Buber's injunction to drop down to the 'mud and filth'

One of the central images, archetypes, in western culture, is the story of the Good Samaritan. Hated by and hating also Jews, the Samaritan is considered, by both conventional biblical interpretation, and by extension, conventional cultural perceptions, the “good guy” in the narrative, and the Jew, taken for granted as dead, in the ditch, is the rescuer. He purportedly lifts the Jew from the ditch, finds a room for him, pays for the room, and goes on his way. And all this happens after the priest and the Levite have passed by without so much as a glance or a helping hand.

While the is much merit to the bridging of the gap between Jew and Samaritan, and historic value in the gzillion acts of kindness that have been both performed and received, through a transcending of traditional barriers to mutually respectful relationships, and the lifting up of people in need by those who can, there is another perspective on this story, that, if brought to consciousness, and then lifted to a different and higher bar could have an even greater impact on the world than the original version has had.

And that view is encapsulated in Buber’s seemingly innocuous quote from yesterday’s blog: If you want to raise a man from mud and filth, do not think it is enough to stay on top and reach a helping hand down to him. You must go all the way down yourself, down into the mud and filth. Then take hold of him with strong hands and pull him and you out into the light….

The seemingly radical-‘ness’ of this insight is in the submission, first, to the state of the plight of the individual in the ‘mud and filth’ and then to ‘enter’ into that space, physically, metaphorically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually, before putting out a hand to then pull both rescuer and rescued up to the light.

Historically, the world can be perceptually, cognitively, statistically, politically and in every other conceivable dimension, between those in the ‘mud and filth’ and those ‘up’ on the ‘high ground’ peering ‘down’ into that ‘mud and filth’. And, from a sociological, political, and even cultural perspective, those ‘up’ are now deemed ‘have’s’ while those in the ‘mud and filth’ are deemed ‘have-not’s’.

The categorization, for the purposes of academic study, has some merit, in that it attempts to ‘investigate’ segments of populations, and then compare those populations from a variety of perspectives. Does a specific culture and historical and geographic region ‘treat’ those in the ‘mud and filth’ better or worse than another period or region? Does the size of that segment of the population rise or fall dependent upon and/or resulting from certain steps in an agenda adopted by a regime? Demographics, stratification, and the concomitant contextual colourations, both positive and negative, have been built into the cake of all human cultures and civilizations, as it were, just like those stratifications based on skin colour, relationship to god or Gods, or gods and the rituals, demons and spirits that have accompanied those various differences.

Power, whether measured by physical strength, fiscal resources, academic achievements, spiritual and religious piety, or scientific investigations and potential ‘cures and/or healings’ has been a prominent part of the gold that is both burned into and painted onto the ‘ring’ that attests to the most, and the most relevant power in the kingdom, at any moment in time.

Implicit in the assumption of power, status, influence, and the degree to which that power is sustained and sustainable, of course, is also the relationship of those ‘with’ power to those ‘without’ power.

And implicit to power and those holding it has been the ‘right’ or the ‘freedom’ to decide how far to reach down into the ‘mud and filth’ in order to help those permanently assigned to or resigned to that state. The decision even as to whether it is worth their while to consider whether or not there is any obligation, duty, responsibility or ‘benefit’ to such reaching down is also reserved to, by and for those with power and influence. The social, political and cultural notion that ‘this is how things work’ as an accepted, concrete, immutable fact both of history and of the nature of human beings, however, could well merit re-visiting. This current epoch, especially, could benefit from a profound reconsideration of the meaning and the impact of that conventional norm.

Occasionally, we will hear of an individual, like Mother Theresa, for example, who chooses to live among lepers, as a model of deep, profound and exemplary faith. And there have been others, throughout history whose lives have been ‘dedicated’ to climbing down into the ‘mud and filth’ in order to become one (atonement) with those in need. Another historic aspect of this “divide” between those ‘up’ and those ‘down’ is, from the beginning and continues throughout history, is that those ‘down’ have grown a deep and seemingly permanent resentment, detachment and hopelessness about the potential for those ‘above’ both to reach out a hand, and even more profoundly, to consider the option of ‘coming down’ into the ‘mud and filth’.

Political parties, in the west, trumpet those policies and practices that mete out dollars in and through programs to “alleviate” the suffering of those, whose votes they need in order to retain power and, in possible, to enhance their own ‘power position’. Barnacled to those policies and the cheques that drop into mailboxes, is an implicit attitude that can legitimately be considered, and is so deemed, as patronizing, condescending, marginalizing and even colonizing of those in the ‘mud and filth’. Of course, those designing and voting for such policies and programs either do not consider that aspect of their ‘honourable’ work, or if they acknowledge its darker features, choose to phrase their approach, ‘we are not letting the perfect impede the good and we are doing good’ in this approach.

Nevertheless, one is prompted to ask, what kind of policy and approach would result if and when a political party, leader, group were to “enter” fully and completely into the space, the mind-set, the implicit and explicit roughness of those in the ‘mud and the filth’ and then imagine, conceptualize and actually design and write approaches that would incarnate that fully-realized experience?

We do not, as privileged, mostly white, highly educated, above-average affluent men and women whose lives have spanned the last half of the twentieth century, and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the depth of the plight of the Jews rounded up, herded onto trains, and then gassed in concentration camps, in spite of the many worthy efforts of their ancestors to continue to bring their stories to light. We do not, as white privileged, educated, modestly affluent mostly men, fully appreciate how our attitudes and beliefs in the relevant definitions of masculinity have impacted those great-grandmothers and grandmothers, wives, sisters, daughters over the last century-plus. We do not, as white, healthy, educated, affluent men and women, most of us brought up in something called a Christian home and church, have any more than a superficial, and often dismissed conception of the depth of the pain our approach to indigenous tribes, all of whom preceded us on the North American continent, has had and continues to have, on the health, education, access to opportunity and weight of hopelessness that we have, unconsciously and perhaps ever innocently, imposed on those indigenous peoples and their descendants.

We also have little to no consciousness of the feelings of both explicit and implicit racism that we continue to struggle to maintain, for the simple reason that ‘that is how things are supposed to be’ when that “supposed to be” concept is our own design and imposition.

Recently, I read a comic’s depiction of the last century-plus has evolved, primarily, as he put it, through nothing other than mansplaining. The informal definition of that new word is ‘the explanation of something by a man, typically to a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing.’

If men have been writing the philosophy, the theology, the scientific papers, the academic standards and processes, most of the literature, and the political philosophy from the beginning, there has been little attention paid to the Buber notion of ‘climbing down’ into the ‘mud and filth’ in order to fully comprehend and to identify, and to resolve to confront all of the plight of those doomed to such conditions. And as a corollary to that blindness, hubris, innocence, denial and resistance, there is also much about “reality’ that we have refused to acknowledge, that can only be discovered and potentially learned from those conditioned by the ‘mud and filth’.

And to relegate those people to ‘a problem, a nuisance, and a blight on an otherwise proud, accomplished, resilient, brass, gold and glass symbolic architecture, or another gilded age “achievement” or a tech-wave of superiority or a medical miracle of any of the many procedures and pharmaceuticals is merely to perpetuate a cultural, societal, personal and sabotage.

