CHAPTER 9:
TO BEGIN AGAIN: THE CHOICE BEFORE US

People think politics is so ugly, and part of it is. But there is something else there too, when we allow it to unfold—something noble and meaningful and good. As someone who has been speaking to audiences regularly for thirty-five years, I have seen something wonderful happen when people sit together in a room and consider the most significant questions about their common existence.

My father was a lawyer, and he always said that you should speak to the smartest person on the jury. I have had the good fortune in my career to see people at their best—not necessarily when they were at their happiest, but when they were at their deepest and most real. Whether counseling a single person or a couple or talking to a large audience, I have been with people in that place—everyone knows it, we’ve all been there—where life is serious and hushed and true, even when painful. We should participate in politics with the same level of consciousness we bring to intimate love and therapy, parenting, and all of our most important and meaningful pursuits. We should bring all of ourselves to politics. We should bring our hearts and minds and deepest dedication to something bigger than ourselves. Politics is very, very serious business in a country as big and powerful as ours; when we get it right, it can be a beautiful thing, but when we get it wrong, it can be a terrible thing. And we are all responsible for that. With every election, with every campaign, we are deciding something extremely important. We are deciding what is possibly the fate of millions, the fate of the earth, even perhaps the fate of humanity. If that is not a sacred charge, I cannot imagine what is.

Americans are a good and decent people, no different from people anywhere else. Although fear and bigotry have been harnessed for political purposes, we have love and decency we can harness too. But first we must find and harness them within ourselves. We all have to look at ourselves and check our judgments at the door. A nonviolent revolution begins with facing, and surrendering, the violence within ourselves.

What’s going to save this country is a massive revival of spirit among the American people.

I’ve seen how the energy in a room can change profoundly when we drop into our hearts for a meaningful, sober, sincere conversation about things that matter most. The political atmosphere shifts when the spiritual atmosphere shifts, and that is as true among the masses as it is in a small room. I have witnessed and experienced what happens when love has joined two people’s hearts together. I have also witnessed and experienced what happens when love has joined the hearts of two thousand.

That is the kind of social movement that America needs now; not a community of hate but a community of love. All the great social justice movements in America’s history have been born out of religious and spiritual communities, because that is who takes love most seriously. We should address social, political, and economic issues from the highest level of consciousness. For if you know how to heal one heart, then you’re the one who knows how to heal the world.

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A RENEWING OF THE MIND

Those who recognize the effects of the invisible realm are not antiestablishment; they are forming what is in essence a new establishment, a much-needed correction to the overly materialized focus of the twentieth century. The significance of the founding of the United States was itself metaphysical: the declaration of a radical new possibility for the human race, a philosophical as much as a political revolution to overthrow the chains that bind. Never yet fully attained or embodied, the American Dream remains the light upon our path—our mission to ensure that all citizens, regardless of race, creed, or religion, be allowed the material means of self-actualization. This radical commitment to human possibility must be thrown down like a gauntlet in the face of oppression, in any form, at any time, and by every generation. The last thing we need to do is whine about the fact that other generations didn’t complete the task; it is every generation’s job to carry it forward, to build on the success of those who came before, and to disrupt any patterns of failure we’ve inherited. We need to emotionally recommit ourselves to the sacred charge we’ve been handed, not only for ourselves but for all the world.

Strong forces, both in the mind and in the world, would pull us down into the mire of despair. But equally strong, even stronger forces compel us to rise up. That is true for us as individuals, and true for us as a country. We must clean up the past and make way for new beginnings.

Jim Forbes, the former senior minister at Riverside Church in New York and a friend and mentor, once pointed out to me that the “end days” are not just times of “wars and rumors of war”—they are also times of “signs and wonders.” If these are the end times, they are also wondrous times. And perhaps what is ending is what needs to end, so something miraculous can now be born. For where there is love, there are always miracles. It is ours to choose, and the time to choose is now. The choice lies in what we choose to express, what we choose to foster, what we choose to embrace, and what we choose to commit to.

It is time to make the choice for love.

Love is not passive; it is active in the world. And there is much to be done. In the words of Dr. King, “Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war. . . . When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love.

Ah yes, to commit ourselves to the glories of love. We’re a nation that has become more concerned with being rich than with being good, more concerned with getting more than with being more, more concerned with what happens on the outside than with what happens on the inside. And it is killing us. Human beings were created to love each other, not to hate each other; we were created as brothers and sisters, not as enemies; and we were created to be reverent, not to be too cool to care.

We must resist the temptation to intellectual and emotional shallowness that defines our popular culture today. We need to disavow the chronic silliness that has us playing at life like children rather than tending to life as genuine, powerful, responsible men and women. We need reverence toward each other, toward the children of the world, and toward the planet itself. We need reconciliation with the God of our understanding, and radical forgiveness toward each other. We need to look at ourselves and ask how we can do better, devote ourselves to our country and to our children’s children, to rise up from the ashes of our self-preoccupation. We need desperately to evolve from “me” to “we.” Only then will our country rise—when we rise first.

Democracy gives us rights, but it also gives us responsibilities, not just to receive the blessings of liberty but to tend to them in our time and bequeath them to our children. This is not a job for someone else. It’s a job for each of us. We the people are the only true guardians of democracy. We have a much greater purpose on earth than to just get what we want. That has always been America’s greatness: that we stood for something higher than ourselves and strove for something higher than ourselves. Until we retrieve that greatness, we will continue to go down. But as soon as we do retrieve it, we will miraculously rise up again. For on the level of spirit we have wings.

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THE POWER OF LOVE

One evening I was sitting in a hotel room in Charlottesville, Virginia, having given a talk at a church there earlier in the day. I noticed that the Mr. Rogers movie Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was available on the room’s TV, and having heard several people mention it, I turned it on. By the end of the movie, I was sitting on the edge of my bed with tears flowing down my cheeks. Here, in a city that had been beset by an incident of American hate, I’d seen a movie that was a testament to American love.

Interestingly enough, I then turned on the local news—which I used to skip over when I went to a town until I realized that that’s where you see some of the best news ever: the good news! It’s where you see what real people do to make their lives and their communities better, from volunteer-run hunger programs (there should not be hunger in America!) to small business expos (a teenage girl selling earrings she had made, saying, “I do this because I didn’t want to always be asking my mom for money”) and festivals at public schools (these kids are so earnest I can’t stand it, it’s so beautiful). So many of the things that used to seem corny now seem so radical, so relevant: people simply loving each other, trying to do the right thing. We’ve so strayed from the basics—we all know we have—and we’re all dying to get back to them. The small pleasures of life turn out to be the best ones. Small, random acts of kindness really do occur everywhere; we need to take all that love now and turn it into power.

We shouldn’t underestimate the dangers of this moment, but neither should we underestimate the love in our hearts that can guide us through it. Mahatma Gandhi said that the real leader of the Indian independence movement was “the small still voice within.” The small still voice within will lead our generation too, for it hasn’t gone away. It is an aspect of human consciousness. It is an eternal internal guidance system. Each of us has a job to do, a unique part to play in the repairing of our world, and we can be internally guided as to what part is ours to play.

It isn’t always easy for us to know what to do, but it wasn’t easy for our ancestors either. The abolitionists, the suffragettes, the civil rights workers—they too were traumatized by their circumstances and stressed by the enormity of the challenges before them. But they rose to the occasion, and so must we. They heard the call and responded to it. They did their part; now it’s time for us to do ours. The calling of the heart that called to them is now calling to you and me.

Minimizing the importance of the inner life is a legacy of a time now passing. At a time when the stresses on our planet—from climate change to out-of-control machineries of war—are so rampant, nothing is more realistic than to seek answers from within.

Consider spending five minutes every day sitting with your eyes closed, sending love from your heart to everyone in your country, and then extending that love to every sentient being in the world. Such meditative practice opens the mind to new dimensions of problem-solving as new synapses, new insights, new connections arise automatically. Our biggest failure is to limit our imaginations to twentieth-century prejudices, surrendering to the insidious illusion that there’s a limit to what’s possible. Where there is love, possibilities are endless. But they do not emerge from the world as we know it; they emerge from a place that lies beyond our normal waking consciousness.

At a certain time, abolishing slavery in America would not have been seen as a reasonable proposition. Gaining women the right to vote would not have been seen as a reasonable proposition. Ending segregation would not have been seen as a reasonable proposition. When it comes to disrupting what appears like an intractable status quo, reason alone isn’t our guiding light. The good, the true, and the beautiful emerge from a quantum realm of infinite possibility, when love and intention and commitment and devotion override all other factors.

It is not just our plans but also our imaginations that will summon the next great chapter of our history. It is not our reason but our hearts that will take us to the Promised Land. It isn’t an angry no to those who don’t know better, but rather a tender yes to the possibilities for a different kind of future that will open the door to the world we want.

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How do we make love our agenda? By making it everything. Our generational problem, more than anything else, is our lack of full devotion. The miracle that will take us forward now is a 100 percent commitment to being who we need to be now, and doing what we need to do. We must not give in to the demonic chatter that life is lived for any other purpose than our capacity to love each other.

Teilhard de Chardin’s amazing words—“someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love”—should no longer be seen as a distant aspiration for some mythic future. What we are talking about now is our today and tomorrow. We will discover the fire of love, or we will be destroyed by the fires of fear.

Something is rising up from the depths today, centered not in any one geographical area, ethnic identity, or national identity. It’s the evolutionary lure of a sustainable future, calling us to remember who we really are and inviting us to rise up from the past. It is a hunger felt among all the people of the world. We are stirred to live our lives in a different way; to align ourselves with something truer and deeper than mere bricks and mortar or dollars and cents. This stirring brings with it a deeper reverence, for earth and sky, and for each other. If we truly want a different world, we must be willing to think in a different way and live in a different way than we do now.

Our children do not deserve to be burdened by the insidious delay tactic of passing on to them the work that is ours to do. This is our time. The mess is ours to deal with, the challenge is ours to meet, and the miracle is ours to claim.

Consciously abandoning holiness, we have subconsciously become prey to all that is not holy. We must rid ourselves of darkness now, by turning on the light of the higher mind. Its power alone can break the chains that bind us to a limited and unjust world. It gives us the strength to imagine, to work for, and to summon a more beautiful world.

The call that should beckon us is not the call of our pocketbooks but the call of our hearts—an ancient melody that lies in all of us and can never be totally forgotten. Let us awaken to the call of love reborn, hope restored, and life renewed. We can—and in fact we have no other choice. Death awaits us if we do not choose life.

Human beings can descend, but we can rise back up. We can choose wrongly, but we can choose again. Humanity has come to a fork in the road, and each of us is responsible for choosing which way we go now. There is a way marked Love and there is a way marked Fear, each path leading to more of the same.

Our powerlessness is feigned. We are not powerless at all. We are simply in the habit of disengaging from the things that matter most. We can change that. We are waiting for nothing but our own true selves, our commitment, our conviction, and our choice to choose again. Our national salvation begins when we consider the possibility that there might be another way. There is no reason, no wisdom, in holding on to past, unworkable ways. Moreover, there is no survivable future there.

In our finest hours, America has stood for what humanity at our best aspires to be. We have sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed, but today, in our time, it is ours to decide our path as we move forward. Lady Liberty’s torch is in our hands, but only we can determine whether it burns within our hearts.

Either we will allow it to illumine our understanding, or consciously or unconsciously we will burn down the house.

The mass of humanity is crying out for another way, and that way will be found. All walls will fall away that block us from our destiny. The only questions are, How much suffering will have to occur before that happens, and Will America be a leader in finding a new way—or one of the greatest victims to the old? Shall we pave the way to humanity’s higher purpose, in line with our historical mission, or shall we continue our current stumble into the depths of an irredeemable fall? This is not a rhetorical question. It is quite a literal one, and it cannot be answered by anyone but ourselves.

The day has come for an American reckoning. This is not the time to close our eyes, but to open them to the light within. It is a time of atonement, a time of replanting, and a time of deliverance. Or not; the choice is ours. In honor of our ancestors, and in honor of our descendants, may we choose well. May we choose wisely. May we choose love.

Chapter 1: Love in a Time of Crisis: Lessons in Fear and Love

Chapter 2: A Revolution of Love: Reviewing the Plot

Chapter 3: Love and Conflict: Disagreeing with Love

Chapter 4: An Economics of Love: A New Bottom Line

Chapter 5: American Youth: Equal Rights for Angels

Chapter 6: Race and Repentance: Out of Many, One

Chapter 7: The Sojourner among Us: The Hope of Immigrants

Chapter 8: War and Peace: Fighting the Profits of War

CHAPTER 8:
WAR AND PEACE: FIGHTING THE PROFITS OF WAR

A politics of love is neither unsophisticated nor naive about the dangers of the world; it acknowledges the need for military preparedness. But in the world as it is today, we need to know as much about how to wage peace as how to wage war.

The US military deserves the utmost respect from every American. Those who serve display not only advanced expertise but also advanced devotion: a willingness to sacrifice their lives in service to their country. Any criticism of US military policy is not a criticism of the military itself, but of the civilian leadership that controls it.

Our military should be like the best surgeon in the world. Of course we want to have the very finest surgeon available if we need surgery. But any sane person tries to avoid surgery if possible. We should go to war only because we need to go to war. Our defense establishment should not be a self-perpetuating war machine.

Yet that is basically what has happened over the last few decades, as we have fallen into a continuing pattern of war that few even dare to question. Most Americans couldn’t tell you which countries we’re engaged with militarily at this point. After 9/11, through the Defense Authorization Act, Congress gave the president unprecedented authorization to do whatever he wants in the name of fighting terrorism (decidedly against the “advise and consent” clause of the Constitution), basically giving the executive branch of our government carte blanche over military authority. All we can do is pray that they’re getting it right.

The US Constitution made the president commander-in-chief of the US armed forces in order to guarantee civilian control of our military. This is how the Founders protected a democratically elected government from being overturned by a military coup. But while it’s important that the military work at the behest of the president, it’s also important for us to remember that the president and Congress work at the behest of us. This is one more area where financial corruption, so endemic to our current politics, has put advocacy for corporate profits—in this case, military defense contractors—before advocacy for the health and well-being of the American people.

No American would argue against protecting our homeland. But enemy threats today do not arrive only via land, air, or sea; they also arrive over the internet. Terrorists don’t trade in warships, bombers, or submarines, but in pathological ideas and malevolent cyberwar. And they’re not always foreign fighters either; they are just as likely to have been born and raised right here. America today is like the British Red Coats during the Revolutionary War—standing abreast in a straight line waiting for someone to yell “Fire!” while American colonists were hiding behind trees like the early guerrilla fighters that they were. Our entire notion of national security is like something out of another century.

That is why in this area, as in so many others, we will adequately address our challenges only if we are willing to rethink them. We will be able to keep our nation safe in the years ahead only if we think differently about war, and differently about peace. In the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt, “We must do more than end war. We must end the beginnings of all wars.

Traditional warfare addresses external realities, seeking to suppress or eradicate malignant symptoms. But with society as well as with the body, we ultimately cannot just treat symptoms; we need to treat their cause. We can’t just fight the symptoms of hate; we must cultivate the love in the presence of which hate does not grow. Most of our problems are opportunistic infections, none of which would have gained such power had our societal immune cells been healthier. That is why cultivating justice and brotherhood is more than just a “nice” thing to do; by cutting off its oxygen, the politics of love is the most sophisticated response to evil. This century demands a different mental framework through which to view the entire notion of security. In today’s world, no amount or means of brute force can provide an absolute guarantee of our safety.

We should see the soul force of peace-building, then, as central to our efforts to create a peaceful world. Our conversation around national security rarely names the goal of creating peace at all, and that is where our modern political establishment most fails us. Peace is not the absence of war; war is the absence of peace. Preparing for and waging war—while it might fend off some enemies at times (while often creating new ones as well)—is not the most potent tool for peace creation.”

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PROFITS OF WAR

Our current national security strategy is all about war and very little about peace. If we really wanted peace in the world, then we would strive for peace. But a quick look at America’s national security budget makes it obvious that peace is not our direct goal. Peace is just something we sort of hope we’ll back into.

Our Defense Department now functions in a role of dual advocacy, both for America’s security interests and also for the economic interests that accrue to military defense contracts. Where the interests collide, at present the defense industry tends to win out. A case in point is America’s current relationship with Saudi Arabia. For the sake of over a billion dollars in arms contracts, the United States is providing arms to the kingdom in a war that has led to the starvation of tens of thousands. Also, Boeing has signed a $500 million contract to provide technical support. Even the brutal murder of a Saudi journalist, a legal permanent resident of the United States, wasn’t enough to tear us away. The State Department issued a statement saying it’s possible for us to have “strategic partnerships” with people “who do not share our values. Which is to say that it’s okay for us to have no values at all.

Supporting our military is very different from supporting the multibillion-dollar behemoth of military contractors that make up America’s current war machine. Too often today young people die on battlefields so that old people can get rich selling armaments. It’s not enough to have private morals if we, as citizens, are willing to acquiesce to the complete surrender of our public ones.

It was the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower—the supreme Allied commander during World War II—who, in his farewell address to the nation, warned us of what he called the “military-industrial complex.” This is the enduring financial and political alliance that makes war such big business—now on the scale of a $718 billion annual US defense budget. Today our defense budget outstrips those of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and India combined.

Before World War II, the United States had no standing army; while no one would argue that we don’t need one in the present age, neither should we deny the risk that comes with making war into such big business. Too often, weapons are not manufactured to help fight wars so much as wars are manufactured to help sell weapons. If defense manufacturers stand to make billions of dollars off the machinery of war, there will always be more and more political pressure to provide theaters in which to use it.

In less than one hundred years America has gone from military power “as needed” to military power as big business, with the attendant false glamorization that all militarized societies proffer. All this has led to subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which Americans have begun to think differently about war. It is no longer something we do only when we have to; it has become something that is sort of just “always there.” When there was a draft, war was never just “over there.” Without a draft, it’s far too easy for all of us to simply look away. This is not an argument for the reinstatement of the draft, but it is an argument for the reawakening of the American mind.

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SPEAK SOFTLY AND CARRY A BIG STICK

When I was a child, as we watched images of military parades in the former Soviet Union on TV, we were taught that we didn’t do things like that in America. And we were proud of it. When Dwight Eisenhower was the supreme commander of all Allied forces, he obviously wore military clothes, but as president, he just as proudly wore civilian clothes. Not just the symbolism of these differences but the energy they carry can determine how a society perceives itself. We are not a military society, and we don’t want to become one.

President Theodore Roosevelt described his foreign policy this way: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” No one in the world doubts how powerful our military is. But the military misadventures of the last half century have garnered us neither greater respect nor friendship nor affection. Quite the opposite: millions around the world, having witnessed American involvement in wars such as those in Vietnam and Iraq, see no reason to believe that America is always a beacon of democracy or that the US military is effective at solving every problem.

This is not a conundrum for politicians alone to handle; it is an issue for all of us to wake up to. It’s said that war is too important to be left to the generals, but it’s also too important to be left to the politicians. Our political establishment is enamored of the power of brute force, and undervalues the power of soul force. We need to adopt a new political mind-set if we are to deliver to our children and our children’s children any semblance of a peaceful world.

Only those who are either ignorant of history or willfully blind to it can deny the role of widespread human despair, economic hardship, and lack of education in fostering eruptions of violence around the world. Only when we consciously and willingly address those issues in a meaningful way will we be paving the way to a sustainable peace on earth. We can’t just go around fighting violence all the time; we must learn how to cultivate peace.

At present, the resources we spend on building true foundations of peace—diplomacy, support for democratic institutions, expansion of economic opportunities for women, providing educational opportunities for children, and ameliorating human suffering—are minuscule compared to what we spend on defense.

An example of our war-for-profit mentality is the following. The US Air Force has recently ordered one hundred B-21 raiders at a cost of over $550 million each, for a total price tag of $55 billion. Each of these stealth bombers carries both conventional and thermonuclear weapons, begging the question: are we planning to drop one hundred thermonuclear bombs? Of course not.

But it’s relevant to ask, because once even four or five of those start dropping, it’s over for all of us. It’s difficult emotionally to even think about a prospect like nuclear war. Yet that is exactly where America needs a revolution in consciousness: our willingness to think about some very serious things.

It is our denial, our avoidance of such painful topics, that is most dangerous to us now. We have gone from being a country with a vital ban-the-bomb movement—the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 was a really, really big deal—to one where the average citizen has been lulled to sleep, where the very subject seems so complicated, so difficult, that many of us have just left it to other people to think about. Yet the people we’ve left to think about it are the same ones ordering those B-21 raiders! That is why we are where we are today. You simply can’t outsource your thinking, your conscience, or your heart.

Even the smallest nuclear bomb that exists today, if it were to be detonated in a major city, would kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. This is not a technological issue; it is not even a military issue. It is a human issue.

For the $550 million we are spending on just one B-21 raider, we could ameliorate the human suffering of billions of people around the world. That would be the moral thing to do. That would be the loving thing to do. And that would be the smart thing to do.

To whom in America do we turn for moral guidance in handling issues of war and peace? Theoretically, that would be our president and Congress. Yet the moral judgment of our politicians is far too often sacrificed at the altar of financial and political corruption.

As an example, the defense authorization bill approving President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was based on the political considerations of that moment more than on deep and sober analysis of US intelligence. In fact, most members of Congress apparently did not read the full analysis made available only to them in classified reports. That would have meant walking down the hall.

The US military establishment has become a gargantuan enterprise with seemingly no moral oversight whatsoever. No religious, spiritual, or philosophical voices are publicly asked to contribute in any meaningful way to a political topic that could determine whether humanity lives or dies. Yet if whether we kill each other is not a question for moral consideration, I don’t know what is.

Not only are we dealing with the reality of nuclear bombs now, we’re dealing with a plethora of them, and some are not in the hands of responsible people. The idea that we can deal with the issue only through an ever-escalating arms race—even to the point, being currently discussed, of putting nuclear bombs in outer space—is not responsible. It is insane.

A politics of love expands the political conversation by expanding its human dimension. Institutions do not change quickly, but people’s attitudes can, and Americans are good at doing that. One of the greatest dangers posed by the breakdown of our democracy, as evidenced by the disconnect between the consciousness of our people and the actions of our government, is the threat this poses to our national security. People are evolving in one direction and our government is evolving in another. People are clamoring for peace; too often our politicians are clamoring for war. If we the people don’t inject some higher consciousness into the conversation soon, then God help us all.

A politics of love takes an integrative approach to political issues. The same holistic paradigm that has transformed our view of physical health can be applied to our societal health. We know better than to think that we can avoid taking responsibility for our heath and not expect to get sick. We know better than to think that we can avoid paying attention to our nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle and then simply suppress or eradicate any symptoms of sickness that may arise. We realize that we must cultivate our health of we want to be healthy, not simply fight sickness when it appears.

We should apply that same logic to issues of war and peace. We should know better than to think that we can avoid taking responsibility for peace and not expect war. Active peace-building measures reinforce the social health of our planet the way good nutrition and exercise reinforce the physical health of our bodies.

Currently, not only are more and more resources being added to our defense budget, but more and more resources are being withdrawn from actual peace-building. Since the beginning of 2017, while building up our military, our president has routinely attempted to strip our government of programs that provide humanitarian aid and support diplomacy, education, campaigns to eliminate violence against women, refugee assistance, mediation, postconflict and restorative justice, democracy-building, and other critical peace-building measures.

What would it look like for a politics of love to infuse the workings of the US government? Among other things, we should foster a far more equal working partnership between the Defense Department and the State Department to handle international security needs. James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, said that if we didn’t fund the State Department fully, then he would need to order more ammunition. We should establish a US Department of Peace to identify and foster domestic peace-creating projects in the United States; outbreaks of violence here are as horrifying as those anywhere else in the world. We could make peace-creation central to all domestic and international policy, not just in word but in deed.

While some say it’s naive to believe that massively realigning resources toward helping people thrive—by leading efforts to eradicate global poverty, support democratic institutions, and expand economic and educational opportunities—is central to creating peace in the twenty-first century, we need to unabashedly insist that it’s naive to assume humanity will even survive the twenty-first century if we do not.

A more loving life is a smarter life—smarter for our health and for the health of our planet. When it comes to international relations, if someone asks, “What’s love got to do with it?” the answer is “Everything.” In study after study, the success rate of “soft powers” at dissolving international conflicts has proved greater than that of military might. Love is not a less sophisticated worldview; it is a more sophisticated worldview. There’s nothing sophisticated at all about viewing security only in terms of bombs on land or sea, when the first bombs that go off are inside a person’s heart.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. . . .

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.*

We are hanging on a cross of iron right now. And this is not just corrupt; it is dangerous for us all. Large groups of desperate people anywhere in the world should be seen as a national security risk, as desperate people do desperate things. The problem isn’t just that some people hate us; it’s also that a lot of people who never really hated us just don’t like us anymore either. They too often see us not as a beacon of democracy, but as a bullying and imperialistic power. And that makes them far more vulnerable to ideological capture by genuinely psychotic forces.

After World War I, the economic devastation of the defeated German nation was a primary factor in the rise of Hitler. After World War II, we did not make the same mistake, but rather passed the Marshall Plan to help all of Europe rebuild. The best way to create a more peaceful world is to treat people with greater compassion. Our task is to replace a politics of fear with a politics of love. Love is a wiser, more evolved, and more powerful modus operandi than fear, if our goal is to bequeath a habitable world to our children and our children’s children.

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WAGING PEACE

As children of God, peace is our natural state of being. It is our moral responsibility to cultivate the conditions in which our natural state of being can thrive.

Every cause has an effect, and there is no way to obstruct the ultimate consequences of our actions. That is why war waged for any purpose other than absolute necessity is a danger not only to the victims of its perpetrators but to those who perpetrate it as well. The tragic mistake that was the invasion of Iraq, for instance, should arouse within us more than a collective “Oops.” It should arouse within us the deepest realization of the horrors we unleashed both for ourselves and others, and a sincere attitude of atonement before God.

The women of America are key to challenging the insanity of America’s war habit. If nothing else, we should be awakened by the fact that more women and children die in wars than do male combatants. We should unabashedly stand up to militarism, viewing this stance as simply one more way of dismantling the patriarchy. Feminine values like nurturing children and caring for the home are not just peripheral issues; they are the keys to peace on earth.

If Americans are to adequately deal with terrorism, we need to look deep into our own hearts and minds. A trigger-happy propensity for war should give way to a taste for wisdom, maturity, and reflection. The false power of the tough cowboy should dissolve now, giving way to the genuine power of wisdom. We should reach not only for a rich society but for a good society, both in how we behave at home and in how we express ourselves abroad.

According to research done by the Friends Committee on National Legislation, “The world spends just $1 on conflict prevention for every $1,885 it spends on military budgets. In the US, less than 2 percent of income tax goes to civilian foreign affairs agencies; while, 39 percent goes to the military. And though taxpayers provide almost $1 billion per year for military academies, they pay only about $40 million for the United States Institute of Peace—the only US agency dedicated to conflict prevention and peace-building.” All this despite the fact that investing early to prevent conflicts from escalating into violent crises is, on average, sixty times more cost-effective than intervening after violence erupts.

The problem does not lie with our military; the problem lies with our politics. And the problem lies with us.

We the people must become deeper thinkers now. No think tank’s research or government commission’s findings can substitute for the power of personal reflection and citizen engagement. A corrupt government will do what we allow it to do. We need to say things that a lot of politicians are not going to say, and insist that they do some things that they otherwise will not do.

We need to look at some difficult facts of American history over the last sixty years. The United States, for instance, through the invasion of Iraq, was the biggest factor in the formation of ISIS. Could we not take a moment away from our popular amusements to seriously reflect on the suffering caused by that immoral, illegal invasion? And should we feel no remorse? The only person who feels no remorse, who expresses no regret, is a sociopath. An entire country failing to do so is no less pathological.

You don’t get to irresponsibly cause thousands upon thousands of tragic deaths and then just say, “Oops.” Nor should we allow ourselves, or anyone else, to perpetuate the canard that “Oh well, they acted on the best information they had at the time.” Actually, no, they didn’t. The pretext for the Iraq war was a “major intelligence failure,” according to the Bush administration’s own report, and they knew exactly what they were doing at the time by misleading Congress and the world. We invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, that was actually serving as a buffer between us and Iran, and whose leader was a secularist who kept Al Qaeda at bay; and with no serious plan for rebuilding a city that we ourselves destroyed. None of those factors can be ignored by a conscious person, or a conscious country. Even if Iraq had had weapons of mass destruction, we do business with countries that have weapons of mass destruction each and every day. Even though Saddam Hussein was a horrible murderer who terrorized his people and killed many innocents, we routinely do business with governments that have done the same. Is anyone thinking the Chinese arrived in Tibet with candy? How easily we, the American people, acquiesced to something so wrong.

In a nation’s life as well as an individual’s, invisible forces of healing are released when we admit the exact nature of our wrongs and atone for them in our hearts. Only then can we pave the way to new beginnings.

America will not move forward into a new era of greatness unless we atone for the militaristic madness that has gripped our country in the years since World War II. We fought that war because we needed to. We’ve fought at least a couple of wars since then for one reason only: because someone wanted to. Dealing with America’s militarism—not just in the leaders who led us into wars that in retrospect we can see to have been huge mistakes, but also in us, that we acquiesced so easily to them at times—is essential to disrupting the dangerous patterns that now threaten our future. Militarism, like racism, has become an American character defect. We must soberly realize this, humble ourselves before God, pray for forgiveness, and seek fundamental change.

Too many times, as a nation, we have chosen the ways of war over the ways of peace, the ways of mean-spiritedness over the ways of compassion, the ways of separation over the ways of unity, and the accumulation of money over the accumulation of good. What we need more than anything now is to return to the wisdom in our hearts.

In the words of President John F. Kennedy, “This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.” People heard those words when he uttered them, and we need to hear them today.

At times such as these, understanding the powers of the spirit is as important as understanding the powers of the world. The meek shall inherit the earth because, in the end, they are stronger. To be secure, we need to ask deeper questions than “What should we do?” We need to ask, “Who should we be?” And “Who should we be to each other?

After the Charlie Hebdo tragedy in Paris in 2015, where twelve French journalists were killed by Islamist terrorists, a rally of two million people on the streets of Paris provided a beautiful show of solidarity. Such solidarity is what we need now, not just as a reaction to tragedies, but as a way of preventing them in the first place. When men, women, and children feel like they belong to something, feel that they are part of something, feel that they stand for something meaningful—that is the answer. It is the key to peace abroad, and it is the key to peace at home. What could be a more horrific irony than that jihadists say they feel a sense of community? The only thing more powerful than a brotherhood of hate is a brotherhood of love.

A “brotherhood of love” is not just a metaphor, and “the better angels of our nature” is not just a symbol. Both represent a matrix of choices made moment by moment as to how we will behave, how we will treat each other, and how we will choose to live our lives. They also represent the existential challenge now facing humanity: will we or will we not grow into the people we need to be now—to endure the times in which we live, navigate the times in which we live, and transform the times in which we live?

As any expert will tell you, there is no way to track down and stop everyone who has ever been radicalized. The force now tapping into the darkest corners of the human psyche, both here and abroad, will be defeated only from the most light-filled corners of the human heart.

WHEN THE BOTTOM LINE IS PEOPLE

For years, when politicians spoke of America’s “vital national interests,” I assumed they meant peace, the cultivation of our democratic values, and genuine security. Little did I know how often they had in mind the care and protection of American and multinational corporate interests.

Our vital national interests do not lie in protecting Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Boeing, and Exxon. That they and companies like them provide thousands of jobs is true, the importance of which is not to be minimized. But they are also companies that could be transformed through values of corporate responsibility to serve a peacetime rather than a war economy, and a green rather than an oil-based economy. In issues ranging from war to climate change, what such corporations do now, in too many cases, not only does not serve our vital national interests but actually works against them.

Our vital national interests lie in protecting the 3.1 million children who die from hunger-related preventable causes each year, the 71 percent of the world’s population who live on less than $10 a day, and the nearly one billion people who live on less than $1.90 a day. It is the humanitarian aid workers, diplomats, and peace-builders who most serve our vital national interests. The amelioration of unnecessary human suffering, both here and around the world, should be the bottom line of all US policy.

It is not the radicalism of hate that is our biggest danger today; our biggest danger is that we lack the radicalism of love. That is the revolution now to be waged: a change in our thoughts, along with a change in our behavior, along with change in our institutions, along with a change in our votes, that will lead in time to a change in our world.

Any conversation less radical than that simply plays into the hands of those who despise us. We have the power to override the heinous efforts of those who terrorize, to overrule them and nullify their malevolence. But it cannot be done with mere military might.

What we need now is our spiritual might. The real war is not without, but within: between ego-based fear and spirit-based love. That is the contest that matters the most, and it rages constantly inside our heads. Will we choose brute force or soul force to provide for our security? As long as we the people are not answering that for ourselves, there will always be others seeking to provide the answers for us. Whether we let them do so will determine the fate of our precious world.

Chapter 9 will be emailed tomorrow!

Chapter 1: Love in a Time of Crisis: Lessons in Fear and Love

Chapter 2: A Revolution of Love: Reviewing the Plot

Chapter 3: Love and Conflict: Disagreeing with Love

Chapter 4: An Economics of Love: A New Bottom Line

Chapter 5: American Youth: Equal Rights for Angels

Chapter 6: Race and Repentance: Out of Many, One

Chapter 7: The Sojourner among Us: The Hope of Immigrants

CHAPTER 7:
THE SOJOURNER AMONG US: THE HOPE OF IMMIGRANTS

In 2017, traveling with friends to the Za’atari camp, a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, I met three adorable little sisters so precious that I cried at having to leave them. Despite their parents’ extraordinarily challenging circumstances, these beautiful, intelligent children were raised to be cheerful, disciplined, and friendly. They and the other children in the camp spent all day in class, at sports, even at a circus filled with clowns. Their parents made diligent efforts to make sure their lives were shielded from the harsher realities of their circumstances. Any of us would have been honored and delighted to have such well-adjusted children. Their joy and positivity were contagious.

Leaving the camp, I was silent in the car on the way back to our hotel. I wished everyone I knew in America could have spent the day as I had. I wished they could see the human reality behind the word refugee. I felt a painful juxtaposition between the character and refinement of the people I met at the Za’atari camp and the narrow-mindedness and closed-heartedness of America’s current policies toward them.

Now, as I write this, people seeking asylum on the southern border of the United States are being scapegoated as criminals, their children deceitfully taken from their arms with no plan as to how they will be returned. In violation of American law, which mandates that almost anyone who sets foot in the United States has full constitutional protection here, and almost universally accepted human rights, these asylum seekers have been grossly denied fair protection. They are being prosecuted instead of welcomed, and their efforts to escape violence are being met by another kind of violence.

The traumatized cries of their separated children have become a rallying cry for the American conscience. A howl of outrage is being heard throughout America, not only because of the specific immigration policy of separating parents from children, but because of the moral descent that is represented by such a policy.

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This is not the first time America’s immigration policies have reflected the lower rather than higher angels of our nature. The Palmer Raids conducted in 1919 and 1920 during America’s “First Red Scare” were responsible for over five hundred foreign citizens—mainly suspected radical leftists who were mostly Italian and Eastern European immigrants—being ripped from their homes, arrested, and illegally deported. Earlier, during the 1880s, a federal law called the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited the immigration of all Chinese laborers. But we look back on such things in full awareness that they were wrong. Contemporary Americans are now facing something we have never had to face before: our government, caught red-handed in an act of transgression against one of our most treasured principles, responding with a brazen “Yeah, what of it?”

Scapegoating immigrants, particularly Mexicans, has been a primary fear tactic of our current president since the first day he announced his candidacy. Some took him seriously; some did not. Some saw the dangers of his rhetoric then; some did not. In fact, nothing is more dangerous than hatred harnessed for political purposes.

Scapegoating is a deliberate dehumanization technique. Americans had to see Africans as somehow less than fully human in order to enslave them. Americans had to see Native Americans as savages in order to acquiesce to the destruction of their culture. Germans had to see Jews as weeds in the garden of humanity in order to put them into death camps. Rwandan Hutus had to see Tutsis as animals; Chinese had to see students at Tiananmen Square as criminals; Croatians had to see Bosnian Muslims as enemies of the state, which is how Turks had to see Armenians and Myanmar has to see Rohingyas today. Dehumanizing others has always been the required first step in the commitment of history’s collective atrocities. Demonizing others brings out the demons in those who demonize.

When I was a child, my parents took my brother and sister and me to many places around the world. My father was an immigration lawyer, and I was taught at a very young age why America mattered, what my grandparents had escaped from as Jews living in Russia during the nineteenth century, and what coming to America had meant to them. I learned early to appreciate the plight of the immigrant, the blessing of an American passport, and the value of a free society. I realized at an early age that what makes America special is that people can breathe free here. Not just that people can have things, but that people can have freedom. That people can simply be.

I was around thirteen years old when our family visited Budapest, Hungary. Having been invaded by the Soviets in l957, that country was still living under Communist domination. A young man had been our guide on the trip, and when he drove us to the airport at the end of our time there I saw my father surreptitiously hand him his business card and say in a very low voice, “You get yourself out of here, and I’ll take care of you from there.” I registered the tearful look of gratitude in the eyes of that young man. Even as a child, I viscerally understood in that moment what living under Soviet rule meant and what making it to America stood for.

My father himself was the son of poor immigrants. As a child, he was the only one in his family who could speak good English, and he was often asked to help his parents and their friends fill out immigration forms they couldn’t read. My mother’s father came to America alone when he was thirteen years old and sold bananas on the East Side of New York until he had raised enough money to return to Russia and get his next-younger brother; together they sold enough bananas to make the money to return and get their next-younger sibling; and on and on until all seven brothers and sisters and their mother had been brought over to America.

Through stories about the lives of strangers, and about the lives of my own family members, I was taught from an early age about the often desperate plight of the immigrant and the blazing hope that America held out to them. I remember my father explaining to me that at the time when his father grew up there, Jews in Russia were conscripted into the army for twenty-five years of service. Now, in our time, we read of people all over the world who endure situations more horrible and devastating to body and soul than we can imagine in order to make it to the shores of America, where life might be better for them and for their children. What makes their plight less devastating, or less worthy of human compassion, than that of our own ancestors?

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TO BE BLESSED, BE A BLESSING

The plight of the modern refugee—the vast majority of whom are asylum seekers—is no different now than it ever was. What has changed is how anti-immigrant fervor has been weaponized in the modern era, taking a wrecking ball to something previously considered a point of pride for our country: that we’re a nation of immigrants. At a time when we have a greater refugee crisis than at any point since World War II, with over 60 million people displaced or homeless worldwide—often, in fact, as a result of tragedies at least indirectly influenced by US foreign policy—America is closing its heart.

The United States has significant border security issues, and other immigration issues, that pose legitimate points for bipartisan problem-solving. But the bigger issue at the moment in this, as in so many other areas, is America’s paramount need to return to our moral axis. Seeking asylum here is a statutory right established in the Refugee Act of 1980. While it’s legitimate to discuss conservative versus progressive options regarding how we help a refugee fleeing humanitarian horrors, there should never be a question of whether or not we do.

Earlier this year, I visited Ellis Island. I was deeply moved not only by the building but by the museum exhibits included in a massive renovation of the island and its buildings in the 1980s. Visitors see a slice of history that is relevant to us all.

The building containing the Great Hall at Ellis Island opened on January 1, 1892, and from the time it opened until it closed in 1954, 12 million immigrants to the United States entered there. Four of them were my grandparents. Pictures at the exhibit show extraordinary images of immigrants from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries—people from many countries, many backgrounds, all seeking a better life in America after having fled persecution, pogroms, and all forms of unspeakable hardship. It is impossible to look at the pictures at the Ellis Island Museum and not have a visceral understanding of what the history of immigration has meant to this country.

When I took the ferry back to the island of Manhattan, I saw a man playing music in Battery Park. He was an Asian man playing an exotic instrument I had never seen, a violin of some kind that emits the most gorgeous music. Across the sidewalk from him sat a woman in a headscarf, sitting on a bench and playing with her baby. Together with everyone else in the park that day, they formed a tableau of modern America. As moved as I was by the pictures in the museum, I was even more moved as I witnessed this man and woman, sitting opposite each other across the sidewalk, both having come from very different places but seeking the same possibility. He with his music and she with her baby, both were passing on to others the beauty of who they are.

The immigrant story of today contains no less richness, variety, contribution, creativity, and life pulsing at its most ordinary and beautiful than it did a hundred years ago. The immigrant is not our enemy. It is so important to remember this today, as immigrants are often viciously scapegoated. This is not the first time this has happened in America, and we must stand up against it now as other generations stood up against it in their time. The story of immigration in the United States has been ugly before. But we got through those earlier dark periods of mean-spiritedness in our history, and we will get through this one too.

On the way to Ellis Island our ferry stopped at the Statue of Liberty, where every visitor is reminded of the power of Lady Liberty’s message. Her torch is held high, and it’s not coming down. As long as she stands firm in our hearts, she will stand firm on that little island of hers. She keeps alive an eternal idea, created by God and a creed of our national identity. There are no strangers in God’s universe, nor need there be any strangers in the family of man.

In 1883, Emma Lazarus wrote a sonnet titled “The New Colossus” to raise money for the construction of a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. Millions of immigrants over the years have viewed the statue as they entered New York Harbor and knew that they had come home. Visiting Ellis Island today, one can practically feel the ghosts of the 12 million immigrants whose entrance to the United States was processed between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. Their hopes, their dreams, and their stories were not so unlike those of almost everyone seeking to enter America today.

Lazarus’s poem, inscribed not only on the base of the statue but in the hearts of millions, is a reminder to all of us of one of our most treasured values. Yet its words, like the words in our founding documents, will lose moral force if we fail to embrace and protect them. A nation, like an individual, compromises its principles at the expense of its soul.

Poetry read quickly doesn’t penetrate the soul. But poems such as this one, read slowly, savored and embraced, can change your entire view of being an American.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Who do we resemble more today—the “brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to land,” or the “Mother of Exiles”? Do we really want to destroy the very notion of America as a nation of immigrants?

America has undoubtedly been blessed. But the blessings upon us are not due to some special dispensation from God; they’re due to our having chosen to be a blessing to others. We set out to be a blessing, and as with all cause and effect, it was the blessing we gave to others that magnetized so much blessing to us. That is why it’s so dangerous when we withdraw those blessings—as we do with policies like imposing a Muslim travel ban, separating children from their parents at the border, or enacting reckless environmental policies. We’re not just messing with visible forces when we do that; we’re messing with invisible forces too.

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A question central to our current immigration drama is this: who we do we think America belongs to? How ironic that a people who stole this continent from Native Americans, who had lived here for thousands of years before we arrived, now turn around and claim some God-given right to ownership. It’s like stealing a house and then proudly sending out a “We Moved” card to your friends.

Seeking asylum in America is not a scam, it is a statutory right. And immigrating to America is not a crime. The modern immigrant is chasing the same dream of a better life that lured the ancestors of every American who isn’t descended from either slaves or Native Americans.

When I was a little girl, my father used to point out to us that the entire concept of national boundaries was created by man, not by God. He would have us look at an atlas, or a globe, in which the boundary lines weren’t present, to see what the world looks like geographically from miles above. God didn’t draw a line between France and Spain, or between the United States and Mexico. The whole idea of national boundaries is a man-made material category. National borders have a place in our material functioning. But they should be used to organize our societies, not to divide our hearts.

The deeper questions for a nation are the same as for an individual: did God put us on the earth to be brothers and sisters, or did He not? I was taught as a child that people are the same everywhere. The love of a mother for her child in Malawi is no different from the love of a mother for her child in Minnesota. No matter where we were born, no matter what our socioeconomic background, we are made of the same essence, the same intersection of the human and the divine.

We should reject any notion that while such sentiments might be lovely, they have nothing to do with politics. The humanity of all people should have everything to do with politics. I have never forgotten how my parents made us aware that here in the United States their parents and many millions like them had found refuge from lives of suffering and oppression. My siblings and I were not just taught to be grateful for that; we were taught to never forget where our family had come from, what a gift America had given to us, and the importance of that gift to so many people in the world. Too many Americans seem to take for granted a gift that did not just fall out of the sky; rather, our freedom was created through extraordinary struggle and sacrifice, meant to be passed from generation to generation. What we have received from our ancestors it is our moral responsibility to pass on to others.

