Searching for God # 27

 Recently, I read of a man who, because he could not longer tolerate the notion that he was not ‘loving his neighbour,’ as he put it, by continuing his formal membership in the Republican party of the United States. The removal of food stamps, higher health care costs, higher consumer costs especially around food and necessities, all combined to ‘push him over’ into the Democratic party.

And while the sentiment of aspiring to ‘love his neighbour’ a notion that takes on different meanings for each of us, is both honourable and worthy of respect, it falls into the category of a first step on a ladder toward what Tolstoy calls a higher calling, that is to non-violently resist evil by force. Doubtless, dear reader, you quickly and easily see the ‘gap’ between the man’s expression of his refusal to endorse his former political party, and in doing so, he is in a way taking a non0-violent path of resistance to the evil that party is foisting on the American people.

And, among his friends, family and neighbours, his shift in membership can and will be considered both laudable and commendable, as it is. Even to declare his decision publicly, as he did on his Facebook page, takes it to another level, so that his circles will have access and may even re-consider their own Republican membership loyalty.

Now, is he finished with his shift in both thinking and action? Is his step a first  one toward actually joining in active, non-violent resistance to the horrors that continue to tumble out of the Oval Office, about armed military personnel on city streets, especially those governed by Democratic mayors and/or governors, about deporting women and children without due process, about jerrymandering election districts in order to ‘win’ the 2026 mid-term elections, if there will even be any, and if whatever the results they will be termed ‘fake,’ ‘false,’ ‘fraudulent,’ or ‘rigged,’ by the current administration.

Can or will he write a letter to his Congressman and Senator explaining his valid and considered shift in political loyalties?

Can he or will he host a conversation with his neighbours, either formally or informally, in order to open up for discussion and debate the serious reasons behind his decision?

Can or will he make phone calls to engage in the political process at an even more active and assertive level, in order to more fully engage in non-violent resistance to the many exposed, obvious and invidious evils that are being perpetrated on the American people, as well as on the U.S relationships, both economic and military, as well as in foreign aid, health care, social services, education, and even national security?

This sinister, nefarious, invidious and heinous corpse of an administration, brain and heart dead from the get-go, is far more dangerous than merely threatening and obviating the minimal support services needed by many millions. The administration, or what passes as an excuse for an administration, really a bully pulpit for a bully and his bullying disrespect, dishonouring, and even deconstructuring of the traditional establishment, both in institutional form as well as in conventional expectations and aspirations. This current moment in history warrants  and needs and requires the ‘force’ of millions of Americans, Canadians, Europeans, East Asians, Africans, Indians, and Middle Easterners to form a spontaneous phalank of opposition, armed with data points, the support of millions of their respective countrymen and women, as well as the support of the American and international press corps and the universal human conscience within each of us, that we know points to brotherhood, equality, and justice.

It is not only those domestic and needed programs that are on life-support, those still breathing; it is everything else, especially international alliances, treaties, arms reduction treaties, and the honour to uphold promises previously kept (Think Ukraine, in 1991, having given up its nuclear weapons on the promise of protection from both Russia and the United States of America). NATO, the United Nations, and the plethora of human rights agencies, human mercy programs and agencies reliant on American funding support that are in jeopardy.

Our focus, while honourable and ethical, on our ‘own’ people (irrespective of our nation of birth), is no longer adequate to the history of this moment.

We have all an obligation to become ‘citizens of the world’ in a phrase so abstract as to be almost literally foreign to many. There have been monumental migration movements of refugees, immigrants, asylum seekers, students, and professionals who have travelled far from their homelands to cross borders into foreign lands, bringing with them their perspective, their industry, their ambition, their ideas and their creativity, and their courage to seek and to find new horizons and homes among strangers. None of us can say, any more, that there is only one racial group in our town or village. And none of us can say that our neighbourhoods have not been enriched by the arrival of those millions of new arrivals. Ou hospitals, our universities and our corporations are all profiting from their participation. And their contributions are exemplary, distinguished as scholars, as technicians, as entrepreneurs, and all of them paying taxes to their respective new national homes.