Buber’s profound, if highly idealistic, yet worthy injunction to all of us, while rarely applied, offers an inexhaustible reservoir of experience not only for the artists among us, or for the philosophers, or the theologians, or the political class. If and when we encounter another in the ‘mud and filth’ and we are in a position to ‘drop down’ to the ‘mud and filth’ we will invariably and inevitably discover, mostly to our shock and surprise, both a deeper experience of our own human spirit of empathy and agape, but even more importantly, the gift of insight of what really matters.

There is no time or energy in the‘mud and filth’ for idle wondering about what to do next, or how to interpret whether or not someone ‘likes’ us or not, or whether to eat out or order in, or whether to tout a specific faith as “right” and all others as “evil”…

James Hillman’s injunction for each of us ‘to get down’ into the earth of our own existence can and will be enabled and enhanced by this Buber injunction, which exceeds the boundaries and beliefs of all faiths.

 "Tikkun Olam," Hebrew words typically translated as 'repair the world' or 'mend the world' or 'heal the world' can and will be more fully and effectively accomplished, or even aspired to, if we really listen, digest, absorb and apply Buber's insight.

Reflections on soul/conscience/truth/conviction in this moment

Martin Buber, a prolific Jewish writer, thinker and believer once wrote:

If you want to raise a man from mud and filth, do not think it is enough to stay on top and reach a helping hand down to him. You must go all the way down yourself, down into the mud and filth. Then take hold of him with strong hands and pull him and out into the light….

And Buber also wrote these words:

Question: We are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves. How can I do this if my neighbor has wronged me?

Answer: You must understand these words rightly. Love you neighbor as something which you yourself are. For all souls are one. Each is a spark from then original soul, and this soul is inherent in all the members of your body. It may come to pass that your hand will make a mistake and strike you. But would you then take a stick and chastise your hand because it lacked understanding, and so increase your pain? It is the same if your neighbor, who is of one soul with your, wrongs you because of his lack of understanding. If you punish him, you only hurt yourself.

Question: But if I see a man who is wicked before God, how can I love him?

Answer: Don’t you know that the primordial soul came out of the essence of God, and that every human soul is a part of God? And will you have no mercy on man, when you see that one of his holy sparks has been lost in a maze and is almost stifled?

Dr. Anil Kuman Sinha* wrote these words about soul:

A soul is Divine energy, a little piece of God within you. Your inner identity, your raison d’etre. The soul is the self, the I that inhabits the body and acts through it. Without the soul, the body is like a light bulb without electricity, a computer without the software, a space suit with no astronaut inside. With the introduction of the soul, the body acquires life, sight and hearing, thought and speech, intelligence and emotions, will and desire, personality and identity.

*Dr. Sinha, former Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation in India, holds a post-graduate degree in psychology and an MPhil in strategic studies, and is an alumnus of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He also attended the National Defence College, India (Wikipedia)

Both Matthew and Mark’s gospels carry similar words about losing one’s soul:

Matthew 16:26: For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?

Mark 8: 36: For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

James Joyce, Irish writer: Each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in it’s very vitals.

Minnie Maddern Fiske on actors: The Actor who lets the dust accumulate on his Ibsen, his Shakespeare, and his Bible, but pores greedily over every little column of theatrical news, is a lost soul.

Charles M Shulz: The rain washed away my pitcher’s mound. I’m a lost soul. I’m like a politician out of office, or a sailor without an ocrea or a  boy without a girl.

C.S.Lewis: The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words; ‘Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.’# There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery.

# Benjamin Ramm, in BBC, April 19, 2017 writes in a piece entitled: Why you should re-read Paradise Lost, writes: “By contrast (with Milton’s God), Satan has a dark charisma (‘he pleased the ear’) and a revolutionary demand for self-determination. His speech is peppered with the language of democratic governance (‘free choice’, ‘full consent,’ ‘the popular vote)—and he famously declares, ‘Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven’. Satan rejects God’s ‘splendid vassalage’, seeking to live: ‘Free, and to none accountable, preferring Hard liberty before the easy yoke of servile Pomp…Famously, William Blake, who contested the very idea of the Fall, remarked that ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’

Why all of these quotes about losing one’s soul? Why is the North American continent faced with the dilemma, pouring over our television screens, depicting the litany of evidence that, to any normal jury, would spell ‘conviction’ and ‘barred from holding public office forever’ and yet, watches the speculation that enough Republican Senators will likely vote to acquit? Charged with inciting an insurrection against the Capitol, the ex-president has such a ‘hold’ over the mostly men in the Republican caucus in the Senate, as well as over a considerable number of Republican Congressmen and women, that the talking heads are left, as are the rest of us, scratching our own heads, seized with the picture that only something as mysterious and sinister as a tragically evil man, and certainly not the inherent evil of all of the Republicans who will vote to acquit, is responsible for the actions leading up to, including and subsequent to January 6^th, 2021.

There is a truth to the notion that humans try to explain unfathomable mysteries with myths, images, poems, archetypes, gods, goddesses, and evil monsters. It is as if, living in a universe in which the absolutely inexplicable takes shape and form, not only in horror films, or in terrorist acts, or in the dark and dank allies of broken towns and cities, and on the fence posts of Nebraska farm fields, (Matthew Sheppard) or, spewing from the larynx of an ex-president for many more than four years, somehow transfixes us. We become like that frozen, paralyzed and terrorized deer, caught in the headlights on a sub-arctic February freeway after midnight. And, on the edge of what we perceive as a potentially existentially dangerous cliff, if not personally then certainly as a voice for what we have come to know as democracy (dependent on the trust of voters, their tabulators, and the reporting and recording of those votes), we are bereft of understanding. Nothing in our cognition, or in our shared view of how the world works, can begin to integrate and to assimilate this horrendous tragedy into our tolerable world view. Murder, mayhem, stabbings, shootings, attempted lynchings, well over a hundred serious injuries to protective officers of both the city of Washington and the Capitol itself, not to mention the sheer vandalism of the mob, allegedly incited by a single man (with compliant and sycophantic acolytes, think Cruz, Graham, Hawley) are not compatible with a view of the world for the moderately educated, moderately informed, and even moderately moral and ethical vision of individual human beings. And yet, it was human beings who acted! And it was a human being who incited their actions! And it was human beings who had, for more than four years, not merely tolerated the ranting lies of the ex-president, but hubristically rode his coat-tails into power, and into mostly large trust accounts floated by thousands if not millions of sycophantic donors.

A tweet from Senator Lindsey Graham: “I think most Republicans found the presentation by the House Managers offensive and absurd” (9:48 pm, Feb. 10, 2021) was answered both brilliantly and succinctly by former CIA Director John Brennan in his own tweet: These are the words of a man with no conscience, not integrity, & not interest in doing the right thing. Lindsey Graham & other Senators who hold this view are unworthy of public trust. History will judge them as it should-political cowards who betrayed their oath of office. (From Bess Levin, Lindsey Graham: “Democrats Should Be Ashamed of Themselves for So Thoroughly Incriminating Trump,” Vanity Fair, February 11, 2021, 2:58 PM)

On the national and the world stage, the world is witnessing and participating in what amounts to a Greek Tragedy of epic proportions. The Collins dictionary (collinsdictionary.com) defines Greek Tragedy this way: a play in which the protagonist, usually a person of importance and outstanding personal qualities, falls to disaster through the combination of a personal failing and circumstances with which he or she cannot deal. Depending on one’s perspective, the only ingredient missing in the American drama is a “person of outstanding personal qualities”. And it is this missing element that makes the tragedy even more contemptuous: there can and will be not pathos, the emotion of pity and fear evoked in the international audience, for the fall of the ‘great man’. Just as divorce provides no “funeral” equivalent, (although some have actually written and conducted liturgical poetry and prose to substitute) thereby leaving many feeling empty, hollow and exhausted without a formal closure, this political drama will inevitably leave millions feeling empty, hollow and exhausted, and more importantly potentially experiencing a deep erosion of their trust in the very processes, personnel and protections that are enshrined in the constitution.

