Failure and recrimination...

The headline is almost more important than the article...

America's Longest War...A nation once joined together in shock and vulnerability is now riven by failure and recrimination...

http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7854412

If there is one word that describes my concern with America, right now...and I don't mean the American government...I mean Americans, although it's not just Americans...I've heard it with people from all over the world these days...

If there is anything that describes my concern with the world, right now...it is the recrimination...

I don't just mean looking for who to blame, although that is a fairly ignoble instinct as well...

I mean all of the ugliness and destructive attitudes about who to get, where retribution needs to be meted out, and how else to rationalize ugly feelings post-9/11 and post-Iraq war...in its most extreme, it manifests itself as genocide and terrorism and oppression...in it's least but still important extreme, it manifests itself as hurtfulness and insensitivity and a lack of compassion...

The partisanship we've experienced, I think, is a function of a nation lost, still, in its grief over 9/11 and the failures of the Iraq war and looking to take that out on someone...and, at some level, everyone...and a world wracked by violence and power-struggle and inequity and repression...and all of the ways that our worst instincts divide us...

My concern is with the us vs. them mentality that is the foundation for partisanship that assumes that one group of good people must dominate another group of good people if goodness is to be restored to the world...

It's all the rage, these days...liberals believe it...conservatives believe it...it's nonsense, of course...it is just as much nonsense as when democratic citizens in the 20th and 21st centuries look back at sectarian divisions among Protestants and Catholics in Great Britain or France or Spain that plunged those countries in endless wars and civil wars...it is just as much nonsense as 21st century democratic citizens look on with incomprehension at Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq or the broader Middle East and wonder how any group can believe that theirs will win some kind of final control or why they want to win even temporary control over the other...

It's foolish and nonsensical...and deeply destructive, for no good purpose...

But, sadly, what both divides Americans and people all over the world, right now, and what so many of them have in common is recrimination...is the desire for revenge and retribution...is the constant hair-splitting over what is unpardonable, because we are just too cowardly to forgive...

It is profoundly wrong-headed and destructive and it is nice to see one magazine pause and ask us if we have not lost track of our souls in the process...

It's the seriously troubling self-fulfilling prophecy of aggression and power-hunger...pursuit of power rationalizes destruction and the maintainance of power rationalizes destruction, which creates grief for others who then seek revenge or power to impose grief on those they see as enemies or opponents...

It doesn't start out that way...but it always ends up that way...
And right now is the worst that I have seen it in my lifetime...
And the more I see how ugly all people can be of all political, religious, nationalist, ethnic, gender, racial, class, and whatever other backgrounds, the less I romanticize any of it and any member of any group...

Fundamentally, we all are human beings...

And this time, more than any other, I see how important it is is think in those terms rather than in terms of all of the things that divide us...because we are too easily divided, for very little good purpose...
Power does not resolve our problems...nor does it resolve our grief...or our desire for revenge...

Forgiveness is the only way out of the recrimination and grief and desire for revenge...and power and aggression must be used as little as possible if we are to get anywhere as a species and a human family...and as long as we rationalize power and aggression for the benefit and at the expense of another, we will suffer this kind of division and violence and destruction...it doesn't matter for what purpose...we will always suffer together until we learn to treat one another better and respect limits on our capacity to hurt and force and compel one another to do our bidding...

The last 6 years, and as my friend Carson says, in the last 5 years, in particular, we have been lost on a road of darkness that promises to deliver us nowhere...

I no longer believe that that dark road is led by one group or one ideology or another...anyone and everyone who does not take forgiveness and dealing with the pain and grief seriously leads us down that road...and anyone who creates more pain and grief while detaching themselves from responsibility for that compounds the problem...

We will not ever resolve the important issues among us with power or force...we will, at best, win a battle, only to prolong a longer war...
We can, on the other hand, learn to respect and embody democratic ideals that sort out our fundamental needs, together...we can learn to respect one another's need for self-determination and self-governance, our need for freedom and our need to learn to take responsibility for ourselves without coercion (as a general rule), our need to be treated as equals and with an attention to equity when it comes to the talents and abilities we have to offer, our need to be helped when we are suffering, and our need for dignity while suffering or not...our need for love and genuine concern...our need to be loved and cared for and to love and care for others as human beings, not as members of parties or ideologies or religions or ethnicities or genders or races or sexual orientations or nationalities or any other way that we too often divide ourselves...

And as long as we do not take those ideals seriously, we can expect to be divided and to be treated badly as a consequence of those divides...

Martin Luther King was not some naive idealist, some pawn or passive collaborator in the brilliant machinations of Malcolm X...he was the most genuine moral leader of the 20th century, outside of Mohatma Ghandi, despite his foolhardy embrace of radicalism in his later, apparently more bitter years...and it is his message of love and compassion and forgiveness that is his greatest legacy, no matter how much our rationalizations try to twist that differently...that is the reason that his loving message is taught in schools and why we celebrate Martin Luther King day...to embrace what brings us together, not to vindicate what divides us...

