Entering the Darkest Time of Year, and the Yearning for Gifts of Light; Are There Any Gifts We Can Give Each Other to Help Us Survive the Coming Years?

Both politically and seasonally, we’re entering the darkest time of year for those of us in the northern hemisphere and the US. The winter solstice is this week, along with several other seasonal and spiritual holidays. And in the next year, next month, a new political reality arises, filled with so many unknowns and threats, threats that might convince us to physically or emotionally emigrate from the new reality in the US. So, are there any gifts we can give each other to help us survive the coming years? And to find the awareness, the strength to better perceive opportunities for appropriate action and better take care of ourselves and our loved ones?

 

I would like to suggest a different sort of holiday gift, a gift of resources, programs to listen to, books to read, different emotions to share to strengthen ourselves, our friends and others. The first is difficult right now for many of us⎼ gratitude. With so many threats and unknowns staring us in the face, we might ask what do we have to be grateful for?

 

I was driving home earlier in the week listening to Here and Now on NPR, and there was an interview with Monica Bartlett, Professor of Psychology of the Positive Emotion and Social Behavior Lab at Ganzaga University. She spoke about how gratitude can be healing in times when we’re frightened and feel isolated and powerless. We all share a negativity bias. We tend to think first about our safety, more about what might hurt us than what might uplift us. And this negativity just enhances our fear. In contrast, when we feel gratitude, we feel more powerful and capable. And when we care for others, it’s easier to feel cared for.

 

Professor Bartlett suggests practices like pausing near the end of the day and writing down 3 things we’re grateful for, no matter how small, and recognizing who we interacted with or why that event happened. This can include a person we know well, or the person at the supermarket who showed us where to find what we were looking for, or a pet. Their research showed such a simple practice highlights the connections between ourselves and others, the good others bring to our lives, and the power in relationships to better the world.

 

Then there’s compassion⎼ it’s such a powerful source for freeing ourselves of suffering. One day as I was meditating on compassion, by doing a Buddhist practice of taking a moment to stop what I’m doing, sit down in a quiet space, and saying to myself “may I be happy, may X be happy. May I be healthy, may X be healthy. May I be at peace, may X be at peace. May all beings be free of suffering.” And I just felt the breathing, in and out. And suddenly, my problems, worries, and plans stopped repeating themselves in my mind. There was a silence so deep no thoughts appeared, yet nothing was missing.

 

Compassion goes beyond empathy, to not only recognize the suffering of others, or myself, but a readiness to act to reduce that suffering. Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg points out it’s the opposite of passivity. It readies us to act in recognition of our interdependence, our shared presence in the world, and for the benefit of all. Of doing whatever we feel ready to do, to help a neighbor in need, or to support or start a political action to help millions in need.

 

A third recommendation returns us to the healing power of a pet, or to the bond with or care for another being…

 

*To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project.

The Conversation that Arises Out of Everything: What We Feed in Ourselves Lives in Ourselves

When a conversation begins in our mind, what do we do? When we respond to such a conversation by just listening, wondering, then letting it go, we learn from it and it usually passes. When we talk back, or hold onto it, the conversation continues. Even if we step back from it for a while, it carries on someplace in us. What we feed, lives.

 

A feral cat has lived in our neighborhood for at least 6 months. For months, he kept coming to our house. He would show up at different doors of our home and call to us. He would hang out with one of our cats sometimes, or at least not get in a fight. But if we’d try to get close to him, or even open the door when he was there, and he’d run quickly away. He’d never let us close.

 

Then one day, my wife gave it food, despite knowing the likely consequences. It was just too painful to hear him cry or see his need. Then a few days later, she did it again. The cat appeared more often, but still ran when we opened a door and roamed without us seeing him for hours or days. Then my wife did it again. And then every day. Then twice a day. Then he let her touch him. Then he let me pet him. And now? Now he acts like he’s ours. He follows us around or hangs out by the front door on our deck, looks in the kitchen window with pleading eyes, and dreams of us taking him in.

 

It’s the same with the content of our mind. What we feed becomes us, or “ours.”