Often described as a “frail” entitity, democracy does in fact require the constant vigilance of an engaged, informed and articulate electorate. And while at least the first of those three attributes exist in the American political culture, the last two are clearly incomplete. Information that is framed to portray one ideology as superior and “correct” and another ideology (and its purveyors) as inferior, incorrect and untrustworthy, fulfils the Orwell criterion that all literature is political. The current political culture also gives inordinate evidence to the notion that the truth has been shredded, and the residue continues, like the pandemic, to infiltrate the coffee shops, the pubs, the news rooms, and the television studios. True facts, versus alternative facts…that dichotomy lies at the heart of this impeachment trial. Those who may agree with the “facts” of the case, that the ex-president did indeed incite an insurrection at the capitol on January 6^th, and yet continue to argue against its constitutionality, and then drag in irrelevancies like Democrat Senator Leahy’s assuming the Chair (he is after all President Pro tempore of the Senate and Chief Justice Roberts has declined to preside), and then vote to acquit, thereby aborting the vote on disbarment from office, will find their names in the history books, and potentially in the electoral refuse bins, after votes have been counted.

It is, however, their individual capacity to ‘sleep nights’ and to ‘look their constituents straight in the eye’ and to ‘tell their kids and grandkids their shame’ at their failure to convict that will inevitably haunt them to their graves. And, in a nation bound both by laws and what proud Christians would sing is a profoundly Christian nation, one is left wondering if the ethical and moral principles of any faith community would embrace the hollowness, the emptiness and the sheer hubris and narcissism of their abandonment of principle, oath, and conscience.

Ghandi, the renowned Indian non-violent mystic once commented, “A ‘NO’ uttered from deepest conviction is better than a ‘YES’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble. Men and women of deep conviction are not only in great demand today; there is a glaring deficit of their numbers, especially among Republican Senators about to make the decision of their political lives. Their ‘yes’ to acquit is so blatantly, irreverently and irrationally, and blindly in service of a motive to please, or to avoid trouble however each of them might define that trouble. It is a short-term, personalizing of the issue, in the face of a national and potentially an international tragedy.

The long-term trustworthiness of the United States’ word, and the people selected to represent that ‘word’ can and will only be shaken, if not eroded, by a Senate decision to acquit. It is not only the evidence that clearly convicts; the hearts and the minds, and hopefully the souls of the individual Senators, even if they are in harmony with conviction, and then vote to acquit, demonstrate that the ‘show’ is more important than the substance.

Like the bishop who aborted a mission of pursuing the spiritual growth of every parishioner, selling out to the corporate vision of a 10% increase in people and a 15% increase in revenue, as his view of the Christian mission of the diocese, their souls will illustrate their inherent hollowness. And their consciences will also continue to atrophy as they add this mis-step to their legacy.

And it is not only the specific vote to acquit, and the implications for democracy, and for international world order that is at stake. Think, just for a moment about the reverberations among those too young to cast a vote today. They will be taught that the Senate of their nation was unwilling, and unable to vote to convict when even among other Republicans like former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, 'If inciting to insurrection isn't an impeachable offense, 'then I don't really know what is.'  (Josephine Harvey, HuffPost, January 10, 2021, Chris Christie: If Inciting Insurrection Isn't Impeachable, 'I don't know What Is')

Neither does the rest of the world!

Political inaction is no longer an option

It was one of the many cogent observations, following the 9/11 terrorist attack on the U.S. that the reverberations of the multiple incidents and the nearly 3000 deaths would continue long after the grieving and the anger. Not only were two wars incited by the attacks, travel restrictions were introduced, a Homeland Security monster, and a transformation of how each of us perceives and relates to the world.

It is this latter concept, the injection and embedding of what now seems a permanent psychological, if not also physical, biological, cognitive and even spiritual anxiety, that began in the early months and years of this 21^st century, and has been significantly exacerbated with the now year-long onset of a global pandemic. In the middle of the first decade, there also fell from the sky-scrapers on Wall Street, an economic downturn that can be traced to a resilient reservoir of greed, credit derivatives, bankruptcies generating multiple bail-outs.

Recently, public health figures have documented a spike in depressions, suicides, marriage failures, job losses, business closures, food shortages, and also remarkable stories of home schooling by parents with neither the training nor the experience to accomplish this task. Individual biographies of single mothers, struggling with part-time or no employment, home schooling, food shortages, and a residue of both resentment and anxiety, depression and even hopelessness can and will surprise no one who has been paying attention to the daily narrative. Add to the list of immediate and pressing needs, in nearly a half-million families, in the U.S. the deaths of a family member from COVID-19, many, if not most, of those deaths preventable if the former administration had not adopted a narcissistic, and highly cavalier attitude to the exigencies of what could and should have been a national public health program on steroids.

Commentary on the prevalence and the profundity of the social and mental health earthquake in which the world is trying to cope, may seem so redundant, if it were not for the facts that stare people who are engaged in the face:

·       That COVAX, the international group allegedly purposed with providing vaccines to underdeveloped countries and their people, when that program will meet only 20% of the estimated need

·       That the wealthy nations seem to have joined a competitive race to acquire and then distribute and inject millions of vaccinations into the arms of THEIR OWN people, as quickly as possible, in order to address the urgency of the political moment,

·       That the truth of the matter, without a global elimination of the virus, and its continually growing number of variants, in every country, county, city, town, village and hamlet on the planet (mission not a single one!) the rest of the world will continue to be subject to surges of the pandemic, and the need for additional, alternative and highly effective vaccines, as the mutations will continue.

·       That the pharmaceutical companies, given a developed nations’ mind-set favouring the capitalist model, have both been given and have taken the “upper hand” in when and how they will develop their unique vaccines, the prescriptive modalities of their administration, their storage, and their relative effectiveness. Just today, the Astra-Zeneca vaccine has been pulled from administration in South Africa, for the reason that it is not sufficiently effective against the variant that has emerged in that country.

·       That national governments have been scattered, non-collaborative in their approach to the original production of vaccines, (Operation Warp Speed was an exclusively American trump-warped program excluding all other nations) and that there is still no conjoined, collaborative, unified and effective arrangement, under the auspices of the WHO, to assure equal and universal acquisition, distribution, funding and storage of vaccines, a measure that will only impale the efforts of each nation and region, thereby assuring the continuing spread and mutation of the virus.

·       That the world was warned at least five years ago of the impending certainty of a pandemic, without taking specific, collaborative, and preventive steps to forestall, and/or to minimize, and to limit the scope and the severity of the pandemic.

