Beyond the tragedy of September 11th, beyond the bourgeoning body count, beyond the barely veiled rhetoric of vengeance, even beyond our impending military response, the US and specifically its progressive community, must have a serious reality check.
And the needed awareness is not that terrorism has always been with us, that its roots are in the history of imperialism and as long as the we insist on training these people we will always be subject to our sons visiting their sins on the father. Nor is it that violence breeds violence and someone, a la Nietzsche, from a position of supreme strength, must finally lay down their arms. These are realities, for sure, but we have known them for a long time.
No, what must be heard here, echoing through the rubble of our gleaming, marble and steel creations, is that unless politics in America changes substantially, fundamentally, we cannot expect such events to just up and go away. Indeed unless we can move politics into a new realm, a more spiritual realm, such events are guaranteed. In short, the moribund state of politics, and I mean active, engaged mass-democracy politics, must be reawakened and revisioned for our society to have any hopes of a less brutal future.
This is not to say that there are not a plethora of good works and good campaigns underway across this nation. But in an age marked by comfort and affluence they are just a dim reminder of dissent. The dissent of Sam Adam's gang in 1774; dissent of the Whiskey Rebellion, the Pushcart Rebellion, the Populist Revolt and the Civil Rights Movement. Dissent that moves us to repeat the words of Noah, "Everything that's fastened down is a comin' loose.". A shuffling that engenders a reevaluation.
Our 21st century "$100 for Sierra Club" dissent is not the painful cry from the streets of yester-year but a comfortable leisure activity. Adjusting deck chairs on the Titanic as it has been called. We are neither a class nor a community jointly experiencing and responding to oppressive conditions or policies. We are "members" in a club. Successfully co-opted, institutionalized or marginalized, our engagement no longer requires much of a sacrifice and therefore not much of a commitment. Dissent has become choosing Stay Puff over Downey.
And frankly the kind of dissent we need, that embodied by John Brown, Big Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King and the movements within which they grew, appears neither very fashionable nor very feasible. Citizens are fragmented into a 1000 different causes and concerns already-it once was that no one was plugged in and an emerging conflict brought unaffiliated people together. Citizens are stretched to the max from a 1000 different life and work commitments-again, a time was that no one could be stretched that far because community was simpler and the world was much further away. Citizens are just not interested-the vast landscape around the American middle class is now, as community organizer Saul Alinsky called it decades ago, the "have a little want mores" and dissent is opposed to their career track.
Yet until the time we rebuild and legitimize the infrastructure of social and political dissent that once thrived in this country, Peter Jennings will have little new to talk about, and men like Bin Laden and George Bush will have a cultural platform and audience that eats up their despoiling, polarizing rhetoric like peas and carrots. The men of terror, and I identify them here as a class, be they corporate executives, Presidents, or suicide bombers, totally devoted to an Old Testament form of human relationships with violence and vengeance heading their tools of international 'good will', will remain in power. And it will take more than checks, recycling tot bags and "AID" concerts to change this.
But a simple resurrection of old leftist politics will not do it either. What it will take as a minimum is that a new infrastructure, within which we must network together an alternative press, community organizing efforts, non-violent training, church groups, anarchists, Zen, etc. must be spiritually oriented and based on the wisdom teachings of the interdependency of all life. It must be absolutely rooted in people, processes and structures that mirror, as Susan Salzberg's says, a heart "as wide as the world."
The first reason for this is purely practical. We are living in a post-political era and it is no longer just political change that we must seek but spiritual change that will revision political thinking. In The End of the Nation State, Jean-Marie Guehenno says that it is the connection of law and territory that makes people citizens, political animals, and that it has now been completely undermined. Battles are no longer drawn along political or national lines and in this trans-boundary world little is accessible to a 'citizen': In fighting US Bank corporate policy in the rain forests of Nigeria, there is no one at City Hall to fight because there is no longer any City Hall. And as the imperialist machine distributes and then redistributes huge sums of money across the globe in seconds, the menace is no longer one government, one policy, one administration. It is the entire trans-political structure, lumbering through the fields of Gaia, raping its way along, without even petty Communist-Capitalist rivalries to slow it down.
A much more important motivation for such a spiritual redirecting, however, is that we are at root spiritual beings and spiritual beings together. Politics is a human invention that may at times torment us as it helps bind us together, building and supporting a container within which we live and work. Prior to any such creation, however, we were already linked together, born out of a universal mystery called a hundred names in a hundred faiths. That we are all touched by this remote tragedy in New York is at least evidence of such connectivity. More basic is the vastness of our own bodies: my bones comes from ancient stars, my oxygen from rainforest trees, my tears from a cloudburst just east of town. My ideas flow in and out of others, my heart intermingles with those who pass by, my life changes and flows with all I encounter. We may hide these sensations, but we cannot will them away. They are our undeniable legacy as human beings and we must honor them as even more fundamental to our life than our "political identity" as Americans.