What makes America great is that America is good. In both the Old and New Testaments, we are told to greet the stranger with respect and with an open heart. “Treat the sojourner as you do the native, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). But many Americans today can’t relate to the idea of being a refugee with nowhere to go, even though that was the plight of most of their own ancestors. We’re allowing our national heart to harden, our moral compass to be driven off course, our critical thought processes to be jangled, and our minds to be propagandized by the notion that people who are no different from us are somehow our enemy.

Americans have an instinctive understanding that America matters and that it matters for a reason: to light the way for all humanity. But to lead the way, we must be the way. Hatred and bigotry and racism are not light; they are spiritual darkness, and it is that darkness out of which we must pull ourselves now. If our spiritual values matter at all, they must matter everywhere. And that includes in the arena of politics.

America’s covenant with history is to always set our sights high, whether we are able to reach those heights or not. The push-pull relationship between the highs and lows of our national character is baked into the cake of America’s historical narrative. We like to think, however, that as we evolve through time we move forward, with every generation adding to the formation of a “more perfect union.” Today, dangerously and tragically, we are moving backwards in certain ways. The moment is perilous, though filled with miraculous possibility. We need a politics of love to put our nation back on its moral course.

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A TRUMPED UP CRISIS

Where some have harnessed fear for political purposes, it is time to harness love for political purposes. A politics of love not only says yes to what we do want; it is also capable of saying no to what we do not want. Where crowds have gathered to protest a Muslim ban or the forced separation of families, the spirit of the “Mother of Exiles” has expressed itself. And it will continue to do so. The better angels of our nature have often been silenced, but never forever. It is time for our generation to rise up as others have, to sing in our time the eternal song of a loving heart. Angels can sing only if we allow them to sing through us.

When someone says, “Yes, but what would you do about the immigration crisis?” remember this: although there are certainly reasonable changes that need to be made in our immigration policies, the idea that we have a crisis is simply a canard. Our border crisis is a made-up crisis, used to distract the most disadvantaged Americans from seeing who and what is really leeching their resources, who and what is really undercutting their power, and who and what is really stealing their democracy. In the words of Mayor Tony Martinez of McAllen, Texas, in the midst of the literally Trumped-up crisis at the border, “We were doing fine, quite frankly.”

In fact, over the last decade, illegal immigration has been going down. There are no hordes of immigrants “infesting” us. And while no one wants violent criminals in our country, and all Americans want the violent gang MS-13 expunged both here and in El Salvador, the current anti-immigrant fervor has little or nothing to do with such matters. The actual rate of criminality among immigrants—even the undocumented—is lower, not higher, than the rate of criminality among our non-immigrant citizens. And the rate of their contributions, in fields ranging from the arts to science to academia, is at least as high. The deliberate attempt by some of our leaders to make Americans fear something so basic to our greatness in the name of our greatness will one day be seen as a dark, aberrational chapter in our nation’s history.

The contributions of many of America’s immigrant communities are among the highest of any subpopulation, whether measured culturally, academically, or economically. We have much more to fear from the domestic terrorism of anti-immigrant hordes than from anything immigrants are bringing into the country with them.

The hardening of the American heart is far more dangerous than the softening of our borders. Those who scapegoat immigrants, like demagogues throughout history, are demonizing others to increase their own power. Their lies, like all lies, have risen to prominence temporarily, but they will not stand.

It is only in devoting ourselves to the things this country stands for that we will reclaim our invulnerability to forces that would tear us down. It is not enough to be appalled by bigotry; we must rededicate ourselves to the idea of a nation in which bigotry has no place. I don’t know any progressive who is arguing for open borders, but we are arguing for open hearts.

A politics of love is not just a sweet and gentle concept; it is a fierce and committed field of energy made of people who have awakened not only to the darkness in our midst but to the eternal light that casts it out. It is not enough that the Statue of Liberty holds the torch. Each of us must hold it in our hearts as well, and hold it high. Neither angels nor demons are a thing of the past. They are present in the choices we make today: whether to stand for love . . . or not.

Chapter 8 will be emailed tomorrow!

Chapter 1: Love in a Time of Crisis: Lessons in Fear and Love

Chapter 2: A Revolution of Love: Reviewing the Plot

Chapter 3: Love and Conflict: Disagreeing with Love

Chapter 4: An Economics of Love: A New Bottom Line

Chapter 5: American Youth: Equal Rights for Angels

Chapter 6: Race and Repentance: Out of Many, One

CHAPTER 6:
RACE AND REPENTANCE: OUT OF MANY, ONE

From a spiritual perspective, if our life is in crisis, we can repair it only by getting straight with God. And we cannot get straight with God without getting straight with each other. It is our God-given purpose on earth to love one another, and no serious spiritual path gives any of us a pass on making the effort.

No one always gets everything right, and neither does any country. Sometimes people and countries can do bad things. But the atonement principle, universal to all serious spiritual systems, posits the power of repentance. We can atone for our mistakes, make meaningful amends, and behave differently going forward. No life, and no country, can redeem itself otherwise.

The law of cause and effect, or what in the East is called karma, is the spiritual principle that organizes the universe. It is an unalterable law that every cause will create an effect; love calls forth love, and lovelessness calls forth lovelessness. Only through atonement and amends can this law be overridden. We can change things on the level of effect over and over, but only when we change things on the level of cause are they fundamentally altered. We must change our thinking as well as our behavior in order to change our lives.

A politics of love recognizes that the same spiritual, emotional, and psychological principles that prevail in an individual’s life also prevail in a nation’s. There is no opening our hearts to God without opening our hearts to each other, for our God-given purpose on the earth is to love one another. We feel blessed when we choose to bless others, and we cannot feel blessed when we withhold our blessing from others. We cannot find God outside our relationship to each other. It’s our sacred task as citizens to take a deeper look at America’s “relationship issues.” That means not only our relationships with other nations but also our relationships with each other.

The United States, like many other countries, has relationship conflicts that literally go back hundreds of years. In addition to the relationship between white Americans of European ancestry and Native Americans, whose ancestors inhabited this land for thousands of years before white settlers got here, our primary domestic relationship is the relationship between white Americans and black descendants of slaves who were brought to this continent from Africa.

I do not believe the average American is racist, but I do believe the average American is woefully undereducated about our racial history, particularly since the Civil War. Have we taken strides forward since the days of slavery? Yes. But have we completed the task of reconciliation between the races? Not anywhere near. In fact, in some ways over the last fifty years we have been sliding backwards. Our generation needs to educate ourselves more deeply, and act more nobly, in order to realize not only where we’ve been but also where we should be going.

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A politics of love is a whole-person pursuit that traces the psychological as well as political history of a relationship between peoples. Only when we know that history can we understand an issue deeply enough to adequately address it.

Slavery existed in slave-owning states in America beginning in the 1600s, and it increased significantly with the expansion of the cotton industry in the early 1800s. It did not end until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. When finally freed, the slave population in America was somewhere around four million.

On April 9, 1865, Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union general Ulysses S. Grant at the courthouse in Appomattox, Virginia. Thus, the Civil War ended. The stroke of a presidential signature on the Emancipation Proclamation, even an amendment to the Constitution, could abolish an institution but not the pathology that produced it. For external remedies do not of themselves eradicate internal causes. Racist thought burrowed even more deeply into the fabric of Southern society after the Civil War. For most Americans today, it is our racial history since the Civil War that remains misunderstood.

During the Reconstruction Era from 1865 to 1877, with federal troops stationed throughout the region, a vanquished South was forced to come to terms with having lost the war. Lincoln’s voice proclaiming malice towards none, and charity for all” had been silenced “orever, and Northern attitudes were far from compassionate toward the defeated South. Bitterness over having had to fight the war was the main emotional tone of the North, and humiliation over having lost it was the main emotional tone of the South.

Upon the removal of federal troops at the end of the Reconstruction Era, many Southerners created forms of institutionalized oppression to express their hatred toward former slaves. The postwar period saw the rise of an era of white supremacy in the American South that was almost as ugly as slavery itself. Violence against blacks did not end so much as morph into other forms, both personal and institutional. Many former slave owners had simply held their breath during the period of Reconstruction, waiting until federal troops were gone before seeking their revenge. They had not awakened to the deep humanity of African Americans; they simply could no longer own them.

Although the field of psychology did not exist in the nineteenth century, we can now look back at this time with a much deeper understanding of the emotional as well as political forces that were at work at the time. That former slaves were now fellow citizens represented not only a change in circumstances but a fundamental change in social relationships. We used to be rich and you were slaves on our plantations; now we are poor, we have nothing, and you are free living here among us. History doesn’t unfold only according to what happens on the outside, but every bit as much according to what happens on the inside.

The South hadn’t given up slavery voluntarily; it gave it up for one reason only—that it lost the war. They thus surrendered their slaves but not their anger. The last thing the former slave-owner class of Southerners was ready to do for a population they had kicked to the ground for hundreds of years was to say, “Great, now let’s be friends.” A cold and cruel dehumanization of black people before the war was replaced with hot and violent rage after it ended.

Had Lincoln lived, things might have unfolded very differently. But in the absence of enlightened leadership, the ugliest faces of both the North and the South prevailed after the Civil War. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, founded in the 1860s, began a wave of terror in which lynchings—hangings of black Americans as well as of whites seeking to help them, carried out by angry mobs of white Americans—became common. Once federal troops were withdrawn from the Southern states in 1877 and white supremacists regained control of Southern state legislatures, blacks were routinely intimidated and attacked to prevent their voting in state and federal elections.

Even as early as 1865 and 1866, laws called the Black Codes were passed in Southern states to restrict the freedom of African Americans and keep them tied to a subpar labor economy. During the period between 1890 and 1908, Southern legislatures also passed constitutions and electoral rules guaranteed to disenfranchise most blacks and many poor whites. Racist legislatures enacted a series of segregation and Jim Crow laws to enforce the second-class citizenship status of black Americans. Lynching and election violence became normal, reaching a peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

While most people realize the evils of slavery, many may not realize the extent to which social, economic, and political barriers prevented the integration into free society of the formerly enslaved population after the Civil War.

If you’ve kicked someone to the ground, you need to do more than just stop kicking; you have a moral responsibility to help them get back up. You can’t just say to four million people who have had no experience other than that of forced labor, “Glad you’re free! Now good luck to ya! Hope you find a good job!” What they were freed to was a violent prejudice, white supremacy, and segregation that would go unchallenged in any fundamental way for another hundred years. Thousands of black Americans fled to Northern cities in search of jobs and freedom denied them where they came from, yet racial prejudice routinely met them even there.

It was not until the mid-1950s and the 1960s that the horrors of segregation were met, challenged, and resisted by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. The struggle of the civil rights movement was a heroic repudiation of racist oppression, and Dr. King became the target, both professionally and personally, of the full force of supremacist rage. From the lynching of integration rights workers to police brutality to church bombings and ultimately the murder of Dr. King, the white supremacist movement did not go down quietly.

Yet the movement prevailed. Dr. King was a Baptist preacher whose moral authority matched his towering intellect and political acumen. He realized that the movement’s political strategy had to be matched by its spiritual authority in order to awaken the conscience of a nation. Having gone to India and studied the nonviolent philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, King applied the principles of nonviolence to the struggle for civil rights back in the United States. As a minister and then as a movement leader, King had the Gandhian “soul force” necessary to lead his people to the promised land of racial justice. It was not only the things he said but the things he did that parted the waters of racial hatred. Not only did he believe that love is the only force powerful enough to overcome hate; Dr. King displayed that love with the full force of his being. His combination of nonviolence and political courage stirred a nation that had long acquiesced to the ugliness of white supremacy, and under his leadership the civil rights movement created the political will to pass federal civil rights legislation.

After so much horror and bloodshed, Dr. King and others who struggled so valiantly beside him achieved a historic political victory. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited racial discrimination in voting.

As someone who grew up in Texas, I can remember many of the outward signs of segregation in America. I’m aware of the vast strides that have been taken toward the creation of racial justice. But as a student of history, I also know how much remains to be done and how in some ways we’re even sliding backwards. Mass incarceration means we’re sliding backwards. Racial disparity in criminal sentencing means we’re sliding backwards. Voter suppression efforts aimed primarily at disenfranchised populations means we’re sliding backwards. While we shouldn’t minimize the struggle, sacrifices, and victories of our ancestors, neither should we pretend that we’ve come further than we have. For reasons external as well as internal, the establishment of full justice for African Americans remains a task not yet completed.

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AN UNFINISHED TASK

The hot violence of slavery was replaced by the burrowing violence of white supremacy, which was finally vanquished by the victories of the civil rights movement. The mistake many white Americans make is to think the story ended there. Indeed, after the civil rights movement America’s complicated racial history continued. And for all the talk about trauma these days, we would do well to consider the psychological trauma of hundreds of years of oppression.

What came next—after a nation exhausted by the social and political tumult of the 1960s elected Richard Nixon president in 1968—was a cold but insidious violence called “benign neglect.” Benign neglect is a phrase first articulated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Nixon’s urban affairs adviser. Moynihan argued that the drama of the civil rights movement should be followed by a period of social quiet in the relationship between blacks and whites. It was not necessarily a proactively racist sentiment on Moynihan’s part, or even on Nixon’s. But it legitimized an abandonment of any effort to continue the pursuit of racial justice, and in that sense at least it was a passive betrayal of the relationship on the part of white America. Benign neglect sent the message that the government wasn’t going to intentionally hurt you, but that if you were being hurt by someone else, it was not going to proactively help you either. And in too many ways, that is where we remain.

While it was one generation’s job to end slavery, and another generation’s job to pass civil rights legislation, it is our generation’s job to address the fact that today, over 150 years after the end of the Civil War, social and economic legacies of institutionalized white supremacy still exist in our society. A fundamental effort at economic restitution has never yet been made. Our country has not paid its debt to a formerly enslaved people, nor have we addressed the deeper issues of their full economic integration into American society.

The moral challenge posed by Martin Luther King Jr. to the America people was this: having freed the slaves, what were they then freed to? The lack of a fundamental plan of economic repayment to a formerly enslaved population, and the denial of access to full economic recovery to generations that came after them, is at the root of many racial issues still existing to this day.

A pattern of greater poverty among black Americans remains unbroken, along with a pattern of less access to education and statistically less access to criminal justice. Those who see America today as a postracial society ignore certain underlying dynamics. “Blacks go to Harvard,” they point out. “There are extremely wealthy black people now, and a black man became president!” Those comments are true, yet they are used like a mantra to gloss over continuing racial disparities in America. The fact that geniuses can make it in America doesn’t in and of itself mean that full social justice exists in America. It doesn’t mean that much work doesn’t remain to be done.

Although it is true—and very much to be celebrated—that blacks have opportunities in America today unheard of even fifty years ago, those opportunities do not constitute full economic justice. One in five American children, 20 percent, live in poverty today, which ranks us as the country with the second-highest child poverty rate in the advanced world. Among black children, however, the poverty rate hovers at 40 percent. Being poor in America comes with lower-quality education, which leads to less economic opportunity; less economic opportunity often results in greater despair, which in turn produces greater dysfunction. These problems are not discrete and newly formed; they are the legacy of a situation that began in the 1600s and still plagues us today. Some instances of racism and white privilege within political, economic, and social policy have been drastically reduced over the last few decades. But in other arenas—particularly those related to criminal sentencing and incarceration—it could be argued that racism and white privilege have actually increased.

In 2013, the US Supreme Court took steps to gut the Voting Rights Act, making voter suppression—particularly among populations of color—a real and present danger to our democracy. This is unfortunately only one of the ways in which our commitment to racial justice has been dwindling rather than deepening over the last fifty years.

It is time for a new chapter in the history of racial reconciliation in America, involving a spiritual purification of the American heart, a deep national atonement, and willingness on the part of our country to make appropriate amends.

It’s not as though racial tension finally erupted into violence on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 after a white police officer killed a black teenager. The situation continually erupts into violence in the hearts of black parents all over America each day, as they teach their children how to behave—particularly their sons—to avoid the unequal application of criminal justice in America. Most white Americans cannot imagine the layer of fear that runs through the psychic bloodstream of black Americans due to the killings of unarmed black men by police. And this problem isn’t going to just magically disappear.

A politics of love is one in which we address the psychological and emotional wounds underlying our political realities and seek to heal them in meaningful ways. One such issue, when it comes to race in America, is our need for what is called in the Catholic Church a “purification of memory.

Until we fully appreciate the extent of a wrong done in the past, we cannot fully appreciate the ways in which we continue to repeat it. Educational and economic disparities in neighborhoods of color and racial disparities in criminal sentencing persist. And given that the current Department of Justice is seeking to roll back Obama-era efforts to improve these disparities, it is up to us, we the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, to rise up and to speak out.

Racial healing is a journey through time. It would be a dishonor to our ancestors to minimize the struggles, sacrifices, and successes of past generations; but it would be similarly dishonoring to our descendants to fail to take the necessary steps, in our generation, to continue moving forward.

We know we have a race problem in America—manifested in the injustices of mass incarceration, the racial disparity in our criminal justice system, the lack of diversity in education and employment, instances of police brutality, rising white supremacy, and more. A greater sensitivity has emerged to the psychological and emotional nuances of white privilege, as well as its economic advantages. Yet the problem persists, poisoning the blood of our collective psyche. Just as an individual needs to identify and admit his or her character defects, so America has to identify our character defects as a nation. There is a strain of racist thought and feeling that has been with us from the beginning and is with us still. It is time for us to face it, atone for it, make amends for it, and end it. People can transform, and so can countries.

The question at the heart of our racial tension can also be found in immigration issues and other ethnic and religious prejudices: is the consciousness of America ready to evolve beyond the myth of Anglo-Saxon ownership? For many, the idea of a genuinely multiracial, multiethnic America represents the fulfillment of our national promise, while for others it represents a threat to some divine right granted to white people. And that is our psychic divide, the crooked place that must be made straight in our hearts. This country was “established on the principle of e pluribus unum—“out of many, one”—yet the actualization of that principle remains a continuing work. And until we realize our spiritual oneness, the deeper work cannot be done.

Underneath the level of our bodies, we are spirits united in a holy oneness. Nothing short of that realization—not only grasped as an abstract concept, but experienced as an emotional reality carrying with it political imperatives—will save this country from our most self-destructive tendencies.

It was the task of a previous generation to abolish slavery, and it is the task of our generation to abolish racism. As a whole-person response to the problems of our time, a politics of love recognizes that both internal and external healing is necessary if we’re to transform our country. Our sense of citizenship must include the purification of our hearts if we are to solve the problems of the world. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “The desegregation of the American South is the externalization of the goal of the civil rights movement, but its ultimate goal is the establishment of the beloved community.

Dr. King knew that if all we do is address the externals of a problem, then the internal causes can still do damage. While the South has been desegregated, the American heart has not yet been totally purified of the scourge of racist thought and feeling. Just as a little bit of cancer can metastasize, the scourge of racism grows when left unchecked. And in many ways over the last few years, it has done just that. We have gone from a heady celebration of the successes of the civil rights movement in the 1960s to the injustices of mass incarceration, voter suppression, and white supremacists marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

We need to do more than feel bad about that. We need to do something.

A politics of love stands for more than incremental changes. It is a fundamental disruption, a revolutionary stance, and a proactive movement in the direction of a greater good. Whites can listen more to black Americans, and we should. Whites can do more to recognize the depths of white privilege, and we should. We can oppose voter suppression and disparities in our criminal justice system, and we should. We must do all those things. But we should also pay up.

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TIME TO PAY UP

If you steal a lot of money from someone—and more than two hundred years of unpaid labor certainly amounts to a lot of it—then you owe them more than an apology. You owe them money.

After the South’s defeat in the Civil War, the plan for Reconstruction included economic restitution to a formerly enslaved people. Yet many who worked hard to see such restitution occur were met with strong resistance by forces in both the North and South.

On January 16, 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman promised forty acres and a mule to black farmers who had been enslaved. This compensation was extremely important because formerly enslaved agricultural workers had no way of entering an economy as free agents without the means to do so. Forty acres and a mule could provide the opportunity to establish themselves as free and economically independent citizens of the United States. A few former slaves were given that acreage, most of them only to see it returned to its former owners after the departure of federal troops from the South in 1877.

From then until today, there has been no serious, concerted effort to repay the economic debt created by over two centuries of slavery.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton suggested that we have a “national conversation about race.” But it’s difficult to have an authentic conversation when half of the people involved in the dialogue have over two hundred years of understandable rage to express. There are situations in life—and race in America is one of them—where talk without action does not heal a wound but only exacerbates it. Whites and blacks have a relationship in America, but it is an unequal one. One side owes something to the other, and until the debt is paid—or at the very least acknowledged—the relationship will remain unhealed.

By the twentieth century, the concept of reparations was widely recognized as a reasonable payment to a formerly wronged people. Germany has paid $89 billion in war reparations to Jewish organizations since World War II, and the United States should pay reparations for slavery. Germany could not undo the Holocaust, but reparations were part of its reconciliation with the Jews of Germany and the rest of Europe. America cannot undo hundreds of years of slavery either, but reparations can go far toward establishing a new frontier in racial reconciliation. Until then, each generation of Americans will continue to pass on to our children the toxicity of a psychological and economic debt.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act to compensate more than a hundred thousand people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. The legislation included a formal apology and a payment of $20,000 to each surviving victim. Why should America not pay reparations to the descendants of slaves who were brought to America against their will, used as slaves to build the Southern economy into a huge economic force, and then freed into a culture of further violence perpetrated against them? The fact that slavery ended in 1865 doesn’t mean the debt should be considered null and void. It certainly hasn’t been nullified in the ethers.

The problem of racism is hardly behind us; when handled in one area, it has morphed into new symptoms in another. It is time for our generation to rise to the challenge and take a fundamental step closer to national atonement and amends.

While there is no one solution that solves every aspect of the problem, a plan of reparations would have significant psychic as well as economic effects. The United States should appoint a Reparations Commission comprising a council of black leaders from across the spectrum of American culture, academia, and politics. A payment of $100 billion—probably more—paid over a period of ten years, would then be disbursed to projects of economic and educational renewal in the black community as determined by the Reparations Council. This plan would be rendered as payment for a long overdue debt.

The argument, of course, will always be that we “can’t afford it.” Yet it is time to push back against such hypocrisy. America will spend over $718 billion on defense this year alone. Over $2 trillion has been spent on the Iraq War, seen now to have been a massive foreign policy blunder. Two trillion dollars were given away in the 2017 tax cuts. Yet no one ever asked if we “could afford” such things. When it comes to paying reparations for slavery, on an emotional, psychological, and spiritual level we cannot afford not to. Until we do, the cycle of violence that began in the 1600s and continues to this day will continue to haunt our psyche and disrupt our good.

Chapter 7 will be emailed tomorrow!

Chapter 1: Love in a Time of Crisis: Lessons in Fear and Love

Chapter 2: A Revolution of Love: Reviewing the Plot

Chapter 3: Love and Conflict: Disagreeing with Love

Chapter 4: An Economics of Love: A New Bottom Line

Chapter 5: American Youth: Equal Rights for Angels

CHAPTER 5:
AMERICAN YOUTH: EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ANGELS

Often when I look at a small child, I feel like I’m looking at an angel.

Yet if children are angels, as a country we’re sure not treating them that way. Unseen by most of us, America has a terrible underbelly of millions of suffering children. Health crisis. Hunger crisis. Addiction crisis. Safety crisis. Education crisis. Traumatic stress crisis. So many of America’s children are endangered either physically or emotionally, it should be seen as a humanitarian emergency.

Obviously, the problem isn’t that we don’t love our children. But the love that will save the world is not just love for our own children. It is also love for children on the other side of town and the other side of the world. For every problem, whether personal or societal, the solution lies in the realization of our oneness and the expansion of our love.

The economic system of the United States was invented at a time when women did not yet have a public voice. The care of children was considered “women’s work.” But today we do have a voice, and it should be raised loudly on behalf of every woman’s child. Women have a unique role to play in addressing what is in essence systemic child neglect.

It took more than a hundred years of feminism to root out of Western consciousness the idea that women are the property of men. But in the arduous struggle for women’s equality over the years, perhaps we did not attend enough to the concomitant needs of children to be freed from the yoke of ancient injustices. While we have evolved as a society beyond the idea that women are the property of men, we have not fully evolved beyond the notion that children are the property of adults.

Children are not our property. They have their own rights of citizenship. If a child is a born or naturalized citizen of the United States, then he or she is legally accorded all the rights thereof.

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If every citizen is given by God unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” then government theoretically owes children more, not less, than adults because adults can more fully provide for themselves. A small child cannot feed, clothe, or educate himself or herself. Children cannot vote against special interests that profit financially off activities that harm their health, or that deny them education through the leeching of financial resources, or that profit off their problems through unjust punishment.

Few people want to actively harm a child, and there is certainly a universal consensus among us that such behavior should not be tolerated. We are certainly willing to hold an individual accountable for hurting one child. But as a society, we are neglecting millions of them. Most Americans probably don’t appreciate the level of chronic trauma now suffered by children in our midst.

Due mainly to economically disadvantaged parents, millions of American children live in food-insecure households, lacking consistent access to sufficient and nutritious food. Millions of our children go to school each day in schools that do not meet safety standards. Almost four million children lack health care coverage. Millions go to schools where there are not the required school supplies to reasonably expect a child to learn to read. And when children can’t learn to read by eight years old, the chances of them graduating from high school are greatly reduced and the chances of incarceration are increased.

And what are they to do? They are not old enough to vote; therefore they have no voter influence. They’re not old enough to work; therefore they have no financial leverage. They can’t afford highly paid lobbyists to stroll the halls of Congress to advocate on their behalf. Who is to speak for them, if not us?

And that is why politics matters. It’s not something “over there” to people whose lives must bear the impact of policies that work against their interests every day. An issue shouldn’t spark us only if it happens to impact us personally. Politics shouldn’t be just about you and yours, or me and mine. It’s about we and ours. Politics is the purview of our collective sensibilities and our collective decision-making. It should be a place where we address more than just what we want for ourselves; it should be a place where we come together to consider hould be a place where we come together to consider what is right for America. There’s a bigger question in life than “How am I doing?” And that’s “How are we doing?”

Millions of children living in chronic distress in the richest country in the world is a form of collective child neglect. And that should matter to all of us.

THE COST OF CHRONIC TRAUMA

The crisis of American children is multidimensional, with manifestations in our economic system, health system, educational system, justice system, and mental health care system.

Seventy-eight percent of incarcerated inmates in America came out of the child welfare system. Sex trafficking of American girls is a $91 billion business, making us number one among sex-trafficking countries around the world. Some 120,000 girls were shipped into Minneapolis for last year’s Super Bowl, making it arguably the largest sex-trafficking event in the world.

Obviously, the primary problem here cannot be reduced to any one issue. Poverty is a problem. Opioids are a problem. The breakdown of the family is a problem. The ease with which fathers can avoid making child care payments is a problem. Lack of education, particularly among low-income populations, is a problem. An increase in the number of children sent to foster care is a problem. The fact that the sex-trafficking industry has infiltrated the network of foster-care parents and even hovers over schools is a problem. But perhaps the worst problem of all is how desensitized we are to the urgency of the problem.

More children have been killed by gunfire in the United States since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, than American soldiers have been killed in overseas combat since 9/11. From sex trafficking to a chronic pattern of school shootings to children torn from their parents’ arms as an act of immigration policy to millions of children living in chronic trauma, something has gone horribly wrong. And what child can stand up for himself or herself and say, “Enough is enough”?

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Our system does not actively transgress against children. For the most part, the American legal system does its best to protect children from active measures that harm their well-being, though far too few resources are devoted to that purpose, to be sure. In a country whose government has increasingly aligned itself with the interests of corporate power before the needs of its people, it should surprise no one that the interests of children fall to the lowest spot on our political priority list. Teachers’ unions, youth advocacy groups, and nonprofit educational organizations such as the Children’s Defense Fund do important work, but they’re no match for the economic clout accorded to corporate interests.

The vital interests of children should be seen as our most important, not our least important, political concern—and then treated that way. We should massively realign the material resources of our country in the direction of children eight years old and younger. If we were thinking about genuine long-range economic planning—not to mention securing the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to every citizen—then there would be not one American in early childhood with anything less than the best-quality health care, the best-quality education, the best-quality access to the arts, and the best-quality food.

Why should a child’s basic rights as an American be tended to less just because the circumstances of his or her birth were less fortunate? Where in our Constitution does it say that rich children should have greater access to the fruits of liberty? If we’re going to take the “God gave all men inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” part of the Declaration of Independence and declare it no longer operative, if we’re going to take the “governments are instituted among men to secure those rights” phrase and simply declare it null and void, then shouldn’t we at least have a conversation about it first?

We’re the only country in the world that funds our educational system through property taxes, guaranteeing that children of well-to-do parents have a good chance of a quality education while children of less-well-to-do parents do not. It is astonishing to look online and see all the ways in which teachers ask for help getting their students basic school supplies, just so that they can learn. This points out a basic flaw in our political perspective: care for our children should not be a charity issue, but a justice issue. And at the deepest level, a human issue.

It’s grossly cynical to tell people to climb the ladder of success when, as children, they weren’t put onto the first rung by those who are older. As Martin Luther King Jr. would say, you can’t tell someone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps when they don’t even have any boots. Often we read of people who “escaped” a childhood of poverty in America, but all of us should ask ourselves: in the richest nation in the world, why should so many children be in need of “escape”?

The health and well-being of American children should be top on our list of national priorities. The means of self-actualization through education and culture should be available to every child, regardless of what neighborhood they live in. Their libraries should be fully funded temples of arts and literacy. Their schools should be palaces of learning and joy. Their neighborhoods should all have safe and beautiful parks for them to play in.

To ask for those things doesn’t mean we’re asking for too much. Not asking for them means we are asking for too little. There is no lack of money to do this. This is simply too much money going elsewhere.

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Americans have become so habituated to skewed natural priorities that we’re almost programmed to ask, “But where would the money come from?”

“How would we pay for all that education and culture, health and safety?” ask those who have no problem whatsoever paying for ill-begotten wars and tax cuts for the extremely wealthy. Such a question should be met by laughter from those who were never consulted as to how we would pay for a $2 trillion war in Iraq (which, among other things, created ISIS) or a $2 trillion tax cut for the wealthiest among us (which, among other things, is already adding to our wealth inequality).

Let’s ask instead what price we’re paying by not doing more to help our children. Or to be more exact, the price that our children are paying and will continue to pay. When it comes to our children, we should protect them from the ravages of poverty no differently than we would protect them from the ravages of a natural disaster.

According to the most recent poverty data from the US Census Bureau, almost 13 million children in the United States lived in poverty in 2017. Most of those children went to school hungry each day. Hunger diminished both their capacity to learn and the statistical probability of their future success, both educationally and professionally.

If everyone who reads this will simply put down your book for a moment, close your eyes, and try to imagine what it means that 13 million children in this country go to school hungry each day, then we will be a better nation for it.

In her book On Becoming, Michelle Obama describes in some detail the admirable efforts she made while living in the East Wing on behalf of America’s disadvantaged children. I couldn’t help wondering while reading it, however, why the plight of those children didn’t get more attention in the West Wing.

In the words of Nelson Mandela, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” Yet the United States ranks at the bottom, or near the bottom, on almost every indicator when it comes to governmental policies toward children. In the United States, youth homicide rates are more than ten times the rates of other leading industrialized nations. Social scientists and psychologists describe our own “war zones”—areas in some of our more violently charged homes, communities, and inner cities—where levels of trauma and post-traumatic stress among children are similar to those experienced by returning vets. But there is nothing “post” about their traumatic stress, because it is triggered and retriggered every day. We have simply normalized their despair.

Americans have become enamored of the idea that our government should be run like a business, but that idea is flawed. In fact, our problem is that too often our government is run like a business—the wrong kind of business. It gives precedence to the gains of corporate shareholders while often ignoring the needs of the average stakeholder, which in this case is every citizen. And what business can long endure that pays out dividends to its shareholders but ignores the development of new products?

The US government should not be run like a business; it should be run like a family. Millions of years of evolution prove that no natural system can survive and thrive that does not first take care of its young. New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ahern, in a speech to the United Nations in 2018, said that her goal is to make her country the best place in the world to be a child. Americans should ask for no less.

Over 74 million people in the United States are under the age of eighteen.* And every one of them could have a world-class education, starting in preschool and going through college or technical school. Every dollar spent on the health, education, and general welfare of our young will multiply mightily in the form of the creativity, health, and economic vitality of the adults they will become. And every dollar we withhold from them is stolen many times over from our economy and social vitality in the future.

The relative neglect of the needs of this segment of our population is a threat to the security of our country, because it is a threat to our future. How dare those of us who do not statistically stand to be around in fifty years live our lives in such a way as to make the lives of those who will still be here more difficult? Such thinking derives from an economic system that views children as dispensable because they add no immediate economic value to that system. It is true that they add no short-term value to our economy, but they are critical to the long-term possibility of survival—the survival not only of our democracy, but possibly of life on earth.

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INVESTING IN NEW BEGINNINGS

In Proverbs 22:6, it is written, “Start children off in the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.” This is not just a religious scripture; it is a scientific fact. There is no greater human potential than that provided by the brain capacity and neuroplasticity of children under the age of eight. We now know in ways that were not scientifically established a century ago that a child’s brain is infinitely more flexible, more emotionally intelligent, and more capable of learning and retaining information than an adult’s.

As the iconic filmmaker Billy Wilder once said, “If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.” The most sophisticated kind of long-term planning focuses on getting things right at the beginning.

This country is standing on top of millions of tiny gold mines. Enter any kindergarten and you’ll see an unlimited amount of unmined energy, creativity, and genius. Every American elementary school student has potential talent and intelligence unmatched by any technological, financial, or institutional power. Nothing humanity has created can begin to rival the potential of the human brain, and no human brain carries more potential than the brain of the child. The greatest fuel for twenty-first-century abundance comes not from the oil or gas in our ground, but from the genius in our elementary schools.

Our political system is the product of a time when children were basically thought of as little adults-in-waiting. The fields of psychology, neurology, and sociology are relatively new compared to the economic and social theorizing from which our modern society emerged. Stuck in twentieth-century and even nineteenth-century models of social theorizing, we’ve viewed children as charges to be taken care of, yet never factoring their intellectual, emotional, cultural, and physical development into our long-term view of progress. The beginning of any system is all-important, and that is what childhood is—not only for an individual but for a society. Once a beginning is set, things are far more difficult to change afterwards. In its low rankings on prenatal care, maternal health, and the psychological and emotional care of new parents, the US government fails not only mothers and children but also the country at large.

We’re one of very few advanced democracies, for instance, that don’t provide federally funded parental leave. It’s ironic that this failure stems from sectors of the business community insisting that they can’t afford it; in fact, the time spent by a newborn child in the arms of a parent statistically increases the child’s productivity in later years, as well as the parent’s productivity when they return to work unencumbered by the sadness of going back to work too soon. The idea of helping people has been propagandistically turned into some twisted vision of a nanny state—like it’s some enabling, codependent, fuzzy-minded thinking as opposed to what it really is: action that aligns us with our spiritual nature, the laws of the universe, and the ultimate well-being of all.

As long as there was a dearth of women in positions of political, social, and economic power, this chronic skewing of American priorities in the direction of short-term economic interests as opposed to humanitarian values was understandable. As long as women were basically invisible, children were invisible as well. But women are invisible no longer, and neither should our children be.

Of course, we should teach our children reading, writing, and arithmetic. But our educational system should expand to include a more whole-person vision of what it takes to prepare a child for self-actualized life in the twenty-first century. We should help our children develop the emotional and psychological skills to navigate life in what has become an extremely complex world. Until we do that, our educational system will remain inadequate despite whatever funding we put into it.

Are we preparing American children to grow up to be cogs in the wheel of a vast economic machine—designed to protect the advantaged ones, picking out the most talented ones to fill the ranks of the elite—or are we committed to the development of the full potential of every child to be their most creative, empowered best? The former—basically the educational model we follow now—is the legacy of an aristocratic worldview, while the latter is the actualization of democracy.

We should do more than educate children so they’re prepared to get a job. We should educate children so they’re prepared for greatness. We should educate them to realize that each of them has the potential to be anyone and anything they want, and that their opportunities are limitless. That is the American Dream.

Every child in America could have a world-class education, starting in preschool and going through college or technical school. No American child should go to a school in which class size makes teaching more a matter of crowd control than the cultivation of young minds. Every American child should learn civics and history, for only then are they adequately prepared for the responsibility of citizen leadership in a democracy.

Children should be taught not only what to think—as in science and math—but also how to think, as in honing their critical thought processes so they know how to think for themselves. America’s educational system should be the crown jewel of America’s investment portfolio, our greatest asset in producing creativity and progress. In the words of the poet William Butler Yeats, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

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DEMANDING CHANGE

A kindergartener in a disadvantaged neighborhood has the same inner fire as a kindergartener in an advantaged neighborhood. No child in America should be denied a world-class education because his or her parents are poor. Such disparity perpetuates our slide toward a veiled aristocratic system. Access to the finest education remaining in the hands of a few is the way an unjust system ensures that power remains in the hands of a few. That’s why the failure to provide the highest-quality education to every American child is a passive attack on our democracy.

Millions of American children, born as innocent children of God with unlimited human potential, fall through the cracks in our society ever year. They do so without the level of support they need to function as healthy, productive members of society, neglected not just by their families but by our society. Failure to provide this support drives up the incidence of violence, drug addiction, and other dysfunctions among our young people, only adding to the size and entrenchment of America’s permanent underclass. And how do we pay for that? With our blood and treasure.

Children growing up in homes riddled by trauma—much of it the result of the scourge of poverty and racism—are likely to be clinically diagnosable with mental health disorders. The high statistical probability of their taking a path along what the author Marion Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, has termed the “cradle to prison” pipeline is a moral scourge upon our country. When the richest nation in the world fails to address the hunger in the stomachs of its children and the hunger for learning in their minds, we as a nation are in danger of reaping desperate consequences.

Are we not already? Of the incarcerated 2.3 million Americans—more per capita than any other nation in the world—does any serious person think this represents only personal failure on the part of those imprisoned? Is there nothing there for us to look at as a society, not only in terms of our criminal justice system but also in terms of our failure to prepare more of our children for a productive, successful life?

We the people can rise up and stand for a massive change. Trauma-informed education and community wraparound services are needed and should be adequately funded. From playgrounds to parks to libraries, from better-paid teachers to upgraded schools, from music to dance to art, from social and emotional learning schools to nonviolent communication skills, from health care and mindfulness techniques to whole-family support services, we should upgrade our commitment to children not just a little, not just incrementally, but fundamentally. Most important, we should connect the dots between economic disadvantage as it affects a parent and the almost inevitable trauma it imposes on a child. With nearly a third of all Americans living in near-poverty conditions, you don’t have to be an economist to know that something is wrong with this picture.

The economic formulas of a bygone era are morally neutral and essentially heartless. They leave out women, they leave out mothering, they leave out children, and they leave out love.

No wonder we’re so fractured as a society, given that we’re so fractured from our own essential nature. No system thrives that doesn’t prepare its continuation. We’re a generation more aware of our own childhood wounds than any generation before, yet neglectful of the multiple wounds to the hearts and minds and bodies of America’s children today. Only when we awaken spiritually to our responsibility to our young will we be creating a more sustainable future. By allowing so many desperate children to wallow in despair, we’re creating a future in which we will inevitably be wallowing in our own.

What’s impressive about American young people is that despite the odds that are pitted against so many of them, they continue to strive for the American Dream. What all of us should ask ourselves is why our society is invested in making it so hard. Governmental action should help people thrive, not make it more difficult for them to do so.

About 40 million Americans hold student loans, and about 70 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients graduate with debt.* The size of student debt is staggering, with 44 million people owing $1.5 trillion in student loans. Most of those loans are held by the federal government, which could ameliorate those debts if it chose. Instead, it has essentially created among America’s youth a new form of bondage that exists only because our young are trying to better themselves. The average student in the class of 2016 graduated with a student loan debt of between $28,000 and $37,000. Millions of young Americans would love nothing more than to participate in a free-market economy by having enough discretionary spending money to build a website and start their own company. How ironic that our capitalist system now works so hard to keep them out, when all they want is just a chance to be let in!

Nothing holds more promise for the twenty-first century than a radical rethinking of our responsibility to children and young adults. This country should undertake a massive realignment of our resources in the direction of the young. We should make college or technical school available to everyone. We should cancel most college debts. And why should we do all these things? To unshackle the American spirit, to release the chains that bind our circumstances, to liberate the potential in every citizen . . . and then to watch this country soar! America’s problem is the problem of a constricted heart. As individuals we are a good and decent people, but as a society we have become rather mean. It is time to reconsider. It is time to self-correct.

Chapter 6 will be emailed tomorrow!

Chapter 1: Love in a Time of Crisis: Lessons in Fear and Love

Chapter 2: A Revolution of Love: Reviewing the Plot

Chapter 3: Love and Conflict: Disagreeing with Love

Chapter 4: An Economics of Love: A New Bottom Line

CHAPTER 4
AN ECONOMICS OF LOVE: A NEW BOTTOM LINE

The Latin root of the word economy refers to the management of a household. There is no better example of right management of a household than the economy of nature. It is a perfect ecosystem in which nothing is wasted, every part of the whole has a perfect relationship to every other part, and all things inherently move in the direction of greater life.

The problem with modern economics is that it does not honor the economy of nature, but rather has set itself up in competition with nature. It is based on the organization of goods and services for the goal of profit, rather than for the goal of furthering life. As such is out of alignment with the enlightened thinking necessary to guide us to a sustainable future.

When viewed through the lens of modern economics, the primary driver of the economy is profit. When viewed through the lens of an enlightened economics for the twenty-first century, the primary mover of the economy is human creativity.

When financialization replaces production as the dominant way to make money—as has happened over the last four decades in America—the dignity and creativity of human beings is sacrificed. For example, when capitalists take over a profitable company that produces and sells goods, carve it into pieces, shut down operations, put people out of work, and bankrupt the company, but then they make millions of dollars doing it. That is the kind of scenario that has resulted from the separation of capitalism from ethics. It is unconscious capitalism and an amoral economics. Human beings are there simply to serve the economy, when in fact the economy should be there to serve human beings. Transaction replaces relationship as the main mode of human organization. And all hell breaks loose from there.

Enlightened economics is moral, in that it honors the needs of people and planet before the needs of the marketplace. Interestingly, Adam Smith, the primary analyst of modern capitalism, argued that the free market cannot exist outside an ethical context. Yet today it does, which means that it is not free. Since the 1980s, economic policy in the United States has been driven by a decidedly amoral perspective positing that the demands of the marketplace—unlimited by any ethical restraint—should be our financial bottom line.

A healthy, free economy is about more than numbers. It is about more than things. It is about more than goods. It is about us.

An unconscious capitalism—freed from government protection of workers and the environment through the removal of Glass-Steagall legislation, global trade deals that fail to protect the American worker, taxes favoring wealthy corporations, union busting, and more—has done incalculable harm to democracy, people, and planet. In the United States, it has destroyed our middle class and turned the majority of our citizens into little more than serfs to a system over which they feel they have no control. It has made the short-term profit maximization of multinational corporations our society’s bottom line, claiming this would lift all boats when in fact it has left millions without even a life vest. It has made people subservant to things, and loving human relationships secondary to money. It has replaced the tyranny of a king with the tyranny of an amoral economic system.

And it is time for this to change. The harm it is doing to our society is more than political or economic. It is a moral rot that leads to political corruption that leads to human devastation.

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While it’s the task of economic policy to promote prosperity, more than money is needed to make life prosperous. True prosperity includes a sense of security and well-being that goes beyond finances. The ultimate prosperity is dwelling in the sense that all things are possible. And the ultimate American Dream is the establishment of a society in which, if anyone works hard enough, then they have a reason to feel that way.

Our economics should honor that dream, not function in a way that as often as not shatters it. To survive, people need our base-level physical needs met. But to thrive, people need more than that. We need meaning. We need spiritual sustenance. We need a sense that our lives matter.

Our economic system should serve, not stymie, a genuine prosperity. It should free, not limit, the ability of all citizens to harness their creativity in service of something larger than themselves. That lifts people to our higher place, out of which creativity and energy flow naturally.

That is why education, health, infrastructure, and culture should come first, for they are the most serious investments a society can make in the happiness and well-being of its people. Happy, secure people are much more likely to produce creativity and wealth than are those who are struggling just to survive.

We should not just ask if the economy is healthy; we should ask if we are healthy, in every way that the word has significance. When we are healthy, our economy is more likely to be as well.

