Re-Lighting the Torches of America's Soul
Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers
June 30, 2003
What happens when individuals or whole societies damage -- or even temporarily lose -- their soul, their spiritual anchor, their sense of themselves as moral entities?
Oh, I know that talking about "soul" and "spirituality" is anathema to a good share of the Left. Those terms often are regarded as too new-wavy or are found mostly in the camp of conservative churchgoers.
But we need to focus on the moral and spiritual aspect in our politics for a variety of reasons, including helping to re-balance our own souls amidst all the horrors being perpetrated by our so-called leaders.
Further, if we in the progressive movement avoid the spiritual field, we certainly will be crushed in 2004, and the know-nothing forces of Bush&Co. will have free rein -- read: reign -- to carry out further imperial misadventures abroad and police-state-like constitutional shredding at home. The result will be catastrophe -- to our already shaky economy, to our national treasury (and treasures: our young men and women sent to patrol the empire), to the collective soul of America.
The United States is, and likes to think of itself as, a highly moral country, dedicated to fair play and to the belief that God takes an interest in our democratic experiment. Americans, at heart, want to do the right thing.
When our society goes outside the boundaries of decent moral behavior -- as we did with slavery, for example -- those lapses are regarded as aberrations, correctable as we learn more. We are in another such moment in our history right now, but we can hope that as more and more citizens learn what's really going on behind the scenes, and face our political shadow, the pendulum will begin swinging back the other way -- if permitted to do so.
Using fear and a permanent-war scenario, the Bush Administration has been able to manipulate the American populace into turning its spiritual button to the off position. By demonizing and lying, it has put America's moral sense of itself into a kind of numbed "pause" mode.
Americans are led to wallow in the fright and negativity pushed daily by Bush&Co. and its conglomerate-owned mass media. After months and years of having this negative template laid on top of our society, it's not difficult to have one's energy sapped, to sink into a kind of fatalistic torpor, or even, because the feelings are so intense, to deny that one is having doubts at all.
THE DARK CLOUDS GATHER
The shadow forces in American politics have been in the ascendancy for more than two years, and many ordinary citizens, not used to having mean-spirited and mendacious leaders in control of the country, have been confused as to how to respond. And so many folks closed down their moral sensibilities. But there are signs that this is beginning to change.
Normally, you see, America doesn't initiate wars when we haven't been attacked or are in little danger of being attacked, or when our vital national interests are not at stake. But, in this Iraqi case, the American public has been led to feel: "After 9/11, we need to get those guys, and Saddam is capable within 45 minutes of sending his drone planes to drop anthrax on us, or a nuclear bomb" -- and more such whoppers. And off go a quarter-million American troops to the Persian Gulf, with little or no serious debate -- and with more of them dying every day.
(Don't get me wrong. There are bad-guy terrorists out there who need to be confronted and captured, but we don't need to become a unilateral bully abroad -- thus enriching the soil in which terrorism grows -- and move into a police-state at home to handle the problem. And our officials certainly don't need to lie on a massive scale to dupe us into approving their imperial policies.)
Even though it has become clear that the U.S. is in no danger of an imminent attack from Iraq, and that indeed there were no weapons of mass destruction worth worrying about, the Rove propaganda machine has done its work well. More than half of those polled think we did the right thing, even if no WMDs are ever discovered.
So. How to combat that moral lethargy, that overwhelming sense of denial that America maybe, just maybe, might be doing something wrong, something that violates our normal sense of ourselves as a righteous, ethical people?
Rather than simply bash away at the bourgeois, religious middle class for their willingness to go along with whatever Bush&Co. says and proposes, it might make more sense to try to reach folks on an idealistic level, where they live and/or repair to emotionally.
It's key to remind ourselves that we are taking this approach not only, or even mainly, as a political tactic, but because it's the right thing to do: to see folks as individuals, with very real fears and sensitive spots. Think of it as a kind of holistic political-spiritual practice. Love, in the long run, always is more powerful than hate and suspicion. Healing always is more gratifying than destruction.
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continued at
http://www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/torches.htm
