The Examined Life #1: Pride and Arrogance

Let's talk about pride and arrogance.

Arrogance is when I assume that the other person doesn't know what I know, or as much.

Arrogance is when I assume that the other person agrees with me about every point, or that my opinion is correct and/or obvious.

When someone I'm collaborating with asks me to do something differently and I assume their need is unimportant, or I take their request as an attack, that's probably arrogance.

Arrogance is the destructive expression of pride. Pride can be a positive emotion in small or temporary doses, to keep us striving, carry us through difficulty, or overcome shame. It feels good to acknowledge our achievements. When we stay stuck in pride, it begins to hurt the ones around us.

Arrogance is not meant. If I know I'm lording it over someone, it's more like aggression or cruelty, and that is another discussion. Arrogance is an unconscious state, and that's its greatest danger.

Arrogance is a disease found in the accomplished and the educated. Arrogance is not about achievement itself – it's about a psychological need in the achiever. Ironically, when you meet a true master of some discipline – someone who has been working at it for a long time, been tested, struggled, and overcome frustration, failure and even humiliation – that person is often quite humble and easy to talk to. A true master always wants to learn more, and knows that she knows nothing. Stumbling through the pitfalls of pride is part of the path of a student, and getting stuck in pride stifles one's ability to learn. A true student is constantly learning humility.

Arrogance seems to come from a need for “freedom”: freedom from. Freedom from having to work hard, freedom from having to do the work of considering another's opinion or reality, freedom from having to stretch outside of one's comfort zone. Arrogance is a disease found in democracies, where “liberty” is the common currency. Healthy democratic constitutions establish a balance of liberty and responsibility, and consider both the individual and the community. 

If I think my mind is free from arrogance, it's probably out of arrogance. 

Remembering Humanism

I'm a humanist. I mean I aspire to be.

A friend once responded that she is a “being-ist.” I understand the idea, but it's kind of like responding to Black Lives Matter with “all lives matter.” Humanism doesn't mean “valuing humans over other beings;” it's the effort to retain our “humanity,” and fierce humanism often (maybe always) emerges in times when we're seeing cracks in our humanity, or the horror of its opposite.

The word “humanity” is by its very nature hard to define – it's a work in progress, and it's taken a whole human history of trial and error to build a definition. The halls of humanism are populated by minds who love the gray area: Montaigne, Primo Levy... and millions of others who will not reach fame because of their lack of sensationalism or absolute adherence to an idea.

Some possible aspects of Humanity: compassion, reason, self-examination, self-critique, willingness to change, moral courage in the face of one's peers (never mind one's enemies – that's easier,) willingness to consider another's point of view (especially an unpopular point of view.) Maybe its main characteristic is a love of those aspects that make us human, such as our curiosity, creativity, sense of wonder, and consideration of the world beyond the tip of our nose.

Looking up formal definitions of “Humanism” will give you a good sense of how humanism is moving forward – old definitions of the word, blindered by Western masculinist academic myopia, imply that classical booklearning is necessary. While education is valuable to the expression of humanism, and humanism teaches us to value well-rounded education, booklearning itself is not a prerequisite of a humanist mind, and plenty of learned people don't pass the test of being humanists. 

Humanism is not necessarily secular, either, though there are those who identify as “secular humanists.” Humanism asks a person to reflect on and question one's beliefs, and is antithetical to fundamentalism or evangelism, but there are many humanists who also follow a religious faith. Many of the most illuminating humanist thinkers of the 20^th Century West were Jewish, for example, and for obvious reasons. 

When I say “for obvious reasons,” I'm coming to the heart of the definition of humanism. We are currently honoring the 75^th anniversary of the end of an event that exemplified the exact opposite of Humanity – the Holocaust. While the Nazi's main targets were Jews, and “Others” of various kinds, the Nazis also feared and murdered liberal intellectuals in general. And many of the Jews and others who escaped death went on to become dedicated, devoted scholars of the questions, “What makes us human?”, “What causes us to lose our humanity?” and “How can we create a more humane world?” See Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, or any of the founding scholars of the New School for Social Research.

Arguably, 1945 was the year that a trend of particularly modern inhumanity reached a climax, from colonialism and slavery, through the commodification of labor and its abuses, to systematic genocides, peaking in the blinding light of the bombs dropped on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our species has always had brutality, and in some fundamental ways we are always improving, but the above events had to give 20^th Century humans pause in assuming we were becoming more “civilized.”

Perhaps humanism is, most simply put, the response to inhumanity. Hence humanism has more questions than answers, because it is trying to make sense of the senseless. Humanism's home is in the uncomfortable middle ground.

