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Faced with July 4th celebrations that are focused on militarism, ultra-nationalism, and “bombs bursting in air,” many American families who do not share those values turn July 4th into another summer holiday focused on picnics, sports and fireworks while doing their best to avoid the dominant rhetoric and bombast.
We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives believe that this is a net loss. There is much worth celebrating in American history that deserves attention on July 4th, though it is rarely the focus of the public events.
We also acknowledge that in the 21st century there is a pressing need to develop a new kind of consciousness – a recognition of the interdependence of everyone on the planet. A new (and this time, nonviolent) revolution is necessary – one in which our actions reflect a realization that our well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and of the planet itself.
We’ve designed the following material as a possible guide for individual families or for public celebrations that share the values we hold. We hope that families will reflect on the themes raised in these pages at their celebrations, and that churches, synagogues, unions, community organizations, and neighborhood associations will incorporate this material into their public celebrations of July 4th.
Please have people at your picnic, dining room table, outdoor outing, or wherever you are on the holiday take turns reading the paragraphs below:
 
Celebrating What is Good about the United States of America
Today hundreds of millions of Americans will celebrate all that is good in the history of the United States of America. Even though we know there is much to criticize about America (including the use of the word “America” as synonymous with the United States, thereby ignoring Canada, Mexico, Central and South America) there is also much to celebrate.
Today we mark the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a document that still inspires many Americans today.
Unfortunately, the high ideals expressed in the Declaration, “that all men are created equal and endowed with their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were not actually put into practice when the Constitution was created and the United States came into existence. The word “men” was applied not in a general sense to include women, but rather to only include men. And, in fact, for the first decades of our country the only people who could vote were white men who owned property. Worse, slavery was permitted and African Americans were counted as 3/5 of a European American in the census that determined how many people lived in a given area who deserved representation in the Congress. Native Americans -those who had survived the near genocide of European settlement- did not figure at all in these equations.
Some of these distortions got rectified through the democratic process that had been set up by the founders of our country. History books focus on the people who were in power as if all change comes from those in positions of authority. The truth is, though, that much of what we love about America was created by ordinary citizens. Often they encountered resistance from those in power, their messages distorted by the media that has mostly been controlled by the rich and powerful, their activists sometimes beaten, jailed or even killed, their employment put in danger, their families suffering. On some occasions they found allies in some of the powerful, especially for struggles that did not threaten the class structure but only sought to widen the opportunities for people to compete in the marketplace.
At this celebration, let’s give thanks for the ordinary and extraordinary Americans whose struggles brought about those changes. [ Take turns reading the paragraphs below. If you are reading this during a meal, ask each person there to raise a fork, or even take a bite of food if they are hungry and the food has already been served, for each of the following with which they agree.]
 
WE ARE GRATEFUL:
 

• To the waves of immigrants from all parts of the world who struggled to accept each other and find a place in this country {raise fork}

• To the escaped slaves and their allies, particularly Quakers, evangelical Christians, and freedom-loving secularists, who build the underground railroad and helped countless people to freedom {raise fork}

• To the coalitions of religious and secular people–women and men, black and white–who built popular support for the emancipation of the slaves {raise fork}

• To the African Americans and allies who went to prison, lost their livelihoods, and were savagely beaten in the struggle for civil rights {raise fork}

• To the working people who championed protections like the eight-hour day, minimum wage, workers’ compensation, and the right to organize, often at great personal cost to them {raise fork}

• To the immigrants who fought against “nativist” tendencies and refused to close the borders of this country to new groups of immigrants, and who continue to support a policy of “welcoming the stranger” just as this country opened its gates to their ancestors when they were the immigrants and strangers {raise fork}

• To the women who risked family, job security, and their own constructed identities to shift our collective consciousness about men and women and raise awareness of the effects of patriarchy {raise fork}

• To gays and lesbians who fought and won the right to marry and who continue to struggle for full rights in housing, employment, and other arenas {raise fork}

• To transgendered people who are beginning a similar battle for respect, dignity, and equal rights {raise fork}

• To all of those who risk scorn and violence and often lose their families to lead the struggle against homophobia and for the acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer people {raise fork}

• To those who continue to work for equal access for people with disabilities {raise fork}

• To those who advocate for sensitivity to animals and refuse to kill them {raise fork}

