Remembering Our Common Dreams

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Having survived our mid-week tour through the eye of the storm known as the Grand Cross, we can look back and discover yet again that the sky didn’t fall in the way we expected it to. We humans come by our tendency toward literalism honestly. When someone tells us the barn is on fire, we expect to smell smoke. When we hear that the president was born in Kenya, we want to see baby pictures outside the family homestead. When we hear the nation is in trouble, we look around and see if not just ourselves, but our neighbors and friends as well, are struggling, because seeing is believing — or at least it used to be.

For several years, believing seemed to come first for many of us, not only defining the way we saw things, but the way we insisted on seeing them. It’s always easier to find the simplistic view when our educational system prefers religious opinion to science and history; it’s more comfortable to see the world through a filter of nationalistic propaganda than through stark reality. When we stopped teaching and encouraging critical thinking in our young, subjecting them to impassioned religious rhetoric entwined in absolutes as a matter of course — like climate change denial, re-written history, and expectations of sexual abstinence rather than sound sex ed — how can we expect them to discover their betrayal at the hands of pay-for-play politicians and for-profit corporations? Whom can they trust?

Black and white thinking is not only the most adolescent way in which to view life on Planet Terra — zero sum, winners/losers, good/evil — but has become the default position in our culture, sold to us over decades by those who have methodically milked the cash cow of our ignorance. Nuanced thinking, on the other hand, not only demands a longer view and deeper understanding of human behavior, it requires us to develop and use compassion and empathy, to approach problem solving from a wider spectrum of possibility. It asks us to break through the thick walls of literal religious rhetoric and cultural superstition, to work our spiritual muscle, let in a little more light.

I’m betting that when we look back on this time in history, we’ll see that it provided us a pivot point in the mad dash to turn back the clock of America’s enchantment with the vigilantism and “might makes right” ideals of the Wild Wild West, the romanticism of those early days when complex government regulation couldn’t thwart cut-throat opportunism or prevent purchased political influence. Perhaps we’ll even retire the delusion that if Negroes “learned” to pick cotton to keep their family together, they’d be happier than they are now, as families torn by a disproportionate arrest rate among black males and supported by government handouts. Maybe we’ll even give up on stereotyping any non-white citizen, instead simply counting them as fellow Americans.

Little by little, we’ve returned to a 21st century version of harsh and crippling bygone days that very few of us would choose to live in. Life has turned into a bad movie where Stand Your Ground requires that we all become gunslingers, where FDR’s protections against monopoly and plutocracy are largely forgotten, where forms of slavery are not just defined by color but by classism and an unlivable minimum wage, with voting, sexual and equal rights based on the serendipity of state doctrines.

In fact, standing on a precipice looking down at an America mired in corruption and fiscal inequity, ankle-deep in oligarchy and social irrelevance, most of us are fully (and finally) informed that, as populist heroine and excellent human, Senator Elizabeth Warren tells us, “The system is rigged.” Warren’s long-awaited new memoir, A Fighting Chance, hit the top five books sold at Amazon and Barnes & Nobel immediately upon launch. The senator is a teacher first, and, as are most good teachers, a story-teller. Among the things she wants us to know is that wealth and power dominate politics so completely now that if democracy is to survive, we must take immediate steps to stop big money corruption.

Every headline we read gives us another reason to become an activist. If change is going to happen, that must be our initial response. For the first time, our Canadian neighbors to the north have a wealthier, more stable middle class than Americans. All of the banking irregularities that put us in meltdown at the end of Bush’s reign are being committed again, and even worse. The banks that were too big to fail are now bigger by a third than when we first questioned their continuance. Studies show that CEOs of the top 350 corporations earn approximately 331 times what the average worker earns, and not only do those individuals pay a lower tax rate than their employees, the corporations they head often pay no taxes at all. In some cases they receive whopping returns, to add to the corporate welfare our government hands out to keep industry happy.

Even the origin of wealth is changing. In what has become a nation run by and for private concerns, the preponderance of big money will be inherited in 15 or so years, a reflection that we see in Sam Walton’s relatives: six people richer than small countries, controlling a fortune equal to the combined wealth of the bottom 42 percent of Americans. This is called dynastic wealth, creating an upper crust that makes its own rules, something we got a gut-full of around the turn of the last century, during the Gilded Age.

For some of us, class isn’t an issue. For me, it isn’t. Maybe it’s past life stuff, but I don’t feel the “better than” or “worse than” tugs, even when in the company of those resting on their moneyed laurels, so I was really interested in Elizabeth Warren’s comment about Wall Street. “I think a lot of people are struggling to get hold of the psychology of the big money movers on Wall Street. Yeah. They’re not like you and me.”

