[On one side you have the Zionists who accuse anybody saying boo about Israe's bad behavior of being anti-Semitic, and then you've got the Anti=Semites who see evil Jews behind every ill in the world. It is instructive maybe to remember that racism and anti-Semitism have common roots. That the Jews survived the destruction of Israel by the Romans in 60AD is somehow to be held against them. Are there evil Jews? Yes. Do they control the world? Hardly.Jews were not thr first or the last to come up with a 'chosen people' idea. Pointing to Jewish bankers and financiers with an 'aha'! is to ignore the far more numerous non-Jewish ones. I was struck in college by how many of my classmates were Jews, but I learned that that scholastic tradition is indeed ancient, and is part of what has held Jewish communities together all these centuries in foreign and hostile places. As I read through the anti-Semitic comments on the Rastafari Speks forum, I am saddened by watching intelligent people succumbing to bigotry, and more, I am sympathetic about the impulse we humans have to understand the world and its woes and how vulnerable we can become to easy explanations for all the complexities that confront us. Jews did not invent White Supremacy, and in fact throughout their history have fallen prey to it That some Jews have risen to prominence in corporate, financial, and political arenas is not surprising given their history as mainly urban dwellers in Europe who were denied the right to own land or practice trades. It’s ironic that they were forced into money-lending and then blamed for the evils of capitalism. As always, they are convenient scapegoats.I think predatory capitalism is pretty-much a Christian invention, when we get right down to it. Why let all those white Catholics and Protestants off the hook?Anyway. I thank Julius Lester for his humanity, his generosity, and his blackness and his Jewishness too. Each of us is mixed in that we carry in us the capacity to do great good and great evil. By consistently projecting evil on to one ‘them’ or another, we are failing the great introspection test. Didn’t somebody once say “Know Thyself”?]

On one side you have the Zionists who accuse anybody saying boo about Israe's bad behavior of being anti-Semitic, and then you've got the Anti=Semites who see evil Jews behind every ill in the world. It is instructive maybe to remember that racism and anti-Semitism have common roots. That the Jews survived the destruction of Israel by the Romans in 60AD is somehow to be held against them. Are there evil Jews? Yes. Do they control the world? Hardly.Jews were not thr first or the last to come up with a 'chosen people' idea. Pointing to Jewish bankers and financiers with an 'aha'! is to ignore the far more numerous non-Jewish ones. I was struck in college by how many of my classmates were Jews, but I learned that that scholastic tradition is indeed ancient, and is part of what has held Jewish communities together all these centuries in foreign and hostile places. As I read through the anti-Semitic comments on the Rastafari Speks forum, I am saddened by watching intelligent people succumbing to bigotry, and more, I am sympathetic about the impulse we humans have to understand the world and its woes and how vulnerable we can become to easy explanations for all the complexities that confront us. Jews did not invent White Supremacy, and in fact throughout their history have fallen prey to it That some Jews have risen to prominence in corporate, financial, and political arenas is not surprising given their history as mainly urban dwellers in Europe who were denied the right to own land or practice trades. It’s ironic that they were forced into money-lending and then blamed for the evils of capitalism. As always, they are convenient scapegoats.I think predatory capitalism is pretty-much a Christian invention, when we get right down to it.  Why let all those white Catholics and Protestants off the hook?

Anyway. I thank Julius Lester for his humanity, his generosity, and his blackness and his Jewishness too. Each of us is mixed in that we carry in us the capacity to do great good and great evil. By consistently projecting evil on to one ‘them’ or another, we are failing the great introspection test. Didn’t somebody once say “Know Thyself”?


 Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Concept of Evil
Julius Lester, University of Massachusetts Amherst

I.
Racism is an exceedingly complex, tricky, and confusing phenomenon. This is so because racism is often indiscriminately extended and applied to nonbiological and nonracial groupings - nations, linguistic groups, ethnic or cultural groups. For example, Jews are not a race and anti-Semitism was not expressed in the language of racism until the 19th century, but the religious and political expressions of anti-Semitism that roll through Western Civilization like a mighty and polluted river are racist.

Racism is chameleon-like, and takes on the appearance of ethnocentrism, social discrimination, liberalism, conservatism, or Marxism. But this is because prejudice and discrimination look almost identical whether the object is a race or ethnic group.

Racism is also difficult to unmask because it can also wear the camouflage of ethnocentrism. Theoretically, ethnocentrism alleges inferiority, disabilities, and negative traits to an outgroup on the basis of culture. Racism ascribes negative definition on the basis of biology. In reality, however, the differences are not clear. This is why anti-Semitism can be cultural in one instance, religious in another, and racial in yet another. Further confusing matters is the fact that ethnocentrism is universal. Members of practically every culture regard their way of life as superior to that of their neighbors.