·       That the failure of the world leaders to take joint, substantive, preventive and then collaborative action in designing a strategy, and the necessary tactics, in both public health and ecological prevention measures, is a foreshadowing of the extremely limited, and thereby further anxiety and depression-inducing reality that the world is not prepared for the already extant impacts of global warming and climate change

·       That the separation and the segregation of the public and the private capitalist sectors of the governments of the developed world, especially in regard to confronting the impact of both the pandemic and climate change, render the world’s population victim to a degree and ubiquity of self-serving narcissism in both camps, to which neither the pandemic nor climate change will be subdued or even managed effectively

·       That the world continues to experiences the largest spike in refugees, migrants, and displaced persons from a variety of nefarious and preventable circumstances, each and all of them compounding the already stretched shared capacity and structures or world governance,

·       That world leaders continue to bicker over what are deemed to be serious conflicts among and between various enemies, while the condition of both the world’s population and the globe’s planetary ecosystems continue to suffer from what can only be considered political negligence, political indifference, insouciance, parochialism, provincialism, and an adamantine refusal to surrender a single iota of what they call sovereignty, for the greater good of humanity

·       That the diplomatic establishment clings to the model, and the modalities of national sovereignty if and when another country, or its diplomats, dare to question the practices around ethnic cleansing, detention camps, the poisoning of political opponents, the state murder of journalists, the public documentation of corruption by state officials, in another country. And this “hands-off” approach is not only stultifying and negating any potential amendment to the abuses in human rights that continue to abound, but also sustains a political “soil” and climate that will continue to favour and to protect the persons, the agenda and the greed and corruption of those already steeped in those projects.

·       That the world’s international bodies, such as they are, need to be seriously and creatively transformed urgently, while the debates in national political discourse barely cast a glance in the direction of international co-operation, collaboration, and the surrender of sovereignty, those ingredients that we all know and affirm are and will continue to be required for the pandemic to be brought to its heels and the earth’s climate to stabilize

·       That the world’s care and ranking of the care of seniors, especially in facilities owned and operated by for-profit corporations, demonstrate a degree of indifference to those in care, and also to those providing care, that can only leave most of the rest of us appalled, yet powerless to affect the kind of substantive changes that all families require, expect and deserve.

·       That the long-standing indifference of the American Republican Senators to the urgent human needs, including the needs of public education, public affordable health care, and now access to necessary nutrition, while providing trillions of dollars of tax breaks to the uber-affluent, demonstrate an example, not one that the world would benefit from emulating but one that will serve to exacerbate the growing and persistent human casualties, all of whom will wash up on the shores of the Emergency Rooms, the ICU’s, the police wrap-sheets, the drug offences, and the morgues, already filled to overflowing with victims of the pandemic.

To assess the political negligence that we see in too many governmental establishments as merely short-sightedness, however is analogous to assessing the pain of a lethal tumor as nothing more than a muscle strain. Failure to meet the basic requirements of the job of an elected official in an allegedly democratic state, while not punishable legally, nevertheless, qualifies as negligence. And for an already exhausted, anxious, depressed and dispossessed electorate, however, the job of mounting a substantive public protest, organized, funded, legally guided, co-ordinated and sustained, in such times, when it is desperately needed, seems beyond reasonable expectations.

As the world’s people face the inevitable compounding crises of the pandemic, the rise of global temperatures, in a global political theatre whose ethos and culture are dominated by private interests, dependent on and insisting on profiting from each and every public initiative, even those so desperately and immediately needed, where the short-term goals of elected officials trump the pursuit, in any avid, vigorous and effective manner, those clearly evidence long-term goals and objectives shared by every person on the planet, the hopelessness can and will only continue to fester, compounding itself, and exponentially rising, like a tide of its own making.

And yet, we can all see its inevitability, the forecasts are indisputable, the schools are only barely functioning for a generation of kids whose lives will be forever negatively impacted, through the carelessness of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.

It is to these last two groups that this scribe belongs.]

And so long as there are keys to tap, and light to see to tap them, and fingers mobile enough to continue to tap them, I will continue to emit my private pray for some kind of recognition, not merely among individuals, but in families, schools, churches, businesses, universities and colleges and governments at all levels, that we can no longer tinker and tweek our situation. Those approaches were minimally useful, perhaps, in the past, except when the duration and breadth of the emergency (like the First and Second Wars) compelled immediate and sustained action. Today, however, the urgency is different: we are not facing tanks, bombs and missiles coming out of the sky. We are facing micro-virus cells swimming through the air we breath, contaminating our respiratory systems, while we are also breathing increasingly poisonous air, and depleting fresh drinking water resources. Just as importantly, however, we are being fed lies, and prevaracations, distortions and cancerous propaganda for which we have no vaccines nor antibodies, nor therapeutics.

Our complicity in our own sabotage, especially among the cultists, seems both unfathomable and suffocating. When grown, professionally trained men and women agree to become subservient to lies and personality cults, and their answer to question of fact, is to declare, “we have an alternative set of facts” then we all know that it is not only a single voice that is spewing poison. We have armies, in all countries, who are committed to their own set of alternative facts, and those “facts” do not include or even begin to tolerate a body of facts that are based in empirical science, common sense, and some degree of fairness for all.

Unless and until the tide of public discourse and political agendas turns away from being slave to the political class, to being the servant of the public good, and their actions individually and taken cumulatively, shift to embrace the legitimate needs of ordinary people in all countries, we will all continue to suffer more anxiety, depression, hopelessness and fear than is bearable. And that, of course, if precisely the state of the world that these insurrectionist cultists are driving us to. Only then will their campaign of fear and terror will be considered successful. So those of us who, never before, wrote a letter to the editor, or a letter to our elected representatives, or who never hosted a political discussion or open house, or who never before signed up for a political campaign….we all must now consider how and when to sign up…it is no longer a question of IF we will do it. WE HAVE NO OTHER OPTION! 

The elephant in the public square

From Todd Schoepflin’s blog on Everyday Sociology March 4, 2011, reviewing Eviatar Zerubavel’s, The Elephant in the Room, Silence and Denial in Everyday Life:

Silence and Denial in Everyday Life is the subtitle of a powerfully insightful book, The Elephant in the Room by sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel. I came across this gem a few years ago and it has since become one of my favorite books.

Surely you’ve heard the phrase “elephant in the room,” which refers to something obvious that is being ignored. It can be a problem or controversial issue that is overlooked for a variety of reasons, including embarrassment, shame, fear, or because the subject is taboo. As Zerubavel explains, silence is a practical way of avoiding painful or controversial issues, and so we might “look the other way” instead of confronting a problem or discussing a delicate matter.

But why else do people remain silent in the face of controversial issues? According to Zerubavel, one answer is norms about remaining silent or ignoring information. For example, think about sayings in our culture about keeping quiet like “Bite your tongue,” “Button your lip,” and “Silence is golden.”

Other sayings that tell us we shouldn’t seek out information: “Ignorance is bliss,” “What you don’t know won’t hurt you,” “Look the other way,” “Turn a blind eye.” There are also common expressions to discourage us from getting involved in matters that supposedly don’t involve us, like “Don’t rock the boat” and “Mind your own business.”

In a very powerful point, Zerubavel reminds us that silence, in some cases, is consent. If we don’t say anything, we essentially condone improper behavior and the person responsible for it might view his or her actions as acceptable. He gives the example of a woman who pretends not to notice that her husband is molesting their daughter. As he says, her silence enables the abuse because it conveys approval. Zerubavel uses the phrase “conspiracy of silence” to describe this type of situation.

Silence prevents us from confronting (and consequently solving) problems and controversial issues. Breaking a conspiracy of silence can start with an acknowledgment that an issue (an “elephant”) is present and will not go away by itself. This is why, as the author explains, breaking silence can be a moral act.