• To all of the innovators and artists who have brought so much of beauty and usefulness into our lives {raise fork}

• To those who fought to extend democratic principles not only in politics but also in the work place and in the economy {raise fork}

• To those who developed innovations in science and technology, in literature and art, in music and dance, in film and in computer science, in medical and communication technologies, and in methods to protect ourselves from the destructive impacts of some of these new technologies {raise fork}

• To those who developed psychological insights and increased our ability to be sensitive to our impact on others {raise fork}

• To those who developed ecological awareness and are now building strategies to replace a system that privileges growth and consumption over preservation of the life support system of the planet {raise fork}

• To those who brought the insights of their own particular religious or spiritual traditions which emphasized love and caring for others and generosity towards those who had been impoverished – and sought to turn those ideas not only into a call for personal charity but also into a mission to transform our economic and political systems in ways that would reflect those values {raise fork}

• To those who fought for peace and non-violence, and who helped stop many wars {raise fork}

[Invite other attendees to offer “toasts” to other groups who have contributed to the things that are good about America.]
[Sing songs of the civil rights movement, the suffrage movement, the labor movement, or any other song of struggle. Two such songs appear below. You can find recordings and lyrics for others here]
 
Adding to the difficulty of the struggles listed above was the sad fact that groups who were struggling for their own rights and liberation did not identify with or give adequate support to other groups who were struggling for their own liberation and rights. Sometimes people in oppressed groups would say, “My suffering is more intense or more important than your suffering,” undermining rather than building solidarity. Sometimes one oppressed group was used by the people with power to fight against another oppressed group. Some people in each previously oppressed group would seize their hard-won power and turn their backs on the needs of others, even discriminating against or looking down on others whose struggles had not yet been won.
It was sad and shocking when people struggling for peace found that some of their allies were racist or sexist or homophobic or anti-Semitic or anti-Islamic or anti-Christian or held hateful views about all religious people or about all secular people or about all white people or about all men. Sometimes that would lead oppressed people to give up in despair not just about the difficulties of overcoming the obstacles that the powerful set in place, but out of disillusionment with groups that rightly should have been their allies.
Luckily, many others did not give up, and so the struggles for human freedom dignity, human rights, economic security, and civil liberties were not abandoned. Those struggles continue today, and it could easily take many more decades before they are fully realized.
The good news is that many people have retained their basic decency and caring for others. We are surrounded by people who care. True, it’s often hard to show that. When first approached, many people express indifference to the well-being of others. Our economic system encourages selfishness, me-first-ism, “looking out for number one,” and indifference to the ecological and ethical impacts of our activities, and acting counter to those attitudes feels not only unfamiliar but risky.
Most people yearn for a different kind of world, but they think it is “unrealistic” to struggle for what they really believe in, since they are convinced that nobody else shares that desire with them. This is part of the reason we’ve created a Network of Spiritual Progressives (www.spiritualprogressvies.org) to support each other in building a world that really does reflect our highest values.
If peace, social justice, ecological sensitivity, full implementation of human rights and a society based on love is “unrealistic,” then we say “screw realism” – being realistic in a deeper sense is not accepting “reality” as it is presently presented to us. We want a different kind of world and we have to engage in non-violent struggles to build it. And that has always been the way we have won the battles for precisely the things that make us proud of the victories of the American people: it was always people who were told that what they wanted was “unrealistic” and who essentially said “screw realism – we’re going to fight for what is right” who became the real heroes of the American story. Of course, the powerful often obscure that history and teach us to think that all the human rights and liberties and freedoms were “given to us,” but actually it was precisely the little people like us who made the big changes that have made this country worthy of celebration.
Today we celebrate the moments when the U.S. and the American people have acted not only from self-interest but also from genuine caring. The people of this country have a huge amount of goodness in them, and they’ve shown that side to the world as well. They showed it when they supported the Second World War efforts to stop Hitler and the fascists. They showed it when they stopped the war in Vietnam. They showed it when they reacted with revulsion at the torture being done in our name at Abu Ghreib and Guantanamo. And they are showing it today when they’ve finally been told enough truth about the war in Iraq that they are turning against the killing in massive numbers.
{Here ask people to share their own stories about times when they’ve felt proud of the United States or of Americans. If there is a large group, break into smaller groups of 4-5 people. If the group is small, just go around to everyone in the circle. After allocating at least 3 minutes for each person, resume the larger group conversation.}
We are proud of our country. We love its physical beauty. Many of us come from immigrant families who found refuge here when there were few other societies on the planet that would welcome our ancestors. Let us once again commit to overcoming the fear of the other and cultivating a spirit of generosity and lovetoward the stranger.
We are proud of the people of this country in many of the same ways that we are proud of our own families – not by denying that there are problems, sometimes even overwhelming problems, but that we are still proud and care very deeply about them, and are committed to working through the problems.
 