Following WWI, the Far Right took political control of Germany through democratic voting, and subsequently attempted to take military control of the rest of the world. It failed. The fascists attempted to crush humanist thought out of existence, and instead an explosion of humanist thought prevailed in the decades after. Now, the Far Right is succeeding in taking political control, through democratic voting, of many of the most powerful nations in the world, and military victory doesn't even look necessary any more. The gains that we made toward a more just world in the late 20^th Century are being eroded. Will humanism survive this wave?

When times are dark, there are always those who will passionately rail against the wrongs of the world and promise fast and sweeping solutions. Humanism longs for a humane world, and yet understands that “the arc of the moral universe is long.” Humanist politicians don't last long in populist political climates, unless they have enormous charm and are masters of compartmentalization... and then they could still be brought down in an instant. 

Humanism, to me, has a feeling to it. It's hopeful and sad, proud and appalled, full of wonder and alarm, and completely alive and engaged in life. It rises above the fray to reflect, but it can't exist in a vacuum or a bubble – one must feel the pain and discomfort of involvement to feel how we could do better; one needs the moral compulsion that comes from being part of the fray. 

Humanists are the first to be torn apart by mob mentality. Humanists are hated and feared by extremists on either end of any scale. And the life of a humanist is the most marvelously alive of all lives.

Today, humanists are writing beautiful essays about the sadness of Brexit. 

Humanism is the canary in the coal mine. 

Democratic musings for weird times

Sometimes in the muck of modernity, or the crazyquilt of postmodernity, we long for a benevolent dictator, or the romantic notion of a loving, parental monarch from centuries past. When the debate gets ugly, it's easy to forget that the debate is in fact sacred stuff. 

We grew up. We are no longer the children of a king or queen. The language of the enlightenment and later thinkers, such as Kant, Spinoza, and Mill, whose ideals both fueled and were fueled by the American Revolution and subsequent democratic revolutions, was full of references to a new sense of, and need for, a feeling of “maturity.” Sapere aude! Dare to think for yourself! 

During a presidential election season I think we have emotional flashbacks to the days when the decision was out of our hands, when the dear leader would show up, chosen by God, for better or for worse. Thousands of years of monarchy and nobility are still in our DNA memory, and there's a lingering fondness for daddy, who protected us, made our decisions for us, provided for us. I think there's a good reason “Hamilton” has been turned into a popular musical recently – he loved aristocracy and royalty and argued to keep remnants of it in our Constitution, and even died in the noble, violent style of the ancienne regime. In times of uncertainty and upheaval especially, we long to run to the old familiar lap. 

This secret love of the monarch underlies our passion over the presidential race, and our relative apathy and low voter turnout during mid-term elections. (Even the term mid-term elections implies that the presidential is the only really important election, the point of reference.) Of the three official branches of our government, Americans statistically have the lowest confidence in the Legislative, probably because Congress resembles us. They don't wear long black robes, they are not solitary heroes who will singlehandedly save us; they are grunts who do a dirty job with consistently imperfect results. The halls of Congress are even jokingly called a “sausage factory;” we don't really want to know what happens there, and we love to complain bitterly about the outcomes. 

In fact, relative to many younger parliamentary democracies, our Constitution gives an excessive amount of power to the President, precisely because in the eighteenth century even our most progressive Founders, with no contemporary democratic role models to work from, had a hard time thinking outside of the box of monarchy. Arguably the stature and magnetism of George Washington himself (often referred to later as His Excellency, or His Highness the President,) within the Philadelphia State House influenced the Constitutional Convention to create an office with his benevolent leadership in mind. (We still only elect tall guys. Well, that may be changing.)

As I said, we've grown up. Maybe a little fast. Humanity's gradual yet sweeping embrace of democracy as an ideal and as a system of government is, I believe, an adolescence in our spiritual growth – the societal-level version of the throwing-off of parental authority and the acceptance of personal responsibility for one's choices. Of course it's messy! So much of the horror and turmoil of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was basically our species using its limited mental, emotional, spiritual, and linguistic tools to deal with the beginnings of a radical, global paradigm shift.

But democracy was, is, and continues to be our trajectory. (Yes, I'm unabashedly teleological in my belief in our spiritual evolution. But it's not a belief in anything as simplistic as “destiny.” We are making the choices here. That's the exciting part.) Democracy is not a finite system – there is no such thing as a perfected one. We strive for a more perfect Union – not a perfect one. The discussion of inclusivity is one example of the gray areas that democratic discourse reveals: who should be allowed to vote, or hold office? If people in prison are affected by public policy, should they be allowed to vote? If people in Mexico are affected by U.S. foreign policy, should they be allowed to vote in our elections? What about children? It was once seriously thought, by educated men, that women and people of color were not qualified to vote. Imagine that! Was that even a democracy? Well, yes, a less perfect one. Democracy's trajectory is towards more and more inclusion, but where do we draw the line, and when do we re-draw it, and how do we keep our system flexible enough that we can re-draw the lines when we've learned better? Democracy, by its very nature, demands that we admit we can't know all the answers, and that we still try to find them. It's exciting stuff, if you're ok with the unknown and can remember to breathe. 

