By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
China leads the world in executions, and I’d bet that the number reported is just a spit in the bucket, given its totalitarian disposition and enormous population. Right behind China comes Iran, then Iraq and Saudi Arabia. We’re next, according to Amnesty International, although Robert Scheer’s recent essay on state-approved murder cites Yemen and North Korea as major players. That’s the human tribe that traffics in overt government-sanctioned vengeance: China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the U.S., Yemen and North Korea. And woe to us that such an ominous list of murderous nations includes the United States of America, hiding behind its moral imperative and democratic trappings while seeking revenge unto death on those judged guilty.
A passage from Howard Zinn’s book, Killing People to ‘Send a Message,’ tells us: “There are nations like the United States (whose) punishments are legitimized by a complex set of judicial procedures. This is called ‘due process,’ despite the fact that each step in this process is tainted by racial prejudice, class bias or political discrimination.” Up until his final moments, all three of these social stressors were poignantly evident in the sad case of Troy Davis, but that should not surprise us. As the man himself told us on the day his life was extinguished, advocates for the end of the death penalty must keep up the good fight because there are a LOT of Troy Davises out there, all facing a merciless system unconcerned with their civil liberties.
You know this story by heart, I suppose. The news, the websites, the television blared with the high drama of putting Davis to death, Georgia on the record and the judicial system itself in the spotlight. Scheer tells us:
This case was so freighted with contradictions that a stay of execution was clearly in order. As Amnesty International spokesperson Laura Moye stated: “Today Georgia didn’t just kill Troy Davis, they killed the faith and confidence that many Georgians, Americans, and Troy Davis supporters worldwide used to have in our criminal justice system.”
Ultimately, that was the boon that Pollyanna might have culled from this frightful travesty of justice. This week, millions of people around the world peeked in on the life of a doomed prisoner on Death Row and found not only the compassion to sign petitions or join marches on his behalf, but also the empathy to understand that “there, but for the grace of God, go I.”
I would like to think that the Fates used Troy Davis as a poster boy to expose the steel-fisted authoritarianism disguised as the Georgia Department of Corrections. I’d like to think that this blood sacrifice awakened us to the enormous holes in our flawed system, forced us to rethink the ancient proscription of an eye for an eye that has left us all blind. If that isn’t true, then Troy Davis died for nothing. But Davis and the death penalty aren’t what I want to examine this week. The penal system is just one wheel being turned by larger cogs.
Abby Zimet at Common Dreams reminded us this week that Howard Zinn regarded the death penalty as “a kind of terror waged by the state, one death at a time…to instill fear and obedience in the population.” This kind of low-level terror, based on fear of punishment and estrangement from society, has always been an effective instrument for crowd control. It’s emblematic of this common era — one in which great governments seldom see their populations as more than livestock to be herded and turned as necessary — and it’s part of the patriarchal model that all government is based upon, authority for authority’s sake.
Ditto on everything I just said as applied to the church and the various religions seeking a stranglehold on the world population. “Good” people acquiesce, “bad” people must be punished and estranged, and if God has given us that mandate, then government is merely an arm of His authority. It is this notion of central power, buoyed by insider money and backroom deals, of mandated “correctness,” of unquestioned patriarchy, that is breaking down before our very eyes.
Here’s a bumper sticker that seems to have caught the imagination of the nation:
“I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one.”
Tell me you can laugh at that — ruefully, of course — and I’ll tell you that you are one of Jon Stewart’s people, savvy and lucid. You are on key with the tune the nation is humming, in tempo with the zeitgeist of the moment and pitch-perfect with the full understanding that it’s not the emperor who has no clothes, it’s the whole damned country. The things we thought were true are now being revealed as lies and manipulations. The amendments to the Constitution that we’ve relied upon are being questioned and reinterpreted by a handful of zealots who insist they represent us all. Meanwhile, the basic requirements of our social contract — decent schools, drivable roads, fully-staffed police and fire departments — fall to ruin all around us. Perhaps even the United States Post Office (I wonder what Kevin Costner thinks of that).