 

The painful follow up with the cat is that we took him to the ASPCA, who vaccinated and neutered him, but wouldn’t take him in for adoption; they were too full. We next took him to our vet, for tests and further treatment. It turns out he has feline AIDS. Now, we must figure out what to do next. We have two other cats, who are indoor-outdoor. Even though feline AIDS is not easily transmissible, and humans are safe from it, there’s still a chance he might infect our other pets. In fact, our vet said that if we took in the stray, infection would be inevitable. Plus, he would need to live only indoors so he doesn’t spread the disease or get injured himself.

 

He must’ve had a home, once. Did they kick him out of their home and cut him from their heart? Or did they just run out of money to care for him? I wonder if they even knew he was sick and were afraid of, or didn’t want to face, a cat with AIDS?

 

What we try to ignore or cut from our hearts stays with us. The cat might be physically gone for this person. But the memory? The pain? The guilt? Cutting out is just another and more harmful form of feeding. It’s feeding what psychologist Carl Jung called our shadow, the part of our self that we deny, won’t or can’t acknowledge and try to project onto others but carry with us as a weight. To let go proficiently, we must do it with awareness, care, compassion, even love. What we feed in us becomes us.

 

I have to say that hearing that the cat had AIDS hurt so much….

 

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

What is Personal Strength? One Way to Demonstrate Who We Are

What is strength? Weakness? It’s not just aerobic capacity. It’s not just physical. It’s not how much weight we can physically lift but maybe how much reality we can allow ourselves to feel, consider, and act upon.

 

How would any of us like it if we were mistreated? If our children didn’t respect us and quarreled even with each other? If the schools our children attended were filled with people perpetually angry, constantly looking for revenge, and ready to attack before being attacked? Who held grievances they wouldn’t let go of and wouldn’t listen to anyone that expressed an opinion different from their own?

 

Or imagine a workplace like that, where no fellow worker would compromise or work on solving any problems or disagreements, and then spent their time and energy blaming someone else for the failure to get anything accomplished or a workplace filled with mistrust. And then they used fear and intimidation to get what they wanted⎼ their agenda or no agenda. These are not places filled with people I’d consider strong.

 

This is the US GOP led House of Representatives. They quarrel not only with Democrats but each other. Who could forget that, in a historic situation, it took them four days and 15 rounds of voting to elect Kevin McCarthy as Speaker? The Hard-Right GOP later removed McCarthy for the sin of working with Democrats to keep the government functioning⎼ and took 22 days to replace him. Too many threaten opponents with violence instead of trying to talk or negotiate.

 

Too many don’t care about governing as much as seizing power, attacking President Biden, and saying no to legislation proposed by Democrats, even if the proposed legislation will help the nation. What have they done besides holding up funding the government? Or starting an impeachment investigation into President Biden with an accusation of fraud, despite the fact that there was no evidence of fraud? Even their own witnesses in their investigation proved nothing except the corruption of the GOP accusers. Or they threaten to remove President Biden from the ballot in GOP states in order to stop or make meaningless Colorado and Maine removing DJT from the ballot for his involvement in the January 6th violent insurrection.

 

Too many accuse others of fraud to distract from the prosecutions of their own leader(s) for fraud and to make the reality of corruption and its destructiveness meaningless⎼ or to make it seem that all leaders, all of us, do it. I don’t know about anyone else, and I’m not always successful, but I do my best to be sincere and honest, not corrupt.

 

Too many use hate and violence as tools of manipulation. But hate is a way we distance ourselves from others, blinding us, or anyone, from what we’re doing to ourselves and others. It is moral weakness and pain masquerading as strength. It deprives these GOP of the character, patience, or ethical system required to work on the substantive issues we face as a nation, or to care about the pain and difficulties our fellow Americans face. Such work requires the strength to listen to and respect other people as being important. The ability to self-reflect, be patient, and feel empathy illustrate what I think is true strength.