For Buddhists this is practicing an awareness of the Sambogakaya, the realm of the vast, interpenetrating web of being. It is a movement away from beliefs and actions based exclusively on 'me, myself and mine', to ones focused on a felt experience of the single thread of life that weaves us all together. More powerful and hopeful for people of all faiths, however, is that each major religion holds such a truth at its base. The love of Christ, the wisdom of Allah, the teaching of the Torah and the tears of Kuan-yin all pronounce the core value of compassion, passion for the community of being, as central to faith, and therefore central to life. But as Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Than says this interdependency of being, "interbeing" as he calls it, is deeper than formalized religion, and is a gift of creation itself. It is the nest we are all nurtured in, before we choose to be a Christian or a Muslim or a Buddhist.
It is with a mind and heart for this nest that we must in good conscience chart a clear and wide path into a radical awakening of "interbeing". And not just as a practical mode of politics, as a modification within the systems we currently work with. A little consensus decision making here; a little ethnic awareness there. No. We must move there as a culture, away from the Old Time Religion, which fragments, excludes and polarizes, that claims God as "on our side", and towards a sentiment of the heart which unities, includes and heals.
This movement of interbeing must begin at home, in our family relations, in our connections with our neighbors, but we must extend it into the streets of our public life. Inspired and committed leaders need to be weaving the interconnections between green's politics, inter-religious dialogues, social justice forces and even, yes, New Age gurus. Here is the alchemical pot that might form a new alliance of people power. A place where people of disparate backgrounds but with the same fundamental commitment to life as a whole can speak out together, as a strong voice for compassion. Initiatives like the Global Nonviolent Peace Force, dedicated to unarmed intervention in areas of political repression and violence, could be a result. Personally, if we could jam the halls of the Capital with a 1000 people chanting, "We are One People", we would have a good beginning.
The irony of course is that while our country is a religious one, and it often uses the words of Christ in its brutal actions, it is not a spiritual one. Still the land of Abraham and Moses, "an eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth" is the dominating mentality in our economy and in our government. We are a Christian nation, but compassion for each other does not run the country nor defend the economic bottom line. In such an atmosphere, the Religious Right in America has had a powerful impact at mobilizing Christian sentiment for its homophobic causes and agenda, tapping into mainstream 'us vs. them' religious veins. The American left's desertion of the religious playing field has only aided and abetted their process and left progressives increasingly out of sync and thus out of touch with much of mainstream American life. It is a sad result for a simple review of the past 100 years shows that the most powerful non-violent social and political movements have been in some way faith based initiatives. The consequence is that we now live in a time when we desperately need a progressive, spiritually centered movement that can transform society and we essentially have nothing to offer. A scary reality if I ever felt one.
Yet a trans-religious movement based on interbeing, that joins people of all faiths together on the grounds of the interdependency and sanctity of all life, is what must be conjured. And if we are to ever fulfill the hope of poet Pablo Neruda who said, "Let us spread a huge tablecloth across the world and sit down and eat with all those who have not eaten" we must begin to fashion the cloth. A key thread comes from Vaclav Havel, who said that building a moral state is creating "a way of going about things, and it demands the courage to breathe moral and spiritual motivation into everything, to seek the human dimension in all things." When have we made such demands on our government, our culture or ourselves? We are the Wal-Mart culture of accommodation to what is offered-we have forgotten the power of making demands, moral demands, on a system that has put us asleep with the drug of materiality.
Significantly, as we find ways to make these demands they will no longer come from the old standard of 'us' who protest asking for 'our' rights: we now must protest for theirs. We must dissent against the suffering of the innocents, at home and abroad, and as such truly engage in interbeing for in this effort we must, absolutely must, see the other--the stranger, the potential enemy, an unknown victim in a foreign land--as ourselves. We are not the oppressed workers, we are not the subjugated minority, we are the wealthy comfortable few who can now, to invoke Nietzsche again, from a height of conscience, sacrifice our self for our fellow being-with no personal gain but the joy of human compassion.
This is the doorway into a new type of protest that is focused on bringing the suffering of the world into our hearts as our own experience. It once was that progressive movements were rooted in an intellectual critique of society. We must now move out of our heads and back down the long journey of 12 inches to our hearts. The other, and our separation from him/her, must be embraced as the root of our collective suffering and we must act to bring down those walls of disconnection constructed by the western mind's archetype of separation where ever we may find them.
In the hope that we do possess for such work, we must remember that even as peaceful a man as Gandhi, while cautioning against having enemies, said that as a social resistor you must always have opponents. This is the dialectic that moves society, a family or a spiritual journey forward and we must not shy away from it as I sense we have in our 'politically correct' days. He understood that standing up for justice was not aggression it was just ahimsa-truth force-a natural expression of deep spiritual commitment. His was the way of showing the Buddha's bowl of compassion, of turning the other cheek, in direct confrontation with what was wrong, while still being in communion with all souls.
The state we currently seem to be in, however, is not all darkness. If we can be present with our powerlessness even in the face of these gruesome attacks, not lash out with old style vengeance, practice the patience that the long struggles ahead will require, we may find a sense of release and an acceptance of our situation that opens us up to new forms of reality. Powerlessness may then turn into empowerment, tapping energy from that deep connected stream of life, energy that has strength to resist the boot stomping that is even now churning up the stillest of hearts. There interbeing lives and there we can find the power to overcome.
David Sawyer
Diamond Sangha - Hawaii
E-mail: Davidlsawyer@aol.com