Understanding is what is missing and needed

As I watch so many situations in the world - the war in Iraq, the revived Middle East peace process, and, today, the DUI and criminal drug charges being lodged against Lindsey Lohan and the criminal dog-fighting drama for Michael Vick of the Atlanta Falcons - it becomes clearer to me that what is missing that is needed in all of these situations and around almost every issue that democratic people face with one another is greater understanding, of one another and of the experiences and situations that we all face.

Lindsey Lohan does not understand the need to not be driving while intoxicated, nor to avoid drugs like cocaine, her protestations notwithstanding. She's not a bad person. She is being irresponsible. But it has clearly not been helped by the arrests and criminal charges she has faced. Journalists following the case ignore that failure and cheer it on further with headlines that speak of Lindsey needing jail time for her own good. That case is obviously without any real regard for Lindsey's own good, which Lindsey is in a better position to assess than any journalist rallying for her imprisonment. And, worse, the failure of legal efforts to correct her behavior in absence of her own conscience coming to terms with it and with a greater maturity that is perpetually undermined by young people like Lindsey by the more controlling efforts of older "wiser" heads who want to imprison her "for her own good." Most people who follow Lindsey's case don't understand this fact of life. Lindsey herself may not understand it. But the facts of her life certainly do bear it out. And the failure to face up to that lack of understanding is occurring on the part of those who would imprison Lindsey as much as Lindsey herself. The difference is that Lindsey is looking at jail time for her failure to understand. And older people wonder why younger people romanticize outlaw culture.

Michael Vick, so some say, doesn't understand the seriousness of the situation he faces, right now. He won't take a leave of absence to deal with the trial on Federal charges that he faces for dog fighting. He doesn't understand what the big deal is. And the truth is that he just doesn't. Michael, like so many people, especially young people, and like me, in most ways, does not accept the legitimacy of government to regulate his behavior (though I do very seriously appreciate the intentions; the results just aren't too whoopy, by any standard) and have trusted older people in their lives who have told them that they will learn from their mistakes, just as those same older folks learned from their own. Most people accept the legitimacy of government regulating someone else's behavior. But few people, when push comes to shove, really believe in the government's or anyone's legitimate right to regulate their own behavior, when they are honest. It doesn't make Vick a bad guy. It just means that he doesn't understand. Most people involved in that drama, and so many such situations, don't understand what it means that Michael doesn't understand the gravity of the situation. And it's easier to paint people as bad than it is to recognize that they think about such situations differently. And older people wonder why younger people romanticize outlaw culture.

The fact that most people think this way when they are in similar situations and the hypocrisy that we all demonstrate when faced with such situations is the reason for why I support the broadest scope of freedom possible for all people, and the reason why liberal values taken seriously make the most sense to me.

The war in Iraq pits American political leaders and citizens who largely look at that conflict through their own self-centered lenses against both the real needs of the Iraqi government, military, and law enforcement, and, ultimately, the Iraqi people, and the more self-centered outlooks of those same Iraqis, not appreciating the gravity of American blood being spilt for Iraqi security and the hope of an Iraqi political resolution.

And the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, similarly, involves so many parties more attuned to their own more self-centered outlooks than to the needs of one another. I generally have thought of Israelis as the more selfless party in those negotiations, and then the Israelis go and say things like they did today to the Arab League proposal that they could not accept a right of return for Palestinians displaced by Israeli forces at Israel's founding because they do not want to impugn the "Jewish nature" of their state. Read: though Israel was founded as a safe haven for Jews who face discrimination and genocide abroad, we really are the discriminatory assholes that Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims accuse us of being.

And as I watch all of this, it becomes clear that, not only is what is missing is greater mutual understanding and efforts at understanding between people, but that what, more than anything else that stands in the way of such understanding is our more repressive, forceful efforts, as a rule.

I suppose, at some level, this is something many people have just resigned themselves to. And, more nefariously, it is something that many people will perpetually dismiss, out of their arrogance and hubris that their more repressive efforts accomplish more than they do.

What saddens me is the whole of it is based on the biggest lie of all, which is that it is that understanding and not the repression and force that is responsible for most of our troubles. It is the premise that others' interests must be sacrificed to our own rather than the much more honest and enlightened and decent idea that everyones' interests are benefited when we genuinely look after and make stronger efforts to understand the interests and perspectives and thoughts of everyone better and that it is our failure to do so which undermines so much of our presumed goals and is responsible for so many of the problems in the world today.