 

The world is suffering deeply right now. Many of us in the US have so much compared to others in this country, and world. There is a great concentration of wealth causing immense poverty. Too many people worldwide are suffering from disasters caused by the climate emergency. Too many are suffering in Palestine and Israel, Ukraine, etc. The GOP just try to deny the threat the climate emergency and wars are to us; yet the threats continue. As an article in the Atlantic Monthly put it, we (our environment) can’t afford another DJT Presidency. We, all the people on the earth, can’t afford another DJT presidency. During the DJT administration, they scrubbed data on global warming, undermined the EPA and environmental laws, pulled out of international agreements, etc. etc.

 

We might cry out in anguish, “What can I do? What effect can I, alone, have?” As if, in a democracy of millions one person should have such an effect. As if each of us was an isolated being, uninfluenced by or incapable of affecting others, and independent of the earth….

 

*To read the whole piece, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

When I Was Blessed by A Crow: We Soar on Wings We Never Knew We Had, into A Sky We Never Knew Existed

Were you ever blessed by a crow?

 

When I was around 13 or 14, I started playing tackle football on a sandlot team. We played in a park less than a mile from my home. For three years, a crow used to come to the practices and for almost every game. We sometimes fed it. But mostly, it was just there, hopping around, watching, and we began to think of him, her, them as a friend. I never had the superstition that crows meant misfortune, but rather I associated them with good fortune. A blessing from nature.

 

If, when walking, sitting, or standing somewhere, ruminating⎼ lost in thought amidst the noises or silence around us⎼ and a crow flies above us, its harsh call can save us. We can listen, and then silence arrives as if summoned. Other times, the call comes so intermittently we can barely stay with it. But if we can accept its offer, however brief, and listen closely, our attention is re-awakened. We open to whatever is there in that moment.

 

It’s like hearing a friend call to us, or a voice from a dream, or from deep inside our bones. It comes to us, and we can fly into it. We can fly into a sound so full it makes room for everything. And then we soar on wings we never knew we had into a sky we never knew existed⎼ a sky so empty it welcomes us home.

 

Or if we allow ourselves to feel the life of a crow, or maybe anything, to feel that it feels life, feels wind and rain as we do⎼ or maybe differently, but just as crucially, and then we become more alive. It’s so tricky to let go of ourselves and our concerns, our schedules, our anything, or the theatre of our lives. Crows can be a blessing to us all.

 

But it’s not the only call we can focus on. When we meditate, natural sounds like the speech of crows, or chickadees, the rain, wind, or ocean⎼ or the sight of a waterfall or smell of a honeysuckle, or an artwork, anything we find beautiful⎼ can give us something to disappear into. If we welcome it, listening to the calls of whatever we find beautiful can be a wonderful way to let worry and anxiety fly away, leaving a clear sky, or mind, behind.

 

I’ve read meditation teachers advising us to find the emptiness before a thought. That’s so difficult. And I don’t know how much crows think or hold thoughts, or whether they’re adept at finding the emptiness before thought. I do know they are incredibly smart. I once wrote a blog about 3 crows who often visited my yard. I’ve tried to take their picture. But even though I’m inside the house, if I pass a window, they follow me with their eyes. If I just look, they look back. Or they simply eat. But if I pick up a camera, they know. They fly. And when I allow it, the crows fly me to silence. They reflect to me different shapes of myself, exposing who or what is watching, or doing the watching….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

An Experiment the Universe is Conducting Right Now: Our Theories About Who We Are Shape How We Feel and How We Act ⎼ Revised

When I was teaching high school, students often asked: If it’s true that humans are (or can be) compassionate, why is there so much human-caused suffering and hurt in the world?

 

One scientific experiment greatly influenced, for decades, how many people thought about this question. This is the “obedience experiment” carried out by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s, just after the beginning of the Eichmann trial. In that experiment, a volunteer was asked to play a teacher to help another person, the “student,” learn word pairs. Each time the “student” replied with the wrong word, the “teacher” would seemingly give them an electric shock. The voltage of the shock was increased with each wrong answer.

