Magic versus Magical Thinking, a Practical Guide (Part 3): One to Rule Them All

 

Vast swaths of the general public (here, there and everywhere) take great stock in the notion of inevitability. 

This is a very interesting fault in human perspective. The “inevitable” whatever can manifest as concretely positive, negative or neutral, or take a positive, negative or neutral tone. The reason I suggest that this is a human fault is because most people will relate the word inevitable to the word fate, and take both words together as an indication that no action is needed, so why bother to take any?

This is a type of magical thinking. Here are examples of abstract notions people take to be inevitable (aside from the punch lines of an old joke from Daniel Defoe’s 1726 play The Political History of the Devil, As Well Ancient as Modern, famously quoted by Benjamin Franklin: death and taxes): progress, world unity, the end of the world, equality, change makes us better, a simple solution to every question, and God’s will.  I’m sure you can think of a few abstract concepts that are linked to the notion of inevitability. Some of these could be categorized as “pipedreams,” others as apocalyptic fears.

When we think or believe that things or situations are inevitable, do we push back on the notion by trying some alternative or do we give up?

We are asked questions and the manner in which we are taught often implies that there are answers to every question and that we should know what those answers are or how to calculate them. We therefore dutifully attempt to find solutions to every question directed toward us. For example, here is an actual word problem that has been given to children in school:

There are 125 sheep and 5 dogs in a flock. 

How old is the shepherd?

Do you know what the answer is? When children are posed this questions, their first thought is likely: I’ve been given this as a math problem, there must be an answer, therefore, I’d better do something to come up with a solution. 

In reality, sometimes, it might be better to question the question. How old is the shepherd? is intended to be an exercise in logic; it is hoped that students will be able to discern that this question is illogically constructed and unanswerable. Hilarious results ensue, to be sure, when students try to compute answers to such a question. But, let’s be honest, this is a dirty trick to play on kids.

It’s a dirty trick to play on adults as well, who, sadly, also fall prey to the illogical question. The search for a fundamental theory of everything, in my humble opinion, is an adult variety entertaining the illogical question, a high-brow version of magical thinking. There is a lot of grant money being given to further abstract theories of everything, but I find questions along these lines a diversion from the kind of innovation we need—innovation that offers practical solutions to diverse daily problems. For example, it may be more practical to explore non-polluting ways of turning wastewater into biogas that can be safely used as fuel. We, as a species, certainly produce plenty of it! Why not recycle it!

The search for “one and done” solutions is another example of magical thinking. A gullible pubic is socially engineered down a pay-to-play rabbit hole that is papered with bright and misleading advertisements. However, as explored in a previous essay in this series, the world of intense diversity flies in the face of “one size fits all” thinking. We really do know better; one size cannot possibly fit all. Every place presents its own set of circumstances that need to be taken into account, and every individual in a place is liable to present a different set of skills and perspectives that may bear on those challenges. Baking bread is completely different at sea level than it is at high altitude.

Politically, we have in real-time reached that tipping point where utopian literature turns to its darker, fully dystopian side. Every single utopia ever conceived empowers a small elite counsel of elders to dictate what is best for the masses. Plato explored this in The Republic and The Laws, followed by a long line of writers, from Thomas More and Francis Bacon, to Margaret Cavendish and Jonathan Swift, on down to Edward Bellamy and William Morris, thence to appear ever darker in scope with Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, even unto Margaret Attwood. In the most positive examples of this form of literature, the minority band running the program is intelligent and benevolent; on the flip-side, the leadership is always less than well educated, punitive and totalitarian.

In the United States, circumstances beyond the control of the majority plebiscite has put the fate of our foundational liberalism, which for so long seemed to embody “inevitable progress,” into the hands of a conservative majority of the Supreme Court. This same court seems poised to undo all that has been traditionally (in my lifetime) regarded as “inevitable progress” toward equal recognition and rights for unique personhood, poised instead to enshrine “christian values,” retreat from founding Enlightenment principles to medieval standards of law, promote permissible armed violence, and put certain men in charge of institutions and bodies.

