Ah, Wisdom

The arc of wisdom bends

like the horizon towards infinity.

Hard-won, steadfast, and durable,

it quietly defies the fashionable

while it settles the soul.

 

Socrates, Seneca, and Christ—

unwilling to be unwise.

Threatening to the vapid fools,

drunk on political power,

who executed them for their wisdom.

 

Willing to serve, able to save,

wisdom seldom makes the guest list.

Dismissed with a swipe

in favor of the vainglorious

whose claim to history never arrives.

 

Wisdom finds strength in silence.

It never leaves, it never runs.

Its agenda is truth and integrity

to foster acuity with solemnity,

often in the face of cruel ignorance.

 

Wisdom is that soft low voice;

hard to hear and yet always there.

Always ready to serve

once we let go of ourselves,

opening to the prospect of liberation.

 

Clarity is revealed at the confluence

of mysticism and common sense.

To give rise to wisdom

and put the twinkle in the North Star.

To set and stay the course.

 

Summoned with humility and patience,

wisdom resides in the threads of awareness.

A reservoir as big as eternity,

yet as sublime as the sunrise

that opens the wildflowers in the meadow.

 

We ignore Nature at our peril—

the divine cradle of wisdom.

 

Wisdom is in the warmth of the sun

and in the power of the wind.

It flows in each rivulet of rain,

as mist in the cascading waterfall

and in the musky soil of fertility.

 

In the opaque hue of evening’s dusk,

wisdom coalesces with time

to conjure epiphany and thrive

in the comfort of innocence.

To bend like the horizon towards infinity.

By |2023-06-18T12:57:51+00:00June 11th, 2023|General, Recent|0 Comments
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Healing the Heart in the Heartland

In our collective reemergence from the last few years of unwelcome isolation, I decided I needed some windshield time; to air myself out and reconnect with humanity. I chose the Heartland of America. Nine states and 3,500 miles driving from my hideout in southwest Colorado all the way to the upper peninsula of Michigan and back. Eleven days with all my senses engaged; a blissful liberation.

Countryside very different from my own with people whom my local friends would find beguiling if not threatening to their own socio-political dispositions. But also familiar to me inasmuch as I spent a great deal of my youth in the Heartland as my parents were both reared there. I spent many summers putting up hay, tending to livestock, and coming of age on the back of a horse as the lazy summer sun slipped down beneath the western horizon just before the mosquitoes rose up to make a meal of me.

On this road trip, I spoke with everyone from a homeless veteran in northeast Colorado to a retired professor in southern Michigan. I frequented diners, hotels, bars, museums, a state capitol, parks, gardens, cemeteries, and visited a university. What I found was a paradox of prosperity and fear; both inspiring and heartbreaking. I also believe I found a way forward to heal the dissonance that emanates from that paradox to set things right for the future of America.

Heartlanders are lovely people. I can’t remember being treated as nicely and respectfully over eleven days of travel in a very long time—perhaps ever. MAGA hats and all, these are folks who love their country, families, and communities. Their ancestors came mostly from northern Europe arriving first on foot from the east, walking next to their covered wagons, probably carrying Captain Randolph B. Macy’s Prairie Traveler as a guide (published in 1859). Then later they arrived by river, train, and much later via Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. The old Lincoln Highway still bisects most of this terrain and their many rivers were bulging with spring runoff as I made my way over and through.

The first thing I noticed was how nice all the roads are today, whether interstate or state highways, or county or city roads. Lots of new cars, shiny new pickups, and new gargantuan tractors and farm implements cover the landscape. Tidy yards, ballparks, and freshly painted houses and barns all point to an America that is as prosperous as I ever witnessed in my lifetime. It all set the expectation of a people who must surely feel successful and confident about the future—who feel very good about themselves.

But under the surface—barely under the surface—I found folks who were proud but scared. Afraid of boogeymen—from communists to transsexuals—who had been plugged into their psyches by nefarious national actors including Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson whom they listen to incessantly and embrace fervently. They are the principal villains in perpetrating the toxic psychological dissonance that arises from that mix of prosperity and fear.

Heartlanders have bought into—hook, line, and sinker—the idea that they live in a state of imminent peril. That their position in the social and political order of America is being stolen from them much in the same way the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. And, moreover, that woke liberal communists from cities in both the east and west intend to corrupt their children resulting in their moral ruination. That the thing they cherish most—their families—will be destroyed. Finally, that their political Lord and Savior is Donald Trump and, if they can’t have him, they want Tucker Carlson. I know, yikes.

I should stop-down at this point to remind my purple and blue friends and readers that these are really nice people. They are not mean or angry, or even dangerous. What they are is brainwashed. It is true that they live in a culture that prefers faith to reason which, of course, is a critical element in their vulnerability. But they would do anything to help humankind, even while they have been convinced to see much of the world beyond their fence lines as profoundly dangerous.

They have suffered what is the biggest con in the modern era: Trumpism. I see it as our job as caring Americans not to ridicule them, but to liberate them.

What they need today is a Reagan-esque leader to step forward and summon their substantial and well-intentioned American patriotism. To bring back that shining city on a hill that Reagan loved to invoke. Not to reshape the country or world in their image, but rather to honor the example they set—with humility—for their fellow Americans. To be regarded with the respect they deserve as critical contributors to the strength of America. To be told that yes, their lives matter too. To be told that their values and, most especially, their faith in God are not misplaced; that those attributes are respected too.

What they need is a Republican candidate that matches their prosperity to their self-worth. Trump has beat them down with fear. Heartlanders have been abused and like so many who suffer abuse, they have become their abuser’s prisoners. However, also like all who suffer from dissonance, they crave consonance. They need to close the gap to regain their well-being. They need compassionate healing.

Unfortunately, none of the current Republican field of presidential candidates for 2024 (with the possible exception of Asa Hutchinson) have adopted a strategy that doesn’t mirror—in one way or another—the game plan of Donald Trump. None are aspirational Americans. None speak of a new “morning in America” as Reagan did in his 1984 campaign. None foster even a hint of optimism. They are all stuck in the Trumpy game of negative manipulation.

I don’t know if the Republicans can find a candidate in time to displace Trump, but I know the approach I have outlined above would resonate mightily with Heartlanders who have fallen under his spell. These are good people and good Americans. They are open-hearted, but under Trump have become close-minded. It would be a catastrophe for America if they close their hearts like their minds. It is up to the rest of us to make sure the opposite happens: that their minds open to match their hearts.

All they need is a hand up. And, a new ballcap.

By |2023-06-11T12:50:30+00:00May 21st, 2023|General, Recent|0 Comments
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Surviving the Future One Day at a Time

Every day of life is a test. Will my mind make the correct decisions? Will my body handle what it has to bear? Will my heart be held in comfort or be broken? Will I be better or worse off when I lay my head down to sleep again?

Our world is in transition; one day historians will probably point to these years as an interregnum. We are in that uncomfortable between-place of past stability and future unknowns. Like in the suspension of the bardo: between worlds. We have enjoyed a long period of relative peace and global well-being that now faces a number of disturbing challenges. The tensions of the old Cold War—between authoritarianism and liberalism—are back. As a result, globalism is in retrograde and with it the prospect for peaceful coexistence. Decades of fossil fuel consumption have now produced an existential threat to humanity, although many of us are in denial. Our democracy in the United States is becoming highly anti-democratic. By 2025, all three branches of our federal government may be controlled by a radical-right minority, as well as enough state legislatures to force a constitutional convention to codify their minority power for generations. (It takes 34 states to call a convention and 38 to ratify amendments under Article V.) And the next big thing: artificial intelligence (A.I.), is looking everyday more like the last big thing: nuclear power. Will it transform our lives making them better, or will it destroy us? I expect that like nuclear power, A.I. will most likely be a mix of blessings and curses, except this time we will all be participants in this Manhattan Project, and we will all have the nuclear codes. Gosh, what could possibly go wrong?

