I am finally free
to forgive him, something the rest of my family has managed, but I never was
fully able to do while he lived, despite his desperate wish that I would.
In forgiving him, in a sense, both his and my own teshuvah (turn)
may complete,and he can return to God an upright man.
"You have allowed the material means by which you live to outdistance the spiritual ends for which you live."
My facebook friend Steve Sorkin recently posted the following selection from the speeches of Martin Luther King. The timeliness - I hope not "timelessness" - of King's words struck me hard, and I so I share them here.
"America, as I look at you from afar, I wonder whether your moral and spiritual progress has been commensurate with your scientific progress. It seems to me that your moral progress lags behind your scientific progress. Your poet Thoreau used to talk about "improved means to an unimproved end." How often this is true. You have allowed the material means by which you live to outdistance the spiritual ends for which you live. You have allowed your mentality to outrun your morality. You have allowed your civilization to outdistance your culture. Through your scientific genius you have made of the world a neighborhood, but through your moral and spiritual genius you have failed to make of it a brotherhood. So America, I would urge you to keep your moral advances abreast with your scientific advances. . .
I understand that you have an economic system in America known as Capitalism. Through this economic system you have been able to do wonders. You have become the richest nation in the world, and you have built up the greatest system of production that history has ever known. All of this is marvelous. But Americans, there is the danger that you will misuse your Capitalism. I still contend that money can be the root of all evil. It can cause one to live a life of gross materialism. I am afraid that many among you are more concerned about making a living than making a life. You are prone to judge the success of your profession by the index of your salary and the size of the wheel base on your automobile, rather than the quality of your service to humanity.
The misuse of Capitalism can also lead to tragic exploitation. This has so often happened in your nation. They tell me that one tenth of one percent of the population controls more than forty percent of the wealth. Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. If you are to be a truly Christian nation you must solve this problem. You cannot solve the problem by turning to communism, for communism is based on an ethical relativism and a metaphysical materialism that no Christian can accept. You can work within the framework of democracy to bring about a better distribution of wealth. You can use your powerful economic resources to wipe poverty from the face of the earth. God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty. God intends for all of his children to have the basic necessities of life, and he has left in this universe "enough and to spare" for that purpose. So I call upon you to bridge the gulf between abject poverty and superfluous wealth.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Paul’s Letter to American Christians Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, on 4 November 1956.
Have you, by any chance, checked out the tabs across top of this blog? One of them is EcoCurious, my blog about matters of the environment and sustainability. If you've visited EcoCurious, you might have noticed a flip comment across the top, "If only the answers really were inside the envelope."
Well, duh. Of course the answers are outside the envelope.
If we look at the world we know as though it's the only possible world, if we look at the rules we operate by as though they are the only possible rule set, then we will remain stuck inside the envelope.
To find solutions that could create a different, better, healthier, more sustainable world, we have to believe that our world is just one possible version, that our rules are just one set of possible rules. We have to shake it up and find the alternatives. Shake it up!
Today I bring you Anthony Weston, a philosopher who spends his professional life helping people see beyond our mental obstacles to enable us to rethink our biggest, most complex ethical and practical dilemmas. He's mastered a method for enlarging the realm of choices, figuring out how to apply different sets of rules than the "usual set" to expand the possibilities for ethical problem-solving.
Let me give you a quick Weston example. You may have heard about the Heinz dilemma. It's an ethical quandry used by psychologists to test children for their level of moral reasoning. Since it's written for kids, it's will be easy for us to follow Weston's logic, as he deconstructs his process.
A woman is dying of cancer. There is a medication available to her, but she needs several treatments at $2000 per treatment, and she and her husband do not have that kind of money. The husband counts all his resources, sells what they don't absolutely need, asks his family to help, but the money he can scrape up does not amount to enough money to cover her treatment. He goes to the pharmacy and pleads that they sell the medicine for what he has, or she will die. They tell him, "no." The dilemma: Should the husband steal the medication so that his wife may live?
Let me simplify: Steal or die?
Weston asks his students to back up from the question, and see whether they can enlarge the realm of possibilities. They come up with these sorts of answers:
He could offer the pharmacist something he needs or wants, maybe trade his skills to make up the difference.
Maybe the wife could go to the pharmaceutical company and offer to be part of a follow-up study, in exchange for the medication.
In one of his workshops, a group of nurses even suggested that the wife steal the drug, specifically to get herself arrested, because the law requires medical care for all prisoners, and that way the state would pay for the drug.
What about the community? Could it band together to raise the money?
So now that we're brainstorming ideas, I bet you can come up with a few yourself.
Weston's point is this:
What if, instead of distancing ourselves from the question, and asking, "What should he do?" we ask, "what can we do?" Or even, simply, "what all could be done?" The realm of possibilities expands beyond "steal or die," both of which are not ethically acceptable or morally desirable.