But regarding one's way of life as superior is not the same as crowning one's race as superior. Sometimes, however, it is difficult to perceive a difference in a group's attitude toward its way of life and its attitude toward itself.

Racism and ethnocentrism are not, then, mutually exclusive. But while racist societies are almost invariably ethnocentric, the reverse is not true. While nearly every group is proud of its cultural accomplishments and derogates those of their neighbors, the idea that a group is superior to another because of genetic makeup is not widespread. The startling historical fact is that, in its origins, racism is the creation of Western Civilization. Where racism exists outside the West, it is "mostly an outgrowth of the rationalizations of slavery and colonial expansion," according to Professor Louis van den Berge. "Far and away the most widespread, enduring, and virulent form of racism and the costliest in terms of human suffering has been that which developed in western Europe and its colonial extensions in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Western Hemisphere." He concludes that "The Netherlands and Great Britain were responsible for the growth of the most racist colonial societies that the world has ever known -namely, South Africa, the United States, and Australia."

Racism is not then intrinsic to human nature. It is a product of history, the result of decisions made in the course of human events. Thus, racism is not an irrational phenomenon, nor does it proceed from the minds and souls of people acting irrationally. To consider racism irrational, to deem it a social aberration is to dismiss it. The failure or refusal to see that racism is rational is to evade taking responsibility for our civilization and the horrors it has wrought all too often.
It would be comforting to believe that the Holocaust, the most extreme expression of racism, had its sources in an irrationality with roots in the farthest reaches of insanity. We are allowed no such comfort. The executioners, the active and passive ones, were rational men and rational women acting rationally.

Something in us may want to reject this. We want to believe, may even need to believe that rational people do not conceive and execute a program of genocide. Higher education glorifies the use of reason, extolling it as the royal road to a greater tomorrow. Thus, we are almost compelled to believe that reasonable men and women would not participate in and sanction, actively and passively, the murder of one-third of the Jews in the world.

Higher education assumes that reason is intrinsically moral, that, by definition, it partakes of the good and shuns evil. It does not. Reason is only a tool of the intellect. As such, it is the servant of morality, not its avatar. "Nothing is so lest thinking make it so," wrote Shakespeare. We can think anything and rationalize any justification for it. That reasonable people murdered six million Jews should not surprise us because reason justified a morality with racism for a matrix. If one accepted the matrix, if one believed the Nazi premise about Jews, the extermination of the Jews was a theological and reasonable conclusion.

To understand any society or civilization, it is necessary to uncover the principles around which that society organizes itself. Anti-Semitism and racism are two of the organizing principles of Western civilization. Under Naziism, anti-Semitism and racism came together in a horrifying conflagration which demands that we take responsibility for this world in ways our predecessors on this planet did not.

What, then, is racism? It is "the theory or idea that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and certain traits of personality, intellect, or culture and, combined with it, the notion that some races are inherently superior to others." Racism is a race's idealization of itself, not only in the society but in the very cosmos. Racism confers, then, religious identity in secular garb. George Mosse, in his Toward The Final Solution: A History of European Racism, describes racists as having a particular set of values, namely, "a certain concept of beauty [which is] white and classical....middle class virtues of work, of moderation and honor." It follows logically, then, that a racist society will designate the Other as inferior because it lacks beauty and middle-class virtues. "All evil was blamed upon the restless inferior races, who lacked appreciation of a settled order of things."

Racism establishes Order for the racial or national majority. It provides the majority
with a cohesive and beneficent collective identity, an identity based on the exaltation of the majority - its physical endowments, its civic virtues, its morality. In other words, racism gives the majority an image of the Good, the True and the Beautiful, and that image is itself. By default, then, Evil is projected onto those who were not created in the image of the Good.

Order is the greatest imperative of any society. Without Order a society falls into chaos. Of course, there are many components to Order -economic, political, social, etc., - but these rest on the foundation posts of a deeper order which is spiritual, i.e. not only is it necessary for the individual to be given a place of security in the society, but the society must serve as a microcosm and reflection of security in the universe itself. Thus, the atheism of communist countries, the anti-religious premise of Naziism, are statements of spiritual order which convert politics into religion.

When a group idealizes itself as the apotheosis of humanity, it automatically creates an Other, a Them. Richard Grunberger in The Twelve Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany writes:
The white outline of the German's image of themselves - in terms of character no less than of colour - acquired definition only via the moral and physical darkness of its Jewish anti-type. Metaphysically as well as materially, the roots of the German heaven were deeply embedded in the Jewish hell....the majority of Germans accepted Jew-baiting...as an integral part of a system beneficial to themselves.