 

The “teacher” sat in one room before an electronic control panel and could see through a window into the room where the “student” sat hooked up to wires. A white-coated experimenter stood in the room with the “teacher” encouraging and instructing with comments like, ”Continue using the 450 volt switch for each wrong answer.” The experimenter repeated these instructions even as the “student” began to scream⎼ and later drop over, silent. The “teacher” raised objections at times; but as the instructions continued, the “teacher” continued the shocks. The student was, in fact, an actor; the shocks to the “student” were not real. However, the emotional effect on the “teacher” was real.

 

It was initially reported by Milgram that 65% of the “teachers” continued to shock their students even to a lethal level. But, according to author and researcher Gina Perry, that statistic was only true with one of the 24 versions of the experiment. There were over 700 people involved in the experiments, and the 65% represented only 26 people. There were some variations of the experiment where no one obeyed the authority. If she is correct, this drastically changes how we might understand the experiment.

 

The philosopher Jacob Needleman studied the visual recordings of the experiment and commented on the facial expression and speech of one of the “teachers.” When questioned just after the experiment was over, the “teacher” said, “I don’t like that one bit. I mean, he [the “student”] wanted to get out and we just keep throwing 450 volts…” The teacher was dazed, and under further questioning couldn’t let themself comprehend what they had done. They couldn’t comprehend their own feelings let alone allow themselves to feel what the “student” might have felt.

 

A startling parallel to Milgram was a series of experiments by Doctor of Psychology, Daniel Batson, who tested whether people would act compassionately to save others from suffering. In one experiment, volunteer subjects, like Milgram’s teachers, watched people receive shocks when they incorrectly answered a memory task. The volunteer was told the person they were watching had suffered trauma as a child. They were then given the choice to leave the experiment or receive the shock intended for the supposed trauma victim. Many subjects felt such compassion for the other person they actually volunteered to take on their pain.

 

What is the message of these experiments? Milgram’s experiment is often considered a cautionary tale revealing the potential for evil in all of us⎼ and the “evil” demonstrated by Milgram arises from our propensity to obey authority despite clear evidence of the wrongness of the act. But why do we hear so much more about this experiment than Batson’s, whose work demonstrates the capacity for compassion?…

 

Happy New Year, and may 2024 be an even better year for all of us than we imagine.

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

**

Original post:

https://irarabois.com/who-are-we-humans-the-milgram-experiments/

 

When Fear and Hate Burns in One of Us, It Could Ignite Any of Us: What Kind of Human Being Will Emerge from The Flames?

 

It’s gray and raining. Raining as if the earth itself were crying. As if the gray “inside” me and the gray “outside” were one and the same. As if the very light of the world was going out.

 

We’ve had so many gray, shattering moments over the last seven or so years. The election of a wanna-be dictator, who put his own darkness as more important than the life of anyone else. Luckily, we also had some relief, some sunshine, as he, despite his lies, was voted out of office and now faces prosecutions for some of his most major crimes. We had a life-shattering pandemic. We had all the weather disasters signaling the climate itself was shattering. We had the invasion of Ukraine by another dictator.

 

But this…. Hamas invading Israel and committing such torture, of children and of so many others. And then, the whole world waited to see what horrors would follow in retribution, as Israel attempts to free the hostages and end Hamas forever. A whole world seemingly brought to the edge. And then the violence continued.

 

However, as many have said, an idea can’t be killed. Many of us are acting to limit or control the violence. But the killing, maiming, torture, and displacement continues. It must somehow stop.

 

What kind of humanity will emerge from these flames? Who will we, we individuals, and we as a species, show ourselves to be? This moment is all we have.

 

What face will we see as ourselves? What will we do? Will we lay blame, or will we model compassion? Will we care more for securing our assumptions and beliefs than perceiving the reality of the whole⎼ the reality of ourselves, of all humanity, all life? After 70-80 years of such grief, and historic trauma going back before that for years and years, of fear, anger, and horror, compassion is not the first response that might come to us. But what about those of us not in Israel and Palestine?

