{"id":45941,"date":"2011-09-24T05:10:10","date_gmt":"2011-09-24T09:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=45941"},"modified":"2011-09-26T14:39:05","modified_gmt":"2011-09-26T18:39:05","slug":"a-bridge-too-far-reclaiming-our-american-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/a-bridge-too-far-reclaiming-our-american-dream\/","title":{"rendered":"A Bridge Too Far: Reclaiming Our American Dream"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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A passage from Howard Zinn’s book, Killing People to \u2018Send a Message,\u2019<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

This case was so freighted with contradictions that a stay of execution was clearly in order. As Amnesty International spokesperson Laura Moye stated: \u201cToday Georgia didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Here’s a bumper sticker that seems to have caught the imagination of the nation:<\/p>\n

“I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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).<\/p>\n

Ahhhhh<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

Ahhhhh<\/em>, 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. I<\/span>nstitutions 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cemergency,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Chomsky’s commentary<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 which our constitutional scholar of a president always speaks to, when let off his leash — are what is left to us.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1744],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45941"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45941\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}