Racism and anti-Semitism benefit a group by satisfying, in George Mosse's words "a longing for coherence, for community and for an ideal in the face of a changing world....[Racism is] part of the drive to define man's place in nature and of the hope for an ordered, healthy and happy world....the racist outlook fuses man's outward appearance with his place in nature and the proper function of his soul."

Thus, racism must exist because it creates Order for Euro-American civilization. George Mosse writes: "Scientific accomplishment, a Puritan attitude toward life - the triumphant middle-class morality, Christian religion, the ideal of beauty as symbolic of a better and healthier world were all integral facets of racism....Such noble ideals as freedom, equality and tolerance would become reality only if the race were preserved and its enemies defeated....Racism defined utopia against its enemies." Many still consider a white and Christian Western Civilization to be that utopia.
II.
To unravel the origins of racism, we must go back to the year 1452 and the words of the Italian humanist, Gianozo Manetti: "For everything that surrounds us is our own work, the work of man: all dwellings, all castles, all cities, all the edifices throughout the whole world, which are so numerous and of such quality that they resemble the works of angels
rather than men. Ours are the paintings, the sculptures; ours are the trades, sciences and philosophical systems. Ours are all inventions and all kinds of languages and literary works, and when we think about their necessary employment, we are compelled so much the more to admiration and astonishment."

One hundred fifty years later Shakespeare expressed the same sentiments more succinctly and eloquently in Hamlet: "What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!”
The celebratory words of Manetti and Shakespeare are the culmination of changes whose beginnings go back at least to the 12th century, to that time of which Henry Adams wrote, "Church and State, Soul and Body, God and Man, all are one." He exaggerated, but did not falsify because life in the Middle Ages had a cohesion which, in retrospect, gives the time a deceptive unitary quality. As Andrew MacCall observes in The Medieval Underground

...feudalism restored some semblance of stability to Christian Europe....the new feudal social structure came to be seen as the divinely-designed means of promoting an Ideal Order, in which the forces of evil at work in the universe would be vanquished, and harmonious relations between man and God assured, by the obedience of each and every member of the feudal hierarchy to the law.

The price of this Order was a conformity difficult for us to imagine. Everyone and everything had its place on the Golden Chain of Being. As long as everyone and everything remained in its proper place and performed its ordained function, Order, divine and human, existed. But when cooking pots and swords fell from shelves or hooks for no apparent reason, they were brought to trial for refusing to remain in their places. In 1474 in Basel, a chicken was sentenced to be burned alive for "having so forgotten its proper function" to lay an egg. At Laon, a pig which killed a child was tried, found guilty and hanged.

It was a time when man was merged with nature and could separate from it only to the degree that he invested it with sanctity. St. Bernard said that "Stones and trees will teach you a lesson you never heard from masters in the school." In his The Gothic Cathedral Otto von Stimson observes, "For medievel man, the physical world...has no reality except as a symbol," which is exemplified in the words of the 9th century Scholastic, Erigena: "We understand a piece of wood or a stone only when we perceive God in it." In other words, a rose is not a rose is not a rose.
Change begins in the 12th century when Peter Abelard, the first modern man as we might understand that, sought to reconcile reason and faith using Aristotelian logic. This indicated that the Golden Chain of Being as a metaphor for Order was declining. "It was futile," wrote Abelard, "to utter words which the intellect could not possibly follow...nothing [can] be believed unless it [can] be first understood." He claimed that "The first key to wisdom is assiduous and frequent questioning. For by doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we arrive at the truth.”

St. Bernard of Clairvaux saw clearly that Abelard threatened the foundation of Order: “Abelard is trying to make void the merit of the Christian faith when he deems himself able by human reason to comprehend God altogether. He sees nothing as an enigma, nothing as in a glass darkly, but looks on everything face to face.”

To look on things "face to face" is to know that a rose is indeed a rose and not a surrogate for the Almighty. Abelard was using reason to separate man from nature and even, if need be, man from God so that man might see himself.

Abelard was not alone in this effort to look on "everything face to face." At the monastery of Saint-Denis, where Abelard was a monk for a period, statues of Jesus with the face of human being were being carved. This was the first time Jesus was depicted other than as an abstraction representing the Eternal. The art that decorated Saint-Denis glorified, in the words of Georges Duby, "not God's transcendence, but his incarnation." By humanizing the image of Jesus, it is as if man himself is being born, and this humanization is symbolized in 13th century Italy where Francis of Assisi erects the first creche.