The life blood of democracy is the open mind. Here is the kernel I mean to get at today, if I can find the words for it...

I don't like debate. It makes me really uncomfortable, and there always seems to be some aggressive loudmouth who wants to dominate the conversation or prove something at the expense of the discourse. The point of view of the quiet and the deep is almost always bulldozed over by the noisy mob. Our democratic culture has a love/hate relationship with public debate. There is in fact a sub-discipline in democratic theory that idealizes what it calls the “agonistic” nature of deliberative, or town-hall, democracy. I'm sorry, but a conceptual model of democracy with the word “agony” in its root is just a hard sell. (OK, my interpretation of agonistic democracy is a little reductive, but please bear with me...) 

What people need is to be heard. 

When a person is repeatedly not heard, he or she will go crazy. 

The function of open debate in a democracy is not that one can argue until one finally convinces the listener of the verity of one's opinion. We've seen that this almost never happens. Debate and argument generally causes each party to dig their heels even deeper into their own ideology. It's even being proven with psychological research – our ideologies are practically hard-wired into our brains. An extended ideological debate between a liberal and a conservative ultimately ends with a “communist” and a “fascist” storming off in opposite directions. 

So let's free ourselves from the term “debate.”

The real work of democracy is in making sure that everyone is heard. Or, pragmatically, that more and more of us are heard.

Why the appeal of the Republican frontrunner? His fans say that he is saying things that need to be said. He is giving voice to their fear and anger. That's all. A minority of our society that has been driven to extremes of negative, reactive emotion feels that it has found a spokesman. And of course the media, whose economy is driven by the sensational and the provocative, is going to amplify the squealing voices and faces of discontent (as long as it's not the type of discontent that threatens the media outlets themselves, or their cronies.)

  

If you found out that your teenage son had joined a gang, would you turn your back and refuse to listen to him anymore, the moment the truth came out? Or would you make a point of sitting him down and talking to him? Would you listen when he talked to you? Would you try to find out what was wrong in his life that made him feel the need for gang membership? Even if you knew he was going to be stubborn and contrary and storm off, you would at least try, wouldn't you? Maybe you'd encourage him to join a hardcore punk band to express himself.

This is not a prescriptive essay – I'm not going to say there is something we should do, like run out and hug a tea-bagger. (Though maybe you could buy him coffee and a donut and listen to him for a few minutes.) What I'm reaching for here is an expression of the spirit of democracy, because I think we lose sight of it in the noise and fury of election years. I'm just going to riff until I find it... 

We are moving toward being a more compassionate species. Those of us with the time and luxury to reflect can imagine, for instance, a future without war and poverty. We grow as a culture and as a species the same way an individual grows toward being a more fully realized human – by stretching to consider new ways of... well... stretching and considering. This is the essence of living democracy – it's a system that contains the very mechanisms that allow it to grow democratically. (Here the term “strict constitutionalist” is an oxymoron – a true democratic constitution is made to be re-interpreted as conditions change. RIP Mr. Scalia. Good bye.) 

I guess I'm saying we can't be groovy, enlightened people in our personal or spiritual lives, and still turning our backs on each other politically. Our problem is not that there are wackos with radically different beliefs than ourselves. It's a bigger problem that we're isolated from those wackos in our own bubble. The practices that erode democracy – isolation, failing education, misinformation – are more dangerous than the isolated, undereducated, misinformed people themselves.

One of the defining characteristics of the ideal democracy (which, as I've said, doesn't exist per se, but needs to exist as an idea for us to strive toward) is that all voices are heard. Even fearmongers. Even strict constitutionalists. Even socialists and middle-of-the-road diplomats.

Something new needs to happen. Something new is being born. Things just wouldn't be this weird if it wasn't. And we're going to birth it.

What could it be?

We fantasize sometimes about the whole system crashing and being re-tooled. Things are so science-fictiony now it seems like anything could happen. But collapse and rebuilding is an awful prospect – a lot of babies would be thrown out with that bathwater, methinks. When my mind is calm and clear it always seems to be able to come back to rest on democracy, and it feels like the sanest place – the place where we are all truly in this together (even our crazy fringy cousins,) where age-old wisdom proves solid over and over again, where human decency again shows itself to be the bottom line, and where systems (however incomplete or flawed) built by intelligent, thoughtful, hopeful people with consideration for future generations are still pretty reliable tools for moving forward with each other.