And the significance of love and forgiveness is stronger than King or Ghandi or Jesus or Buddha or any of the people who taught about it...
And there has been no other time in my lifetime which has so embodied the need for love and forgiveness as our center...as our moral center, as our political center, as our human center...

The grief and repression and overweaning power that we impose on one another perpetually rationalizes further rounds of those ugly impositions, as Pablo Freire and Desmond Tutu remind us...just as the violence and bloodshed perpetually rationalize more violence and bloodshed until at last humanity can think and feel its way out of the ugliness and destruction...

Maslow was incomplete in his description of people losing their emotional life and vitality because of what happens to them in their lifetimes...what is more true is that people lose life and vitality in their lives because they lack the courage and willingness to face the pain and heartache and let it go...our lack of will more than what happens to us is responsible for our smaller visions...and the consequence is the cynical world that then further rationalizes our cynical outlooks which then further rationalizes a cynical world which then further rationalizes our cynical outlooks...

There is only one way out...Desmond Tutu writes powerfully about it...it is our need to forgive and to be forgiven...to love and to have compassion...there is no other path...everything else is a fool's journey...

There is no division of people that will finally vindicate us...vindicate how right we are/were or vindicate why we are superior to others or worthy of our larger rewards...

All of our divisions are premised on the notion that if we can root out those we see as different from us or defeat them or oppose them, then we can live in peace...it is false premise of peace and of a more universal humanity which is necessary for that peace...

We obviously must use force and aggression, at times, for our self-defense and for the defense and liberty of others...but we should use power as little as possible -- so that we can trust better when authorities must use power when it is genuinely necessary -- and we must use the least possible force and aggression necessary for our purposes at times when terrorists threaten or genocide must be stopped or dangerous and violent people must be captured...we must widen the scope of freedom, not narrow it, to build faith in our common political institutions -- particularly for times when that faith is necessary, as in the case of collective self-defense or criminal justice -- and to build our trust between one another...there is no trust with power...there is only fear...and fear is not a sustainable or decent way to lead people...it is a means of control that inevitably leads to abuse and/or corruption...

We must earn the trust of one another and build institutions -- with our words and our votes -- that earn the trust of all people...anything less is a recipe for prolonged and sustained conflict which will always threaten those institutions until it is resolved...

It is not power that keeps us together during these dark times...it is an idea...the idea of our common humanity...of our need to look after ourselves, and help others as we can...our need to be decent and take each individual seriously in their own rite...our need for love and compassion and understanding...our need to forgive and to share burdens and to mutually engage one another...our need to think and be open to ideas of people who disagree with us or see the world different from us...our need to be our best selves and to forgive our worst...

We have a million reasons for why we don't live up to that idea...for why we don't take that idea seriously...

But those reasons are all excuses that serve neither us nor anyone else...

As Jesus said, we are much more apt to see the splinter in our neighbors' eye than the beam in our own...

And as I hope we are learning during this period, our rationalizations can go as low as we'd like...that is the nature of our free will...whether we try to force away that reality or not...

Power and violence rationalize themselves...because someone exercises power over me or because they are violent with me, I must aspire to be likewise to avoid their grip...as my good friend John Shtupka (sp?) used to say when I first moved to Lawrence, "Life is a shit sandwich. The more bread you have, the less shit you eat." Fill in power for bread -- meaning money -- and you have the essence of that rationalization...it happens to be false, by the way...we all eat shit, no matter how much money and power we have...and often we eat more shit when we have more money and power, which then reinforces peoples' desire for more money and power for the greater amount of shit that they eat...

It is a powerful rationalization that animates much of the world, sadly...though it genuinely serves noone...

And our capacity for rationalization is the reason why ideals and ideas are so important...because they check our capacity for acting rashly and compounding the rationalization...and they are the only basis for a sustainable future...

I think I understand in this period more than any other the importance of the idea of public education, where we all learn together and take thought seriously together...

As adults and as kids we often pair and divide off into people who think or act or we believe are more like ourselves...but the truth is that what has sustained us through this period has not been any central power...to the contrary, in the realm of politics, divided power and our ability to dissent and to criticize and to engage and to block abuses of authority, when necessary, has been terribly critical to checking the power-hunger of all people with authority...and there is still much more to do, in that regard...

What has sustained us, independent of the political process, has been our capacity to think and reason and aspire independently and together for something better than our current malaise...

This Economist article or Joe Nye's work on Soft Power or Mark Twain's literature, in that regard, are and have been, during this period, much more valuable than anyone being elected or unelected...we just persistently take it and the ideas and heart that are the real backbone of humanity and human life for granted...

For the same reason that most people choose long-term monogamous relationships over the thrill of fucking strangers, I have confidence in peoples' capacity to recognize this...recrimination or power-frenzy or identity politics or ideological or any other form of polarization are all highly charged forms of rebellion and dark impulse for people in the short term...

But they can't sustain a culture or a democratic government...that can only be sustained with something more genuine and honest and sincere and true...

We all know that...even as we indulge our darker temptations and impulses...

Failure and recrimination can rally us around ignoble ends...but they cannot sustain us...thought and compassion and common bonds are the only things that can sustain us...everything else is a fool's journey...

Love,
Ben