Our political establishment posits the idea that a healthy economy guarantees a happy society. If that were true, given that we are the richest nation on earth, we should be the happiest. Yet clearly we are not. High rates of depression, suicide, economic anxiety, drug addiction, incarceration, and environmental toxicity are not the marks of happiness.

A healthy economy is currently defined as total output of gross domestic product (GDP). But GDP should not be seen as an accurate measure of our well-being, whether economically or in any other way. It overlooks the issues of working conditions, environmental well-being, and health and safety, among other things. It doesn’t take into account the chronic anxiety, opioid addiction, and emotional state of millions of Americans traumatized simply by living in their neighborhoods.

Our primary economic indicators measure products but don’t measure us. In that sense, our view of economics is unnatural; it is an idolatrous way of thinking that bows more to material values than to universal human values. When we turn our focus toward being a good society rather than a rich society, a lot more people will be richer in every way.

What is referred to as an economy that’s “doing well” is actually one in which, however low the official unemployment rate may be, 40 percent of all Americans struggle to make ends meet and have a hard time covering their food, shelter, transportation, and health care costs. Many of them are referred to as the “working poor.” Yes, they are working. But they are not doing well. Many official figures coming out of Washington do not reflect their difficulties so much as make a mockery of them. Our government’s attitude toward economic despair is often less about ameliorating it and more about announcing to the desperate that they’re not really desperate.

An economics of love makes people, not products, the focus of our investments. An economics of love does not take an unsophisticated view of finance, but in fact has a more sophisticated view of how money is created. Our greatest creative energy comes not from outside us but from inside us; therefore, anything that supports our internal growth supports our capacity to economically thrive. It’s long been recognized that ensuring that people feel respected for their contribution to a workplace and valued for who they are as people does more to increase their productivity than does money alone.

Money is created by creativity, not the other way around. The source of our creativity is within. It is part of who we are. The greatest proof of this is evident in any kindergarten anywhere in the world.

Consider, for instance, a Montessori classroom, where children are allowed to roam among play and work stations. Are they not industrious? Are they not creative? Are they not in their own way entrepreneurial? Most of our economic theories were invented by men who had not spent a particularly great amount of time around small children—not even their own. If they had, perhaps they would have realized that people are naturally creative and industrious, particularly in the first eight years of life.

An economics in sync with the more enlightened thinking of the twenty-first century is an economics based on two main factors: one, feed the creativity of the child in order to foster the productivity of the adult that child will become; and two, remove as much unnecessary anxiety as possible from people in order to unleash their creativity and productivity.

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It is not as though children want to create, but then lose the desire as they grow older. Rather, creativity is too often beaten out of people. What happens in a society like ours is that so many people live with daily economic stress and anxiety that their creative juices are sapped. (What will happen if I lose my job and I don’t have benefits? What will happen if I get sick? What will happen if one of my kids gets sick? How will I pay for my kids to go to college? How will I pay off my college loans? Will I have enough money to retire without going broke?) Some argue that we “can’t afford” programs such as universal health care and the cancellation of college loan debt, yet the sleight of hand there is preposterous. Every dollar invested in education is an investment in tomorrow’s economy. Every dollar invested in people is an investment in their productivity, and thus a larger consumer base. Our current economic functioning has nothing to do with long-term economic planning, and everything to do with leeching from our system every possible short-term advantage for a minority of our citizens. Thus, we steal from our children, our planet, and our future. If we were really thinking about our long-term economic good, we would be massively realigning our investments not toward our economic overlords, but toward we the people of the United States.

Americans of every age are entrepreneurial by temperament, and when we’re supported in such endeavors and allowed to thrive, we are naturally productive. Each of us carries within us greater God-given potential than most of us will ever actualize. That is as true of a poor person as it is of a rich person. No socioeconomic group has a monopoly on the desire to create, to contribute, and to do so with dignity. Millions of Americans work hard and are deeply creative, yet can hardly make ends meet. That doesn’t mean they’re any more “lazy” than rich people. The often articulated correlation between wealth-creation and willingness to work—and the concomitant correlation between poverty and unwillingness to work—is false. In fact, millions of America’s most industrious citizens—people who get up before dawn each day, raise families, and work the hardest—struggle daily to make ends meet.

Such assumptions as those mentioned above are simply vicious stereotypes used to justify the leeching of resources from those who need it most. The majority of America’s poor are not looking for handouts but for a fair shot—which too often they are not receiving now. There is a difference between handouts and simple economic justice. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “When they give it to the rich, they call it a subsidy; when they give it to the poor, they call it a handout.” Governmental policy skewed in the direction of giving more to those who already have more, and less to those who already have less, is neither just nor democratic.

We defer to the needs of the market when instead we should be deferring to the needs of the people.

In the era of corporate conglomerates, employment has become nothing more than an amoral numbers game that is divorced from ethical considerations and turns the majority of people in the world into its servants. And too many people are left out of the game entirely, regardless of whether or not they have jobs. Financial figures are frequently used to obscure human realities that tell a different story than they do.

Traumatized, stressed-out, and unduly anxious people have a difficult time accessing their potential. Yes, some stress is healthy, but the economic stress of way too many Americans today is not that. Rather, these Americans endure the stress of having been cast out of nature’s economy. For while nature has a way of supporting the living creatures within it, an economic system untethered to an ethical center has a way of casting out anyone and anything that does not serve it.

People want to feel that their work in the world expresses their creativity and life force and produces more than money—that it also produces dignity, self-satisfaction, and a sense of meaning and purpose in the world. An economics that offers nothing more than “employment,” with little concern for what that employment offers above a baseline salary, is an economic model inadequate to the human demands of the twenty-first century—especially when that baseline salary is often not enough to enable hardworking people to support a family.

It is true—and to be respected—that successful businesses create jobs. But they are not the only engines of prosperity. And in truth, small businesses employ almost as many workers as big business does. It is only because big corporations have so much more money and influence over our government that they can skew economic policy in their favor. Making the profitability of large corporations the center of American economic policy has very little to do with actually serving the people, and everything to do with serving a donor class/economic ruling class that loves to present itself as America’s great economic benefactor.

Business is important, and successful businesses are essential to a healthy economy. But the business sector is no more important or more essential to our economic good than education, health care, or any other avenue by which people are aided in their ability to self-actualize. Education, not big business, is the biggest job-creating sector. The greatest job-creator in America is not the businessperson but the teacher—one who doesn’t simply give you a job, but prepares you for a career by providing you with the internal and external tools to create it. It is not just overseas outsourcing that has taken our jobs away; it is in equal measure our failure as a society to provide for the preparation of our citizens, from the earliest age, for the challenges of living in the twenty-first century.

Education, both intellectual and spiritual, is our largest engine of prosperity. Whole-person education prepares us to succeed. It gives us the training, hones the critical thought processes, and cultivates the attitudes that are essential to success. It gives people more than a path to a better job; it gives them a path to power. Perhaps that is what some American elites do not wish to see happen.

Health care is an engine of prosperity as well: first, because healthier people obviously have more energy; and second, because health insurance coverage takes away much of the economic anxiety that keeps people from soaring at full wingspan. Illness is one of the most common reasons people go bankrupt in this country: in the absence of health care coverage, illness robs us of both work and savings. It’s hard to imagine how much more money would be circulating through the American economy if so many Americans weren’t weighed down by illnesses—not only those they have but those they’re terrified of getting.

Art and culture are engines of prosperity because they expand who we are as people and broaden the scope of our creativity. They energize us and deepen our humanity. Numerous studies have established that participation in the arts increases cognitive skills, yet more and more American children lack exposure to them in any meaningful way. In the richest country in the world, we have seen arts curricula fading fast from many of our schools, leaving only a market-based entertainment industry to take up the slack. A lot of good comes out of Hollywood—in movies, TV series, and internet productions—but artistic tastes that require cultivation, such as classical art and music and theater, should be taught in our schools as a means of basic cultural literacy.

By not vigorously supporting the arts, not providing universal health care, and undereducating so many of our citizens, today’s economic system does more than keep money in the hands of a few—it keeps power in the hands of a few. It stymies genuine prosperity even while it claims to foster it.

None of us should accept the assumption that the business sector is the primary generator of prosperity. Such an assumption serves no one but the business sector, which then claims the right to undue economic advantages under the pretense that such advantages for the business sector foster a healthier economy.

Our esteemed economic councils shouldn’t have just financiers in business suits serving on them; they should include schoolteachers and child psychologists, experts in liberal arts and technical education, and those who know best how to nonpharmaceutically address the trauma of modern life. Help people soar and they’ll build their own economic prosperity, thank you. The paternalism of an economic system that first creates economic hardship for millions, then pretends to know how to assuage it, is delusional. Our current economic model is a holdover from an aristocratic perspective that views people as servants to a system; but our economy should be a system that is a servant to the people.

The theory of “trickle-down economics”—the idea that if we give enough of our tax dollars to the already highly paid business sector, then their economic prosperity will trickle down to everyone else—was cast like a modern spell over us during the final two decades of the twentieth century. Given current statistical evidence that most of our propensity for economic success is established in the first eight years of life, if we’re really going to subsidize those who “generate prosperity,” we should subsidize elementary school teachers!

Businesses that diminish the quality of life and well-being of our citizens do not make us more “prosperous.” Are fossil fuel companies and chemical companies engines of prosperity when the damage they cause to our environment increases illness and thus health care costs? Are big agricultural companies engines of prosperity when they wreck our rural economy? Are big pharmaceutical companies engines of prosperity when they knowingly hock unnecessary, addictive medicines for no other reason than to increase their bottom line? Are banks really engines of prosperity when they saddle college students with a lifelong burden of college loans?

All of those industries have the capacity to do good, and in many cases they do. But businesses should have the same ethical obligations to society as any other sector. The idea that a corporation should bear no responsibility to anything other than the financial bottom line of its stockholders destroys the social fabric of our society as well as the natural environment on which all business, and indeed all life, depends.

Those who decry the lack of conscience so rampant in corporate America today are not “antibusiness.” Quite the contrary. It is a grand American tradition to resist overreach by the capitalist system when it becomes unmoored from conscience. From the establishment of child labor laws to the rights of workers to unionize to regulations guaranteeing worker safety, corrective measures have been taken to stem capitalism’s excesses throughout our history. They are chapters in a grand American narrative. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushed for New Deal policies that helped working people and restrained the worst impulses of capitalism, he argued that his policies would save capitalism, not destroy it. And he was right. The progressive economic conversation is not necessarily about repudiating capitalism, but simply holding it ethically accountable.

The tension between someone’s right to make money, on the one hand, and someone else’s right to clean air and water, safety, and economic justice, on the other, is built into any free market. What has changed over the last few years, however—primarily because of the undue influence of corporate money on our political system—is how often the government sides with corporate overreach rather than the American people! This change amounts not only to a different economic policy but to a radical realignment of the American government with the interests of its donors as opposed to the interests of its constituency.

In fact, business needs us as much as we need it. Business requires good schools for an educated workforce, just as democracy requires good schools for an educated citizenry. It also requires roads, bridges, and public transit to transport workers and goods. And business needs to have enough people who are doing well to buy its goods and services. Doing things that help people thrive shouldn’t be seen as an economic loss but as an economic gain.

We have acquiesced to an aristocratic economic system, lured into doing so not by the tyranny of kings but rather by political propaganda designed to convince the abused that the abuser is their friend. Tax revenue currently given to help the top .01 percent should be used to create the largest matrix of technical colleges and free institutions of higher learning in the world. The fact that our tax revenue is not used this way is a travesty of economic justice and a legacy of ancient serfdom.

The American people have been mentally trained to expect too little from our government. It should not be considered radical that, in the richest nation on earth, our government serves the health and well-being of its citizens before the health and well-being of multibillion-dollar corporations. We need to shift our thinking, and our organizing principles, from an economic to a humanitarian bottom line.

THE TRICKLE-DOWN ILLUSION

America has flourished most when corporations shared the fruits of increased productivity with workers and viewed their ethical obligation as extending beyond mere fiduciary responsibility to stockholders. Between World War II and 1980, we had a vibrant social contract whereby many corporations acted more responsibly toward workers, consumers, and communities. Unions were strong, and workers’ wages rose. People earned higher wages and could buy more products, enabling companies to thrive. Prosperity was more broadly shared. From the end of World War II until 1980, corporations in America were expected to consider more than just stockholders to be stakeholders in the company. Employees were considered stakeholders. The community was considered a stakeholder. The environment was considered a stakeholder. Why? Because all of us, not only those who were financially invested, were viewed as having a stake in what happened in corporate America.

After 1980, however, that social contract eroded. Companies shared fewer of the fruits of their labor with workers and pushed to crush unions. Governmentally, the entire decade of the 1980s was a full-scale legitimization of corporate greed. More of a company’s wealth went to CEOs and our top 1 percent, weakening our middle class.

The rugged narcissism of Ayn Rand married the greedy free-market-at-the-expense-of-everyone-and-everything-else of Milton Friedman and spawned the financial monster of trickle-down economics. The theory of giving all our money to those who already have enough of it in the hope that through job creation the money will trickle down to everyone else is demonstrably false. Yet that lie has been used in the United States for propaganda purposes for decades, despite all economic evidence to the contrary.

Tax breaks and other financial breaks that favor the wealthiest among us do not create greater prosperity for all; they simply siphon off more and more money to those who already have it and shift more and more money away from those who do not. They do not promote wealth-creation opportunities that benefit all; they simply redistribute wealth from those who do not have much to those who already do. The notion that a $2 trillion tax cut—with 83 cents of every dollar going to the wealthiest among us—is an economic windfall for the people of the United States is nothing short of a cruel hoax perpetrated upon the American people.

If we give a huge amount of money to the rich, we simply don’t have enough money left over to help those who are not. This tax bonanza for big business and the very rich drains the public treasury, intensifying pressure to cut vital programs like Social Security, Medicare, and many other social services. An economic model that steals from the American worker on the premise that, once having been stolen, the money will then be returned to them by the thieves who took it in the first place is patently absurd. And one more thing, lest we forget: the workers are supposed to be grateful.

This pattern amounts to more than financial theft; it is an assault on the foundations of our democracy. A government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is meant to be just that.

A government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” has become a government “of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.” Because huge corporate entities can supply campaign funds way beyond what can be supplied by individual citizens, such industries now exert an influence on government policy that is completely out of proportion to the social—and economic—good that they provide. In fact, the 2017 $2 trillion tax cut—which mostly benefited the very wealthy and the largest corporate entities—even removed the tax deduction for public school teachers who use their own money to buy school supplies for their classrooms because school budgets are inadequate!

Corporate interests dominate our politics so much at this point that our government, for all intents and purposes, is merely their handmaiden. Whatever Wall Street wants, Wall Street gets. Corporatism is the new order of the day, and who suffers as a result? We the people.

Charles and David Koch, the owners of Koch Industries who pushed most vigorously for the 2017 tax cut, personally received a cut in taxes of $1 billion a year!

The Koch brothers pledged to spend $400 million in the 2018 election cycle supporting candidates who pushed for the tax bill and promised to continue to extend its economic influence.

In order to pass the bill, the same old trickle-down propaganda was trotted out and sold to ill-informed citizens on the basis that money spent on the tax bill—basically money stolen from the middle class and given to the wealthy—would “trickle down” to the rest of us through job creation, and so forth. But as usual, such propaganda is simply false. In fact, the vast majority of the tax cut money will not go to job creation and wage increases but to extra wealth for the already wealthy. This tax bill is not a reasonable piece of economic legislation; it is a raid on the US Treasury, a massive theft from the American middle and lower classes that will dramatically intensify already extreme income inequality.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 1989 the average ratio of CEO to worker compensation was 59 to 1. By 2016, CEO compensation had skyrocketed while typical workers’ wages remained fairly stagnant, and the ratio had zoomed to 271 to 1. What this means, then, is that CEOs and stockholders were able to financially benefit from the growth of a company, but its employees could not.

Over the last forty years, CEO compensation has increased 1,070 percent, while the typical worker’s compensation has risen only 11 percent; the 2017 tax bill does nothing to assuage that. In fact, it will probably only exacerbate the disparity. Since the bill’s passage, big companies, instead of increasing workers’ wages have routinely used the tax cuts for stock buybacks, which simply directs more money to shareholders.

Before the 1980s, CEOs couldn’t be paid with stock options; a Reagan-era “reform” changed that, adding an inherent financial conflict to the role of CEO. The CEO of a corporation would thereafter have a financial incentive to increase stock value, often at the expense of larger stakeholder value and the long-term health of the company. Back when our government supported the values of democracy over an obsequious adherence to corporatist demands, corporations had more incentive to do the right thing.

Yet time and time again, Americans are asked to support measures that will aid corporate interests as opposed to their own, the very interests that crucify America’s economy and then present themselves as our economic saviors—a brilliant strategy and one that is working. But it will not work forever. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, “You can fool all the people some of the time, some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” We’re in the midst of a new American awakening, as more and more people realize that a company of thieves is a company of thieves, no matter how mild-mannered, educated, well-spoken, or generous to charity they might be. He who steals billions from the public but then throws a few million to charity is not someone deserving of thanks.

Private giving is important, but so is public fairness. Charity matters, but no amount of private charity can compensate for a basic lack of social justice. Beginning with the Occupy movement, Americans began to see the extraordinary economic disparity between the 1 percent and everyone else. Many now realize that our economy is rigged in favor not only of the 1 percent, but in favor of the 1 percent of the 1 percent. With more and more millennials paying the cost of a rigged system, and simultaneously more and more of them coming of an age to vote, American capitalism will self-correct or it will self-destruct. It is particularly unfair for people who will live the majority of their lives, or even all of their lives, in the twenty-first century to be burdened by the effects of bad economic theories that are outworn leftovers from the late twentieth.

If everyone in America is deemed to have been given by God “the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and if, as it says in our Declaration of Independence, “government is instituted among men to secure those rights,” then our government should be advocating for us, not for corporate conglomerates! It should not be whoring for systems that routinely endanger health, destroy our natural environment, and limit the capacity of those with fewer material resources to thrive.

And we the people have the right to say so.

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HISTORY IS ON OUR SIDE

Our history is one in which overreach by moneyed forces, more often than not, has ultimately been met by righteous protest. Pushing back against what Thomas Jefferson called “the general tendency of the rich to prey upon the poor” is more in line with the “American way” than our current acquiescence to legalized economic tyranny. America has historically prided itself on expanding economic justice, not weakening it.

The narrative of our past is not one in which Americans consistently folded in the face of economic injustice; it is one in which, more typically, the American people railed against such injustice and ultimately prevailed.

The question of whether capitalism has a moral responsibility to people and the planet is not new. American brilliance applied to business has always been one of our greatest strengths, but we are also a people for whom ethics matters.

Our history has been marked by an ongoing struggle between the engines of economic prosperity, on the one hand, and the ethical considerations that make life meaningful and righteous, on the other. The sacrifice of our moral core to the false god of short-term economic gain is as morally dangerous for our society as it is for an individual. A morality that applies to everything except the things that affect real people’s daily lives is not morality at all. It is our moral responsibility to insist on just enough regulation of American business and to give enough pushback to an otherwise unfettered, amoral capitalism.

We should neither romanticize the history of capitalism nor fall prey to an intellectually lazy, knee-jerk condemnation of it. We should support it when it supports us and push back against its overreach when it becomes untethered from ethical considerations.

That is what Americans have done before, and that is what we should be doing now.

The industrial revolution of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought forth a burst of productivity never before seen, with the industrial prowess of railroads and factories putting America on the path to becoming a major world power. Yet that burst of industrial power induced a financial drunkenness in its main beneficiaries that eventually was met with appropriate, often heroic resistance on the part of both citizens and government. Yes, Henry Ford built the Model T, but he also used a private security force to shoot demonstrators at his factory. Yes, American manufacturing flourished, but it took the passage of child labor laws to make it illegal for six-year-olds to be put to work in factories. Yes, the “robber barons” built great cultural institutions, but they also amassed their enormous wealth by exploiting workers and the environment.

It took the advent of the labor movement, nonprofit organizations, and legislation such as the passage of antitrust legislation and union protections to guarantee a more just economy for all Americans. With the founding of this country, we had already repudiated an economic royalism; we did not, and do not, want to go back to it. Workers should receive fair compensation for the fruits of their labor, and our natural environment should not be desecrated in the name of economic progress. It is those convictions—not the allure of an aristocratic redux—that created the American middle class and made us the wealthiest nation in the world.

After World War II, the GI Bill created by Congress allowed millions of returning soldiers to attend college and enter the workforce at a higher level than they would have otherwise. A nation devastated by World War II then realized that our biggest opportunity for an economic re-greening lay in educating the American population and rebuilding our infrastructure. This civic wisdom led to an explosion of economic prosperity among us and the creation of America’s great middle class.

An extreme corporatist agenda—increasingly hostile to democracy itself—has worked hard over the last few years to interrupt that pattern and change America’s course. It has worked hard to diminish the power of unions, reduce the progressive nature of the tax system, undermine the effectiveness of regulatory agencies, and slash spending on programs like public housing and other aid to the poor. All of these actions have contributed mightily to increased wealth inequality and other economic and social injustices experienced by the working poor as well as those without work. Most recently, corporatist forces represented on the Supreme Court have even chipped away at the Voting Rights Act, diminishing the power of the people most affected by those injustices to fight back against them.

The new corporatist extremism has come at us with such shock and awe over the last few decades that our resistance to it has sometimes been fragmented and unfocused. Like a boxer hit right in the eyes, we’ve been knocked back so hard that, seeing stars, we’ve been unable at first to adequately respond. And at other times, after being hit again and again, we have simply grown too weak to hit back. But knowing our history can create the emotional support we need to get back into the game. It’s almost as though we can hear our ancestors exhorting us, “Get up! Don’t let this happen! Fix it!”

A fundamental shift in the functioning of our government—from primarily serving the financial interests of a small group of corporate entities to once again making the interests of the people of the United States its highest priority—is the course-correction now needed.

The average American isn’t asking for gifts from Santa Claus; he or she is asking for simple fairness and decency and respect. The values of brotherhood and justice that form the framework of any right relationship form the framework of a healthy society. And that applies to the economy too.

Millions in America today—hardworking people who should have every right to feel securely ensconced in the middle class—are only one unfortunate step away from the ranks of the poor. They know that a health crisis, a car accident, or a layoff could ruin them financially. Their anger and despair are valid.

An unfettered global capitalism, untethered to any ethical considerations beyond its fiduciary responsibility to stockholders, is both a political and spiritual abomination. Any system that lacks compassion, love, and conscience is out of alignment with the moral laws of the universe and in time will produce chaos.

It is spiritual voices that should decry such injustice—and often do. In his 2013 exhortation on global capitalism, Pope Francis said:

While the earnings of the minority are growing exponentially, so, too, is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. The imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. . . . A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. . . . The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything that stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.*

A new economic ethos, one aligned with a consciousness not only of prosperity but also of justice, not only of wealth-creation but also of deep democracy, is rising up among the people of the United States and the people of the world. This represents an unstoppable force that the American capitalist enterprise would do best to work with, and not against. Otherwise it will create its own repudiation. Someone once said that if we want things to stay the same, then some things are going to have to change.

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MONEY IN SERVICE TO LOVE

And now for the good news!

Fortunately, many corporate leaders in America today are enlightened thinkers. Some are working daily to transform the capitalist ethos, putting it back on track with the angels of our better nature. In a 2018 interview with the New York Times, for instance, the fashion mogul Eileen Fisher said that she believed stock sharing with employees should be mandatory. “I think corporations should have to share a minimum 10 percent of their profits with the people working. It’s not socialism; it’s good for business.

Fisher is not alone among successful American business leaders who are turning the tide toward corporate responsibility. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has founded a movement called “conscious capitalism,” calling upon corporate leaders to reintroduce ethics and values into corporate governance. In the summer of 2018, the Danone Corporation, a multibillion-dollar global company that acquired American Whitewave Food, converted its entire corporate structure to a B-Corporation (or B-Corp.). A B-Corp. bases its success on social and environmental performance, going beyond profit maximization. It holds itself both publicly and privately accountable to a higher ethical standard. Danone is joining a group of conscious capitalist firms that have outperformed their public counterparts by a factor of ten to one as measured by stock valuation.

An argument for a loving economy isn’t an argument against the free market; if anything, it’s an argument for letting more people into its ranks. This argument recognizes that what is free to many of us is not free at all to millions of people who are locked out of the “free market” entirely.

How many young Americans whose lives are stymied by the burden of thousands of dollars in college loans would love nothing more than to have the cash on hand to start their own small businesses? How many hardworking Americans, trapped in one or even more low-paying jobs, have the talent and ability, as well as the desire, to be creating, producing, and contributing to America’s consumer base—if only they had a chance?

All of us know, deep in our hearts, that a good life for everyone is a better life for everyone. Not every rich person is greedy any more than every poor person is noble and pure. A politics of love in America doesn’t speak to the part of us that is rich or poor, but to the part of us that is American.

We don’t just need small, random acts of love today. We need huge, strategized acts of doing the right thing. I don’t believe that God simply wants us to be good people; I believe God wants us to be a good nation. Not just personally but also politically, we should care. And I believe that deep in our hearts, most of us do.

In truth, a moral argument is not incompatible with an economic argument, because aligning with a higher natural order is never to humanity’s detriment. The universe of love is a universe of plenty. After World War II, millions of veterans were able to go to college because of the GI Bill, which also made low-interest mortgages available to expand homeownership, and President Eisenhower’s administration built the interstate highway system. These government actions, by making deep investments in the bottom line of bettering the lives of human beings, helped create the healthiest economy America has ever had.

LOVE AND WEALTH INEQUALITY

There is no real mystery as to what created the wealth inequality that’s now higher in this country than at any time since 1929. The systematic removal of American wealth from the middle and lower classes to the very richest among us has been happening for decades.

At this point, the wealthiest 1 percent of American households own 40 percent of the country’s wealth. The three richest people in the United States have as much money as the bottom half of all Americans.

The problem, of course, is not that some people are rich. As Americans, we celebrate the opportunity for wealth-creation among hardworking people. The problem is not with individuals, but with an unfair system. The problem is that our laws are skewed in such a way as to make it easier for the rich to stay rich and get richer, and harder for those who are not rich to rise above their circumstances. The system now makes it unnecessarily harder for average Americans to break the material chains that bind them.

Currently, the driving impulse behind policies emanating from three political power centers—the White House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court—is to favor the financial viability of large corporations at the expense of their workers. The current argument over net neutrality is just such an issue, with our newest Supreme Court justice, Brett Kavanaugh, having argued that net neutrality laws—which ensure that everyone has the same access to the internet—would be a violation of corporations’ First Amendment rights!

That’s the face of a government that puts corporations before people. The elite use government statistics to brag about how many jobs they’ve created, but more and more of those jobs are low-paying rather than middle-class jobs. And the low-paying job sector in America does not routinely pave the way for growth opportunity, but rather is increasingly an economic trap in which millions of people are forced to rely on public assistance while their corporate overlords earn obscene amounts of wealth.

More than 50 percent of employees in the fast-food industry rely on some kind of public assistance. The co-owner of Burger King has a net worth of $25 billion, while his workers receive an estimated $356 million in public subsidies every year. And once again, those subsidies are paid for by you and me. McDonald’s, with a net worth of more than $104 billion, actually encourages its workers to sign up for public assistance. It’s our money that pays for food stamps, Medicaid, and public housing, so that some McDonald’s workers can put food on their tables.

According to one report, in 2014, Walmart employees received billions in public aid. How does that jibe with the fact that the Walton family, which owns Walmart, is the wealthiest family in the country, with an estimated net worth reported at somewhere around $130 billion?

Jeff Bezos, worth an estimated $158 billion, bowed to public pressure and increased the wages of all US workers at Amazon to $15 an hour after Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a bill that would have taxed Amazon for the amount that we, the US taxpayers, were billed in public assistance to his underpaid workers. Bezos’s move is not without controversy, however, since some Amazon workers will lose benefits, including stock options.

Ideally, when it comes to increasing the minimum wage, more corporations will follow suit and raise wages as Bezos did. Until then, the rest of us will continue to foot the bill for the failure of some billionaires to pay their workers fair wages. The cost to taxpayers of increased public assistance to these workers is so high, in fact, that the very purveyors of the unjust system are champing at the bit to start cutting the government entitlement programs that make it possible for many people to simply live.

There are a few American politicians struggling to right the ship of American capitalism by using the powers of government to advocate for the right of every American to simple economic justice. In addition to a bill sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders to charge huge corporations the amount of money we’re having to pay in federal assistance to the employees they routinely underpay, Senator Elizabeth Warren has also introduced legislation to encourage greater corporate responsibility. Called the Accountable Capitalism Act, this bill aims to restore some of the social responsibility “that many companies showed for several decades following World War II.

The idea that the role of our government is to advocate for the economic aristocrat rather than the right of the average American to pursue his or her happiness is contrary to everything this country is supposed to stand for. It is bad economics, and it is bad for democracy. The God-given unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” should include economic fairness.

There are good politicians who see what has happened and are trying to change it. There are good corporate leaders who see what has happened and are trying to change it. There are good social and political activists who see what has happened and are trying to change it.

It’s time for the rest of us to weigh in.

Chapter 5 will be emailed tomorrow!

Chapter 1: Love in a Time of Crisis: Lessons in Fear and Love

Chapter 2: A Revolution of Love: Reviewing the Plot

Chapter 3: Love and Conflict: Disagreeing with Love

CHAPTER 3
LOVE AND CONFLICT: DISAGREEING WITH LOVE

After giving an Easter sermon at a Unity church in Raleigh, North Carolina, I went for Mexican food with four of the church’s congregants. With me sat two ministers, plus the husband of one and the son of the other. I was happy to be sharing margaritas and conversation with lovely people on a beautiful Easter day. Then, after some pleasant chitchat about spirituality, children, and relationships, I ventured into tougher territory.

“So,” I said, “I want to talk about politics.”

A moment of silence. My friends looked at me intently. They had heard me talk about politics the night before (feedback: “I don’t agree with a lot of what you say about politics”), then forgiveness and Jesus that morning (feedback: “I love it when you talk about God”).

“Did you vote for Trump?” I asked the minister’s husband.

“Yes, I did,” he replied.

“Did you?” I asked his wife.

“I didn’t vote,” she said. “I couldn’t vote for either one.”

“Did you?” I asked the minister sitting next to me.

“I did.”

I knew that the minister’s son had voted for Donald Trump, because in the car on the way to the church he had explained to me his conservative politics.

I looked at all of them and, after a couple of moments, said simply, “Can you please tell me what it is I’m not seeing?”

They then proceeded to tell me a variation of something I’d heard before: that they didn’t particularly care for the president as a man, but they liked what he was doing for America. Where I saw an attack on the press, they saw “standing up to fake news”; where I saw the dismantling of environmental protections, they saw “needed deregulation”; where I saw the words of an authoritarian dictator, they saw a man who “doesn’t really mean those things.”

A politics of love has as much to do with how we listen as with the things we say. Partly because I had shared with them an Easter service filled with prayer and meditation that morning, and partly because my friends are lovely people whom I genuinely like, I could hear them at lunch that day without reactivity. I felt no constriction in my heart, no negativity, no judgment. We were meeting in Rumi’s field “beyond good and bad, right and wrong,” which is the only place where souls can meet.

I heard a thing or two that deepened my understanding of where they were coming from, and I like to think that maybe I said a thing or two that had an impact on them as well. I mentioned at the table that it should be part of our spiritual practice to remember that no one has a monopoly on truth. Our capacity to listen to each other is more urgently needed now than our capacity to yell at each other. Hate anywhere is a toxin everywhere, and if we demonize each other personally, then we’re wrong even if we’re right.

It’s my personal goal—at times I’m successful and at times I’m not—to dissolve the personal negativity I sometimes feel toward those with whom I politically disagree, while retaining the passion and conviction of my disagreement. I’ve read enough words of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and studied enough treatises on political nonviolence to know the goal. I know that we have to be the change. It’s practicing all that that’s sometimes hard.

All of us have our fingers pointing at someone today. “They’re the problem.” “No, they’re the problem.” But in a spiritual sense, the pointed finger is the problem.

The answer isn’t what you think or what I think; the Answer, with a capital “A,” is a place in consciousness where no one is demonized and everyone is appreciated for the innocence at their core. That’s the only place where we can all be heard, and heard without judgment. Not enough of us today feel from others—or grant to others—the emotional permission to express our views or theirs without ridicule or dishonor. We’ve become a nation of bad listeners, concerned more with getting our point across than with hearing what someone else is trying to say.

Many years ago, I was visiting then-congressman Dennis Kucinich, a progressive Democrat, at the US Capitol in Washington, DC; at the time, the country was convulsed by the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. As we entered an elevator Lindsey Graham, then a conservative Republican congressman (now a senator), came out of the elevator, and the two men greeted each other affectionately. After the elevator door closed, I made a disapproving comment about Congressman Graham.

Dennis looked at me like I was nuts. “What are you talking about?” he said. “He’s a great guy!”

I’d heard Graham on television railing against President Clinton, and I had made judgments based on that. I mentioned a particular TV show in which I’d seen conservatives doing political “crossfire” with liberals, and I was decidedly in one camp.

“That’s just TV, Marianne!” said Dennis. “It has nothing to do with how things work around here. Lindsey is a great guy, and we work together on a lot of things.”

Now my blood was boiling again, not at conservative politicians but at what had happened to our public sphere: we had turned our politics into a boxing match, what should be high-minded debate into a psychological blood sport, and it was already doing damage.

I was right to be concerned. Decades later, entire generations have grown up thinking that this is what politics is—a boxing match and a blood sport. Until we address that issue and deal with it, we will continue to spiral into an even darker night of the American soul. How we are talking to each other is as corrupt and corrupting as what anyone is saying.

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JUST SAY NO TO CONTEMPT

Some people argue that since it’s so hard to have a political conversation these days without getting into some kind of negativity, we should simply avoid the subject of politics altogether.

I disagree.

Avoiding political discussion is what got us into this mess. We need to transform our political conversations, not suppress them. Disagreeing with someone doesn’t mean we’re “attacking” them. Standing up to evil doesn’t mean we’re being “judgmental.” And there’s nothing holy about using spirituality as a justification for political disengagement. “Spiritual” people should be having the difficult conversations. We should be the biggest grown-ups in the room.

At Easter lunch that day, I mentioned my concern about a pattern of unarmed black men being shot by police. To me, this should not be a conservative issue or a progressive issue. Who among us wouldn’t be horrified when a young man, father of two, standing in his grandmother’s backyard with nothing in his hands or on his person but a cell phone, is shot in the back twenty times by police who’d been called to check out a report of vandalism in the neighborhood?

One of my new friends told me that he couldn’t join me in my concern because he “supports law enforcement.” At which point, I said it was insulting to suggest that those who have a problem with that shooting do not support law enforcement!

“But murder is murder,” I exclaimed, “no matter who is doing it!”

His mother then said that she’d had a problem with the statement in my talk the night before that a country in which police can just kill people at will is called a police state.

“But it is!” I told her.

It doesn’t show lack of support for law enforcement to point out that only in a police state can police kill whomever they want, at will. That might not be a fear that I or any of my white friends live with on a daily basis, but there are people of color who do. That is simply a fact. Does it mean that I love America any less, or support law enforcement any less, that this disturbs me greatly?

I believe that the vast majority of police officers in America are good people who take extraordinary risks to ensure the safety of the rest of us every day. I am deeply grateful for that, as we all should be. But most doctors, most lawyers, and most teachers are good people too. That doesn’t mean that all of them are, or that those who aren’t should not be held accountable.

I can’t see how anyone can defend what they consider “American values” with a defense of attitudes that undermine those values. On the other hand, I know I’m spiritually off-base myself if I close my heart to someone because of my perception that they’re closing theirs. Who among us hasn’t found ourselves at times judging people for “being judgmental”? Ah, the irony. From a spiritual perspective, if someone is driving us crazy, then the deeper issue is still our own craziness. The work is always on ourselves.

While the ego always monitors other people’s thoughts and behavior, the spirit would have us monitor only our own. And since everyone can subconsciously register where we’re coming from, regardless of what we say, it’s only in purifying our own hearts that we have any chance of touching someone else’s. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “We have little morally persuasive power with someone who can feel our underlying contempt.”

That has to be our goal now: not mere defeat of political opponents, but also engagement in the art of moral persuasion—the ability to so commune with the heart of another that real communication can occur.

I don’t think it was an accident that the conversation with my Trump-supporting friends that day took place on Easter Sunday—not for symbolic reasons, but for literal ones. We had spent time together thinking about the infinite power of love that morning. We had prayed and meditated together. It was Easter, for goodness’ sake! We were predisposed to loving each other, and that made all the difference. There was no way I could see them as stereotypes, and I assume that they could not see me that way either. My friends and I were able to honor each other, even while we disagreed, and engage on serious political issues without compromising our convictions.

Our political as well as our personal salvation is indeed a revolution of the heart. I knew that at the deepest level my differences with my friends were semantic. All of us agreed on basic values; we were simply worlds apart on what those values looked like when expressed in political terms.

Gandhi said that “politics should be sacred.” By that, he didn’t mean religious; he meant that the level of our political conversation should be sacred. It should be the level of conversation we have in therapy, or support groups, or intimate conversation. The level from which we speak determines the level of our understanding.

The sacred place within us lies beyond such polarity as liberal and conservative. In the words of Dwight Eisenhower, “The American mind at its best is both liberal and conservative.” High-minded conservative principles and high-minded liberal ones form a creative synergy, a yin and yang of American politics. Both are great American political traditions, and both support the ideals of democracy. The threat to our democracy comes from neither of those traditions. The threat is authoritarian corporatism, which does not respect serious conservatism, serious progressivism, universal humanitarian values, or even democracy itself.

We need to be able to discuss these things. Whenever anyone says, “We’re not going to talk about politics or religion,” I’m so like, “Well, that leaves me out at dinner!” Our tendency these days to have a political conversation only with people who already agree with us—exacerbated by all the mean-spiritedness on social media—is destructive to the social fabric of our country. It is intellectually lazy to stereotype someone just because they see things differently, and it lacks emotional discipline to lash out at people for the simple fact that they disagree with you.

It is essential to nonviolent communication that we affirm the dignity and goodness of other people, even if we disagree with them. That is the sweet spot underlying honorable debate: to first assume someone’s basic innocence and speak to them from there. The ego’s temptation is always to attack, to create separation, to make another person wrong—especially when we’re so sure we’re right! As someone who can jump into snark or sarcasm more easily than I should, I know the dead end those attitudes represent. Making another person feel guilty will never build unity or goodwill; only blessing, not blaming, can do that. All judgment does is to shut people down emotionally and psychologically.

I was struck by a tweet I saw once: someone said that her grandmother had told her: “Just remember that when the two of you are fighting, it’s you two versus the fighting, not you versus him.” That struck me, because who among us has not at times given in to the temptation to demonize those with whom we disagree?

Only in a totalitarian society is everyone supposed to toe the line and see things the same way. No one owes it to us to agree with us about anything, including politics. No side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on righteousness or values, and anyone who argues otherwise represents a viewpoint unworthy of who we are.

FIGHT THE FIGHTING

In 2002, I was invited by Coretta Scott King to speak at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta at the birthday celebration for Dr. King. It was a great honor to be invited, and I was prepared to give a speech about the differences between Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolence and President George W. Bush’s statements after 9/11.

Having arrived at the church, I was escorted to a room where I was to wait before meeting Mrs. King. When the greeter came in and asked, “Are you ready to meet Mrs. King and Mrs. Bush now?” I was stunned. I had had no idea that Laura Bush was going to be there. I was totally unprepared.

Okay, Ms. Nonviolent Feminist, how are you are going to pull this off, talking about the president right in front of the woman who is married to him?

I had to think quickly, which was probably a good thing. I prayed for both women, and for myself, and then I had to go on to the pulpit. The only way I could think of to handle the situation was to turn around to Mrs. Bush every time I spoke of the president and say, “Mrs. Bush, we’re praying for your husband at this difficult time.” And then, as respectfully as I could, I’d let it rip.

At the end of my talk, I went to shake hands first with Mrs. King and then with Mrs. Bush. When I put my hand out to Laura, I started to apologize if I had offended her. But she graciously put her finger to my lips and, nodding her head, said, “Shhh! You did good!” I knew in that moment that she realized what had happened. She knew where she was going that day; she realized that I disagreed with her husband, but that I had made every effort to do so with respect. She affirmed me for that, and for her kind behavior toward me that day she earned my respect as well.

My standing with those two women in that moment is a memory that is frozen in my brain. In many ways, we couldn’t have been more different, yet in that moment we couldn’t have been more the same. In our own way, we were experiencing politics as sacred.

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We don’t all have to agree with each other, but how we disagree is a crucial issue in a politics of love. I’ve learned the hard way in my life that the inappropriate indulgence of anger is a form of self-sabotage. We’re not only responsible for our thoughts; we’re also responsible for our behavior. And our behavior includes not only what we say but how we say it.

I notice on my social media that there are two different types of critics: those who disagree with me with reason and respect, and those who attack and insult me personally. From the first, I can learn things I hadn’t thought about or known before; I can appreciate what they bring to my awareness. From the latter, however, I feel the energy of attack and then feel my heart constrict in response.

Nonviolence means more than giving up physical violence; it means giving up emotional and psychological violence as well. Whether we attack a person physically or not, an attack is still an attack. Every thought we think takes form on some level, then boomerangs back to us after we put it out there. So many mental missiles are flying through the air today, you can almost feel a new American Civil War raging on invisible planes.

This is not a time for knee-jerk attacks on people who don’t agree with us, although it’s absolutely a time to stand passionately for the things we believe in. That balance is challenging at times, but we owe it to ourselves, and to our country, to arrive at the place where we can bless even those with whom we disagree politically.

Since President Trump’s election, such efforts have been more challenging than ever. Not every situation is like my lunch in North Carolina, where we had to hold on to nonjudgment for only as long as it took us to share a meal! Some of us have close friends or family who vehemently disagree with us politically these days. And in some situations, those disagreements are tearing us apart.

For instance, two of my close girlfriends are enthusiastic Trump supporters and I am not. In both cases, we found early on that not discussing politics was probably the best way to go. But my friend Alana and I have tried to find a way past that: to communicate in a way where we can both be true to our politics, yet true to the bonds of our affection for each other as well. Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we don’t.

During the year after Trump’s election, Alana asked me if I would help promote her skin care line on my social media. I didn’t see skin care promotion as appropriate for either my Facebook or Twitter pages, but I wanted to be a supportive friend. I settled on an idea for Instagram; I wrote what I thought was a cute little caption under the picture of her holding her skin care product, saying that we didn’t agree on politics, but hey, who doesn’t agree about collagen! I thought it was harmless, fun, and even demonstrative of how those of us who disagree politically can make it through these times with our personal relationships intact.

Several people who posted seemed to agree and appreciated our efforts to protect our friendship. Yet many did not. Some of those who did not, in fact, were vicious. They would no longer follow me if I was even friends with a Trump supporter! The ridiculous assumptions about who I am, and even more so the outrageous assumptions about who Alana is, were so devoid of anything approaching dignified disagreement that I ended up deleting the entire post.

None of us, no matter what our politics, are invulnerable to the machinations of the negative ego. A smug, self-righteous, intolerant left-winger poses no less danger to the emotional fabric of this nation than a smug, self-righteous, intolerant right-winger. Something I need to tell myself constantly these days is that not every comment needs a follow-up opinion! My mother used to say, “Count to ten before you speak.” Sometimes I need to count to fifteen.

As an author, I notice that if I write something in a book that a reader doesn’t like, I’ll probably never know about it. It’s sort of none of my business. Maybe that person will stop reading the book or even give it a harsh review somewhere. But with social media, everyone now has a public platform from which to espouse their opinions immediately—and boy, do they!

It’s as though no one today has any impulse control; anger and anxiety spew out everywhere, making much of our public discourse dangerously toxic and mean-spirited. From both Left and the Right come harmful shutdowns, aimed at those whose only transgression was the audacity to share an opinion that doesn’t align with someone else’s preconceived notion of truth. Adding to the chaos, a constant bombardment of disconcerting news has millions of Americans on edge each day. Our very nervous systems are assaulted by these things, increasing the possibility of mistakes and inappropriate responses. And all of it mitigates against the wise, deep thinking and communication so needed among us now.

Our tendency to fly off the handle politically can be a challenge for all of us. A politics of love speaks to more than our political opinions; it speaks to the quality of our personhood, our emotional self-discipline, and our ability to embody the love and peace that we claim we so want for the world.