I still trust our ship of state to right itself. Now please get out and vote. And please especially get out and vote again in two years.

[This is not a scholarly essay, but some of the ideas reference the following sources:

Miracle at Philadelphia by Catherine Drinker Bowen

An Answer to the Question, What Is Enlightenment? by Immanuel Kant

The claims about American confidence in the various branches of government, and the neurology of ideology, should be Google-able. If not, my apologies.] 

Ten Minute Conversation with a Plant

A large-scale, sociopolitical solution to global warming and the environmental emergency would be most welcome now. We can all get frustrated, though, if not heartbroken, with how slowly top-down solutions work, if at all. And not all of us can find the time to grow our own food or the money to buy a hybrid car, or even make it out to the farmer's market.

So here's something we can each do (or not-do) right now that takes no effort at all, and can help build the foundation for the shift of perspective necessary in our species to help us move forward.

It'll take ten minutes.

Go outdoors, into your yard, or to a park or bus stop. Sit. If the weather's unbearable you can look out a window. Look at the nearest bush or tree. Or cactus. Even a weed or patch of grass will do if resources are that limited. Something from the plant kingdom.

Do not attempt to “quiet your mind.” Let it chatter on if it wants to. In the midst of any and all chatter, observe the plant. Ask yourself the following questions:

In what ways has this plant grown? In other words...

Does it lean? Toward or away from the morning sun? Toward or away from the afternoon sun? Does it seem to be reaching for the shade instead?

Is it “legging out,” i.e. does it have limbs growing peculiarly long and skinny toward the sun or shade?

Are there “suckers,” or branches coming up out of the ground around the base of the trunk?

Is the trunk twisted in a certain way? Is it scarred?

What do the answers to these questions tell you about the way the plant lives? This requires no magical powers or intuition – use simple logic. Could the plant be reaching for something as it grows – sun, shade, water, other nutrients? Could it be competing with another nearby plant for any of these resources? Could it be twisting a little every day to reach somewhere? How could nearby animals, including humans, be affecting its growth?

How might this plant be growing in the wild, without human intervention? Would its leaves scrape the ground? Would animals be eating it? Would it be more dense, or spindlier?

Every plant needs a certain balance of sun, water, and specific nutrients to thrive, according to its genetic makeup. A desert cactus may swell up, rot and die with too much water. A northern vine may hide from the sun if it's too hot and intense. As well, many desert plants can actually suffer from sunburn, and some cooler-climate plants like tons of sun. Sun and water are the biggies, and any question about the health and/or growth patterns of a plant can usually be answered by some excess or deficit of one or the other, before even considering things like nutrients and soil PH. The actual survival of a plant of course also depends on its tolerance for freezing or excessive heat, and its natural lifespan, among other factors. But pardon my garden geeking...

Keep looking at the plant, and consider what kind of plant it is. Do you know its name? Do you know its normal habitat? If not, don't sweat it - it's easy to get hung up on titles and definitions. Plants have individual lives and stories as well as their genetic predispositions.

Consider the plant's characteristics:

If it's a leafy plant, are the leaves waxy, fuzzy, large, small? In what pattern do they grow – in rows or bunches? Are the leaves scrunched closed or splayed wide open? Are the leaves all alike, or are some different? What color are they? If green, is it dark, light, dusty? Look closely at the leaf shape. Could you memorize the way this leaf looks and draw or describe it later?

Leaves are primarily sunshine collectors. What do the leaves tell you, logically, about the plant? Does it want a lot of sun? Does it like to have the sun barely brush its leaves, and filter through? Is it happy with the sun it's getting? Might it be getting too much? Too little? What might any other characteristics, like fuzziness, waxiness, or peculiar shapes mean?

Look at the trunk and/or branches. Does it have bark, or is it smooth? Are there thorns? Look at the knots and places where branches have grown out and fallen off, or been removed. How has the plant healed from these changes? Is there a pattern to how the branches grow? Are there dead branches? If you were a sculptor and could sculpt the exact shape of the trunk, could you, from memory?

Is there fruit? Are there buds? Flowers? Where do these grow? How? Observe the details... How might your plant reproduce? Does it send out shoots that root? Are there insects? Birds? If so, what are they up to?

How is the weather? Humidity? Is there impending rain? How might these factors be affecting the plant, right now?

Is there wind? How does the plant move in the wind? Take a little time to watch this carefully.

What time of year is it? How could this be affecting the plant?

What are your other sensory experiences of the plant? Crush a leaf in your fingers and see if it has a smell. What does the bark feel like?

