… And Protect Us From Evil

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

“… we know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Miffed beyond the ability to reason, last November the American public elected some 16 new state governors, all members of the corporate party. Added to the red states that already had conservative leadership, those numbers now include such hotbeds of Tea Party activism as Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wisconsin. Each of these new governors vows that its respective state has unique qualities and challenges demanding fresh thinking and serious solutions, yet their policies replicate one another as dependably as Dolly the sheep cloned her predecessor. Dolly was short-lived. Let’s hope the precedent sticks.

Working in hive-mind, the corporate party is dismantling anything that smacks of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. There isn’t a dime in play across this nation that they don’t expect a share of, nor a working class citizen that they fail to blame for the nation’s problems. And while the Congress works to turn back all progress made in the last years, state leaders are taking liberties so questionable that they will surely end up decided in court. In Michigan, new Republican Governor Rick Snyder passed a law saying he had the right to take over any community by declaring it a “financial emergency,” whereupon he would be free to dismiss local officials and declare contracts void. You can almost see him turning to Wisconsin’s Scott Walker with a smirk and saying, “I’ll see your tyrant and raise you a despot!”

Meanwhile, it’s almost a joke how often Republican governors have transferred so much of their state’s piggy banks into the pockets of big corporations that they must then declare a fiscal emergency, hacking at the livelihoods of working class citizens. In Wisconsin, state government declared war upon public servants who had dared to organize into unions, exempting only the firefighters and police whom they evidently still needed. The specter of a greedy kindergarten teacher with a fat paycheck and over-the-top medical coverage has never kept me awake nights, but if you think the Department of Education should be cashiered along with public schools, it makes sense to go after teachers. If you think unions keep the money out of the hands of the ruling class, and the rulers’ good defines your own, then union-busting makes sense as well.

Across the board, states with Republican governors face a coup against public interests and well-being in the name of fiscal conservatism and balanced budgets. Conservatives attack public interests and civil rights with the zeal of brutal theocrats. Reckless, rash policies are being pushed on an unwilling public. Think Progress has listed what the various governors are up to and it’s shocking. The question at hand is obvious: why are we letting this happen?

We no longer think for ourselves. According to the laws of capitalism, when business is booming, companies make money, competition prevails, and costs come down. In 2011, we’re told that business is bad and times are dire. How is it, then, that corporations world-wide are reporting their “best quarter ever?” Although business can boom for a while even as costs climb and jobs go south, I can’t imagine saying, “Well, those poor corporations have to spend more so I guess it’s all right if they get all those tax breaks.” Conservatives everywhere not only say this, they claim tax breaks as entitlements.

Similarly, years of propaganda have painted Social Security — an insurance program the rich will never need but the poor can’t do without — as causing such a drain on America’s coffers that it endangers our future. Thirty years of propaganda and the pretense of trickle-down voodoo have trained us to accept such lies and yield to fiscal authority, draining us of the creativity and imagination we need to fight off the vampires of big business.

Len gave us a W. H. Auden quote this week that covered this perfectly: “Evil has every advantage but one – it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil. but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself.”

That’s quite a statement. Essentially, it explains the surreal down-the-rabbit-hole experience we are having in this nation. It also proves one of my favorite “ah-ha” statements: you can’t go back. First, let me establish that I don’t think evil merits the capital letter — it’s mundane at best and very much a product of human failing. This seems simple enough to me. One is either loving or unloving. What is unloving is hurtful. What is deliberately hurtful is evil. There it is: mundane, selfish and entirely human. “Evil” is the polarity to “good,” and — brace yourself — we made both up. These are not functions of the natural world, but of the one we’ve created.

The spiritual movement has told us that we are the authors of our own realities, the dreamers of our own dreams within a collective illusion that we are free to influence. When we create in joy and wonder, doors of energy open to receive us, and even the improbable becomes possible. When we add fear to the mix, Maya is strengthened and we become stuck, battling our lower instincts. Our anachronistic tribalism — loyalty to family or to party or to nation, above all else — keeps us playing small and must be enlarged to embrace the global tribe if humanity is to endure. According to Auden, and echoed by a larger spiritual community, our outcome can be changed using imagination. There is much, then, to re-imagine. But first we have to agree that it is within our ability to imagine anew, that it is not too late to change our circumstances.

We have the capacity to recreate ourselves if we wish, but first we have to put the darkness behind us. As we re-imagine ourselves within our social contract, I long for the time when we won’t need a union to protect our working rights or a government mandate to make sure the poorest among us is fed or cared for. I yearn for the just world we can create together, brothers and sisters dedicated to life and love. Michael Niman wrote an article entitled Unionize Everybody! in which he illustrated how far we’ve come from the years of prosperity we once enjoyed. As we remember when this was possible, we must affirm that it is probable in the years ahead. He wrote:

So my question, which should be painfully obvious, is why are we vilifying union members for successfully defending a right we should all enjoy? Rather than adopting the feudalist argument that none of us should have health care, why not insist that we all have health care? Why don’t we all fight to have the same health care as Teamsters have? The same can be said for all other rights that unions have successfully defended. Shouldn’t we all have the right to some modicum of job security — perhaps a mandate that we be fired for a reason, as union contracts often provide, rather than be fired on a political or ageist whim? Shouldn’t we all have a right to be protected as whistleblowers when we see our bosses acting immorally or illegally? Shouldn’t we all have a right to contribute to a guaranteed pension system that won’t be looted by our employers? Shouldn’t we all have the right to work in a safe environment? Shouldn’t we all have the ability to negotiate a living wage? Is this really a radical notion?

Those who play us against each other are classic examples of evildoers, promoting mundane, lower-level thinking to keep us separate from one another. Petty envies and jealousies needn’t exist in the society we imagine. Equality is the loving choice. In order to re-imagine our world, we must stop believing that any of us deserves anything less than the full portion of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness guaranteed by our Constitution. We have to stop imagining that the world is too big, the times too harsh to make the changes that are necessary to our ability to thrive and bloom.

Need an example? Think about Detroit, a place most of us can agree has been pummeled and discarded by this economy. You know what’s going on in Detroit? A renaissance of gardening and green craft, a thriving new order of self-respect and creativity. When the going gets tough, the imagination sparks. Let’s summon that spark in order to conceive of a just world, a healed nation and a balanced, productive future. Then, let’s step back to let the windows of energy open on the glorious possibilities.

Tell the doubters, it’s not too late for anything. In my imagination, it’s just beginning.