By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
If we have no peace, it’s because we have forgotten that we belong to one another. ~ Mother Theresa
I’m sure you’ll understand if I tell you that I’m hard pressed to make sense of the week, even from a political point of view. I suspect you’re having the same problem. Sometimes — a mere handful of times in our personal lives, hopefully — everything seems to stop, the routine shaken and the events of the day suddenly unimportant. It happens with the shock of tragedy: death, divorce, dire illness, unexpected job loss or displacement. And when it happens, there are few words that can comfort. If we are fortunate, there are friends and family members who will step up to simply stand with us, offering support until we can find our sea legs, and even after as we learn to make peace with unwanted change.
This has been a period of history in which that kind of shock has turned mundane — even expected — thanks to growing income inequality and predatory fiscal opportunism, thanks to the loss of oversight and civil liberties and public policy designed to benefit the average citizen. Hopes to remedy these inequities have produced only a loud, sucking sound from the halls of Congress, where any attempt to work for the public good has swirled down the drain for years. The current Congress has never before done so little while spending so much on unsupportable junk legislation like the 50-odd attempts to repeal Affordable Care, Darrell Issa’s glut of subpoenaed witch hunts, and now House Speaker John Boehner’s bogus lawsuit against Obama, all added to the taxpayers’ tab. Back in Dubya’s day, when congressional approval numbers hit the teens, there was a collective gasp. There is only a sullen silence now that current approval stands at 7 percent.
We’ve spent several decades unraveling the spiritual and ethical center of this nation, with the public slowly becoming inured to news of unprovoked wars, the unimagined loss of pensions and retirement funds, chronic un- and under-employment and foreclosures. We’ve learned to shrug at stories of reduced safety nets, increases in police brutality, consumer fraud and enforced austerity. Only slightly different than personal loss, these public losses are shocks that spin us into limbo, frozen in pain and helplessness, and they’ve increased in frequency until they’ve become a bona fide zeitgeist, an overwhelming volume of white noise that stalks our daily lives like a specter of unwelcome possibilities. With gun rights seemingly more important than victims’ rights and corporate personhood more protected and entitled than our own, life seems less safe here at home, and even worse out there in the larger world. It is much to bear.