There is a paradox here: By depicting Jesus with the face of a human being, by concretizing in human form the birth of Jesus, it appears that religious faith and piety are being affirmed. The means for doing so, however, actually bring man to the threshold of discovering and asserting the secular. To look on things face to face is to assert the secular over the sacred, is, eventually, to make the secular itself sacred.

A dramatic expression of this came at the beginning of the 15th century when a young French woman was ordered by the Church to repudiate the voices of angels she claimed to hear. She refused, saying that while she acknowledged the Pope's authority in matters of faith, her obedience to her voices was a matter only God could judge. This was heresy and Joan of Arc was executed.

What is secular in Joan of Arc is precisely what is secular in Abelard, namely, the assertion of the validity of looking on things face to face, the assertion that the individual is the ultimate judge of reality. In Abelard it is through reason; in Joan of Arc, it is through the insistence on the truth of individual experience. This insistence makes her a harbinger of Protestantism. It is a mere 25 years from the execution of Joan of Arc to the words of Gianozo Manetti where the assertion of man as existing for himself is fully-developed.

Secular man has been born and is astonished and enthralled with himself: "How beauteous mankind is!" rhapsodized Shakespeare. "O brave new world/That hath such people in't."
Who are the people populating this "brave new world?" They are not the monks, clerics and knights of the medieval world. These are explorers returning from exotic lands with commodities like sugar, introduced into England in 1456, with avocados, papayas, tomatoes, chocolate, vanilla, and turkeys, brought to Spain in 1527. These are artists and composers who are so audacious as to sign their names to their creations, to say to the world, "I created this." These are men like the 14th century Florentine banker who had his portrait painted for his tomb, men like Piero d'Medici who, in 1453, commissioned a portrait
of himself.

European man has recognized that he exists as a creating being, that he creates paintings, builds castles and cities, and thinks the thoughts of science and philosophy, that he can change and shape the world instead of being a passive and abstract occupant on the Golden Chain. To know that one can change something is to know that one possesses not only reason but, equally important, the energy to use and direct that reason - namely, the will. "It is better to will the good than to know the truth," wrote Petrarch, a father of the Renaissance.

To believe in the will is to believe that by one's own efforts and energies, one can take charge of himself and the world. Pico della Mirandola put it succinctly when writing about the child: "To him it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills." He also wrote:

This is the culminating gift of god, this is the supreme and marvelous felicity of man...that he can be that which he wills to be. Animals..[and] angels are from the beginning...what they will be forever. But God the Father endowed man, from birth, with the seeds of every possibility and every life.

Such optimism is astounding, but why shouldn't Pico have been filled with exuberance? Three events of the 15th century ushered in a new world that could not help but make it appear that God had endowed man "with the seeds of every possibility and every life." Those events were: The invention of printing, the Protestant Reformation, and the European discovery of Africans and the Americas. Any one of these events would have transformed the West. That all three occurred in the same century is almost beyond belief. The medieval definitions of Order were inadequate to nurture secular man who was now born full grown, it seemed, from the head of Zeus.

The invention of printing was a democratizing force which broke the Church's control over the masses of people. When people could read for themselves, they could think for themselves. In 1450, there were less than 100,000 hand-written manuscripts in all Europe; in 1500 there were nine million printed books. Many of those books were Greek and Roman classics, the jewels of paganism, which represented a new kind of knowledge, a new way of thinking about and experiencing the world. With the rediscovery of secular learning, Christianity was no longer the vessel of absolute Truth. The invention of printing also led to translations of the Bible from Latin into the vernacular. The Church had most of Tyndale's translations of the New Testament burned. Martin Luther's translation of the New Testament into German created the German language by giving that language a legitimacy it could not have as long as Latin was the only written tongue. The same was true for the translation of the New Testament into French.
Medieval Order was further destroyed by the Reformation. Protestantism established the authority of the individual over the authority of priest, bishop and Pope. "The Christian man must examine and judge for himself," said Luther, echoing Abelard.

The third event, the explorations of Africa and the Americas, brought the discovery of a trade routes to India as well as African slaves to Europe. Suddenly, the world seems filled with opportunity, even for peasants, and a new economic mode, capitalism, comes into being. This is made official in 1517 when the Fourth Lateran Council overturns the Christian ban on usury. Money is needed to outfit ships and for trade. Using capital to make capital becomes the way of life.

