Daily Archives: August 15, 2015

Family, Friends, Politics, US History

Hear the Other

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Lughnasa                                                            Labor Day Moon

Read an article today that wondered if we might be coming to a four party moment in American political history. The far right tea party and their running dogs, what’s left of the Republican party that’s center-right, the center-left politics of Hillary and mainstream democrats and the leftist politics of Bernie Sanders and his followers. This could be true and may well reflect the deepening among political factions.

In itself I find nothing amazing about this. Two party politics has produced two centrist groups both organized around protecting corporate America. Each has slightly different inflections, pro-defense spending on the right and pro-social programs like Social Security and Medicare on the left, but in their design to retain status quo economics both look and act much the same. Neither will either one get too far into the so-called values voter mess, preferring to avoid such topics as gay marriage, abortion, fringe positions on patriotism and the widening inequities in our economy. In these matters they have taken safe positions, neither too for nor too against, and hope they’re cover won’t be blown.

What I find troubling here is that we may be coming to a point where factions no longer speak to or with one another, but past one another. Recall how many times you’ve seen an article or heard a remark about an opposing point of view from your own and dismissed it. Not thoughtfully analyzed it, but dismissed it altogether. If I see a remark about the sanctity of the family, Benghazi or Muhammad Obama, my mind glazes over with thin ice and I go on to something else.

And here’s where I want to say a good word for Facebook. Many of my high school classmates, perhaps some of yours, have grown into a partisan place among one of the four factions. I know I have. Family members, too, and some odd folks that get inserted along the way who knows how also populate other factions than my own. In this way I see posts about leaving the country if you burn the flag, the glories of Donald Trump, the essential fact of Hillary’s candidacy, even the occasional call for fiscal responsibility.

My first, second and third reaction to these posts was OMG. What are these people thinking? Or, are they thinking? In other words I was dismissive. That thin ice covered my attention and I slid on to different material.

More recently though I’ve had another take on it all. I have known Larry Cummings, Jim Oliver, Mike Thomas, Connie Cummins since they were kids. When they and others post things that makes the ice begin to crystallize over my attention, I have to wonder, can I dismiss persons I know so well? Granted we’ve grown into adults with different lifeways and probably started with different assumptions based on our families of origin, but are they no longer to be heard?

Struggling with this, knowing I still disagreed with what they believe, I still cared about them, still found their lives and their journeys interesting, worth keeping up on. I could have this realization because I knew each of them from elementary school, some even before that. So, I began to wonder, are the tea party folks whom I don’t know really any different from Larry, Jim, Connie and Mike? Of course not.

What I’m getting at here is that in spite of our differences in political orientation, we are still citizens of the same country, folks on the same journey in this life, part of the broader human family. I may disagree with them, wonder how anyone could buy that point of view, but they are still folks I know and want to continue to know. Might be I’m trying for the political equivalent of Martin Luther, something like disagree with the belief, but love the believer.

In doing that I imagine a world where not only can we respect our differences, but seek hard for our common ground. Knowing these folks, I’m sure family is important to them and so are the communities in which they now find themselves living. Me, too. Perhaps that’s where we can start to hunt for coalition building. Or, another example, I’m sure these folks want clean lakes in which to fish and healthy forests in which to hunt. Good schools for their children and economic opportunities for them as they grow. They probably want a financially and medically secure old age for themselves, too. We need to talk to each other, walk on each other’s thin ice until one of us breaks through.

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Writing

Having a Moment

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Lughnasa                                                            Labor Day Moon

I’m having a moment. It’s immediate stimulus has been reading How Forests Think, by Eduardo Kohn. Kohn is an anthropologist who has done significant field work in el Oriente, the east of Ecuador where the Andes go down into the tropical rain forests of the Amazon drainage. But this book is something else. Though it draws on his field work with the Runa, its focus is the nature of anthropology as a discipline and, more broadly, how humans fit into the larger world of plants and animals.

Thomas Berry’s little book, The Great Work, influenced a change in my political work from economic justice to environmental politics. Berry said that the great work for our time is creating a sustainable human presence on the earth. In 2008 I began working on the political committee of the Sierra Club with an intent to do my part in an arena I know well. I continued at the Sierra Club until January of 2014 until I resigned, mostly to avoid winter driving into the Twin Cities.

Since then, I’ve been struggling with how I can contribute to the great work. Our garden and the bees were effective, furthering the idea of becoming native to this place. The move to Colorado though has xed them out.

Kohn’s book has helped me see a different contribution I can make. Political work is mostly tactical, dealing in change in the here and now or the near future. In the instance of climate change, tactical work is critical for not only the near future but for the distant future as well. I’ve kept my head down and feet moving forward on the tactical front for a long, long time.

There are though other elements to creating a sustainable human presence on the earth. A key one is imagining what that human presence might be like. Not imagining a world of Teslas and Volts, renewable energy, local farming, water conservation, reduced carbon emissions, though all those are important tactical steps toward that presence; but, reimagining what it means to be human in a sustainable relationship with the earth.

Kohn is reimagining what being human is. His reimagining is a brilliant attempt to reframe who thinks, how they think and how all sentience fits together. He’s not the only one attempting to do this. The movement is loosely called post-humanist, removing humans from the center of the conceptual universe.  A posthuman world would be analogous to the solar system after Galileo and Copernicus removed the earth from the center. Humans, like the earth, would still exist, but their location within the larger order will have shifted significantly.

This fits in so well with my reimagining faith project. It also fits with some economic reimagining I’ve been reading about focused on eudaimonia, human flourishing. It also reminds me of a moment I’ve recounted before, the Iroquois medicine man, a man in a 700 year lineage of medicine men, speaking at the end of a conference on liberation theology. The time was 1974. He prayed over the planting of a small pine tree, a symbol of peace among the tribes of the Iroquois confederacy because those tribes put their weapons in a hole, then planted a pine tree over them.

His prayer was first to the winged ones, then the four-leggeds and those who swim and those who go on water and land, the prayer went on asking for the health and well-being of every living thing. Except the two-leggeds. I noticed this and went up to him after the ceremony and asked him why he hadn’t mention the two-leggeds. “Because,” he said, “we two-leggeds are so fragile. Our lives depend on the health of all the others, so we pray for them. If the rest are healthy, then we will be, too.”

Reimagine faith in a manner consistent with that vision. Reimagine faith in a post-humanist world. Reimagine faith from within and among rather than without and above. This is work I can do. Work my library is already fitted to do. Work I’ve felt in my gut since an evening on Lake Huron, long ago, when the sun set so magnificently that I felt pulled into the world around me, became part of it for a moment. Work that moment I’ve mentioned before when I felt aligned with everything in the universe, that mystical moment, has prepared me for. Yes, work I can do. Here on Shadow Mountain.