Interdependence Day

The holiday is about "independence". We should all reflect on what that means. We should be thankful, yes, but also mindful of the tremendous costs of freedom, choice, relationship, unintended consequences, and war. A recognition of interdependence is necessary at this point in human history. Let us pray for that, even as we remember the costs dearly paid for our constitution, in life, in liberty and in happiness.

~ Elisabeth T. Eliassen, Facebook entry July 3, 2010 

I was reading today’s issue of the San Francisco Chronicle. Homelessness has been at the heart of all the reporting in the Chronicle, this week, culminating in the front page being complete devoted to an editorial on the issue of homelessness, in San Francisco but also everywhere.

Reading further into the paper, I struck by a comment from Willie Brown’s column. He wrote, “The goal of any movement for freedom and justice is ultimately to work itself out of business.” I think he is correct in his assertion, but frankly, the long road toward such eventualities stretches before us.

Identity politics is a thing precisely because freedom and justice are not available for all. Law is not justice when there are double standards; law is only successful when it meets the needs and situations of all. Instead, what we find, over and over again, is that law is created and applied divisively. Some have access, while others do not.

What we need to evolve beyond, as a race of beings we call “humanity,” is the notion that inhumanity is okay. Inhumanity is never okay, just like being a bully is never okay. But, while power and privilege are constantly being called into question, they are never being addressed for what they are: Deep societal deficits and ills. Is the billionaire better than the homeless person living under an overpass? That is entirely the wrong question to be considering, but laws and programs seem to lean in favor and support those who have everything but need. Programs for people in need are authored in nonsensical terms and conditions, meted out in nonsensical ways from locations not sensible to the transit needs of those without transit.

But to look deeper, we have got to see that, to echo the immortal words of Langston Hughes, the dream has been deferred for too many, and not by accident. There is been a dark and fatal intentionality about inequality and the plaque buildup of political walls, separating every single demographic that is used as a measurement. This is “divide and conquer.”  

“United we stand; divided we fall” sums it up beautifully, whether filtered through the Aesop fables, the gospel of Mark, Patrick Henry, or any other source. As Americans, we claim the first clause as our national gospel, but that is not the reality here. Division is our meat and potatoes, or at least it is food for some.

These states are united, except that they really are not. The people are united, except that they really are not. Why is it that the haves and have nots are now divided over who has a right to use a public toilet? It is as ridiculous a political ploy as any schoolyard bully’s power trip over a shy and fragile child. Ridiculous! And insulting!

If these states are to live up to the label “United,” we need to grow up. The schoolyard bully games are played in order to veil corruption, the kind of corruption that allows fewer people to have what they need, so that a few can have more than they could ever use. We need to grow up, to realize that all people are important, have a place and a vital role in our diverse society.

We are not independent. “Independence” is a lie that people use as a rhetorical tool to deny dignity and wellbeing to others. We must learn about dignity and that it is applicable everywhere. We must learn about our interdependence on each other.

We are all, whether we recognize this or not, teachers. But what are we teaching? I look around and I see some people learning anger, disappointment and deviousness; I look around and I see other people learning about value, generosity and kindness. I wish all teachers were among this later group; such are the people who understand true citizenship.

The dream can only become reality if we march forward as global citizens, but we have to become good citizens here at home; it all begins at home. Business and law need to serve human dignity, not the other way around. We need to march forward, not as individual political blocks pitted against each other, but as citizens who are for everyone’s success.

“When will we be satisfied?” Dr. King asked. I take a liberty to update the words from his immortal speech when I say that “we can never be satisfied as long as” any of our people “are stripped of their dignity. We cannot be satisfied as long as” people “are denied the vote, or believe they have nothing for which to vote.” We cannot be satisfied as long as we remain dysfunctionally disunited, as long as we fail to live out our creed that all are created equal.

We cannot be satisfied until the dream becomes a reality for every person.

© 2015 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Social Contact or Social Contract? Thoughts on 9/11

There could have been many titles for this entry, but this is the title I ended up with.

This blog has been quiet for a week, as I took some time for reflection on life, on tragedy, on love and the notion of an everlasting.

I remember exactly where I was on September 11, 2001.

Just the day before, my entire family had traveled home from Seattle by plane, following a cruise to Alaska, the kind of trip none of us had ever taken before. During the cruise, a horrible virus ran its way through the passenger list, and I had been hit hard by it at the end of the journey, while our toddlers suffered mild cases of seasickness. Despite these things, we had all had a wonderful time, but we had returned home late at night, and I was very ill by then.

The next morning, my husband was feeding the children when a phone call came. When he got of the phone, he turned on the television to see the news. He called to me from downstairs and said I needed to come right away, as something very important and very disturbing had happened and the happening was actually still in progress. The repeating loop of the collapsing towers made me dizzy. I reeled back up the stairs to my sickbed and said, “turn it off.” I could not think or breathe.

We all know what that event was, and we have been beating our breasts over it ever since. Arguably, this event galvanized Americans like no other event since the Civil War. It has been ten years, and we still vent pain, rage and sorrow over what took place. We want to lay blame, but I conclude that the blame has mostly been laid in the wrong hands.

We ourselves are to blame.

As a nation, we have traded the national treasure of our ideals in equality for a complacency that looks the other way when it comes to real social justice and equity. We have put our trust in leaders who are just plain crazy and obviously out for all that they can amass for themselves themselves. The leaders have been bought off by huge megalocorporate business entities that promote societal mores of greed and worship of money. The megalocorporate god giveth jobs and then taketh them away when no one is looking, or hideth them from certain kinds of candidates or offshore them. We thought they were working for us, because we are their people and they are our megalocorporations. Little did we know that we were being sold up and sold out, just as is happening nearly every nation in the so-called “third world.”