If you've been observing the plant this long, you're probably noticing many characteristics not even mentioned here. Think about them. Come up with your own questions and theories.

If you feel like sitting a little bit longer, allow your imagination to play a little. What would it be like to be that tree or shrub, standing there day in and day out? What might its roots be doing right now? How might they be growing, in relation to the water sources around? What do you have in common with this plant? What questions would you ask it, if it could speak? What do you think it would say?

Observe how you feel now.

If you've spent 10 minutes on this exercise, consider the possibility that you've done a service to the planet and yourself. Next steps: Do it again tomorrow, or in a week. Do it throughout the year and observe the seasonal changes. Do it for years and observe the longer changes. Do it with a variety of plants. Try it with the whole ecosystem of your yard. Come up with your own variations.

If repeating this exercise seems like a chore to you, then don't trouble yourself. Please consider, though, that there is a wealth of information in a single living form, and that the longer you spend with a living, changing being, the more you can learn about life. A tree will teach you more about itself than any book or nature documentary can, if you take the time to look and listen. And in taking this small amount of time, you are forming a relationship with a being from the plant kingdom and helping to reconnect our species to the web of life from which we've become alienated, or distracted at best. You are perhaps better equipped than you were ten minutes ago to deal with large-scale abstract climate news that can be so overwhelming. You are an ambassador.  

What now? Civility.

One of the main messages that Radical Right politics has promulgated is that the only people worthy of the good things in life are entrepreneurs, and of them only the successful ones. The joke goes, I think, that we have no poor people in the United States, we only have temporarily frustrated millionaires. The ideal of the self-made business success story pervades our media and culture, our language, our though patterns, and our very conceptions of reality – what we believe is even possible. Many New Age belief systems elevate financial success as a sign of being spiritually evolved, universities require academics to market their work, and we tend to feel personal guilt and low self-worth when we are not making ends meet. In the 19^th century, bankruptcy was often accompanied by suicide. The woman who jumped to her death in Spain recently, simply because she lost her home, may be a specter of the same thinking.

The irony, at least in the realm of political leadership, is that many of the men preaching entrepreneurship as an ideal are not entrepreneurs themselves. Their daddies, or their granddaddies, were. When public policy punishes the financially unsuccessful or unambitious through cutting social safety nets, gutting education, stripping legal protections and funneling more and more poor folks into prisons, the men creating and pushing these policies are, at best, basing their decisions on an abstract ideology their fathers taught them from anecdotal experience, at worst transferring their own fears of inadequacy onto society’s most vulnerable. It’s like the kid who gets beaten by his father at home, then goes to school and beats up the littlest kid on the playground.

It’s bullying, on a systemic level.

There are many of us who are simply not entrepreneurs. Some of us are scholars, some are spiritual seekers and contemplatives, some are artists, some are healers, nurses, public servants, gardeners, gifted ditch diggers and visionary educators. We do the things we do because the doing makes us feel alive. And all of these gifts are valuable to the greater society. Speaking as an artist, contemplative and scholar, every minute I spend trying to market my work feels like it’s draining my lifeblood. But I will work passionately, twenty-four/seven, if I’m allowed to simply do what I’m put on this earth to do.  

A truly civil society allows all of its members to express their gifts, without necessarily having to also market those gifts as products and services. In our world the way it is, it’s a nice marriage when an artist finds an entrepreneurially inclined person to market his work. But an artist’s very survival shouldn’t depend on being able to find an agent. When we have to scramble to find patrons to take us under their wings and agents to slay our dragons, we’re looking at feudalism again. It’s the same when a contemplative needs to buy into a specific religious doctrine simply to have a monastery in which to be supported to pray, or when a scholar has to work herself to death as an academic bureaucrat just to do the research she values.

So far, our Liberal-democratic system of governance has been constantly developing and evolving so that the gifts of all can in fact be expressed with minimal distraction. The reason we haven’t bought pure communism is that we acknowledge entrepreneurial people, and the majority of us feel these folks should be allowed to express their gift and be rewarded for it to some degree. And the reason we haven’t bought pure free-market capitalism is that we value the gifts of non-entrepreneurs, and that we also acknowledge we have a moral imperative as a society to provide for the basic needs of all, even those whose gifts we don’t recognize yet. The constant push-pull of conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, has kept this system in a state of equilibrium that has allowed the ship of state to move forward, and democracy to continue its painfully slow growth process.

The ship has leaned so far to the right lately it has almost capsized, in the U.S. and all over the world, because of flaws in our system that have allowed certain greedy interests to shape policy to their own financial benefit. The democratic revolutions in the Middle East, the protests against austerity in Europe, and the recent Democratic victories in the United States are all indicators that we may, thankfully, be able to lean our ships of state back to the left a little bit, and that humanity is not buying the laissez-faire capitalist ideology. But the ship is taking in water, people are falling overboard, and the moneyed interests are not going to give up yet.

