Be A Light

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

This has been a news week that, for me, dotted the I and crossed the T in the word idiot* — as in, “Good grief, we’re behaving like idiots!” Oh, I don’t just mean the obvious dust-up over Anthony Weiner’s penis, which has apparently named itself Carlos Danger and sexted its likeness to any woman willing to engage in its fantasies. Nor am I suggesting that the growing rightward-leaning tantrum over Hanoi Jane’s cameo as Nancy Reagan in the soon-to-be-released movie, The Butler, or the casting of lefties Robin Williams as Ike and John Cusack as Nixon, is less than might have been expected from a political philosophy gone so radical and antiquated as to be fatally anachronistic.

I suppose I’m just weary with the public appetite for the salacious and mundane, happy as clams dining on a mix of rumor, innuendo and self-righteousness, and currently found evident by our breathless desire — on all news channels, mind you — to watch a seemingly befuddled, twisted creep in Cleveland accept a plea bargain that will keep him alive awhile longer, if pinned like a bug on a board. Life plus a thousand years seems just right for sexual predator Ariel Castro, with more than a thousand criminal counts against him.

And what does this particular evil look like? Paunchy, balding, only the slightest bit defiant when in chains. While we’re at it, what does narcissism look like? Drags the wife up to the stage to make her share in the global humiliation it has wrought — as masterfully detailed by John Oliver on Comedy Central — and then expects us to respect its personal privacy in sexual matters. Right.

Haven’t we been through all this before? Don’t these topics seem dull, lifeless, so … yesterday? The unyielding nationalistic response to Jane Fonda doing a spot-on interpretation of Ron’s Nancy seems about as relevant today as Weiner’s ability to outdistance his sexual history or Castro’s chances of dodging his. Fonda’s comment to those who still have Vietnam on their mind? “Get a life.” A bit sharp, but then she’s done her mea culpas in years gone by, apologized and issued statements of regret for an incident decades behind her. Those who wish to brand her a perpetual Commie sympathizer and traitor are those who wish to remain in the old paradigm energies, and therein lies the actual critical issue of our times.

While these examples seem more about social issues than political, they’re as entwined as kudzu up a power pole. We might say this blurring of lines is true now, more than ever, but if Julius Caesar were alive to interview, we might ask him about the bread and circuses that defined his political landscape and be surprised at the similarities between (these two versions of) expectations of the populous and political aspirations of a fading empire.

Why political? Because Castro’s holding three women in their very own neighborhood for a decade should make the current search for over 500 missing women in Cleveland an electric, relevant concern, but instead we remain indifferent to the class and color of those disappeared. That Castro’s victims were overlooked so long, that hundreds of similar victims are still gone without trace, should be a political hot potato. So far, it isn’t.

Concerns that a dramatic portrayal of presidents served by a black butler across three decades might be acted by any other than the authentically conservative is a useless slap at “liberal Hollywood,” but the truth is inescapable: the profession itself requires the kind of empathy that loosens the hard edges of bias and encourages progressive thought. Finding conservative actors to represent the three Pub presidents would surely change the quality, if not the content, of this anticipated movie. Art requires the wiggle room found outside conventional boxes, and the profession of acting, much like water, has found its own level, politically speaking.

(Scouting around for a similar group approved of by the right, all I can summon are the televangelists so enthusiastically embraced by conservatives. I’m specifically thinking of bearded and white-haired, Tammy Faye-less Jim Baker, who sells freeze-dried foods and bomb shelters in anticipation of Armageddon every morning on my television. These “entertainers” represent cults of personality and ideology rather than the in-depth character studies preferred by actors, of course: no stretching of personal bias required.)

As for Anthony Weiner, whose prior political performance revealed him to be a — forgive me — real hotdog looking for the limelight without providing any viable legislation, his character flaws will lead the way in the New York mayoral election. His numbers seem to be dropping and I can understand why. I have little interest in Weiner’s personal life or problems, nor do I condemn his activity since I’m not privy to the arrangement he has with his wife, but I think his preoccupation with his little alter-ego, Mr. Dangerous, overshadows good sense and renders his veracity suspect. As John Oliver suggested, he should give up this addiction (to politics) and default to what obviously captures his imagination: sexting.

We speak often about losing our balance; we’ve also lost our historical perspective, or rather, surrendered it without a murmur to replace it with versions we like better. If that isn’t idiocy, I don’t know what is. It’s a difficult conclusion to avoid. For instance, I told myself earlier this year that I wanted to reread Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States — a refresher course in how we got where we are today — but it’s late in the season and I’m not there yet.

Guess I’ll have to make that a goal for the Fall or slap it into my bucket list, for later. And I suppose I’d better hurry, since neighboring Indiana has declared eradication of all things Zinn, his American history deemed “propaganda,” preferring cultural mythos and nationalism to objective truth. Sadly, my own state probably won’t be far behind, given its current Bagger political majority and intent to turn back time to the Middle Ages. Indeed, the volume I speak of has a home in the local library only because it was donated by our little Democratic PAC. I check often to make sure it’s still there.