Perhaps their greatest gift, if we are willing to open our eyes and ears and minds to consider, is their traversing, both physically and culturally, the national boundaries that tend to keep millions in the illusion of being protected from the outside world.

That illusions, or is it rather a delusion, to which we can no longer cling, in our self-declared, paroachialism, under the ruse of the rubric of nationalism, especially heinously entitled ‘white Christian nationalism’…This is another of the many hypocrisies that serve as barnacles on the feet, legs, arms, and eyesm ears, and especially our minds, that enable many of us to utter words of self-congratulations about how welcoming we are to those very immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, without for a split-second giving a glancing thought about how they can and will open us to a new world of our shared re-creating.

We are all now co-creators, not merely co-habitors, in each and every nation on the planet, of new forms of traditions, customs, and festivals and festivities, none of which we had any idea we either missed or needed. And, the question for each of us white Caucasians, many of us raised as titular Christians (in name if not in life-embodiment) is whether we are open to the spectre of a new world in which we are no longer considered patronizing, condescending and superior ‘welcomers’ but actually share in a new equality, fraternity and brotherhood and sisterhood whose very existences have been re-configured, re-imagined, and re-created, for the shared and mutual benefit of both the new arrivals and those who consider ourselves native to our towns and villages, provinces and state.

A world-citizenship card is only a token of a  physical and emotional aspiration. No international agency exists for is inception. And, given the galloping rise of nationalism and the closing of minds and borders, it will require an international cadre of those, of all races, genders, ethnicities, religions, and non-religious, as well as all social and economic and educational levels, to come together in a collaborative, collective and unified ‘force’ of non-violent resistance to the toronadic winds of supremacy, superiority, elitism, privilege, and the concomitant abuses that those winds inevitably and universally spawn on the millions of ‘inferiors’.

We are all also those inferiors, in the face of an armed cabal, of identifiable world leaders, whose loyalty is exclusively to their own holding onto their power, by whatever means and methods available.

And we have all to be aware that we are also part of their ‘availability’ of power, so long as we are non-participating in their dreaded murders, wars, laws that ensconce them in power and in their sycophantic political and economic bowing to their so-declared-self-affirming elites, among the tech moguls, and the corporate behemoths whose share in the bounty of tax breaks, and regulation-releases, combine to threated the very air we breathe, the land we need to grow our food and the water desperately need to survive.

And it is not only mere humans whose lives are now endangered by these reprobates. Animals, fish, flora and fauna are all threated, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

Anyone who thinks that  switching political parties, in the American political landscape is enough to non-violently resist the evil forces that have been unleashed  both through the chicanery of their hollow-man actors, and through the complicity of silent and obedient and unsuspecting and innocent and uninformed men and women who have left the governing of our jurisdictions to those who sought public office. And in failing to challenge and to vet those candidates, and in failing to critically evaluate their intentions, we are all complicit in the current dilemma.

And even the word dilemma is inadequate; it is a global disaster on our doorstep, irrespective of where we live. Politically, economically, environmentally, ethically and morally and even philosophically and spiritually we are on the edge of a metaphoric doomsday…..and it is of our own making.

Are we ready to acknowledge our personal responsibility to become fully informed, fully engaged fully non-violently resistant to this macabre monster of the abuse of power in the  lives of millions of voiceless, millions of homeless and millions of starving men, women and children.

And the complicity of the churches, of whatever brand, that not only sanction the abuse of power, but actually condone its existence, for the stability and security of the ‘state’ as if they were being loyal and compliant patriots, is appalling.

So too is the hypocritical complicity of the active and ‘elected’ politicians in many countries whose political lives depend on their loyalty to abusive tyrants, appalling and tragic in the extreme.

In this moment of global chaos, conflict, terror and tyranny, who is ready to roll up our sleeves an step the first of many steps toward engaging in non-violent resistance to the many manifest evils with force (not with weapons of war)?