It is important to mention one other invention that enabled European man to seize control of his world. In 1511, there is the first reference in print to a new and amazing thing: the watch. The watch gives man control over the flux of life. Life will no longer be lived in relation to the rising and setting of the sun and the cycle of the seasons. Time is created as a way of measuring life. Life itself can now be controlled. The watch is the symbolic representation of the will.
In the 15th and 16th centuries the world becomes secular. Never before and never since has man so experienced himself as if he were a god, as if there were no limits on what he could do and who he could be, and there was little doubt that all that man could do, all that man could be would be good.

Rabelais (1490-1533) wrote that "free men, well-born, well-educated, conversant in honest company, have by nature an...impulse which always pushes them to do the good and to withdraw from vice." Thus, freedom, prosperity and education are all that's necessary for men to do good and not evil. Something in us would like to believe still that was right, that education, art, music, literature humanize the world and because they do, the good must prevail.

That is not so and it was never so. Looking on things face to face does not mean becoming enraptured by an idealized reflection of one's self. In fact, looking on things face to face means you cannot see the shadow looming behind, and it is in the shadow of the Renaissance that we must stand if we are to see ourselves today.

This shadow side of the age of humanism can best be described through a 90-year chronology beginning in 1441, eleven years before Manetti wrote his paean to man:

36 dairy farms in the state of Vermont (pop. 500,000) have ceased operation since January due to the plummeting price of milk.

Dairy farmers from Maine to California have been committing suicide.

In the inner cities of this country, the fallout from the predatory lending of the big banks is that black people are moving out, white people are buying their former homes for a song, and houses are being torn down. My daughter who is a community worker for sustainability tells me it's a pretty mixed blessing when the reason there is all of a sudden a bunch of 'green space' opening up in her city is that black people are being disappeared out of their neighborhoods.

In her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Naomi Klein writes of the Friedmanite free market fundamentalists and how, whether it's a tsunami, a hurricane, or an often deliberately manufactured political or economic crisis, there is nothing like a disaster to advance corporatist interests. For them these times are like a dream come true, when they can achieve what they could only have dreamed of before.

It's interesting looking at the hostile comments after the article too, lest anyone think we're living in a 'post-racial' world...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1177123/The-European-Created-fragments-fossil-face-forbears-35-000-years-ago.html

"There is a tragedy in this situation, for all of its absurd comedy. In the hippies, after all, we have a group within the West that has made a correct analysis of its moral and spiritual corruption, and is trying to live an alternative. But how to live an alternative while benefiting all the time from the privilege the system confers? Certainly, the answer cannot possibly be to withdraw from the complexities of the situation by setting up an illusory Maginot line between 'us' and 'them'.

Every white American and European is 'them', like it or not. And there must be one item and one only on the agenda: to dedicate excess funds and excess leisure and use the voice privilege gives us to bring down global white supremacy. This can take as many forms as there are humans to envision it, but if this is not the one motivation in the hearts and minds of every privileged white, hippie or not, any happiness they think to find in life on Earth will always be elusive. There is not a meditation technique powerful enough or a quartz crystal big enough to give enlightenment to a spiritually and morally degraded people.

There is one thing that characterizes white privilege perhaps above all else, and that is the attempt to mitigate the pain of one's complicity in it. Whether through mainstream diversions like material consumption, the media, sports, entertainments, and alcohol, or alternative forms of 'feelgoodism' like hippie fests, 'free love', sweat lodges, and clouds of ganja smoke, the attempt is the same. What makes the hippie movement so irritating is that they believe they are truly living an 'alternative lifestyle', that they 'walk lightly on the earth.'

The white West is the one-ton gorilla sitting square on history. Some whites clearly feel it is enough to voice their opposition through an alternative lifestyle and all of its trappings. What they fail to see is that a much more serious and focused response is required, one that involves personal sacrifices, another idea met with discomfort by the privileged. If hippies think that by playing poor and powerless they can deflect responsibility from themselves, I have only one question: what's that you smokin'? And if smoking it is what keeps them from confronting the challenge to create a truly peaceful and just world, I suggest they stop. "

So I don't usually quote myself, but I went back and read the hippie essay from 1993, and I don't see anything different between what I said then and now. You sling a lot of accusations but make few true responses to anybody, which is too bad.

The only one here who refers to Obama in terms of hero worship here is you.

Just for the record, in my previous post when I referred to 'now' I was actually thinking of this era of instantaneous global communication which began I think in 1962 when I was five years old.

I hope you're about half my age, 26 or so, like my youngest son. Why can't you disagree with me in a respectful way and settle down and really debate this instead of all the outburst?