I’m feeling hopeful right now, though. I think one thing the U.S. elections showed us is that more money does not exactly correlate to more votes. Yes, I’m sure it had a lot of sway; things would no doubt be a lot “bluer” if corporate giants didn’t own all of the mainstream news media and possess unlimited campaign spending power. But we still got Barack Obama back in office, and more Democrats in Congress than we might have hoped for. I think it actually turned a lot of people off to be constantly bombarded by negative political ads on TV, and that many of those in the middle politically chose to go with the party that was displaying decency, humor, compassion, and moral and social responsibility, and was finally showing the huevos to stand up for gay, women’s, and immigrants’ rights.

I find it especially exciting that here in Arizona, we are electing to Congress Kirsten Sinema, who wrote a book on how to work with people we disagree with (she should know, as a Democrat who cut her teeth in Arizona’s ultra-conservative legislature), and Ron Barber, who founded the Fund for Civility, Respect and Understanding as a positive response to being brutally shot by an armed gunman in the January 8^th, 2011 shootings. The Fund for Civility is dedicated to working on issues of bullying and access to mental health resources, among other projects. It’s poetic that these people who have experienced some of the worst of what a violent, selfish, and irresponsible ideology can produce, and who have responded with love, patience and creativity, are going to Congress to represent us.

These times have been incredibly divisive, and I think that’s one reason many of us came away from Tuesday’s elections not exactly ebullient - we were simply exhausted from the stupidity and excess of overfunded campaigns, and from having to fight like hell just to hold on to things we thought were our birthright – decency, fairness, equality, justice, the possibility of peace… Right now we are a country divided, and that is the greatest danger to our democracy – much greater than leaning too far to the right or left. We have a lot of nasty policy to clean up over the next few years, and crises to be averted and fixed, but more than that we need, on a cultural level, to reclaim our civility. Barack Obama has been a model of the commitment to civility. We have a few more models in Congress now. And we can each contribute in our own way to making this a more civil society, where everyone’s worldview is respected and where every person has the political and social space in which to self-actuate. In every moment, we can choose to interact with each other in a way that does no harm. We can commit to living by the Golden Rule. To be compassionate is, in fact, a political act. The only cure for hate is Love. It's up to every one of us. 

A New Choice: Does More Money Equal More Votes?

We’re winning. 

I think we all know that we can’t solve our problems merely by throwing money at them, or more pointedly, that more money does not necessarily equal more solution. Ironically, it has been the strong suit of old-school conservatives to point this out, ideally helping keep government programs and bureaus streamlined, efficient, and accountable. I say ironically – because the new-school neo-conservatives running the GOP are throwing money at their campaign like there’s no tomorrow. (Well, there obviously is no tomorrow in the Radical Right’s worldview, for example – its pathological lack of responsibility toward our planet’s environment and future generations.) I think it’s a promising sign, actually.

It means that their usual fight-or-flight mentality (which in its low-grade, day-to-day state merely keeps them unimaginative yet calculating,) is in full panic mode. They’re being just plain stupid now. Like the Chimera when she realizes Odysseus just isn’t falling for it. Or Mystique when the Wolverine has bested her.

The “omney yan” yard signs should be the first clue that something is out of balance. Have you seen them? So poorly designed that the “R”s are almost invisible. Maybe the campaign couldn't find a single graphic designer with an ounce of imagination who would work with them. Or perhaps some clever graphic artist sabotaged the logo by underdesigning it, and still brought home a good paycheck. (Kudos, if some artist pulled that one off!) The Republican Party can probably afford to dust every street corner in the nation with these yucky signs. But does more yuckiness mean more votes? 

The coup de grace, though, is the new spate of Republican ads on YouTube. Now, I’m not sure of the exact demographic that tunes in to YouTube, but I’m guessing it’s one that is generally more informed, creative, engaged, critical, and interactive than the one vegging out in front of The Tube at prime time. In other words, the Far Right is probably not going to find a large fertile field for its narrow, selfish platform here. On top of that, the ads they’re running are the obnoxious kind that can’t be turned off after a few seconds. I guess this type of ad costs more money. So of course they can afford it. And the ads are bad! The color schemes, the editing, the writing… just plain bad art, funded by people whose aesthetic sense is blinded by fear-based ideology. 

So what they’re doing is using their superior spending power to create an ugly and obnoxious presence on YouTube that will probably turn people already unsympathetic to their agenda even more strongly against them. Spend away, boys! Keep those big bucks rolling in to populist online information hubs! We can endure your ugly ads for another month, I suppose.