Ahhhhh, change. What a pisser! Let’s pause just a moment to thank George W. Bush for fucking up so resoundingly, shall we? Over the last two years, the standard rationale we’ve used to drive our country into the future has been examined and found riddled with hypocrisy and hubris, fouled by a decade of bad actors who manufactured conflict for profit and power. Had George behaved less greedily, had he raised taxes to fight his wars, had he kept an eye on errant Wall Street speculation, we might never have realized how broken and befuddled we’ve become. We might have put off our ultimate demise for another generation, quietly bled by big business and corrupt government that encouraged and counted on our lethargy. Without Dubby going a bridge too far with his Neocon policies and his Fundy inclinations, we would still be the cocooned and distracted batteries enabling the Matrix to rumble on, undisturbed.
Ahhhhh, change. What a blessing! The spell is broken now and many of us realize we’re in a rare time of turning, marveling at how quickly the energy is moving. Nothing that seemed solid remains so. Institutions we thought stable are in turmoil, rules and regulations we thought standard are in flux. Worse, the bare bones of our original founding ideals are being corrupted and attacked by a group that meets the Sinclair Lewis definition of fascism: wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. If we fancy we’ve outgrown that, we shouldn’t be so sure. Read this and be concerned, for surely there are millions who will read it and cling to the elusive hopes that institutionalized religion offers, affirming yet again their allegiance to the patriarchy that controls them and the authority that will punish them with eternal fire if they don’t keep their eyes down and their thoughts pure.
That’s clutching at straws, of course, because there seems little else to clutch. Big government may not be the answer to all our woes, but no government at all, as proposed by t-evangelicals, is even less a solution to what ails us. Yet we are still unable to come together at some mid-point, to scream “emergency,” to let go our belligerence and have a common sense conversation. We have met what Robert Reich calls the “waste and futility of an unending and undeclared war against Islamic extremism” with a brand of American extremism that our old friend Noam Chomsky and the rest of the world consider insane.
Chomsky’s commentary has to do with climate change denial, while Reich speaks to economic improprieties, but the kind of blanket denial we face seems too large to throw our arms around, even if our intent is just to wrestle it to the ground to get a better look. We meet it every day as deluded freshman Republicans threaten to close down government for the good of the electorate at home. We face it in our third-rail issues, like denying Palestine legitimacy in the UN, even as Israel ignores our demands to cease settling the West Bank, all of which makes us increasingly irrelevant to both the peace process and a Middle-east morphing in front of our very eyes. We met delusion this week when more than half a million signatures failed to move the Georgia Department of Corrections.
Here’s the good news: if you’re reading this without a blood pressure spike, if you can consider these thing calmly, then you’re ok. You’re questioning reality. To look around us and ask ourselves if we’re as deluded as what we witness is our ultimate affirmation of sanity. We may have become dumbed down by decades of inadequate education, by lack of intelligent dialog and a glut of information, but we’ve grown in instinct and intuition these last years. As sane conversation was denied to our intellect, our emotional body fired itself up to compensate. Now, if we’re honest enough to put personal bias and party affiliations aside, we cannot be surprised to find the national contract as empty inside as a brown paper bag. Those last little crumbs of self-respect, love of liberty and dedication to commonwealth – which our constitutional scholar of a president always speaks to, when let off his leash — are what is left to us.
They are enough, if we act quickly. We have collectively gone a bridge too far in this country. Leadership has misjudged, misled and overreached on all levels of governance. It is useless for those of us who knew better and cried to Heaven all the while to defend ourselves from culpability; this is our collective karmic national gig and we must own it, all of us. We won’t be able to fix it until we do. But once we commit ourselves to the task of rebuilding, of remodeling or reclaiming, I believe that the inspiration of the basic principals of this nation will move that mountain. I believe the spirit of collaboration and brotherhood will become the wind beneath our wings, more than enough to lift us up when we decide that’s not only possible but necessary.
Call us populists, if you will, but don’t be fooled by that word. The Tea Party tried to co-opt that definition for themselves, but they do not represent “the people.” Populists speak for ALL of the people. Elizabeth Warren — now running for Teddy Kennedy’s old senate seat in Massachusetts — is a true populist. She speaks for the good denied the citizenry spread across this nation, from sea to shining sea, and she makes no bones about who is responsible for their decline. Here are her comments on the American social contract made last month at Andover, responding to accusations that asking the rich to pay taxes commensurate with their income was a form of “class warfare.” Listen to what a populist has to say, then, so you’ll know it the next time you hear it:
“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.