 

Whenever we feel tempted to believe we know the one and only truth, we must look more carefully. Many of us focus on Israel oppressing the Palestinians for years, keeping millions locked into a tiny space under inhumane conditions. And this, I think, is part of the truth. Or we might see that Hamas has been secretly plotting for years for this moment; planning to utterly destroy the Jewish state, maybe destroy all Jewish people they find. And this, too, is part of the truth. Or maybe other nations in the area have been contributing to keeping Palestinians locked up in Gaza, to serve their own purposes? The situation is so complex; so much I don’t know.

 

But why close our minds with blame, and justify it with hate, instead of feeling our shared humanity? Why must we demonize one person or group? Why must blame come first? Too often, blame paves the road for violence to travel on. Can’t our pain unite us? We need to quickly recognize what or who is dangerous to us. But can’t we use less distorted distinctions than those based solely on race, nationality, religion, gender, etc. to do so?

 

Many claim it’s just human nature to create in and out groups. But whatever we say about human nature we can find factual evidence for the opposite….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

Reading, and Sensing an Immense World: It Takes a Universe

A wonderful friend and former colleague recommended a book to me that I found fascinating. It’s called An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, by Ed Yong. It speaks to so many issues and concerns of our world today.

 

We both live the truth, and an illusion. The world we perceive can be so clear, immediate, and vital to us. Yet it sits imbedded in innumerable other worlds, universes, though we don’t and can’t perceive almost any of them. We mistake what we see for all that is there. What we perceive is not the world but one our human brain and body have evolved to perceive.

 

For example, Yong points out that we humans “cannot sense the faint electric fields that sharks and platypuses can…[nor] the magnetic fields that robins and sea turtles detect.” Our ears can’t hear the ultrasonic calls of hummingbirds or the infrasonic speech of elephants and whales. We can’t perceive the infrared radiation that is the heart of what snakes detect or the ultraviolet light birds and bees sense every moment.

 

Each species has what Yong, borrowing from Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexkull, called an umwelt or perceptual world. A tick does not perceive a tree, green leaves, blue skies. It doesn’t ignore them. It simply is incapable of sensing or knowing them; they are outside its umwelt. Likewise, we can’t sense the tick’s world.

 

Too often we ignore, or are ignorant of these co-existing realties, and we harm other species by imposing our perceptual system bias on them. For example, our submarines use underwater noises that confuse whales and drown out their calls. The glass panes in our homes appear as bodies of water to a bat’s sonar. We hurt our cats and dogs by interfering in their use of their primary sense activity, sniffing, and unknowingly impose our human visual bias on them.

 

If we can’t understand what the other worlds are like to live in, Yong points out maybe we can use our reason and imagination to honor and recognize them. For example, we can imaginatively enter the world of a dog, or even more so, an elephant. Scents, unlike light, do not move in straight lines. They go around corners, up and down, swirl, and twist in all directions. Humans have fine noses. But a dog not only has more sense receptors, a larger olfactory bulb and scent-brain than we do, but a more complicated nasal structure.

 

When we humans exhale, we purge odors from our nose. But each nostril of a dog is divided in two so it can exhale carbon dioxide while inhaling more aromas. This is one reason they can detect low blood sugar levels or tumors in humans or discern a single fingerprint on a microscopic slide even after it was outdoors for a week. They can smell in the air an oncoming storm.

 

For dogs, everything around them includes the scent not only of what’s here, now, but the past and future. And smell has the most direct link to the brain of any sense. And since that link goes right to the brain’s emotional center, I imagine their world is dominated by emotions. Some might doubt the rich emotional lives of many animals but this science argues otherwise….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

 

The Dread That Was Sitting Beside Me Was Now Me: We Appear Like Two So We Can Be One

It finally caught me and then my wife. A thing we have dreaded; a thing that has pursued all of us for over 3 years and has touched everyone in one way or another in multiple times and ways. That has caught most of us. That we hoped and might have imagined was over. COVID.

 

In 2022, the CDC did a study of Americans 16 and older and found 77.5% of us had antibodies from infection. Clearly more of us have been affected since 2022, at least two more, and all the people we all know who have been sick in 2023.

