Moral Framework

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

If you’ve kept your head down this week, vowing to ignore news and just keep the lid on tight, you’re in good company. Most folks are loathe to crowd their full plate with anything else at the moment, lest it drop like a rock along with their emotional well being. With the explosive 2012 energies the ones throwing the bones, searching the patterns and particulars has brought up more questions than answers in the last few days, and while it adds little to our comfort zone, that’s probably a good thing.

Even overwhelmed by the glut of information, there are gems of wisdom out there for inquiring minds and the only way to find them is to keep a look-out for the universe to offer them up.

One of the questions on everyone’s mind has to do with a missing jet carrying 249 souls, four of them American. Everyone loves a mystery, but this is ridiculous. New search areas open every day or so, giving up sea-trash but little else. Did someone just want a Boeing 777 so much they took it, or might the Greys have snatched an entire group of abductees? The suggestion that the plane was highjacked to North Korea or elsewhere remains a more realistic possibility, but such talk results in a nervous tic for those who have any “friendly sky” phobia.

As suggested by Eric in Part II of Planet Waves FM this week, we may get major clues or even a resolution to this question by the weekend Full Moon in Virgo. Meanwhile, try not to succumb to fearful propaganda, and if you’re scheduled to hop a plane for some long-anticipated event, (breathe in peace, exhale fear, and …) be mindful that you, your shoes, your toothpaste and shampoo remain suspect.

It’s been a strange news cycle, kind of fluffy, kind of dark. As always, some of it has amused me. Wee Southern lawmaker, Lindsey Graham — hawkish buddy to Arizona’s McCain, and rabid critic of Obama’s “girly” position on foreign affairs (because Benghazi, yadda) — is being primaried by a candidate on the right who has called him “the ambiguously gay senator from South Carolina.” Stephen Colbert, a faux-furious South Carolina native, has demanded that Graham release a sex tape proving his heterosexuality. Those of us who have scrutinized Lindsey over the years will not be holding our breath. I suppose the Senator is verklempt about this apparent outing, especially since I assume the entirety of his Benghazi mantra is designed to endear himself to the right-wing and appease the rumor mill. Ahhhh, but we are well into the 21st century now, and so are the Days Of Our Lives.

Colbert’s buddy Jon Stewart had a brilliant week, giving us Samantha Bee weighing in on a topic regarding Medicare coverage which has long pissed me off: how is it women’s health care, and specifically contraception, is fought tooth and nail while men’s wood meds are covered as a matter of course? It appears that 172 million penis pumps have been provided to the limp among us by the Fed at $360 a pop, not to mention the staggering price of Viagra, but women in Michigan are being forced to consider buying separate “rape insurance” to receive termination services should the worst happen. Bee does a funny bit, poking this topic with a sharp stick. Also, Jon has gleefully discovered that Mitch “Turtleman” McConnell has the perfect face to fit any song: for a lark, go here to spend some bi-partisan creative time #McConnelling.

There have been surprises of the good sort too. This week brought a possible breakthrough in unemployment extension for the roughly two million people dropped several weeks ago. If passed later this month, the temporary five-month measure will come too late for some and just in the nick of time for others. Five Pubs have to step up to break the filibuster necessary to get the measure onto the floor for a vote, and Reid thinks he has them, although politicians are as feckless as wild hares, and the vote is very close. Once past the Senate, the House will have to approve, of course, but the mandatory cuts have already been sacrificed to keep the natives calm. Only time will tell how this works out.

Other happenings have, as usual, outraged and amazed, including a continued inability for good sense or even bite-you-on-the-ass truth to penetrate the conservative brain pan. For instance, the Koch brothers have embraced national unease with the Affordable Care Act as the lynch pin of their hopes in 2014, assisting the GOP camps to demonize the program. There have been a reported 66,000 TV ads for the House and Senate races so far, more than 30,000 of them ripping Obamacare. Seventeen thousand of them are from the Kochs, targeting Dem legislators. Eight months out, conservative money is flying around like monkeys in Oz, and if you haven’t got an in-box full of progressive pleas for your spare change, I’ll eat mine.

Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-backed advocacy group, is running an attack ad starring a woman who asserts that her cancer treatments have become unaffordable under the new law. Every time I hear one of these stories, I wince and hope someone will vet the situation. In this case, the Detroit News did just that, finding that the patient will save more than $1,000 a year on comparable treatment for leukemia with her new insurance carrier. When confronted with that news, the woman — not an actor but obviously a dyed-in-the-wool Republican — insisted that it simply couldn’t be true, that she personally did not believe it.

This is not stupidity, it’s ignorance. This is abject refusal to connect the dots to something other than dearly held, if erroneous, belief. Remember the rallying cry from the wingers, back in 2008, warning government to “keep your hands off my Medicare?” What can one do with that level of density, of denial? I live with that all around me here in rural Missouri. Reading the consensus of thought on the opinion page of the little local newspaper (4 folded pages) is to weep. It isn’t a matter of not hearing the truth or investigating it. It’s a matter of rejecting it.

