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This Just In: The Latest Dispatch from Surreal World

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In the first part of last night’s dream, I was trapped in a building, but as soon as I began to wake up, I lost that image. What lingered was a swarming crowd, people rushing to join a mass on the horizon, gazes transfixed skyward. Huge fireballs were forming in the blue air, spinning as they fell to earth, landing somewhere out of sight. Voices began to sound, the ordinary tones of TV newsreaders: clear, oddly animated, slightly robotic. They described the scene around me, the completely unprecedented and unexplained rain of enormous fireballs, in exactly the same way they might tell a story about a road accident or a snowstorm.

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Ejecting The Oppressor: It Takes Earth and Earth and Earth

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Prosper Kompaore shared a proverb from his home country of Burkina Faso: “How is it that sky-high termite mounds can be made by such tiny insects?” he asked. The answer, counseling determination, endurance, commitment and plenty of sustenance: “It takes earth and earth and earth…”
Community, Culture and Globalization
It is not given you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it. Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Ancestors) 2:16
In times of great disappointment, the temptation to just react is powerful. I’m as angry, sad, and scared as anyone. But I also know that in the grip of those feelings, my judgment is impaired.

Politics & Society

Arguing with Integrity: Ford, Ramirez, Swetnick, Kavanaugh, and the Senate Judiciary Committee

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Brett Kavanaugh should never have been confirmed for any judgeship, nor receive approval for his current bid for Supreme Court. My reasons for saying this are simple: charges of sexual assault from three credible witnesses; an increasingly well-documented history of public belligerence, including violence; a mounting body of lies about his own conduct; and an appallingly intemperate performance of outraged entitlement and partisanship before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The arguments against him on these grounds are solid and sufficient to carry the day, judged flatly on the merits. If they fail to do so, it will be on account of a nauseating party-line refusal to care about women’s safety and well-being, compounded by a cocktail of enraged white male entitlement. The most recent polling makes this clear: 81 percent of black voters are opposed to confirmation, as are 65 percent of Hispanic voters.

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Fahrenheit 11/9: Two Lessons We MUST Face

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I saw Michael Moore’s new film on Friday. This is not a review (I liked this, didn’t like that, who cares?), but an extraction of two main points Moore makes in ways that set my heart pounding. See Fahrenheit 11/9 if you can (it’s playing in three different theaters here in Santa Fe, a small city, so I’m guessing you have the opportunity close to hand). But whether or not you do, I am urging—begging—you to consider and share these lessons. How we act on them will make the critical difference between life and death for democracy.

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By Our Dreams Will You Know Us: Impeachment Edition

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“In dreams begin responsibilities,” wrote the poet Delmore Schwartz. What do our dreams reveal about our responsibilities to the body politic? Everyone I know is ecstatic that two individuals have been definitively revealed as guilty of serious criminal action in direct service to the Present Occupant of the White House. As Michael Cohen’s attorney said, “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?” The New York Times editorial sums it up nicely and links to the relevant details.

Culture

When Two Truths Collide, Part Two: Can You See Yourself as The Accused?

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Something in our body politic is troubling me. I do not think it is possible to have a just society without understanding that every member of society bears the same potential to harm or heal. I do not think we can have just laws and processes without imagining how we would ourselves be treated as either the accuser of wrongdoing or the accused. Yet I hear so many people exempting themselves from these deep truths, advocating positions conditioned on understanding their own virtue as unimpeachable, on seeing themselves as incapable of serious wrongdoing. The antidote I think we need is perspective, the ability to see our own virtue, accomplishments, or status as subject to change, to braid empathy and imagination with justice.

Culture

When Two Truths Collide

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Minnesota holds primary elections today. One of the most prominent candidates is 11-year congressional veteran Rep. Keith Ellison, running for state Attorney General. A few days ago, first the son of a former partner and then the partner herself, Karen Monahan, accused Ellison of “narcissist abuse,” a term that has come into use fairly recently to describe a pattern of emotional manipulation and bullying in which someone pressures another to ignore one’s own needs to satisfy those of the narcissist, for example. Ellison has denied the charge. Here’s a quick recap.

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Feared Than Loved

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I’ve been thinking about love and fear. Love is a strong force in my life, the thing that heals, the thing that opens my heart to give, the thing that greets me each morning as I open my eyes, grateful for another day. As the Song of Songs – the epic liturgical poem of awe and desire – puts it, “love is as strong as death.” But love’s opposite – fear, the weapon of the unloved – is swirling all around me. There’s the ambient fear of racism, violence, poverty, and exploitation, so deeply woven into the fabric of most U.S. cities that it becomes normalized.

Culture

What Needs Rethinking to Make Another World Possible?

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I miss my optimism.She’s hiding deep in shadow, in a place that has more in common with the Kali Yuga than the messianic era. She’s trying to wedge herself into a future of chaos and oppression in which the old world breaks down, holding onto the hope of rebuilding along lines far more loving and just. I keep hearing this scenario framed as spiritual teaching or political analysis. Either way, the type of encouragement I’m feeling these days says that we are on the bridge between worlds, the old systems crumbling, the new order not yet having taken shape. We are wisely counseled to take heart from history, from those forced to live under the boot of dictatorship who found ways to resist, survive, thrive, and regain freedom.

Culture

Where Is The Exit Out of The Trap?

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Back in the day, I had a quote from Wilhelm Reich* over my desk:
The nature of the trap has no interest whatsoever beyond this one crucial point: WHERE IS THE EXIT OUT OF THE TRAP? It was the resonant wisdom of this sentence and not the cult of its author that drew me. As a young activist I had already observed progressives’ delight in analyzing the life out of ideas, to fall into bitter conflict over differing interpretations of the causes and effects of social injustice and their remedies, and often to invest more energy in conversation about such things – in the dimensions, decor, origins, textures, and other characteristics of the trap – than in getting out. Reich made the obvious yet often ignored point that “to break out of a prison, one first must confess to being in a prison.” I had already seen how easy it is to normalize captivity with distractions, rationalizations, creature comforts.