It is highly ironic that this small, ultra-conservative group (or members thereof) proclaims a literal orthodoxy exists within the text of our constitution, where two centuries of jurisprudence has seemingly seen the text through a lens more flexible and moving with the times. It seems that this portion of the Supreme Court group is throwing modern America back to the time Cotton Mather and the Salem Witch Trials. Note, however: Less well known than his discussion of devils inhabiting the invisible world, Cotton Mather was also a scientist; he was an advocate for inoculation against smallpox, and he wrote a book proclaiming harmony between Newtonian physics and religion. Fact!

Any claims of original this, orthodox that are illogical excuses to proclaim a modern paterfamilias--which is what? This could only mean a totalitarian autocracy the likes of Stalinism. But who would the pater be? Certainly not Jesus, who used parables to teach illiterate people how to navigate oppression while maintaining cultural ethos and personal integrity. The words of Jesus don’t seem to matter at all to “christians" who call for the death of liberal secularism, control of the womb and the right of armed, white hooligans to menace and kill—what resonates more are texts from Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

Meanwhile, the average person, having been rendered inert by false notions of inevitability that are accompanied by a blizzard of disinformation, is thrown down a socially engineered rabbit hole. When and where will we land? Shall the landing be hard or soft?

There are 330 million sheeple and 6 dogs in a flock.

Who is the shepherd?

Magic versus Magical Thinking, a Practical Guide (Part 2): Of Origins, Migrations, Memory and Nostalgia

 

Of all the various types of magical thinking, this particular variety is among the most frequent—and the most dangerous:

If only we could return to the way things were, everything would be all right.

If only that could possibly be true, in any way shape or form! This expression of longing, however, is most often the result of incomplete, in some cases manufactured, memory. 

Here is an example of what I mean. That collection of “books” that comes to many of us prepackaged in a single volume called The Bible, with all its errors of translation and transliteration, gaps, glosses and bridgework, contains in its first book not one but two creation stories. (As an aside, there are actually many other creation stories throughout the entire collection. Look to the Psalms, Hosea, Isaiah, Job, Proverbs,  Jeremiah, John and, of course, Revelation.) Most people who have read Genesis from start to end conflate the two stories, so that they become a single narrative. (The same thing happens with the Jesus birthday stories of the gospels.) What I mean to imply by mentioning this is that all such stories are afterward stories and not true accounts of any reality, particularly, as in similar stories from other cultural heritages, when anthropomorphism is applied to planets, stars or birds from the sky, ants and worms from below ground, or the fish in the sea. If you ever read any Greek mythology, even the most watered down versions, you understand what I mean. Said another way, we may have lived through our beginnings, but we were not there at our beginning.

As alluded to in the previous essay, people long for settled place and a sense of belonging in the midst of change and upheaval. This is not what the experience of living dishes out. 

The photo above was taken by me at the V Bar V Petroglyph Heritage site in Sedona, Arizona. Created over a long period by tribes identified today as Sinagua, this is a storyboard that could be applicable to many groupings of people, anywhere in the world, except that this particular storyboard is a product tied to a particular place and a particular time (roughly 1100 through 1400 CE). The storyboard is an almanac, depicting among other things seasonal changes and migration patterns that area dwellers followed. Not much, naturally, is known of the specific peoples who contributed to the storyboard; “mysteriously disappeared” is always the explanation given, but what we must read into that is a prolonged period of drought and/or invasion by unfriendly or warring tribes, as well as the ravages of colonization; anything might have triggered human migration from the area. What any person might be able to read (given a basic background in world mythology and South Western symbolism) on this magnificent stone cliff is the story of people in constant seasonal migration. During winter, groups would follow the herds of elk and other creatures, which would roughly end at the Spring thaw, at which time the People would shift their operations to rivers for fishing and collection of reeds for fashioning baskets, fishing traps and other useful items. In late Spring, the People would remove to flat or terraced fertile areas near water, in sheltered valleys or in the shadow of buttes, to plant, gather and build up stores for the winter. Throughout the area, there are fine examples of cliff dugout and masonry buildings, all of which were abandoned, for whatever reason.

At the site, we were given rough information by a white Forest Service docent, and then also an Indigenous Representative came (we were lucky; tribal representatives are not always available). People asked questions about the various symbols. The tribal Representative both knew and did not know. I remembered experiencing this shifting sort of vagueness on a decades previous trip to Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, where a question was asked about symbols in murals on the walls of the Mission Church. 