Celebrating Global Interdependence
 
Part of the cherished myth of this country is the notion of the rugged individualist who makes his own way – the rugged individualist is almost always male in this myth – without anyone else’s help. This image was never true. Even on the frontier, people relied on their neighbors, on the animals that provided their food, and later on those who built and operated the railroads, bringing supplies to frontier towns. Today it is even less possible to be a rugged individualist. We can’t drive on a road, operate an appliance, run water, or make a phone call without benefiting from the work of countless other human beings, some here in the United States and some in other parts of the world.
With the advent of a deeper understanding of how our global environment works, and with the increasing integration of the economies of all countries into a global economy, we’ve come to see that our well-being is linked to the well-being of everyone else on the planet. Our well-being depends on their well-being, and their well-being depends on our well-being. We are all fundamentally interdependent. And we’ve learned the same thing about Nature – when we pour poisons into the air, the ground, or the oceans, those toxics eventually come back to hurt us and other people around the world, just as when they do the same it ends up hurting us and not just people who live near them. Yet the ideal of individualism persists and we’re encouraged to act as if we need no one else, no community support.
[Invite attendees to comment on the ways they see the archetype of the self-sufficient individualist influencing their own lives or the life of our country.]
Despite the persistence of this individualist mindset, our impact on others and theirs on us is huge, and manifests not only in personal and cultural terms but also in relationship to economic and political conditions. Today, close to 3 billion people (half the people in the world) live on less than $2 a day, and close to half of that number live on one dollar a day. Huge numbers of people are starving or very very hungry even as we are reading this and preparing for a good meal and playful celebration. Is it any wonder that some of these people, and those who care about them (even if they themselves are not poor), are very angry at the way the world’s politics and economics get set up? We don’t think it is good or legitimate when their anger gets expressed in violent ways. But we also have to take some responsibility for benefiting from a world order that is so unfair and so cruel. According to United Nations figures, somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 children under the age of five will die today, and again tomorrow, and again the next day, because they don’t have the food and basic medical supplies that could have kept them alive. That’s over 12 million children a year – the equivalent of two Holocausts per year!
We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives want to change all this, both by changing the terms of global trade agreements so that they work on behalf of the poor and the hungry, and by establishing (first in the US, and then in all the advanced industrial societies) a Global Marshall Plan that would allocate between 1-2% of our Gross Domestic Product each year for the next twenty years toward the goal of ending once and for all both domestic and global poverty, homelessness, inadequate education, and inadequate health care. On this celebration of our Inter-dependence, we want to reaffirm our shared commitment to these goals and commit to working with people all around the world, and building the Network of Spiritual Progressives on best ways to achieve these goals.
{You may want to download the following text, which is available on our website, and distribute it to attendees rather than reading it aloud.}
 