In those states whose politicians refuse to accept Obama’s Medicaid assistance, some thirty million of their citizens will fall between the slats, condemned to go without health care for the foreseeable future, which means an estimated 17,000 Americans will die unnecessarily (without preventative care or maintenance of chronic conditions). As Missouri has joined that Southern block, unable to convince its Bagger-highjacked state congress to accept federal monies, I find that I know and love a number of these endangered folks. Indeed, I would be one of them without Medicare, which is still a stretch for my modest income. So I can’t help but ponder the ethics of condemning one’s neighbors and friends to such a dramatic outcome, especially among those of the — loud and pushy, here in the Pea Patch — religious community.

How is civilization served by those who would deny food, housing, and medical care to those in need? How can that be right action for democracy when we have spent several hundred years advancing out of that kind of very self-serving arrogance? Our cherished notions about the soundness of American character are stretched thin by the actions of voters being pumped up with fear and loathing of the black guy, of “mentally ill” liberals who want to turn their children gay, of a world waiting to pounce upon them from under the bed, around the corner, and obviously, from the sky. We need to learn how to talk to these people.

As someone intent on reducing the space between “me and thee,” as it were — dedicated to the establishment of a healthy and respectful “we” — I have been interested in the theories of linguist George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science at UC Berkeley. Lakoff came to my attention during the early days of George W. Bush, as progressives ran into the disinformation wall erected by the Neocons. You may remember that breathtaking moment when they proclaimed themselves the originators of all “reality,” whether we liked it or not.

Those of us on the left looked at each other, stunned, wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the arrogance of such a statement. It was Lakoff who was first to decode that power-play by telling us about “moral frames,” the way in which language engages our emotions rather than our intellect. Every two years since then — as elections loomed — he’s put out opinion pieces attempting to teach logic-loving liberals how to get their message out. Today, Professor Lakoff tells us with regret and growing concern, we’ve failed his class miserably.

Our moral framework is part of our cultural and religious upbringing, part of our social contract and part of our political understanding. Unless those on the left are providing a clear progressive concept for youngsters, giving them reason to think that fairness and integrity are worth the trouble — that acquiring “stuff” is less important to global well being than feeling that they are contributing to the good of others, as well as themselves — we are failing to keep up our end of the moral equivalency. The conservatives have unquestioning faith in their point of view, yielding no ground. And while progressive thought is a much more creative and messy business, our inability to articulate a solid secular position continually gives ground to the right, allowing them to magnetize the fearful and threatened into their camp. If we are to learn to talk so they will listen, we will have to do our homework.

I hear all the time that there is no difference in political parties today and I gotta say it, I think that’s nonsense. Of course there’s a difference. There may be very little difference in politicians, in political activity fashioned by power brokers and lobbyists. There may be little difference in the face off over the failing system we call representative democracy today, but there is surely a difference in the energies of those on the right of the political spectrum and those on the left. Conservatives do not conserve so much as self-protect and seek to keep authority with desperate, and often hateful, measures. Liberals no longer seem to have the stomach for the inner-battle that takes us from self-interest to commonwealth, let alone the political battle that puts ethics above status quo.

We are prisoners of our standard of living, here in North America. Having suffered the shock of loss, we’re fearful unto feeble at the thought of losing more, seemingly unable to sustain our appreciation of what is simple and good in life. No wonder our children are obsessed with a zombie apocalypse overrun by soulless, empty creatures constantly hungry, consuming life-force in an attempt to fill themselves. What do we offer them to fill their souls, their aspirations and dreams? But this problem of left and right is not ours alone. It’s global.

The lefties of the world used to have a firmer sense of self, at least enough to keep from slipping so far to the fearful, self-absorbed side of the spectrum. Here in the U.S., we had the integrity of the constitutional separation of church and state, with our differing notions of God — one as strict disciplinarian, the other as loving nurturer — kept out of the political arena. We had the hard-earned power of the unions to provide a fair workplace, the moral intention of the liberal churches to impact social concerns and encourage civil rights. We had an educated electorate.

The years between then and now gave us a Third Way movement (for which we must thank Bill Clinton, a president acceptable to a nation already turning back from modernity) that moved us farther right, promoting free trade rather than fair, a reworking of matters of meritocracy and monopoly, along with a monetized point of view. Who sez love of money ain’t the root of all evil?

It isn’t money itself that’s the problem, of course, but the coveting of it, the anointing of money as the highest form of reward. Where is the emotional epicenter of such a notion? Seems to me that the true Christian ethic of ‘love thy neighbor as thyself” wasn’t new back in the good old days of Roman occupation. Aristotle said it best when he told us that “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”

And tending to the body, to the appetites, to the obsessions of humankind without minding the soul is the difference between inauthentic and authentic behavior. There comes a time when we have gathered enough experience to understand that there is as much pleasure in giving as in receiving, that what is mentally productive falls short of what is emotionally healing, that what we must allow to impact is not the antithesis of love, or its shadow, seeking some return in kind, but only love itself.

Having, getting, doing are all teaching aspects in the evolutionary goal of being. Human being. If we cannot welcome others into the fold, care for them and promote their growth and happiness, then we have not yet become a fully realized human. Love has been around a very long time, and our ability to offer it to one another has already gone through so many revolutions that surely by now we can get it right.

We cannot come to this turning of an era without finding a way to both listen to and hear one another, without discovering we are invested in the same hopes and dreams, that loving one another is the only way to break the spell of darkness keeping us in a cycle of fear. And love is, above all, fearless. To go where we want to go — to get back to the garden — so must we be.