In the beginning of the book, he provides a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” A quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. is appropriate because he exemplifies the importance of not keeping quiet in the face of inequality and injustice. Indeed, civil rights leaders usually don’t look the other way and they actually do rock the boat.

And society is better off for many a leader having challenged the status quo. We can’t forget the fact that disrupting the existing order is a key ingredient in facilitating social change. The quote is so powerful because it implies that it’s not enough to not be a bad person. The so-called “good people” who don’t say or do anything about cruel behavior or longstanding social problems can be thought of as tacitly condoning the misdeeds of others and accepting the consequences of unsolved problems. (By Todd Schoepflin)

How does one match up this invigorating and historically challenging ethic with the ethic of “compliance” with authority, especially in top-down, hierarchical organizations like the military, the quasi-military, and the plethora or organizations that imitate and emulate both the structure and the order of the military, especially the church.

This question lies at the heart of the dilemma many face when they enter an ecclesial organization, first as a student, then an intern and then deacon and priest. Authority of what has been called the magisterium (the church hierarchy, including the bishop(s), archbishop(s), primates and even the papacy. The question can be framed also in a manner that challenges the degree of compliance, and even collusion (whether conscious or not) between the ecclesial body and the culture in which it attempts to function. And Being ‘nice’ is one of the cardinal guides for how the family and education systems inculcate children into their world. Polite, kind, generous, funny, playful, and smart are guideposts for children in all western cultures, while their more specific application may differ marginally depending on the traditions of the community. Argumentative, challenging, impatient, rude, mouthy, and even bitter are words that tend to, if not guarantee a young person’s alienation, isolation, and bullying and separation. In fact, too many young boys who were giving evidence of any of those traits in schools were prescribed Ritalin as the system’s way of ‘calming’ (read controlling) those boys.

Even at a base level, a culture in the classroom and the school itself, created by and for females, stressing control, patience, physical stillness, reading, writing and answering questions respectfully is both physically and emotionally challenging for many young boys. Trouble is a culture of professional calm defined what passed as professional competence. And anything (act or child) that did not easily and readily fit into that pattern was “treated” as ‘abnormal’…when the biology and the psychology of many of those young boys who were considered “difficult” were both quite normal, for their gender and age. Parents, too, have difficulty if and when their children question how the parenting process is being conducted. There is a dramatic shift between the strategies and tactics parents use with the baby, and the pre-schooler, and the methods considered appropriate for those turbulent hormone-overflowing adolescents.

The question, however, of the issues (conflicts, disagreements, tensions) between parents, can easily, quickly and quietly slip into a pattern of avoidance or even denial, especially if one or other of those parents consider the ‘pay-back’ from detailing a complaint is potentially too risky for them to raise it. Getting along, after all, was one of the prime ‘beacons’ of living in a neighbourhood, of passing in school, of being selected for the minor hockey or soccer team, and even of benefiting from the “praise” and acceptance of those same parents. And then, the pattern of one’s own parents is deeply imprinted on the consciousness (and even the unconscious) of each of us, without our even being aware of that process. So, for boys, if our father was calm and non-argumentative, (and we did not know either the evidence or the name passive-aggressive) we invariably considered such behaviour both acceptable and even honourable in our own marriages. So, we too became, unconsciously often, passive aggressive, if we encountered a situation with which we did not concur. If our mothers were contentious, on the other hand, we were more likely to exhibit our father’s pattern, if we encountered similar contentiousness from our spouse. The original family patterns find their way into the next generation’s families, and often need adjustment, or even overhaul.

Family relations are obviously framed differently than differences of opinion about matters that do not directly impact a relationship, in terms of required behaviour. Confronting a class-mate’s opinion about a historic event, for example, will inevitably ‘distinguish’ the confronter as ‘rough-edged’ by his teachers and could even isolate that person from his peers, except for those who find such challenges exciting, motivating and opening the door to participation. For contemporary adolescents, the opportunity to fire off scurrilous innuendo in secret about the character of others through social media, is counter-intuitive to the whole process of open, honest, respectful and potentially resolving dialogue. The unfettered process affords a kind of impunity that is clearly not warranted, needs change even to the point of elimination. And yet, by whom or by which legislative body, and with or without the compliance of the big tech behemoths?

The legal profession has designed, inculcated and practiced a protocol, for use in professional court proceedings, that permit and enable and encourage and rely on the objective presentation of opposing evidence and opinion between litigants in the case(s). Judges are steeped in this process, and both monitor and shape its unfolding to their taste and reputation. However, such formality, what would readily be deemed ‘rigid’ and ‘strict’ and ‘cold’ and rehearsed, and thereby ultimately controlled would find a rare family kitchen or dining room table conversation. Historically, too, the subject of rhetoric, integral to legal and political discourse (at least in history) helped to shape the exchange of differing views, while preserving the dignity, the honour and the integrity of the opposing side.

These elevated norms, however, are not easily adopted, nor readily appropriate for water-cooler conversation. And, rather than expressing oneself, for example, over the back fence with neighbours, about the military coup in Myanmar, for example, most neighbours will engage in topics like the temperature, the snow storm, and, occasionally last nights Maple Leaf hockey game. Those are safe topics that are almost guaranteed not to offend. Avoiding alienation, isolation, and the gossip that inevitably rises from encounters that are ‘too much’ for normality (however the other defines it) are stronger than a motive of engagement in the exchange of views, even if they might be different. And that language of practical sense (Frye) pertains and prevails in our consumer lives, our lives as patients in our doctors’ offices, at the mechanic shop when our car needs work, and at the town hall when we pay our taxes. Nothing contentious is raised, unless and until the issue is considered so significant that it cannot be avoided.

Bring that gestalt into the sanctuary, for example, not specifically to the pulpit where a level of decorum and formality is both expected and, for the most part, practiced but into the pews. If there were an instrument analogous to a Geiger-counter, that could detect, and then record, and then play back the incidence of gossip among those seated weekly in church pews (regardless of denomination), the inventor of such an instrument would either be rich or bankrupt…depending on whether those engaged in the centuries-long invective could retain their anonymity or not. There is a ubiquitous and inexhaustible reservoir of human energy that seems to find a welcome if not magnetic receptor/expressor in people whose lives are somehow dependent on their spiritual experience on Sunday morning. That energy is seeded and impelled by an over-weening need (?), desire (?), compulsion (?) to tattle, and to criticize, and to shame others, the details of whose lives too often become ‘public’ at least to those compulsively engaged in mining such details.

This deeply culturally embedded dynamic, naturally attracts some, while it also repels others. And the latter group tend to become “mute” in and when such gossip is being bandied about. This pattern applies primarily to the minutiae of individual lives, and while it has the potential of empathy and compassion when legitimate illness or even death impacts a church family, it also has the equally potent and negative impact on clergy, and on the lives of those considered “heathen” or ‘sinful’ or ‘evil’ and these categories are themselves determined individually, often reliant on the stereotypes of the social culture. Sexuality, alcohol dependence, financial strife, job loss, divorce, and for decades, gayness were typically targeted issues, and the faces and persons of deviance served as the diet for an over-needy appetite for derision.