For that, there is no greater ameliorative than prayer and meditation. Aligning our nervous systems with the highest frequency of heart and mind is a prerequisite for enduring and transforming the times in which we live. In the words of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, “In “order to save the world, we must have a plan. But no plan will work unless we meditate.” You can’t be a light of the world and a nervous wreck at the same time.

At times like these, we should stand up, we should express ourselves, and we should rise up to protect our democracy. But we need to do so without lowering our personal energy to the level of those who would seek to destroy it. Michelle Obama said the words we all need to remember, in our personal interactions as well as in our politics: “When they go low, we go high.”

For women—and for any formerly disempowered group not allowed to say much for several centuries—it can be hard to know how to talk at first. It’s like the dirty water that spurts out of a bathtub that hasn’t been used for a while; you just have to let it do its thing for a bit, and then clear water will begin to flow. During that time, however, we can too easily swing between two dysfunctional poles: either we swallow our truth, or blurt it out too harshly.

But angry communication is a self-sabotaging trap. The word communication has the word commune inside it, reminding us that when we speak without love, we’re rarely communicating in a way that will be heard. The ego can be so sly, making us feel we’re “communicating” something when what we’re actually doing is blocking communication entirely.

The fact that I spoke doesn’t necessarily mean that you heard me. To genuinely communicate, I need to be responsible not only for what I say but for creating the heart space between us that enables you to hear it. When people feel judged and attacked, they shut down and do not hear us.

I was just communicating my feelings!” you might say. But being “authentic” isn’t necessarily so great when we’re authentically angry. Real authenticity is more than emotional self-indulgence. It takes inner work to surrender our fear and retrieve our love, remembering that the person we’re speaking to is an innocent child of God no less than we are, and then choosing to speak. A politics of love involves taking personal responsibility as much for how we do something as for what we do, and even for who we are while we’re doing it.

Today, things are moving so quickly that we often text or speak or do whatever we do before remembering to surrender our anger to God. That prayer of surrender matters, because it literally changes our nervous system. It realigns our thought processes and our emotions. This kind of practice is particularly important today, when many have learned the hard way that there’s no way to delete a tweet. In the last few years, major careers have been ruined for no less.

Emotions are running high, and personal self-discipline is hugely important. Through prayer, meditation, and forgiveness, the serious spiritual activist accepts the responsibility of holding to our love despite the temptation to disavow it. In order to transform the chaos in the world, we must address the chaos in ourselves.

About a year ago, I moved into an apartment in New York City. Having moved there from a building that had a beautiful, peaceful view of a church courtyard, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to find such peace and tranquility on a busy midtown street. After being in my new apartment for a day, I was gazing at the view outside and realized I was offered here another kind of peace: the spiritual opportunity to bless all the people in the buildings I could see from my window. After several minutes of thinking about how wonderful all that was—about all the people working and living in those buildings to whom I could send my love on any given day—I realized that I was looking straight at Trump Tower from my window!

You don’t have to be an enlightened master to appreciate how perfect that is. Great, Marianne, I said to myself. This is perfect. Every time you walk through the apartment you can bless him in your mind and feel blessed, or you can attack him in your mind and feel attacked.

Spiritual law is unalterable: if we focus on the guilt in others, we’ll see guilt in ourselves; if we focus on the innocence in others, we’ll feel the innocence within ourselves. Perception is a choice.

I have chosen to bless the president, not only for his sake but for my own peace of mind. I pray for his happiness and for his enlightenment. But that doesn’t mean I have to agree with him. And it doesn’t mean I won’t do anything possible to resist his policies when they’re counter to the values of our democracy or work hard to defeat him at the polls in 2020.

A politics of love is not naive. It is strategic. It is the only power that can override hate. No amount of intellectual analysis or traditional political strategy can override the dangerous energies unleashed by cultlike political forces. Cultlike figures appeal to something beyond the rational brain; in fact, the danger they present is that they can override the rational brain. And we must override that.

When lies are systematically presented as truth in order to obfuscate the truth, and are done so specifically for political purposes, we have a serious problem on our hands. Neither intellectual analysis nor political strategy nor brute force alone can annihilate the explosive energies of politicized hatred. Only a higher truth can prevail against that which would obliterate truth entirely. Only the power of the heart can triumph over manipulations of the mind. Only the power of the soul can override the mortal dangers posed by soullessness in our politics or anywhere else.

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LAND OF THE FREE, HOME OF THE BRAVE

Many claim today that they’ve been “traumatized” by Trump’s presidency; I’ve even seen articles written by psychotherapists who call such trauma a syndrome! But this is not the time to coddle our preciousness. Surely those who walked across the bridge at Selma, Alabama, on Bloody Sunday 1965 were traumatized, not knowing whether at any time the dogs or the hoses, or even bullets, would be used against them. Yet they walked. And anxiety? Surely the suffragettes who were thrown into prison and force-fed through feeding tubes suffered from anxiety. Yes, we feel wounded, and that’s because the times in which we live are wounding. But who have we become that we’re so enamored with our woundedness? None of us has time to finish our trauma work before rising to the defense of our country.

This is not a time for personal weakness, but for strength. The only real strength is love; love makes us vulnerable, but in a way that makes us strong. It doesn’t turn us into wounded birds. It makes us powerful and strong and courageous, intellectually and emotionally.

We must not indulge our hopelessness now, resigning ourselves to the idea that the concentrated assaults on everything from the planet to our democracy have succeeded to such a degree that it’s no longer possible to stop them. A miracle is a shift in our thinking from fear to love, and when our thinking shifts, then everything changes. Synapses in the brain, relationship vectors between and among us, new possibilities both psychological and material, automatically unfold. Things are hopeless only if miracles do not occur, and because miracles do occur naturally as expressions of love, things are not actually hopeless.

Surely the abolition of slavery at one time seemed like a hopeless cause. Surely women’s suffrage at one time seemed like a hopeless cause. Surely ending racial segregation at one time seemed like a hopeless cause. Hope springs eternal because life springs eternal, and life springs eternal with infinite possibility.

America is down, but not for the count. A new democratic revolution has already begun in the hearts and minds of millions. A powerful resistance movement is making itself felt, and it will not be stopped. People are realizing that democracy is not just a right but a responsibility, a gift we were given that matters to more than just us. It matters to the ages, and that is why we will do whatever it takes to make sure that it survives.

Human beings are the authors of our history. It is a story that we write and have the power to rewrite. For a nation as well as for an individual, the universe is merciful when we take responsibility for our mistakes and do what is necessary to correct them.

America was a country that had everything, was given everything, was blessed beyond comprehension, yet chose to sell its soul to the highest bidder. We put economics before love, sales before ethics, and our government on the bidding block. We have treated the earth with lack of reverence, democracy as though we could take it for granted, and justice as relevant only to ourselves. Too often, and in too many different ways, we allowed the values and principles that made our nation great to fall by the wayside, as though they mattered not.

We wrote that story ourselves—we need to admit that—and now we can write another one. Atoning for and making amends for our errors, we are released from their consequences. Where we have strayed off course we can return to the path of righteousness. What we have forgotten we can remember, and when we have fallen we can rise back up.

No conscious person can sit out the current crisis. Crises are never convenient, but they happen. They demand our attention, and our excellence, often when we are most afraid. But we must be brave now, for it’s not just our democracy that’s at risk. The sacrifice of our values, both personal and political, has put everything at risk.

Our challenge is to rise to the divine within us, casting out the shadows of our own lower nature. We must do this not only as individuals but as members of a larger society. It might be in our lower nature to fight, but it is in our higher nature to love. It might be in our lower nature to exploit the earth for our own purposes, but it is in our higher nature to be good and reverent stewards of the earth. Humanity stands at a crossroads now: will we serve only the dictates of our material selves, or will we rise to the full embrace of our spiritual selves? There will be consequences either way.

A world unaligned with the ways of our spiritual nature has begun to fall apart because anything unaligned with the ways of our higher nature inevitably falls apart. The mind unaligned with love becomes aligned with fear, and fear now threatens to overtake our planet. We are challenged to regain spiritual balance, both in ourselves and in our world.

To do so is our purpose on earth, and it is our only sustainable option.

LOVING HEARTS, PASSIONATE ACTION

Several years ago, I read a wonderful novel by Sue Monk Kidd titled The Invention of Wings. The book is about two historical figures during the nineteenth century named Sarah and Angelina Grimke. The Grimke sisters were born into a slave-owning family in South Carolina, then later became converted by Quakers to the abolitionist cause.

Reading Kidd’s book made me think about what it meant for someone raised in a slave-owning environment to awaken to the evils of slavery. This spiritual awakening is encapsulated in a lyric from “Amazing Grace”: “I . . . was blind but now I see.”

The Grimke sisters took a huge personal journey that is relevant to our own day. Being antislavery in nineteenth-century America would have meant not agreeing with slavery, with practicing it oneself. It might have meant not living in a slave-owning sate. But being antislavery, in and of itself, did not necessarily move the needle for one slave. A huge internal bridge was crossed—psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually—when one went from being antislavery to being an abolitionist. It meant going from “I don’t agree with it” to “Not on my watch.”

A politics of love, then, takes a stand. False positivism has no place in our personal lives or in our political lives either. There are certain issues that call upon us to be as passionate with our no as with our yes. When money and not love is our bottom line—when we place economics before our humanitarian values—then unnecessary harm inevitably results. People suffer, children die, and the earth is damaged. Once you see that connection, you cannot unsee it. In the words of Elie Wiesel, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

We do not transcend darkness by simply ignoring it. There is a difference between transcendence and denial. We deny evil its power not by denying its existence, but by denying it room to fester in the sinews of our hearts and minds.

Some people say we shouldn’t focus on our political problems, because what we focus on expands. But that’s as ridiculous as an oncologist saying, “It’s cancer, but only stage 1, so let’s not think about it.” Some negative things expand for the very reason that we did not look at them.

There’s nothing negative about naming things that need to be named. There’s nothing negative about yelling “Fire!” when in fact the house is burning down. And there’s nothing that we cannot do when the heart is filled with love.

Chapter 4 will be emailed tomorrow!

Chapter 1: Love in a Time of Crisis: Lessons in Fear and Love

Chapter 2: A Revolution of Love: Reviewing the Plot

CHAPTER 2
A REVOLUTION OF LOVE: REVIEWING THE PLOT

You can’t pick up a novel in the middle of the book and have any idea what’s going on. You don’t know the characters and you don’t know the plot. You need to read it from the beginning to know how the story unfolds.

The same is true with the story of a nation. We can’t really understand what’s going on in this country without understanding where we’ve come from. We can’t recognize forces for what they represent historically when all we can see is how they relate to us now. With almost every issue, what happens now is part of a continuing narrative that began over two hundred years ago. Issues erupting dramatically today have been developing for years, often underneath the surface, as generation after generation writes its chapter in our ongoing history.

Whether you’re learning the history of your family or the history of your ethnic group or religion, knowing where you come from gives you a clue into who you are. It’s difficult to understand what it means to be an American today without understanding what America means, period.

Yet what America means is open to interpretation. To some people, America means a bright spot of freedom and liberty whose shadows and mistakes are secondary to the exceptionalism of our first principles. To them, our country is so good that it hardly matters what we’ve done wrong. To others, it seems America’s historical errors justify perpetual condemnation. To them, at times we’ve been so bad that it hardly matters what we’ve ever done right. We won’t be led through the storm of this moment, either by those who love this country blindly or by those who condemn her blindly. For the blind cannot see.

The guiding light of America’s destiny is neither blind to our problems nor blind to our potential. We will be led through our current storm by the inner light of a more sophisticated, compassionate understanding that America is a continuing narrative. Like any of us, it isn’t a finished product yet. Nor will it ever be. A nation is continuously moving through time, like a novel whose ending can’t be foreseen. What we need now is a deeper understanding of what came before, and a deeper commitment among us to write well the chapter that is ours.

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Today, we seem tethered neither to where we came from nor to where we wish to be going. We’ve lost the plot of our democracy—we’re not connecting the dots, and we’re not connecting the dots because we’re not connecting the facts. We’re not connecting the facts because the facts have been scrambled.

“Our founders sought safeguards against such scrambling, but the safeguards have been weakened. Thomas Jefferson wanted free public education because only people whose critical thought processes had been honed could be entrusted with the power of self-governance. And he wanted a free press to make sure all citizens had the information we would need in order to make wise decisions. If you’re entrusted with the power to direct a country—which, in a representative democracy, we the people are—then you need to be educated in order to know how to think, and informed by a free press in order to know what to think. On both fronts, however, our power has been diminished.

Someone knew exactly what they were doing when American civics and history lessons started disappearing from many public school curricula. In eleven states, there is no required civics or American history education at all. In more than half of them, no more than half a year learning those subjects is required. But if someone didn’t learn about the Bill of Rights when they were a child, how would they know to be appalled as an adult when they see it under assault?

Knowledge is power, and withholding knowledge is a tool of all oppressive systems. Underresourcing education, particularly among children, and corporate consolidation of the news media have been powerful tools in the dumbing down of the American mind. Without an informed and passionate citizenry, democracy is not a problem for its enemies at all.

Giving people a lot of consumer products but not giving them information is like giving people lots of candy but withholding basic nourishment. Perhaps if you give people a way to make more money, they won’t notice that you’ve taken away something even more precious. If you legitimize their self-centeredness, they’ll be more likely to forget about their ancestors, their fellow citizens, or their descendants.

One of the most powerful things an American citizen can do today is read up on American history, a lot of which most of us don’t remember from school and many of us never even learned. There are enough “American History for Dummies”–type books out there that no one really has much of an excuse for not brushing up on our nation’s history. We gain a deeper understanding of the present when we have a context that includes the past, and a deeper understanding of who we are when we know who came before.

The more we understand the larger narrative of our history and the chapters that were written by other generations, the more empowered we are in writing our own. We learn, among other things, that many of the forces we’re dealing with now are simply the latest iterations of challenges that have been with us from the beginning. The current crisis in our country is the continuation of a narrative that began over two hundred years ago.

The first historical through-line is our foundational democratic principles, the values on which we purport to stand. Inscribed in our Declaration of Independence in 1776, these first principles are the light that guides us through every travail: that all men are created equal; that God gave all men unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that governments are instituted to secure those rights. Along with those unalienable rights go freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to bear arms, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom to protest, and several more meant to ensure our ability to remain a free people. Another fundamental American principle was articulated by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address: that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Those ideas are not just abstract concepts. They are living, breathing forces for which hundreds of thousands of people have struggled, lived, and died. Every one of them represents a freedom in the absence of which every American would live a very different life.

But a second through-line has also been with us from the beginning, and that is a fierce resistance to those first principles on the part of those who see them as threatening to their interests. Usually, though not always, such forces represent the economic interests of the few pitted against the interests of the many.

So on one hand, we’re a nation “conceived in liberty”; on the other hand, our entire Southern economy was based on the slave trade and it took the Civil War to end it. On the one hand, we believe in the “unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; on the other hand, we perpetrated the genocide, forced migration, and cultural annihilation on the Native peoples of this continent. On the one hand, we believe that “all men are created equal”; on the other hand, institutionalized white supremacy and segregation raged throughout the South for a hundred years even after the end of the Civil War. That dichotomy represents a dramatic, often tragic pattern that has been with us from the beginning: we were founded on enlightened principles, have in many ways ourselves been the most violent perpetrators against them, and then ultimately—at least most of the time—have reclaimed them.

Slavery was met with abolition, suppression of women was met with the suffragette movement, segregation was met with the civil rights movement, and so forth. Every generation of Americans has included both enemies of democracy and heroes of democracy. Our generation is even now in the midst of deciding which one, in our time, will prevail.

Political manifestations, both good and bad, are but outer reflections of internal realities. They emerge from realms beyond what the eye can see. Love and lovelessness are constantly duking it out, in our hearts and in our world. Slavery, oppression, racism, and so forth are more than mere political wrongs; they represent spiritual malfunctions. Until we deal with our problems on the level from which they emerge, then no matter what we do to solve them, they will simply morph into other forms. Whether it is a health problem or a money problem or a relationship problem or a political problem, both the source of any problem and the source of its solution lie within our consciousness.

That is why a new American revolution is a revolution of consciousness, and a new American politics is a politics of love. If the choice to love remains merely a private decision, then it will have only private effects. Only when love is applied to public issues will it then have public effects.

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An overly secularized, rationalistic politics is an inadequate response to the challenges of our time. A politics of love is a twenty-first-century, whole-person politics that speaks to both external and internal issues.

External activism fosters a different way of doing things, which is important. But internal activism fosters a different way of thinking about those things as well. Both are important, because everything we do is infused with the consciousness with which we do it. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “The end is inherent in the means.” Enlightenment is a shift in worldview, and only a more enlightened thinking can deliver us to an enlightened world.

America’s founders were products of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, during which Western civilization overthrew the mystification of early church dogma in favor of rational thought and individual freedom. Today, we are entering a new Era of Enlightenment, in which we are overthrowing the limits of overly rationalistic thinking that doesn’t recognize the powers of the soul. We are evolving beyond a twentieth-century worldview that posited the world as one big machine, and realizing that in fact it is more like one big thought. Consciousness is no longer deemed irrelevant to human affairs, but rather the driver of human affairs. Things in the outer world are merely effects created by thoughts we think. The role of consciousness in transforming events is the essential realization of a twenty-first-century worldview. Only if we rethink the world will we be able to re-create it. Only in transforming our hearts will we be able to transform the world.

A political mind-set mired in twentieth-century thinking is incapable of solving our most pressing problems, because its focus on externalities too often leaves their causes unaddressed. It waters the leaves but not the roots of our democracy. Not every force that is driving our world is visible to the physical eye. A politics that gives little credence to the inner life, considering it outside the purview of its analysis, is inadequate to the task of navigating these difficult times.

That is why the spiritual seeker is important to the transformation of our politics, and of our country. Spiritual seekers have always been the harbingers of political change in America—the abolitionist movement was started by the early Evangelicals and Quakers, and the civil rights movement was led by a Baptist preacher. Jews and Catholics have been central to the unfoldment of every social justice movement throughout our history.

In the words of Plato, “To philosophize and do politics are one and the same thing.” Not only does enlightened politics require spiritual understanding, but enlightened spirituality requires attention to politics. No serious religious path gives anyone a pass on addressing the suffering of other sentient beings. The idea that we can leave politics out of our conceptualization of our spiritual journey is an outdated concept, because politics is simply the journey we take together. We can’t transform our country without transforming our politics, and that we can do only by participating. Standing on the sidelines is not an option for a conscious seeker, or for a conscious citizen. Too much blood and too much suffering result from an unconscious politics for those of us who claim to be on the journey of higher consciousness to ignore. We must make a fundamental step forward in re-creating the world from the inside out.

“Love each other” is not just a prescription for personal salvation; it is a prescription for political renewal as well.

When tens of millions of people trapped in economic shackles with little dignity, few prospects, and little hope are then told by a political candidate that the system is rigged against them and only he can fix it, you can’t just blame the candidate for taking advantage of all that hopelessness. The larger responsibility lies with a political establishment that allowed such mass despair to develop in the first place—and with those of us who allowed it to.

Economic despair is not a statistic in the lives of people who are living with it; it is a real, devastating human experience. It is a festering wound from which other symptoms emanate, such as domestic violence, opioid addiction, sickness, bad health from lack of access to care, depression, suicide, and a general breakdown of community and culture.

In a country dominated by a political system that has been dedicated more to its campaign donors than to its people, and more to the financial gain of the wealthy .01 percent of its population than to the actual practice of democracy, the crisis we now have on our hands was almost inevitable. A massive cry of economic despair was going to make itself heard—whether in support of a progressive populist such as Bernie Sanders, or an authoritarian populist such as Donald Trump. It’s not that either of them necessarily had better plans for dealing with all that suffering than did Hillary Clinton; it’s just that they’re the only two candidates who acknowledged all that suffering. And that made all the difference.

Having substituted obeisance to the dictates of market forces for obeisance to the dictates of democratic and humanitarian concerns, the political establishment is reaping now what it has sowed. Climate change has reached extreme and dangerous levels because the US government has done more to advocate for the short-term maximization of profits to the fossil fuel and chemical companies than to advocate for the well-being of our citizens and our planet; our tax policies do more to fill the coffers of the 1 percent than to address the economic struggles of the 99 percent; and our efforts to protect national security center on increased preparedness for war yet diminished efforts at waging long-term peace. All of those factors represent more than a political challenge; they represent dire threats, over the long run, to our democracy and quite possibly to the very existence of our species.

Such problems represent something deeper and more fundamental than a system dedicated to externalities has any idea how to fix. They are reflections of the fact that, in the words of Gandhi, “humanity is not in its right mind.”

A lack of love is the level of the problem, and a lack of love is the level of the solution. Only when we realign our politics with our deep universal values will the forces arrayed against us fade away. In the words of Albert Einstein, “The problems of the world will not be solved on the level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

Political issues are moral issues. War and peace are moral issues. Economic injustice is a moral issue. Mass incarceration is a moral issue. Unfair tax laws are a moral issue. Racial inequality is a moral issue. Breaking treaties with Native tribes is a moral issue. The neglect of America’s children is a moral issue. Global poverty is a moral issue. A self-perpetuating war machine is a moral issue. Putting immigrants in cages is a moral issue.

The question is not simply what we should do about such problems. The larger question is, Who are we that such problems even exist among us? And who do we have to become in order to solve them?

Whether for an individual or for a nation, every crisis comes with two things: a reflection of who we have been, and an invitation to become who we need to become. And that is where America is now. We need to reach for higher ground than that on which we’ve been standing over the last few decades. Nothing less will heal our country.

Separating politics from the deeper questions of our humanity leaves us dangerously fractured as a civilization. America needs to atone for some mistakes of our past and make serious amends. We need to be willing to do things differently moving forward. And we need to take a brutally honest look at how certain concepts left over from the late twentieth century do more to corrode than to advance our democracy. A new kind of American—a new kind of thinker and a new kind of citizen—needs to arise now.

And quickly.

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WE THE PEOPLE, WE THE PROBLEM

For too many decades, Americans have been chronically distracted by less important things, not bothering to engage in serious self-examination. Material progress has become our false god.

While private morality might have thrived among individuals, issues of public morality began to wither. Economic values have taken precedence over ethical values, and now we’re having to face the consequences of this moral corrosion. An amoral economic system, in which a corporate bottom line is given precedence by our government over considerations of who or what gets hurt, has corroded our nation’s politics. And the symptoms are everywhere. Wealth inequality, racial and criminal injustice, the undue influence of money on our government, the desecration of our environment, the destruction of nonindustrial farming, compromised food and water supplies, opioid addiction, lack of educational and economic opportunity for the many while a tiny few are made richer every day—all were wounds given a chance to fester while too many of us weren’t looking, weren’t even complaining about the problem if it didn’t apply to us.

Politicians who tried to warn us of what was happening were typically viewed as “too negative,” and journalists whose job is to inform us about what’s happening were too often owned by the very forces that drove this systematic selling-off of our collective good. Once a few corporate conglomerates were allowed to own the majority of our news outlets (i.e., the term corporate media), stories that once might have earned someone a Pulitzer for good investigative journalism began just as likely to get the journalist fired.

The main organizing principle of American society today is not democracy; it is short-term profit maximization of multinational corporations. Our government does not now function to protect its citizens from overreach by corporations, so much as it works to protect corporations from all those pesky citizens who keep demanding that their rights be respected.

Democracy is not the enemy of an amoral economic system; it’s simply inconvenient to an amoral economic system. The thieves who stole the treasures of our democracy—a thriving middle class, accessible health care, a robust educational system, and proper environmental stewardship—didn’t use brute force to knock down the door. No, they used the soft, insidious power of political propaganda that no seriously thinking person should have fallen for. Yet too many of us were not serious. Too many of us were not thinking. The American people have been played for fools.

As early as the 1980s, the causes of many of our deepest problems were sold as good economic policy. Plans were laid for an economic reversion to what is basically an aristocratic system; “trickle-down economics” hailed as our economic salvation when in fact it created all manner of entitlement for the few and all manner of misery for the many. It did not uplift our middle class; quite to the contrary, it destroyed our middle class: from workers losing their jobs when corporations got tax breaks for moving their factories overseas to farmers being pushed off their land so agribusiness could take over to mental health care facilities being closed all over the country to attacks on unions, stealing from the middle class in order to give more to the rich was actually sold as good economic policy. Over and over we’ve elected those whose policies exalt the profits of corporations over the well-being of our citizens. Just enough of the serfs were allowed to get rich themselves, you see. What a clever sleight of hand prevailed.

The wealth inequality in America today has led to what is essentially a new class of aristocrats and a new class of serfs. In the richest nation on earth, roughly 40 percent of our citizens now have a hard time covering their basic costs, from food and health care to transportation and rent. Sixty-two percent of Americans cannot be deemed members of the middle class. Millions of Americans have to work at two or three low-wage jobs just to make ends meet. And in issues ranging from justice to education to health care to environmental protection, the underlying cancer of unbridled corporate influence on political campaigns is poisoning the very roots of our democracy.

In the words of the late Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, “We may have democracy, or we may have “wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

The “few” in this context are made up mainly of large corporate interests, for whom government now, for all intents and purposes, primarily functions. Their flood of undue financial influence—especially since the Supreme Court Citizens United decision removed restrictions on their donations to campaign coffers—is now so great as to chronically and systematically override the will of the American people. Author Jane Mayer refers to this nefarious phenomenon as “dark money.

Like addicts coming out of denial, no longer thinking that they can control their drinking or drugging, Americans need to get out of our denial regarding the depth of corruption that prevails within our political establishment. Such a moment of clarity can be frightening at first, but it’s also a moment when breakthroughs occur. It opens the mind to the possibility that there might be another way. And there is another way. That way is not to disparage our democracy, but to reclaim it, rebuild it, and return it to its deepest principles. It is ultimately our emotional connection to democracy, and our devotion to the possibilities it creates for the human race, that will empower us to save it.

Democracy is important because it is a conduit for the will and the wisdom of the people ourselves. If we lose sight of that internal value, then we lose the light that guides us. And that light is not mere symbol; it is the power of enlightened thought. Through the night with the light from above” from the song “God Bless America” is not just a lyrical phrase. America is experiencing a dark night of the soul now, and we need our “light—our wisdom, and our love—to guide us. For in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

RECLAIMING OUR REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT

The United States was born of the courage and commitment to start something new. We’re always starting new things, whether it’s new projects, new businesses, or new versions of ourselves. That is an upside to who we are.

The very founding of our country established a new possibility for humanity, repudiating an aristocratic system and starting over on an entirely new philosophical foundation. To Europeans at the time, we were called “the New World.”

The Old World was based on social inequality, and the New World, at least in theory, was to be based on social equality. The very idea of such a radical departure from the past was revolutionary. In the words of Thomas Paine in 1776, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

According to an ancient monarchical system, a king, a queen, and their cronies, the aristocracy, had been deemed entitled to land, education, wealth, wealth-creation, and all other means necessary to actualize their dreams. No one else was so entitled. No one else could own land, get an education, or create wealth for themselves. An aristocratic system gave power to those at the top—and only those at the top—to be shared with those below only at their will. According to “the divine right of kings,” God shared His power only with a king, who could then use the power to lord over people at will.

With the founding of the United States, God wasn’t seen to have given power to a king with which to rule over us; He was seen to have given power to the people with which to govern ourselves. Governments were established to secure our rights, and we were given constitutional authority to redress our government if it failed to do so.

That’s why the very notion that all men are created equal was—and remains—so radical. An entirely new political possibility emerged from the idea of equality. The American Dream has never been a fully actualized reality; forty-one signers of the Declaration of Independence themselves owned slaves. But the power of the American Dream lies in the power of a possibility, a possibility never yet fully embodied on the material plane, but one that has lived on in the imagination, hopes, and aspirations of generation after generation.

When the behavior of our government is out of sync with the rights of the American people, then it’s in the finest American tradition to protest our government and seek redress. American citizens aren’t here to be good boys and girls, to do as we’re told, to just go along to get along. We were born of an audacious spirit, and that audacity runs in our veins even now.

We were founded by revolution, and have been sustained by minirevolutions ever since. And now it is time for another one. It is our responsibility, to ourselves and to our children, to cast off any chains of an economic tyranny. An economic system that is predicated on the notion that giving more to the rich somehow helps the poor (contrary to all evidence, by the way) is as tyrannous as the aristocracies of old. The fact that the new aristocrats wear pin-striped suits and are often highly educated doesn’t make the system less tyrannous; it just makes it more familiar. In the words of Thomas Paine, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” But it isn’t right. It is wrong.

For decades, we have made the short-term financial gain of corporations—slowly and incrementally at first and ultimately in a huge cascade of democracy-demolishing economic tsunamis—the false god of our day, the idol of our imagination, and the master of our destiny. That is the issue underlying almost every other issue, from endless wars to environmental desecration to economic hardship to a lack of health care and inadequate child care. There is no one to blame so much as something to take responsibility for, a fact to realize, a dream from which to awaken, and actions to take while there is still time.

Whether it’s a king lording over us or a corporate donor class exerting undue influence on our government—the economic equivalent of lording over us—the right and responsibility of every generation of Americans is to cast off any chains that bind us.

The moral mission of the United States is to create a society in which, to the best of our ability, all material shackles are removed that keep any person from becoming who he or she was created to be. It is every generation’s task to claim that mission, and to further it. The power of our first principles, our democratic values, is that they speak to something higher than politics. They speak to the human condition.

America’s higher purpose is not just to allow you to have what you want, or to allow me to have what I want. Our higher purpose is to give everyone a fair shot at making their dreams come true. Anything that stands in the way of that will ultimately deprive all of us of the opportunities we hold most dear. For America doesn’t belong to any one of us; America belongs to all of us.

That kind of thinking was radical in 1776, and it’s radical today.

It’s radical to declare that God created all men equal.

It’s radical to declare that God gave all of us unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It’s radical to insist that governments are instituted to secure and protect those rights.

And it’s radical to insist that our government should be a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Such philosophical radicalism is our heritage, but it cannot be guaranteed. Once a democracy is established, it cannot be taken for granted. Just as a relationship must be tended to, and our bodies must be tended to, and our careers must be tended to in order to thrive, so our democracy must be tended to. Its survival isn’t guaranteed. At what point in a flight, once a plane is in the air, can the pilots then afford to ignore the panels in the cockpit? Every citizen is a pilot of our democracy,

and if we do not think of ourselves that way, and act that way, then the plane of our democracy goes down.

Devotion to the ideal of democracy is a living force; it needs to be kept alive in our hearts and fostered by our political engagement. Democracy does not drive itself.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1787: “I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” We rebelled against the tyrannies of slavery, female oppression, and segregation. We rebelled against monopolies and purveyors of child labor. We rebelled against union busters and dangerous work environments. We don’t need to summon up some new revolutionary spirit now so much as claim the one that has always been part of us.

Americans remain a rebellious people, but too often our rebellion is misplaced. We expend our spirit of rebellion on relatively minor matters, like a cable company denying us the premium package, rather than on confronting the unholy alliance of government and corporate tyranny. This has got to change, or we will lose something very precious.

Neither the exceptionalism of our principles nor liberty itself can be automatically bequeathed from parents to children. They must be won and rewon with every generation. No amount of money, political strategizing, or algorithms can substitute for the emotional power expressed by enough people who really care. And that is what the new revolution of consciousness signifies: millions of Americans are now realizing—many for the first time—that when it comes to what happens to our democracy, we really do care.

There has been a stirring of democratic fervor in the United States over the past few years, making it clear that we do: the Tea Party, the Women’s Marches, activism led by students after the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, uproar over the separation of families at our southern border, and the resistance movement” since the 2016 election. We indeed are heirs to revolutionary forefathers, and at last we are beginning to act that way. Now, at arguably the eleventh hour, a generation that had been on the verge of amusing itself to death has awakened to the fact that there is nothing amusing at all about the death of our democracy.

THE REAWAKENING

A spiritual awakening is necessary to redeem our country, but a spiritual awakening takes courage. And a spiritual awakening takes love.

Some Americans have a hard time loving this country today because they’re ambivalent about things that occurred in the past—and even some things occurring in the present that we haven’t taken responsibility for. Without a willingness as a nation to become more self-aware, we will not be spiritually awakened. And we will not be able to summon up the emotional and psychological strength to take us to a better place.

It’s important that we recognize America’s historical errors, not as a reason for national self-hatred, but as a foundation for correcting them. It’s true that this country has committed atrocities, from slavery to the genocide of Native Americans to the oppression of women to institutionalized white supremacy to violently enforced segregation to the cruelty of separating parents from their children at our Southern border. But we have also seen the rise—and the success—of the abolitionist movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the marriage equality movement, and so forth. We should identify our problems, but identify with the problem-solvers. We have always embodied a characterological struggle between the most illumined principles and the basest human instincts; that is nothing new. But our historical narrative has been one of ultimately improving things. And cynicism is just an excuse for not helping.

We’re both a brilliant country and a country that has made some terrible mistakes. But our pattern has been one in which enough Americans rise up in their time, with power and love for the possibilities they know in their hearts are real, to right those wrongs. The problem-solvers of our past didn’t act like victims—they proclaimed victory and saw it through. And so can we. They didn’t just sit around and make cynical comments, or complain about their exhaustion, or simply yell at those who disagreed with them. Transformational love requires personal maturity. It is convicted and fierce, and so should be our politics. We’re not the first generation to be compelled to push back against antidemocratic forces. Let’s just make sure we’re not the first one to fail.

But we will fail if we keep having the same conversation we’ve been having for the last forty years—and doing the same things we’ve been doing for forty years—but pretend things will turn out differently. We must move into a higher level of awareness in order to interrupt the patterns of crisis, for the laws of consciousness are set and unalterable. Merely tinkering with the external effects of our problems will not be enough to solve them. Fear destroys and love creates. An amoral economic system cannot not produce chaos, and love cannot not produce miracles.

The choice is between chaos and miracles. And the choice is ours.

Again the words of Jefferson:

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.*

Now, in the twenty-first century, we must once again keep pace with the times. We need to align ourselves politically with “the progress of the human mind” that marks the realizations of the times in which we live. With a more whole-person approach to everything from health to relationships, we have become more developed and we have become more enlightened. The biggest problem we have collectively is that our politics lag behind.

Our political establishment, too often at the behest of its corporate overlords, cannot but deliver the spawn of its malfeasance. Yet we continue to expect that those who knew how to do things before are somehow the ones who know how to do things now—even when things that they did before were spectacular failures.

Someone who led you into a ditch isn’t usually the one who knows how to lead you out of it. So why do we keep looking backwards? “Seasoned politicians” led us into wars in Vietnam and Iraq; “seasoned politicians” created the biggest wealth inequality since 1929; “seasoned politicians” brought us to the brink of environmental catastrophe. Clearly, we need a new kind of seasoning.

Our politics, and our political establishment, remain in the coat that Jefferson referred to as fitting him “when a boy.” They continue to act as though money, not love, is the factor that will save us; as though economics, not humanitarian values, is the principle that should guide us; and as though short-term corporate profits, not the people of the United States, should be the primary beneficiary of their largess.

Such thinking is not the light that guides us; it is the darkness that blinds us.

In fact, in order to survive and thrive in the twenty-first century, we must make our love for one another the central factor in all political decision-making. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. . . . We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” We heard those words in the twentieth century, but we need to hear them now in a whole new way. We can no longer afford to think of them as mere metaphor. They are directives that speak to the realities of our time. We need to recognize what they mean—not deny what they mean and simply hope that things work out.

We need to recognize that climate change poses an existential threat to our survival.

We need to recognize that the physical resources of the planet are not unlimited, and that in abusing them we are endangering ourselves and our children’s children.

We need to recognize that the endless application of brute force will not bring peace to the world, and that only the soul force of justice, meaningful human relationships, forgiveness, and compassion can end the scourge of violence on our streets and throughout the world.

We need to recognize that to fail our children is to destroy our future.

A politics that fails to honor the knowing of the heart is a politics that fails the quintessential task of paving the way to a survivable future. Love, not money, should be our new bottom line.

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THE POWER WITHIN US

Today we are not in the middle of a covert corporate takeover of our democracy; we’re in the middle of an overt corporate takeover of our democracy. An establishment that thinks traditional political strategizing alone can override this threat is not as sophisticated as it thinks it is. In fact, it is naive.

The forces of unbridled corporate power are hugely funded, politically savvy, and active on local, state, and federal levels. They don’t care if we defeat their candidates in a particular election, because behind that candidate they have several more. They’ve shown they’re not above suppressing votes, hacking machines (or conspiring with those who do), or spreading lies to the American people. Only a massive wave of conscious citizenship, alert to what is happening at every level of our government, can override their nefarious influence.

The conscious citizen is working on more cylinders than the traditional political activist. Not just the power of the intellect, but also the powers of imagination and love, are necessary to overcome the influence of the new aristocracy.

With our imagination, we give birth to new realities. We can envision the world we want and then work back from there. We can imagine a world at peace, a planet healed, and all sentient beings happy. We can visualize those things and commit ourselves to their manifestation.

When we do, we are confronted by the gap between what we are imagining and what we are currently creating. Is America’s foreign policy a prescription for world peace? Are our environmental policies a prescription for a healed planet? Are our education and economic policies a prescription for economic growth for any but a few? No wonder so many people on the spiritual path avoid politics altogether. It’s hard to meditate in the morning, then read the newspaper and see how billion-dollar American arms sales and technical support to Saudi Arabia are contributing to the starvation of tens of thousands in Yemen. It’s even harder to see when our own leaders confound all efforts to stop the evil. It’s hard to watch a beautiful sunset on a gorgeous beach and consider that millions of children in some other part of the country go to school each day in schools that don’t even have needed supplies. The cognitive dissonance is painful.

Yet being with that dissonance is important; it is our soul work. The purpose of our lives is to close the gap between what could be and what too often is. Goodness must be willed; it doesn’t necessarily happen of itself. It’s not enough to not intend to do harm; our moral responsibility is to intend to do good. And then do it.

That is why it’s our responsibility to protest when our nation, with our tax dollars and in our name, does wrong. If we’re morally responsible for monitoring our own souls, then we’re morally responsible, as well, for monitoring the soul of our nation.

It’s not as though the majority of our citizens don’t want a peaceful world; of course we do. The problem is that our political and economic systems are not currently placed at the service of that vision. If one’s main goal is the attainment of power or the creation of short-term profit, then what is truly peace-creating, loving, behavior is often dropped by the wayside or given short shrift.

The things that in fact do the most to improve our democracy and create peace among us are not the things that make immediate money for our economic overlords. Do we truly want world peace? Then expanding economic opportunities for women and educational opportunities for children, not just profits for military manufacturers, should be at the core of our national security agenda. Do we really want a healthy environment? Then we must stop using the Environmental Protection Agency to shore up profits for fossil fuel companies at the expense of their effect on climate change. Do we really want a long-term healthy economy? Then we should massively realign our investments in the direction of support for health, education, and culture among America’s children.

Old systems do not die willingly, particularly when they control gargantuan amounts of wealth and power. From the dismantling of environmental protections to economic policies that increase the gaps between rich and poor to the destruction of indigenous wisdom and peoples in the name of economic “progress” to the often unthinking extension of our military prowess, we have been moving away from, not toward, the realization of humanity’s highest hopes for life on earth.

Yet we would do well to remember the laws of evolution. Any species behaving in maladaptive ways will either evolve or become extinct. A world in which we habitually and powerfully attack not only each other but even our own habitat, is a world the laws of evolution will not support.

Our species will either evolve to a more heart-centered consciousness, choosing a greater reverence for planet and people, or we will go extinct due to collective behavior that is maladaptive for our survival. No change in government will fundamentally save us unless we are willing to evolve as a species from one with prodigious intellect and technological power but disconnected from its heart to one that puts reverence and devotion and love before all else. As with any other species, our opportunity for survival lies in the presence of an evolutionary alternative, or mutation. For the human species, that mutation is a mutation of consciousness. It is represented by the great spiritual masters who have lived among us, teaching the message of compassion and love. Only a spiritual leap forward will save us from the evils of the world.

The weight of history is on our shoulders now. This year—not next year or the year after that—we are called upon to put aside unimportant things and get to the work of correcting our evolutionary course.

Chapter 3 will be sent tomorrow!

Chapter 1: Love in a Time of Crisis

Hi, everyone.

I hope you enjoyed Healing the Soul of America. Today we begin with Chapter One of The Politics of Love.

All subscribers are receiving the downloaded books, and we’ll do a two-day book club for paid subscribers to discuss them.

Book Club Dates: June 3rd and 4th
Time: 4pm PT / 7pm ET
Link: We will begin sending the Zoom link out to paid subscribers on May 28.

Click here to read Healing the Soul of America

We’ll be sending out the chapters of A Politics of Love over the next week.

Enjoy!

CHAPTER 1
LOVE IN A TIME OF CRISIS: LESSONS IN FEAR AND LOVE

I began lecturing on A Course in Miracles, a book of spiritual psychology, in 1983. I was thirty-one years old.

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to do what I loved: talking to others about the themes in a book that had made such a difference in my life. But I had no idea I was doing something that would become a career path. I simply thought I was talking about A Course in Miracles because it brought me joy to do it.

Then something happened. I was living in Los Angeles, and as anyone who was around at the time can testify, there began to be all this talk about a new, mysterious, very scary disease that was spreading. No one knew much about it except that it was deadly and communicable, mainly gay men were getting it, and there was no known cure. To contract it was an automatic death sentence. The disease was called AIDS.

I had been lecturing mainly to a small group of people at the Philosophical Research Society in the Los Feliz area, and suddenly my lecture audiences began to grow. We went from a small room on Saturday mornings to the auditorium on Tuesday nights, then from the auditorium on Tuesday nights to a church in Hollywood on both Tuesday nights and Saturday mornings. We continued to need more space. Gay men in Los Angeles—suddenly terrified—were looking for miracles, and with good reason.

Day after day, guests at someone’s party turned into attendees at someone’s funeral. Western medicine played various cards, but it was clearly stymied. In the early days of the epidemic it had nothing to offer, and organized religious institutions at the time were oddly quiet. One can see why a young woman talking about miracles, and about a God who loved everyone no matter what, was just the ticket for many. Most of my audience was young, and at the time I was too. None of us knew what had hit us, but my faith in miracles was strong and I was glad to share it.

Unless you’ve been in a war zone, you can’t truly understand what those days were like. Friends and loved ones were dying all around us. Once people were diagnosed, there was apparently no hope for survival. People were young and gorgeous one day, then covered with horrible sores, blind, and walking with a cane the next. Many had to deal with the harrowing experience of revealing to their parents that they were gay and that they were dying. There was no room, and no time, for anything but being present to the moment, making every effort to survive. This wasn’t the fun and fabulous eighties anymore. For many, life was lived on a razor’s edge between life and death.

Everyone I knew was dealing with the disease, either directly because they had been diagnosed or indirectly because of friends or family who were. You were emotionally exposed to the epidemic simply by living in LA. The creative ranks of Hollywood contained a large gay population, and the entertainment community was hugely compassionate toward those who suffered. More and more people were being diagnosed who were not gay as well, having gotten the disease from blood transfusions, shared needles, or even one-night stands. The experience was overwhelming. To be alive at that time and in the presence of that disease was to be heartbroken—but it was also to be transformed. There is something about being around death that makes life more obviously precious.

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Whatever shallow preoccupations might have meant something before meant nothing to us now. Superficial concerns simply melted away, except when needed as an escape valve. The goal was survival, by whatever means and for however long possible. And everyone was grasping for hope. I remember saying over and over, at lecture after lecture and support group after support group, “There doesn’t have to be a cure for AIDS for it to become a chronic, manageable condition. There isn’t a cure for diabetes, but it’s a manageable condition!” We survived on that hope, articulating it over and over with tears in our eyes. I marvel at the fact that AIDS has now become, for many people, exactly that.

What I remember most from those days, however, is not the pain but the love.

I remember the people, both those who passed and those who remain. And like everyone who lived through that time, I remember so many stories. There was one young man named Merle, slightly built and shy, not the Hollywood type at all, who used to volunteer selling books at my lectures. As he grew ill, his father—built not at all like his son but more like a football quarterback—began helping him carry boxes of books to my lectures every Saturday morning. Merle’s father was clearly unaccustomed to the world of gay Hollywood, and was at the very least in denial about his son’s homosexuality. He sat at my lectures surveying the scene every Saturday, seeming to gradually awaken to what was happening around him. I would often watch him, so clearly flummoxed, so clearly heartbroken, as he did everything he could to help Merle continue an activity that gave meaning and purpose to his life.