This made me think. Weston's simple dilemma is really not very different than the way we've taken to laying out our most difficult dilemmas. Look how some of our current policy debates are framed:
Affirmative action or fewer minorities admitted into programs and hired into jobs?
Drill for oil in the United States or continue to be dependent upon foreign oil?
Keep shipping soldiers to the middle east or be subject to the murderous intentions of extremist Islamist fundamentalists?
And so on... We have become a nation of simplifiers, a nation of sound bites and political slogans. We scream, it's either this way, or it's that way! It's my way, or no way. We are so polarized.
What if, what if. What if we could get good at backing up from the either this, or that solution envelope? What if we could get outside the envelope altogether?
Have you, by any chance, checked out the tabs across top of this blog? One of them is EcoCurious, my blog about matters of the environment and sustainability. (In CuriositySquared, I write about stuff .) If you've visited EcoCurious, you might have noticed a flip comment across the top, "If only the answers were in the envelope."
Well, duh. Of course the answers are outside the envelope.
If we look at the world we know as though it's the only possible world, if we look at the rules we operate by as though they are the only possible rule set, then we will remain stuck inside the envelope.
To find solutions that could create a different, better, healthier, more sustainable world, we have to believe that our world is just one possible version, that our rules are just one set of possible rules. We have to shake it up and find the alternatives. Shake it up!
Today I bring you Anthony Weston, a philosopher who spends his professional life helping people see beyond our mental obstacles to enable us to rethink our biggest, most complex ethical and practical dilemmas. He's mastered a method for enlarging the realm of choices, figuring out how to apply different sets of rules than the "usual set" to expand the possibilities for ethical problem-solving.
Let me give you a quick Weston example. You may have heard about the Heinz dilemma. It's an ethical quandry used by psychologists to test children for their level of moral reasoning. Since it's written for kids, it's will be easy for us to follow Weston's logic, as he deconstructs his process.
A woman is dying of cancer. There is a medication available to her, but she needs several treatments at $2000 per treatment, and she and her husband do not have that kind of money. The husband counts all his resources, sells what they don't absolutely need, asks his family to help, but the money he can scrape up does not amount to enough money to cover her treatment. He goes to the pharmacy and pleads that they sell the medicine for what he has, or she will die. They tell him, "no." The dilemma: Should the husband steal the medication so that his wife may live?
Let me simplify: Steal or die?
Weston asks his students to back up from the question, and see whether they can enlarge the realm of possibilities. They come up with these sorts of answers:
He could offer the pharmacist something he needs or wants, maybe trade his skills to make up the difference.
Maybe the wife could go to the pharmaceutical company and offer to be part of a follow-up study, in exchange for the medication.
In one of his workshops, a group of nurses even suggested that the wife steal the drug, specifically to get herself arrested, because the law requires medical care for all prisoners, and that way the state would pay for the drug.
What about the community? Could it band together to raise the money?
So now that we're brainstorming ideas, I bet you can come up with a few yourself.
Weston's point is this:
What if, instead of distancing ourselves from the question, and asking, "What should he do?" we ask, "what can we do?" Or even, simply, "what all could be done?" The realm of possibilities expands beyond "steal or die," both of which are not ethically acceptable or morally desirable.
This made me think. Weston's simple dilemma is really not very different than the way we've taken to laying out our most difficult dilemmas. Look how some of our current policy debates are framed:
Affirmative action or fewer minorities admitted into programs and hired into jobs?
Drill for oil in the United States or continue to be dependent upon foreign oil?
Keep shipping soldiers to the middle east or be subject to the murderous intentions of extremist Islamist fundamentalists?
And so on... We have become a nation of simplifiers, a nation of sound bites and political slogans. We are so polarized.
What if we could get good at backing up from either this, or that solution envelope?
"Life is pretty bleak at the top too. All of the bobbles of the rich, they're kind of this phony compensation for the loss of what's really important: the loss of community, the loss of connection, the loss of intimacy, the loss of meaning. Everybody wants to live a life of meaning. But today we live in a money economy, where we don't really depend on the gifts of anybody. We buy everything. Therefore we don't really need anybody. Whoever grew my food or made my clothes or built my house, well, if they died or I alienate them, if they don't like me, that's OK. I can just pay somebody else to do it. It's really hard to create community if the underlying knowledge is, 'we don't need each other.'" ~ You Can't Evict an Idea
# # #
Yesterday my friend Cathy Wiken shared an #Occupy movement video (embedded below), "You Can't Evict an Idea," by economist Charles Eisenstein. My friend was raised in a conservative household in a conservative town, and she is still very much a conservative. But she is also an expansive thinker, and she can see past labels. The video reached her in a place of higher humanity - a place that transcends politics and ideology and talks to us about what is becoming of our world in terms of human experience. Regardless of one's politics, it is impossible not to be moved by the slide of our global community into economic decline and therefore human impoverishment in all its multiple manifestations.