Hahaha believe me there's nothing 'soft' about LSD. Like with so much, you conflate a lot of information and draw dubious conclusions. The history of psychedelics is ancient and whatever the CIA thought they might use it for, they gave up on the idea fast, though Tim Leary might have been CIA.

As I made clear in the essay you keep using to be disrespectful to me, I think some good things happened in the 60's and some ideas starting gaining traction that stand a chance of bearing fruit now.

But like I said WAY back there in my very first post, the mistake of many lies in their apocalyptic desires/expectations which cripple them in the here and now of the work each person can do, pretty much the same mistake the hippies made. How do we defeat imperialism and white supremacy?

Wowsers.

Your post makes me want to know what is really bugging you.

I am not aware that I am turning away from anything I've ever said or believed. I am certainly no less committed to addressing racism and privilege, and in fact I don't even get where you're coming from on that. 

I was talking with my daughter and said that the Obamas are roughly my contemporaries, a little younger, and how much higher the stakes are for blacks, how much more life and death, and whereas I could choose to 'drop out' and consciously NOT go to Harvard Law School or wherever, I can't second-guess their decision to do so. And get into the arena, and engage in debate people whose ideas they despise in order to move some things forward. I don't believe everybody has been co-opted, I just don't.

One thing I'll never regret is the LSD though. Ha. But really. Precious insights.

I keep in mind always what Ayinde has said about the proper role of whites, and about how its the worst sufferers from whom the impetus for lasting change must come. What is different and yes revolutionary about the possibilities which exist now is our ability to see ourselves as a whole planet in a vast web of connection. The bastards can talk about 'global connections' while right under their noses there are any number of little projects going on which provide models for how business can get done and people can live decently without trashing the planet. And it's not about 'aid' or any of that but about solidarity and collective effort, and invisible heroism.

Again and for the umpteenth time I ask you to answer my question--what is your vision for the future? What are we supposed to do in the meantime? Everything you say may prove to be true, but the question remains--what do you, Disciple of Ma'at, do with yourself here and now?  What is a disciple of Ma'at to be working for in this time? And if this question bothers you, why?

Why would I ban you?

I understand your anger. I understand your grief. I feel it every day. Lots of good people get the picture. I get the picture. I don't think Obama is just a figurehead. I don't think the fix is in. I think what we do about what we see matters. I don't think Obama himself matters all that much, as I said. I think something much bigger is afoot, and that Obama's appearance on the scene is catalyzing it. Just the feminine intuition...you say you honor the feminine principle...

Horror and joy. Joy and horror. I heard Alice Walker on inauguration day say that's what life is about. Wise elder. She should know.

As for Schindlerizing, it's possible to have the whole picture and do your thing at the same time. What is important is not to become paralyzed by despair.  I'll write more later.

What I am talking about here is how, almost 50 years after the advent of spontaneous global communication, there are people on the ground all over the planet doing their little thing for the good of their communities, and this is the ultimate revolution because it comes from the bottom up, is informed and grows by the understanding that similar struggles are taking place all over.

If some former or present hippie is aiding in this, behind the scenes, that's a good thing. if 'hippies' with bank are awakening to their responsibilities it's all to the good. To me the fallacy of 'hippieism' lies in the arrogance and thinking that the right philosophy and the proper physical trappings are enough--kind of like some Rastas.

I wonder what gets you so riled up that you don't really seem to respond to what I'm actually saying in all this. I wouldn't expect you to re-read what I said in all those posts, but it's pretty annoying. I wonder yet again and to this you have never responded--what is your vision of how this is all going to shake down, and what should good people be doing right now? Obssessive posting on message boards? Sarcasm? Cynicism? What?

I stand by what I wrote back then, but what are arrogant privileged ones to do? Just nothing and think it's something? That has been their mistake all along!!!

I have been thinking about how what we have is a spontaneous global movement all towards the same life-affirming values, and what's more that it is center-less and leader-less which makes it way more difficult to f*** with.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/11/leahy-knocks-cheney-i-don_n_165997.html

Senator Patrick Leahy and Dick Cheney have a legendarily icy relationship, one that crested with the former Vice President telling the Judiciary Committee Chairman "go fuck yourself" on the Senate floor.

And while in a recent interview Cheney insisted that the animosity between the two has been "patched up," some, it seems, still remains.

In an interview with Leahy last night, I asked him about the former V.P.'s latest, cryptic assertion that the Obama administration was making it easier for terrorists to successfully attack the United States. The senior Senator from Vermont didn't disappoint.

"I just want to say here Bush and Cheney were in charge when the last attack happened," Leahy said. "They were warned about the last attack before it happened. On September 10th their proposal was to cut our counter-terrorism budget substantially. I don't need any lectures from him. They screwed up badly.