There are very specific reasons for this shifting between knowing and not knowing. First of all, there is a palpable, even visceral cultural memory of the violent ravages of colonization. Acoma was violently taken over by the Spanish, who then forced Christianity on the indigenous. There was a lot of resistance; one aspect of resistance to oppression is the presence of native symbols, discretely placed, under the radar. Telling strangers about that is like giving away personal identity. Secondly, because migration has always been a way seasonal way of life, and climate shifts play a huge role in that, many of the indigenous who live in a certain area now may have come from somewhere else; the tides of time and assimilation have sometimes washed away specific local cultural memory. 

The notion that the way we were is better than way things are now is a lie we tell ourselves when we feel unmoored from rootedness by the vicissitudes of an ever-changing world. The truth is, people want to feel rooted and complacent, but the reality is people cannot live that way for very long. The lands and cultures, the economies and governances are in constant fluctuation. There has never been the stasis our soul longs for. Snapshots of a carefree childhood are an incomplete knowledge of what it took for our parents to bring us to adulthood. Nietzsche called nostalgia a form of nihilism. In Will to Power, he wrote: 

A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning.

As I know from the practical experience of bringing up twins, nothing stays the same. Just at the very moment you come to understand one stage child development and how to manage within it, the next stage crashes like a wave that you are completely unprepared for and ill equipped to deal with, except that you must.  When I now see cute little kids walking to the park, it tugs at my heart, but I wouldn’t want to go through those first five years of childrearing again, at the age that I am now. 

As the sage named Jesus told a man called Nicodemus, everyone must be reborn again as from above. Nicodemus responds with a ridiculous question, offered on purpose, as in a Socratic/rabbinic dialogue, “You cannot mean that a person is to reenter his mother’s womb and be born again.” The sage responds metaphorically, “No one can enter the kingdom of the Divine unless they are born of water and the spirit.” By this metaphor, I take it to mean that, of course, there is no going backward, there is only forward movement and momentum toward a change in perspective, a maturation of understanding, enlightenment.

The desire to go backwards, aside from being impossible, is completely unnatural. As the survivors of the Surfside Condominium disaster could attest, as much as one might long to return to a place once known of as home, it might well no longer be there. The desire to go backwards is, to some extent, an expression of rage at being forced to adapt. 

But, we are intended to migrate, both physically and mentally, through the seasons, and through every stage of life. As T. S. Eliot relates in that famous poem of his, which echoes the sentiments of writers who came before him:

In my end is my beginning.

Magic versus Magical Thinking, a Practical Guide (Part 1): Of Recipes, Rites and Action

 

In the beginning, when people were evolving, power was present in the place where one found oneself—by power, I mean the inherent dangers of a place, such as raging waters, sheer cliffs, and roaming gigantic flesh eating creatures. Survival, in such places, came to be seen as a certain sort of blessing, and the people who seemed to have better survival tools (or rather who seemed to make better choices) came to be revered. Some of those revered people, when asked to what they attributed their success at overcoming adversity, might have said something like, “I owe it to the benevolent spirit of the place,” by which they might have meant that they had learned by experience, trial and error, how to make good choices in a hostile environment. Indeed, some people are better suited to survival in certain places than others, and this can only be the result of an education by experience that teaches a type of discernment when it comes to making choices, especially when the unexpected happens. Such people, when they die, become the stuff of legends, and sometimes the legends of such people become so famous, they are turned into demi-gods.

Another scenario related to hero worship is the worship of forces of nature, such as water, air, fire, quaking earth, and the like, seen and unseen. Survival of the fittest when it comes to forces of nature is also an aspect of the power of place, where the unexpected happening can limit or endanger chances of survival.

Yet another scenario related to worship is the reverence of any thing or being that produces food. In such a scenario, corn is reverenced, wheat is reverenced, cows are reverenced, and so forth.

I will say that none of these models of reverence is inherently incorrect; these are all valid examples of reverence and respect. With reverence and respect to the powers of place, to the life-giving powers of food produced in the natural world, to exemplars of right discernment and choice, one is able to learn from past example, build on that with innovation, and survive, even to the point of producing offspring that carry the species forward in time toward newer innovation.

I will now identify an aspect of these primitive forms of reverence that I believe to be incorrect: magic.