As Jerome Roos, a political economist at the London School of Economics recently wrote, “The solutions we pursue today—on global peace, the clean energy transition and the regulation of A.I.—will one day come to form the basis for a new world order.” He argues, progress and catastrophe are engaged in “an endless dance of creative destruction, forever breaking new ground and spiraling out into the unknown.”[1] It seems both thrilling and terrifying; like being strapped to the self-infatuated Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship: will we “slip the surly bonds of earth … and touch[ ] the face of God,” or be blown to smithereens?[2] One thing I have learned in life is that when uncertainty is at peak levels, one must be both strong and flexible—to be physically, mentally, and emotionally resilient—to face what comes for better or worse. To steel thyself. When things one does not control seem to be out of control, personal resilience is paramount. Unfortunately, Americans are far from ready to deal with the new realities we face. Many Americans are sleepwalking into the future, while many others are self-absorbed in their own pity parties.

In the last several years in America, victimhood has become a prevalent cry in every corner of our society. While many claims are valid, grievances have also become a reflexive response deployed in even the slightest occurrence of dissonance—where what happens doesn’t fit with someone’s expectations of how they should (ideally) be treated. I understand that everyone wants a free backrub and a wad of free cash, but crying foul has become a national pastime. It has become an endemic cultural marker of American society. It’s not just the woke left who deploy it; it is equally asserted by MAGAs and everyone in between. Trump’s entire 2024 presidential campaign is grievance-based. The poor me/poor you, sympathy/empathy paradigm to attract and bind voters to his own contrived victimhood to return him to the Oval Office. His go-to campaign line is “I am your justice,” as if MAGA supporters are disenfranchised victims of injustice. Today in America, from the young lesbian black girl to the old misogynist white man, we have become so thin-skinned it is a wonder we can even get through the day. The allure of victimhood has weakened America right when we need generational strength.

Further, victimhood is now claimed even when no consequences have been endured. Today, if professors in American universities don’t warn their students of course material that might trigger their personal sensitivities, many students claim they have been wronged before even being subjected to the potentially offensive material. They plead for protections from unrealized and largely unforeseeable offenses.[3] I will spare you my what-a-bunch-of wimps rant on how ridiculous this is—at how it compromises education, let alone violates the principles of liberalism and free speech. Rather, let me flip the discussion and argue in favor of suffering, or rather, for what can be its benefits. To illustrate the vital role that suffering—reframed as an opportunity—plays in building personal and societal resilience. I will illustrate how suffering can lead to liberation; to higher levels of power in the form of resilience (which is the most essential power in the natural world); and is ultimately the gateway to joy.

As Friedrich Nietzsche suggested, if we don’t find meaning in suffering, we may not endure, let alone enjoy, our lives. And while we all know that strong bodies do not come from lying on the couch, in our modern era of affluence we have nevertheless embraced the idea that strong hearts and minds are built best by being swaddled in cashmere away from any prospect of ill-consequence. The vital link between undesirable outcomes and learning has become toxic when, in fact, it has always been the principal process in building intelligence and in strengthening character. We seldom learn much from success; it is in our suffering failures that learning occurs. The first step is to understand the nature of the sources of suffering, then to translate those experiences into new levels of liberation, such that we thicken our otherwise thin skin to experience greater multitudes of transcendent joy.

When we think of suffering, our minds first go to those events that originate externally that cause our suffering. Physical and emotional injury, negative economic consequences, or illness are all examples of things that happen to us—largely beyond our control. In these sufferings, we do not control the onset of suffering; most of us just do what we can to avoid the circumstances that created the unwelcome consequences to guard against their recurrence. But even with these types of suffering we can, as the Stoics taught us, control our response to the causal event. How we respond can actually have a significant impact on the magnitude of our suffering. We can’t eliminate it, but we can act to mitigate it.

Besides the arguments of ancient stoics like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, the best modern-era guide to consider suffering that originates from externalities is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl, who suffered mightily in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, reflected upon Nietzsche’s sense of meaning that “He who has a Why to live can bear almost any How” to find meaning during his internment and build his strength to survive. In other words, he managed what he could: his response to the suffering imposed upon him. He summoned the physical, intellectual, and emotional fortitude to turn Auschwitz from the obvious camp of horrors it was into an opportunity to focus his mind on the meaning of reuniting with his wife and to turn the lessons learned from the ‘school’ of Auschwitz into a thriving post-Holocaust practice as a psychologist—to teach others how to transcend to endure. His aim was to be “one such example … that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.” Obviously, these lessons are unavailable to those today who swaddle themselves in cashmere to avoid ill-consequence, or demand a priori protections from potentially triggering events. Learning the hard way is indeed a beneficial contributor to a life well-lived as long as we recognize our agency—our power of choice—to craft our response to suffering.

One of the ironies of our suffering is that internally-sourced psychological and emotional suffering far outnumbers the externally-sourced suffering described above. Today in America, in the totality of our sufferings, we are are own worst enemy. We need point no further than our own meddling minds to eliminate much of our suffering. We have our own inner voices that should be on our side—that ostensibly are acting in our interests—but are actually slaves to our egos. To be fair, our egos have been carefully crafted throughout our lives and, in many ways, serve us well. Our egos protect and project the identities we have created to, on the one hand, form bonds with other similarly identifying people and to, on the other hand, differentiate ourselves from the rest of humanity to create a sense of unique value upon which we can gain favor in our many endeavors.[4] However, as our egos direct our minds, they introduce all kinds of thoughts that can initiate rumination—downward thinking spirals—that often leave us bereft and can lead to deep states of depression.

The key, then, is how to interrupt the meddling mind before it can foment rumination. In my experience, Buddhist teachings best address this objective.[5] Transcending the self, or ego, is one way to affect a disconnect between the ego and the mind. Essentially, through the practice of mindful meditation, we train ourselves to recognize the impermanence of all things by watching our thoughts rise and fall without consequence; to, in effect, let them pass without causing suffering. Deliverance from such suffering begins with awareness. We are not rejecting our ego (although I have argued that in late-life transcendence we should largely abandon it), we are simply taming it. We are saying, “I hear you, but chill out.”

Another emerging tool to interrupt rumination that leads to suffering is low-dose, or micro-dosing, psilocybin.[6] Unfortunately, due to ill-founded political interference, we have fallen way behind in our scientific exploration of utilizing psychedelics like psilocybin for what appear to be many break-through applications for psychologically-based maladies like PTSD and depression, as well as drug and alcohol addiction.[7] In America, we historically prefer much more toxic and addictive elixirs like nicotine and alcohol as numbing remedies, and would prefer dispensing chemically concocted medicines rather than non-addictive substances that come straight from the earth and have been utilized successfully for centuries by indigenous peoples. (Big sigh.)

In my personal experience with micro-dosing psilocybin, I did not experience any impairment whatsoever—not even that warm flush one experiences from a glass of wine. Zero, zip, nada. It just makes every day a bit sunnier and stops the onset of rumination in its tracks. I am not recommending everyone add it to their medicine cabinet today inasmuch as sourcing and dosing is a bit of a crap-shoot until further research and regulation are completed, but in my last three years of suffering during which I endured divorce, Covid, and cancer, I frankly wish I had discovered it sooner. Judge me harshly if you wish (although it has been decriminalized in my state of Colorado[8]), but your judgment is your problem, not mine. If you ask around, you may actually find many people like me in your community who have experienced similar benefits (albeit very quietly).

Finally, on the subject of suffering, deprivations (a common source of suffering) have been employed throughout the history of humankind as a pathway to liberation, enlightenment, and the building of resilience. Virtually all monastic practices—including numerous religious traditions—employ deprivations, or self-inflicted suffering, to affect spiritual practices to abandon the ego in favor of spirituality. Ridding the self of the self has been proven over and over again to be a critical element to support the prospect of enlightenment. In monastic practice, until the declarative statement “I am ___” remains a blank, it is presumed that enlightenment is unachievable. In our hyper-consumptive and materialistic America, we could all be much better citizens, friends, and family members if we embraced some simple deprivations. Being wealthy does not mean being able to get whatever you want; rather, truly wealthy folks are those who want what they already have, which leads me to our next subject: liberation.