My hope is, of course, that this annoyance will get young YouTube watchers to actually vote.

What’s really exciting about this phenomenon, though, is that it’s a harbinger of a potential sea change in consciousness. The less it feels the need to hide behind a mask of average American values, the more the Extreme Right is showing us all what it truly is and who is behind it. It’s the same way the villain in an epic adventure takes off his disguise for the final confrontation, when he’s sure that he’s winning. It’s a sign of overconfidence and narrow vision. (For those who feel my references to fictional stories weaken my argument, remember that our mythologies are a reflection of real processes in our psyches. And our institutions are a macrocosm of ourselves. Or so Socrates implies.)

We may be coming to a point in time where the majority of voting-enabled Americans will be presented with a fresh new choice. And God knows they’ve been longing for one. The choice is no longer between two fairly reasonable political ideologies. As well, it is not between two puppets spouting differing policy stances but still in the pockets of corporate power - the "lesser of two evils." Please get over these old scripts; one is antiquated and erroneous and the other is debilitating to the spirit. 

The choice we have before us is between beauty and ugliness. Between love, music, creativity, intelligence, responsibility, care, compassion, diversity, fertility, aliveness, sexiness, and humor, and a pale, fearful, monochrome worldview that negates all of these. We are coming to a time where our survival as a democratic state may actually depend on the electorate going with their gut. The Right no longer feels accountable to factual truth. Yes, that’s another sign of pathological thinking and moral bankruptcy, but maybe there is a bright side; when facts become so clouded and inaccessible that rational choice becomes difficult, it forces one to go with feelings and intuition. (It’s the whole point of a Zen koan to confound the logical brain, hence opening the doors of the mind for spontaneous wisdom.) The overworked, underpaid, malnourished, ill-informed, frustrated majority of Americans with no time to research the issues is going to have to decide, on feeling, whether to go with those guys who are beating us over the head with excessive, ugly, divisive, negative ads, or the ones who can’t afford as much airtime. Since the life-affirming doesn’t get much voice in the mainstream, the average American may have to gamble on the ones not making as much noise, may have to step into The Unknown.

Yes, I’m talking about the Big Shift here. Most of those still reading this have done some sort of inner work that required them to step outside of their comfort zone for the sake of their souls, whether through mainstream therapy or through spiritual work. In the lives of most adults there comes a point where, for the sake of health, survival, or merely happiness, we are faced with a choice to let go of old destructive behaviors and beliefs. This process always requires surrender to feeling and intuition. I think we as a nation are coming to the same place in our collective story. (Remember Plato? The larger is a reflection of the smaller, and vice-versa.)

Will we make the step? It’s anybody’s guess. I think something else is being challenged, too. Our faith. It’s a sad side effect of critical thinking that it can lead to a pessimistic outlook on the future of humanity, or at least for America. So the challenge for critical thinkers is to stay positive, trust that one way or another we’re going to be ok, and remember that there is a younger generation of people not so hardened by disappointment; they’re the ones who got Obama into the White House in the first place, against all odds, purely on innocent faith and youthful energy. Remember that. Remember that the way Christians remember that “Pharaoh’s army got drowned in the Red Sea,” or the way Jews remember the Menorah candles staying lit. Try some faith. You don’t have to be religious.

What can we do on the ground? Encourage voting. Vote. It’s not just about the Presidency – we need a Congress that can work with Obama or we will suffer four more years of struggle and stagnation. We can’t afford that. And we need state governments that will not waste our time and resources bucking national policy based on localized bigotry. Work for progressive congressional candidates in swing districts. There’s one near you, no doubt, worth a few hours’ drive if necessary - here's a good place to find out: House races: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/house/2012_elections_house_map.html 
Senate Races: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/senate/2012_elections_senate_map.html

The Deep Sacred Night

The Deep Sacred Night

Fall has always felt like a sacred time in my life. I guess it’s a favorite here in Tucson, when the blowtorch of summer is turned down a notch and it’s actually pleasant to be outdoors, and we all come out of hibernation. Overlay that with the more general cultural mythical undertones of the harvest, reaping, the death necessary for Spring’s rebirth, and it’s a recipe for magic. For me, the All Souls Procession is a perfect expression of this mystical time. Spring also has its giddy form of sanctity in the Sonoran desert: the Yaqui Easter ceremonies, the intoxicating smell of orange blossoms, the ethereal green of brand-new mesquite leaves…

A new deeply sacred season has been added to my own liturgy. Maybe other Tucsonans are feeling it too. For personal reasons, it begins for me in early December, and will probably go through the end of January. I’m not sure yet, because this is year one.