This is not to say that magic and magical moments do not exist or that they are irrelevant. Magic is very real; it may be the most real thing there is. Magic goes back to the power of place and the power of the unexpected. Magic is an experience, an awesome and unexpected result. The error comes when people believe they can recreate a magical experience by performing a litany of rites, instead of living and experiencing, learning. The error occurs when people do not, as the heroic exemplars of the past did (or may have done), use and build on the knowledge acquired through experiences of surviving the powers of place and the unexpected to make choices, then accept responsibility for inauspicious outcomes. 

Simply put, one person’s choice might work for someone else, but this is not necessarily the case, and is most often not. In the words of a song Doris Day sang, but hated:

“Que sera, sera

Whatever will be, will be

The future's not ours to see

Que sera, sera

What will be, will be

Que sera, sera.”

The Great British Bake Off television series delivers a concrete example of what I am talking about. At some point, all the participants are given the same recipe to prepare. Amazingly, the results are different for every single participant. Why? They are all using the same ingredients in the same weather conditions, with roughly identical equipment. Why is it that the results can be so different?

Recipes (receipts, in old style) are scientific formulae from the realm of the practical cook. Someone made a tasty dish and invited friends to dinner. The friends really enjoyed the dish and wanted to recreate it in their own homes, so they asked for the receipt, which was a list of ingredients, most often, including a sketchy explanation of how the ingredients were to be combined. The cook had been preparing the dish for so long, it was second nature, and they figured another (experienced) cook would know what was intended.

Here is a recipe from “Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus [Estes]”:

Mushroom Sauce, Italian Style—(for macaroni, spaghetti, ravioli and rice)—a small piece of butter about the size of an egg. One or two onions, cut very small. About two pounds of beef. Let all brown. Prepare as you would pot roast. Add Italian dried mushrooms, soaked overnight in hot water, chopped in small pieces. Add about one-half can of tomatoes. Let all cook well. Salt and pepper to taste. Add a little flour to thicken. 

The beef, is it cubed or a slab of meat? Small, medium or large onions; yellow or red? What quantity of dried mushrooms? What size can of tomatoes are we talking about? Do you know how to make pot roast? Is this done in the oven or on the stovetop? What sized pot to use? Any added liquid, or do the tomatoes suffice? At what temperature? For how long?

The experienced, practical (that is, practicing) cook can take that receipt, procure the ingredients, and turn them into a delicious meal. In the hands of others, “results may vary.” And that is the truth of the matter, results do vary; life is not cast by lots, nor can the turn of a card predict outcomes—that is magical thinking. 

That’s all for now. Not sure when the next installment will be, but I can say that it will have something to do with praxis, religion, reason and governance.

Commencement Day 2022

 

For Max and Hazel, and all the grads of 2022

You may not remember the first step you ever took,

but look, here you are, stepping off the dais,

as newly minted today, as you were then.

For years—too many, it seems—you’ve been told:

Line Up,

Move forward,

Look Up,

Look Down,

And STOP!

The world, now, is your oyster, as they say,

but they never tell you what this means:

The world is your classroom perpetual and teacher,

and every day brings a new challenge 

that writes a new lesson

for you to be tested on,

culminating in the greatest

of all questions:

“How do I make a difference

while I’ve got the day-to-day grind on my mind?”

This is the question for the ages;

All the great sages and philosophers have pondered the issue,

and here is what they said (abridged):

Line Up: Conform to goodness in everything.

Move Forward: Challenges are not intended to thwart your trajectory.

Look Up: Nothing in the vast universe is beneath your notice.

Look Down on nothing and no one; 

atoms—as people—differ in constituency, 

but coexist together in the same metaphenomenon;

honor that truth by learning to be together

in cooperation with all that is.

Stop at nothing achieve your goals, even as they shift.

Be yourself, accept yourself, even as you change and grow;

you hardly know it, but you’re already a techie,

  inventing and reinventing yourself,

inside and out, in every moment.

When you accept all others as equals,

this is where all dialogue begins,

and today is where the seeds are planted

for the gardens of tomorrow;

All that is left to do, then, is tend them, wisely,

today and tomorrow—always.

© 2022 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen and songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com

September 11, 2021: A Meditation on Being

 

Rosh Hashanah is here. A time to turn and return. Here is one fundamental lesson I learned from a small portion of the sermon, given by Rabbi J. Perlman, something I had not known and found to be utterly amazing. 