Some today might find it hard to understand just how devastating it was for a young man at the time to be forced to deal not only with the disease, but with the fact that his parents didn’t even know he was gay. Some expressed greater anxiety about saying, “Mom and Dad, I’m gay,” than about saying, “Mom and Dad, I’m dying.” Merle’s father was someone for whom the idea of homosexuality was clearly foreign, but AIDS burst that closet door open for millions. Merle’s father loved his son, and stood by him every step of the way; he also came to realize all the other gay men who were there for him too. And how that man transformed. On the day Merle died, both he and his father were surrounded by a community of gay men.

That story is one of millions of memories, not only mine but those of many others who were affected by the scourge of AIDS. I look back on that era now as having been a deep initiation, not just individually but collectively. Fear was there, horror was there, suffering was there. But love was there too.

Love was there in the people who were dying, and in the people who were there to try to help them die peacefully. Love was there in the support groups we held, the nonprofits we established, the arms with which we held each other, the hospitals where we visited each other, the acceptance with which we faced the death of so many, and the endless tears we cried and which I’m crying now as I write this.

I learned from that experience what tragedy looks like. But I also learned how beautiful people can be. To have learned those things on the level I learned them then is to know them in a way I could never forget. Whenever I meet someone I knew then, I feel a bond. We share something that did not go away when that period ended, something that would mark all of us forever. We lived through a crisis, yes. But in surviving it, we learned something very important: not only that crises pass, but that love is what gets us through them.

I have borne witness to many other crises since that time, both in my own life and in the lives of others. I’ve lived long enough to know, both personally and professionally, that there are seasons of life. As my father used to say, you take the good with the bad. From divorce and painful breakups to the deaths of loved ones to surviving abuse to professional and financial failures to serious illness—there are many ways that a life can fall, many variations of grief, and many forms that devastation can take. But one thing that makes suffering bearable is love. Love not only makes a crisis endurable; it makes it transformable. For where there is love, miracles happen. Love changes people, and when people are changed we change the world around us.

I have seen how love changes one life, but I have also seen how love changes groups of people. As someone who experienced the time of the Vietnam War with the attendant violence of the 1960s, and then the AIDs epidemic, I know what it feels like when groups of people experience a collective trauma.

In many ways, the political situation in America today seems like those times. Once again, there is an experience of shared chaos and anxiety. Our personal and political foundations seem as though they are under assault. But what feels to me to be lacking now is a sense that we are going through this crisis together. Too many seem to think today that their stress and anxiety is theirs alone, or at the least not deeply related to the stress and anxiety of others. The culture of self-centeredness that emerged in the 1980s and helped create this crisis to begin with now leaves us weakened in our capacity to deal with it.

During Vietnam, the trauma was everyone’s. During the AIDS crisis, the trauma was everyone’s. But today, people are oddly cocooned in their misery. Many fail to realize either the collective reasons for our problems, or the collective changes necessary in order to solve them. Yet within the awareness of our oneness lie both our power to rise up and the ladder on which to climb. A belief in separation is always at the root of a problem, and a realization of our oneness is always at the root of its solution.

Self-love has become an odd sort of god in America. A generation that has become so sensitive to its own pain is often desensitized to the pain of others. One would think Jesus had come to earth to say, “Love yourself.” Somewhere along the line, the “Love each other,” “Love your neighbor as yourself” part has been subtly minimized, conveniently so for a market-based system that legitimizes self-centeredness as a lead-in to “I absolutely have to have this.”

Any person, economic system, or political establishment that fails to concern itself with the pain of others is out of alignment with spiritual truth. And where there is a lack of spiritual alignment, chaos is inevitable. Spirituality is the path of the heart, and compassion for the human condition.

Yet American politics has developed for decades in a direction that has had increasing disregard for such tender mercies. Hard data, hard facts, quantifiable factors are what’s deemed to be real—serious, sophisticated, and relevant—making the separation of head from heart more justifiable and tenable. Material concerns matter, while spiritual concerns are deemed the stuff of fantasy. To the analytical mind, the journey of the soul seems irrelevant. And that is the beast. From there, we are lost.

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The ego mind is very sly, and it’s not a big leap from ignoring the pain of others to ignoring the fact that you yourself are inflicting pain on others. Once we give ourselves social permission to think that money, not love, is the organizing principle of a well-adjusted society, chaos is inevitable. And that is what has happened to us. The money of a few is given more attention than the pain of the many; the needs of those who are playing the game are deemed more important than the pain of the many left out of it. A phrase like “job loss” is a cold description, easily ignored after an hour’s business meeting, for what is an experience of despair in the lives of millions.

Our political establishment was gobsmacked by the success of Donald Trump in the last presidential election for exactly that reason. It didn’t see it coming, but it should have. In its arrogant reliance on what it considers “hard facts,” the political establishment failed to hear the galloping of a million hooves coming at it. And it didn’t hear those hooves for one reason only: it wasn’t listening. Psychological pain doesn’t register on its radar. The chronic economic despair of millions of people—despair that our political establishment had in part created and largely failed to address—had been going on for years, and it was going to make itself heard in that election.

The political establishment was caught off guard because words like “despair,” “anger,” and “anxiety” refer to emotions, and the establishment mind-set sees emotions as “soft” rather than “hard” political factors. Its worldview is transactional rather than relational, treating the exchange of money far more seriously than the exchange of love. But a healthy political order does not leave our deep humanity out of the equation; it values the workings of the heart as well as the workings of the economy. Government is here to serve its people, and people are not just job numbers or cogs in a corporate machine. We are living, breathing, divinely created beings on this earth for a high and mighty purpose. No politics, and no political establishment, that fails to see us that way or treat us that way is worthy.

We don’t just need a progressive politics or a conservative politics; we need a more deeply human politics. We need a politics of love. Love is the angel of our better nature, just as fear is the demon of the lower self. And it is love, not fear, that has made us great. When politics is used for loveless purposes, love and love alone can override it. It was love that abolished slavery, it was love that gave women suffrage, it was love that established civil rights, and it is love that we need now.

Fear has been politicized once again, and once again love must respond. Fear has been harnessed for political purposes, and the only thing powerful enough to override that fear is a harnessing of love. But love must be more than the reason we’re doing something; it must also be the way we’re doing it. Only nonviolent, spiritual resistance avoids the trap that is turning us into that which we resisted. Anger is like the white sugar of activist energy; it gives adrenaline in the short term but is debilitating in the long term. Love is the nutrition of the gods.

Where racism, bigotry, and hatred have been harnessed for political purposes, we need to harness love for political purposes. Where an economics without empathy or compassion has been harnessed for political purposes, we need to harness love for political purposes. Where the foundations of our democracy are being corroded by corruption, we need to harness love for political purposes. What is going on in America today is not just a political contest; it is a spiritual contest. Bigger forces are at work than mere political strategizing can cast from our midst. The darkest parts of the human psyche are seeking political expression, in America and around the world. Nothing short of a politics of love can drive them from our midst.

Over the last few decades, in keeping with the way pretty much everything else in America has been driven into a corporate straitjacket, American politics has been drained of its juice and turned into a rationalistic, abstract intellectual exercise based more on economic than human imperatives and invested more in dumbing down than in uplifting the American people. Our government has become a system of legalized bribery, less concerned with deep issues of humanity’s purpose and more with shallow questions of money and power. This has put our politics squarely out of alignment with the evolutionary lure of this new century and the yearnings of the human heart.

People sense this, and a new wave of revolutionary fervor is rising up among us. It signals a new conversation out of which will emerge a new path forward. A fear-based, undemocratic influence has infected some of our most important institutions, and ancient thought forms of oppression and domination have reappeared among us. And we, like generations before us, are called upon to respond.

SHAKEN AWAKE

Just as the body has an immune system, so does a society. Just as cells awaken to the need to heal an injured body, citizens awaken to the need to heal an injured group. No one had to tell anyone in New York City after the attacks of September 11, 2001, to show up to volunteer, to give blood, to help victims in any way they could. There is a deep instinctive yearning in all of us to create the good and repair the broken.

Several months ago, I was on an airplane when, just as it was gaining altitude after takeoff, a closet in the front flight attendant’s cabin flew open. Food trays and drinks went everywhere, rolling down the aisle. What happened next was interesting. The hands of everyone sitting in an aisle seat just went to work, almost as though they were separate from the bodies they belonged to. The aisle was a sea of hands working together as though they had their own intelligence. Belonging to people who couldn’t even see each other, one hand would pick up a can, pass it to someone else, and join with another to pick up a tray, all in a hugely smooth and successful operation that entailed no conversation whatsoever. No one messes around when there’s a challenge on an airplane. If there’s a job to do, you simply do it. And no one should mess around when there’s a challenge to our democracy either.

The same biological intelligence at work in the physical immune system, the same emotional intelligence at work when responders came to the aid of victims after 9/11, and the same group intelligence at work on the airplane that day are available to us now should we choose to use them. We are going through a difficult time in America, and our political salvation lies in the arousal of a group intelligence.

For a country as for an individual, the issue is not just what we’re going through, but also who we choose to be as we go through it. The same psychological, emotional, and spiritual dynamics that prevail in the life of one person prevail in the life of a group, because a nation is simply a collection of people. That’s why those who understand what makes one life change are those who have a clue about how to change the world. Psychologists and philosophers know more about what’s going on in America today than do traditional political strategists. And more important, in many cases they know more about what to do about it.

What is going on in our country is not just a political crisis, but a moral and a spiritual crisis as well. Our political challenges are mere symptoms of a deeper malaise and a deeper dysfunction. Humanity itself is being challenged to move on to the next stage of our evolution. If we try to solve our political problems only through traditional political means, the symptoms will merely morph into different forms. The only way we can deeply address our problems is if we are willing to address them on the level of cause.

The area of race is a specific example. As important as it was to abolish slavery, no stroke of a presidential pen or constitutional amendment could eradicate racism. What other generations changed on the outside, we need to also change on the inside. A politics of love is a holistic perspective on human change, addressing the internal as well as external aspects of societal dysfunction. Otherwise, ancient symptoms simply morph over time into new iterations.

Three tasks follow from our decision to apply spiritual wisdom to solving our political problems. First, we need to look the crisis squarely in the eye and take full responsibility for how we got here. Second, we need to atone for our mistakes as a nation and return to the democratic principles and universal human values from which we have strayed. Third, we need to realign our politics with the imperatives of love and humanitarian concern rather than the imperatives of short-term profit and power dictated by an amoral economic system.

In addition, we all need to take responsibility for the part we played as citizens in allowing our current upset to happen. As tempting as it is in life to blame everything on someone else, “other people” aren’t always the problem. Our current political problems are like opportunistic infections that couldn’t have taken hold unless we’d had a weakened societal immune system.

Our current problems did not come out of nowhere; in many ways, they’re the inevitable consequence of compromises that we as citizens, in ways both large and small, made with the better angels of our nature over decades. As we neglected our civic responsibilities a little bit over here, disengaged from politics over there, allowed ourselves to be distracted by unimportant things over here, acquiesced to the diminishment of justice over there, compromised our values over here, and ignored a problem because it wasn’t happening in our own neighborhood over there, slowly but surely our democracy began to experience serious distress.

It’s easy to cast blame on others, but what’s more helpful at this time is to take a deeper look at ourselves and our own issues: our distractedness, our belief that we are “too cool to care,” our cynicism, our cultural superficiality, our denial, our lack of historical understanding, our insistence that “we aren’t political.” We the people have a problem, but at the deepest level we the people got ourselves into this ditch. And only we the people can get ourselves out of it.

Having won a world war for the cause of freedom in the mid–twentieth century, we didn’t stop loving our freedom, but we began to take it for granted; we started tending to our money more than to our values, and we started protecting our egos more than our freedom. We became preoccupied with ourselves as individuals, concerned less with how to be good men and women and what it means to be a good society than with how to be rich and powerful. We were lured into a seductive web of lesser, self-centered goals, both as individuals and as a nation. We became reckless, irreverent, and irresponsible with too many things in too many ways. And now we are reaping what we have sown. The group naiveté of too many people thinking that “politics doesn’t really “matter,” or that other people are taking care of it,” allowed a raging group pathology to develop.

Navigating this crisis will take not only the political renewal of our institutions but also some personal renewal of all of us. To reweave the rent fabric of our country, we’re going to have to stitch it back together one torn place at a time. In order to grow from this collectively, we’re going to have to grow from it individually. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., we need “qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.

That we have serious challenges before us is true. And there is no reason to think that the assaults we’re experiencing now will be lessening anytime soon. The very foundations of our democracy have been shaken, and we’re in a situation we’ve not experienced in our lifetime. From threats to the press to assaults on equal treatment before the law, from economic policies that favor the wealth of a few over the health of people and planet to authoritarian behavior that runs counter to traditional democratic norms, many in power today have done more to undermine democratic governance than to exercise it. Our democracy itself is in peril now.

We’re being reminded—painfully, and at a late hour—that democracy cannot be taken for granted. Perhaps we needed to get this close to the cliff for enough people to realize that we really don’t want to fall over it. And often what shakes us to our core is what shakes us awake.

Americans have prevailed against threats to our democracy before, and we are going to do it again. From our earliest beginnings, there have been forces consistently ready to undermine the American experiment. Yet anyone who knows anything about American history knows that if Americans are sometimes slow to awaken to our problems, we slam it like nobody’s business once we do.

We need, in our time, Lincoln’s proverbial “new birth of freedom.” Nothing less than that will override the forces that threaten us now. We need to take an evolutionary leap forward in how we think about ourselves and how we relate to each other; in what we think about America and how it relates to the rest of the world. We need to think deeply about our ancestors and more responsibly about our descendants. We need to awaken to the cries of children, to the cries of the desperate, and to the cries of the earth. We need a revolution of the heart.

It is not political mechanics but rather philosophical vision that will pull us back from the cliff and deliver us to sturdier ground. The power we need will emerge not from the identities that separate us but from the principles that unite us. One of our founding principles is e pluribus unum, or “unity in diversity,” and as Americans we should cherish both. The level of our external separation is the level of our rich diversity, and that is a good thing. But what separates us physically need not divide us emotionally; what makes you different is not what should make you suspect. But now, in this moment of peril, we need to remember the universal principles that unite us as well. We need them to glue back the pieces of our fractured nation. We are white Americans and black Americans and brown Americans, Christian and Jewish and Muslim and atheistic Americans, gay and straight and transgender Americans, wild hipster Americans and staid traditional Americans, progressive Americans and conservative Americans. But we are all Americans. Every problem being experienced by any one group of Americans is rooted in the fact that we have strayed, as a nation, from the principles that apply to all Americans. To forget that freedom belongs to every American makes any American vulnerable. Whatever they can do to anyone they could someday do to you.

America’s democratic values—that we are created equal; that we’re given by God inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that governments are instituted to secure those rights—are the rock on which we stand. They come from the higher mind, and are the sacred calling of citizenship. More than any law or institution, those values are our only sure protection from tyranny. We need to rediscover them and fall in love with them again. It isn’t enough that our values be inscribed on marble walls or on parchment. They must be inscribed in our hearts, generation after generation, or they lose their moral force. Only our love for them, and for each other, can unite us in a common field of devotion. From that field alone will we derive the power to endure and transform these difficult times.

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A NEW POLITICS

Our politics today is severely out of alignment with our decency, our love, and our higher intelligence—but we need to do more than just whine about that. We need to course-correct. We need to realign our politics with the angels of our better nature. We need to reclaim it for the best of who we are.

No one is doubting anymore that politics matters. What has happened in our country since the last presidential election makes political disengagement no longer an option for any serious person. We’ve learned the hard way the truth of the old French saying “If you don’t do politics, politics will do you.” Now we need to create a new political consciousness and drive it forward without delay.

Americans are not inherently a complacent people. It is in the characterological DNA of this country to push back against assaults on our freedom and to rise up when we have fallen down. The arrival of a new historical moment and the desire of the human heart to right the mistakes of the past: that was the original genesis of the country, and it’s the psychological force we need to drive us forward now.

A person who lacks empathy or conscience is a sociopath. Similarly, an economic system that is essentially amoral—that does not factor empathy or conscience into its determination of right action—is a sociopathic economic system. When a government has become for all intents and purposes a mere handmaiden to such an economic system, democracy dies. Today, Americans are living at the behest of a tyrannous economic system that puts the short-term profit maximization of huge, multinational corporate entities before the health and well-begin of our people, the people of the world, and the planet on which we live.

Such is the crisis in which we find ourselves. Such is the crisis we must now transform.

This country was born in repudiation of tyranny, and we have shown at various times in our history that we have it in us to do it again. We have overthrown forces ranging from slavery to the oppression of women to Hitler’s armies to institutionalized white supremacy, and more. Our ancestors were not sissies: when faced with forces of oppression, they said, “We can handle this.” And then they did.

Most of the historical challenges to our freedom have taken the form of specific activities or institutions, like operable tumors that needed to be surgically removed. What confronts us now, however, is something more like a cancer that has already metastasized. What threatens our democracy today is an amoral economic worldview that puts money before love and things before people. It is an idolatrous mind-set that expresses itself in various ways through environmental, economic, and other forms of injustice that inevitably sacrifice the rights of people at an economic altar. The US government concerning itself more with the well-being of market forces than with the well-being of people and planet has created an untenable, unsustainable, and unsurvivable trajectory. We must interrupt it now.

The tyranny in America today is not really so different from the tyrannies of any other time or place; it’s just branded better. A recurring pattern has merely repeated itself in a newer, softer, but no less pernicious form. An aristocratic archetype has waged its nefarious influence over us once again, luring us into willing acquiescence to a system in which the appetites of a few have gained precedence over the rights of the many.

That’s why revolutionary political change is in the air. A democratic revolution can’t be fought once, as in 1776, and then simply considered handled. Democracy is never safe from those who find it inconvenient to their purposes. Every generation has to rise up in its own time, face the challenges of its own day, and continue the revolution in its own way. The American Revolution is an ongoing process. In the words of President John F. Kennedy, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Peaceful revolution is waged not with guns or bullets or violence, but with votes and consciousness and love.

A revolution is a new beginning. Today’s cultural and political revolutionary needs to both think differently and act differently. Like a young person individuating from his or her parents, Americans need to ask ourselves what we will carry forward from the past, and what it’s time to let go of. None of us, but particularly those who will live the majority of their lives (and for some of them, all of their lives) in the twenty-first century, should be burdened by outworn ideas left over from the twentieth. This is not a moment for obsolete formulas or for a mechanistic, externally obsessed twentieth-century mind-set that doesn’t hold water in the twenty-first. The enlightenment of the twenty-first century represents a new perception of oneness among all aspects of our lives. This is the most powerful tool we have, not only for breaking free of what doesn’t work anymore but for giving birth to what does.

Just as a body emerges from a physical womb, new ideas emerge from a womb of consciousness. It is from there, in our minds, that we can summon new possibilities for America and the world. We will re-create our country from the inside out, not by intellect or money or technology, but by the wisdom of the heart. A new politics will emerge from a new conversation, speaking to both external circumstances and deeper truths. We need to break free of the rationalism constraining our politics over the last few decades; such rationalism is too narrow to adequately describe our real problems or to adequately address them.

Life is deep, but our current politics is shallow. The history of this country is like the stuff of great art and philosophy, while our current politics is more on the level of gossip magazines. It is shallow and tawdry, an unworthy vehicle for grappling with the meaning of what we are going through. We need to think more deeply if we’re to create more powerfully. We need to focus on a broader understanding of the American story and commit ourselves to rewriting it.

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LOVE AND FEAR

In the spring of 2018, I visited Mauthausen, a former Nazi concentration camp in Austria. As I viewed the gas chambers that had been the vessels of industrialized mass murder and the ovens into which were cast the human remains of those killed, I witnessed the effects of Nazi hatred. During the Holocaust, the world saw what hatred and fear can do in their most wicked, evil form.

But I also saw at Mauthausen the plaque commemorating the American forces who liberated the camp at the end of the war. The Nazis were a horrifying example of collective darkness, but that darkness did not prevail. Allied forces won the war.

Ironically, while I was visiting the camp, the world watched in amazement as twelve little boys trapped in a cave in Thailand were saved in an extraordinary rescue mission. From the soccer coach who taught the boys meditation to help them remain calm and use less oxygen, to the divers and experts who gathered from all over the world to aid the Thai army efforts, the world saw that week what love can do. Whether emanating from people or emanating from nature, history gives us many examples of human tragedy and dysfunction. But it gives us examples of human transcendence as well.

From abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights activists here in America, to the international effort of the Allied forces during World War II and the team that rescued the boys in Thailand, the world has seen what happens when collective efforts dedicated to justice, peace, democracy, and love overcome forces that mitigate against them. History has shown what fear can do, but it has also shown us what love can do.

Nazis, white supremacists, and terrorist organizations of any stripe anywhere represent hatred harnessed for political purposes. And they are as potentially dangerous today as they have been at any other time. Such hate-filled groups do not represent—either in America or in the world at large—anything near a majority of the population. Yet they exert dark and increasingly dangerous influence.

The problem is not just that some people hate, however. The problem is that those who hate have a way of hating with conviction.

Conviction is a force-multiplier. I can’t imagine a terrorist who’s kinda-sorta-sometimes-when-it’s-convenient committed to hate. Yet who among us has not at times been kinda-sorta-sometimes-when-it’s-convenient committed to love? Hate has shouted, while too often love has only whispered. We need to display as much conviction behind our love as some have displayed behind their hate.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that our commitment to love is shallow so much as that it’s simply confined to the personal self. Many spiritual and religious groups in America still focus primarily on the role of love in the life of the individual. Nazis, white supremacists, and other such terrorists, however, are not just committed to hating an individual; they’re committed to hating whole groups of people and effectuating social and political changes that reflect that hate. That is why we need a politics of love. We need to commit to loving humanity, and effectuate social and political changes that reflect our love.

Love is the core of nonviolent political philosophy as articulated by Mahatma Gandhi, who argued that love would heal our political relationships as well as our personal ones. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to India and brought back Gandhi’s principles of nonviolence to apply to the struggle for civil rights in the American South in the 1960s. Gandhi and King turned love into a broad-scale social force for good. And what they did in their time, now we need to do in ours.

The love that will save the world is not only a love for our own children, but a love for everyone’s children. And it isn’t just a desire to save our own homes; it’s a realization that this planet is everyone’s home. A politics of love sees the world through reverent eyes, viewing love, not economics, as the most enlightened organizing principle for human civilization. This view represents a fundamental change in our human, political, and economic priorities—not merely an incremental approach to bettering society.

In the words of the French philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” I used to read those words and think it would be nice if it were to happen. Now I read them and realize that only if it happens will humanity survive.

It’s not naive to suggest that we reorient our politics around love’s purposes. What’s naive is to think that we can afford not to, and retain either our freedom or our survival as a species. When fear has coalesced into a terrible sickness, the only medicine is love. A worldview centered on love is no less sophisticated or psychologically astute than any other—in fact, it is more sophisticated than any other. It is the only worldview that nurtures and sustains life.

Responsibility means response-ability. Fear is speaking loudly in the world today; now we the people need to respond.

“FIGHT THE SYSTEM, LITTLE SISTER”

Years ago, I mentioned to a friend that I noticed children weren’t saying the Pledge of Allegiance like we used to do, and I wondered why.

He practically yelled in my ear. “Because there is no f—kin’ liberty and justice for all in this country, man! That’s why!!”

“Yes,” I said. “But the fact that when I was a little girl I put my hand over my heart and pledged allegiance to one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all, turned me into a woman who gets really upset when I see liberty and justice not happening.”

The Pledge of Allegiance is not a guarantee; it is a pledge. The fact that our country at times has so veered so far away from “liberty and justice for all”—indeed, that we have never fully actualized that reality for all our citizens, and in many ways are veering from it now—is a call to awaken, not to whine. No earlier generation owed us anything, and many of them contributed mightily to the lives we live today. Sometimes this country has gotten it right, and sometimes we have gotten it wrong. But cynicism about our history on the Left is no less revisionist than denial about our history on the Right. The world has never been perfect, but our job is to make it better now. As an old rabbinical saying goes, “You are not expected to complete the task, but neither are you allowed to abandon it.”

When I was growing up, the one thing that was never allowed in our house was whining. We were told that if we had a challenge, we had to rise to it. And where the world was broken, it was our job to repair it.

My father grew up in deep poverty and was very sensitive to issues of social justice. He knew what it meant to be poor, he knew what it meant to be hungry, and he knew how large and powerful systems can keep such misery in place. Throughout my childhood, a constant refrain was “Fight the system, kids! Fight the system!

Everyone in the family knew what he meant by that. “The system” is not just a particular political or economic structure, but a morally corrupt way of looking at the world—a loveless mind-set externalized in material form. It is the social, political, and economic expression of a worldview that says, “I matter, but you don’t. My gain matters, but your suffering doesn’t. Whoever might be hurting, it’s someone else’s problem.” It is a political order devoid of the sense that we are our brother’s keeper, that what we do to others will be done to us, or that our mission here is to love others as we would wish to be loved.

Often, when passing an elderly janitor cleaning a building late at night or a homeless person begging on the street, my father would say to us, “See that old man, kids? His life is hard.” He would quote Linda in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman saying to her sons about their father, Willie, “Attention must be paid.” Too often,when it comes to the suffering of others, we look but we do not see.

When I became an adult and began to write and speak about spirituality, my father at first seemed to think I’d betrayed his values. He had taught me about society at large, and he could not understand my focus on personal transformation. “I raised you to fight the system, to wage the revolution!” he exclaimed to me one day.

I replied, “But, Daddy, I am! Love is the revolution! It’s the only way that things will fundamentally change.”

I saw a twinkle in my father’s eye when I said that. He did understand. One of my most precious memories is walking into my parents’ bathroom one day when my father was shaving. He was listening to one of the early cassette tapes of my lectures, and as I entered the room he turned to me, put down his razor for a moment, and said, “Very good, Little Sister. I’m proud of you.” Today, twenty years after my father’s death, I feel at times like I’m still trying to get his approval.

Over the years, I have gone from having to justify my spiritual interests to a politically oriented father to feeling the need to justify my political interests to a spiritually oriented audience. After the 1960s, those two domains—politics and spirituality—had taken differing directions, and I felt caught between the two. I had been comfortable during the time when we read Ram Dass in the morning and went to antiwar rallies in the afternoon. That creative mix fit my temperament then and fits my temperament now. Spirituality is simply the path of the heart, and if it applies to anything, then it applies to everything.

A few years ago, a young man said to me at one of my lectures, “But aren’t you kind of an aging hippie, Ms. Williamson? Your generation was just into sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll!” I replied with a knowing smile: “Uh . . . that was just part of the day!!” Then I was silent for a moment. “We spent the rest of the day stopping a war.”

I knew he heard me. The revolution of my youth occurred on both inner and outer planes. It was sex, it was culture, it was music, and it was politics. The spirit of rebellion today feels similar in that it isn’t confined to any one category; rather, its influence is everywhere. Love’s revolutionaries aren’t antiestablishment now; more enlightened thinkers are the new establishment.

Should we allow our internal wisdom to guide us as much as an exterior road map, then a divine intelligence will show each of us the part we can play in the creation of a new America. This moment is not just a time of breakdown; it is also a time of breakthrough. Millions of Americans are doing the heavy lifting all over the country, both electorally and nonelectorally, dealing with our challenges creatively and making us, despite the difficulty of this moment, an even better nation for what we are going through. Our current unrest can lead to a national reset if we’re willing to become the people we need to be in order to do the things we need to do.

America has fallen, and now it’s time for us to rise.

Chapter 2 will be sent tomorrow!

How many times we have all sung the song, “America the Beautiful.” The line, “And crown thy good with brotherhood,” remains poignant throughout the generations.

I heard the late U.S. Congressman Walter Capps tell the following story. It is a traditional rabbinical tale.

A rabbi was giving instruction to some children, when he posed this question: how do you know the night is over and the day has come? Puzzled, the children took some time to answer. Then one of them ventured, “You know the night is over and the day has come when, at dawn, you look out at a tree, and you can tell whether it is an apple or pear tree.” The rabbi acknowledged this response, but repeated the question. A second student offered, “You know the night is over and the day has come when you see an animal in the distance, and you can tell whether it is a donkey or a horse.” The rabbi acknowledged this response, too, then repeated the question. At this the students, too puzzled to know how to answer, asked the rabbi to solve the dilemma he had posed. The rabbi said, “You know the night is over and the day has come when you look into the eyes of any human being, and you see there your brother or your sister; for, if you do not see your brother or your sister, it is still night—the day hasn’t come.

Are we, the citizens of this planet earth, brothers—or are we not? That is the fundamental question underlying world events. How we answer that question will make all the difference. If we are not brothers, then it is reasonable to continue to live as we live now. If we are brothers, after all, then we must rethink our world. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

We have ample evidence that our social and political systems are critically stressed. What we need is the ample wisdom to deal with it.

We have the information we need; what we need is the ability to process that information in a more meaningful way. We have much data, so much in fact that it feels more at times like tiny points of mental bombardment than as illuminating bits of information. We have a lot of dots; what we need is a way to connect them.

The consciousness that will provide a navigable path through the turbulent waters of our current history is not simply one of increased data, but of increased love. Not just love that unites us in moments of tragedy, but one that impels us to avoid them. Not just one in which we are united in fear, but one in which we are united in courage. Love and love alone is the unifying factor that will bring us together as a species, and allow us to prevail.

What can we do to hasten the day when the state of love underlying all things becomes the dominant consciousness of the world? We need to find that place and live there, cleave to it and pray never to leave. For it alone is our only safety. And that is why our culture is in peril. We have created in America a culture that is dedicated to a financial rather than a humanitarian bottom line, and until that is addressed we will continue to move in directions that do not serve us.

Perhaps we should be thinking less how to educate our children than how to protect them from the teachings of our modern world: the teaching that things are everything, that money is worth compromising our integrity to procure, that anyone’s life is cheap, that other people “aren’t like us,” that anyone’s suffering doesn’t matter, that war is okay as long as it’s somewhere else, and that violence is somehow fun.

We want to teach our children to grow up to be leaders, and that is good. But what kinds of leaders? Leaders who exploit great masses of people so that the standard of living of their own people can remain high? Leaders who increase a financial bottom line at the expense of human and natural resources?

Or do we not want to raise our children to rise up in their time, and with their voices mighty, exclaim, “Enough of that now. There must be another way.”

There are leaders in the world who are trying to find that way, and succeeding. And we must join them. Our task is to create a strong enough field of consciousness in the world to form the necessary firmament, a grid of possibility, to turn the human tide from violence to love. To create a world in which our leaders will experience a common eureka, a common moment of searing vision and electric understanding. They will see the glorious possibility of a world in which we fight no more, and mothers cry in anguish no more, and children starve by the millions no more, and peace will be ours at last.

When will this occur? That depends totally on the state of our consciousness. For consciousness trickles up, not downward. When we ourselves are clear that love is what we want our leaders to stand for, then such are the leaders we will choose and empower. We will no longer buy, and our leaders will no longer try to sell us, the mad delusion that the world will survive even a hundred more years if we simply rely for our security on our armies, our military, our economies, or external means of any kind.

Such a fundamental change is huge, but it is doable. In fact, it is the only sustainable option. We tend to ask, like Job, “How long, oh God, how long?” But what’s really happening is the opposite of that: surely God is asking, “How long, oh people, how long?” How long will we wait before the preciousness of all human life is placed higher on our list of values?

We cannot save the world without God’s help, and neither can He save the world without ours.

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I’VE LED SEVERAL group tours abroad. It has been one of my most satisfying professional experiences, watching it dawn on a group of Americans that the world outside our borders isn’t quite what they had thought. Americans have a unique perspective, inhabiting a very large continent surrounded on two sides by huge oceans. For a long time in our history this provided relative safety from foreign enemies, and independence from the vital concerns of most of the rest of the world. But those days are over. Our fate is now intrinsically tied up with the fate of all humanity, and the destructive weapons that make up the arsenals of the world today would have little trouble making it over the oceans. We have an entrenched perception of separateness, even superiority, regarding the rest of the world. Transforming that consciousness is very important if we are to prepare the way for peace in the century ahead. If 9/11 proved anything, it’s that if someone hates us enough they can get to us.

There is no greatness in the absence of humility. In the larger scheme of God’s universe, the United States is just a little dot on a very little planet. Even one of our most boastful presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, knew the value of this enlightened perspective. He used to bring guests at his home, Sagamore Hill, on Long Island, out onto the lawn on a fine, clear summer night and say, “Look, look at the stars.” They’d just stand and look for minutes or even hours. Then Roosevelt would flash his famous grin and say, “All right, I think we feel insignificant enough now—let’s go to bed.”

There is no advance in consciousness, personal or collective, without humility. We are a two-hundred-year-old society in the habit of giving lectures about high civilization to people who have been around for hundreds, even thousands of years. We have a higher standard of living in this country, but not necessarily a better standard of living, and everyone except us seems to know this.

The average American is less well read and informed about world events and situations than are our European counterparts, our children are less educated, and we imprison more people than any other nation (including Russia and China). While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. We are the only Western industrialized nation that does not have universal health care. We lecture others about human rights (sometimes legitimately), while other nations regard health care as a human right. We go about singing the praises of democracy, but we don’t ask ourselves why, if we love it so much, we don’t make it easier for people to vote; in fact, voter disenfranchisement and voter suppression, plus a chipping away at the Voting Rights Act, have become the new order of the day. We talk endlessly about family values in this country, while taking less care of our children than any other nation with similar resources to do so.

“I am certain,” said President Kennedy, “that after the dust of centuries has passed from our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.” I foresee an America in which our contribution to the human spirit is our highest national concern. And when enough of us foresee that, then that is what will come to pass. The magnificent gift of who each of us really is, and what we came to earth to give, is awaiting our expression. It will genuinely be the New Order of the Ages proclaimed on our Great Seal, when America remembers the greatness of her purpose and every American feels they have a part in making it manifest.

America has a historic mission, important not only to ourselves but to all the world, relevant not only to this day and age but relevant to the ages. That mission is to stand for hope and possibility for all humanity despite whatever challenges exist.

Over the last few decades we have forgotten our mission and we have strayed from our purpose. We have been lured into a seductive web of lesser, self-centered goals, as individuals and as a nation. But a most radical blessing bestowed upon humanity is our capacity to change; an activation of heart and mind accompanies the willingness to remember. None of us is perfect, as individuals or as nations. But when we have forgotten we can remember, and when we have fallen we can rise back up.

It is time for America to rise up now. It is time for America to remember. It is time for America to return to the path of our historic charge, to be a place where dreams can come true not just for some but for all, not simply for the purpose of getting anyone anything but for the purpose of glorifying what is possible on this earth during the time that we are here.

Some of us see this as a charge from God. Some of us see this as an ethical responsibility to our children and our children’s children. Some of us see this as simply a better way to live our lives. From whatever angle we approach the idea, let us return to America’s soulful purpose as a servant to and beacon of human possibility. That alone is the light of democracy, the inextinguishable torch within all our hearts. Let us again become the home of the brave, dedicating our lives to that which we have learned most painfully can never ever be taken for granted: that this be a land of the free.

Whether it be external chains of slavery or economic servitude, or internal chains of narcissism and greed, may all the chains be broken now that would delay our return to a path of a greater destiny. It is time for America to course-correct. We have done it before and now, in our time, we are preparing to do it again.

We are living in troubled times, made this way by the sleep of our forgetfulness. But this is not the time to fall more deeply asleep. This is a time to awaken, to be active, and to be glad. There is a promise that was bequeathed to us, which is ours to hold and then pass on to our children. It is a sacred promise. We are part of the American river of destiny, running through time and carrying with it the extraordinary gift of one great idea: that there can be a land where all are free to be and to become their essential selves. This is more than an inspired idea: it comes straight from the Mind of God. Keeping faith with it is keeping faith with the divine.

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WHEN KING SAUL saw that young David, unskilled in the ways of war, was the only Israelite courageous enough to take on the giant Goliath, he offered him his armor to wear in battle. David put on the king’s armor but then removed it. The armor would only slow him down and weigh him down. It would not be armor, but lack of armor, that would empower David in facing Goliath.

Israel’s warriors had been taught the ways of war, and yet when the ultimate test came along, they were not brave enough to face it. David, on the other hand, was young, a musician, a shepherd—not a warrior. What looked like his lack of preparation for taking on the force of evil turned out to be simply a different kind of preparation—a preparation of the spirit.

David could not imitate what others had done, but he knew to trust himself and his own abilities, to wage battle in another way. And that is what is happening in the world today. There is a new Davidic impulse, a renaissance of hope, and it cannot express itself through the old, tried, world-weary ways. It’s not imitating something old but rather creating something new. It is a mystical revolution that will usher in a mystical age.

In some ways, history is something to respect. In other ways, it is something best interrupted. In this new millennium, peace will be forged not only by those who study war but also by those who study peace. The peaceful warrior has an expanded, not a diminished, skill set. Health is much more than the absence of illness; it is the cultivation of health. And peace is much more than the absence of war; it is the cultivation of peace.

From racial healing workshops and youth initiatives in the inner city, to peace-building projects throughout the world, to meditation meetings at military headquarters, to social and emotional learning in our schools, there is an emerging global movement toward an alternative mode of peace creation. It is nothing short of an unstoppable force, and every day people are joining the ranks.

Commentator Matthew Albracht put it succinctly in an article published in 2016: “Teachers are bringing conflict resolution education into classrooms; community programs are dismantling gang violence; restorative justice programs are effectively modeling new methods of dealing with criminal justice; programs in prisons are helping inmates turn their lives around; sophisticated policies and practices are averting violence from erupting in international conflict hotspots; and parents are learning new skills and taking daily actions toward being more supportive and connected with their children. There are countless options and examples offering powerful alternatives to many of the more punitive, less effective methods we have traditionally relied upon when dealing with conflict and violence.”

Often we call members of our military “peacekeepers” and I have no doubt how many of them would wish to be. The armies and police of our future will include conflict resolution as a part of their training, and in some places they already do.

Peace is more than the absence of conflict; it is the presence of peace. And to create that, we need new tools. Conflict resolution, nonviolent communication skills, and community building are to peace what guns are to war. Highly effective peace-building initiatives are routinely quenching the fires that rage within troubled hearts and hotspots around the world, addressing on the level of cause the scourge of violence that takes such a dangerous toll. Yet these initiatives are universally underfunded and underutilized. The full actualization of their potential power, therefore, remains on the horizon. As a loving critical mass coalesces, as hearts around the world continue to yearn and work for peace, these new forms of peace building will gain greater credibility. They will continue to be important components in the manifestation of a new planetary vision.

This new wine, however, cannot be put in old bottles. The old bottles of political formulation, mere relics of twentieth-century thinking, are inadequate for the task at hand.

Old-paradigm thinking responds solely to circumstances, while the enlightened mind responds to vision. Traditional politics is locked into reaction to how things are; with spirit added to the equation, we are free to create something else, to proactively serve a vision of how things could be. The choice is between the human race merely repeating our past, or freeing our future to be something entirely new.

A critical mass of the world’s population meditating on a new vision for the world, and devoting ourselves to its emergence, would tip the planetary field of energy in the direction of peace and justice for all. If enough of us pray for and commit to this peace on a daily basis, holding the vision in sacred silence for at least two minutes, then a miracle will occur. If we imagine a world lit from within, filled with happy people living whatever lives they choose and unburdened by the violence of a world gone mad, then our minds will become conduits through which love can work. Holding the vision of a world in which everyone is loved will lift our minds and hearts, make brilliant our thoughts and tender our emotions. The vision itself will cleanse and transform us, making us who we need to be in order to bring it forth. Such is the work that lies before us now.

And so it is, and will forever be: love reasserts itself, every morning, every time.

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IMAGINE IF EVERY member of the United Nations kept one delegate permanently stationed there to spend all day silently blessing every other nation of the world. Imagine humanity committed to universal love, meditating on peace, studied and practiced in the cultural, educational, artistic, philosophical, and diplomatic arts of waging peace. Imagine a world in which war no longer exists. That world is just around the corner, as soon as we turn a corner.

Only a new political sensibility arising throughout the world can counter the war machine always lurking in the background of international politics. Perhaps we will become bold enough to create what kind of world we want, instead of always trying to accomplish small gains within a system we know is ultimately destructive.

Traveling in India in the 1990s with a group of fellow Americans, I spent quite a bit of time in meditation and prayer near the Taj Mahal. There is a mosque right next to the Taj, and all true houses of worship, of whatever religion, hold spiritual power for people of faith. We had already found that, while we were meditating, Indian people would frequently come and join us, sit down in the group, and start meditating with us as though it was the most natural thing in the world. One particular day, as we came out of a deep period of silence, a line of about thirty or so Indians stood, at the edge of the patio where we sat. We stood as if in a trance and faced our Indian counterparts. What followed in a sublime silence was an exchange of mutual honor and respect that was almost mind-altering. All of us were profoundly moved.

In a meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, I learned some things about foreign policy. His Holiness told me that a German physicist had said to him that we should remove the concept of “foreign policy” from our minds and think of all nations as our “domestic partners.”

We shouldn’t be overly impressed by terms like “foreign policy,” and government departments that play the world like a giant chessboard and view it as no more than a game we’re trying to win. Our consciousness should drive them, and not the other way around.

According to the esoteric wisdom of the ages, every nation carries with it a facet of divine light as it streams from the Mind of God to earth. The soulful function associated with the United States is to “light the way.”

America needs to reclaim our own inner light. “The people of the world,” the Dalai Lama told me, “no longer look at America as a champion of democracy. Too many times we have seen you take the side of undemocratic forces.” We are known as the great underminer of communism, to be sure, but that is far from synonymous with always being a champion of freedom. We have sabotaged democratic governments as well as communist governments when they did not move in the direction we wanted them to move, and even today we sell out oppressed democratic forces for a greater market share of their country’s economies.

In our international relations, we have become in most ways just like any other world player, seeking political and economic advantage, manipulating events according to what some would call our “vital national interests,” though those interests today seem clearly defined more by economics than by values.

But what if we, the American people, were to change our minds about that? We shouldn’t underestimate our power. The entire world would shift.

I originally published this book in 1997, at a time when many of the horrors in the world today were mere threats on the horizon. I ended the book then with what turned out to be a tragically prescient story. I repeat it here:

ANOTHER INTERESTING THING happened to me at the Taj Mahal. The Mufti—Egypt’s highest Muslim cleric—was visiting Agra at the time, and happened to pass our group as he walked through the area with his entourage. Seeing a group of Westerners meditating at the Taj Mahal made him curious, and he asked who we were. Upon being told we were a group of Christians and Jews from the United States, many of us clergy, he asked if he could meet with a small group of us later at his hotel.

The meeting was very formal and the Mufti spoke through an interpreter. His basic message to us was this: “I am aware that for most Americans, when you hear the word ‘Islamic,’ you usually hear the word ‘terrorist’ in the same sentence. I wanted to speak with you to make sure you understand that Islam is a religion of peace.

Every people has a dark element—a group which does not represent the larger group well. Obviously, we have ours. But please do not think that Islamic terrorists represent true Islam, any more than Christians who commit violence in the name of God represent true Christianity, or Jews who commit violence in the name of God represent true Judaism.”

After meeting with the Mufti, as I made my way through the lobby of the hotel, one of the Egyptians who was attending His Eminence tapped me on the shoulder and asked if we could speak. In the most gentle, gracious tones, he said that he wanted to tell me something.

During the very week that we were in India, a group of Indian women threatened to burn themselves alive in protest of the Miss Universe pageant being held in New Delhi. What they were protesting was the imposition of Western standards of beauty on Indian women, expressing the resentment that many Indians—indeed, many people throughout the Third World—feel toward America.

The Egyptian diplomat whom I met in the lobby of the hotel in Agra said to me,

I do not mean this as a criticism of the United States. I know the Americans are good men and women. But please try to make them understand: many people in my part of the world feel that they have been forced to try to keep up with you, in a race that we do not really care to run. Your technology is amazing, but America seems spiritually polluted to many of us. Your ways are not our ways, and while we were tempted for a while to think that your ways should be our ways, we do not think that anymore.

This is the problem, Ms. Williamson, and there will be terrible consequences in the world if Americans do not come to understand this. Islamic terrorists have had such success—if you can call their campaigns a success—because they have been able to persuade millions of peasants that America is bad. It was not too difficult to do, Ms. Williamson. All they have to do is describe the television programs you export to this part of the world, and millions of our people are very horrified.