We don’t have to be monks to learn from our sufferings. One of the benefits of suffering is the illumination of entanglements we have (wittingly or not) incorporated into our lives that often precipitate, or provide the environment for, our suffering. These entanglements come in the form of toxic relationships, wants and desires, conflicts, obligations, dependencies, regrets, and other contingencies that, without resolution or fulfillment, compromise our pursuit of happiness. They each represent a form of dissonance, which is at the root of nearly all suffering. Most importantly, they form the tentacles of bondage that prohibit our liberation, which is a prerequisite to the reliable and consistent experience of joy.

Toxic relationships speak for themselves; these are relationships that clearly produce more costs than benefits. Wants and desires are a classic form of dissonance; we want what we don’t have, which is a prima facie case of dissonance. Conflicts are disputes that usually harbor some amount of fear and anger and, more often than not, result in loss for both parties. All bad. Obligations are not necessarily bad; in fact, they are often quite necessary. But no obligation should be considered permanent. Meet your duty and move on. If an obligation cannot be completed, it may be more accurately considered as servitude, which is definitely inconsistent with liberation. Dependencies are all forms of subjugation whether to a person or thing. With the exception of those things that are necessary to survive—like food and water—all other dependencies are links in the chain of bondage. Regrets bind us to the past, which inhibits our ability to live in the present let alone enjoy tomorrow. Release them into a strong wind to carry them away from you forever. Contingencies—”Unless ____ happens I won’t be happy”—are most often beyond our control and represent perhaps the most insidious form of dissonance creating extraordinary levels of disturbance in our lives. Keep your feet out of the contingency trap; learn to take, and accept, life as it is.

In my post, “Twelve Contemplations for a Better Tomorrow” (September 4, 2022), I talk about dying to live.[9] It starts with the basic question, “If today was the last day of your life, would you die in peace?” Stated otherwise, would you be liberated from your many entanglements (like those discussed above) such that your passing might be considered as it should be—the ultimate liberation—and your soul would be freed? What I further suggest is why not affect your liberation to the greatest extent possible, today? Why not heaven on earth? It is impossible to eliminate all entanglements without becoming a monk (or a forlorn hermit), but it is entirely possible to limit your list and reduce your suffering to increase your resilience and foster the prospect of transcendent joy. A largely unencumbered life reduces the points of leverage that can be deployed against you, which increases your resilience. Further, it makes plenty of room for equanimity and joy. When much less matters—when your exposure to disturbance is minimized—you become a very hard target. Take a moment right now and visualize your life with 90% fewer entanglements. Your first feeling should be one of relief; once entanglements—sources of suffering—are discarded, your burdens are lightened, you can stand taller, and set your eyes on a horizon of joy. Welcome to liberation. Once your slate is relatively clean, the last discipline I suggest is to be very stubborn moving forward as to adding to your list of entanglements. If they don’t offer the prospect of joy, don’t go there!

Below, I also offer what I call a wordplay toolkit to differentiate suffering from liberation. It’s like a flashcard of reminders of the manner in how you might like to be described by others; an affirming device.

 

Suffering Liberation
Deceit Truth
Self-centered Open
Vanity Humble
Complexity Simplicity
Cowardice Courageous
Imposter Authentic
Deluded Clarity
Broken Whole
Victim Stalwart
Fragile Resilient
Disturbed Calm
Myopic Aware
Reckless Deliberative
Wayward Intentional
Synthetic Natural
Materialist Minimalist

 

One last note on liberation. Maintaining it and nurturing it are also enhanced by these three practices. First, stay in the present moment. There is nothing you can do about the past and very little you can do to affect the future. The exercise I often employ is what I call mastery-in-the-moment, one moment at a time. Whether you are performing in an orchestra, or doing the dishes, do the best you can at just that in that moment. Second, practice gratitude. When your mind is occupied with what you are grateful for, it is very difficult to fall into the negativity that precipitates rumination. And, grateful people are much more fun to be around. Finally, practice forgiveness. Let transgressions go. The exercise here is let it be, let it go; relax and release to rise.[10] Sometimes forgiveness is too difficult and, unlike others who claim it is essential, I suggest that whether or not you can forgive, you at least have the capacity to dismiss and discard, both the event and the offender. That is enough. After all, you are human, too. You can worry about sainthood later.

Resilience is the most important life-power we have. In physics, resilience is simply the capacity of an object to take a blow and maintain, or return to, its original form. It’s not about projecting power in any way; it is the capacity to preserve oneself in a manner that maintains all of our physical, mental, and emotional capacities. In Rick Hanson’s book, Resilient, he cites nine ways to make your life better—more resilient. He talks about “durable inner strengths hardwired to your nervous system” and how to grow them. These include the elements from three basic capacities: safety, satisfaction, and connection. As with all human capacities related to strength, resilience is like a muscle that must be exercised. For safety, he suggests exercises to build compassion, grit, calm, and courage. For satisfaction, exercises in mindfulness, gratitude, motivation, and aspiration. For connection, exercises in learning, confidence, intimacy, and generosity. In all of these types of self-help offerings, I will add the attitude you bring to yourself—your own self-critical nature—be highly modulated by kindness and patience. Strength is not built in a day, or even a month. It takes years and must be continually maintained. However, the strength of resilience is a much-preferred modality to fostering victimhood.

In Stephen Flynn’s 2007 book, The Edge of Disaster, he warned that Americans were living like “reckless teenagers.” His concerns were about things like chemical facilities and oil refineries located too close to neighborhoods; homes built on flood plains; fragile electrical grids; and the fact that our police and emergency responders were incapable of matching the ferocity of foreign terrorists who might exploit these, and other, vulnerabilities. At the time, his book was quite alarming, while it seems quaint—almost charming—today! The threats we face now, accompanied by a steady drumbeat of daily mass killings by our own trigger-happy homegrown terrorists, have placed us on a whole new “edge.” Today, we are tipping toward an existential abyss with extreme political dysfunction that threatens global peace and our own democracy; the now fully realized threat of pandemics; a climate that may no longer support human life in much of the world; and the prospect of putting nuclear-level power in the hands of A.I. where anyone, including A.I. itself, can pull the proverbial trigger.

Needless to say, our appetite for victimhood may be well earned under these threats, but it can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is essential that we learn to embrace suffering and the opportunity it offers to pursue liberation such that we can become much more resilient, and even improve our prospect for transcendent joy. In Part III of my book, Saving America in the Age of Deceit, I outline how to achieve resilience for yourself (chapter 7), your community (chapter 8), and how to transform leadership at all levels of American society (chapter 9). As I wrote there, “There is no magic wand to wave; what lies ahead requires honesty, work, sacrifice, and above all, character.” We can either wallow and whine, or stand up and graciously accept responsibility for ourselves and each other. We can denominate our lives in rancor, or goodwill. One path ends in despair, the other in joy.

In America, we always have a choice. What is yours?

 

[1] See Roos’ essay here, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/opinion/global-crisis-future.html.

[2] From the poem, High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee Jr.

[3] Fortunately, some universities are pushing back. See, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/nyregion/cornell-student-assembly-trigger-warnings.html?searchResultPosition=1

[4] For more on this mind-ego connection and what I call the “identity trap” see, https://ameritecture.com/the-identity-trap-suffering-or-transcendence/.

[5] There are many books on this subject, but an essential one is Michael Singer’s, Living Untethered.

[6] See this recent article on emerging applications of psilocybin, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/well/mind/psilocybin-mushrooms-addiction-therapy.html.

[7] See, Michael Pollan’s, How to Change Your Mind.