The beauty of repression is that people can hide those more self-centered, unconcerned, uncaring sentiments under their pretenses and facades (though anyone with an eye for pretense can tell the difference, better, generally). And even when our more cynical, less mutually regarding selves are out in the open, we so often glorify them rather than be more self-reflective and self-critical. That's what motivates a Michael Vick to be engaged in the kind of cruel dog-fighting that he was involved with that has precipitated his legal and professional troubles. And that is what motivates his prosecutors, who are more concerned with abstractions about the law than they are with the reality of a man's life and freedom.

Most people resist that kind of understanding, I am learning. And since they are often rewarded for it and because they so often see more understanding efforts overwhelmed by more repressive efforts and nice guys finishing last, too often, they can rationalize their self-centeredness as a means of survival, even if it means the utter and complete dysfunction and ugliness of a world where everyone's interests get sacraficed for the interests of someone else. Or as such that wrong-headed and ugly value system is articulated in common parlance: every man for himself.

It is reinforced by a market and political system where people too often behave this way and then call it "reality". It's the same kind of reality that animates the Iraqi sectarian civil war. It is an ugly and cynical reality. And it is responsible for so much that is wrong with the world.

It is exactly what Lord Acton warned us of in his 19th century musings: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Power persistently corrupts reality. And then power proclaims itself the savior of that same reality. It is likely the biggest lie ever told to humanity and that humanity tells itself.

It most certainly gets better, generally because it breeds mistrust in its proponents. But it does much harm along the way.

Hillary Clinton says that Barak Obama is "naive" and "irresponsible" for his suggestion that leaders of rogue nations should be engaged by heads of state rather than isolated. He happens to be right and all the writing is on the wall to suggest so. And Obama is right to point out that Clinton, who voted for the Iraq war without raising any serious objections about that war, is in a curious position to call Barak Obama naive or irresponsible about anything. Clinton is playing politics. She knows that many older voters, especially, will view Obama's honest admission of taking illegal drugs in school as "irresponsible" and that his popularity among young voters for that fact associates him with the pride that older voters and Democrats maintain that they are wiser, not more cynical, than their younger counterparts, who can thus be disregarded as "naive". It's a cynical ploy by a cynical politician. And exactly why I don't trust Hillary Clinton any further than I could throw her.

And exactly why such cynical power grabs are unsustainable. Because they breed mistrust.

Hillary Clinton might or might not win this election. I will likely be voting against her. Largely because it is clear just how power-hungry and paternalistic she seems to irreparably be.

But there is no way in hell that a Hillary Clinton administration will breed anything but mistrust among a younger generation that will long outlive here political career.

And that is the long view that Hillary Clinton sacrifices in her machinations for power. And that all people sacrafice in their rationalizations of a more repressive direction for liberal democracy.

Americans were cowered for a time by the machinations of Adolph Hitler, in the same way. But they soon enough saw through the charade, largely because an allied Japan overreached and attacked American homeland and also largely because people with more courage and clearer liberal purposes could see what a masterful and cynical power-monger he was, despite the conventional political cowardice of the times, while others were blinded by that popular cowardice. The more repressive fact of the present politics is not a fact of Hillary Clinton or Rudy Guliani or any of the candidates alone. Neither is this fetish with a governing philosophy of force sustainable, anymore than its comrades in governance, Nazi Germany or Soviet Communism, were sustainable.

It is a sad fact of life that the more decent and honest far from perfect idealism of youth is perpetually undermined, punished, corrupted and treated with contempt by the cynicism and desire to control by far from perfect older generations. It is also the quite happy fact of life that such cynicism, control and corruption of spirit fades away, slowly, each generation as young people learn to mistrust their elders, for good reason, and to face their problems more honestly than previous generations.

Slowly.

And, in the meantime, it is understanding of one another that is needed. And it is understanding of one another that is undermined by our quest for power to solve problems it cannot solve.

The only way out of this cynical mess is to recognize this. And for all of their terrible records of dealing with problems well while they are in the midst of them, liberal democracies, like the people who make them up, do seem to have a pretty unflagging ability to face their problems more honestly after everything else has failed.

Understanding that this is a fact of life made so by peoples' natural incapacity to solve problems they do not more completely understand is what is missing and needed, as much as understanding of one another.

It will remain so, and all of the problems that it harbors, until we face the need for that kind of understanding.

If I am so confident that liberal democracies correct themselves, in the long run, why, might you ask, am I so depressed about their behavior in the short run?

The answer: because I grieve for so many who will be hurt in the meantime.

May that number be as few as possible.

Love,
Ben