The name of the Holy One (one, at least) is not a noun! It is an action verb, an imperfect action verb because the action is incomplete. To offer clarity, scriptural Hebrew has only two tenses Perfect Tense (denoting a completed action) or Imperfect Tense (denoting an incomplete action); these tenses are related to function, not to time. When Hebrew is translated into English, where all the tenses are time oriented (past, present, future), obvious difficulties are encountered.

This is a rather important detail Christian – and readers of scriptures in other language renderings – would likely miss because of the vagaries of translation. Indeed, just how to properly translate certain Hebrew phrases into English and other languages has been argued about for a very long time, and there is no concrete answer or agreement to the discussion. This is an open discussion.

What in the heck am I talking about, you ask?

It is that passage in Exodus (3:14) where the Holy One answers the question Moses asks: “What is your name?” The answer is given in many English renderings as “I AM THAT I AM… tell them I AM sent you.”

The Hebrew, transliterated, is “ehyeh asher ehyeh”; ehyeh is the verb “to be.” Because time is not a factor in Hebrew, verbs must be understood contextually. The meaning of the short phrase “ehyeh asher ehyeh” is less like “I am what I am” than “I was/I am/I will be what I will be as I continue to evolve [because I never end].” As I am not a linguist of ancient Hebrew, I had to consult an array of information on the internet to provide this particular, wide-ranging, personal understanding for you to consider. 

Moses found the enormity of this reply difficult to comprehend; the entity he had encountered was most definitely above and beyond any being he could imagine, but how do you identify – how do you name – such an apprehension, such a limitless, uncontained being, to others? How do you name something that cannot be understood, seen or embodied?

 

Ehyeh realized this was a problem, a stumbling block, for Moses; this is why Ehyeh goes on to say everything contained in the remaining passages of Exodus 3, identifying what has already been done for this set of people l’dor vador (from generation to generation), and what indeed will be done next, if Moses will go back to the people and proclaim the news.

 

The reply of Moses, at the start of Exodus 4, is understandable: They won’t believe me – in part because you have not appeared to them, as you have appeared to me. That response is natural, and it speaks to blind faith in the invisible, which struck me as blind faith in the future, given the context of the Rabbi’s sermon, the one I heard just a few days ago. [In my own Christian tradition, this brings context to that passage where Thomas needs to see the wounds of the Jesus that has returned. Jesus does not rebuke Thomas for his reaction, he draws near, remarking: Seeing is believing.] That would be food for an interesting discussion, but that is not what engaged my mind, on this particular Rosh Hashanah.

 

The Divine is being, and we are being also, in the image of the Divine. I will date myself by making a reference to the Flip Wilson Show, of the 1970’s, where there was an infrequent silly segment called, “The Church of What’s Happening Now.” 

The Holy One is always more about “what’s happening now” than anything that happened in the past, ever urging people to keep up and keep clean with current issues and relationships, rather than dwell on old ones. This is why the High Holy Days are so vitally important. Turning and Returning is not about dwelling on the past; Turning and Returning is about now and future. This is why reconciliation and forgiveness are such important features of the Days of Awe. How can we move forward, after all, if we allow ourselves to be hindered by what happened yesterday, last year, or decades ago. Anything that binds us to the past keeps us from participating in and realizing the future good we can be or make.

Dwelling on the past – also fundamentalism and orthodoxy – can be seen, in this light, as hindering our ability to move beyond “the way we’ve always done things;” it limits what we can apprehend and what our responses should be to what we apprehend. When we Turn and Return, it should always be toward forward momentum, following in the wake of Ehyeh, always moving ahead of us. This does not mean forgetting, this means getting on with life.

In a few days, on Yom Kippur, these words will be chanted (Deuteronomy 30:19), and I have edited the passage to represent the Divine in keeping with this discussion: 

This day, I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love being, apprehend what it is to be, and to hold fast to being. For to be is your life’s work, and being will give you many years in the land Being swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Today is the 11^th of September. We can mourn our losses and remember those we lost. What we should not do is be stuck in a past that leads to further destruction, further strife, further war. 

Even later in the day on Yom Kippur, a portion of these words will be chanted (Leviticus 19: 32-37), and I have edited the passage again, to fit the context of this discussion:

Show honor to the elderly; stand up when they come into the room. And show respect to your leaders. I am Being. Do not do bad things to foreigners living in your country. You must treat them the same as you treat your own citizens. Love them as you love yourselves. Remember, you were foreigners in Egypt. I am Being! [I declare that ]You must be fair when you judge people, and you must be fair when you measure and weigh things. Your baskets should be the right size. Your jars should hold the right amount of liquids. Your weights and balances should weigh things correctly. I am Being. I brought you out of the land of Egypt. You must remember and obey my ethics. I am Being!”