[8] See Colorado’s new law here, https://www.cpr.org/2022/11/25/colorado-psilocybin-legalization-whats-next/.

[9] “Twelve Contemplations for a Better Tomorrow” can be found here: https://ameritecture.com/twelve-contemplations-for-a-better-tomorrow/.

[10] For a summary and workbook links to practicing forgiveness, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/04/20/forgiveness-mental-health-benefits/.

By |2023-05-21T21:05:40+00:00April 23rd, 2023|General, Recent|0 Comments
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My Easter Sermon: Healing & Hope for a New America

I was recently asked by a friend who is a trustee at a college of theology what I thought they should be looking for in their search for a new president for the college. My default answer to this question of any institute of higher learning has always been to bring in leaders who can help turn theoretical intelligence into applied intelligence. To focus on the transformation of knowledge from passive to active. In the case of a college of theology, how to turn the noun—theology—into a verb. How to actualize the study of the nature of God and religious belief into measurable societal benefits; to heal a once great nation and world. To save ourselves from ourselves.

Since 1944, when the U.S. passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (commonly known as the G.I. Bill), thousands of Americans went to college; most of whom were the first in their families. This effectively set the expectation of higher education for every American and established one of America’s greatest advantages over the rest of the world: our colleges and universities. Learning—the development of knowledge—has been America’s greatest asset in its ascent to superpower status. Since the end of World War II, Americans got way-smarter and it way-mattered.

During the last half of the 20th century and now into the 21st, our colleges and universities turned out thousands of engineers, scientists, mathematicians, digital technologists, business managers, bankers, doctors, and lawyers serving all the requirements of an industrial high-growth society. My own father, who was a World War II veteran, wanted to be an architect, but his father told him the country needed engineers. So, since he was a pilot in the Army Air Corp (the predecessor to the Air Force), he became one of the first aeronautical engineers ever minted out of the University of Michigan. Like many others in his time, he was a significant albeit largely unknown contributor to America winning the space race in the 1960s. We not only won the space race, Americans created the most affluent society in the history of the world.

However, our needs have changed. As I have argued recently at this post, our great success in transforming the world from a state of scarcity to one of abundance, and in the case of the United States to high affluence, has been both amazing and debilitating. Today, America is a very sick society. Notwithstanding our extraordinary wealth, we are emotionally and spiritually impoverished. We are the most violent nation in the world with the highest suicide rates in the world. When our children die, the most likely cause is death by gun. That fact alone should stop us in our tracks and cause us to take immediate corrective action, but it hasn’t. Meanwhile, many of our fellow Americans manifest all the characteristics of the chronically abused even though they are often considered well-off by traditional metrics.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, our citizenry had entered into progressive states of withdrawal. Many, like the white Christian nationalists who supported Trump, felt they were being slowly dispossessed of their position in society, while others saw the promise of Obama’s post-racial post-bigotry America evaporate before their eyes. Yes, we became profoundly divided, but together we were slipping into a bog of anger, fear, and depression. That bog of despair became our only common ground. Then, the pandemic turned isolation into a national state of mind. Deceit became a principal modality for many of us, most especially our politicians. Of course, the most divisive president in the history of our nation also contributed mightily to our emotional and spiritual malaise. We now know that his only purpose was to exploit our new vulnerabilities for his own gains. Thus far—in his ex-presidency—he remains a parasite feasting on the soul of America.

Today, our youngest adult generation—Gen Z, the Zoomers—are rejecting most of our traditional institutions and norms that bound us together and provided the foundation of our common interests. As David Brooks cited in the New York Times recently,

the Wall Street Journal/NORC poll … found that the share of Americans who say patriotism is very important to them has dropped to 38 percent from 70 percent since 1998. The share who say religion is very important has dropped to 39 percent from 62 percent. The share who say community involvement is very important has dropped to 27 percent from 47 percent. The share who say having children is very important has dropped to 30 percent from 59 percent.

These results were heavily influenced by Zoomers whose sense of withdrawal is even more significant than the general population. They have more-or-less had it with America and, frankly, I don’t blame them. They came into the world around the time of 9/11. Since 9/11, they have seen our ill-fated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Great Recession, Covid-19, the Trump era, and now a Supreme Court that is—for the first time in our history—taking rights away from Americans, many of which directly impact them. America in the 21st century is hardly a picture of superpower magnificence. Zoomer’s rejection of American institutions and norms is completely understandable. After all, what have we given Zoomers to believe in besides social media? America is sliding backwards for the first time since the Great Depression more than ninety years ago.

Unlike the post-World War II era, however, this is not a problem for smarter engineers and scientists. Our fundamental problems are relational involving matters of the heart more than the mind. Americans today suffer from poor interpersonal relations, poor relations with the natural world, and poor relations with the truth that underpins reality. We don’t need more STEM classes, we need more—much more—of the humanities. We need to reconnect with each other and the world in which we live in an honest and respectful manner. We need schools of theology and divinity, schools of the visual and performing arts, and schools of liberal arts to lead us out of this darkness. We desperately need them to translate the abstract contemplations of aestheticism and spirituality—and the heart and soul more generally—into coherent action plans to restore our nation and to lead the world again.

My daughter’s dream about college was different than my father’s and, in an era of affluence, she was allowed to pursue hers. She fell in love with live theatre in middle school and, after attending a performing arts high school, wanted to attend NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. In her essay to gain admission, she related her experience in acting in the production of And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank. In her preparation for her performance as Anne Frank, she was able to meet with Holocaust survivors. She related this experience in her admission essay as believing that theatrical performances could change the hearts and minds of those who attend. She now works to cultivate creative teams to produce shows on Broadway for Creative Arts Agency. She is a shining example of what our country and world need right now (and has one proud papa).

In the Christian tradition, this is the season of resurrection and renewal—of inspired new beginnings. Our politicians have proven they are not going to lead us out of our malaise. If anything, it appears to be in their perverted interest to act to deepen it. It is up to philosophers, artists, the clergy, poets and writers to bring us answers we can both understand and act upon. We must stitch back together the fabric of the America that believed in itself; that cared about its neighbors at home and allies abroad; and who understood the sacred nature of Nature itself.

As a young boy-then-man in the 1960s and 70s, I witnessed great tumult in American society during the civil rights movement, the Viet Nam War, and Watergate that followed. There were violent protests—often accompanied by bombs rather than guns. We also had recessions and much higher inflation than we have today. We were locked in a cold war with the Soviet Union that was commonly cast as a fundamental battle between good and evil. The threat of a nuclear apocalypse was an everyday concern. Perhaps the presence of an enemy kept us humble and focused.

However, one thing never wavered: our belief that America was the greatest nation in the world. This remained an unshakeable core belief for the vast majority of Americans regardless of political affiliation, religious tradition, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, or gender. Had we perfected the aspirations of our founders that “all men are created equal,” or that everyone deserved the opportunity to pursue happiness on their own terms? Absolutely not. But we never abdicated our belief in those ideals.

Today, we need a renewal of our ideals—perhaps a combination of old ones and new ones. We need to listen to the soft power of the humanities more than the hard power of the sciences. We need everyone to lock arms and move forward to once again embrace the ambitions of our founders and those of the leaders of the world’s great religions including not just Jesus Christ, but Moses, Muhammad, and the Buddha too. We will never achieve perfection, but that is not failure; that it is simply human. Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount set impossible standards, but it is not the standards that matter in the end. It is the pursuit thereof that will bind us together in a cause to save ourselves personally, our nation, the world, and humanity itself.

I have always believed in the power of One; of you and me and every other One we know. My message is not just for scholars of the humanities. It is for each and every One who comprise humanity. As I have written before, we must stop shaking fists and start shaking hands. We must turn contempt into understanding and conflict into cooperation. Hope is hard, but it holds more promise than cynicism. Remember, we are dependent on each other and upon Nature. This is a fundamental truth. Another, which some describe as a “noble” truth is that suffering is inevitable. The silver lining of suffering is, however, that it makes enlightenment possible.