Your government does not understand. They do not see how the people feel. We need the American people to understand. Perhaps you will bring more Americans to our part of the world. If they come to understand us, then they will respect us. We would feel that respect, and then I don’t think that the terrorists would have such success. This is not a job the CIA can do. It is only a job which people can do.

I thanked him for telling me those things, and I promised him I would pass the information along.

In originally writing this book, I tried to do that.

AMERICA IS NOT now the home of the brave, but I think we are the home of those who wish to be brave.

Another story, now twenty years old, is as true today as it was then. Coming back from Cairo to JFK Airport in 1997, I handed my landing card to the agent at the U.S. Customs counter. He read what I had written.

“What do you do?” he asked me.
“I’m a writer,” I replied.
“What do you write?”
“I’m writing a book about healing America.”
He looked at me. “Well, America is shot,” he said. I didn’t say anything.
“You ought to come here for a day, to do research for your book. Come see what I see. These people are terrible.”
I was rather shocked. “Do you mean immigrants?!”
“Well,” he hesitated, “Americans are the worst. But they’re all bad. I came here wanting to like everybody, you know, thinking everybody’s fairly decent. But now everybody’s as bad as everybody else.”
I thought for a few moments, then ventured a comment. “Well, I have an idea that might help.”
“Really?” he asked.
“When people come up to you here, look them in the eye and silently say, ‘The goodness in me salutes the goodness in you.’ ”
He thought for a moment. “Would that maybe really work, you think?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Really, it does.”
He smiled and collected my card, showing me which way to exit.
As I reached the door leading out, I looked back at the agent. He was looking at me. We both stood still for a moment, in silence, our eyes locked.

The ancient Egyptians believed the stars in our eyes are reflections of the stars in the sky, and that the stars in the sky are our home. I had heard that in Egypt, but I learned it’s true in America. I saw the stars in my brother’s eyes, and I knew that I was home.

Preface and Introduction

Chapter 1: Mystical Power

Chapter 2: Dreams and Principles

Chapter 3: National Atonement

Chapter 4: An American Awakening

Chapter 5: The Eternals of Finance

Chapter 6: Old Powers, New Powers

Chapter 7: Holistic Politics

Chapter 8: Citizen Power

Years ago, I made my first Congressional constituent call. It was an initiation of sorts into citizen power. Too many of us feel powerless in life for no other reason than that we haven’t really exercised our power. And politics is a powerful place to do it.

The U.S. Senate was debating at that time—and then turned down—an amendment to the budget bill that would have added a 43-cent tobacco tax on every pack of cigarettes, creating $30 billion in revenue to pay for health insurance for millions of children of the working poor. The amendment, which lost by only ten votes, had been proposed by conservative Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah and the late liberal Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts.

President Clinton had helped defeat the amendment because then Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott had called it a “deal breaker” in working out the budget agreement. Opponents of the amendment were saying amazing things like, “Voting for this bill will actually hurt the poor because they’ll just keep on smoking but it will be more expensive.

Senator Hatch said, “It’s Joey versus Joe Camel, and no procedural niceties can obscure this reality and everybody here knows it.” Senator Kennedy said, “We shall offer it again and again until we prevail. It’s more important to protect children than to protect the tobacco industry.” I agreed with Ted Kennedy, and was all fired up one morning as I read about it over coffee.

I was living in California at the time, and I saw one of my senators voted to defeat the rider. She’s a good senator and I respected her, particularly her stand on gun control, but on this one issue I strongly disagreed with her vote. I called the main switchboard at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. (202-224-3121; that number should be in your phone, by the way), and asked for her office. The switchboard connects you immediately to whatever office you request. “Senator Feinstein’s office please,” I said.

A nice young staffer was on the other end of the line.

“Hello,” I said. “This is a constituent call. My name is Marianne Williamson, and I’m calling to express profound disappointment that the Senator helped defeat the rider yesterday that would have provided money for children’s health insurance. Could you explain to me why she did that please?” Remember: they work for you. I was simply asking an employee why she had done something.

“Certainly,” he said, and put me on hold. In a few seconds he was back. “The Senator felt she had to do it because the Majority Leader said it was a deal breaker for the budget deal.”

“Yes, I know that he said that. I read that in the newspaper. But quite a few people argued that that was a bluff. Why must we so consistently cave in to those who would have us balance the budget on the backs of our children, rather than on the back of the tobacco industry? Could you explain that to me, please?”

Yes, certainly,” he said, and put me on hold again.

In a few moments, he returned. “I was told to tell you that the President himself called here yesterday, and asked that the Senator vote the way she did.”

“Would you please tell the Senator that my response to that is, ‘So what?’ ”

“Yes, of course,” he said.

“Please tell the Senator that at least one of her constituents wants to go on record saying that doing the right thing is never a wrong move.”

“Thank you,” he said, “I will tell her that.”

Like hell he will, I thought, as I put down the phone. I had no illusions, of course, that the Senator would be told what I said. But I knew this: if she received a hundred calls like that—or, better yet, two hundred—she certainly would hear about it, and I even think she would care. These people still run for election. In fact, we know that far fewer than one hundred calls coming into a senator’s office is enough to get their attention.

There are millions of people in America who read about what happens in Washington and are disgusted at how we keep selling out to various industries at the expense of American families, day after day. But too many of us don’t call Washington, don’t write any letters, and don’t even vote; we just feel the darkness in our guts, knowing what we know but doing nothing. It’s like David saying about Goliath, “Geez, he really is big. Maybe I won’t do this.”

But Goliath isn’t that big. And each of us has a slingshot.

Life isn’t just about what happens to us; it’s about who we choose to be within the space of what has happened to us. The issue isn’t just how your representatives in Washington vote; the issue is how you, as a citizen, respond one way or the other. Just responding through a vote every four years, or even two years, is simply not enough. If anything should be obvious by now, it’s that.

The term “nonviolent resistance” is nonviolent, yes—but it’s also resistant! Without the serenity of inner peace, there is no character formation; but without the commitment to resisting injustice, there is no impulse to powerful action. We desperately need both, particularly politically. There is no machine, technology, or scientific project that can renew and restore democracy. If we want that done, it’s a job we have to do ourselves.

Don’t just call a friend; call your reps. Don’t just march; march to the polls. And don’t just get pissed; get powerful.

AFTER HE LEFT the presidency, Harry Truman was asked how it felt no longer being President. He responded that he had gotten promoted to a better job: “Mr. Citizen.”

Most Americans do not even vote. For years, people have felt as though politics was a distant reality having little to do with their actual lives. It became a spectator sport, when it was intended to be a participatory drama. No American citizen should be watching the action from the sidelines, when each of us has important lines to say. And now, we have paid a heavy price for this. Even Plato knew the dangers of political nonparticipation, having said this: “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

Hello.

“The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “and are the only instruments which can be used for their destruction. It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves. . . .”

Yet many Americans do not exercise their rights because they have come to take them for granted or underestimate their power. It is often when people have been denied their civil rights that they most appreciate how important such rights are.

When this book was first published, I had seen the problem already bubbling up among us. I read about a woman named Michele McDonald, an African-American single mother who lived in the inner city of Hartford, Connecticut, and attended the President’s Summit on Volunteerism, held in Philadelphia in 1997, and had this to say about it:

The Conference is a nice concept, but it’s missing the element of real democracy. What we want are the tools of power. We want to be the driving force of the richness of our own community.

We want to be the ones to determine the needs of our own community; we appreciate people coming in to help, but we don’t want to just be an object of someone’s “needs assessment” program. That makes us victims, and it disempowers us. What we want is to learn the tools of democracy, so we’re not just drowning in the system—we want to learn Civics!

The system shouldn’t be deciding what I need; I want to tell them what I need. I want to learn how to be a better citizen in my community and my nation. I want to help my neighbors be more focused on their gifts than on “their deficits. What I want to know is how to empower my own community, so we’ve got real input on where we’re going. We want to be empowered to take care of our own neighborhood.

Those people don’t want us to have the tools because then we’d have real power. That’s what’s really going on.

Sometimes they say they want parents from the community to sit on their boards and things, but once we get there, they don’t want us to know how to really use the system. We’re supposed to just sit there and be quiet, but they can point to us and say, “See, they’re included.

This woman understood the game that was being played: a system that constitutionally owes her much was patting itself on the back for giving her just a little. Michele was part of a burgeoning impulse to take back the tools of democracy.

Now, twenty years later, the situation is not just problematic; it is dire. Many Americans have internalized their powerlessness but have awoken and are ready to reclaim it. Nothing less than a massive citizen uprising, in consciousness and in civic activism, can save our country from the clutches of some seriously antidemocratic forces that have their hands upon it now. Serious voter suppression efforts are emerging around the country. The institutional levees we would have thought would keep them at bay have broken, and the only thing that stands between us and the demise of our democracy is our willingness to wield the power of our citizenship in a deep, and meaningful, and seriously kick-ass way.

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WHILE THE AMERICAN political system should be a context for the discovery of solutions, the system itself is beset by some of our most severe wounds. The selfishness, violence, absence of teamwork, shortage of creative thinking, lack of courage to take risks, propensity to put the protection of entrenched interests before the pursuit of truth, obsolete hierarchical management systems, glorification of external resources, underemphasis on internal resources, lack of integrity, and diminished standards of excellence that are all hallmarks of a crumbling system are, if anything, more prevalent in politics than in any other institution in America. A weakened structure cannot give us strength. Far from being a fount of answers, politics in America is a big part of our problem. If democracy is a river that would provide the water to help us spring back to life, current politics is a dam that holds the water back. It is a conversation stuck at the level of a shouting match, an adversarial us-versus-them debate of total polarization and very little synergy.

Instead of endeavoring to present the political issues of our time in as historically and socially significant ways as possible to ensure the deepest exercise of democracy, the political establishment has turned itself into a clone of the advertising industry and the workhorse of a ruling class. It works less to serve than to exploit us, to manipulate the electorate for the sake of its own power.

Neither Democratic nor Republican establishments saw the writing on the wall, but it was there. It might have been written in invisible ink, but it was there. The rising economic inequality of the last thirty, almost forty years was a like a pressure cooker that was bound to blow, and anyone whose politics were led by their heart rather than their pocketbook could see it from miles away.

Over the last few decades, fueled mainly by the increasingly undue influence of money that was allowed to pour into our system (from the Supreme Court declaring that “money is free speech” to the disastrous Citizens United decision), both major political parties became too-frequent accomplices to corporate rather than democratic rule.

Political parties at their best stand for ideas about what the country should be, ideas about how to achieve that, and ways for the average citizen to be involved in the effort. Yet the average American citizen is too often seen by the major parties as mere cannon fodder in their fights for power. Both major parties are now challenged to reclaim their souls, in order to achieve again a true connection with the hearts of the American people.

We are living at a crossroads now. Our choice is between serious political darkness or serious political light.

IN HIS FAREWELL Address, George Washington had the following to say regarding political parties:

They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put in the place of the delegated will of the Nation, the will of a party; often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the Community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the Mirror of the ill concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests. However combinations or Associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People, and to usurp for themselves the reins of Government destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

He added, “Let me now . . . warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party.”

There’s nothing in the Constitution that says, “You will be divided into two main political parties, and together they will determine the direction of the country, even if that direction is into the ground.”

While historically, third parties have been a very important contribution to American democracy, bringing to the political table such issues as Abolition, women’s right to vote, antimonopoly legislation, child labor laws, and even Social Security, slowly, ever since the late 1960s, both Democratic and Republican legislatures have passed laws making it more and more difficult for third-party candidates to get on ballots around the country.

The healthiest period of our democratic system was from the 1870s to the 1880s, when voter turnout was around 80 percent. During that time, many powerful third parties existed, keeping the vast majority of voters engaged in the political process owing to a genuine sense of viable political alternatives. Before 1888, there were no ballot access requirements; from 1888 to 1920, minimal requirements were passed; during the 1930s, ballot access laws became far more restrictive; and in the 1960s, laws began to be passed making third-party involvement in the electoral process extremely difficult. It has been noted that our great-great-grandfathers, if they were American voters, had a greater opportunity to change public policy with their votes than we do today.

It is important that we recognize the history of political parties in America, but today stakes are too high not to be deeply realistic about the situation we are in and the choices that confront us. What we most need now is for both the Democrats and Republican parties to reclaim their souls: to return to their values, to remember the people they are here to serve, to stop their slavish devotion to huge political donors, and remember their moral responsibility to the American people. Both of them deserved a huge comeuppance in 2016, but the American people did not deserve the form that that comeuppance took.

We must concoct something new now: If we harness our best ideas, our love for each other, and our commitment to the furtherance and betterment of our society, then a new vortex of social and political power will emerge in our midst. It seems to some as though this is just a pipe dream, but the most serious among us would not think that at all. It is not naïve to think we can heal our democracy; it is naïve to think it can survive another one hundred years if we do not. If we were serious about democracy then voter registration would occur automatically on an American citizen’s eighteenth birthday, voting would be held on a Saturday or Sunday and possibly for more than one day, early voting would be expanded, and the polls would be open for twenty-four hours. It cannot be said that the current system encourages voter participation.

If we were serious about democracy, we would mandate free TV time for all candidates, where they are free to speak for themselves but their Madison Avenue handlers have to keep their paws off our brains.

If we were serious about democracy, our legislators would not feel free to continuously avoid grappling with the challenge of limiting the influence of money on the electoral system. Americans have turned off to politics now because we know it’s such a sick, corrupt game. What we need to remember, however, is that while current politics is just a game, democracy is not. It’s as though we own a house and we do not like the current tenants. So you don’t avoid the house or burn down the house; you remove the tenants and put in new ones!

While our party affiliations come and go, our citizenship itself is a permanent aspect of our relationship to this country. And citizenship is a relationship. It is, when we allow it to be, a process of interaction that fosters growth and betterment. America is better off when we’re involved with its governance, and we ourselves are better off when we can effectively participate in making the world a better place.

Below are some very simple basics for making a political difference. Sometimes something very small can go a long way, and if all of us did even a few of these things, this country would completely change.

It is estimated that fewer than 10 percent of American voters will ever write to elected officials. Yet contacting our elected officials with a letter is an important part of making a difference. They work for you. They theoretically want to hear our views, and they definitely can’t afford to ignore them. It’s our responsibility to express those views.

Like voting, communicating our views in the political arena increases your own power. The universe registers your every serious intention and vigorous action on behalf of what you perceive to be a greater good.

You may think your elected officials are flooded with letters on issues you care about. The truth is that most members of Congress receive fewer than a hundred letters on any one issue. On the state level, elected officials often receive fewer than ten letters on a particular issue. Your letter can carry a lot of weight.

Your opinions are particularly important when an issue is timely—for example, when a vote is expected or when there is a lot of news coverage of the subject.

Tips for your letter: Be brief, address only one issue at a time, keep the letter down to four or five sentences; say why the issue or legislation matters to you; state your reason for opposing or supporting a particular bill. If you have particular expertise, then say what it is. Be positive and constructive, give compliments if they’re sincere. Send or email a copy to your local newspaper to help build support for the issue. Use the appropriate title of the elected official. After you have written once, then keep up the contact and periodically communicate that you’re following closely what happens; thank the official and state that you’ll be following up with a phone call in a week to receive a response, and then do so.

As effective as one email or letter is, twenty-five on the same issue are even better. Getting others who are concerned about the same issue to send letters is not as hard as you might think.

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KNOW YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS

USA.gov/elected-officials is a government-run site that allows us to find our representatives—local, state, and federal—by entering our zip code.

Send your letter or email to:

The Honorable _____

United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510

The Honorable _____
United States House of Representatives

Washington, D.C. 20515

Both the legislative and executive branches have Web pages: www.House.gov, www.Senate.gov and www.WhiteHouse.gov

DON’T HESITATE TO PICK UP THE PHONE

By phone, you can call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. The switchboard can connect you with your representative’s or senator’s office. The White House switchboard is 202-456-1414, and the White House comments line is 202-456-1111.

Say who you are, why you’re calling, give facts and background about the issue, state your position and why, say what you want, and use a pleasant but firm closing that lets them know you’ll be contacting them further. If there is a bill number related to the issue you’re calling about, make sure you give them that. Then follow up with a letter or email or call.

WRITING FOR THE Op-ED PAGE

This is easier than you might think. If you have a strong idea or opinion about a public issue that you’d like to express, write it out. Write it well, communicating your personal experiences. Make your position clear from the beginning, get right to the subject, make your sentences relatively short. Be sure all names are correct and all quotations accurate. End your article with a forceful conclusion, and write your name, address, and phone numbers on your submission. A good op-ed piece is about 750 words, or three double-spaced typewritten pages. Write in the active voice, get your facts right, and make sure you’re adding some new insight into the argument.

MEETING WITH ELECTED OFFICIALS

Visiting elected officials is an important part of promoting our points of view. A citizen visiting his or her elected officials is visibly identifying himself or herself as a constituent or a voter. Because the official is focusing on you as an individual and as a voter, a visit will have great impact.

One of the important ways of effecting change with elected officials is by building a strong relationship. Developing strong relationships with them is an important part of exercising our power in a democracy. It is especially important to develop relationships with staffs of elected officials. Elected officials and their staffs are eager to get information that they can use in speeches and when working with constituents.

1. Make an appointment by calling the elected official.
2. Indicate the issues you want to discuss.
3. Study the issues to be covered in the visit. Keep the discussion to one or perhaps two issues.
4. Keep the atmosphere friendly and open. You are there to exchange ideas; under no circumstances should you become angry.
5. Limit the time of the meeting. Don’t let the conversation drag.
6. If you don’t know the answer to a question the official asks you, just say so and explain that you’ll get the information. Make sure you follow through.
7. Leave some information with the elected official on the issue. This will help him or her remember your visit.
8. Follow your visit up with a thank-you note. Remember—your main objective is to establish a continuing dialogue with your elected officials.

SITTING AROUND WAITING for someone to tell us what to do is not the pulse of this moment or in keeping with the gift of democracy. Today’s zeitgeist is to do the thing that each of us knows is the one pure thing that stands before us on the road of life, the undone task of personal growth or community involvement that paves the way to our higher becoming. That is the critical issue in democracy today: that each of us rises to the nobler places within us, to the stuff of integrity, excellence, and love.

No one can lift the fog in your mind except you, yourself. Some of us need to read more; some of us need to pray more; some of us need to go to therapy; some of us need to get a job; some of us need to be more generous; some of us need to participate more fully in our family or community; some of us need to forgive someone, some of us need to ask forgiveness; almost all of us need to become more politically involved. All of us need to do something that we know is the next step in the journey of our soul’s unfoldment, and most of us know deep in our hearts what that is.

Leadership itself is changing from a top-down, old-fashioned Newtonian model of someone acting on a system from the outside to try to change it, to a new-paradigm image of change from within. The primary responsibility of leadership in the era now upon us is to hold a space for the genius of others. In the presence of someone who believes in us, we move more quickly into who we might become. Becoming different, we behave differently. And then the world begins to change.

There are universal laws of consciousness that apply to social change.

1. It is always our prerogative, as individuals and as nations, to choose again: to say no to a direction we’ve been moving in and yes to a new one. Our greatest power is our capacity to change our minds.
2. Alignment with higher principle is always supported by invisible forces.
3. If an energy is not in alignment with love, it is ultimately temporary. It will not last forever and is more vulnerable than it appears.
4. The universe is impersonally invested in evolving toward goodness, and uses any available conduit for purposes of doing so. Willingness to be so used activates the conduit. You’re as good for the job as anyone else, and your past is “totally irrelevant.
5. Don’t expect the old order to like you.
6. A life of love and effort on behalf of the collective good promises the satisfaction of knowing you are doing what you are born to do. You are not, however, promised specific results as you might define them.
7. Your happiness regarding the reality that’s coming is a more potent method of social conversion than is your anger regarding the reality now.

As my father used to say, “You know. Now do.”

Chapter 9 will be emailed to you tomorrow!

Preface and Introduction

Chapter 1: Mystical Power

Chapter 2: Dreams and Principles

Chapter 3: National Atonement

Chapter 4: An American Awakening

Chapter 5: The Eternals of Finance

Chapter 6: Old Powers, New Powers

Chapter 7: Holistic Politics

Beyond the appearances of history there is a great and glorious unfolding plan for the destiny of nations. According to mystical traditions, God carries this plan within His mind, seeking always, in every way, channels for its furtherance. His plan for the evolution of humanity, and the preparation of teachers to guide it, is called within the esoteric traditions the Great Work.

Contribution to this work is not unique to any one nation or people. On every continent, in every age, there have been spectacular contributions made to humanity’s journey toward the fullness of our being. Worldly institutions are useful in advancing God’s plan for the enlightenment of the world, to the extent to which the ideals of that institution reflect the highest philosophical truths. The Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and other great beams of American light have reflected and furthered the evolutionary arc of humanity’s progress.

Yet no mortal, and no nation made up of mortals, is immune to pride or ego or selfishness or greed. Where immoderate ambition or brute power take hold, the fragile bond is broken between the spirit of the Great Work and the structure that contained it. The work continues; it always continues. But it leaves behind what becomes unworthy of it and gravitates toward truer hearts.

In modern sociological terms, there is a phenomenon called the “local discontinuity of progress.” The next step forward in a system rarely comes from a predictable place. Grace is not logical, nor can brilliant insight be rationally formulated. Where human beings pride themselves, the spirit of God departs. Human arrogance is not a container for God, nor will it ever be.

When a particular group or structure fails to keep faith with the spirit of love—not measured by its words but by its actions—that structure then loses the privilege of guardianship of the Great Work. The plan passes on to other groups or structures. Human beings cannot stop or pervert the work of destiny, but we can dissociate ourselves from its higher enfoldment. Having done so, then we will cease to share in its blessings.

America has been a vessel for the Great Work from its inception. Now, however, we have in many ways lost our conscious contact with the greatness of our destiny. We ignore invisible principles yet obsess about all manner of visible pursuits. We allow our time and attention to be frittered away in a scramble for things too shallow to satisfy us even if we can attain them. Having overcome so many forms of external dysfunction, we are now bound up by internal ones.

But powers greater than we continue to minister to humanity. Today, as always, any heart or institution that surrenders itself becomes a channel for the vibrations of love still emanating from the mind of God. It is never too late to change our minds, to self-correct, to embrace the notion that all men are brothers, that indeed we are one, that what we do to anyone we are doing to ourselves, and that in time we will come to see this and know this and live this in truth.

America keeps trying to find the right drivers, when instead we should be questioning what road we’re on. Contrary to what we are told, the road that we are currently on is not full of just light; the road ahead is full of consequences. But there is another road that America can take, a road of high and enlightened purpose for both our abundance and our genius.

Material expansion will take care of itself if we take care of all things true and beautiful. For those whose hearts respond to this thought, it is time to break through the superstitious thinking that might lead us to believe it’s too late to change. We can change; in fact, we are changing. That is our destiny. A question that faces us is this: can we re-create politics and society to reflect these things, or must the pursuit of higher truth remain separate from the public sphere? This moment is one of opportunity for the creation of a new civic force field. It is up to each and every one of us to decide where America goes now.

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OUR TASK IS to create a political context for higher questioning, for national self-definition beyond economic and military power, for national purpose beyond increasing our economic status, and for national compassion as a value upon which our nation stands. The essential question of our day is this: Do we lead with our values, or with economic and military might?

If love comes first, then money comes second; and if money comes first, then love comes second. Those who see economics as the primary determinant of our “vital interests” aren’t always looking for the loving solution to domestic or international problems. If love came first, we would use our financial resources to create jobs to help people live well instead of building more prisons to punish them when they do not; if love came first, we would value human rights at least as much as economic rights; if love came first, we would seek to educate and help rather than to prosecute our children violently screaming out for attention.

• FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION: Do we, as a nation, really want to be a small portion of the world’s population consuming the lion’s share of the world’s resources, calling our absolute right to do so our “vital national interest,” thus sowing seeds for our own inevitable comeuppance?

• FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION: Should corporate power drive the financial engines of the world, pushing more and more corners of the planet in the direction of uncontrolled economic growth while, in fact, the natural resources of the earth are already maxed out?

• FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION: Are we content responding to the rage and despair of millions of underprivileged Americans with an ever more lucrative system of punishment rather than a committed system of education and “economic revitalization?

• FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION: What is the state of our democracy today, and can we make it through the crises that confront us?

These are important questions, of course. And they will only be answered adequately if we, the American people, are willing to ask and answer them for ourselves.

THE QUESTION BEFORE us is: how do people who have reclaimed their spirituality best effect political change? We have already established that only nonviolent resistance is acceptable to the spiritual seeker, and ultimately it is the only kind of resistance that is truly effective anyway. When a power dominates the physical world, it is in looking beyond the physical world that we find our victory.

Just as David took on the giant Goliath, there is an emerging gestalt of spiritually based activism around the world, ready and willing to form a wave of resistance to multinational corporate dominance of the planet and its peoples. As usual, Goliath is bigger than we are. As usual, Goliath is totally armored and defended. As usual, Goliath laughs at his critics. As usual, Goliath taunts his enemies.

But consider this as well: as usual, Goliath moves slowly. As usual, Goliath is not as smart as he thinks he is. As usual, Goliath’s Third Eye is uncovered; one hit in the middle of his forehead, and the giant will go down. Make your words your slingshot. Make his conscience your bull’s-eye, and he cannot help but transform.

The evil, as well as the ultimate vulnerability of the giant, is that it is not human. Its life force is not the spirit at the center of the universe, but merely corporate papers filed away somewhere. A corporate mentality whose bottom line is money, not love, is a thing—it is not a human. Of itself it has no heart or soul, or conscience. It cannot cry, or fall in love, or conceive a child, or feel pain. That is what makes it a dangerous guide to human affairs, and also what makes its days so numbered. A force that is not alive is now ruling the world, and nature will not endure that forever.

To be sure, there are human beings who run that corporate machinery, but they themselves are often slaves to its functioning. I’ve been told by corporate CEOs who fully agreed with me in theory that their policies were at least potentially threatening to the planet and its peoples, “Marianne, I know what you’re saying, but I’m answerable to my stockholders. If I bungle it this quarter and don’t increase their bottom line, I’ll be out, and the person who replaces me will probably be worse than me.” Until stockholders make it clear to corporate powers that we don’t want our investments to yield financial profit at the expense of the quality of human lives, then many corporations will continue to place economic values before human ones. Socially conscious investors hold a key to the development of corporate conscience.

Until the 1980s, it was commonly appreciated that corporations had a responsibility to something beyond their financial shareholders; that they were accountable to stakeholders that included workers and the larger society as well. Yet in the 1980s there was a huge shift in this country, as the very idea of short-term economic gain became a new American god. And now we have to shift things back. We either serve a god of money, or a God of Love. We cannot have it both ways.

The person of conscience, deeply committed to a radical change in human civilization—from a dangerous, unsustainable order to a veritable garden for our children and grandchildren—must be willing to risk being considered a whiner, or worse, by polite society. Living a meaningful life is not a popularity contest. If everything we’re saying always receives applause, then perhaps we’re not saying all the right things yet. And there’s nothing unspiritual about yelling “Fire!” if the house indeed is burning down.

The nonviolent revolutionary in fact has a responsibility to be a thorn in the side of a complacent status quo. The person of conscience holds up a mirror to the world, which must include him- or herself. The lover of humanity is an agent of awakening, in a world where there is a collective urge to sleep.

Who is going to change the public conversation from shallow economic inanity to passionate human concern, if not you and me? It is true that in many environments, to bring up the unnecessary suffering of millions—and the policies that perpetuate that suffering—might quickly get you slapped with a label of “bleeding heart.” Or, these days, “snowflake.” But there’s an answer to that: Any time someone calls you a snowflake, tell them to expect an avalanche.

And take heart. All you need is one person in the room to say, “Actually, I agree with that,” and we’re starting to act like participants in a broad-based social change.

Just saying those things is not enough, of course; there is much more we need to do than just talk. But once the words have left your mouth, they tend to be more alive within you.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead gave us a perfect slogan for such times as these: “Never doubt that a small group of concerned citizens can change the world,” she said. “Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

This isn’t going to be easy, because the war against the fundamentals of our democracy has been extreme recently. Only a massive citizen uprising—among other things at the polls in local, state, and federal elections—will be able to turn back the tide of undemocratic forces now unleashed among us. But while the days ahead might be difficult for our country, I would still bet on a long-term positive prognosis for America. For while Americans are often slow to wake up to problems in our midst, we slam it like nobody’s business once we do.

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FROM CORPORATE AGRICULTURAL giants turning the American farmer into an economic serf, to the injection of all manner of potentially dangerous chemical and genetic elements into our food production processes merely to increase corporate profits, to the displacement of people throughout the world to smaller and smaller corridors of economic and social opportunity when they no longer serve the machinery of international financial institutions, to the suppression of democratic protests against such economic dominance, to a system of corporate welfare that makes it so much easier for the rich to do business in America than for the poor to even get started, Americans are seeing things that are clearly antithetical to the ideals on which this nation was founded.

Indignation among people of conscience is rising—among both conservatives and liberals. Democracy itself is not a Left-Right issue. A coalition of the decent is now forming in America and hopefully it will restore the souls of both major political parties. As it does, and most particularly as we the people awaken to the dangers in our midst, the chains that now bind our national conscience will be broken, because David could sing and David had a slingshot and David loved the Lord with all his heart and all his might. He knew that “the Lord saves not with sword and spear.” The Lord saves with love, as all of us know in the depths of our souls. We must love the oppressed and we must love the oppressor, but we must refuse to participate in the oppression itself. We must name the game, tell truth to power, and rise above the battlefield not in anger but in love, not in fear but in hope, not in cynicism but in absolute conviction that here, in these United States, we have always risen to the challenge of justice, and now, in our day, we will do the same. The game isn’t over. It has only just begun. We do love justice and we do love democracy; we do love our children enough to make a stand for their safety against the environmental encroachments of an invisible order; and we do love America enough to turn our attention back to politics and reclaim that realm for our most honorable impulses, compassionate feelings, and noble thoughts.

When this book was first published in 1997, I wrote that there was a storm ahead, or an awakening ahead. Alas, the storm is upon us. But even now, in the midst of our national turmoil, there is an awakening as well. People are remembering the radicalism of the American experiment, the drama and power of democracy as well as its fragility. It cannot long survive in the absence of a population awakened to our responsibility to vigilantly protect it. Americans were sleeping but now we’re waking. A giant has been aroused that was too long napping. Among the rich and among the poor, among men and among women, among old and among young, among people of all colors and all faiths and traditions, millions and millions are looking at what’s happening in our country and are saying, with genuine passion in our hearts, to all the forces that would destroy our democracy, with courage and with conviction, “Hell no.”

“PLATO SAID THAT “to philosophize and concern oneself with politics are one and the same thing.” Many now expand our political activism to include spiritual growth work, in order that we might ourselves become facilitators of change. And many now expand our perception of spiritual practice to include political activism, that we might most profoundly extend our compassion into the world.

A path of love takes conscious effort. Many Americans have the unfortunate habit of waking up every morning and surrendering their lives to fear. Newspapers, TV, or Internet assault our nervous systems and hook us into the anxiety-ridden miasma of contemporary culture before we’re even out the door. And that will need to change, if we are to rise to the occasion. The only way we can create a more peaceful world is if we are able to become more peaceful people.

The cultivation of hallowed silence, meditation, or prayer; even a small amount of inspirational literature, a minimum amount of yoga or mindful technique; these are things that counter fear and help lift us above regions of low-grade hysteria. After we meditate, we’re ready to read the paper; after we’re inspired, we’re better prepared to be informed.

Politics can be a tremendous temptation to stray from our spiritual center. One more crazy tweet, and we’re angry. One more Congressional action that belies the whoredom of our political system, and our judgmental mind goes off the charts. The ego within us loudly proclaims both our anger and our fear. No louder voice, but only silence itself, can stop the noise within. What we most need to hear today, we can only hear when the mind is quiet.

Devotional silence is a powerful tool for healing hearts and healing nations; as any of us grow closer to God, all of us grow closer to each other. The true religious or spiritual experience, through love and forgiveness, unites instead of separates. Now, a global grassroots movement—made up of people from all religions and no religions—is gathering to forge an experience of universal oneness. This movement, spontaneous, international, and inspired—will ultimately join all hearts.

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POWER DOESN’T FLOW from the top down, but from the bottom up. Wisdom doesn’t flow from the outside in, but from the inside out. Both of those spiritual tenets are at the core of a highly functioning democratic process. Where a top-down, authoritarian power holds sway, democracy is diminished. Where people get their guidance only from external sources, as opposed to the goodness of our own hearts, democracy is diminished as well. Disconnection from our internal selves produces a decrease in personal energy, and where personal energy diminishes, the last thing we feel we have time for is participation in the democratic process. Tired people don’t do democracy, and that is why a distracted, burdened, overstressed population is literally a threat to our liberty. President Eisenhower said, “Politics should be the part-time profession of every American.” But tell that to someone who already has two or three part-time jobs!

One way to reconnect our personal and political energy is through a process called Citizen Circles. These are small, spontaneous groups, in which two or more join together to hold the vision of a healed America. To “hold a vision” is to hold a thought, and thought is the most powerful, creative force in the universe. We are, as a species, only beginning to tap into the true power of our spiritual imagination—the wings we have been given but have not yet begun to collectively use. A thought grows more powerful the more people hold it. “An invasion of armies can be resisted,” wrote Victor Hugo, “but not an idea whose time has come.” The Berlin Wall came down because the love of freedom literally overcame the physical and political structures that resisted it. We, too, can make a bloodless transition to a better social order. We can so consciously embrace a world of justice and compassion, that such a world will literally be magnetized into manifestation. Such is the miraculous power of the human mind.

Citizen Circles open with a prayer or inspirational quote, remaining both religiously and spiritually inclusive. Twenty minutes of silence follow. For some people this is a time for prayer or meditation, while for others it is merely a time for personal reflection. Our wisdom, being rooted in silence, is then more clearly brought to bear upon our social and political lives.

There is a power in stillness that counters the cacophonous, hysterical energy that dominates so much of our popular culture today. Sharing silence in groups is a powerful way, in the words of Gandhi, to help “make politics sacred.” At the beginning of the devotional silence is a Quaker-type exercise, in which those who feel so moved say, “I see an America in which . . .” followed by their vision of a healed nation. We might see a nation or world in which all children are safe and happy and educated. Or see a world in which the earth is healthy and the water and air are clean. We might see a world in which all nations live together in peace. Or an America in which the races live in harmony and joy together, and so on. This process gives all participants an opportunity to speak their sacred word, and thus exercise their spiritual power to re-create the world. People’s hearts long to create the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Words spoken in normal speech do not necessarily carry spiritual power, but words spoken in sacred process, emerging from silence and with heartfelt dedication to the common good, carry moral authority for both the speaker and the listener.

Seven principles guide our spiritual/political practice:

1. The powers within us—mind and spirit—are greater than all powers outside.
2. Forgiveness and love are both our goal for the world and our means of achieving that goal.
3. We do not look away from the problems of the world, for that is negative denial. Rather, we look toward them and pray to be agents of positive change.
4. We embrace both the love and the sorrows of the world, for what is embraced with love is automatically delivered to realms of more positive unfoldment.
5. We will take constructive political action, in accordance with the opportunities afforded us as citizens of a democratic society. But we do not act only in order to oppose what is; we act in order to make another, more positive choice for the future.
6. We seek peace within ourselves at all times, for lack of peace within us will be reflected outside ourselves.
7. We see citizenship as a moral responsibility, to be used in love’s service, for the creation of a better, more just, more compassionate world.

CIRCLES CAN HELP to ground new political energy.

The key to a successful Citizen Circle is that we speak from the heart about subjects that matter. The agenda includes:

1. Silent meditation or nondenominational devotion.
2. Discussion or visualization of what we as individuals would wish America, or the world, to be like.
3. An educational element such as group reading and discussion. If the meeting is weekly, perhaps one member of the group brings in an article or chapter of a book for group discussion.
4. Citizen lobbying. With every article or discussion, the group should then plan a specific lobbying action, such as letters to an elected official. Remember, we do not all have to be lobbying for the same things or expressing the same opinions.
5. Part of the value of these meetings is that they provide a chance to hear the views of those whom we know are just as intelligent as we, but see things from a different political perspective. If splinter groups grow out of that, whereby we lobby for common things, that is fine and good. But listening to other people’s viewpoints keeps our own from calcifying.

Many people open their Circles with prayer, such as the following one:

Dear God,
We come together,
different perspectives,
different politics,
different cultures,
to ask that you heal our country.
We surrender to You
the thoughts and attitudes we now hold,
and empty our minds that they might
be filled by You.
Show us to each other,
as You would have us see each other.
Show us the world,
as You would have us see the world.
Guide our listening,
as You would have us hear each other.
Teach us, and inspire us.
Use us on Your behalf.
Amen

In an environment where prayer is either inappropriate or perceived as threatening to some members of the group, a generalized reference to “the spirit of goodness within all of us” or “the love [or light] within our minds” carries with it the power to bring groups of people into spiritual alignment with each other and a higher power.

Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship. Behind the harsh appearance of the world there is a benign power. To say God is personal is not to make Him an object among other objects or attribute to Him the finiteness and limitations of human personality; it is to take what is finest and noblest in our consciousness and affirm its perfect existence in Him.”

The greatest power is neither money nor technological device; the greatest power is the power of consciousness. So it is that a new politics centers around the arousal of that power, using prayer and meditation to create a force field of transformation.

The following are some suggestions for the kinds of prayers that break up old political thought patterns:

1. Pray for every one of the fifty states.
2. Pray for help in giving up judgment toward whatever person in public life, or group of people, you tend to judge.
3. Pray for the children of America.
4. Pray for the leaders of America.
5. Pray for the poor in America.
6. Pray for America’s incarcerated population.
7. Pray for all drug addicts and alcoholics.
8. Pray for America’s sick.
9. Pray for America’s relationship with all other nations.
10. Pray for atonement and amends toward those who have been wronged by us as a nation.
11. Pray for racial healing. Atone for the systemic racism that permeates our social policies today, and surrender your own thoughts as well.
12. Pray for parents and children in America.
13. Pray for husbands and wives in America.
14. Pray for all lovers and friends.
15. Pray for America’s environment.
16. Pray for the American economy.
17. Pray for American education.
18. Pray for American health care.
19. Pray for America’s homeless.
20. Pray that you might become a better American citizen.

The following are some prayers that might assist your efforts:

Dear God,
There was born on this land
a possibility of freedom
more expansive than the world had ever known. And the promise still exists.
There is freedom here
for some,
dear Lord,
but clearly not for all. And the promise still exists.
Help us, Lord,
to free our country from the chains
of our hardened hearts. And the promise still exists.
Amen

Dear God,
Please bless our children,
and the children of the world. May their innocence remain.

Dear God,
Please bless their tender souls.
Lead them away from harsh stimulation
and the violent ways which hurt them.
Cast out of us the things which offend
the spirit of love
in all of us.
Make our children free of all the darkened things in life,
and make us free as well,
dear Lord.
Make us free as well.
In these United States
and in the world,
may only love remain.
Amen

Dear God,
We are the richest nation,
the most blessed of places,
we praise you, Lord, and thank you.
Surely the bounty You have given us
is meant by You to bless the world,
Please show us how,
dear God.
Please re-create our culture,
renew our tired lives.
Let light and love
flow down on us,
our country
and our world.
Amen

Dear God,
We bless the souls of those who founded these United
States, of all who came before us,
and who struggle still today,
to bring forth all the greatness
and the glory of America.
Thank you, God,
and them.
Amen

Dear God,
Please bless the people of America,
and all people throughout the world.
Use me, God,
in whatever way
You would have me serve.
Show me how to live my life
in such a way as to spread the love
which feeds and redeems us all.
Amen

Dear God,
May the angels
of America
burst forth across this land,
healing hearts and
blessing souls.
May they awaken yet
the cry of freedom
in one and all.
Release us from bondage,
release us from fear.
Amen

Dear God,
Turn back the fist
that sits upon the process of our furtherance,
limiting our good.
Remove it from our hearts,
remove it from our streets,
remove it from our government,
remove it from our land.
Thank you, God.
Amen.

Dear God,
Please forgive this country
for the racism,
past and present,
which so hides Your light.
Take from us any thoughts we hold,
or feelings we have,
which make firm the wrong.
Please show us how to create anew
American society,
that truly we might be as brothers.
Thank you very much,
Amen

Dear God,
We don’t even know
all the things which are wrong in this country,
but You do,
dear Lord,
You do.
Please reveal to us
what You would have revealed,
and take from us what You would take.
Thank you, God.
Amen

Dear God,
May our essential nature
as a country
and a people,
awaken on this day.
May the glorious possibilities
of our miraculous beginnings
once more enchant our hearts and
set us free
of limitation.
Break the chain
of dominance
which false power holds upon us still.
Renew the spirit
of freedom and love
which are Your truth within us.
Amen

Dear God,
Please help us change America,
from a land of violence
to a land of love.
Where there is separation,
please bring union.
Where there is distrust and pain,
please bring reconciliation of our hearts
with each other,
and with You.
May all be blessed
and prosper,
here and throughout the world.
And so it is.
Amen

Dear God,
Lead us
where You would have us go,
show us
what You would have us do.
Guide us
in what You would have us say,
and to whom,
that we might serve You best.
Give us hope
that there is yet
another way.
We are open,
we are willing,
we are waiting for Your hand
upon our shoulders and our hearts.
May Your will still yet be done on earth,
as it is in heaven.
Amen

Dear God,
Please give every mother’s child
enough to eat,
in America
and everywhere.
Give every mother’s child
good work to do,
and the strength to do it,
in America and everywhere.
Give every mother’s child
the wisdom to see,
and the courage to act,
and the heart to forbear,
in America and everywhere.
Use us to help You, Lord,
to make these things so.
Amen

Dear God,
Please forgive us
for how we offend Your spirit,
ignoring the poor,
yet feeding the rich,
not fostering peace,
yet making fortunes
on the instruments of war.
Please turn us around, dear God
and heal our minds
and hearts.
Please open our eyes,
transform our minds,
that we might be
instruments of love.
Amen

Dear God,
I know not where to go,
but You do.
I know not what to do,
but You do.
I know not how to be,
but You do,
to change this world,
to heal this country.
Please show me, Lord,
for I would do my part.
Amen

Dear God,
Please bless our Congress,
our President,
our judges,
and all elected officials,
and the people of the United States,
with wisdom
and light
and love.
Please bless those who have no voice,
and lend them mine.
Amen

Dear God,
There are those
who have too little hope.
There are those who try,
yet feel their dreams
shot down.
There are those who love,
yet feel forgotten
in the madness and the crowds.
Please help them all.
Open wide our hearts
and eyes
and ears,
that we might know and hear each other,
in our joy
and in our pain.
Amen

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SOCIAL CHANGE EMERGES more from a vertical than from a horizontal axis. A consensus of people joined passionately in an internal shift will do more to affect the conditions of the world than millions of people joined in superficial external changes. The morphic resonance of loving thought is a literal force field, not just a metaphorical concept. It is the sacred of which Gandhi spoke, carrying more potential power than a nuclear bomb or military force. Martin Luther King, Jr., said “We have within us a power more powerful than bullets.” The question is not whether this power exists, or even whether enough people believe that it exists; the question for our time is whether enough of us are prepared to harness that power for the purpose of national and planetary healing. To speak of love is one thing; to sit in silence with others, to pray, to speak from our hearts, to envision a loving future, to forgive ourselves and each other—these are something else altogether. They are the tools of nonviolence and the seeds of a brand-new world. Where some have harnessed fear and bigotry for political purposes, let us now harness love.

Years ago, as I drove past a Planned Parenthood clinic in a central California town, I noticed that on one side of the driveway were protesters with picket signs, while on the other side of the driveway was a woman wearing a bulletproof vest, on top of which was written “Clinic.” I was stunned at the sight of such a thing here in America.

People who are free to debate their views but define that debate as screaming at each other, people who are free to express their opinions but dishonor the opinions of others, are not practicing democracy but are in the process of destroying it. Our forefathers foresaw for us a deliberative, consensus-building, reasonable form of political debate. But a generation for whom a culture of distraction in too many ways competes with a culture of depth has had difficulty developing the social maturity necessary for the authentic practice of democracy. Such practice demands our capacity to speak from our depths and listen from our depths. Cultural cacophony is an enemy of democracy.

A challenge of our time is to create an alternative political culture. If our goal is to do that, then it’s not just the content of our political conclusions but also the process by which we arrive at them that needs to be addressed.