And then, on the subject of how a town is dealing with a rise in adolescent suicide, drug dependence, school-drop-outs, racism sexism, ageism, and all of the many faces of both superiority and inferiority, (colonialism and the abuse of power), or how the province or state is policing minorities, or how the nation is tending toward fascism, oligarchy, nihilism, the church community is for the most part, silent. The power of its voice, it seems, has been gagged by the willful negligence of both its leaders and its parishioners. The honour, respectability, dignity and even truth that has the potential to impact the lives of both parishioners (through detailed, and open conflict resolution) both between hierarchy and clergy, and between and among parishioners themselves, is too often left to the private one-on-one sessions, in which the power of one over the other reigns, without appeal, or even re-consideration.

The culture, including the political landscape, is thereby robbed of the very moderate and needed voices of those who seek reconciliation, resolution and the amelioration of conflict, (except for the fanatically and compulsively motivated anti-abortion activists, and more recently the equally rabid gun-rights activists). The competing polarities of “political correctness” and excessive and potentially anarchic excesses are likely to continue to play themselves out, so long as the moderate, intelligent, modest, and penetratingly relevant voices of those who pursue their own spiritual pilgrimage (in all faith communities) without engaging in the life of the body politic.

The binary, either or, just like the Manichean black/white, is not a pattern of language that can or will lead a culture to the more nebulous, and more nuanced and more insightful fine print of how we might come together for the greater consideration of the public good. And, the millions of missing voices, all of them balanced, insightful, sensitive and mature, will find the public arena distasteful so long as the extremes are screaming or mute.

the burden of developing the soul....

In the Return of the King, (p. 190) J. R. R. Tolkien writes: It is not our part to master all the tides of the world. But to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule. (M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie, p. 39) In a footnote, on page 46, Peck outlines three models of evil:

·        the nondualism of Buddhism and Hinduism in which evil is envisioned simple as the other side of the coin. For life there must be death; for growth, decay; for creation, destruction. Consequently, the distinction of evil from goodness is regarded by nondualism as an illusion.

·        ‘Integrated dualism,’ espoused by Martin Buber who referred to evil as ‘the yeast in the dough’ the ferment place in the soul by God, without which the human dough does not rise. (reference, Buber, Good and Evil, 1953, p 94)

·        ‘Diabolical dualism’ of traditional Christianity in which evil is regarded as being not of God’s creation but a ghastly cancer beyond His control. Peck suggests that, even with its pitfalls, ‘it is the only one that deals adequately with the issue of murder and murderer.

Another of the more pithy observations Peck makes is this: “We become evil by attempting to hide from ourselves. The wickedness of the evil is not committed directly, but indirectly as a part of this cover-up process. Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it. (People of the Lie, p. 76)

And then, as a footnote, Peck quotes Buber again, from Good and Evil (p. 111):

Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one’s evil from oneself, as well as from others, that to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture?...I mean only that evil people tend to gravitate toward piety for the disguise and concealment it can offer them. (Peck p. 76-77)

Another guiding light, in the process of any attempt to begin to unravel the gordion knot of evil, is found in Erich Fromm’s The Heart of Man : Its Genius for Good and Evil, p.173-178) found also in Peck, p. 81-2: Most people fail in the art of living not because they are inherently bad or so without will that they cannot lead a better life; they fail because they do not wake up and see when they stand at a fork in the road and have to decide. They are not aware when life asks them a question, and when they sill have alternative answers. Then with each step along the wrong path it becomes increasingly difficult for them to admit that they are on the wrong road, often only because they have to admit that they must go back to the first wrong turn, and must accept the fact that they have wasted energy and time.

Whether or not evil is a developmental evolution, as Fromm suggests and Peck endorses, the issue of how a culture envisions, defines, and then enforces what human acts it considers evil is deeply embedded in both religion and history. What may have been thought of as not evil two hundred years ago, could well be considered profoundly evil today (e.g. slavery). Similarly what was considered evil two hundreds years ago might today well qualify as quite morally and ethically acceptable. (e.g. gayness and transgender) Having both taken, and assumed the role of the arbiter of evil in a culture, the various churches have a considerable burden to bear in the dynamic that they both encounter and disclose, especially given the equally perplexing dynamic of the evil that they do not encounter (or seek to encounter) and thereby fail to disclose.

A now deceased bishop exclaimed to me once, rather didactically and also as a cautionary warning, the T.S. Eliot epithet, ‘humankind cannot bear very much cannot reality.’ In a deeply personal and also highly insightful piece in the Guardian, (Nov. 14, 2008) Jeanette Winterson undertakes an explication of Eliot’s renowned phrase: “That for him, was not the reality of dingy streets and gas fires, typists and tinned food, …but the vast reality of two quite different invisible worlds—‘the heavy burden of growing soul’ (Animula), and what might be called the ‘shaft of sunlight’ (Four Quartets), a spiritual illumination that became for Eliot, a journey towards God. For Eliot, the 3D world where we live, that which he calls in The Waste Land, the ‘unreal city’ is a beguiling or distressing distraction from facing life head on, facing ourselves as we are—and ultimately facing God. He is tough, he refuses consolation, ‘Time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.’ (She continues) When I read him that day, gales battering me within and without, I didn’t want consolation: I wanted expression. I wanted to find the place where I was hurt, to locate it exactly, and to give it a mouth. Pain is very often a maimed creature without mouth. Through the agency of the poem that is powerful enough to clarify  feelings into facts, I am no longer dumb, not speechless, not lost. Language is a finding place, not a hiding place.”

The heavy burden of growing soul, of facing ourselves as we are, and ultimately facing God,  an entirely appropriate and even essential process whose nature habitat is indeed the sanctuary and the ethos and the community we know as ‘the church’ is too often and tragically blocked, diverted, and even declared dangerous by the church hierarchy. For centuries, the Christian church not only permitted by actually endorsed slavery, absolutely decried gayness, and so embedded its culture in the culture of the affluent, the corporate, and the implicit biases, bigotries, and, even more deceitfully, in the process of continual denial of what it was they were either endorsing or castigating.

Did the Christian church stand up to the fork in the road in 1933 and in the years following?

Did the Christian church acknowledge the fork in the road when the epic line screamed out across the continent, a signature of the late twentieth century film Wall Street, “Greed is Good!” as if there could be a more explicit defaming of the role and importance of money in the American culture? There were likely some, even before that Michael Douglas line, who prophesied about the demise of the hollow and desperate life of one Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman. The playwright, Arthur Miller, however, was not a prophet representing the faith.

Did the Christian church not only fall victim to the marketing chicanery of the corporate world, “Fill the coffers and the pews!” came the cry of an urban bishop, to a clergy who categorically refused, knowing full well he had all the tools and the skills to do what he had been directly ordered to do. That same bishop drove his thumb into my chest, uttering the words, “You will not publish that thesis! I am ordering you as bishop! My report is in the archives and that is all that will be made public on that event.” Tragically, it was the death of that same clergy by his own hand, at the altar, to which the bishop was referring.

Suicide, by anyone, is a deep and profound tragedy. And its committal was included as a criminal act, in Canada, until it was silently removed in 1977. Death, especially by suicide, among a small somewhat close community of worshippers, is deeply injurious to their individual lives, and to the community generally. However, there is much more to the “aftermath” than a rapid-fire paint job, a clearing of all affects of the deceased, and the smoothing over and almost unspoken convention, if not actual ritual, of silence, of never uttering the name of the deceased, and of ‘moving on’ so the struggling church can and will survive.