Please join me in transforming our collective suffering into our mutual enlightenment. To affect healing and embrace hope. It can be done. It must be done. My humble plea is that each of you go forth into this season of renewal and bring your one humble, curious, and warm light into the world. Perhaps together, our lights can vanquish the darkness. Maybe we can even reconstruct the pedestal built by prior generations upon which America once stood.

This much is clear: we have the resources to do whatever we wish. The question remains: do we have the will? Can we summon the strength of our humanity to set aside our grievances and claims of victimhood to lift each other out of that bog of despair? Can we convert our losses into opportunities to address our world again with courage and compassion; with reverence for our past and a renewed sense of hope for our future? Can we commit ourselves to each other as partners for a new day?

The time is now to open ourselves to this new day for a new America that is eager to be born.

Happy Easter, Passover, Ramadan, and spring!

By |2023-12-01T15:39:28+00:00April 9th, 2023|General, Recent, Spiritual|0 Comments
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The Courage of Patience

He faced the mob of righteous zealots

Standing against a cold wind-driven rain

Relentless in their intent to shame

His rain-streaked face knows what the righteous don’t

His resolve stands with the certainty of timeless wisdom

 

In the moment the mob wonders

Is he confused, feeble, or just plain crazy?

Shamed many times before and yet he stands

Undaunted against the forces of ignorance

His scars like armor reveal the truth

 

The mob has chosen an easier path

To surrender themselves to the convenience of deceit

Their sentinel trolls smirk at the man of patience

Hunchbacked, revealing their spineless character

While he wields the power of time against expedience

 

His strength assured by the clarity of integrity

And the patterns in the sands of time

Pointing always toward the wisdom of patience

Against the hordes of the fashionable scions

He awaits that magical moment of revelation

 

As angels circle like a halo of reverence

The sky clears and only calm warmth remains

Time has its way, as it always does

Patience worn thin, but never bare

The dazed mob left staring at the spot the feeble man once stood

Only his divinity remained

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The ancients, sages, and prophets had many points of view and dispositions. Most lived unsettled and nomadic lives. Many were persecuted and some executed for what they believed. What they all had in common, however, was the courage of their convictions that survived the ages largely because of their most valuable virtue: patience.

They held and shared their convictions with a sense of undaunted perseverance. Regardless of what was popular and most often an easier path to take, they leaned into resistance whether in the form of a cold wind-driven rain, as employed metaphorically in the verse, above, or more direct ridicule.

In the past few years, we have individually and collectively endured plenty. In spite of their sense of moral virtue, many gave in to the impulse of expedience and joined the often-angry mob, while others chose to flee their commitments and obligations to wipe their slate clean; both attempting a different form of escape from civil and personal responsibility. Those who were steadfast in their sense of virtue and duty took their licks, often enduring periods of painful isolation. They remained—both in-place and in-virtue.

But the sun always rises again. Sunlight reveals and, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis suggested, is “the best of disinfectants.” In the moment of dawn, roaches and rats scurry for cover. Sunlight is always unwelcome to those with something to hide or who wish to simply conceal their shame (if they can even still feel shame). Those left standing, who have endured their lot with a sense of honor, are the ones we should quietly acknowledge if only with a mental note of admiration.

Spring is a time of rebirth and renewal, perhaps this year more than any in the last few years. It is also time for spring cleaning. Look around your life. It is time to take stock of those who stood with you in the cold wind-driven rain and those who took cover or ran. I expect you will find the number who stood relatively few, which at first may be disheartening, but it can also make life much easier moving forward if you actualize the opportunity. Now you know with whom to spend your time and energy.

One of the great lessons of life is knowing when to discard the practices and people that threaten your well-being. This may sound harsh and contrary to building your circle of friends and community. It may appear to violate your sense of empathy or inclusion. But, as the stoic Epictetus taught, “protect your own good in all that you do.” Do not allow your sense of moral virtue—your good—to be compromised by those whose selfish cowardice is their prevailing navigational beacon. After all, it’s okay to be empathetic toward yourself, too. You have no duty to those who succumbed to the convenience of deceit. Rather, your duty is to shield both your character and your soul from these nefarious influences.

Carpe diem. And, happy spring.

 

Note to those who read “Our Imagination Blindspot” (March 12, 2023). In this post I warned of the emerging technology of AI. I ran across an excellent examination of both the promise and threat of AI recently in the New York Times by Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin. It can be found, here.   https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/opinion/yuval-harari-ai-chatgpt.html

By |2023-04-09T13:16:33+00:00March 26th, 2023|General, Recent|0 Comments
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Excavating Happiness

The great promise of meditative mindfulness is that peace and tranquility already exist; that they are within you right now and in every prior and future now. At first, I met this claim with curious skepticism. If they are already here, why can’t I feel them? If I am so full of goodness and beauty, why do I often feel like crap? After hundreds of hours of contemplation, the answer appears to reside in a simple yet powerful truth: we are living in an artificial world under the illusion of connection in violation of natural truth resulting in chronic moral suffering. We know what is right, but we are living wrong. The good news is we are in complete control and, therefore, can change all of it. We can move from what the writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit calls moral injury to moral beauty.

First, we must recognize the problem. As many, like Harvard’s Steven Pinker argues, the data suggests things have never been better. Measurements of wealth and welfare nearly all support the argument that because of our rapidly expanding capabilities over the last few hundred years, the lives we lead are longer, healthier, and more productive than any lived by our ancestors. Common sense suggests we should, therefore, be happier. But, by many other measures we aren’t nearly as content as those in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries whose daily lives were much more difficult. In the Happiness Index that ranks countries around the world, none of the wealthiest countries ranks in the top ten. Number 1? Finland. The fundamental problem is that our pursuit of success—measured in traditional terms—has limited positive impact on our happiness and, in many respects, may even be detrimental.

As Solnit observes,

Look closely, and you can see that by measures other than goods and money, we are impoverished. Even the affluent live in a world where confidence in the future, and in the society and institutions around us, is fading—and where a sense of security, social connectedness, mental and physical health, and other measures of well-being are often dismal.

To address the problem, we must first realize that we have created this world. The incentives we have structured in our marketplace of success and the feel-good receptors we have allowed to define our egos are born from the same psychic infrastructure that favors exploitation over altruism, isolation over connection, and conflict over cooperation. Of course, inasmuch as we created this world, we can un-create it, too. In other words, as I often remind my children, the second rule of life applies: it is up to us. (The first rule is: shit happens.)

Exploitation rose naturally from the reality of scarcity. Survival meant realizing that there were only so many pieces of pie to go around. Under the condition of scarcity, us vs. them, and zero-sum game theory were prevalent and legitimate constructs. But things changed in the late 20th century. This is where we must heed Pinker’s argument of greater welfare. The fundamental shift that occurred was from scarcity to abundance. The culmination of the productivity of the industrial era and the transition from an analog world to a digital world meant that win-lose could become win-win.

This is when we should have shifted our thinking from exploitation to altruism, but we didn’t. We should have transitioned from coercive power to referential power where we accumulate power by the extent to which we serve the interests of others. If we had, we would all be better off and be able to meet the challenges of the day, like poverty, the pandemic, and climate change. Instead, we stayed the course allowing both power and wealth to intensify in their concentration within a small percentage of the population. The shame belongs not on the heads of the have-nots (as many politicians would assert), it belongs on the heads of the haves. And, please note: the exploitation I speak of is not confined (as some may quickly judge) to capitalism. There is just as much if not more exploitation in socialist and authoritarian regimes. If anything, capitalist democracies hurdled scarcity first making way for the benefits of abundance. Regardless, none of us were wise enough to fully understand the implications of this shift. In that moment, we missed an enormous opportunity to reshape our world.

