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. 

Our Power

We are not concerned that this movement is not being taken seriously by the champagne-sippers on the balcony. This is just an example of the difference between one understanding of power and another. Any sci-fi fan knows: the evil emperor always thinks he has the upper hand, when in fact he is ignoring the most essential factor of the conflict (or could never have second-guessed that the harmless-looking, primitive Ewoks would throw themselves behind the rebel forces in the final reel.) Those who understand war know that a battle against a native people fighting fearlessly and confidently for their turf is nearly unwinnable (though with enough firepower those people can be suppressed for centuries – but they will in fact rise again. For instance, there is a theory that despite the military defeat and genocide of the indigenous Americans, the eventual embracing of Native cultural values and beliefs by mainstream America will be essential to the very survival of our species; hence, the cultural “victory” will ultimately go to the Indians, not the cowboys. We will all be assimilated.)

The power of the People’s Movement is in our imagination, compassion, humor, and concern for the future – all traits lacking in the forces that would try to hold us back. It’s these deficiencies in the “powers that be” that got us into the mess we are in to begin with. Forces of oppression and coercion have always used a certain strategic cleverness, but it is not at all the same thing as the intelligence of compassion and imagination that we have at our disposal. The fear-based paradigm can't comprehend, much less value, this type of intelligence - it's essentially invisible. Hence, we have "the upper hand." The Ewoks are on our side. As is Love.

Yes, we have lost battles. More may be lost. We are a little punch-drunk from generations of struggle. But there is another factor on our side – we are living in increasingly unstable times. As gracefully explained by Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale, the dominant paradigm of capitalism is collapsing – it is on its way out, whether we can wrap our minds around the fact or not ( http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/10/04 ). Capitalism has been the dominant system for 500 years, has run its course as all systems do, and has been in its death throes since around 1968. We can distract ourselves with critiques of, or attachments to, the old system, or we can get on to the truly important and rewarding work of creating what will come next. Whether we agree with Wallerstein or not on the specifics, the instability of our time in human history is no matter of conjecture – we are experiencing it on all levels.

Fortunately, instability is the home turf of imagination and creativity. It’s where genius thrives. In particle physics, it is the wave form that holds all possibility, before it makes the shift to particle form. Times of trouble are when we tap into our deepest wells of compassion. The stress of the unknown is manageable with humor. And with a serious commitment to our responsibility to future generations, and flexibility in the aliveness of the Now through humor, imagination, and compassion, our steps forward will be productive, and synchronicitous, and beneficial to life on this planet. Wallenstein says that in times of stability, it takes great effort to effect the smallest change, as exemplified by the general failure of the violent revolutions of the last few centuries to bring sweeping social justice for their instigators. But in times of instability, small actions can create great change. It’s simple chemistry.

When one truly believes in something, one will not be very concerned with danger to life and limb, or concepts of failure. In my own experience, jumping out there into the real experience of standing up for what I believe in has been the most alive feeling I’ve ever known. It is an experiential type of knowing that cannot be second-guessed – you have to just go do it. This is what’s behind the smiles on the faces of some of the protesters as they are hauled away by police. This knowingness is spiritual power, and it has been demonstrated by prophets, saints, spiritual teachers and social movements all through human history. It’s also called faith, and it is the basic ingredient in miracles. And it’s what is happening in Liberty Plaza, and what happened in Cairo, Libya, and Madison, and it is spreading all over the world in one form or another. We are truly the ones we have been waiting for.