Similarly, there is much more to the narrow rendering of the Eliot “reality” line, than the bishop allowed, in his proferred perspective of the capacity of the church to encounter and to deal with head on the truth of our painful process of growing soul. If the church itself, and that means each parish, and each clergy in each parish, is not openly committed first to a spiritual discipline that includes facing our own darknesses, hidden traumas, dysfunctional families of origin, and perhaps even the kind of easily disguised guile and self-deception that can so easily dominate one’s personal modus operandi, then how can the church even begin to consider helping those sitting in the pews, in the committees, in the choir lofts, at the organs, and in the counting rooms, to consider that process an integral to membership, and certainly to discipleship?

It is not only a refusal to discuss the implications of a clergy suicide, but also the refusal to openly acknowledge such petty tensions as power politics, on an open, conflict-resolution framework basis, using each conflict as a moment of insight, clarity, and the concomitant ‘charity’ that can come only from a process of truth-telling. In another urban parish, an honorary assistant, substituting for an incumbent clergy on leave, delivered a homily addressing the defunding of a needed social service program for handicapped adults. The parish response, to the returning clergy ran something like this: “We cannot have him criticizing a premier whom we have just recently elected.” And then, when another parishioner privately told the returning clergy, “The honorary is a leader, and you are not!” all hell broke loose. A secret kangaroo court was held to discern the wishes of the parish leadership, about the future of the honorary. Even the results (13-4, 2 abstentions) were neither conveyed, nor executed!

Silence, in Man for All Seasons, from the mouth of Cromwell: “So silence can, according to the circumstances, speak!” Does one’s silence construe consent, as Sir Thomas More says in the same play? Or is silence, in the case of the unreported kangaroo court, another way of expressing a fear of the kind of confrontation that would have ensued upon the honorary’s receipt of the news of the meeting, and the failure to honestly and openly and honourably deal with its implications.

Fear of conflict, however, is no assurance of no conflict. In fact, fear of conflict is a guarantee that there will be more conflict, the implications of which will only grow and fester and ultimately, too often, result in some “significant” episode, the cauterizing of which boil will only engage the church in another one of its cover-up campaigns. Keep the lid on, if and when a priest decides to leave a marriage after falling in love with a parishioner. Secret, private, midnight surveillance of the apartment of the parishioner, in a directed effort to prove the evil, will only lead to another act in a drama too old for the church itself even to digest and to resolve. It is the ecclesial co-dependence that shackles both the individuals in an interior conflict and  the institution itself. And, of course, for the institution, the secrecy, the avoidance of having to confront whatever it is that is emerging as an open sore, is open acknowledgement of its institutional dysfunction, immaturity, and failure to provide a healthy model of conflict resolution for the people in the pews, themselves, obviously and inevitably, engaged in their own conflicts, (emotional and spiritual and familial). Furthermore, a theology that supports, encourages, and even enmeshes with “political correctness” as the voice of authentic Christianity is itself a denial of the essence and the spirit of that theology.

Anyone who speaks directly, as I do, will inevitably encounter many forms of rejection:

from a female supervisor: “You are far too intense for me!” to which I retorted, “I am also too bald so deal with it!”

from a senior parishioner whose family founded and funded the mission: “I am here to tell you all what to do about the organ and how to do it!” to which I retorted, “I feel very strongly parented at this moment!”

from another senior parishioner: “There really was no Resurrection! To which I retorted, If not, then this whole thing is a fraud!”

From a bishop, to whom I suggested, “It is time for men to learn and to own their emotions (2000), to which he retorted in a loud and uncontrolled scream: “No! That is much to dangerous!”

From a canon to the ordinary: I want you to meet with the bishop. When I asked, “Why?” he replied, “I have been trying to get through to him for nine years, and maybe you might be able to get through.” And then, to my shock, upon entering the meeting I learned that the canon had not informed the bishop that he had called the meeting, and the bishop was misled into believing that I had asked for the meeting.

From another supervisor, upon reading my report on rural ministry: “You were only sucking up to the Canon to the Ordinary!” to whom I today (twenty years later) “That is both insulting and disingenuous!”

From a Canon to the Ordinary: “If you so much as even contact a legal counsel, I will see that you never work again!” To which and to whom (now deceased) I respond: “If you and the church are so fearful of actually confronting the whole of reality, in my or any other’s situation, and circumstance, for which you have never taken responsibility, then I am obliged to follow through on legal counsel, if not for my own defence, but for the protection of the others who follow.”

Raised in a family in which too much abuse was routinely buried under the metaphoric carpet, and in a church in which the theology of bigotry and the messianic evangelist went un-challenged and then elevated into some kind of haloed and holy dogma, I guess it will come as no surprise that my little journey into and through the “fields that we know” (“Tolkein above) would have generated a perspective and a will to declare what little corner of reality of which I am familiar. It is shared in the hope that others will not have to endure the hierarchical silence, cover-ups, failures to investigate fully, and to confront the needed truths and reality of both abandonment, and denial. It is a failure to confront that fails most of us, and the church has a significant position to embrace its failed history, in the light and the spirit of a confronting God. 

Kardman triangle #2

Our first look at the Kardman bully triangle, in our last piece, detailed the Republican conspirators (conspiracy theorists, cultists) as self-identified victims, and their extreme passion and irrationality also works hourly on every platform and from every microphone available, to paint the Democrats as persecutors. This paint-by-number political theatre sadly, is not a game like paint-ball. The poisoned words, beliefs, and acts of insurrection (Jan. 6, 2021) are neither erasable nor can they be tolerated in a state that calls itself a democracy. Furthermore, any attempt, however lame as depicted in the last piece, to bring the two sides to a common table, through what in family therapy would be termed mediation, is so ephemeral, ethereal, and even quixotic, as to disqualify as a credible political agenda. The best and most idealistic intentions of Biden and his administration to work “across the aisle” are already running into predictable roadblocks on the size of the COVID Recovery bill.

The phrase, “words matter,” has been bandied about profusely since trump rode down the escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015. Nevertheless, five years have passed and, the words chosen and weaponized into grenades (not merely bullets) by the ex-president and his millions of cult members, have left a political landscape littered with, from trump himself, some 20,000 documented and curated lies. It is the appetite for those lies, the false emboldening of his cult by those lies, and the dangerous consumption of the implications of those lies among the 74 million voters who cast ballots for trump that continues to impale the Democrats, and the political structure, as well as the American culture on the horns of a dilemma. An army of 74 million, not all of whom believe all of his lies, nevertheless, is a political force, armed with millions of funds from supportive donors, who themselves either believe the lies, or tolerate them, in order to facilitate an agenda that seems to cohere with trump’s style and actions.

How can the country, (including the media, the academe, the churches, the corporations, the military, the civil service, the justice system, and the behemoth that is the U.S. government) together, even begin to mount a “truth-campaign” that will penetrate the wall of denial, resistance, hubris, and what some would call outright psychosis, in the political sense. (In a junior high definition of neurosis from a physical education instructor I heard once, a neurotic builds castles in the sky, whereas a psychotic moves into his castles.) A mere line drawing of psychological trends much more complex, that description clearly applies to the trump’s cults enmeshment in their conviction that trump has come to be their saviour, from the hordes of blood-drinking satanic pedophiles. Not only is their depiction of the Democrats a monstrous projection, of their own worst and most dark unconscious; their individual and collective readiness to acknowledge their projection, is, so far, totally out of reach. If there were time, and if there were a professional therapist, it would take several sessions to break down the wall of intransigence that separates them from their ownership of their projections.