Today is the Jewish Sabbath. The Sabbath - Shabbat - was God's way of urging us to regularly step back from the rush of our lives across the fulcrum from birth to death, to ask ourselves if the path we are taking to that eventuality is the one we want to be on. This Shabbat, I feel grateful to Cathy for giving me pause to think about our greater purposes, to ask myself whether I am contributing.
So, Cathy, this blog is for you. I want to share with you - a non-Jew - the Jewish mystical view of the human condition, of why we are here. And crazy enough, I want to connect the deeper urges of the #Occupy movement with a longing to act upon the oldest and most sacred obligation of humankind.
To put this in context: I worry about the power of language to shape our reality, and in fact to lead to the ultimate destruction of society. Jewish mystics would likely not be surprised if the world's end is facilitated through the power of words. Such is simply the logical flip side of this Jewish belief: the word is so powerful that God created the universe by speaking it into existence. We are all familiar with the fable where a woman's cruel words have scattered like scrap paper to the winds; there is no way she can reclaim them to undo the damage caused. Words are not simply mouth noises controlled into formulaic emissions. They are powerful tools of construction and destruction.
Today's political parties and their operatives are experts at the use of language. Specifically crafted language, slogans and framing are artfully employed to manipulate opinions. The best arts, science and tools that marketers and demographers have to offer help us agree on policies that sometimes stand directly in opposition to what is good for us, and for humanity generally. Plenty of research has explored the reasons why people often support social policies that appear to be contrary to their own interests. While academically this is all very interesting, practically speaking we have endless examples of the destructive outcomes from using language manipulation for political power and control. Outcomes ranging from national paralysis in the face of economic disaster to jihad to genocide.
What if we could somehow strip away all the lingo? What if we could strip away the anger and disagreements that tear us apart as a nation, and as cultures fighting over a planet? What if we could shed the stylized, formulaic and strident speech imposed upon us by those in power, rhetoric that allows for little conversation or disagreement?
"Anything people can articulate can only be articulated within the language of the current political discourse, and that entire political discourse is already too small. And that's why making explicit demands kind of reduces the[#Occupy]movement and takes the heart out of it. It's a real paradox. I think the movement understands that." ~ video "You Can't Evict an Idea"
If we strip away the rhetoric, the demands, aren't we likely to find underneath it all that we are all much the same? That we are all, more or less, simply yearning for the opportunity to get by in peace, to do our best to be good family members, neighbors, community members? To self-fulfill through relationships and finding purpose and meaning in our work? Oh sure, we come from different cultures and celebrate different holidays, but how is it that we are different, really? At base, we are human animals. What gives us the illusion of difference is our verbal insistence that we are. Why cling to these verbal representations past the point of sanity?
I'm not suggesting that we return to the melting pot, trying to assimilate the black and the brown and the foreign and the native into the majority culture as though all vanilla all the time is better than 31 flavors.
Instead, I'm asking whether we might do more justice if we could shed the human-contrived definitions of truth, definitions keeping us perpetually angry at one-another for failing to see it my way. I'm asking whether we might do more justice if we come at our earthly problems from a sacred place, a universal place, a place that employs rhetoric of healing and wholeness, from which we could begin to work things out among us.
Jewish mysticism has a metaphoric explanation for our world that goes roughly like this (I am about to way oversimplify here for the sake of getting a point across):
God was always everywhere and took up all the "room" in the universe and beyond, and in fact is the universe, or rather the universe is part of the everything that is God...
Then it arose in the Divine will - e.g. God decided it was time - to create our finite Universe. To differentiate some of God's being into us. There are some who say God was lonely and others who say the Universe is simply the evolution of God's will over time.
In order for the finite Universe to be created, God is said to have 'constricted' God's self or pulled inward (in Hebrew, tsimtsum), and then re-expressed outward, resulting in the creation of a "first" Adam (adam is Hebrew for earth), a prototype, if you will. Some say the constriction was to 'make room' for the finite.
A series of these constrictions followed by re-expressions is said to have lead to the creation of our finite world. It's a hard idea to follow. I like to think of a metaphor where a baby is born through a series of contractions, each of which pushes the baby closer to its birth. The finite world in this view could be said to have been pushed through a series of heavenly "contractions" into being.
Like a baby is not yet an adult, this heavenly birthing exercise did not complete our finite world.