 

It was said, over and over, we’re all in this together. And that is the most fearful thing, and the most hopeful. That maybe we will wake from a collective sleep and realize our mutual relationship, or that it’s not even a relationship but a continuum, or web of interrelations.

 

In the most basic way, someone passes the illness to us. We may pass it to someone else. Which gets to another part of this I had nightmares about: getting others sick. My spouse as number one. I couldn’t stand the thought of her sick, especially from me. She tested negative Thursday. But this morning, Friday, a sniffle, a cough, and a positive test. And I was scared all over again, but for her. When we realized I was sick, we had started sleeping in separate rooms, wore masks, etc. But at home, with only one bathroom and kitchen, isolation proved impossible.

 

The symptoms started for me on Tuesday. My wife and I were in New York City, on one of our few vacations since COVID. I was climbing the steps to go into The Museum of Natural History, a museum I knew well in my youth but not in recent years. And I tripped. One foot seemed to fall asleep on me. Then it happened again when we took stairs down from the fourth-floor dinosaur wing. And again, descending from the third floor. I realized something was off. I feared a stroke, but everything else in me was working perfectly⎼ or so it seemed.

 

Then at night, after a wonderful dinner, we returned to our hotel. And my head started feeling too heavy to sit on my shoulders and was spinning from the weight. My throat was absurdly dry and scratchy. My stomach a bit queasy. Most of you know the signs. And now I knew.

 

When I turned out the light, I realized that lying with me in bed was something so big it had become myth sized. Larger than any one human. Darker than night. A myth that felt very modern but in one form or another has been with humans forever, or maybe more so once we moved from grassy plains to enclosed spaces. To big groups instead of small ones. A possibly deadly illness that we could catch and pass on from one person to the next.

 

And I was frightened. Here it was. And I knew not what would happen to me or to us. Suddenly, I was not in my own hands. I realized we were never totally in our own hands.

 

And just as I fell asleep, someone knocked on the door of our room, The noise woke us up, and was repeated again and again. I yelled out in response, “Who is it?” “Me,” they answered. Was this a puzzle posed by the universe? “Who?”

 

I got up and went to the door. I looked through the peephole. A young woman was standing there, apparently alone, but my view was obstructed. I opened the door. Once she saw my face, she knew she was at the wrong door, apologized, and turned away.

 

It took a while, but finally peace and quiet replaced the knocking.

 

The next day, I tested positive….

 

*To read the whole post, please go to this link to The Good Men Project.

What Might Being at Peace Mean? The Deep Joy Embedded in Presence that Inclines Us to Laughter

Each morning, before meditating, I follow a version of the Buddhist practice of dedicating the meditation to relieving the suffering of others. I wish that I, my wife, and anyone close to me who is suffering, or every being anywhere, be at peace. The practice calms me. But I must admit that it’s not always clear what being at peace would realistically be like in our world today or if my notion of peace is like anyone else’s.

 

It’s clear to me that saying it and meaning it, doing it with sincerity, is possibly a beginning of an answer in itself. Telling ourselves being at peace is possible is a door to being there. Or maybe it’s a door to persuading ourselves we deserve it.

 

So, what do I mean by being at peace? It can sound to many of us like contentment or being satisfied; and it does share something with those two states of heart and mind. Yet, it’s closer to calmness or happiness, both of which might be components of peace.

 

But contentment, satisfaction, and even happiness have a bad rep in many quarters today. There’s so much that is terrifying right now, so many threats, so much injustice, how can we want peace? How can we be content, happy, or satisfied? Don’t we want discontent, fury, and outrage? Don’t we want determination and commitment to change?

 

And so many of us, even critics in my own mind, seem to doubt we deserve it. It seems we’ve been educated in discontent with ourselves.

 

I think fostering discontent with political policies that harm people is simply responsible behavior. But discontent that arises from conducting a war with ourselves is an entirely different story. It assists those who would do us harm. It undermines our work to create a more compassionate and equitable country by undermining our ability to be compassionate with ourselves. Being at war with ourselves exhausts inner resources that could help us imagine positive actions to take, and then take them.