“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
Did you hear that? That was populism. Did you hear Obama when he spoke on jobs this month? That was progressivism. Did you hear your gut when it rumbled and twisted over the murder of Troy Davis? That was compassion, that was empathy. Does your gut jump and churn over the dissembling of the Republican party when it holds the nation hostage to its ideology? When it defends the wealthy? When it disenfranchises the poor? That’s integrity, offended. That’s common sense, insulted.
We’ve gone a bridge too far in this nation. We’ve overreached and let the center slip. It happened because it was inevitable, but we allowed it to go too far for too long, content with our pursuit of stuff and our dreams of more, unwilling to upset the applecart. We were afraid of letting go of our illusions about ourselves, afraid of authority, too often an empty suit but still able to kill us from time to time. But that was then, this is now.
Now we must stand up, like we did for the presumably-innocent man on death row; stand up for those remaining crumbs of belief in liberty and justice, stand up for a return to national and personal sanity. The conversation, split by polarity, will go on unending and unresolved in the nation’s capitol while our neighborhoods, one after another, collapse and disintegrate. We need to take our stand against the real class warriors who live in gated communities and expatriate to safer climes, insulated by their money and privilege.
For populism, then — for progressivism, compassion and empathy trying to reestablish themselves at the core of this nation — stand up now. Listen for the integrity and common sense knocking at your consciousness, asking you to open that door and walk out into activism as an act of love. Change is already here, but it will flow like molten chaos into the empty spaces unless we fill them instead with the expansive dreams of our heart and the loving aspirations of our soul. As the whole of the planet enters into a stage of incubation to emerge as a new creature, while the whole of this nation is being required to face itself squarely and let go of all that no longer adds to humanity, it’s time to realize that the American Dream isn’t what we have, dearhearts — it’s what we are. To reclaim that as harmless? Divine!
“— and I think it’s clearly up to us to remind everyone that peace and love are choices we make, not prizes we capture … ”
love that. exactly. ties into the “there is enough for All”, ya know?
I’m not sure why, maybe because sadly some are so starved? but the vision that is popping into my head is people scrambling, giving black-eyes by elbowing their neighbor for “The Goods” they so desperately want- (whether that is love, designer Italian shoes on sale, or Justin Bieber merchandise?) ( thinking “i” before “e” instead of “e” before ” i”)
“e” being everyone of course, all of humanity.
good one again Judith!
thanks All !
Nice example of loving yer neighbor, Sag — thanks for sharing that. I’d suppose that’s exactly how we can begin to dialog about what “love” actually is, Zero — one on one, just a casual good-natured conversation — and I think it’s clearly up to us to remind everyone that peace and love are choices we make, not prizes we capture … not only for our own sake, but for the sake of those who are missing the opportunity to help lift the planet, and themselves, with that majikal vibration.
And Namaste backatcha, Green — wordsmithing seems up your ally as well. I’m going to save “diamond-bright stuff to dazzle the sleepy ones awake” in my notes to inspire me. I listened to the Elders too and haven’t forgotten that we are the Rainbow Warriors; we pretend we don’t know what to do next, but it doesn’t take much to get us dancing around the fire that is building in our hearts. We just need to listen for the drums.
Thanks for playing this weekend, dearhearts, and for your kind words — I am encouraged when you receive what I send so graciously. You are each one Starshine, and we are making our way back to the garden.
Judith,
What Gary, Sag and Green Star said…and from me, with gratitude that I have a source in your eloquent prose that I can “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” and be empowered to move on.
Thank you so much, Judith, for your keen observations and wisdom as an old hippy, for never losing that these last xx?? years, and for bringing it back to consciousness. Most of us of that age (and I are one, too!) got diverted by the “promise” of the “American Dream” on the one hand, and threats of violence if we did not continue to believe in that “promise.” It was a false promise, a lie, based on a premise of endless consumption (and as also noted by Richard Tarnas “we all know you can never get enough of what you don’t really need”). The violence was Kent State and the Chicago Democratic Convention, the draft that forced that lie upon us.