It is said that during these holy contractions, if you will, God's holy light, the force or energy necessary to propel and complete the finite world, had to be gathered. I guess another way to say this is that, prior to this gathering of light/energy, one might think of God as undifferentiated holiness. To create something as uniquely differentiated as our finite world required God's energy and holiness to be corralled. It was corralled into ten "vessels" representing ten attributes of God that must have been necessary to the creation. I do not pretend to know exactly what is meant by the word vessel, for while you would think that God's energy could not be contained by anything like a ceramic vessel, on the other hand, the finite world IS made of destructible materials like board and brick and flesh and bone. SO apparently these vessels were destructible. In fact, the light pouring into these "vessels" was so intense and the energy so strong that the vessels did shatter. God's energies remained "above" (in the heavenly realm?) but the vessels exploded into pieces. Permeated by holy light, the vessels' shards scattered about our newly formed world like so much sacred shrapnel.
The Jewish mystics say that these ten attributes of Divine energy now infused into shards, must, for the completion of God's creation - our world - now be collected and reclaimed by we sons and daughters of Adam.
Are we here to collect the shattered pieces, or are the shattered pieces here so that we may collect them?
Because everything is by Holy design, we can surmise that the infusing of the vessels with holy light and energy, and their breaking and scattering, was not accidental. Our world was intentionally broken into tohu, or chaos, shaping our existence here. The mystics say that our job on earth - our reason d'etra if you will - is to collect the shattered pieces of vessel, and "lift them back to holiness." Lifting each piece to holiness will in some way complete the human connection with the Almighty, and will help to finish creating and making holy - you could say "healing" - our broken, unfinished, finite world. My apologies to any Kabbalists who find themselves shaking their heads, muttering "that's a vast oversimplification." Well, yes. http://tinyurl.com/shatteredvessels
What is involved in "lifting the shards"? To find and lift the shards, we must learn to recognize the pieces of the vessel when we see them. These pieces are not actual shards laying around like pottery. Rather, they are the opportunities for interaction with one-another, with the earth, with God. How will we treat these relational opportunities? With anger? With kindness? With impatience? With arrogance?With mercy? With selfishness? With empathy and compassion?
If we choose to live our lives in a way that promotes healing and wholeness, then we sanctify the shards. If we choose to live our lives in a way that promotes only self-aggrandizement, selfishness, the destruction of "the other," then we miss an entire lifetime of opportunity to help finish God's creation.
I'm pretty far away from my original proposition about the #Occupy movement, so let me bring this back to where I started.
"This movement isn't about the 99% defeating or toppling the one percent. You know the next chapter of that story, that the 99% create a new one percent. That's not what it's about. What we want to create is the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible, a sacred world, a world that works for everybody, a world that is healing, a world of peace. You can't just say, 'We demand a world of peace..." ~ "You Can't Evict an Idea"
I truly believe that the political rhetoric and labels and framing and slogans are keeping us from sanctifying the shards. That the rhetoric and formulaic ideologies keep us from seeing the holiness in the relationship opportunities we have - with each other, with the earth we were given to live on, with God, Him(Her)self. I believe God wants us to get out from under the rhetoric and see our relationships as opportunities to bring God's energy back into alignment and finish this holy creation. To heal and finish making whole.
Ideologues are people who can only see the world in one way and would discard everything and everybody who does not fit this limited vision or agree to conform. Ideologies - like communism or capitalism, either one - are just man-made theories that ask us to believe there is only one way to put the vessels back together. But these are human blueprints, and they fall short of offering a way to put God-made vessels back together. Human ideologies are not encompassing enough, any of them, to be a blueprint for a Holy creation.
One of the reasons I love the #Occupy movement is because it is self-organizing. By that, I mean that in its emergence, it is following its instincts rather than any ideology. In fact is refusing to be co-opted by ideologues. While embracing all who wish to help or join, it has refused to adopt or become a tool for a single perspective. It has refused MoveOn.org. It has refused the Obama-ites. It has refused to wear the union label. Refusing these labels, refusing to grant these formalized organizations a place of leadership, creates room to follow our God-given human instincts.
Some of these instincts will be base. The media likes to point its cameras to the basest parts of humanity. But some of its instincts will be holy - or you could say "transcendent." By refusing a single ideology, #Occupy asks us to look into the deepest parts of ourselves, beneath the many unholy grails that pervade our media, into our souls. To reconnect with our deepest sense of humanity. And to lift up what we find there out into the light of day. To become something better, more humane, more giving and therefore more sacred.
And if that's not why we're here on earth, I really don't know what else God might have intended.
"You have necessary and important gifts to give...as more and more people wake up to the truth, that we're here to give, wake up to that desire, to the understanding that the other way isn't working anyway, the more reinforcement we have from people around us, this isn't crazy, this makes sense, that this is how to live, and as we get that reinforcement then our minds and our logic no longer have to fight against the logic of the heart which wants us to be of service.....An economist says that essentially more for you is less for me, but the lover knows that more for you is more for me too." ~ "You Can't Evict an Idea"