 

And maybe recognizing this is a key to feeling at peace ⎼ accepting and being able to live in our own minds and bodies. ‘Accepting’ not in the sense of being unaware of the reality of what we are and what we face, but instead very cognizant of it. It’s not easy to accept that we can’t always be strong or feel good or know the answer, or to not automatically attack whatever feels threatening. Being at peace begins with not being at war with ourselves.

 

Our thoughts often take the form of stories, or internally created and enacted stage-plays or scripts. “All the world is a stage,” said Shakespeare. These plays can be noticed through mindful observation and are described not only in meditation teachings but the psychological approaches of Transactional Analysis and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

 

Self-criticism can be helpful, if it motivates us to be aware of painful patterns of thought and behavior. But it can also separate our inner world into warring parties. The self-critic is one character or side in the drama. The criticized is another. Too often, we react to the critic as if it was a celestial judge. When we abstract ourselves from the moments of our lives and try to reduce our world to only an idea of it, we suffer. Our ideals can be impossible to live up to, yet we all have them. We are all imperfect, full of contradictions. To the degree we hold an ideal too tightly, to that same degree we can hurt ourselves for not meeting that ideal…

 

*To read the whole blog, please go to The Good Men Project.

Do We Love Ourselves Enough, and Love the World Enough to Save It? When We Feel a Hole in the Center of Our Lives, Loving Action Can Heal It

We know this. So much climate suffering. Droughts. Then rains. Then dangerous smog from fires. Then heat, heat domes so large and deep people are not just sweltering but burning. Dying. And it’s increasing. We are burning our earth around us. The earth itself is crying out to us. The city of Phoenix had over 19 days straight days of 110 degrees or more. Residents of south Florida might be tempted to swim in the ocean to cool off from the extreme heat, but the ocean temperature itself is about 100 degrees. We can, we need to do all we can to stop the policies, the ways of thinking and behaving that contribute to global warming.

 

And our leaders? I don’t agree with all that President Biden has done, or not done. But he has given us and our earth a chance. He has pushed helpful legislation for the environment, and  accomplished a great deal that benefits most of us⎼ for the economy and international situation, but so much more is needed. And he’s managed to do this despite a political opposition not seen since possibly the Civil War, and so virulent that many denied that he fairly and legally won the presidency. Several GOP lawmakers even supported a violent insurrection against him. Many news outlets severely under-report his accomplishments.

 

The GOP in general have no shame, or care about the state of the world; don’t care about our rights, health, children, or the democracy they are sworn to serve. One of their favored governors stated some blacks benefitted from being slaves. They let free their own hate, lusts, and other unethical behavior, while they act to restrict the right to vote to young, black, brown people. To take away a woman’s right to control her own health. They lie about who they are, and so much else, including the science of climate change.

 

Their leader is a 2-time, and soon, possibly, a 4-time indicted criminal, liar, and sexual abuser who in public conspired to stop an election and end democracy. He continually  threatens violence against anyone who opposes him. He uses hate to serve his own personal aims, uses misogyny or hate against women, hate of black, brown, Asian, Jewish, Muslim and LGBTQ+ people. Maybe all those not white, Christian, patriarchal.

 

DJT even told us what he would do if he regained the White House. Historian Michael Beschloss described his goal as a “presidential dictatorship.” Others have labeled his goal as White Nationalism or Fascism/Nazism. The New York Times reports he and the GOP plan to expand the power of the President so deeply that his authority would cover every part of government.  They want the power to regulate the economy, control the Department of Justice, the courts, and dictate to Congress. All members of government agencies and bureaucracies would be chosen according to one principle—their allegiance to him, not to competence, not ethics. If we want a passport, loan, building permit, etc. we’d first have to pass a loyalty test.

 

This would convert the mission of the government to one goal⎼ to exert DJT’s narcissism, to free his lust for power and sense of entitlement so it covers the whole earth. And all of us, all creatures, would serve him. His followers think he would bring them freedom. But the only freedom they’d have is to serve him while expressing their grievances at the wrong people. This is almost unbelievable; but if we can stomach listening to him we can judge this for ourselves….

 

*To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project.