"They are also the same people who said the war in Iraq would be over in a couple weeks, shock and awe and we would find the weapons of mass destruction. Their policy was to let Osama bin Laden get away when we had him cornered and send the troops into a useless war in Iraq. No, no, I don't think he has a great deal of credibility."

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy insisted on Monday in firm and passionate terms that a comprehensive investigation be launched into the conduct of the Bush administration, saying anything less would prevent the country from moving forward.

Speaking at a forum at Georgetown University, the Vermont Democrat suggested the creation of a truth and reconciliation commission to uncover the "misdeeds" of the past eight years.

"Many Americans feel we need to get to the bottom of what went wrong," said Leahy. "I agree. We need to be able to read the page before we turn the page."

The Senator also stated that Attorney General Eric Holder never gave assurances to Republican Senators that he would not prosecute Bush administration officials who may have been involved in illegalities such as authorizing torture or warrantless wiretapping.

"There are some who resist any effort to investigate the misdeeds of the recent past," he said. "Indeed, during the nomination hearing of Eric Holder, some of my fellow Senators on the other side of the aisle tried to extract a devil's bargain from him in exchange for the votes -- a commitment that he would not make... That is a pledge no prosecutor should give and Eric Holder did not give it. But because he did not it accounts for some of the votes against him."

At one point, Leahy slammed the lectern with his right fist, underscoring the emotion he brought to the debate. His remarks referred to claims that Holder had provided Republicans on the Judiciary Committee a pledge not to prosecute Bush officials -- claims that the Obama administration denied.

Leahy framed his commission idea -- which he had not discussed publicly prior to Monday -- as a middle ground of sorts between those who adamantly oppose investigations and those who say "we must prosecute Bush administration officials to lay down a marker."

The Senate, he proposed, would "authorize a group of people universally recognized as fair-minded and without any axe to grind" to investigate the Bush administration's actions.

"Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened," he said.

This is "not to humiliate people or punish people, but to get the truth out, so we don't make the same mistakes again," Leahy said later during the question and answer session. "We fought Revolution in this country so we could protest the actions of government. We should protect that."

After the speech, Leahy elaborated a bit on what he had just announced: The commission could, if needed, be granted subpoena power and it would investigate everything from torture to the faulty information that brought the country into war in Iraq. He had not, he acknowledged, discussed the idea with the Obama administration or Holder. After 35 years in Washington, he said, "I like being able to say what I want to say."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/09/leahy-investigate-bush-no_n_165227.html

Ok just to add fuel to the fire--I meant to comment on your suggestion 360 that starshyne was 'insinuating' anything. I just reread what she wrote and I don't see where she suggested that you think people are stupid.

But I have to say that my recent shift is partly due to seeing my own and others' assumption that they know all this stuff that others don't somehow places them above the fray--like using information to bludgeon people into a sense of helplessness--this won't work, that won't work because 'they' are working at this whole other level that only the super-perceptive among us can discern...

The suggestion that such thinking gives is that anyone doing any work to change things is just being naive, if not stupid...

it just goes round and round, while in the meantime...

While in the meantime Obama is on the cusp of a disastrous decision to ramp up in Afghanistan. If it's time for a change, it's time to stop using the military to service corporate interests...that is the sea change that's needed.

I should say that the website I'm referring to is one of the white-guy-conspiracy theory sites, so to call it 'left' isn't descriptive or accurate.

"is it really so "under control" that we can't make a difference and anyone
who tries is just a dupe? isn't this in itself an admission of defeat and
an excuse not to get involved?"

That's why I said somewhere back there that the DEEPEST deep-cover agents may be on the extreme left. In fact I was told of one with a popular (among us) website.

The Sandinistas et. al. used the language of the Declaration in their own documents--my point was that those enlightenment ideas about the Rights of Man (sic) reach back into ancient, pre-Empire times. Tom Paine and John Locke didn't invent them. This is why they resonate--and why, I guess, they are so ripe for manipulation. I would like to think that humans are wired for freedom. For the vast majority of RECORDED human history, the poor have been under the whip. The big difference now is that the planet is understood as a whole planet, comprehensible as one because of instantaneous global communication, and it is increasingly understood that whatever our fate, it is a common one. I think that the revolutionary implications of this are just beginning to be felt.

Well, there is a lot to what you both shared here.