On December 7th of 2010, a very sweet and beloved member of my circle of friends, Marta, was killed in a mindless auto accident by a young man who ran a red light to avoid an encounter with the police. As happens with these freak tragedies, a whole community of people was thrust into a period of emotional rawness, the questioning of reality that goes with shock, a search for meaning, speculation on how such a stupid tragedy could have been avoided, the contemplation of mortality and life’s value – all culminating in a strong desire to keep Marta’s joyful spirit alive somehow in ourselves and in the world. What we experienced is also known as the Mystery.

In poetic terms, a period of grief and loss is a time when the veil between the worlds is thin. Whether you believe in a life beyond or not, pragmatically grief is a time when these reflections and feelings can give us a deeper experience of aliveness, catalyze inner growth, and inspire creative responses that actually do keep a person’s legacy (or spirit) alive in the world – immortal. So when I refer to the veil between the worlds, I’m talking about more than the abstract or faith-based idea of an afterlife. I’m talking about (for lack of better words for it) the veil between what is here now and what is possible. The Mystery is a quantum moment.

The key to the Mystery is in our hearts. There’s no “answer” to it – there’s only the feeling of it.

Almost exactly a month later, on January 8th, the entire Tucson community was thrown into grief over another freakishly violent tragedy, perpetrated by another scared young man (this one profoundly disturbed). That it was an attack on a member of the U.S. Congress made the story personal all over the country, and the world.

I think we all get a little emotionally worn down and stressed out by the holidays. At a time of the yearly cycle (here in the Northern Hemisphere) when our mammalian instinct is probably leaning toward slowing down, fattening up, reducing productivity, sleeping, reflecting and relaxing, we are instead thrown by our culture into a juggling act of obligations, expectations, expenses and social engagements, all stitched together by the complex emotional web of intrigue that our families and materialist culture have normalized for us from birth. Even if one can avoid it in one’s own practices (such as choosing not to give presents, or staying home from holiday parties) one would have to hang out in an isolation tank for two months not to bump up against the general feeling. Of course, enmeshed with all of this are moments of joy, familiarity and comfort in spending time with loved ones, some we only see only once a year – it can be such a loving time of year too.

The holidays we celebrate around the winter solstice come between the death/harvest holidays of fall and the rebirth holidays of spring. Because we can’t celebrate the rebirth yet – plants are dormant – we celebrate the return of the light in the midst of a long, dark night. Whatever our spiritual tradition, or whatever shape the story takes, the light is generally tenuous, vulnerable and even tiny, and the night is fearsome and consuming. It takes a miracle. It’s also kind of an abstract concept compared to the drama of the first freeze of fall or the first green buds of spring – the solar cycle is so slow and subtle we barely notice the days getting longer at solstice. It is a tiny change. But as the days go on we see that it’s really getting lighter. The seeds in the ground, and the branches of the trees, in their own slow, slow, way, are sensing the change.

Maybe I’m just feeling the spirit of this season more deeply than before. Again, Tucson doesn’t exactly fit the temperate-zone mythologies we’re taught as children; our growing season is year-round for a lot of plants. Fall and spring are less dramatic here. Though it’s interesting that last year we had an exceptionally hard freeze that killed and traumatized a lot of our frost-sensitive plants, and this winter has been chillier than normal too. Maybe we’re learning a new holiday.

Last year, after the shootings, people in Tucson were all in a daze to varying degrees – trying to get through our day-to-day activities and wondering why we couldn’t even tie our shoes. The grief hit us all. For those of us who were able to slow down, take some time off, reflect, or simply take moments to be conscious of the profound thing that had just happened in our community, it was a time of great creativity and healing. The shrines are a beautiful example of the immediate creative response. Since then, there has been an explosion of creativity and activity on all levels: Gabby’s office has been flooded with art, writing, and music (as I’m sure the loved ones of the other victims and survivors have); Ron Barber and family created the Fund for Civility, Understanding and Respect; Members of Congress chose to cross the aisle for the State of the Union Address and tone down violent rhetoric; and many people have stepped out to become civically involved, or use their artistic skills in new ways. There are too many examples to name. You’re probably one of them!

This is the definition of a sacred time, I think. Holy Days. A time when we can reflect on the bigger picture, and the potential each of us has to be bigger and brighter, and the better world we can create, and are creating. I’m not saying this in some Polyanna, abstract way – the night is long, dark and scary. People are hurting. It’s by looking into that darkness, acknowledging it, humbling ourselves before it, and feeling all of the feelings of this grief that we touch the Mystery, and bring the light back.

Please be kind to yourselves and each other, and know that things are going to be a little strange, and our hearts a little raw, for the next few weeks.

I’d love to hear other people’s experiences and reflections on this time.