There are always two roads to travel, always a higher octave of behavior to emulate. In politics those roads traditionally look like cronyism or statesmanship. True, few rise to the level of statesman, but we saw a reasonable percentage struggle to do so in past generations. Where are they now, I wonder? We seem to have spent too many years feathering our own little political nests to remember the diversity of our commonwealth and all that’s at stake.

Service to country? Social responsibility, civic engagement, public investment? Did you, like me, suck in your breath, shocked to hear that someone vandalized the Lincoln Memorial, throwing green paint across the lovely marble columns and Abe’s legs? Did those who acted so callously have any idea what they did, besides serve their own impulse to disrespect an iconic monument? Have they any sense that they despoiled the very symbolism of civil rights and social progress, a universal intent that carries the highest energetic signature? And before we cast the first stone, do we have any idea what misinformation or social maladaptation brought the vandals to such an act? Lost in our outrage, will we even care?

In an AlterNet piece entitled The United States Is Awash in Public Stupidity, and Critical Thought Is Under Assault, writer Henry A. Giroux blames a cocktail of rogue capitalism, sovereignty of war and state violence for the loss of our dedication to egalitarian democracy, to economic and social justice. He cites evidence of the growing police state — which to my mind is a form of nihilism — as a factor in developing a population more interested in survival of self than in service to commonality and sustainability. And while I agree with most of what he proposes, I think that what we face today can better be described as a spiritual crisis.

If we accept the premise that we are spiritual beings, having a human experience, our experience becomes much larger and more meaningful than if we consider ourselves finite creatures, squirrels hunting a limited supply of nuts. And while I love the best of Christian thought, the worst of it has melded with politics to create us as a nation of opportunists — every squirrel for itself, in essence — chasing around to secure its little piece before some illusionary freeloader tries to steal it away. These are the same sociopolitical camps that justify the chains that enabled this nation’s earliest capitalism with Bible verses, the xenophobia that self-protects based on Old Testament passages inscribed in the sand when Moses was a pup. This is old paradigm patriarchy, the punishment model of an antiquated Testament, in defiance of the compassionate declarations of the New.

To me, there is no distance between what I consider myself to be as a spiritual creature and the one I consider myself to be as a citizen. My allegiance to All That Is as part of myself cannot be served if I am withholding from others or judging their worthiness to be a portion of the whole. Indeed, the farther away from the basic tenets of democratic thought we stray, the more self-serving and single-dimensional we become, and we’ve seen what that’s accomplished in our social structure. The corporate dominance of our political system, the corruption of our economic system, are a distillation of our misunderstanding of what we are, why we came and what we’re capable of being.

If we are in this together, who can be left out? If we are all of the same energy signal, the same spiritual stuff, which of us must be cast away? If we think of ourselves as squirrels running for the nuts, only the fastest win; yet if we begin to feed one another, to value one another, to act for the benefit of all of us, then our experience of our self is changed by grace and our needs met by other than competition. Truly, when we act in concert with our highest principals, we become something more than we thought we were. We become who we really are.

Neale Donald Walsch put this Emerson quote, from his Essays, on the first page of his book, The New Revelations:

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth.

We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, “How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?” We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake …”

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestation of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life.

In terms of gathered astrological energy, this is a week of Revelation. This is a moment “to know.” It is no longer appropriate to light a candle at the shrine of God/dess, that one of whom we begged blessing and assistance in times past. Our growing understanding of our selves as creatures marked by divinity requires us to step into our power — responsibility, if you will — not just for self but for one another as well.

That is not too big a job, once we suspend old belief about what that might mean. In fact, once we escape the box of limited thinking and the habitual judgment of presumed deservedness, it becomes much simpler to see how our own good cannot fully manifest unless it intends to serve the good of all.

This is easier than it seems. Too quote our own Len Wallick, in his blog post on Inclusion:

You don’t have to change the world, or even your life. You just have to stop thinking of yourself as separate — from other people, from the Earth, from the universe. All you have to do is count yourself in and make that counting the arbiter of all you think, say, and do for as long as you inhabit your body. Somebody has to go first. Somebody said the water’s fine.

If you’re reading this, you didn’t come to this moment to light a candle, you came to be the Light. This is our moment to shine, and being aware of that opportunity is another step toward our enlightenment. Nothing is separate, everything is inclusive and as we grow into that realization, we shine brighter, minds open, hearts surrendered.

The personal, the political, the spiritual: how do we separate them, one from the other? We don’t. This coming week feel free to practice love and be the Light. Do it with passion, with intent, with appreciation! You might be surprised, on the other side, to discover how much your soul knows, and what a genuine relief it is to let go of all that isn’t love.

* Obviously, this term is used to mean, as referenced by the dictionary, a person who is foolish or senseless; not the insensitive and obsolete definition of a person with an IQ under 25.