360, are the 'ideals of the founding fathers' really only lip service? REALLY? They reflect most ancient ideas which I'm not sure have ever manifested on this earth. Whatever the intent, by tapping into that particular symbology have 'they' set something in motion which is beyond 'their' control? Absolutely, and the Sandinistas and Morales and Chavez et.al. would probably agree.
I don't think it's possible to argue about whether basic civil rights and separation of church and state and a coherent court system and free universal education improve people's lives. We would surely not be sitting here doing this if they didn't.

Starshyne is right that it's the 'isms' we need to be chipping away at, ramping up the conversation while people are in the mood to talk. I ask what kind of revolution. what sort of sudden turning over would truly usher in a new time for us on this planet without killing a few billion along the way? There are times for revolution. It seems to me that Evo Morales, in contrast to Chavez, has his eyes on the prize, step by step. Argentina, as the first recipient of 'shock therapy' is way ahead in thinking about how to reorganize ecoonomically for a sane society. There are heroes all over wresting water rights from Coca Cola and such, supporting people who are taking charge of their lives and their comunities. What this most privileged people here have to do is get in line and lend a hand. I think it's interesting what Starshyne said about a possible side-benefit of 'volunteerism': empathy.

I don't feel any different than I ever did about United States arrogance and exceptionalism--we have to address these and change the whole tenor of the conversation that happens here--but who is to do it? Politicians? Yeah right. What Obama seems to me to be doing is clearing some space for US to get down to work--I sincerely believe he knows what I know about the world and is looking for a way to get some essential changes roling, which is impossible without the engagement of people like us who have spent a long time in the wilderness getting a sense of what's wrong. I don't think it was time wasted out there.

It is not the forces of empire putting change on the table. It is no one dictating 'time for change.' Like Starshyne says, it's resonant. It calls us.

Symbols are incredibly powerful. Humans think, after all, in images that stand for deeper realer things. Manipulators of symbols, like Starshyne said, are bound to have it backfire. The rise of the modern nation-state may have been accident or imperial plot or inevitability, but here we are, so what do we do about it?

I think the only way to get rid of priesthoods and hierarchies of this or that is to get off the Platonic idea that there is some underlying order of perfection we have to get in sync with--maybe we just have to breathe and be. IN the meantime while we're waiting for the fruits of the essential inner changes that need to take place, we best be doing our little part, with not a lot of hope frankly, but the joy of being on the right side of history. I do believe in that.

I am  not asking this 360 to criticize, but to reason: what are the fruits of tracking the symbolism these devils are slinging around? Are there secret offices of symbol manipulation? Are there forces at work beyond most humans' ability to see them? Does synchronicity exist? Do archetypes or something like them exist? Does focusing the mind on symbolic systems manifest them? So much to think about

Disciple

I asked you a question. As with many of our 'reasonings', I don't feel like you actually read what I say and respond. And as for starshyne's and my 'buzz' that's pretty disrespectful especially for one ostensibly all about examining his own male-dominance tendencies--just sayin'...

What about what starshyne wrote about the apocalyptic utopian thing? What is your vision of the form 'collapse' will take, what comes after, and what in the meantime?

360

I know neither starshyne nor I are naive about what volunteerism can be a cover for, or unaware of how change happens.  There are people on the ground doing all kind of good stuff all over the place.

I recommend Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She really got me to thinking about whether really its' ideology that moves these you know what's, or simple old-fashioned greed. They came up with the whole "Neoconservative Movement" rhetoric.  Good cover story.

I know what collapse means.

What I'm asking is how you envision that might play out in real life.

Capitalism in itself, as the idea that people have a natural right to the proceeds of the work of their own hands, is not bad. Wage slavery and monster capitalism, on the other hand, is.

Even in hunting-gathering societies, class and hierarchy are there to be seen, though in a much more humane form. 

What will diminish white privilege first is willingness to engage it.

The only way this new chapter can promote conscious change is for conscious people to engage and try to move things along.

You can talk about new-age hippie crap, but what about utopian idealism, the idea that at some unspecified point in the future 'it' will 'collapse' in some unspecified way and usher in a new heaven and new earth? Sounds pretty far out to me. Although I freely admit that for many years that was exactly where I was at. And in the meantime, what is to be done?

I think the best thing for people of good will to do is to get in there and change the discourse, change how the game is played. They can only do that if they're willing to get in there. The alternative is unacceptable. To me. I don't feel a need to convince you about that.

I actually think that after all these years of the right-wing media sowing fear and paralysis, it's pretty refreshing to see some very media-savvy people using it to sow a far more affirmative vision. Neither you nor I can foresee how this is going to play out.

I believe the oppressed people of this earth are a lot smarter than you give them credit for. We are way beyond the time when a mere 'sense of resurrection' will count for anything.