Old Self Surfaces

Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Ancient Brothers. Socrates Cafe. Irv. A cool night for sleeping. Candles. Rituals. Sabbath. Writing. Hanukah. Yahrzeit. Kate, always Kate. Politics. Justice. A just society. Could happen. My Lodgepole Companion waving their Branches, soaking up Great Sol. Presidents. Politicians. Self-driving cars. Teslas. Electric cars. The old kind. Change.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Electric cars

One brief shining: Whoo, boy, every once in a while I put my foot in and forget to take it right back out, like yesterday at the Socrates Cafe when I, much to my surprise, felt a need to defend the reality of injustice and collective effort to remedy it, not my best foot to put in for the first time I showed up in person.

 

Underneath it all I’m still a pretty unreconstructed ’60’s radical. The establishment has the power, oligarchs and millionaire politicians make policy that fits their needs and fail to address the systemic nature of racism, sexism, classism, ageism, and the Great Work itself. The only way to alter systemic problems lies in the realm of politics, something even the MAGA folks seem to intuit. But not the folks at the Socrates Cafe.

This self, this radical self, mostly lies quiet these polarized days. Painfully gained higher emotional intelligence signals me when a situation will not be made better by my political analysis. And they are many. Something I often failed to notice in my working days. Yesterday though.

All my mussar work, all my realization of appropriate venues for political discourse got shunted aside when the majority of folks in the group took up the position that there is no such thing as right or wrong, justice is always personal and contextual, by which they seemed to mean relative to a specific, interpersonal situation.

I’m not used to having to defend the fact of injustice. Skin color for some was irrelevant. (Everybody was white.) It’s not possible to know the positive or negative effect of remedying injustice. (I have some empathy for this perspective, yet it’s an action killer.) Slavery didn’t matter. There was just nothing you could do unless you did it personally.

Acting justly in interpersonal situations? Of course. A minimum as far I’m concerned. Yet. Imagining that even the golden rule will change systemic, historical imbalances in our culture is naive at best and a form of denial at worst.

These folks all knew each other and have been doing this Socratic cafe twice a month since 2003. Afraid I violated their group norms. Didn’t mean to. But justice is a flash point issue for me.

All began because my question was chosen. The method is this: whoever has a question writes it in on an index card and turns it in. Jannel reads the questions through once. Then, the one who wrote the question explains how they came to it. After those explanations, yesterday there were six submitted questions, a show of hands votes each question up or down. 15 people in attendance. My question was: Is a just society possible? The consensus, btw, was a resounding no.