On this September 11^th, let us mark the occasion by remembering, but then by moving forward, choosing life! The best way to honor those we’ve lost is to be! The expectation of the Divine is that each individual engage with Being by being all that we can be, doing as much good in this world as we can. Being is our sacred birthright; being our very best is our sacred duty.

Blessings to you, and let us say: 

Amen.

"Freedom Isn't Free"

The title is a well-worn phrase used by a retired military officer and gentleman that I know. He uses this phrase every Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day. He uses this phrase when military remains from foreign wars are returned to U.S. soil. He uses this phrase whenever he is commemorating the passing of a colleague or commanding officer. My friend is fourth or fifth (maybe even sixth) generation U.S. Army, second generation Special Forces (his dad was a member of the very first SF unit), in addition to which he has served in emergency management, is a historian, and a musician with a fine baritone voice and a huge repertoire of songs from what you’d call the Great American Song Book (everything from sea shanties to Oregon Trail, Westward Expansion, military and cowboy songs, etc.). Like all of the fine military folk that I have known, he is unfailingly kind to every person and ever at the ready to help fellow citizens, family and friends, be they near or far.

 

“Freedom isn’t free.”

 

I write this commentary from semi-lockdown in my home during a pandemic that threatens the lives of millions, in this country and abroad. Fortunate I have been to be a temporary worker in a county social services agency when the crisis hit. I have been able to continue to work, as my work was categorized as “essential.” We are managing. My colleagues and extended family in the music world, to a great extend, have suffered financially during the lockdown. So many legions of others, in various walks of life, all over the world, continue to suffer under the necessary privation that this health threat continues to pose. For those in the very lowest income brackets, daily life is a test that seems helpless and hopeless.

 

In the wake of the 2020 U.S. election, in which the incumbent has been decisively defeated (according to the electoral college vote count), there is grave uncertainty: The incumbent is unwilling to concede, claiming that the election was systemically fraudulent without providing any evidence, and is fanning seditious flames among his fans and followers, while stepping away, largely, from the growing needs of the yawning crises (of which the pandemic is only one) and his duty to the people he was elected to serve. The people he was elected, in 2016, to serve are the people of our nation. All of the People. He was elected to serve us.

 

Well, yes, we have been served. We have been served sarcasm, lies (in the thousands), contempt, nepotism, pocket-lining, money-laundering, influence peddling, a long list of rights continue to be hobbled, and the rollbacks of protections (physical and environmental) continue… In short, within the span of three and a half years, we have been served up a litany of woe. Eric Alterman, writing for The Nation, says: “[W]e must also grapple, sooner rather than later, with the heart of darkness in this country that has inspired tens of millions of fellow citizens to support this evil miscreant.”

 

If you look closely at the election results, both from 2016 and 2020, it is evident that these races have been close. What is the divide? I will make the most obvious and facile divide; the country is divided between rural matters and city matters. Note: I did not say “red state/blue state;” that is one of the most false equivalencies, ever, next to “North/South.” What we face in this country is a two-economy system, both of which are underserved by so-called “free market” capitalism. We could find more adequate names for these two systems, but for now I will call them, “Town-mouse” and “Country-mouse,” evoking characters from a story by Beatrix Potter. The reason I choose these names is to clarify that what we face a culture conflict, one that is actively primed by political elites, on “both sides of the aisle,” in order to consolidate power and pork, to divide and rule, and – most importantly – to under-serve and under-represent their constituents.

 

This is the story of the city-folk pitted against the country-folk. Never would I given this much thought, had I not be queried by a young, gen-Z coworker, who saw me engaged in reading on my lunch break. He was curious; what was it that captivated me so? Actually that particular book was philosophy, specifically an historical exploration of subjectivity, beginning with the rise and development of various schools of philosophy extant in the first and second centuries. (This may seem like minutiae unrelated to my commentary, but it is not.) 

 

My young friend’s interest was piqued. “Could I read it when you’re done?” 

 

What could warm a book maven’s heart more?!