We have also become hostage to our preference for isolation. America is a country that has always celebrated independence. After all, it is called the Declaration of Independence and the Fourth of July is known as Independence Day for good reason. Our most fundamental birthright is the right to self-determination. Unity has always been subverted by our preference for independence—for separation from each other—for isolation. In fact, it is only under dire circumstances that we ever come together, usually when attacked by a foreign actor, as in 9/11. Most recently, even a deadly pandemic that put everyone’s life at risk regardless of social, political, or economic standing, became a divisive event that produced profound disunity. We Americans much prefer, “you be you and I’ll be me” and, moreover, leave me the hell alone. This is the quintessential American.

Our penchant for independence and individualism served us well until it didn’t. A curious and unfortunate coincidence occurred at the time of our shift from scarcity to abundance. As I argued in Saving America in the Age of Deceit, in the late twentieth century, in particular after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “individualism, or the notion that Americans were possessed of free will and took responsibility for its expression thereof, was replaced by narcissism.” Our hyper-individualism turned us into churlish prigs. So full of triumphalism, we even stopped taking pictures of others and landscapes in favor of our own headshots to celebrate our self-perceived magnificence. Selfies became exhibit number one of our many narcissisms. This is where socialist democracies did indeed have an advantage over capitalist democracies (see quasi-socialist #1 Finland, above).

However, our isolationist tendencies expressed as hyper-individualism has proven most damaging in our separation from the natural world. As I have argued before, perceiving ourselves as separate from nature may prove to be the proximate cause of the collapse of Homo Sapiens. One of the by-products of the industrial age is that through the -ification and -ization of everything, humans have placed systems of subjugation between themselves and nature in a perverted master-slave relationship. Make no mistake, this relationship, if pursued to its ends will result in the end of humanity. It is, as many prophets, gurus, sages, and gods have claimed over the millennia, a noble truth that nature rewards harmony and punishes dissonance. If humans remain dissonant, we will (to use Charles Darwin’s phrase) be “selected against.”

Another teaching of meditative mindfulness is the toxicity of conflict. Virtually all spiritual teachers, regardless of tradition or heritage agree that things like desire and attendant conflict are the root of all suffering. Humanity has been burdened by conflict since inception. This, too, is partially a product of scarcity, yet the greatest civilizations would have never become great without the implementation of cooperation. From the hunter-gatherers to the industrial age, specialization and the division of labor has proven far superior to going it alone. Of this, both Adam Smith and Karl Marx agree. Among other things, this practice resides at the core of the strength of capitalism which, notwithstanding its propensity to concentrate power and wealth, is undoubtedly the most efficient system to organize and deploy capital and labor for the production of wealth. Capitalism excels at production. Where it falls short is distribution, which threatens other important principles including the basic norms of democracies.

Again, somewhat ironically, our shift from scarcity to abundance was accompanied not just by the ascendence of narcissism, but also by the rise of hubris. We doubled down on conflict and competition right when we should have shifted to higher modes of cooperation. And, not just by and between nations, but by and between races, political parties, religious traditions, and even gender. Our preference for exploitation, isolation, and conflict is tearing us apart both internally and externally; it is why we often feel like crap. Moral suffering has become an endemic condition in America and much of the world even while we live in the first era of abundance in the history of humankind. How stupid is that?

To move from the condition of suffering to happiness—from Solnit’s contemplation of moral injury to moral beauty—is, therefore, within our grasp. Win-win and plus-sum game theory must become prominent modalities. Coercion must give way to altruism. We must choose harmony over dissonance between ourselves and with nature. Only then can we achieve both internal and external consonance. Only then will we switch to right from wrong. Only then can the peace and tranquility that has been buried beneath our egos be excavated to assure both our happiness and our survival.

The first rule of life still applies: shit happens. But the second rule also holds: the rest of everything else is up to us.

By |2023-12-01T15:39:57+00:00March 19th, 2023|American Identity, General, Recent, Spiritual, The New Realities|0 Comments
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Our Imagination Blindspot

Americans enjoy a robust and durable heritage of ambitious optimism; of believing in ourselves as leaders in invention, innovation, and moral virtue. From John Winthrop’s declaration to his pilgrims in the early seventeenth century at the Massachusetts Bay Colony that “we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us” to Barack Obama’s campaign mantra, “Yes, we can!”, Americans believe they have both the responsibility and the capacity to change the world. We are the chosen people in the chosen land. A designation supported by the many iterations of American Christian sects that rose to prominence throughout the nineteenth century. In 1835, the Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher, in his sermon A Plea for the West was unabashed in his view of American magnificence when he said,

There is not a nation upon this earth which, in fifty years, can by all possible reformation place itself in circumstances so favorable as our own for the free, unembarrassed applications of physical effort and pecuniary and moral power to evangelize the world.

His forecast proved mostly true. By the late nineteenth century, after America survived its own Civil War, it was well positioned to emerge as a power on the world stage; helped mightily, I might add, by an enormous influx of immigrants who brought both strength and diversity to a melting pot of humanity.

However, the phrase that probably best captures this notion of American exceptionalism, which was a new imagining of American identity at the time was put forward in 1845 by the writer John O’Sullivan. He gave us the identifier “manifest destiny” to describe and to justify the annexation of Texas and subsequently America’s claim to Oregon over similar claims by the British as “our manifest destiny to overspread the whole of the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” In his statement, he suggests a divinely bestowed entitlement to proliferate and thereby spread our blessed specialness. This is when American exceptionalism first turned away from its exemplar character as setting the example for others to follow (as in Winthrop’s “the eyes of all are upon us”) to the missionary version of American exceptionalism that reached its pinnacle during the administration of George W. Bush and the neoconservatives who sought to remake the world in the image of the United States.

For the most part, this ambitious optimism and high self-regard has served America well. At the foundation of this fundamental American character lies our penchant for unbridled imagination. There are mountains of evidence to argue America is the most inventive and innovative culture in the last several hundred years. We are upside addicts. Our glass remains stubbornly half-full. After all, would humans be flying without us? Travelling through space? Able to effectively vaccinate millions against horrible pandemics? Put ten thousand-plus songs in your pocket? Successfully classify rap as music? Where would we be without Levi’s jeans? Our culture—now heritage—is to turn the impossible into the possible. It is no accident that our greatest rival, China, that has more than three times our population of human beings can do little more than steal our inventions and innovations rather than tapping into their obviously repressed imaginations. Freedom of the mind has its benefits.

Our great imaginary vision has, however, a huge blindspot. We routinely and systematically underestimate downside risk. Our rose-colored glasses make us vulnerable to evil, cruelty, and catastrophic outcomes. We only see white swans while black ones haunt us. In the last two decades this has cost us dearly. We only saw upside in the digitization of everything. Higher productivity; curing the once incurable; an expansion of wealth that would certainly eradicate poverty once and for all. And, while elements of each of these promises did indeed come to pass, we were also left with bigger—not smaller—gaps in equality and justice. A healthcare system more inaccessible and tragically inefficient than ever in the contemporary era. Thousands of deaths of despair as depression has become an entrenched epidemic. Social media that shames, blames, and disparages us rather than its stated intention to connect us and inspire us. Our psyche has flipped in two decades from victors to victims.

Today, unprecedented, unbelievable, and unimaginable have become dominant adjectives in our discourse. Believing the office of the presidency would modify Trump’s character and behaviors is one obvious example of our failure of imagination. His actions to affect a coup after the election in 2020 amplified these failures further. We knew—scientifically—that Covid-19 would be the disaster it became. But we ignored the science. Surely, Putin wouldn’t be stupid enough to invade Ukraine and take on the entire western alliance of democracies! And, most recently, there is no way China’s Xi can broker rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, but he did. (Among other things, is now the time to ignore Israel’s Netanyahu currying favor with Putin?)

