It’s No Secret

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

“When you flip the switch in that attic, it doesn’t matter whether its been dark for ten minutes, ten years or ten decades. The light still illuminates the room and banishes the murkiness, letting you see the things you couldn’t see before.”

— Sharon Salzburg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

If we read the unvarnished news of the day, it seems apparent that we live in a dangerous world. As Eric has pointed out, speculative remedies to defuse the meltdown at Fukishima illustrate the inadvisability of humankind playing with nuclear fire. You truly CAN’T fool Mother Nature, who makes the effect of our carelessness obvious: the for-profit agenda that has given us destructive factory farming and genetically modified food, ruinous oil leaks as a matter of course, floating islands of trash creating dead zones in our oceans and a fragile water table exploited by corporate thugs. Throw in sinkholes and super-storms and threats of pandemics and no one can deny that we’ve got a planet in emergency and a species (ours) in trouble.

Except we do deny it, don’t we? The majority may agree on climate change but we turn our heads when it comes to how we got here. Each of the effects listed above are consequences of some human interference with natural order. Each might have been avoided to a large extent if we’d been good stewards of the land, respectful of all life and aware of our responsibility to future generations. The irony here is that many of us are unaware that we ARE responsible for much of what’s gone wrong, not just because our educational systems failed to give us an understanding of the consequences of unfettered capitalism, but also because the corporate entities responsible for these offenses operate in secret.

The secrets we keep define us. Some we keep from others, some we keep from ourselves. Those kept by our business class and government are particularly toxic to the social order, twisting rational thought and allowing for the distractions used to cover the trail of cookie crumbs leading back to truth. I was amused by the ledeline on an article dealing with animal rights activists and the Freedom of Information Act this week, titled “The FBI Doesn’t Want You To Know Why It Won’t Tell You Its Secrets.” It appears that there are secrets about these secrets that are — you guessed it — secret, and all in the name of national security, which is the mysterious black hole in which all secret-keeping resides.

But secrets, as you may have noticed, aren’t what they used to be. They’re harder to keep, not because those keeping them aren’t trying their best, but because humans are becoming much better at reading one another’s minds. The channelers speak to this issue as one of the perks of the ascension process. Even the most direct language may limit what things mean, but when our intent is easily discerned by others, there is no way to hide what’s in our thoughts. For those still hiding behind elaborate walls of secret-keeping, this is not good news.

Quite obviously, the government’s swing from protecting truth-tellers to naming them traitors only puts a spotlight on how much is happening behind the back of the American public. Secrecy about the fearsome Trans-Pacific Partnership took a hit this week with an entire section of the hush-hush proposal exposed by Wikileaks, and while the prospects look dire I’ve yet to hear an appropriate response. Meanwhile, the Supremes still hold the cards when it comes to matters of personal freedom and working rights and that should be of concern to us all.

Wall Street movers and shakers remain defiant about their own culpability, depending on the complicity of lobbyists and lawmakers to keep them in the game, but we all know they’re shysters, and those who profit as shareholders know that the game has been skewed to reward them for breaking as many rules as possible without getting tagged. That’s how the money game is played in this century. Those who challenge what has become “too big to fail” become beloved champions of the people. That alone speaks to the number of citizens who see into the many agendas that are no longer secret.

And culture? I can’t figure out if we’re being encouraged by profiteers to become more superficial by the moment, or if the profiteers themselves are so superficial they consider their products/programs brilliant. Either thought is depressing, and its actuality even more so.

As for depressing events, the President appeared on television this week to apologize for the bumpy roll-out of the Affordable Care Act. Turns out that approximately 5% of Americans with crappy insurance are pissed because they’d rather keep what they have than spend a bit more to get better coverage. The Republicans, anxious to do anything possible to kill off Obamacare (and its originator) have joined the corporately-owned national press to create a circus of this easily anticipated (by those who write software) situation.

Obama took responsibility for the problems, vowing to work as hard as possible to reaffirm credibility for both the program and his presidency. Let’s stop there for a moment: even though most of us would rather he’d have spit in the eye of his accusers, let’s try to look at that without political cynicism. Given our historical record, such a response is pretty amazing! Not just that a sitting president tells us the buck stops with him — how often does THAT happen? — but that a technical glitch that those with experience of such things anticipated has put the whole of his presidency (again) up for twenty lashes, confirming the meme that government can’t do anything right. Further, scream the pundits, it proves that Obama is unworthy of his leadership role, his presidency literally washed up. Can the punishment model be any more obvious? And can the whisper campaign that he’s only three-fifths of a president be any more clear?

American politics has become our national embarrassment. Consider how one-dimensional and shallow it is to jump on a president who admits that he isn’t perfect, as if that human quality was a new concept to politics (I’m thinking about George W.’s owl-eyed stare and confused response when asked if he could think of a mistake he’d made on the way to war with Iraq). A man who takes accountability for miss-steps in this nation is considered a weak leader, a loser and a has-been, while one who pretends infallibility is celebrated as strong and decisive?