The worship of money and power is home to roost, and it did not start with that fateful day of September 11, 2001, but it has been a thread embroidered in our national policy, foreign and domestic, for well over fifty years. It started well before Eisenhower’s warnings about the consequences of the military industrial complex, and before WWII. This is a fatal flaw that was seeded well before 1900, 1860, 1770 or even 1492. Indeed, the flaw has existed since before the fall of Rome, before the repatriation of the Jews, before the events detailed in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

George Steiner writes—and these words were penned in those days before 9/11:

Inhumanity is, so far as we have historical evidence, perennial. There have been no utopias, no communities of justice or forgiveness. Our current alarms—at the violence in our streets, at the famines in the so-called third world, at regressions into barbaric ethnic conflicts, at the possibility of pandemic disease—must be seen against the background of a quite exceptional moment. Roughly from the time of Waterloo to that of the massacres on the Western Front in 1915-16, the European bourgeousie experienced a privileged season, an armistice with history. Underwritten by the exploitation of industrial labour at home and colonial rule abroad, Europeans knew a century of progress, of liberal dispensations, of reasonable hope. It is in the afterglow, no doubt idealized, of this exceptional calendar—not the constant comparison of the years prior to August 1914 with a “long summer”—that we suffer our present discomforts.

There has never been an earthly utopia, and we cannot pretend that, as modern Americans, that we are color-blind and truly act with justice and fairness toward all. It is not human nature to be so, and I doubt that the human race can evolve beyond its brutish nature. Is there moral high ground for allowing our own people to be illiterate, unemployed and homeless? How can we talk about leaders in other countries who allow such realities on their own turf?

The events of September 11, 2001 are still unfolding. We cannot claim the role of virtuous victim for those events, neither can we justify those aspects that continue to unfold daily. In our name, our government has done terrible things, including arming our enemies to act against us. Islamoterrorism was created by our government, moving pawns over its giant chessboard.

Our government set this horror in motion. We have allowed our government to do terrible things. We are responsible.

We have all been taught that we have the right to say and do anything we want, and so everyone does, with little or no thought as to consequences. And then we are shocked when something goes too far or the consequences become too great.

People have been taught to talk themselves silly, and they do. Conversely, people not been taught to listen or to hear, or to critically think about their individual choices. The quiet of circumspection is missing from our daily lives.

We have bought into the myth of privilege and elitism. We have bought the lie that we are entitled.

Healing can only come once we understand our individual roles in this great tragedy that is our world. Healing can only come when we agree renew and actually live a social contract, rather than wring our hands and obsess over our social networking and ever-present media.

Healing can only begin when we address the following questions:

What is enough? When is enough enough?

Goethe was a brilliant thinker. And he was being brutally candid when he said:

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

As we remember September 11^th, may all that is Divine rain down peace on all who have been touched by violence and all of us who are left to face the events that continue to unfold.

For, those events are still unfolding.

Chain Reactions

Earthquakes, tsunamis, boardroom shakeups and union busting. What do these have in common? People.

We are part of an interconnected web of existence, as much as we want to believe that we are untouchable islands living in hermetically sealed bell jars.

The planet is a living system, people are living systems, and the natural world is a web of life so intricate, it will never be fully understood.

There are people in the world whose only thought is greed-driven toward accumulation of material wealth. Corporations are given the same status as living beings, but let me note for the record: there is no life there but the life of the thief who steals under the cover of night.

The governor of Wisconsin is paving the way for collective bargaining to be a thing of the past, the conservative wing of the Wisconsin legislature is engaged in union busting, and the President of the United States says nothing about any of this.

We have a class of politicians that works for the banks, the insurance companies and other corporate interests, many of which do their banking abroad, rather than in the U.S.

Regulation and oversight are abandoned as archaic.

There are people who tell us that we must live by sets of values. These are the people who are eroding and eliminating systems that work for the benefit of people and planet. These very people spew the rhetoric, but do whatever they want. These people are inhumanists. Their actions cause destructive chain reactions that ripple through the natural world, leaving paths of devastation in their wake.

I mention this because we live on a small, rare planet. No matter what we humans do to one another, nothing will ever trump nature. So take that, you inhumanists!

For a number of weeks, I have followed the articles in the papers about earthquakes. You can view information about earthquakes that have happened worldwide at this web address:

http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/qed/

The most fascinating thing is the pattern that is so very clear of where earthquakes most frequently occur. As long as two weeks ago, I had seen a pattern of activity that led to the big New Zealand quake. It looked very much like a chain reaction. I wondered if there would be other large quakes along the typical quake pattern lines. That question was answered today, as devastation continues to ripple through the natural world, leaving paths of devastation in its wake.

Let us all say a prayer for the people, worldwide, who are suffering from shock in one of these devastated areas. Let us all say a prayer for the people, worldwide, who are becoming further marginalized by corrupt politicians. Let us say a prayer for the children who have been orphaned and left homeless because a natural disaster killed their parents.

More, let us say a prayer for all the inhumanists, that their hearts of stone will become hearts of flesh, filled with compassion for the needs and well-being of others.

Let us pray that the inhumanists will one day become wholeheartedly human.

If such a day dawns, that will show that human-beings have finally evolved from their primitive childhood.