 

Well, I came back the next day with several books, including two books of essays by Wendell Berry. Perhaps best known to American readers as the author of the poem, The Peace of Wild Things, Mr. Berry, who hails from rural Kentucky, is a farmer, an activist, a poet, a teacher and – although it does not say so on his Wikipedia page, a philosopher– and I would posit that he is one of this country’s pre-eminent philosophers. My co-worker read Berry’s The Way of Ignorance, and then we talked about it a bit. He said, “Well, there was a lot of farming jargon in there, stuff that I didn’t understand. But, I sort of skipped over the terminology, and once I got into what he was saying, I was, like, yeah. It made me think about things differently. I mean, I’m an inner-city kid, and I have absolutely no idea what it is like to be in the country, and what the issues are that people face, there.”

 

And there it was, in a nutshell. He got it. This is the crux of the matter, the heart of our national existential crisis. 

 

Since the dawn of the industrial age, our nation has increasingly been divided by city issues versus rural issues. As population growth caused cities to spill over into suburbs and industry to infringe on the wild places, increasingly, our politics has certainly become “us vs. them.” In part, I think people have put unfounded faith in their elected representatives. The electorate has been trained to believe that their elected representatives are really working on their behalf – that is, that they are truly representing the desires and needs of the people who elected them to office. 

 

Average citizens forget that industry lobbyists have a lot of money to grease the wheels of what capitalism wants. Whether we live in the city or the countryside, you and I do not have that kind of influence; as a result, our needs are left wanting. Oh, there’ll be a carrot dangled near election time, but once the election is over, the carrot evaporates into thin air. Meanwhile, if policy is made that people don’t want, the excuses fly, the fingers point, and those on the “other side of the aisle” become scapegoats. But, trust me, the scapegoats are a fiction .

 

We have a two-house legislative branch that is supposed to serve the people.  There are always claims of a shadow government. Yes, I believe there is a shadow government, and that shadow government is called capitalism. Capitalists always have millions of dollars to throw around, in order to get to the head of the line in terms of service, but they never seem to have the money to pay you or taxes. Billions of capitalist lobbying dollars are spent in order to do the wrong things for the economy of the people. I’ve said for decades that if we just paid average people what they were worth and gave them access to healthcare and services that are based on actual cost of living indices for each region, it would be less costly than all the lobby money poured forth to keep people from such. If there were to be an equitable system of government, we should get rid of the lobbyists, shouldn’t we? Instead, we have enshrined them in a law that states a corporation is a person. Well, actually, We the People did not do that, but our shadow government did, with the help of your elected representatives and the Supreme Court! 

 

We are manipulated by our shadow government (capitalism) into thinking “other” is the problem. Some of our representatives are career politicians who know all to well where their bread is buttered; these folks are millionaires. How did they amass such fortunes on government pay? This is an old story, but somehow, we don’t want to take at the face value what is thrust at us every single day in the news cycle by a person who has no values beyond “me, myself and I.” 

 

But we are irresponsible if we abrogate our duty as citizens to be for each other. One of those duties is to respect the rights of others. I’ve seen so much bashing and smashing and slamming in the media that I am bruised by it. Are you feeling the same thing? 

 

There is an economy that is good for Town-mice, and there is an economy that is good for Country-mice; both need to be honored and served. That we have been taught to believe – and some of us actually do believe – that some are better than others, that some do not deserve to be treated equally, this is a moral outrage and crime that must end. 

 

Freedom isn’t free. I need you and you need me. 

 

Right now, we’re all spitting and clawing at each other, and not just lobbing pejoratives (such as “libtard” or “ever-trumper”), which is bad enough. My brothers and sisters on the left are just as apt to be in an echo chamber as my brothers and sisters on the right. Mutual disrespect is rampant. The right to peaceably assemble is being trampled by extremists of all stripes. Crimes are being committed unabashedly. Law enforcement is trigger-happy; as one victim’s mother put it, “We called the police for help, not for an execution!” People are not being given due process. Racism has gone from undercurrent to in your face. The hydra of rabble-rousers that follows the peaceful protests grows, in turn followed closely by opportunistic looters. I see reckless abandon and mutual disregard, everywhere. The trash dumped by the side of the road is a message that says, “I don’t care!”

 

Where is our national moral compass? Where has it gone?