And now, on our doorstep, is the exponential acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI) that, like the digitization of everything, promises to revolutionize our world for the better. Maybe it will. It most certainly will improve some things. We arguably controlled the digitization of everything that is, today at best, a mixed bag of blessings and curses. We will have much less control over AI. We must immediately begin the necessary thought experiments and imaginings of downside risk to protect ourselves from our ambitious optimism. It served us very well in our first two hundred twenty-five years of history. We don’t need to throw it away, but we had better turn the lens around to imagine what else lurks beyond the borders of our divinely bestowed specialness.

The English poet, John Keats, wrote, “I am certain of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination.” As we consider the future of AI, we would be well served to heed all the truths of imagination for better, or worse. The future of not just America, but of humanity itself may well be at stake.

By |2023-03-19T13:30:55+00:00March 12th, 2023|American Identity, General, Recent, The New Realities|0 Comments
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In Praise of Innocent Ignorance

I know, you know, we all know,

so smart and yet we struggle.

Struggle to know why we struggle so;

struggle much more than we know.

 

Children find joy in not knowing,

they live in a world full of wonder.

While adults claim holy omniscience

 and then wonder where joy is hiding.

 

The pursuit of knowledge is noble,

 to bring the world’s issues to heel.

But there are times of knotty tangles

when old knowns are insufficient.

 

Perhaps we should set our minds aside

and listen to other voices to guide us.

Below the neck; heart and gut?

To be smarter, somehow, someway.

 

Ignorance is bliss, or so they say;

 is not knowing the key to happiness?

Daring to know presumed unknowns

clears the path to enlightenment.

 

“I don’t know” is where humility thrives.

“I don’t know” establishes credibility.

“I don’t know” trumps the know-it-all.

“I don’t know” creates new possibilities.

 

We are taught to answer every question,

though we should be taught to ask more questions.

It’s time to let go of traditional thinking,

and be guided by truth and hope and courage.

 

Curious and brave, willing to be wrong,

all so we can be right again someday.

To cast our struggles into the wind

carried away by a gust of innovation.

 

The meek shall not inherit the earth,

 it is the curious to whom it belongs.

They carry the light of innocent ignorance

to wage the new prospects of humanity.

 

Note to my well-wishers: Tomorrow, I have surgery scheduled at St. Mary’s in Grand Junction, Colorado to rid myself of cancer; hopefully in one step and back home on Friday. It may be a bit before I return to this post as I’ve been told to expect to be knocked down for a while. We shall see. In the meantime, be kind to yourselves and others. Kindness costs nothing.

By |2023-03-12T17:45:41+00:00February 22nd, 2023|General, Recent|0 Comments
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The Fourth Founding of America: a Plea to Gen Z

Biden’s State of the Union address this year was like watching a bad adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s play, CATS. Yes, Joe did an exceptional job of playing cat-herder-in-chief in the pit of feral felines who seemed confused throughout the performance as to whether they should fawn, preen, or claw in response to his many entreaties. Marjorie Taylor Greene purred in her white Persian kittycat costume, but cuddly she was not. She hissed and pounced and clawed at every opportunity. As a cast, the mostly old tired politicians—both toms and queens—appeared either bloated by catnip or suffering from frequent regurgitation of hairballs, or both. Yes, as most pundits concur, Biden won, even while I struggle to understand exactly what he won. Savior of democracy (and Democrats) or modern-day Saint Sebastian, only time will tell. The entire litter box last Tuesday evening constituted exhibit #1 in making the case for what America needs most.

America needs a reboot.

Unsettled is an understated term to describe the way most Americans feel after years of Trumpian dystopic vandalism and a global pandemic that compromised any and every anchor of continuity and security we have enjoyed since we emerged from the Great Depression and World War II. So much damage has been done, the toll of which we may not know for years. After the Great Depression and World War II, we declared victory and moved on swaddled in the presumption of prowess; the confidence of the victorious. I am unsure we even know what victory looks like, today.

Americans are just plain worn out. We are tired of being afraid and angry. We are tired of being lied to. We are tired of being treated as if we are stupid. We are tired of watching the slow but certain normalization of inequity and injustice. We are tired of enduring the abuse of our environment sanctioned by people who know better, but whose craven desire for power and money remains unbridled. Perhaps most of all, we are tired of having the promise of America established at our first founding—the right of self-determination—be trampled on by all three branches of our federal government, but especially and most egregiously by the Supreme Court of the United States.

The first thing we must accept is that the cast of characters we call our national leaders—the pit of feral felines we were forced to watch this week—will never affect the reboot we need. The truth is both Republicans and Democrats have it half right. The Republicans want to tear our government down, while the Democrats want to make it work—bigger and better. The solution lies in the middle: a government repurposed and reimagined to serve Americans again and regain our footing on the world stage. But neither side can find a way to do business with the other. Sadly, many were elected with the mandate to assure nothing gets done. At best, they may be forced into compliance if we are successful at asserting our will as the American people, which is exactly what we must do.

Fortunately, the change that is required does not include a dramatic upheaval that will create more chaos and disruption in our lives. What is required is a thoughtful and deliberate dismantling and reconstruction of our norms and institutions instigated from the ground up. We must begin by recognizing we have, to echo the words of Thomas Paine, the power to begin America again. To gracefully and conscientiously affect a fourth founding of America.

Yes, we have re-founded America before. We do so after every period of crisis. The first founding that we all acknowledge followed the American Revolutionary War. The second founding followed the Civil War, and the third founding followed the Great Depression and World War II. In each of these periods we re-booted America. We stripped the house of America back down to its foundation and structural bones, and we re-designed then rebuilt it to meet the needs of the next several decades. In fact, we do this about every eighty years. Like the second and third founding, the fourth founding will not be nearly as dramatic as the first, nor will it become the fodder for fable and folklore. And, it will most definitely not be led by people of my age or older. The people who should lead this fourth founding are known as Gen Z, and perhaps the few millennials who remain unaffected by entitled dispositions and who retain a healthy sense of agency and responsibility.

The process is fairly simple: assume nothing and question everything. Most importantly, come forward with constructive recommendations for the America you want to design, build, and pass on to your own children. Start locally with town councils and school boards, and move up the ladder from there. Ignore for the moment the noise from Washington D.C. They are well on their way to establishing their own irrelevance. Tame that monster by starving it of attention. They barely have more substance than the air inside a Chinese spy balloon. At any and every opportunity, act to affect the return of authority and financial resources to the local level. To be fair, over the last seventy-five years we have pushed way too much authority and responsibility up to our federal government, it is time to pull much of it back down to the state and local level. We should also carefully consider what public goods should return to the realm of private enterprise. Remember, the power resides in the people from which financial resources also emanate.

Let me be clear to our young adults: you are those people; you have the power!

This is a once-every-eighty-years opportunity. Pursue it with a sense of calm determination. There is no reason to yell or scream like a backbench congresskitty. You don’t even need to march, or be tear-gassed, or be locked up. And, no, TikTok performative activism doesn’t count. You must show up, sign up, and step up. You must act. At neighborhood and town or county meetings. Later, state caucuses. Eventually, as congresspersons, senators, judges, justices, and presidents. Your future is in your hands, which is an unusual and huge opportunity. Few generations get this opportunity. Don’t squander it. Assert yourself. Seize the day. Take control of your destiny.

America’s fourth founding is up to you.

By |2023-02-22T16:35:00+00:00February 12th, 2023|American Identity, General, Recent|0 Comments
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Home is in You

I grew up in Seattle where gray is considered a primary color. In the Pacific Northwest, gray engulfs and obscures, but paradoxically also defines. It is both austere and emotional. It marks time without leaving a mark. It both inhibits and inspires. As a kid, I recall encountering sepia for the first time, which felt like sensory overload; like when the carnival came to town. The burst of color that finally arrived each mid-summer was as if Timothy Leary had traveled through on Jack Kerouac’s bus and dropped a gallon of LSD into our drinking water. But, by late September, our old friend gray would return to remind us we were as boring, and yet intriguing, as it was.