It is so very difficult to talk about love in our culture, in our world. It has been denigrated and relegated to a strictly sexual context that is veiled in prudish religiosity. It certainly isn’t going to be easy to change the view of love with so much anger and hate abounding, but it is the only way. It is going to be exhausting as changes keep hitting in rapid fire succession, but change we must. I can’t ponder the complexity of it all without getting a proverbial raging headache and feeling overwhelmed. There are two things that we can do as individuals. First, is that reconnection to Self and the divine within. The second, as noted by Sag, is one by one, one on one, to communicate and connect (to listen until someone is heard into being), doing it with love.
What more purpose do we need than to love? That is the “simple” answer to the purposeless, godless universe we have created for ourselves (as so eloquently and cogently described by Richard Tarnas).
As I am writing this, I am listening to the live stream from #Occupy Wall Street. It is that youth that can and will take up the next stage of the Uranus-Pluto alignment, the rough squares. Is it possible that the revolution is finally beginning? I hope so, though I know that it ain’t gonna be easy, but it is so necessary.
JannKinz
Judith,
You have a most incredible gift of word-craft. Every time I read your contributions I feel myself trembling with joy… even when the truth you deliver is bitter and hard as nails, I tremble with joy. This is diamond-bright stuff to dazzle the sleepy ones awake.
Will someone please get this woman’s writing onto the main stage if it is not already?
Those of us who are weary, soul-tired and loosing hope need contributions like this to reconnect us to the Truth-fires that burn deep within our being… fires that want to rise up and burn away the fetid madness that has infected our collective body. A cleansing fever is on the horizon… I feel it coming. Wisconsin was a mere glimpse. Cairo a reverberation. Revolution is coming and when the fuse is lit, the corruption and misuse of the People’s blood, treasure and power will have to be addressed, reclaimed and re-balanced.
And as we collectively come to the boil, thanks to the Great Squaring that is upon us, , I remember the words of a wise Elder whom I heard speak, years ago. He spoke of these times we are now stepping into. He said that before the great transformation comes upon us, that there would be a deep division, a choosing time where we each would make the choice in one’s heart about what was most important, and that those who appeared to have won will, in the end, lose. He said that once the true wheels of transformation were put into motion there would be no more time to choose which “hand” to rest in, so we needed to choose wisely now. (this was back in the late 80s and early 90s).
He said that by the time we reach the time of the great transition, we each will have made our choice in our hearts and it will be unlikely that many will cross those lines once they are drawn. And then he said it again: that those who look like they have won, will in actuality be the losers… and those who look like they have lost – almost everything- will find that they have all that they really need and thus will have everything. He said it was all going to get upside down and look impossible to get right… and then suddenly, the losers become the winners and those who thought they were winning will have nothing and they will be asked to leave and to never return to “this place”. (“This place” could have a lot of different interpretations)
I’ve never forgotten his message and it has given me a context to understand the ever-deepening polarity that we now see fracturing our government and society. That fracturing is necessary to help release the power and the toxins so that people can see what is really going on here and choose what to do with this knowledge. Your writings have the same power and integrity that I felt when I was in the presence of that Elder visionary/shaman. Thank you for your devotion to your craft, your deep wisdom and crystalline clarity… it is all much needed, and deeply appreciated.
And I want one of those bumper stickers 😉
Namaste
Judith that was brilliant!
I loved the paragraph starting with ” Did you hear that? that was populism……
that paragraph is key. key. I feel. because it viscerally equates – it registers within as people check themselves upon answering the questions. great job. just great.
turning on the lightbulbs is not necessarily turning on the thinking caps for folks we might be trying to reach. it’s turning on another type of light inside.
this is kind of an aside, but I was riding horses with my NASA buddy Will today, and we were passing by the ranch (where Zeus, the mighty Brahma lives) and there was a new sign posted on his fence. which read:
RECESSION
when your neighbor loses a job
DEPRESSION
when you lose your job
RECOVERY
when Obama loses his job
there were 3 or 4 bullet holes drawn on the sign, for added effect.
I asked the person who put the sign up why they had done so. after looking at me completely oddly, like I was bonkers, the basic answer was because “the state of things are in a gddm mess!”. I kept going, peacefully, talking about economics, lag-times of decisions, etc. etc. -even taxes – but taxes for the rich. to make a long story short, he ended up agreeing that everything couldn’t be blamed on Obama- in fact, he hadn’t really thought that deep about what the sign said, exactly, but he was just so gddm upset about things. he took the sign down. not saying he’s voting Dem, but he took the sign down.
it was a sign for me, that people, all people, want to be involved, want to be listened to, and yes, for some strange reason..can’t figure out how presidential legacies work over time.
just thought I’d share.
peace ya’ll.