I was once giving a lecture to a large audience when the subject of abortion came up in the discussion period of the program. Tensions began to surface; a rip in the emotional fabric of the room was obvious to everyone. One choice was to go for a false positivism, pretending we’re all so “spiritual” here that we don’t have to delve into issues like that. Such a choice is not transcendence but denial, healing nothing and no one. Another choice was to open the discussion—go for it and see what happens. A third choice offered a different way: I asked those in the room to close their eyes and remain in silence for two minutes. I asked that we look within ourselves and call on the spirit of goodness that resides there. I suggested we ask for the soul’s wisdom regarding this issue, surrendering our perceptions into the hands of God.

After our two minutes of silence, we resumed conversation. Everyone in the room was quieter, more accepting and compassionate toward the views of others, and more eloquent in stating their own views. What came forward, then, was not so much anyone’s particular opinions but everyone’s capacity to communicate more deeply. People were truly heard that night by people who had previously dismissed their views out of hand. The “right answer” is not a particular view on policy, so much as an experience of each other in which the process of meaningful communication is restored.

We don’t need to extend democracy out into the world, so much as to deepen it within ourselves. The day after that lecture, someone who was there remarked to me, “I felt like last night I had an intimate living room conversation regarding abortion with two thousand people.” From that intimacy did come healing, and from that kind of healing will come a new America.

At the deepest level, we don’t want—nor can we sustain—a political culture in which we’re fighting each other all the time. Debating, yes. Having a vigorous contest of ideas, yes. But fighting? Truly opposing one another as has come to be the norm in our society? No. A smug, self-righteous, intolerant Left-winger is no less dangerous to the fabric of this country than is a smug, self-righteous, intolerant Right-winger. We need a politics that rests not on personal destruction, but on imagination and creation. Politics should be an art form, and it should actually be enjoyable.

ONE NIGHT AT one of my lectures, we did the Citizen Circle process of declaring the America we would like to see. Scores of people were proclaiming, “I see an America in which. . . .” After doing the exercise, I went off the stage for a twenty-minute intermission.

When I returned, it was time for a different part of my presentation: responding to questions handed in from members of the audience. I had been doing this format—lecture, intermission, then questions and answers—for years, yet this night was different. Almost every time I read a question, before I could even say anything in response, someone in the audience would speak up! Not raise a hand, but just blurt out an answer—and always a good one. Something significant had occurred from merely participating in that exercise; people had subtly shifted from passive to active, from a mode where “someone else has the answers” to one where “I have the answers.” People hadn’t just become wise that night, of course, but many had come closer to owning their wisdom that night.”

Within minutes, people were talking—completely unprompted by me—of which companies produce their products in countries where child labor is used; the tenets of socially responsible investing; how to include infant and child care in a corporate environment; economic injustice and the U.S. tax code; the dangers of gutting environmental regulations. It was like tired flowers that had finally been put in water: people are so hungry to participate in something bigger than ourselves, after years of putting our energies into merely self-centered goals. There is such a thing as group intelligence and group conscience, and democracy cannot live without it. Average citizens joined in a dignified environment of deliberation and consensus building—not back rooms where corporate lobbyists get to call most of the shots. That is the engine that should drive America.

Our collective cynicism and citizen fatigue is the biggest obstacle to breaking democracy’s free fall. Some say they don’t participate more because there doesn’t seem to be any one issue to rally around like there was in the Sixties; some say they feel hopeless, and that it doesn’t matter what you do or who you vote for anyway; some say that dark money has it all sewn up, and so on. But in reality, money—as powerful as it is—doesn’t actually vote. Power has been grabbed from the people, that’s true; but it has also been abdicated by the people, and we should take responsibility for that.

There seems to be no one issue to rally around because so many today are fraught with problems. But the deeper issue is within us: a citizen malaise now ending, opening our country to new possibilities because we are opening to something new within ourselves. We are reclaiming what generations before us had, and which we desperately need again: a sense that we, as citizens, actually matter. A sense that what we think, how we feel, and how we vote actually matters.

I don’t think Americans are apathetic, but too many have begun to feel, rightfully so, that nothing they did made any difference. That has produced within us a kind of all-pervasive societal depression, and it is that which needs to heal now. We cannot turn away from politics; we must re-create the field. For as the French often say, “If you don’t do politics, politics will do you.” And boy, it has. But politics is not a rigid institution. In truth, it will be anything we choose it to be, and people are starting to do what we have to do to put America back on track. Call it the nonviolent resistance, call it woke, call it whatever. But know that it’s happening.

Big changes in the world begin with small movements in the mind. And those who first perceive these changes do not reasonably expect applause. When integrative medicine first burst onto the scene, no one asked the American Medical Association’s permission. Medical physicians made fun of many of us, as we held support groups, prayed for patients, stressed the power of forgiveness to boost the immune system, and so on. But it’s a whole new world now—our most prestigious medical institutions now acknowledge the psycho-immunological factor, the effects of spirituality and consciousness in healing the physical body—and former cynics are not laughing anymore.

So, of course, traditional political types will laugh at a metapolitical emphasis where love, atonement, peace, and reverence for life are seen as dominant political values. That’s okay; they won’t laugh forever. Politicians, like medical doctors, aren’t demi-gods anymore. They’re our partners in healing society. What we need in America now is not so much a visionary leader or a visionary media; what we need is a visionary constituency, and that is what is forming. Organizations and projects are popping up all over the country, helping to build that constituency, giving us a framework for meaningful silence, meaningful discussion, and meaningful political action.

Inner activism meets outer activism: Voilà! Holistic politics.

Chapter 8 will be emailed to you tomorrow!

Preface and Introduction

Chapter 1: Mystical Power

Chapter 2: Dreams and Principles

Chapter 3: National Atonement

Chapter 4: An American Awakening

Chapter 5: The Eternals of Finance

Chapter 6: Old Powers, New Powers

All abundance comes from within, as consciousness precedes matter. Our economic policy should be this: to teach and remind every American of his or her inestimable value and potential, to create the contexts in which those gifts are most easily mined, and then strictly adhere to the ethical standards by which each person is held accountable for what he or she does and does not do. Banks should not be at the center of our economic policy. The stock market should not be at the center of our economic policy. We should be at the center of our economic policy. Our children, our education, our health, our creativity, and our potential for genius.

We have replaced ethics with economics over the last few decades, replacing relational models of human interaction with transactional sales pitches in order to “get what we want.” We were taught that this is the way to win, to sell the product, to get the ultimate reward. But the days are nearing an end when that kind of thinking will produce even a simulated version of abundance. It is thinking that is spiritually impoverished and will ultimately produce only material impoverishment.

The operative word in the phrase “wealth creation” is not wealth but creation. Our greatest untapped gold mine is the place within us where we learn to create material wealth out of the wealth of the spirit. And that we can’t do by making money our goal, because the spirit will not be bought. While counterintuitive to current social wisdom, it is our purity and not our lack of it that is the key to manifesting wealth. It is a riddle, of course, because once you say, “Okay, so I’ll be pure if that will make me more money,” then you’ve lost your purity. Money comes from energy. That energy is like a magical bird that flies away from greed, overattachment, and lack of integrity. Working on our characters is the most powerful way now to work on our careers.

When I was in my twenties, I worked many jobs. At one point, I was scooping soup at Salmagundi’s Restaurant in San Francisco. In walked a young man one day, an old friend I had not seen since high school, dressed in a pinstripe suit, out for lunch with his legal associates. He had been one of the smart kids at school, but so had I. I was traumatized to see him: I didn’t want him to register the fact that while he was now a hot shot, I was scooping soup.

He was friendly to me, but there was pity on his face. I have never forgotten that moment.

For what had happened in Charles’s life that had not happened in mine was that he figured out how to make it in America. I had fallen through the cracks, though that was not supposed to happen, given my family and background. I couldn’t get myself to think the way I was told to think or move ahead in the ways I was supposed to move ahead. Yet I knew that day at Salmagundi’s that I was carrying a diamond in my pocket. I hadn’t gone to law school, but I had been traveling far and wide. I had experienced, while most of my friends were climbing ladders, realms of adventure that they thought they had to leave behind. I didn’t know if I would ever get anywhere in the world, but I knew that there was an inner dimension to the life I was living that was brighter and cleaner than the world my friends were hailing as true success.

I have seen incredible things in my life, and one of them is that the spiritual diamond in my pocket became a key to success as the world defines it. Unknowingly, I had visited the void out of which comes overflowing materialization. That void, or no-thing, is the creative source of all abundance.

Internal abundance produces external abundance. That is true for an individual, and it is true for a nation. The life of the spirit is the source of all good.

A modern Wizard of Oz is the so-called science of economics. Economist Hazel Henderson has written, “Economics is now revealed as a 300-year-old grab bag of unverifiable propositions too vague to be refuted.” Economists are like a group of people who came out of nowhere and all of a sudden run the world. Who made them boss? In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “Nothing in history has been so disgraceful to the human intellect as the acceptance among us of the common doctrines of economics as a science.” Economists do not normally include in their calculations such spiritual precepts as the Golden Rule, but the law of karma supersedes the laws of economics.

There are those who would say that to run a country with love in mind is not practical. But the argument that love is not practical is but a smokescreen. Of course, it is not practical. But what is practical? No one is saying love is practical, but only that it is good. Nowhere in the Bible, or in any other major spiritual source material that I have read, are we told to do what is practical. Would it take a lot of hours and debate and work and analysis to figure out how best to apply our resources toward the eradication of human suffering, here and throughout the world? Yes. Just about as many hours as it now takes figuring out how to wage espionage, create weapons of destruction, and produce the endless streams of things that we obsessively buy but do not need.

Love is as serious a subject, as difficult a subject, and as sophisticated a subject as money. Why should we treat economics more seriously than love? God is love, and love is the only abundance. Everything else is just the toys we’ve been playing with at an immature level of our spiritual development.

From a spiritual perspective, no nation as wealthy as ours, with as many underprivileged children as we have, has any basis for long-term economic optimism whatsoever.

Doesn’t love already rule the world, really? Isn’t it love that makes people do what they think they could never do, and go where they thought they could never go? Is not nature wise, in its programming of mothers to instinctively love our children? Does this not guarantee the propagation of the species? Does not a tigress, or a lioness, grow fierce when she senses a threat to her cubs? Is not a species whose mothers are not so fiercely protective of their young unconsciously heading toward its own destruction?

Our challenge now is to expand our concept of love and family to include the children on the other side of town. And it is not enough to merely love our own children—so did many slave owners and Nazi officers, apparently. We must love all the children, here and throughout the world. To withhold love from any child is to withhold support from the future, and time is speeding up now.

As long as we stay resistant to a deeper, more penetrating discussion of the interior forces that rule the world, then our options for national recovery remain limited. Love will be allowed to save us, or violence will destroy us. Hatred cannot be endlessly managed, but it can, though the grace of God, be undone. It is overwhelmed, as is all darkness, in the presence of love. To understand that mystery, and to learn to live it, is the salvation of the human race. God is one, therefore you and I are one. God is one, therefore all nations are one. That is not a thought humanity has outgrown; it is a thought we have not yet quite grown deep enough to understand.

We must free the subject of love from the mental prison where it has been relegated by our pseudo-sophisticated bias. We should resist the tacit prejudice against its discussion in any other context but the romantic or the mundane. We are quickly coming upon an age when the question of what it means to love will define our science, our educational systems, indeed our politics. As the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

IN 1997, SOME citizens in Oklahoma City created a project spearheaded by the late Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice Alma Wilson. It is called the Seeworth Preparatory School, and its original mission was to address the problem of that state’s “kids at risk.” This means young people who don’t make it in the public school system, who have gotten into either major or minor trouble, and who, after being thrown out of school, usually find themselves sooner or later in jail.

Justice Wilson made a commitment to interrupting the destructive pattern in these children’s lives. The system said it had “tried everything.” Justice Wilson suggested we try love.

When I visited the Seeworth School, I spent some time with the students. Had I not already been told where these kids were from, what their previous histories had been, I would never have dreamed in a million years that these were the “bad kids” we hear about so often. They were clearly young people whose lives were being redeemed and restored, through the power of love and a discipline they could understand. Lisa told me she wanted to be a lawyer, while Jennifer wanted to be a physical therapist. Dylan wanted to be a great psychologist, and Andrew wanted to be a famous artist. Steven just wanted his parents to love him.

Today, Seeworth Academy serves about five hundred students a year, and its mission has expanded beyond its original target population. The problem is that there are literally millions of Jennifers and Andrews in other places around the country, with no place like that to go. Seeworth Academy has established a template for social and emotional learning among traumatized students, based not on the idea that children have failed, but on the realization that we as a society have failed our children. This is part of what is now an underground revolution in American education.

Everywhere I go, people respond enthusiastically to the story of the Seeworth Preparatory Academy. They can see the value of such a school in their own communities. Yet our government, beholden more to economic interests than to human interests, rarely reflects that kind of sensibility. Yes, they’ll applaud it when it’s a private effort, of course, but they are not apt in today’s political climate to fund such an effort. We’ve got more important things to do with our money, such as buying additional military equipment that the Pentagon didn’t even ask for.

The truth is, our nation’s children are simply not put first in American politics. They don’t work, therefore they have no economic leverage; and without economic leverage, you don’t have much clout in Congress today. Unless your parents are wealthy, kids, then good luck to you; your health care, your education, and your general well-being are secondary political considerations, if that. Our continued withdrawal of support from our most disadvantaged communities only exacerbates the problems of kids at risk. And our fundamental response to kids in trouble now is simply to build more prisons. There has been a 500 percent increase in our prison population over the last forty years. While in the 1970s, there were approximately 300,000 incarcerated Americans, today there are over 2.3 million.

I remember a time when America at least tried to do better; when both conservatives and liberals seemed to take human suffering more seriously. In an interview in the New York Times in April 1997, former President Jimmy Carter cited inequities in the criminal justice system that often penalize blacks and other minority groups more than whites, a problem that has only been exacerbated in the years since. He said that as a young governor of Georgia, he and his contemporaries, such as the then-governors of Florida and Arkansas, had an intense competition over who had the smallest prison population.

“Now it’s totally opposite,” Mr. Carter added. “Now the governors brag on how many prisons they’ve built and how many people they can keep in jail and for how long.”

Prison is, in fact, the beast’s answer to Jennifer and Andrew. It is literally the only way that the two of them can currently contribute to the U.S. economy! It is not a mystery, what kids need in order to thrive. We know what they need in order to make it. But if their parents don’t give it to them, our message to those kids in America today is “Tough breaks. You should have worked harder. It’s really too bad.”

And if we suggest that we would spend a lot less money educating our children than on imprisoning them later, we are liable to be met with lines such as, “Money doesn’t solve these things,” or “There you go again, talking about a big government program.” But can you imagine what a major CEO would say if he or she budgeted funds for infrastructure, and you said that these things just shouldn’t cost money? No one can function well while living within the rolling trauma of economic despair, nor can their children. And in America today, no hard-working person should have to.

THE PHENOMENON OF mass incarceration has become a huge, bleeding sore on the soul of America.

While there are brilliant, dedicated individuals working within our criminal justice system, the attitudes that too often dominate the system are barbaric. American society breeds hundreds of thousands of criminals, and then says to law enforcement, “Here, you handle it.” We treat our prisons like garbage dumps to receive society’s refuse. The problem of crime has become so huge in the United States that our government has opted for a crackdown mentality in its search for an illusory “safety.” In some states, young people are still put in jail with the adult prison population. As a gentleman who works in juvenile justice said to me once, wringing his hands and with tears in his eyes, “All I can say is, if you’re going to treat these kids this way, then you better keep ’em in there a really long time.”

What occurs behind bars in the United States today should be of serious concern to all of us, particularly the racial disparity by which people of color are sentenced more harshly than whites who commit the same crimes. But the largest factor determining the path to incarceration remains economic, and most Americans would be horrified by reports of what is really going on. Most Americans think of our prisons as at least humane, but there are increasingly terrible exceptions. Brutality is of epidemic proportions.

From throughout the country come reports—and even videos—of prisoners who have not violated rules or resisted their guards, being kicked like dogs, their skulls crushed against walls by prison officials. This is not to say that every prison official is corrupt, or anything near it, but it is to say that we have a huge problem on our hands too little addressed.

And even more important, is this system working? What does it say about us that America incarcerates more of its people than any other country in the world, with almost a quarter of our prison population low-level, nonviolent drug offenders whose transgressions would best be treated in alternative ways? And have the harsh criminal justice policies instituted over the last few decades served to reduce crime in America, or only to increase profits for those who feed on it?

Awakening to the dark underbellies in America is not a fun or entertaining process, but we cannot heal unless we do.

IN HIS FAREWELL address to the nation in 1961, Republican President Eisenhower said the following:

We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . .

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal Government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

While Eisenhower’s comments were made in the middle of the Cold War, we clearly did not heed his warnings, either then or later. Since that time, our military expenditures have steadily increased to the point where they are 54 percent of all discretionary federal funds.

World military spending totaled more than $1.6 trillion in 2015, and the U.S. accounted for 37 percent of the total. While no one would argue against the need for military preparedness, many indeed would argue that our military budget is out of proportion with the resources by which we seek to prevent the need for military action. The budget of our Defense Department, for instance, is $600 billion, twenty-four times more than the $26.5 billion allotted to the Department of State. In the Trump administration, as a matter of fact, we are dismantling many of the diplomatic functions of our State Department and replacing them with economic advocacy projects for U.S. corporations.

Are we being served, or are we being robbed? Are we being protected, or are we being turned into a militaristic nation whose citizens are being led to believe that brute force rather than adherence to our values is the fulcrum of our security?

In 1953, alert to the dangers of a permanent armaments industry, President Eisenhower said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

In truth, our military budget is more an expression of the financial appetites of our military-industrial complex than it is a truly wise response to admittedly very real threats to our national security. What could be a greater threat to our long-term security than the millions of American children who have no practical access to the social and cultural blessings of American society, and the millions of American adults finding it harder and harder to make ends meet while prosperity expands for so many others in more privileged parts of town? Large groups of desperate people should be considered a national security risk, whether in a corner of an American city or in another corner of the world. Desperate people are more vulnerable to psychological capture by genuinely psychotic forces, including dangerous ideologies both here and abroad. Those forces invade us, by the way, by land, air or sea, as through the Internet.

What is happening when a nation is so much more willing to fund its vengeance than its compassion? I think we are basically a decent and compassionate people; the problem is that our government does not always reflect that. It is ruled for the most part not by the “better angels” of the American people, but by the gargantuan economic interests of a relatively few industries. Until that changes—until a massive shift in American consciousness turns the American mind back to the political process, demanding the place that “we the people” were intended to have within it, demanding campaign-finance reform, demanding that special economic interests no longer be the primary architects of our social and political policy—our own goodness will continue to be less and less reflected in the actions taken in our name. That is the basic healing America needs: not just to find its soul, but to live its soul. Our souls must be allowed to express themselves in circles of influence wider than just our private domains. Small random acts of kindness are not enough; big strategized ones are needed, too.

It is time for us to ask ourselves, “Is it possible to have a compassion-based society?” “What would such a society look like?” and “What changes need to take place in our public policies if our goal as a society is to express love instead of fear?”

Perhaps you wish to lobby your elected officials and tell them that you prefer to have your tax dollars fund the machinery of peace more than the machinery of war. Just doing that—whether making a constituent call, attending a Congressional Town Hall, or in any other way—will make a difference inside you. And someone on the other end will know you did it.

That is the miracle most needed now: a shift in us, from a passive to an activated citizenry.

The American people aren’t happy with the fact that money runs Washington more than we do. We just don’t know what to do about it. We don’t know who to turn to when both major political parties are so beholden to corporate interests. We don’t know how to express our rage, and so it shows up in our midst as apathy or denial. That is why the assumption of spiritual power is so important as a political tool.

Do we need a military? Of course we do. Do we need to radically rethink its function and its operation? Maybe we should think about that. Perhaps it would behoove us to ask ourselves why we are so disliked by many people around the globe. What relatively little money we do give to nations less fortunate than we is applied far less to humanitarian than to military use, or to prop up multinational corporate regimes that primarily serve our own economic interests. For all our talk about how generous we are, the United States has become one of the most miserly countries in the world. It is not just the nuclear bombs pointing in our direction, but all the enmity pointed in our direction, that should make every American pause and think. As one expert on chemical warfare was quoted as saying, “The only way the United States could really be safe from the threat of chemical warfare is if there weren’t so many people out there who hated us.

In the twenty-first century, spirituality, visionary consciousness, and the ability to build and mend human relationships will be more important for the fate and safety of this nation than our capacity to forcefully subdue an enemy. Creating the world we want is a much more subtle but more powerful mode of operation than destroying the one we don’t want.

We spend trillions of dollars on methods of destroying life, while routinely withdrawing billions of dollars from projects and efforts that restore life.

The protection afforded us by the machinations of America’s war machine will serve us but little, if we do not address the fundamental causes of hatred and violence, here and throughout the world. We need a Department of Peace, at least as much as we need a Department of Defense.

THERE WILL BE no real peace in the world until there is peace in our hearts. And in both places, there is a big difference between the creation of true peace and mere management of the symptoms of distress.

One of the ways that we are bordering on cultural insanity, in a dysfunctional effort to suppress our pain rather than truly heal ourselves, is in the area of drugs. A system that makes a lot of noise about battling drugs is itself invested in our being stoned.

While our politicians are big on discussing America’s drug problem, they hardly ever discuss sobriety. There is a reason for this: sobriety doesn’t yet play a serious part in mainstream conversation because America hasn’t yet decided to become sober. The most significant drug stash in America is in our collective medicine chests. America has become a legally ordained drug culture.

Legal, though not necessarily morally legitimate, pharmaceutical company campaigns have set out to drug America, with far too many doctors as their willing accomplices. Our opioid crisis is one of the results, as the most common “gateway drug” to opioid addiction is a legal pharmaceutical.

America’s overmedication of itself and its children is our biggest “dirty little secret.” Notice how illegal drugs are called “drugs,” but legal drugs are called “medication.

We drop antidepressants today as though they were candy. And the last thing Americans need right now is to be artificially convinced things are really okay when in fact they are not. In addition, the FDA has issued a black box warning that for people under the age of twenty-five the use of antidepressants can increase rather than decrease the risk of suicidal ideation. Yet according to mental health watchdog group CCHR International, over 2 million of our young people under the age of seventeen are now taking them. Once again, as with so many other issues, human suffering has been turned into a profit center for corporate interests. A psychotherapeutic/pharmacological/industrial complex has medicalized the issue of depression to the point where even suffering that falls within a normal spectrum of human despair is treated as a medical issue, with little biological evidence to support the claim. Every time they tell you that depression causes a change in brain chemistry, remember that meditation does, too.

We are encouraging an entire generation of young people to rely on psychiatric drugs rather than on themselves and other human resources—not to even mention God. Clearly we are having some problems of our own when we are so quick to drug our own kids.

I’m not saying that there are never legitimate reasons for psychotherapeutic drugs, because clearly there are. But there is a difference—far too little noted today—between serious mental illness and instances of normal human despair. Bankruptcy, divorce, even the loss of a loved one—all are difficult human experiences, but they’re not mental illnesses. And sometimes the fact that you’re upset about something doesn’t mean something is wrong with you; it simply means you’re an adult living in very sobering times, alert to very serious problems and recognizing their severity. This is not a reason to sleep; it’s a reason to awaken.

Psychologist Carl Jung said, “All neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering.” As a culture, America lacks a deep understanding of the value of suffering. Contrary to popular opinion, there are times when allowing ourselves to suffer is the only way to get through the pain.

American popular culture is a cult of pleasure, which is an inappropriate response to deep unhappiness. The happiest life is an authentic life, which is not necessarily one of constant delight. Our obsessive pursuit of entertainment and cheap pleasure is both a response to and a masking of deep unhappiness. When, after fifteen minutes, the pain comes back—no matter how much fun we had and how many games we bought—we should do more than just seek to numb it.

It’s important that our bones hurt when we break them. Otherwise, how would we know that they’re broken? But if you have a broken bone, you don’t just take painkillers; you have to reset the bone. So it is with our society: the fact that so many of us endure deep psychic pain on a daily basis—one in four women in America will be diagnosed as clinically depressed—should be something more significant than a gold mine for drug manufacturers. It should be the source of deep questioning regarding what has gone so wrong and the embrace of real solutions—like maybe a serious spiritual life. Why is a pharmaceutical company that makes billions of dollars manufacturing antidepressants called a legitimate capitalist concern, but someone who suggests that we pray and meditate regularly to help treat depression liable to be called a lightweight thinker?

Americans don’t need to treat our unhappiness so much as we need to respond to it. Unhappiness is here for a reason; it is trying to tell us something. It is a sign that who we have been in our lives, and what we have been doing with our lives, is an inadequate container for the energies trying to emerge within us. Usually it is a sign that on some level we have been playing way too powerless; responding to that powerlessness with drugs is like saying that we’ll respond to a cut by cutting ourselves again.

Our war against drugs is odd, at best. It’s basically a prohibition that hasn’t worked, undertaken by a society that is itself addicted to drugs. I think we keep fighting the drug war for that reason: like any addict, we try to deflect attention away from our own use. The criminal underclass created by the “War on Drugs” costs America more in lives and money and outright human tragedy than any straight-out use of the outlawed drugs ever would if they were legal. Even more important, our children, in taking drugs, are far too often merely imitating us.

If we were intent on fighting drugs in this country, we would seriously foster recovery.

And most important, we should begin asking ourselves what the hole is inside our children, and inside us, that we are all seeking to fill so dysfunctionally. What is it about the world we have created for ourselves that we so don’t want to be here?

There will be drugs on our streets, no matter how much money we spend trying to stop them, as long as there is a spiritual wound in the gut of America’s children. And there will be that pain in them until we have adequately addressed the pain in us.

The issue is a paradigmatic one: we are on the verge of outgrowing a mind-set that says “I will deal with this problem by saying no to something” and embracing one that says “I will deal with this problem by saying yes to something else.” Notice we have a drug czar, but not a sobriety czar. It’s as though our government is run by a group of old-fashioned father figures who rarely spend any time at home, but then love to come into the house and start giving orders. The kids look at him like he’s crazy.

Our drug war should be replaced by a national sobriety campaign. And that means a whole lot more than just saying no; it means saying yes to some things that America, deep in its heart, has not yet decided it wants to say yes to.

The only way America is going to solve its drug problem is if we retrieve our spiritual awareness. That is what sobriety is. There is a magic within each of us that we consistently deny, because it lies in the realm of the imagination. We have been trained since childhood to view the imagination as a less important function than the intellect. This has left us emotionally and spiritually bereft. Taking drugs is a desperate effort to compensate for the loss.

The most dangerous thing in the world for a free society is for a critical mass of people to lose conscious contact with the place within us that says, “Hey, something’s fishy here. I feel something rotten in my gut.” We need to see more clearly some of the terrible things happening in our world today. Not everything that is happening in America today would make a person who is in his or her right mind happy: that’s why we have to be in our right minds. Our right minds are our salvation.

THERE IS SOMETHING about having a child that makes a woman feel she’s a member of the universal “Mommy’s Club.” Once I had a child of my own, all children became so much more important to me.

I know that the mothers of America care about the state of our nation’s children. Yet we are so oddly quiet, so sadly co-opted by the forces that threaten them. Even female hyenas encircle their children, making sure that the adult males cannot feed until the cubs have had a chance to. Surely the women of America can do better than the hyenas.

The true mother archetype is not just soft; she is fierce. And this feminine archetype is making a dramatic new appearance in modern consciousness. She opens a psychic curtain to reveal a radically different worldview than our own, where the female is freed from age-old prejudice and expresses her total nature without fear.”

Part of her total nature is to protect her children at all costs. It is unnatural the way American women are acquiescing to the assaults on America’s children today. As animals protect their feeding offspring, should we not protect our own? Today’s food and air supply is increasingly placed at risk from all manner of carcinogenic content, while American women are still too uninformed, or too distracted, to cry “foul” in any meaningful way. From genetically modified foods to carcinogens in pesticides, to gutted environmental regulations, it remains to be seen whether the women of America are going to say “Enough is enough” in time.”

CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS, primarily working at the behest of the fossil fuel industry, have slowed down progress in an area of vital importance to the health and well-being of millions of American citizens. While they represent a tiny fraction of the scientific community, unfortunately they continue to be represented in government by huge financial and political forces.

Climate change denial is moving irretrievably into the dustbin of history’s worst ideas. American citizens—if not yet the majority of politicians currently in power—are ready to embark upon a massive effort to combat the effects not only of catastrophic weather conditions, but also the effects of climate change denial on our environmental and political policies.

The American people are being vastly underserved, both by America’s rejection of the Paris Climate Accord and by the appointment of a climate change denier, Scott Pruitt, to head the Environmental Protection Agency. The agency, created by Republican President Richard Nixon and with a legacy of forward-thinking environmental policy, has now become an agent of protection not of the earth and the earth’s resources, but of the corporate profits of fossil fuel, chemical, and big agricultural companies. From our land to our water to our air to our food, our most precious treasures do not just lack protection; they are currently under assault.

Environmental justice does not just mean justice for the earth; it also means justice for the people who live on the earth. Gutting the Clean Air Act—as has recently been done—does not just affect the air; it affects our breathing. Gutting the Clean Water Act—as has recently been done—does not just affect the water; it affects our bodies when we drink it. As protectors of our earth, and protectors of our own bodies, we should vigorously and passionately defend the health of our environment against the ill-advised, dangerously recalcitrant policies of the current leadership at the Environmental Protection Agency as well as the political forces that leadership represents. Whether or not Mr. Pruitt is still the head of the EPA as of this book’s publication, the challenge remains. We should not stand idly by while millions of Americans suffer the effects of weather catastrophes, when the majority of scientists both in America and throughout the world have established beyond a reasonable doubt that these conditions are exacerbated by human behavior.

Genetically modified food and dangerous pesticides pose additional dangers as well. A well-known case in point is that after meeting with Dow Chemical lobbyists, Mr. Pruitt reversed President Obama’s previous ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which EPA scientists had declared unsafe under any circumstances due to known harm to children’s brains. Under Pruitt’s direction, advocating for your health and mine, as well as the health of our children and our planet, has become secondary to advocating for the financial interests of American business.

America should always be on the side of progress—human progress—and when our politicians are not, then it is up to the people to correct that. We should reject the criminal negligence of those who for financial purposes now wage a dangerous assault upon our environment, and stand in full alliance with those who see the protection of our environment, and the combating of climate change, as a sacred responsibility to ourselves, our children and our children’s children.

YANG, OR EXTERNALIZED activism, has defined politics in the age now passing; yin, or internalized activism, will be a political force in the age now dawning. Soul force emanates subtle energies that invisibly move and heal the world. Soul force is the essence of a new politics because it consists of the social energies released when a sleeping population awakens. Democracy cannot survive masses of people who either do not care what happens, are not looking at what happens, or do not act on what they feel about what is happening. We can have a nap or we can have freedom. We cannot have both. And millions of people realize that now.

Too much shopping is a way we lull ourselves to sleep. Too much social media is a way we lull ourselves to sleep. Immoderate drug and alcohol use is a way we lull ourselves to sleep. Too much petty conversation is a way we lull ourselves to sleep. But in our hearts, we don’t want to sleep; we want to awaken to our better selves. And our better selves are on this earth with a purpose. Somewhere in our souls we know this. Somewhere in our souls we want this. And somewhere in our souls we are looking for a way to break through to the place where we are fully alive.

Women have a special connection to inner worlds, though that connection has been violently torn asunder for centuries. During the Middle Ages, every feudal village in Europe had a group of women called witches—literally meaning “wise women.” They were the herbalists, midwives, and healers of their world. They facilitated community rituals, which held the inhabitants of a village in sacred connection to nature, each other, and themselves. They held a space, as it were, for the individual’s sense of personal connection to the divine. Some of them were called hags. The word “hag” originally meant “mature woman who carries sacred knowledge.

The witch burnings of the Middle Ages were a systematic effort by the early Church to eradicate the passionate, freethinking woman. Why? Because such women tended to raise passionate, freethinking children. And such children tended to become passionate, freethinking adults. Passionate, freethinking adults are very difficult to manipulate and almost impossible to control. Any time a group or institution seeks to gain control over human minds, one of its first attacks is on passionate women.

What do witch trials have to do with modern America? A lot. There is in modern Western women a cellular memory of burning at the stake, just as there is in modern American blacks a cellular memory of slavery. Many women are still afraid to speak their piece, and there are those who feel it the most natural thing in the world to burn us when we do. But obviously that is changing. From the Women’s March in 2017 to the #metoo movement against sexual harassment, women are beginning to awaken in a whole new way. Gandhi once said, “If I could awaken the women of Asia, I could free India in a day.” The same could be said about America.

WHAT DO SO many of us wish to bring back to civilized awareness in a more potent, alive way? Mystery, intuition, ritual, relationship, healing, emotion, soul, community, imagination. Important parts of who we all are. The stuff of magic and magical people.

The people who never dropped those things from the forefront of their consciousness are the people who have lived at the margins of power in Western civilization during the era now drawing to a close. They have been suppressed at the deepest level, not because the prevailing patriarchal consciousness thought that they were less than. They were repressed because, unconsciously, it was suspected that they were more than. All people have mystical power underutilized in the last hundred years, but it is people who have been historically held down, whose inner strengths have been simmering within the pressure cooker of their profound long suffering, who now stand at the forefront of humanity’s rebirth.

The following stanza from G. K. Chesterton’s poem “The Secret People” is one of my favorite expressions of how the magic of the soul has been shoved aside in the consciousness of the modern world:

They have given us into the hand of the new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling paper; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.

The magic people—of both sexes and all races—haven’t been invited to attend the party in America, for fear that they might dance. They haven’t been invited to speak at the party, for fear that they might sing. They haven’t been invited to run the party, for fear that they might change it.

They would have, and now they’re going to. They are the spirit of a new America, and a key to the revitalization of our democracy.

There has always been a divine plan for the destiny of this nation. Something of indescribable power and light is brewing among us now. It will take us back to the path of the heart, and love will lead us on from there.

Chapter 7 will be emailed to you tomorrow!

Preface and Introduction

Chapter 1: Mystical Power

Chapter 2: Dreams and Principles

Chapter 3: National Atonement

Chapter 4: An American Awakening

Chapter 5: The Eternals of Finance

In the Middle Ages, people believed that their lives were affected by “good spirits” and “bad spirits.” With the advent of the Renaissance and then the scientific revolution, people gave up such folly. But was it folly, really? Is our modern way of describing emotions in terms of love and fear really any different than our ancestors’ describing them in terms of good and bad spirits?

There are eternal patterns in history, both personal and collective. Our histories unfold according to a universal rhythm: thesis meets antithesis, creating new synthesis. Everything in life impels its own opposition and the opposing forces then birth something new.

And thus we grow, as truth expresses itself in an ever-unfolding revelation of how life operates. Yes, Renaissance thinking freed the Western mind from the overmystification of the Middle Ages. But no, the scientific revolution was not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Yes, there are objective, discernible laws of the physical universe, but yes, there are also mysterious, unexplainable phenomena that mechanistic thinking cannot grasp. The cutting edges of science now support some ancient spiritual traditions.

Which takes us back to “good spirits” and “bad spirits.” No, we’re not in the Middle Ages anymore, but neither did “bad spirits” go away just because we stopped believing in them. “Bad spirits” are fear-based thought forms, and they are not merely personal. They are collective as well. In fact, because on a spiritual level all minds are joined, all thought forms are on some level collective. As we have discussed before, mere external remedy does not ultimately solve a problem, unless the root thinking that produced the problem is transformed within the mind. As long as anyone still holds a racist thought, slavery still has legs. As long as anyone still feels that one group of people is more entitled than any other, then war will not be over. As long as anyone thinks that someone else’s being empowered disempowers them, then injustice will not disappear from the earth.

For instance, historians now believe that during the Middle Ages, somewhere between 800,000 and 9 million people were burned at the stake, 85 percent of whom were women. While we no longer burn witches, we have still not completely routed out of the Western mind the suspicion that there is something dangerous about female power. On a psychic level, powerful women are still burning. We’ve merely changed the consonant from “w” to “b.”

Fear-based archetypes live beyond time or place, inhabiting the eternal regions of the subconscious mind. Scientific or social or political progress can temporarily render them ineffective, but cannot rout them out. Thoughts of fear merely mutate when chased, taking different forms in different times and places. Reason cannot exorcise what is essentially a spiritual darkness. Fear grows like an uncontrollable fungus on the soulless layers of the modern mind, leaving us with an insatiable appetite for a stew of externals that cannot feed us. Traditional therapy cannot assuage the spiritual malaise of the times in which we live. It is a spiritual, not a psychological disease, that threatens to destroy us. In the words of Carl Jung, “Only spirit can cure spirit.”

Our disease is not that 9 million people on this earth die of hunger and hunger-related illnesses each year, while there is no fundamental dearth of food on the planet; our disease is that we are willing to tolerate it. Our disease is not that millions of American children are living lives of hardship and despair as deep as that of any Third World country, while politicians appear on political talk shows every night and don’t feel the need to mention it; our disease is that they can get away with this. Our disease is not that while the United States is the richest nation in the world, we give away only 1 percent in humanitarian aid to nations less fortunate than we; our disease is that any politician suggesting we be more charitable might risk losing his or her election!

Only a spiritual awakening can heal us. Our national conscience is impacted now, held as in a cave, waiting for resurrection and release. “Bad spirits” are floating around us, old archetypes that appear and reappear throughout human history, mocking and destroying the most evolved human dreams.

Spirits” inhabit bodies. As Lincoln said, it is the “angels of our better natures” that we must choose to allow to direct our lives—and there are the good and the bad, the loving and the fearful, in all of us. That should apply to politics as much as to anything else, because karma works collectively as well as individually. What goes around comes around for a country, too. And while on the material level what we give away we no longer have, on a spiritual level only what we give away do we get to keep. Spiritual Law will always, in time, supersede material law.

And what we attack in others we merely fortify in ourselves. That is because, at the deepest level, we are each other.

So what are we to do when we see “bad spirits” taking shape in our world? How do we react when we see a fear-based politics threatening to destroy us all? How do we react to oppressive systems?

First, we begin with the power of awareness. Agape love is brotherly love, in which we reject the deeds of the oppressor without rejecting the oppressor himself. What you hate, you can’t get rid of. The warden is asbound to the prison as the prisoner.

Second, we must commit not to participate in injustice and oppression—even if it is turned into law, by the way, and even though there is usually some candy thrown our way if we do participate.

Third, we must ask God to remove the thoughts of fear and guilt from our own minds, for we live in a holographic universe and if it’s out there, then it’s in here, and if it’s in here, then it’s out there.

Fourth, it behooves us to pray for the oppressor—whoever he or she is—for as we know, the oppressor is merely showing us to ourselves. All of us have elements of fear as well as love within us, and seeing fear only outside ourselves means we’re failing to do the nonviolent work that alone can heal the world.

WE’VE ALL HEARD the expression “the spirit of democracy.” It’s a cliché, but it’s also a very real thing. It is a force of consciousness, a love of liberty, and an embrace of the notion that there is a brilliant goodness in all of us that deserves to come forth and creates a veritable garden of the world when it does.

And is there a spirit that is “undemocratic”? Yes. It is fear’s response to the very notion of the equality of souls. Love brings up everything unlike itself, and democracy has always called forth that which would destroy it. This is why those who love democracy, who benefit from its gifts, must always be vigilant on its behalf. Antidemocratic efforts take many forms, but they are always marked by injustice perpetrated by one group of people toward another.

In Europe’s ancien régime, the aristocracy was quite aboveboard about who and what it was. Today, one of the most virulent antidemocracy, aristocratic forces does not announce itself as such, or even necessarily see itself that way. It is an economic worldview that now threatens to dominate the peoples of the world, even the so-called free governments of the world.

In 2017, of the top 100 economies in the world thirty-one are nations and sixty-nine are corporations. Today, these corporations are literally more powerful than governments. An ugly behind-the-scenes drama, to which the United States is not immune, is that of free, sovereign nations succumbing to what is in effect the power of a corporate colonialization process. The world’s most powerful economic institutions push treaties by which nations and communities are prohibited from passing laws that would weaken the hold of global capitalism in that country. Nation after nation is going down, lured by the illusion of economic security sold to unsuspecting citizens. We are giving in to a corporate dominance that would culturally homogenize the world, suppress the vast majority of its citizens, and run rampant over our natural resources. International financial institutions carry a mandate backed by the power of the strongest nations in the world, particularly the United States: eliminate all barriers to the free international movement of goods and capital, ensuring the right to such movement even against the will of democratic governments and the people to which they are accountable. This effectively makes a mockery of democracy. Can you imagine a treaty that says to a nation that it cannot pass this or “that law if it makes it harder for a large corporation to make money in that country? What difference does it make who our leaders are, or how much they put the good of their citizens before the good of transnational corporate entities, if those entities have become more powerful than governments?

IN AMERICA TODAY, free-market capitalism cannot legitimately claim that where more money is produced for a corporate entity, life by definition is made better for everyone. If the cost of doing business is ecological distress that threatens the welfare of people and planet, if American workers continue to lose social and economic ground in the unraveling of the social contract between management and labor, if executive compensation packages continue to eat the lion’s share of this country’s profits, if money continues to rule Washington and turn the American government into little more than a handmaiden to corporate donors, then democracy will be sacrificed. Our almost tragic deference to the needs of the free-market capitalist economy goes even against the philosophy of Adam Smith, who proclaimed that the free market cannot exist outside an ethical context. Part of what makes capitalism a reasonable economic system is that it allows people freedom. But with freedom comes responsibility. Capitalism itself is morally neutral, but capitalists should not be. Every free market enterprise should be backed by human beings asking this question: “Does what I am about to do serve only the short-term financial good of economic shareholders or does it serve a long-term social good for other stakeholders as well—employees, community, and environment?

The issue of whether American capitalism is willing to course-correct its radical swerve away from an ethical center is the overriding political question of our day. It is a political and not just an economic question, because in what is today’s system of legalized bribery called American politics, how corporations go is how we go. Ethics will not return to either politics or capitalism until ethics are returned to both.

If we decide that improving the life of the average American is more important than consolidating more power in the hands of a corporate elite, then we had better go back into politics, with all our intelligence and all our heart. For a corporate colonialism is running rampant over this planet. In the absence of campaign finance reform—hopefully with public funding for federal campaigns and at the very least a way to override the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision—both major political parties are beholden to the undue influence of money.

One of the things that has impacted me most over the last few years is how many elected officials, when they hear complaints about the kinds of things I am discussing here, can only say, “I know, I know,” with the same fear and frustration as so many of us feel. It makes you wonder who’s really running the country, when the people holding all that so-called power are feeling as disempowered as the rest of us.

Our hope lies in a massive, nonviolent citizen revolution coming up from the streets, including local as well as national politics, growing in various communities, open to new ideas, calling on all the powers of the soul, pressing forward despite the spin and veritable shadow dance of current corporate influence, not only over so much of what we do but over even what we think.

CORPORATE INTERESTS—NOT THE people of the United States—for all intents and purposes now own America.

Moneyed interests control the political process, routinely pouring so many millions of dollars into so many political campaigns as to have completely corrupted the process. This is not a secret anymore. The health and well-being of corporate structures are placed before the health and well-being of individuals and communities, no matter how many people are trapped in poverty by the process; no matter how much the preferred corporate policies widen the already alarming gap between rich and poor; no matter how much human havoc is wreaked among working people whose livelihoods are threatened by corporate restructuring and downsizing; no matter how many more known carcinogens are poured into our ground, our air, and our food; and no matter how many young people are sent to decrepit schools that cannot even afford textbooks, where teaching becomes by definition more crowd control than education, in communities where real chances for young people making it in the world get smaller and smaller every day.

The top one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; huge and profitable companies lay off thousands of employees for no other reason than to increase their short-term stock prices and their already outrageous executive compensation packages; Congress grants huge subsidies and tax breaks amounting to billions of dollars in corporate welfare—and the life and safety of the average American are increasingly crushed underneath it all. Yet the corporatists have the nerve to say the poor are too “entitled”?

Gargantuan economic concerns, whose financial interests are unabashedly placed ahead of the collective good, pour through the halls of our government like lava. We do not spend billions upon billions of dollars more to support certain industries than to support our children for any other reason than that organized business interests can afford highly paid lobbyists to make it happen, in both legal and illegal ways. The influence of money on the political process is a fast-growing cancer threatening to destroy our democracy. It grows in small ways and big ways, every day of every year.