In their minds they aren’t, anyway, and that evidently gives them latitude to do anything they like. Sychronistically, I watched the latest version of The Great Gatsby on HBO this week. I’ve never cared much for Fitzgerald’s story of wealth and privilege in 1922, but I was interested in the production values, lush sets and costumes set against a modern musical score. It was well done, I thought, beautifully filmed, if depressing. And in the end, when Gatsby is finally undone, defined by his class, defiled for all the evils of the moment and betrayed by his lady-love, the narrator — Nick Carraway, Daisy’s white-collar cousin — explains how sadly impersonal was the great man’s demise, those responsible isolated and protected by their means and expectations.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Careless people, obscene amounts of money. The quote seems forerunner to Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good,” and originator of those empty-eyed photos of Paris Hilton and other “Prada Pattys” with their pocket pets, over the years. These aren’t attractive faces or laudable humans, yet even now, the seduction of such wealth and privilege threads its way through our daydreams. It runs the engine of some cities, like Washington D.C., bubbled in pretense and power. How could it not? Politics and lobbying and money brokers, a perfect mix to run amok. There are more sociopaths on Wall Street than anywhere else, they say, and yet our culture still approves that level of cold-blooded drive and enterprise, rewarded by vast financial boon.

Another book that has taken public awareness by storm is an economic study, Capital In The Twenty-First Century, by French economist, Thomas Piketty. I heard about this book some time ago — an analysis of two centuries of economic activity in 20 countries — rumored a game-changer, and it looks to be. Bill Moyers interviewed an enthusiastic Paul Krugman who said it changed everything for him, adding “The world is not the way I saw it.” Moyers agreed, calling Piketty’s work “an epiphany.” Piketty argues that unfettered capitalism creates extreme income inequality, and widens the breach between the haves and have-nots. He proposes a global wealth tax to shore up or establish a viable middle class around the world, which Krugman tells us could happen if America would lead the nations.

Elizabeth Warren summed up the tome with just a sentence or two: “Trickle down doesn’t work, never did.” Even Pappy Bush knew “voodoo” economics when he saw them. Odd that this theory is hardly news, and yet the data are so overwhelming and artfully presented, that it provides the financial talking heads an ah-ha moment. (Or perhaps the astrological timing is more perfect than the author could have imagined?) You will find an excellent discussion between Moyers and Krugman, bottom of the (linked) page.

A third book, a New York Times best-seller on the vagaries of high-frequency trading and the predators who practice it — Flash Boys by Michael Lewis — got ’60 Minute’ coverage last month. Money quote from Lewis? “It’s bigger than a scam, it’s the stock market.” That says it all, huh? More about the books and further links can be found here.

The system has broken down so completely that there’s little chance of returning this nation to social and fiscal balance without active citizens, intent on restoration of government designed as the champion of public welfare. It’s that or roll over and die, go back to sleepwalking through our lives. The Supreme Court has partnered with corporate wealth to buy politics and deliver regressive policy (as vehemently opposed by Justice Sonya Sotomayor). The President — even when he attempts to do something progressive, as here and here — fails to bring about the change he promises, and our increasingly militarized police force is more likely to shoot us or our dog than the burglar we report in our yard. We’ve come to a pretty pass, out of sync with all we were taught to expect from our nation.

If God/dess is good, and we find the political will to stand up to the ethical challenges of our time, this will be that moment when most of us finally accept the fact that there’s no one out there to rescue us. If things are going to change, we’re the ones who will have to do the deed. Perhaps this will be that moment when we admit that it’s time to grow up and take charge of ourselves and our reality. If we look around, we’ll find that the vast majority support the same changes we long for, and that they will stand with us. We no longer have to change hearts and minds, that’s done.

What we need now is to remediate a system that ignores the will of the people. Bold political solutions will not happen unless we demand them. The next leg of the journey must be as engaged citizens, able to ask hard questions of those who stand in the way of positive change and demand action of those who have been elected to represent us. And while we do that individually, we don’t do it alone.

Back in the days when labor unions were birthing in bloody confrontation, the people who stood up to big money were a mixed bag of nationalities, many newly American. There were communists and socialists, those who fled from monarchy and mayhem, people who had left deprivation behind in search of a new and hopeful future. Their differences divided them but their common problems aligned them. They found their true north in the promises of the Preamble and the Constitution, the hope of protections for the working class. They pushed forward for themselves and for their children, depending on survival skills we’ve largely forgotten. Now we must do the same, not just for the nation but to achieve a sustainable future for the whole planet.

Here’s a wave from the Grand Cross, where the First House and the Seventh of the Aries/Libra opposition take form for the good of the whole. I AM can find full expression in the WE ARE group dynamics that have discovered and embraced common dreams and goals, passions and loyalties. Take full advantage of the groups in which you have invested, those that support you. Join arms with others that touch your heart.

Remember, when we talk about relationship, our larger relationships to national identity, global citizenship and common interests must not be forgotten. As we evolve, as we heal, so must the soul of the nation. As we grow, as we lift one another up, so will the beloved planet be lifted. As we shine, so will all the world receive Light.