Judith, your voice is getting stronger!! it looks like these incidents are pulling down the veil and others are noticing- and ready to participate-
maybe the tide is turning!
Thanks again for your ideas.
Hey Gary B — you’re talking to an old hippy here, so it’s not hard for me to see how easily we could pull down those walls we hide behind to share a hug, a meal, a communal garden … or meeting hall … or home. It’s only common sense that meeting peoples basic needs allows their experience to become kinder, more peaceful and less desperate. We need to recreate that kind of level playing field for one another if we’re to encourage a renaissance of truly creative innovation and progress into this new century.
If we elected public servants who had that sense of communal integrity and vision and supported them with public funds in a transparent system of governance the only master they would be serving is the commonwealth. What stands between us and that goal is only greed and money — which is why I find this period Holy. It’s showing us the wages of greed and helping us explore our fears about money.
My experience of how people are sorting through this period convinces me that making connections and relying on one another are the critical factors for a rebuilding project, but in order to do that we need to complete our more ambitious internal project — one we were working on tirelessly in the 60s, until hard drugs came our way and deflected us off our Higher path. We need to recreate our understanding of God.
That’s God As Us I’m speaking of. Us as God, godding. We need to reconnect with that Divinity we’ve moved so far outside of us with our mental constructs; our emotional body understands itself to be in constant God communion and God-like creation and pays little attention to what our brain is busy with. That’s part of the internal division that keeps us deaf and dumb. I don’t believe we can make a transition into Aquarian Age dynamics while still identifying with Piscean Age notions of punitive, punishing authority — we need to move into a new understanding of authority and that’s an “inside job.”
We create the world we understand ourselves to be. This time frame, IMHO, is about making the reconnection with Self, putting aside our baggage to see ourselves larger than our circumstances, discovering our authentic emotions and talents and ending the illusion of separation we’ve imposed between ourselves and everything else on the planet. When we change our own internal signal, we change the way our world looks.
We’re finally choking on our Illusion of loneliness, ya know? We’re growing past such restrictions and it will be a great relief to take off such tight shoes. What dreadful situation would unconditional love not heal? What awful circumstance would deep compassion and open arms not improve? The world tells me that working for such a goal is airy-fairy bullshit but I’m not going to give on this — love is all there is. The rest is all diversion. And while it’s one thing to recreate a society as great as this one has been and can be still, the actual recreation going on is in US. That will color everything that comes next!
As regards today’s piece, here’s link to an interesting article on eye witness identification, the only actual “evidence” in the Troy Davis class. It appears this case may be the tipping point for review of flawed ID procedures. It’s no shocker that it’s the conservatives that don’t want to move off the old marks, of course, responsible for the tussle between modernity and “as is” process.
And while Georgia is no slouch, Texas leads the way in state-approved murder, Mr. Perry following in George W.’s footsteps as Murderer-in-Chief. According to this article, Texas led the nation with 44 post-conviction DNA exonerations. That should be enough to make any rational person pause and rethink.
http://stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=601795
Judith,
You have a great knack for putting it all in to perspective!
It would seem that we are entering our own Arab Spring- just a small firecracker to ignite the powder keg as happened in Tunisia is all that is needed. Class warfare, world financial volatility, Middle East on the verge of exploding and bringing the US and Europe into warfare. Nuclear instability of Iran, Pakistan, NK and anyone else with a plan. The upcoming election is over a year away and it looks to be worse than all the aforementioned!
So we need a plan- someone(a lot of someones) with a vision. You have a great knack for this stuff. Most of us it would seem can’t get far enough away from ground zero to see the forest for the trees. We have seven squares of Uranus/Pluto over the next four years and everything is going to Change- even more than at the conjunction of the 60’s. Now I can’t imagine that you could have foreseen the outcome then but I would like to see your imagination on how we could make this shift a better one. Music and youth were a great part of that era -the rest got muddled in materialism–you have to replace the old system with something else as they are dealing with in the Arab countries -what now?
Hope for???
GaryB