A life of low-and-slow stimulation that brings a sense of calm deliverance in the latter stages of life is equally disturbing in our younger years when energy and libido make you dance and spin like a feral cat with its tail on fire. In my senior year of high school, it rained 72 days straight. Trust me, I counted. When my acceptance came from a college in Southern California, I felt like an astronaut waiting on an Apollo launchpad. The allure was that “It never rains in Southern California,” sung by the one-hit wonder, Albert Hammond, (released in 1972). It became the theme song for every kid who lived north of Eugene, Oregon. After a year, I retreated from SoCal once I experienced their gray—from forest fires on Mt. Baldy—that not only blocked the sun, it rained ash! This was my first lesson in the realization that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence.

Still, I moved. Business took me from Seattle to Dallas, then Washington D.C., back to Dallas, and finally (post-business) my escape in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, where every border crossing bears the sign, “Welcome to Colorful Colorado.” (That color thing draws me in like a magnet.) The beauty of where I live today is nothing short of magnificent. I have lived in the left, right, and center of America and each place has its appeal—its own special beauty. I remember in 1982, when I first arrived in Dallas and I played flag football on Sunday in late October when it was 75 degrees and sunny. I didn’t even know it was possible to sweat in October. Then, the awe of power in Washington D.C. in the late Reagan/early Bush 41 years. Pillars of stone guarding halls of grandeur. A musk-like intoxicant of power that (I eventually learned) turns well-intentioned “representatives of the people” into common street walkers strutting in stiletto heels on K Street lusting for lobbyists’ dollars. (If you are Kevin McCarthy, add a Velcro-fastened French maid’s outfit; easy on, easy off.)

My memories are filled with the taste of things. A bowl of steaming clam chowder from Pike Place Market in Seattle; a flaming platter of fajita meat in Dallas; fresh-pressed cider on a crisp fall day in Northern Virginia; and a perfectly broiled rack of lamb in Colorado. I should add the overwhelming scent of fresh-cut alfalfa I found so comforting in my youth during summers in South Dakota working on my maternal homeland. I didn’t eat it, but I sure understood why the cattle gobbled it.

Yes, I have (mostly) enjoyed my life. To be clear, pain too, but that just acts to make the joy more enjoyable. Through my travels, my victories, and my tribulations, I have also come to understand what home is, or rather, where it is. Home is where you are, wherever you may be. In the modern era, we must learn to find solace in this concept. The Hallmark channel may beg to differ as it makes its living on the romanticized version of home as a permanent place where the paint never peels and there is always an apple pie in the oven. But if we are to find peace before our travels end, we must realize home is not a zip code, it is at the core of our being.

Considering home as inside of you, wherever you may be, is an acquired mindset. It replaces an attachment to place with the attachment to self; more broadly, the whole self: psyche and soul. The old saying, “Home is where the heart is” comes close, but my notion of home is deeper and broader. Moreover, it is transportable inasmuch as it travels with you. It is a place of comfort and stability; it is safe.

In several essays over the last year, I have written about the work I have done in seeking, maintaining, and securing a sense of “sweet peace” and being “whole as one.” This is my concept of home: not residing at home, rather feeling at home. Home as a state of being is supported by the following five practices.

  1. Be in the present at all times. There is nothing you can do about the past or the future; the only thing you can affect is the now; the only thing you can ever even experience is the now. Apply yourself accordingly.
  2. Conquer your monkey mind. Left to its own devices, our minds spin out of control several times each day. Rumination—the spiral staircase that descends into the abyss of despair—can be stopped by first being aware of what the mind is doing and, second, by interrupting the process allowing those instigating thoughts to pass by before rumination takes hold. And, if you develop the discipline to hit the pause button, those fatalistic thoughts will pass without further effect. The next trick is reversing the spiral into one of an ascension toward virtue (a topic for another day).
  3. Remain open, aware, and compassionate. Contemplate the world as a three hundred-sixty-degree visual field. Allow everything to rise and fall, come and go, with a sense of calm admiration and explicitly without a sense of judgment. In this mindset, the world is quite amazing.
  4. Live conflict-free, fear-free, and anger-free. Stay above the fray; rise above the rabble. Let others get mired in the mud. Keep your boots clean. Remember, the only true victory is tranquility.
  5. Honor your values. Maintain an uncompromising commitment to your fundamental beliefs that undergird your moral high ground. Your integrity and your virtue are the foundation of your home.

There is no escaping the fact that you have to live with yourself every moment of your life. You might as well make that relationship the strongest one that you have. To be whole as one. Make you your home. Once it is a place of comfort and safety, wherever you are you will be fine. Protect it accordingly. It is your fort. It is your port in the storm. Moreover, it is your special gift to the world. Treat it as the precious thing that it is, with no apologies.

Those of you in committed relationships might ask, but what about being whole as a couple? The prerequisite to this is, of course, that you each first be whole as one. If you aren’t, whole as two will never happen in an enduring manner. One or both of you will suffer and the relationship will likely fail. Balance and symbiosis are foundational virtues in companionship.

As a final sharing today, I offer a poem that is framed by a childhood memory and my current mindset. It was an interesting exercise made so by the requirement that one life be contained in one page. It may be a worthwhile exercise for you as well. Obviously, there are several thousand pages missing from this rendering of my life, but I found this bookend approach quite illuminating for me. A personal thought experiment. Perhaps you will, too.

 

That Boy Grown Gray

In my youth, I roamed.

The sea, then woods, mountains, the prairie

and back again.

 

My eyes transfixed on the telephone wires,

undulating from pole to pole,

as the Empire Builder sped eastward

through tunnels burrowed in granite.

 

A clackity-click, then a clickity-clack;

my train rumbled on

from Seattle, to White Fish, to Fargo.

 

It mattered who I was, mostly just to me.

Few thought I was worth an obligation,

fewer yet a worthy dependency.

 

Ah, freedom.

 

Youth; penniless and pure.

Me just for me.

No one’s prospect, no one’s cure.

 

And now here I am, that boy grown gray.

Just one shadow to cast,

just one meal to make.

I carry my own fire again.

 

Slower in both breath and stride,

I pause more than hurry.

No cards held; none to be played.

Quiet mind, I now see with my soul.

 

Embraced by the wisdom of eternity.

~~~~~~~~~

Note to my politically-stressed readers: I realize I have been quiet about the mess in Washington D.C. recently, but I am not ignoring it, nor you. The fact is that the highest order issues facing Americans today are not political, they are mental health issues. Moreover, I view our current political situation as one of more entertainment than concern. Yes, much must be rectified in all three branches of our federal government. But for the moment, the proverbial car-chasing dog—the MAGA nutjobs in Congress—have caught the bumper of the car, and I expect they will soon find themselves pinned beneath the wheel of reason. (With apologies to car-chasing dogs who arguably have higher character than people like Marjorie Taylor Greene.) This detonation of idiocy must be allowed to fully discharge before any real progress can be made. We are on our way to a clumsy transition from the period of crisis that began in 2003 to the next period of objectivism, where reason prevails once again. So, breathe. And, maybe even snicker with me. Once we transition, I am certain George Santos will take full credit. Perhaps we can bestow a trophy upon him to go on the shelf next to his MVP volleyball award from Baruch College.

Note to my well-wishers: Today, I head to Houston to spend some time at MD Anderson Cancer Center to see if there is any better way to rid myself of these nasty adenocarcinoma cells. This consultation was facilitated by one of my readers; a good friend and better person than I will ever be. So, before they cut me up in Colorado, I will see what else might be possible. Thus far, I have filled out numerous pre-consultation questionnaires, none of which asked me, “What can we do for you?”, but maybe they are saving that question for the consultation. (If they did, they would be the first on this unwelcome and disturbingly empathy-free journey through our healthcare system.) If anyone knows of a better treatment, they should know at MD Anderson. Either way, I shall prevail. After all, I am home.

By |2023-12-01T15:40:29+00:00January 29th, 2023|General, Recent, Spiritual|0 Comments
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