 

Never has its lack been more evident than during this pandemic, where people cry “my rights! my rights are being infringed!” when they refuse to adhere to the most basic health and hygiene guidelines. Is it really so constraining to wear a mask or to wash your hands? The news is full of stories and the hospitals are filling with people who have declared the right to flagrantly disregard health directives and put others, as well as themselves, in danger. Some, sadly, have gone to their graves. Humans really haven’t evolved much since the pandemic of 1917; the same grievances were aired then.

 

Well, guess what, folks? We live in a collectivist society. The old adage (difficult to attribute) reads, “Your right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins.” An individual is not a self-sufficient island, completely free to act at will. This is what we as a society fail, time and again, to understand, to equitably legislate, and to live. 

 

FREEDOM ISN’T FREE! 

 

Freedom is not a ticket to a free-for-all, do-whatever-you-want lifestyle. Freedom is where we hold ourselves and each other accountable to the ideals laid out in the Constitution. Freedom is responsibility to self and to other. 

 

As a nation, we need to gather together around this truism that Freedom Isn’t Free. We need to understand the costs of discipleship to what has been unprincipled, and the heavy cost of deceit. We need to have some difficult conversations about economies – those that are good for Town-mice and those that are good for Country-mice. Repairs are needed. We need to legislate in ways that make sense, not money. We need to mend our nation In the end, it is not “us versus them,” is it?  

 

We ultimately all want the same economy: worthy work, decent pay, sufficient food, adequate shelter in a nice setting, clean water, access to healthcare and protection against criminal activity or invasion. There are costs for all of this. We need to recognize those costs and be willing to share them. 

Anything less is un-American.

  

This is It: Commentary on Episodes 1 through 4

The average reader of that corpus of literature Christians call the New Testament don’t realize that John the Baptist was as powerful a figure as Jesus. John and Jesus were the charismatic leaders of parallel movements, each drawing very large followings. It is possible that John’s movement had more followers than that of Jesus. 

For the sake of my rendering of gospel narrative, I allow the conceit that the two are “cousins,” according to infancy stories in Luke.

Seen through a modern lens, John’s wild appearance and messianic preaching suggest someone on the spectrum. His ministry, from what we know of it, is centered in repentance and renewal as preparatory to the arrival of the kingdom and a final judgment: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” (Matthew 3:2) John’s sacrament was for the remission of sins, but more than that, it was a personal self-healing, a confession, a turning back to the holy one, a rebirth to new ways.

Jesus accepted the sacrament, and then made it integral to his own movement. 

What leaps out to me from the scriptures is that each man points to the other and asks, Are you the one? And by that, each one means Elijah, returned. 

Another interesting thing that leaps out to me is that there was never a suggestion that the parallel movements merge. John went his way and Jesus went in another direction. 

I find it possible—and this is pure speculation—that officials might have been concerned that the movements might merge, particularly because the texts suggest that the two groups maintained contact. Already, the great throngs of people who could be swayed by preaching presented a threat of uprising; a broader coalition of the disenfranchised would have raised the level of such a threat. 

The great difference between John’s ministry and that of Jesus is that only John could administer the sacrament. So, the movement would have died whenever John died. Executing him while he was in prison—and any excuse would have done—was an effective and quick way to destroy his movement and disband his crowds.

By contrast, Jesus gathered a group of willing disciples—a move that I can only think was strategic. He put the sacrament of baptism front and center in his own movement, but he empowered his disciples to offer it, as well as to perform healing. This ensured that the legacy of John would live on, and also made this movement an official target, once John’s movement was ended.

An additional similarity between the thought of John and Jesus has to do with trees bearing fruit. Trees and fruit are metaphors, I believe, for physical and spiritual self-care; how well we tend to ourselves is reflected in the mental choices we make and physical actions we take in the world. How do we tend the tree of our soul? The tree that is not well tended will bear rotten fruit or, worse, no fruit, at all. The ministries of John and Jesus make it plain that such a tree is only useful as fuel for the fire.

© 2020 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen and songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com

Read them again:

https://songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com/2020/03/this-is-it-episode-1-at-river.html

https://songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com/2020/03/this-is-it-episode-2-who-are-you.html

https://songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com/2020/03/this-is-it-episode-3-finding-purpose.html

https://songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com/2020/03/this-is-it-episode-4-blessing.html