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The key to our alternative, what we call the Strategy of Generosity, is our commitment to reestablish trust and hope among the peoples of the world so that we might begin to reflect and act coherently on ending world poverty in our lifetimes and saving the global environment from the almost certain destruction it faces unless we reverse our policies and give highest priority to protecting the earth. Instead of asking “what serves the interests of American economic and political geo-power best?” we want a foreign policy that asks “what best serves all the people on this planet and best serves the survival of the planet itself?”
That is a question that very few people in politics today are willing to raise in that form, fearing that they will not be elected or re-elected because they are charged with not being patriotic enough (even though it is obvious to almost anyone who understands the inter-connectedness of all people on the planet that the best interests of America and the best interests of our children and grandchildren is best served by worrying about the best interests of everyone else, and the best interests of the planet rather than to frame things in terms that reinforce the nationalist fervors of the past and lead us toward selfishness and inability to think globally). A world divided by nationalist struggles and vain fantasies of dominating the resources of the earth on behalf of one or a few of the more powerful nations must be recognized as increasingly insane and self-destructive for the human race. Yet very many decent and moral people, having been talked into accepting the current construction of politics as “the given” within which one must work, end up participating in this insanity and calling it “realistic.” It is an urgent necessity to break through that set of assumptions about what is and what is not realistic–so that people can look at the Strategy of Generosity not through the frame of existing inside-the-beltway assumptions or the “common sense” thrown at us daily by a corporate-dominated media, but rather through the frame of what the human race and the planet earth urgently need in order to stop the insane people who have power at the moment from continuing their disastrous path.
It is a huge delusion to imagine that the insanity of framing our foreign policy only in terms of narrowly conceived American interests is somehow confined to one political party or one set of candidates for office–it is a shared insanity that must be challenged in every part of our political thinking, and it is just as likely to be articulated by people with whom we agree on many other issues as by people who are overtly reactionary or overtly ultra-nationalistic.
Building that Strategy of Generosity requires that we reconnect with the human capacity to recognize the other as an embodiment of the sacred or, in secular language, as fundamentally valuable for who they are and not only as instrumentally valuable for what they can do for us. This pre-reflective, pre-nationalist connection between people must become the center of our campaign for peace and environmental sanity. The bonds of caring among human beings can and must be fostered by our policies.
So although we can emphasize that it is in our own interests as humans to recognize that our individual and societal well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet, and sometimes will frame part of the argument for the Global Marshall Plan in those terms, we have to emphasize as well that our commitment to the Global Marshall Plan is not only because it could save the planet from nuclear and conventional wars and jump-start the process of global environmental planning, but also because it reflects our deepest truth: the Unity of All Being and our commitment to care for each other as momentary embodiments of the God energy (or in secular terms, the goodness and love and generosity) of the Universe at its current stage of evolutionary development. We wish to foster an ethos of caring and love for others because it is ethically and spiritually right to do so, not only because it is instrumentally the only sane policy for saving the planet and saving the lives of our children and grandchildren.
Ironically, what turns out to be the most ethical path is also the most practical and self-interested from the standpoint of saving the human race and protecting the planet that sustains our lives.
Our Global Marshall Plan can’t work unless it is perceived by others as being more than a new, clever attempt to dominate the world through “aid” or some new way to open up the gates of their society for further penetration by Western corporate interests. It can only be perceived as a genuine attempt to change the terms of global interaction if the support for the Global Marshall Plan is transparently built around our ethical vision of world in which generosity and caring for others is valued because it is right, not only because it is smart and a savvy way to protect the United States.
Do not take these ideas and try to “win” with them by abandoning the core vision and only achieving support for some of the details. Our plan will only work if it is supported for the right reasons , with the global common good as the primary goal. In that sense, the Strategy of Generosity is really the core, and the Global Marshall Plan is only a particular way to actualize that new approach to human relations (which is actually the approach that our religious and spiritual and secular ethical traditions have been teaching for many millennia).
Our plan is not about throwing money at the poor of the world – it includes a way to do this that does not allow for corrupt governments to siphon off funds for corrupt elites, that creates a non-governmental mechanism for including the peoples of the world in shaping how the monies and support should be delivered and allocated and mechanism of accountability, reworking all international trade agreements so that they no longer favor the advanced industrial societies but instead help in the economic well-being of poorer societies as well, providing hands-on opportunities so that the peoples of the world including the US get directly involved in helping each other and not just in donating monies. It involves building capacities of people around the world, skills training (including training in nonviolent communication and respect for ethnic and religious diversity, family and parental support, stress reduction, child and elderly care, emergency health techniques, diet and exercise, and caring for others who are in need of help. It involves retraining of the armies of nations around the world to become experts in ecologically sensitive construction and agriculture and health care. It includes using market mechanisms where appropriate and mini-finance of local projects.
We must also insist that the plan be implemented with a clear message that although the West has superior technology and material success, we do not equate that with superior moral or cultural wisdom. On the contrary, our approach must reflect a deep humility and a spirit of repentance for the ways in which Western dominance of the planet has been accompanied by wars, environmental degradation, and a growing materialism and selfishness reflected in a Western- dominated global culture.
Finally, we must not talk about “development” using a Western notion that progress is defined as how many consumer goods you have or how much wealth a society accumulates. We want to eliminate hunger, homelessness, poverty, inadequate education, inadequate health care – but we don’t need a Western model on what this might look like. In fact, the planet cannot sustain a recreation in the rest of the world of irresponsible forms of industrialization and consumption that characterized the West. So, we need a fundamental rethinking of how to organize societies in ways that are sustainable and ethically coherent – and that will require the Western societies to make major changes, rather than preaching environmentalism to the rest of the world while living in environmentally destructive ways ourselves and benefiting from trade arrangements that have impoverished the rest of the world.
The key is humility. We have much to learn from the peoples of the world, their cultures, their spiritual and intellectual heritage, their ways of dealing with human relationships. The West’s superior technology and material success has not brought with it a superior ethical or spiritual wisdom. There is much to learn from societies that from a material standpoint are “under-developed” but from a spiritual standpoint may have within them teachers and cultures that are far more humanly sensitive than our own.
 

