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 19th
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 8th, 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.