Those who think so are celebrating what they believe to be a defining moment in Obama’s second term and a big point score for the free market, although insurance carriers seem quite miffed by the change of direction announced by the beleaguered president (allowing grandfathered substandard policies to stand for an extra year). The glee of those who want insurance reform eliminated is compounded by the fact that many of these same critics are also anticipating the imminent arrival of Jesus riding a cloud, accompanied by Archangels wielding fiery swords to smite evil unbelievers, including the Muslim president and liberal-leaners like me. (I presume in this scenario, Jesus will enjoy Cadillac insurance coverage and all the obvious perks of power.)

The right loves straw men, and Will Pitt and I are in agreement that this current flap over the roll-out is one with which neither of us has much patience. One big straw man, over-stuffed and irrelevant to the challenges at hand and worse, calculated to further cripple government’s credibility and reputation. Back in May — and preceded by the solar eclipse in Taurus — we had a similar bubble of excitement on the right over a trio of supposed scandals that would topple the presidency (IRS targeting, Benghazi and DoJ seizure of AP phone records), all of which have come to nothing, even though they continue to be nursed along on life-support in conservative think tanks and PAC meetings.

We would be better off discussing the necessary complexity of the ACA as it attempts to align itself with hundreds of insurance carriers and comply with laws in fifty separate states, some of which would rather see their citizens zombified than enrolled in Obamacare. It’s the complexity of the law and the stonewall of those required to help implement it that have proven such a headache to all involved. Imagine what we could have accomplished if we’d worked together!

Is that a secret? It isn’t what you’ll hear on the news, that’s for sure. We should be discussing the resistance from those who could work for the good of the nation but choose not to, the obstruction of those who want this program to fail instead of offering respite to Americans victimized by health insurance policies designed to put profit into the pockets of the few. We should be working toward our mutual good, rather than picking a side to support in the tedious us/them smack-down that cannot be won by either side so long as it’s a zero-sum game. We should be talking about how much more effective and affordable single payer would — could, and eventually must — be.

There’s so much that needs truth-telling right now, not because we don’t know what’s true but because the very act of candor is both startling and illuminating. It is a sad but sure reality that the public has become used to being lied to. We break that zeitgeist one revelation at a time. We need to throw more sunshine on the specifics of the worrisome Trans-Pacific Partnership (which appears to be the only bipartisan concern in sight), the GMO fight, the many unpublicized environmental problems with the XL Pipeline, and the immigration issue stalled by John Boehner “just because.”

There are hundreds, even thousands, of situations that need daylight rather than shadows, and if you wonder what they are, visit BuzzFlash or Huffy. They’re listed daily and you’ll be surprised how much you can intuit without opening the link. And while we’re shining that light, I’d really like to put to rest the conceit that both parties in Congress — which suffers an all-time low approval rating of 9% — have moved into the ideological fringes.

The “false equivalency” issue that continues to clog the news pipeline really gets under my skin. Data prove that while Senate Pubs have shifted twice as far to the right as Dems to the left since 1975, House Pubs have moved SIX times further right. Anyone with basic math skills can figure out that compromise with radical views such as those held by the House majority is next to impossible for the opposition.

While we can still be shocked, even scandalized, by the behavior of the ruling class, we can’t really be surprised at revelations about a system we’ve watched crumble over the last decade and more. The secrets that we assume the government keeps, the secrets that are erupting from courageous whistleblowers, the inadvertent slips due to the hubris of those who rest on their imagined laurels: they’re all in plain sight now. Most of what we hear we already know, don’t we? How much of any recently outed ‘secret’ has come as a surprise?

We really have become adept at reading one another’s mind. We can finish the sentence of the beloved. We can intuit the concerns of the neighbor and palpate their inability to face harsher truth, giving us information on how hard to push the envelope. We can grasp the intent of those around us with just a few defining sentences. Because of that, it’s in our own best interests to do the internal work that allows us to face ourselves truthfully as well, not waiting for someone else to point out where we’re blindsided. The ‘work,’ as the sages tell us, is no farther than our nose.

There’s another aspect of this that should encourage us on our journey toward “turning on the attic light.” It wasn’t that long ago that we sought spiritual instruction, seeking out the teacher or the philosophy that seemed to hold the answers that eluded us. Those days are largely over. We are past the age of gurus, my dears. We are well on the road to enacting our own spiritual truth, living our authenticity. Our desire for truthful political discourse, clear relationship communication, transparent business and governmental policy and process, is a reflection of our own struggle to come to terms with the illusions around us. In all instances, we’re farther along than we realize.

Politics is only one facet of the reflection of self that we strive to inhabit. All life expression is born in the open heart of our soul’s intent, and our ability to create that within our experience is our highest purpose. We each have a blueprint, we each have a piece of this 21st century puzzle to contribute, and we each have more help — seen and unseen — in accomplishing what we came to do than we can imagine. I think we can agree, in a heart blazing with Light, there is simply no room for secrets.