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The Global Marshall Plan is the first step toward providing the sense of mutual trust that will allow for the next step needed by humanity in the 21st century: a global plan for how to allocate the world’s resources and regulate what is put into the environment by individuals and corporations. We cannot save the planet from ecological destruction if we are not willing to develop a coherent rational plan and then use it to guide our use of the resources of the planet. Such a global plan will not be workable until the peoples of the world truly understand their interdependence. So, our celebration of Interdependence Day is an important part of the process of building that new consciousness. For that reason, we need to ask each other now to make a pledge to bring more people next year into this celebration.
Yet our interdependence with the world goes deeper than that. Every human being on the planet is valuable, created in the image of God, fundamentally deserving of love, caring, kindness and generosity. We know that there is a huge cultural and intellectual richness in the variety of cultures, religions, spiritual practices, music, literature and shared wisdom of the societies that make up our world. On this Interdependence day, we not only commit to helping improve the material conditions of the rest of the world, but also to learning from the rest of the world. We approach this task in a spirit of humility, aware that we in the United States have sometimes appeared to the rest of the world as a big bully and not as a society genuinely interested in sharing its cultural and intellectual and material gifts or in learning form others about their own particular cultural and spiritual heritages. The impression of arrogance is particularly intense at this historical moment when the war in Iraq and the attempts by the US to manipulate other countries is so visible to many of the people on our planet, but it will be a problem even after we stop the war in Iraq.
We want to communicate to the peoples of the world our own deep sorrow and repentance at the ways that our wonderful country has taken wrong turns in its foreign policy, and the ways that it has acted with arrogance and insensitivity to the needs of others, and supported an economic system whose insensitivity to the needs of the environment and its preaching of “me-firstism” and looking at everyone with a “what’s in it for me?” consciousness has already done immense damage.
{Sing here songs of other cultures and bring their poetry and fiction and spiritual practices as well, or go around the table sharing aspects of other cultures that you find inspiring.}
We are happy to celebrate this Interdependence Day on Independence Day for the U.S.
Some of us wish to invoke God’s blessing on our country, and will do so now. But before we go there, we also wish to invoke God’s blessings on all people on our planet and on the planet itself. We know that nationalist chauvinism, thinking that we are or can be better than everyone else, the manic need to be “number one,” can lead us into wars and destructive behavior. Instead, we want to bless everyone on the planet, to celebrate with everyone. So we rejoice in the people of this country, to rejoice with them as we celebrate all that is beautiful and good in this country, and at the same time we affirm our deep connection to all people on this planet and invoke God’s blessing on all of us, together, and pray that we soon will see a triumph of a new spirit of kindness, generosity, love, caring for others, ecological sensitivity, and celebration with joy, awe and wonder at all the good that surrounds us and keeps us alive.
 
 
Written by Rabbi Michel Lerner and distributed by the Network of Spiritual Progesssives. To spread this this way of thinking: Please join the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) at www.spritualprogressives.org/join or send a tax-deductible contribution to TIKKUN, 2342 Shattuck Ave, #1200, Berkeley, Ca. 94704. When yhou join or donate at the $50 or more level, you also get a one year free subscription to Tikkun Magazine.
NSP Executive Director: Cat Zavis Cat@spiritualprogressives.org 510 644-1200