Parents too often, hurl projections of inferiority, insecurity, angst, and especially those fears of being “found out” for their insecurity, at their children. In a fit of temper, a piercing epithet, “You’re no good just like your father!” can and will come screaming from a larynx of a nearly rabid and frustrated parent. And the piercing goes right into the indelible memory bank, along with the fine details of the time and place of its utterance. The moment is never fully excised from the child’s memory, and any long-term attempts to detoxify the wound usually need forgiveness, treatment, sometimes sharing with a partner, and perhaps even prayer. In the personal life, however, these wounds are likely to be ameliorated with time, work and the gift of the mining of the strength and insight they bring.

Given that a good 40% of the American body politic is linked to, if not saturated by, the lies, the victim-mind-and-heart-set, and the false belief that trump alone can and will rescue them from their completely imaginary and incomprehensible and ethereal danger, even Pizzagate is still considered a real event, whereas the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings are staged flags, by their hated enemies.

How does the body politic excise this psychic, emotional, ideological, and propaganda-feeding tumor?

The depth of dependence on the tumor if extreme. It is as if, like a person sick with real cancer, whom before he would even treat such a patient, Bernie Segal, oncologist, would ask, “What do you need with this cancer?” And where do we find the equivalent of a Bernie Segal, oncologist, to ask these people:

v “What need does this cancer fill in your lives?”

v Are your lives so desperate, empty, angry, alienated, isolated, separated that you are determined to leave an indelible signature, through verbal, physical, emotional, character-assassinating, racially-motivated violence?

v What is it that you hate about yourselves that you have to project onto others?

v What evil monster, of a political and a psychic dimension, has so inflicted pain on your person that only protracted vindictiveness will assuage your hate?

v What kind of battle-field do you conceive your fight needs in order to destroy your perceived enemy?

v What lengths do you intend to pursue in order to meet the profound needs that seem to be animating your hate?

v When did you begin to believe that violence, from your hands, is your only and best weapon to tear the national house down?

v What kind of letter would you leave for your parents, children, friends, colleagues, to explain your total commitment to this vexatious campaign?

v Is this campaign similar to a suicide plan by an individual who has reached the end of his rope?

v If your actions were being perpetrated against you, what would you say to those doing the perpetrating?

v Do you know the meaning of the word, nihilism?

v Do you know the meaning of the word, fascism?

v Do you believe that the Third Reich made a positive contribution to the world’s people?

v Do you believe that your groups are committed to actions emulating the Third Reich?

v If you were a Jew or a Moslem, and these acts and words were being directed directly at you, what would you do or say to those committing or uttering those act/words, respectively?

v Is there any hint of a theology or spiritual component to your self-righteous anger, intensity, passion and unleashed terror?

Naturally, however, such questions would likely only enflame the hard-core insurrectionists…and they would be unlikely to hear them.

And so, as the world grapples with a rapidly mutating pandemic, a race to produce and to inject vaccines into enough arms to generate herd immunity, and the millions whose lives have been ripped from under them strive to stay alive, to find work, to feed their families, and to stay healthy, there are many, including this scribe, who consider the actions of the insurrectionists to be among the most self-centred, narcissistic, vengeful and self-sabotaging and blatantly immature series of actions to have emerged in the last have century.

However, any words or thoughts that can be described as “parental” (and the last sentence certainly qualifies) are less than helpful. What the insurrectionists need, and what the political/legal culture will offer, could well be two different things. Charging, sentencing, imprisoning and potentially further exacerbating the contempt and dissociation of these people, even from themselves, might well spell even further revenge. A protracted, profoundly and diligently designed re-training educational curriculum could go a long way to shifting the attitudes, beliefs, prospects, and relationships (all of which are seriously damaged now!) of many of these people. The nation, collectively, wants its own revenge. And it also wants to find a method by and through which it can go forward without morphing into an armed camp against its own people. And there is a strong and easily discernible mountain of evidence that, when American considers itself ‘under attack’ it rises up into epic actions, programs, budgets, staff super-structures and highly sophisticated ‘deterrent’ technologies.

Prick the skin of the American political culture, (and that skin has been pierced, bloodied, and even murdered and shoved into suicide)and there is a predictable, and not necessarily measured and effective response. Behemoth edifices of intelligence, siloed off from other equally monstrous pyramids of intelligence, tend, first of all, under attack, to ‘protect’ the turf of the silo. Whereas, the sharing of intelligence, in both formal and informal channels, without perhaps the inflated budgets that then get siloed, offers the potential of a very different response.

Bureaucracies, however, hire, train, and then breed professionals to operate within the boundaries and frameworks of that bureaucracy. There has likely never been an administration more siloed, and thereby enemy-defined, and enemy-driven, operating on a zero-sum premise, than the U.S. administration that has just, thankfully, come to an end. And yet, it really has not been silenced. It is certainly not dead. And the cultists, including too many elected Republicans, are still clinging to the envisioned promise of another Greek-like epic and thereby historic event, the rise from the ashes of the Phoenix, trump.

Messianism, the notion that a messiah is an integral and essential component of the religion of the United States, has a long history. A complete history can be found in Karen Armstrong’s, A History of God, (Random House, 1993). A brief summary starts as far back as The Great Awakening in New England in the 1730’s. Jonathan Edwards fueled a frenzy of born-again conversions and ascribed responsibility to God who “was moving the people in a marvelous and miraculous manner…These intensely emotional reversal have continued to be characteristic of religious revival in America. It was a new birth, attended by violent convulsions of pain and effort, a new version of the Western struggle with God…The violent swings of emotion, the manic elation and profound despair, show that many of the less privileged people of America found it difficult to keep their balance when they had dealing with ‘God.’…It was Edwards and his colleagues who led Americans of the lower classes to take their first steps toward revolution. Messianism* was essential to Edward’s religion: human effort would hasten the coming of God’s Kingdom, which was attainable and imminent in the New World. The Awakening itself…made people believe that the process of redemption described in the Bible had already begun. God was firmly committed to the project….In the New World of America, God would ..be able to contemplate his own perfections on earth. The New England would be a ‘city on the hill,’ a light unto the Gentiles, ‘shining with a reflection of the glory of Jehovah risen upon it, which shall be attractive and ravishing to all. (From Alan Heimart, Religion and the American Mind, From the Great Awakening to the Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, p. 43, in Armstrong’s A History of God, pp.323-324-325)

It is not surprising that 1776, the numbers and the cry would help to sign the events of January 6 at the Capitol. However, like so many other symbols, images, metaphors and narratives lifted from scripture, there is little supporting evidence to link the holy book and its contents with acts of insurrection. Their deployment doubtless helped to fuel the American revolution, at a time when the stoic, and staid, and mystical Brits were considered the fundamental reason and culture (monarchy) from which the Americans were revolting.

If and when religion, and the enflamed passions of many of its most desperate and perhaps misguided recruits, is manipulated into an instrument for insurrection, hate, bigotry, anarchy and blatant racism, it has lost its way. There is no justification for any lame attempt to capture and to display a distorted Christian faith, even its minimalist and distorted words, as a psychedelic potion for hateful anarchic motivations. 

*Messianism is the belief in the advent of a messiah who acts as a savior or liberator of a group of people: human effort would hasten the coming of God’s Kingdom, which was attainable and imminent in the New World