CORPORATIONS IN AND of themselves are not the problem, but only their undue and at times unethical influence on our political system. We don’t want to turn off the system. There is nothing beautiful about what happens in a society when money stops circulating. Our challenge is not to destroy capitalism but to transform its dominant ethos; not to childishly and blindly demonize the corporation but to make a case for the importance—and ultimate benefit to all—of conscience within it.

The free market has been good to me, and I know a bit about its upside; I celebrate my economic freedom as much as anyone. But there is no amount of money I can make that would protect my child from the explosion of horror that will occur in this country if we do not commit to a serious effort at universal access to the opportunities a free market affords.

As a child I was fed, stimulated culturally, safe in my environment, and cared for medically. I was told I was valuable by the world around me—psychologically as well as materially, I had a reasonable chance of success. And it was not just my parents, or our religious community, that gave me those things. This was a larger culture of which I was a part, believing in me and supporting me in myriad ways both large and small: in short, I was set up to succeed. If you make it into the club in America, there is no other country like it. But our problem today is that not enough people can make it into the club. Millions of American children today are absolutely set up to fail. It’s one thing to say that everyone has to climb the ladder of success by him or herself; it’s another thing entirely to make the bottom rung too high for a child to reach, and then condemn him when he can’t climb from there! That is what is happening to millions of children in America, each and every day.

Children cannot provide their own health care; children cannot be responsible for their own education; children cannot create their own cultural stimulation before someone teaches them how. To provide those things to all of America’s children is our responsibility as a society dedicated to self-governance. What we are doing today, as evidenced by so many undereducated, undercared for, throw-away children, is abdicating our moral responsibility to the development of millions of American lives, and then acting horrified when they turn to dysfunctional behavior. In addition, too often the dysfunction that results from their suffering becomes fodder for the profit-making machinery of the prison-industrial complex.

We need to do more than rally to serve all America’s under-privileged citizens; we need to ask ourselves what is wrong in our society—including our public policies—that there are so many people living in desperate conditions to begin with.

In the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson sought to break the financial chokehold that he thought the Bank of the U.S. had over American life. His words make sense today:

It is to be regretted that the rich and the powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist . . . but when the law undertakes to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions . . . exclusive privileges to make the rich richer and the more potent more powerful, the humble members of society . . . have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses.

It is time to pause in our career to review our principles, and if possible revive that devoted patriotism and spirit of compromise which distinguished the sages of the Revolution and the fathers of our Union. . . . [W]e can at least take a stand against all new grants of monopolies and exclusive privileges, against any prostitution of our Government to the advancement of the few at the expense of the many. . . .

We hear many people say today that poverty is a “charity” issue, and that the government should not be involved in charity. According to that line of thinking, it should be the purview of nonprofits, churches, and so on, to support America’s disadvantaged citizens. But as someone who has founded nonprofits, who understands the importance of charity work, and has led a religious congregation, I know very well that charity cannot compensate for lack of social justice. When I look at the advantages of my own child compared to the relative disadvantages of children a few miles away, I don’t just think that I should be involved in charity work. I think that child on the other side of town is being denied his or her rights in a democratic society, and I fear for my own grandchildren, years from now, if I and my fellow citizens don’t stem the tide of growing economic injustice in this country.

Pointing out the economic inequities in our midst is viewed by some as incendiary talk, often labeled as fostering “class warfare.” But in reality, class warfare in this country is what already has been and is being waged against the middle-class and poor among us, and the prevailing system feels it has the upper hand in that war because our prison system is large enough to handle the expressions of rage that inevitably arise among our most disadvantaged citizens.

Hungry kids don’t learn, and hungry adults can’t hold down a job. Moreover, the hungry among us exist. They are not figments of anyone’s imagination. According to the USDA, 42.2 million Americans faced hunger in 2015. According to the NGO Feeding America, 13.1 million of our children and 5.4 million of our seniors live in food-insecure households. What is going on in our psyches that we are conducting our national business as though this elephant in our living room does not exist?

Over the last few decades, economic opportunity has been systematically drawn upwards, and now the smallest portion of our citizens control the majority of our wealth. With economic opportunity moving upward all the time, the middle class becomes crushed: the greatest fear admitted by most Americans today is job insecurity. And how does the collective ego respond to wealth inequality? What does the power elite say to those now crushed from above? That the problem is those right below you—those who are actually being crushed even more!

There is too much needless suffering in our midst, forming a pressure cooker right beneath us. Nothing is more dangerous to social stability than a large population of desperate people, and that is what America has. A myriad of social “dysfunctions emerge from poverty, endangering our entire society. What family can function well with the specter of economic catastrophe always haunting them? And who among us will function well in the future, if we continue to ignore this ignobility in our midst?

“I WAS SITTING having brunch with a friend at a trendy location in Los Angeles. A famous model had just walked by.

It’s not enough to just give money to the poor, Marianne,” said my friend, sipping his mimosa. “The poor are going to have to change their attitudes.”

I asked him who he thought had a better chance at a positive attitude today: the people having brunch in this beautiful restaurant, or people about ten miles away on the other side of town. Bobby Kennedy used to say that until you have spent one full day in the neighborhood of the inner-city poor in our society, you have no right to condemn them or judge them.

The poor is who my grandfather was; was yours? The immigrant is who my grandparents were; were yours? The desperate are who I once was; were you?

New paradigm thinking, relevant to all human endeavors, posits the interconnectedness of all people. The poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” This is not just an economic, social, or emotional truth; it is a spiritual, or ultimate, truth and thus will always be reflected across the board in human affairs.

No one can win at the expense of another and long retain his or her advantage. If we severely oppress people economically, they will act out their desperation in ways that ultimately endanger all of us. Harsher prison sentences and other tightened screws will hardly set us free.

The average American, for obvious reasons, has not recently driven through the streets of our most devastated communities. With their jobless rates three to four times the national average, the millions of residents of America’s urban wastelands are caught in a culture of vicious poverty as deep as that of a Third World country. And many of our rural communities are not faring much better.

When someone in America now says the economy is doing well, we should ask ourselves, “Well for whom?” The inner-city poor in America have lived for decades with social and economic conditions as bad as those endured during the worst days of the Depression. The Depression lasted for ten years maximum, and was considered a national catastrophe. It would have been inconceivable for Americans, or the American government at that time, not to try to alleviate the suffering of those whose lives were wrecked by the Great Depression. President Roosevelt created jobs through the Public Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration. President Eisenhower would later help rebuild the economy of the rural South through the Economic Development Administration, creating jobs by constructing the highway system that still runs through that region. To aggressively seek to rebuild the economy of a devastated segment of America hardly runs counter to our traditions; what runs counter to our traditions is the way that, today, we do not help. Today, we act like giving a tax cut to the rich is the best way to help the poor. With no economic evidence to back up this outrageous claim, those who foster it promote it nevertheless.

Why should there not be a Marshall Plan for America’s inner cities? It has been more than half a century since America had a massive repair of its infrastructure. Our schools, parks, libraries, and highways all need a major overhaul. The whole country would benefit from a massive job-training and job-creation program for America’s citizens who need them. What we lack is the political will to do it.

The pain of millions of Americans now stuck in a cycle of poverty and hopelessness can only result in greater social dysfunction, such as family rupture, drugs, and crime. More prisons and tougher welfare laws will of themselves do nothing but spray gasoline on the already raging fire. Hatred does not end hatred, and fear does not end fear.

A return to economic and social justice requires exertion of our national will. A massive focus on the economic revitalization of our more devastated communities is, while not yet politically popular, morally correct. Some would say, “Well, they can get a job at McDonald’s, if they want it,” but it does not substitute for providing a fair means to move beyond that job for those willing to exert the effort. Jobs such as those at fast-food restaurants used to mainly belong to students working odd jobs, while today they are the backbone—sometimes two or three such jobs at once—for millions of Americans. Meanwhile, politicians get to brag about lower unemployment rates! That’s like Yertle the Turtle saying that all the turtles beneath him had purpose in their lives. Millions of people having to work two to three minimum-wage jobs just to make ends meet is not the sign of a morally, spiritually, or economically healthy society. People need more than jobs; they need the opportunity to get a good job. That is what job training and mass transit provide, and child care makes more possible. Underemployment is a crisis in America for millions of people. Child care is a crisis in America for millions of people. It is very important not to let lower unemployment figures obscure the reality.

A conscience-based politics cares less for political expediency than for moral truth. We should extend our hands to the struggling portions of our nation for no other reason than that it is the right thing to do. Why would we bail out another country, but not our fellow Americans? And why would we not want to help those in trouble, if we ourselves are in our right minds?

Some propaganda, of course, is that such ideas would create a “nanny state,” a culture of dependence rather than aspiration. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The nannying being done now is by the U.S. government, taking such care to make sure that the richest among us are tucked comfortably into bed each night, dreaming of more stock options and a second or third $18 million penthouse. I have never seen more aspiration than I have among those who would love nothing more than to get in the game. Who want to work. Who want to create. Who want to produce. And if they had had a better education, or health insurance, or weren’t burdened by all those college loans, then they would! An economy that works only for the few at the top does not necessarily create happy people; but an economy that seeks to foster happy people by removing the material shackles that bind them would explode with creativity and possibility for all.

As usual, we could do the right thing and watch what happens.

ACCORDING TO THOMAS Jefferson, all Americans were to have universal access to the opportunity to produce modest material abundance. Not every rich person is greedy—not by a long shot—any more than every poor person is kind and noble. Indeed, many of the richest Americans are becoming alarmed at the increasing economic disparities in America, for they do not bode well for any of us. If this boat sinks, we’re all going down. It will do us little good to be wealthy if we have to live in gated communities and in fear for our very lives. That is what will happen in America if the emotional violence already spawned by economic injustice continues to spill over into more widespread and collective expressions of outrage.

After World War I, the European Allies made a terrible mistake. Punishment of the vanquished Germans was cruel and unrelenting. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson passionately argued against the punishing attitude of our European Allies, predicting exactly what occurred: that an economically and socially crushed Germany would be prey to something even more dangerous in the years ahead.

It is generally agreed by historians that if Germany had not been in such a desperate state in the years following World War I, Hitler would not have had such an easy rise to power. That is why we treated Germany and Japan so differently after World War II: we helped rebuild their economies, realizing finally that there is no greater threat to peace and security in the world than a large group of crushed and desperate people.

We have to rethink money and its place in our lives if we are to transform American society. But the solution to economic injustice does not lie in making money bad. Spiritually, there is only one of us here; in the final analysis, there are no separate needs. We do not have to choose between the rich and the poor, but only between a consciousness of abundance and a consciousness of lack.

The primary political issue should not be the distribution of wealth but the creation of wealth. That is why job training, job creation, and education matter so much. The creation of wealth should be validated, not undermined; but it must be validated for all American citizens. It is not a limited amount of wealth, but a limited amount of creative, compassionate thinking that is our problem now. There is not a limited amount of potential prosperity in America, because there is not a limit to human creativity. In the presence of love, integrity, discipline, and the commitment to excellence, limits fade away. We must push back against the notion that conscience has no place in politics, and unapologetically proclaim that, in the long run, a little more love would create a lot more money.

President Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address, “The free society that does not take care of its many who are poor will not be able to save its few who are rich.

CHANGE DOES NOT come from the top down, but from the bottom up. Each of us can help transform the financial ethos of the United States.

As individuals, and as a nation, we need to carefully watch our economic choices. They are powerful expressions of our values. Every time a screenwriter says, “No, I won’t write a script in which the woman gets cut up into little pieces and the restaurant full of people gets blown up by a sixteen-year-old blonde bombshell carrying an AK-47, even if you do pay me $500,000,” conscience takes an economic stand. Any time a lawyer says, “I won’t let you buy my services so you can find a way to legally exploit old and feeble people out of their life savings,” conscience takes an economic stand. Any time a business executive says, “I don’t want to spend this meeting only asking ourselves how much money we’re going to make this quarter; let’s also ask how much good we’re going to do for the country and the world,” conscience takes an economic stand. Any time a lumber company executive says, “I don’t care how much money we would get from cutting down those trees—we’ve only got four percent of our virgin forests left in this country as it is, and I don’t want to steal from my grandkids anymore,” conscience takes an economic stand. Any time a Congressman says, “No, I won’t vote to take money away from summer job programs for inner-city youths and then vote for further subsidies for wealthy businesses that don’t need it,” conscience takes an economic stand. And any time we lobby our Congressional representatives against a tax bill that squeezes money from the middle and lower classes to give more money to the rich, conscience takes an economic stand.

A true marriage of conscience and economics will not depress the U.S. economy; it will rebuild it from within, revitalizing it in a way no external economic machinations could do. The greatest unmined source of wealth in America is the potential peace and happiness of millions of now stressed-out Americans. And the greatest unmined source of energy in America is the unmined genius of every undereducated and poorly educated child. When we as a nation return to our natural goodness and common sense, money will flow more easily for all of us. I heard a story once about a man who had some fishes and loaves. He told us to give to the poor. He always took care of the children. And he gave the money-changers a piece of his mind.

Chapter 6 will be emailed to you tomorrow!

Preface and Introduction

Chapter 1: Mystical Power

Chapter 2: Dreams and Principles

Chapter 3: National Atonement

Chapter 4: An American Awakening

CHAPTER 4
AN AMERICAN AWAKENING

Most people I know who are interested in the word “healing” do not particularly like the word “politics.” “Healing” implies to them something loving, organic, and soulful; while “politics” implies something fear based, power addicted, and brutish.

For years we have been pouring our most creative thinking into the building of new paradigm models—in education, health, business, relationships. Yet politics has seemed so dirty, we haven’t even wanted to deal with the subject. Now that is changing, if for no other reason than we see where that has gotten us. Even if we don’t perceive politics as the most powerful vehicle for positive change—and from a spiritual perspective, it clearly isn’t—who can deny how destructive it can be when dominated by the thoughts of fear and hate?

The problem is not politics, per se, but rather an evil we sense lurking in its house. It is not one person, or one group, that is the source of our political travails today. It is a consciousness that has burrowed its way into the “sinews of our civilization. Evil wears a business suit in the world today, hiding behind pinstripes, smiling away. Our biggest problem is not a person or an institution, but a worldview that threatens to destroy all things. It is a sensibility—a sleazy, seductive way of seeing the world—that has no human conscience nor concern for the future. The enemy, of course, is America’s false god, our new bottom line, our economic obsessiveness. It is literally beastly, as it would gobble up our children, our planet, our freedom itself, to satisfy its appetite for endless control. While it clearly has a stronghold in American politics, its goal is to dominate the world.

This problem has become like an inoperable, hidden cancer—always lurking behind this or that, a spider tumor whose root inside you seems impossible to rout out. It is a cancer underlying all our cancers; it is systemic, and cannot be treated effectively through any traditional means. Even before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate money unduly influencing our politics with the Citizens United decision, our cultural ethos had become corrupted by an acceptance, even an exaltation, of greed.

There is no one to be angry at, for we are all conspirators in one way or the other. Even if we did not participate actively in the politics of the last few decades, the choice to not participate was participation in and of itself. And now it will take more than traditional politics alone to right the American ship. The only way to transform the political dysfunction in our midst is to collectively rise above it—not by ignoring politics, but by changing our relationship to it. There is no silver bullet for this problem, nor pat political solution. It is not a medicine we need, but a healing process. The problem is an opportunistic infection that would not have occurred had the citizenry of the United States not given up its social immune system function in the American body politic.

Yet how do we create a new politics—a force field of citizens engaged enough to repudiate the spectral threat in our midst—particularly at a time when the old one is so smugly sure of itself, so bolstered by gargantuan material power? The answer is, with spiritual perspicacity. We don’t have to worry about what’s happening now; the heart“less fall of their own dead weight. Our economic and political status quo will pass into oblivion, as it represents a state of spiritual sleep. Our task is not to fight it; our task is to ourselves wake up.”

THE MOST CRITICAL metapolitical issue in America today is the numbing and suppression of personal power within the individual American. Political power ultimately derives from the personal confidence and courage to express oneself. Where a social system has failed to adequately educate its citizens, bombarded our nervous systems with an overstimulation of mindless entertainment, promoted consumerism as the primary social activity, and accepted the numbing of the resultant pain with massive use of antidepressants as a substitute for questioning the pain itself, personal power becomes the purview of a lucky or courageous few. The game of the culture has been to respond to our feelings of disempowerment by exploiting those very feelings—trying to convince us that if we buy this or that product, or elect this or that official, our feelings of well-being will be miraculously restored.

Americans as individuals tend to be spunky and eminently decent. We are great to sit next to on airplanes. As a group, however, we have a capacity for denial and grandiosity that makes us increasingly easy targets for manipulation by political propaganda. We have become completely taken in by a dangerous brew of public relations genius, limitless campaign spending, and forces of corporate greed.

Much of our education was training in passive acceptance of someone else’s perspective, or mindless facts, rather than the development of an ability to think deeply for ourselves; the ubiquitous assault of popular culture has impacted our capacity for critical thinking; our linear thought processes are jumbled by too much exposure to electronics; and we are left with a dangerous propensity to be taken for a ride by anyone who can afford a specialist at scrambling our brains even more.

We have been lulled to sleep by an official culture that speaks nonsense to us as though it were reasonable, and have been trained by a consumer culture since childhood to conspire in our own psychological bondage. The lulabies are compelling, but waking up is better.

As we meditate and pray, we begin to awaken. As we read good books, we begin to awaken. As we forgive, we begin to awaken. As we deepen our relationships, we begin to awaken. As we eschew mindless social media, we begin to awaken. As we serve our community, we begin to awaken. As we journey toward psychological health, we begin to awaken. As we think for ourselves, we begin to awaken. As we communicate more courageously, we begin to awaken. As we take up the philosophical mantle of concern for the future of life on earth and apply it as best we can to our social, professional, and political endeavors, we begin to awaken both ourselves and others. And in that awakening lies hope for all of us. Mass awakening from our entrenched delusions is the only hope for America’s healing.

IT’S NOT AN accident that Americans have become so passive in the face of systemic threats to our freedom. For decades, the American public education system tried to teach children what to think, avoiding its greater mission in a free society: to teach children how to think. Teaching children how to think means fostering minds that are questioning, assertive, open-minded, and creative. We should bring up our children to be creators, not imitators, for only that prepares them for the wonder of life.

This is an outlook that the perpetuation of democracy requires, but that an industrialized economic system came more and more to resist. As we became dominated economically by the rule of industrialization, the tacit pact that American education made with industry was to provide the system with masses of Americans who would show up on time, do as they were told, not ask a lot of questions, and not bother to assert themselves.

A child would enter kindergarten excited and passionate. By the sixth grade at the latest, his or her passion was squelched. Passion is messy for an authoritarian system and frightening to those who live under it. In the name of discipline and education, yet actually in the service of an economic system which had become our sacred cow, America taught its children to stuff their passions and forget their questions, and thus turn off their minds.

I’m not a conspiracy buff in the traditional sense. The conspiracy that concerns me is our very way of life, our conspiracy of silence about things that matter most. It’s an invisible foe because it’s the tenor of our collective being. There is no one to oppose because there is no monolithic power source that spews out all the poison of our forgetfulness. We want to forget, after all, because there are a lot of things we don’t even want to know. Direct confrontation, even if we knew all the ins and outs of America’s deepest, darkest secrets, is not an option. What we have got to do is rise above, begin thinking again and feeling again like the passionate, authentic, brilliant human beings we were created to be. From that place we will cast a web of insights and manifestation that will disperse malaise and malice, and bring us back to life. The only way to ultimately counter antidemocratic forces is to foster democratic ones.

It’s interesting to note some of the differences between Americans and Europeans. The average European is much better educated, much more aware of the political and social issues that affect his or her daily life, than is the average American. We have become so accustomed to allowing the media to do our thinking for us—and the media so often has dumbed down our thinking— that we are dangerously ignorant of important matters.

What I’ve noticed, however, working on both continents, is that as intelligent as Europeans are concerning a particular subject, their enthusiasm for action is not always the same as ours. Our political DNA is different: they’re the children of those who stayed in the Old World and changed things where they were, and we’re—with the significant exception of those who were brought here as slaves—the children of those who came to the New World seeking something different. All Americans are inherently change-agents. There is nothing more traditionally American than to make a run for something better.

The American propensity to rise up out of oppressive situations and do what we can to transform them sleeps in us, but has not died. And when we awaken, we awaken big. You give a group of Americans a thumbnail sketch of an issue that demands our involvement, a 101 overview, and we’re jumping up and down on chairs, organizing activity, creating solutions, preparing to act. We leave no doubt that we are indeed the psychological heirs of the men and women who, over two hundred years ago, did what it took to re-create the world. As Thomas Paine proclaimed regarding the American Revolution, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

We need a new American Revolution now, a revolution of consciousness and soul.

This begins with our taking responsibility for the abdication of our citizen authority, particularly its moral and spiritual dimensions. We abdicate our power every time we allow ourselves to surrender to the myriad forms of mind-death that pass for culture in America today. If we want a healing in this country, then we will have to take our minds back.

We need to be more than rich or powerful now. If we want to save our democracy and create a sustainable future for ourselves and our children, we’re going to have to become deep thinkers. We’re going to have to begin functioning on more than just a few cylinders. We’re going to have to evolve beyond the mechanistic perspective that is no more than an attitudinal relic of the twentieth century, and which limits our politics to a dangerously immature view of the world. We’ve forgotten who we are as spiritual beings, and we must remember. We have forgotten, among other things, our identity as source and protector of power in America.

As a consequence, that power is seeping like blood from our wounds and our democracy is withering. No more sleeping, America. It is time to wake up.

OUR FOUNDERS, BY signing the Declaration of Independence, were committing treason against the king of England. If they had failed and were convicted, their punishment would have been the most horrendous death possible. Yet most of us do not show anywhere near their courage or conviction. Rather, our thinking marches right in line with whatever commands the invisible beast hands down. Our biggest fear is the disapproval of his minions.

But there is a secret that every mystical revolutionary should know: The beast has no power whatsoever against the divinely illumined mind. In our hearts and minds lies the power of nonviolence, and that is the power of God alive within us. When harnessed for the collective good, there is no power in the universe that can stand before its might.

Know that, and a revolution in consciousness becomes an effortless accomplishment. The heart-filled mind knows no defeat.

But without the strength of an enlivened mind, we become passive observers to our own lives, easy to sell to and easy to control. Thus, the onset of our national disease: citizen anemia. The American people have been spiritually weakened. We know more about reality television than we know about issues that vitally affect our daily lives.

Why are so many aware of every celebrity who entered rehab over the last five years, but not aware that nineteen American children die of gun violence every day? Why are we alert to every micro-aggression against our feelings on any given day, but not deeply aware of state and federal efforts at voter suppression that threaten our very democracy? The brain is a muscle that must be exercised in order to function well. One is reminded of George Washington’s comment that “Americans have almost amused themselves out of their liberties.” American popular culture is starting to look like an exercise in democracy’s assisted suicide.

American democracy carries with it extraordinary rights to express ourselves. As many threats as now exist to those rights, a larger problem is our willingness to abdicate the power of our own voices. No one is forcing any of us to keep our conversation shallow. Many, in fact, have now begun to recognize the price we’ve paid as a nation because too many of us did. Today, we are hearing the roar of a populace having decided to speak up after years of dysfunctional silence about things that matter most.

Americans are often slow to wake up to what’s happening around us, but once we do we slam it like nobody’s business.

America, in fact, has no dearth of genius. What we could do if we wanted, is nothing short of miraculous. And many are now beginning to see this, awakening from the delusional preoccupation with self to a broader concern for our collective good.

What we lacked over the last few decades is an evolved sense of common purpose for our talent and intelligence. Our awesome creativity was applied to mainly self-centered, ultimately unimportant ends. But that was then, and this is now.

Each of us has within us depths of intelligence and creativity that come forth only in response to meaningful purpose. Many millions of Americans sincerely want to see this country change for the better, and are willing to participate in the effort to make that happen. People are naturally attracted to a sense of higher, common need; just watch any of us when there is a storm coming through town or a fire down the street. We are living through a storm, and we’re going to help each other through this.

It is natural to us, at the deepest level of our being, to love each other. There shouldn’t have to be a disaster to bring us together or to inspire us to serve a higher purpose. Disasters give us social permission to be who we already are. The ancient Greeks used the word “politeia” to mean the involvement of the citizen beyond his or her own self, or even family identity, to the larger community of the nation. Politics should not be a place where we merely compete or even negotiate for who gets what, but rather a place where we creatively work together toward a greater good for all.

Service shouldn’t be something we do separate from our daily lives; it should become a way of life. That, at bottom, is what citizenship is. President Kennedy’s line, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” is something that Americans should carry in our hearts, much more than we do the promise of a balanced budget. What we most need, as Americans, is to remember—and then act on the memory—that we were born for something far more important than the attainment of mere self-centered goals. We want to feel we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. Otherwise, no matter what we do or what we achieve, some little voice at the back of our minds will always say, “Is this all there is?”

Ironically, it is a crisis in our democracy—the actual threat to its existence—that has reminded millions of Americans that in fact it matters to us after all.

Like Germany in the early Thirties, Rome before it fell, and France before the Revolution, the United States has been a nation in denial. We routinely danced while those on the other side of town were bleeding. We are not a selfish people; I think the average American hasn’t even been aware of the huge amount of chronic economic despair experienced by so many millions of people over the last few decades. Supported by free trade deals, companies closed their factories in order to increase profits by putting them overseas; societally, we acquiesced to a general sense that short-term financial gain for corporate shareholders mattered more than long-term viability of the entire society, including its workers; and more and more, the U.S. government became a servant to the dictates of the corporate boardroom rather than a protector of the common good. Where else would their political contributions come from?

Tremendous human suffering accrued, as the financial resources of this country were handed over, year after year, in a staggering transfer of wealth from our middle class to the proverbial one percent. Yet for years, a political and media elite were able to make tens of millions of economically desperate people seem almost invisible.

The plight of the economically traumatized in America became a tinderbox just waiting for a match; our political leaders, many of whom had to have been aware that the tinderbox existed, seemed to think that they wouldn’t be reelected if they mentioned it. And boy, were they wrong. A populist revolution has been brewing in our country for years; the only question was whether it would be a progressive or an authoritarian populism that rode it into power.

It is not anger so much as economic despair that fueled the political upheaval we have witnessed since the 2016 election. Both of our major political parties would do well to look deep into their souls in order to discover where they went wrong, and course-correct in order to reclaim their place as true conduits of our national good. Both of them have abdicated their moral vision, that vision having been literally sold to the highest-bidding campaign donor.

MORALITY IS A light with many facets.

Social conservatives tend to concentrate mainly on private morality, whereas social liberals focus more on public morality. To one, someone’s cheating on their partner might be viewed as a serious violation of moral law. To the other, the government’s abandonment of the health and education of millions of disadvantaged children in favor of tax breaks for our wealthiest citizens is an egregious violation of moral law. In fact, in a well-balanced life both personal and collective morality matters.

But a spiritual discussion is not the same as a moral discussion. Moral principles, while not relative in themselves, can be interpreted in many ways. Spiritual principles, on the other hand, are based on objective, discernible laws of consciousness.

The spiritual conversation does not take sides. It merely states the deeper issue, favoring only the enlightenment of the human race. It is a set of principles on which the universe is ordered. Spiritual law is not personal but impersonal, like physical laws. If Hitler strode into the sunlight, then Hitler got sun. If Mother Teresa had walked off a platform, then Mother Teresa would have fallen down. No one gets different treatment by physical laws—or spiritual laws—depending on whether they’re “nice” or not.

The cornerstone of spiritual law is the law of Cause and Effect, or what in the Eastern traditions is called karma. As we know from physics, every action has a reaction. That law is the organizing principle of spirituality. It is the basis for the Golden Rule, which is at the heart of all religious teaching: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, because ultimately they will. Or if they don’t, someone else will. In a way, that’s all you need to know. If everything we do has a consequence, if everything we do comes back to us, then surely we will come in time to learn that it is ultimately in our own best interests to put out only what we would want to get back.

How this applies to politics is interesting. Millions, probably billions of people on earth are aware that the law of Cause and Effect is simply the way things are. But what we have not yet deeply considered—certainly not in the United States—is that this principle holds for collective actions in the same way it holds for individual ones.

If Steve violates the law of love, then Steve is going to have to pay the price. If Steve’s government violates the law of love, then Steve’s nation will have to pay the price. And since Steve lives there, his life will be affected. Steve, at that time, will not be able to appeal to some higher court saying, “But God, I didn’t know what my government was doing!” Particularly not in a society when Steve would have known had Steve been looking, and Steve would have realized had Steve been thinking, and Steve might have made a difference had he exercised his power to do so.

The late legendary newscaster Walter Cronkite once gave a speech in which he said that when Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps, Germans who lived within miles of the camps rushed to meet Allied soldiers saying, “We didn’t know! We didn’t know what was happening there!” But, said Cronkite, they were still responsible—for they had tolerated the shutting down of a free press in Germany, and once that has occurred, then anything can happen. In many ways, we are accountable not only for what we know but also for what we should have known.

As long as we’re on the subject of Hitler, by the way, it’s a good time in our history to remember that he was democratically elected.

Another plea with the universe that doesn’t always work well is, “My boss made me do it” or, “It was someone else’s decision.” Nazi war criminals were sent to their deaths by the Nuremburg tribunal, which held, like Thoreau, that conscience is a higher law than government. If your government is perpetrating something that violates the higher law of life as you understand it, then it is your responsibility to say so and your responsibility to refuse to participate. Satyagraha was Gandhi’s term for the refusal to participate in unjust systems, and he posited that, over time, the moral authority of such refusal turns into political force.

When it comes to the behavior of national governments and huge multinational conglomerates, it is very easy for the individual to look away. It is very easy to say, “This has nothing to do with me. I can’t make a difference anyway.” But from a metaphysical perspective, it behooves us to remember that the universe never looks away. It registers everything, even to the last detail, and what boomerangs at your nation, boomerangs at you whether you have been looking or not.

Another principle to consider is the ultimate illusion of time. In an individual’s life, it is fairly easy to see that if I am unfair to Dorothy, then Dorothy will probably do something to react to that quite soon. In a small enough context, it is easy to see how karma works. But the size of the context means nothing to the universe. In a nation’s life, particularly one as mighty as our own, military and economic power can bolster the illusion that the cosmic order can somehow be modified—but it cannot. We figure we won’t be punished for transgressions against some small nation in the Third World because our military might is so extraordinary, who would dare retaliate? But whether or not that nation can retaliate is irrelevant. Nature retaliates. All that is relevant is the Law of the universe; what we do will come back to us, and—consider this—if not to us today, then to our children tomorrow. Invade a country you shouldn’t invade, and you help create ISIS. You withhold help from millions of desperate people, and they become more vulnerable to radical propaganda. Examples such as these abound.

Our thoughts, and certainly our behavior, set off forces in the universe. If our thoughts are loving, then love will return to us. If our thoughts are not loving, if our national power rests more on “brute force” than on “soul force,” then fear is what will return to us.

Only when our thoughts are healed will the planet be safe for ourselves and our children. We cannot just treat the symptoms of hate; we must rid the world of hate. And the first place to do that is within our hearts.

President Franklin Roosevelt wrote these words in 1945, for a Jefferson Day address that he died before being able to deliver: “More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Westerners were naïvely hopeful that science and technology could solve all the problems of humanity. Now, over a hundred years later, how painful and poignant is the realization that this is anything but true. The forces of humanly manufactured powers merely follow our command. They can be instruments of hate or instruments of love, instruments of war or instruments of peace, depending on how our minds direct them. But no thoughts are neutral; all minds create at some level. Energy is never static. At this point in history, something either leads to a better world or else leads to one more dangerous. What does not create, on some level, destroys. Every thought is based on either love or fear, and then extends accordingly. We are free to choose what we want to think, but we are not free to escape the forces set in motion by the mental choices we make.

The task before the human race is to become a human family. Nothing less will ensure our safety or even guarantee the survival of our species, at a time when the world has become so small and the stakes have become so high.

The question is, do we, the current generation, have what it takes to live up to the critical challenges of the time in which we live? Are we made of the “right stuff,” psychologically, morally, and in every other way, to stave off the dangers and fortify the security of the civilized world?

Now, at this critical moment, we are in the midst of deciding.

SEVERAL GENERATIONS MAKE up the “adult generation” of any particular time, and understanding how each generation fits into those before it can be helpful.

The boomers are aging, but we’re still here—and politically relevant. We are best understood when seen in terms of the psychological differences between us and our parents, the generation of Americans that fought World War II. This earlier generation surrendered five years of their lives to wage the war, and after that they wanted little more than to lie back on the couch, put their feet up on the coffee table, and drink another beer. God knows they deserved it. And seen from today’s perspective, they were an entire generation undergoing posttraumatic stress. People today can hardly imagine what it would mean to take on the Nazis for five years and not even go to therapy to discuss it.

General Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, and then President of the United States from 1952 until 1960. Eisenhower, with his unique vantage point for viewing the devastating effect of World War II on the generation that fought it, would have had a natural tendency to want to comfort people in the following years, to let them rest from too much strain, to at least unconsciously protect Americans from any further, critical public challenges. And thus the Fifties.

Then, of course, came the baby boom. Millions of us were thus brought up by mentally vacationing parents, and simply because we lived in the house with them we went on vacation, too! The difference between our generation and theirs, though, is that they had earned their vacation—and we did not. They had collectively given of themselves to make the world a better place, which awarded them a badge of honor they well deserve. Boomers never had that initiatory experience.

War initiated the World War II generation into bravery. Vietnam was an unjust war, not the just war that most people consider World War II to have been. And it speaks well of the baby boomer generation, not ill, that we rejected it on moral grounds. History challenged an earlier generation to wage war, and it challenged the next to wage peace. We began to do that, and then we stopped. A different kind of drama came our way.

Had the Sixties not happened, I think the baby boomer generation would have made its mark in the most glorious way. We had the leaders to lead us through the door marked “Glory,” but when they died, we felt the door shut in our faces. Like Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land but not being able to enter it himself, the Kennedys and King took us up to the door but they themselves could not walk through. Opening that door is a job still left unfinished.

For we who thought we would repair the world ended up contributing mightily to the mess. The baby boomer generation mastered the art of “making things better for me,” but has done too little to “make things better for us.”

In many cases, the idealists of yesterday became the compromisers, if not the cynics, of today.

What happened to us then is what happens to every generation: our children were born and their very existence says, “Move over. We have other plans.”

Life is intentional. Generations for whom baby boomers are parents and grandparents are expressing a new audacity of spirit, with rebirth at its characterological core. The older you are the more you know some things, and the younger you are the more you know other things. It is time once again—each generation having learned what it has learned—to reclaim the quintessential American audacity to start new things.

To reinvent, to re-create, to say, “No, we can do better”—these are the forces that gave us birth and will redeem us now. New possibilities for life on earth are once again waiting to be born. And for Americans, this includes a revitalization of our democracy and the values it represents. In this emerging new cycle of our national life, it behooves us to remember we are the United States, not the disunited states. At this point in the life of our country, and the life of the world, we will remember we’re together, or we will surely die apart. That joining, and the sense of community it engenders, is the cornerstone of the new America.

Now, in the twenty-first century, there is a yearning among us to apply our talents to collective ends. Millions go home at night to nice apartments, nice houses, nice furniture, nice electronic equipment, even nice bodies beside them, and yet deep in their hearts say, “God, I’m bored.” We long for a more genuinely passionate life, and for a deeper purpose to living it. We want to throw off the invisible chains of a wealthy slave condition, in which our genius has been co-opted to serve no higher god than mammon, which is no god at all. We want to start a new cycle now. The current America just recycles the old; the new America is truly new.

A time of awakening is truly at hand. We are ready to wake up from a very, very long nap. We are ready to get back to the Great Work of being alive.

Author Barbara Marx Hubbard has said that the greatest poverty of our times is the poverty of those who are not giving their spiritual gifts. “Twenty percent live at base level need, and eighty percent at spiritual need. And if the 80 percent were giving their gifts, the 20 percent wouldn’t be in material poverty.”

Like a new mother who feels physical pressure to give her milk, we feel spiritual pressure to give of what we have to generations coming after us. Nothing short of that is deep enough to satisfy our need. We want to be more than contenders; we want to be contributors to something bigger than ourselves.

JUST AS THERE is a so-called art of waging war, there is also an art of waging peace. “True peace,” said Dr. King, “is not merely the absence of some negative force-tension, confusion, or war; it is the presence of some positive force-justice, good will and brotherhood.

We need to declare peace now, with as much serious effort and intention as that with which a nation declares war. Fear-based thinking is essentially a war mentality, and who among us does not live with fear. Our efforts to be spiritually healed, to find the love that sets us free, is our effort to become not only more peaceful ourselves but also instruments of peace in a war-torn world. Gandhi said, “We must be the change we want to see happen in the world.

Until a critical mass of Americans commits to the establishment of a nonviolent society, violence will continue to plague us. The issue, ultimately, isn’t whether gun manufacturers or the producers of violent media and video games are more responsible for violence among our children. The most important issue is to recognize that both gun manufacturers and violent video manufacturers serve the same false god, and his color is green. While 97 percent of Americans now say they want universal background checks and 67 percent of us says we want to ban the sale of assault weapons, the NRA will continue to advocate for more money for gun manufacturers under the guise of protecting the Second Amendment. Yet blood money is hardly true prosperity. In this as in every other area, as long as short-term economic interests are society’s bottom line, then our children will be underserved. Caring for our children does not always serve society’s short-term economic interest, but it does serve our long-term humanitarian one. We cannot have it both ways, and our pretending otherwise is threatening to destroy us. Ultimately, only a massive change of heart will change our societal direction in a serious way.

Love is more than a feeling; it is a choice, a commitment, a stand we take, or it is nothing. A stand for heart is the essence of the new, nonviolent revolution now brewing in America. We are looking within, where we are finding our true power. And we are committed to expressing our power in meaningful, effective ways.

It is time for us to repudiate America’s culture of violence, not just by blaming others but by taking inventory in our own hearts. Some of us need to surrender our guns, some of us need to surrender our violent games and videos, and some of us need to surrender the unforgiveness we harbor and have harbored in our hearts for years.

Until we, the American people, fundamentally change, nothing is going to be fundamentally different. Our children will continue to kill and be killed. Our depression and anxiety will continue to soar. Our water and air will continue to be poisoned. And our very freedom will become mere memory. The American experiment, in that awful yet no longer impossible scenario, will have failed.

THE FABRIC OF American society can only be rewoven one stitch at a time: one person forgiven, one child read to, one sick person prayed for, one elder given respect and made to feel needed, one prisoner rehabilitated, one mourner given comfort. These actions, when performed sincerely, emanate from spiritual ground that is itself the healing of our problems, as our separation from that ground of being has itself been our primary wound. Like the mythical lost continent of Atlantis, there is a ground now submerged beneath the subconscious waters, visible in ancient times perhaps but not visible now, set to rise again, to reappear. Our initial tenderness, wonderment, and innocence have been suppressed and marginalized by the world we have built—the world of modern “progress.” It is only when we fall in love, marry, give birth, grieve openly, or prepare to die that we dare to show our real face, to shine the light that glows within us. Our failure to be more authentically human is threatening to destroy the world.

In a country where our political right to live creatively is so awesomely assured, there is yet within most of us the feeling that a beautiful instrument is in some way going unplayed. There is a saying in the Jewish prayer book, “Sad is he who does not sing, and when he dies his music dies with him.” Something goes unsung in most Americans today, though there is yet within each of us the urging of an internal conductor, exhorting and preparing us to sing.

While earthly resources are finite, spiritual ones are not. In all of us there is divine potential and the natural propensity to reach for it. In a nation of well over 300 million people, there is a stunning collection of unmined spiritual gold. As we each mature into a deeper understanding of our lives and why we’re living them, that understanding itself becomes the womb of a new America. As each of us awakens to the preciousness of our individual right to make a difference in this world—and the cosmic momentum that will support us when we try—we become a powerful wave of resistance to the forces of fear. It is not just our capacity to say no to what we don’t want that is our power to renew the world around us. It is our deeper power to say yes to our own creative abilities and yes to the light within others, which is the healing balm for the American soul. Each generation brings forth new life, physically and spiritually, or life will have to stop. Each of us might ask ourselves now, “Am I ready to bring forth new life, for myself, for my nation, for my world?”

When enough of us start asking deeper questions, then deeper answers will begin to appear. A seemingly endless war against terrorism now forces us into deeper questioning. The environmental desecration of the planet now forces us into deeper questioning. The election of Donald Trump now forces us into deeper questioning. The difficulty and heartbreak of these questions are forcing us to our knees.

And that is exactly where we need to be.

Chapter 5 will be emailed to you tomorrow!

Preface and Introduction

Chapter 1: Mystical Power

Chapter 2: Dreams and Principles

Chapter 3: National Atonement

CHAPTER 3
NATIONAL ATONEMENT

In spiritual terms, the state of the soul is the awakened state, while the mortal personality dwells in perpetual sleep. That is why enlightened masters are often called the “awakened ones.” Great souls—and all of us have a capacity for spiritual greatness when our hearts are open wide—have the ability to see beyond personality to the more spiritually real world than that of practical, worldly concerns.

Behind every human event is a spiritual drama, a deeper movement of the soul toward greater darkness or greater light. With every event, the soul either forgets itself or remembers itself, is either veiled by fear or shining forth in love. The individual life is a soul-drama, and so is the collective life of a nation, an ethnic group, a civilization, and so on.

We have established already that the Founding Principles of the United States were a burst of light for all humanity. They form a system of liberty and justice, both of which are faces of the divine. But we have also eatablished that, from our earliest days, the spiritual light of the United States has at times been eclipsed by the darkness of certain historical forces, many of which our Founders themselves had not outgrown. The march of modern civilization from its most primitive to its most evolved state—from the power of brute force to the power of soul force—is not always a straight but sometimes a jagged line. Two steps forward, one step back, three steps sideways, and so goes history.

The plan of spiritual evolution is marked not only by God’s will that we move ever in the direction of love, but also by another of God’s creative principles: that humanity has free will. What that means is that in any given moment, it is our choice whether we move toward love or retreat from it. What is not love is fear. But in the larger scheme of things, there is a limit past which lovelessness cannot remain. Fear is not life-giving enough to sustain itself. We can move in the direction of fear only so long before it brings us to our knees or to our end.

God is all-forgiving. He does not seek to judge and punish us, but to correct and heal us. He is not invested in our guilt but in our innocence. The spiritual principle by which He helps us return to love when we have strayed from its ways is the principle of Atonement.

The Atonement was introduced into human consciousness by God Himself, as a response to our capacity for fear. It is our eternal opportunity to choose again. That is what makes the Atonement a miracle—it is something introduced into the laws of time and space, by a power beyond them both. Grace supersedes the law of karma. To atone is to admit our errors, praying that God free us from what would otherwise be their inevitable consequences. It is a humble return of our minds to God’s love. It is to recognize where we ourselves have taken a path away from God’s will, and ask to be corrected and forgiven and healed. The story of the Prodigal Son makes clear how delighted the father is when the son who strayed returns. By willingly and consciously unburdening ourselves of the weight of our mistakes, we are given the chance to begin again, to go forward in life from a healed perspective.

Could America atone? Could America not use a miracle? The command to atone is a universal spiritual theme. In the Jewish religion, Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, where Jews admit our errors of the past year, asking God’s forgiveness and for His willingness to inscribe us in the Book of Life for another year. Catholics are called to confess their sins in regular confession. In Alcoholics Anonymous, “we admit to God, and to ourselves; the exact nature of our wrongs.”

In an individual life, the importance of taking stock of our own sins—as opposed to indulging the ever-present temptation to catalogue someone else’s—is a well-understood spiritual imperative. We cannot heal without it. And what of the life of a nation? Do we have collective sins to atone for as well? Is Atonement part of our national healing?

Abraham Lincoln thought so. In proclaiming a National Day of Fasting and Prayer on March 30, 1863, Lincoln said,

We have been preserved, these many years; in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

He added,

It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness. It is the duty of nations as well as of men, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon. . . .

And what are America’s sins or spiritual errors? Some are open to interpretation, of course, but some are clearly not. There are three main areas where America’s need to atone weighs heavily on our national psyche: our cruel treatment, indeed genocide, of the Native American people; our racism toward African Americans throughout our history; and the terrible mistakes that were the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

A GREAT NATION, like a great person, is not one who has never fallen down, but one who has done what it takes to get back up. Once we’re mature enough, we understand that there isn’t one among us who has not made mistakes. The issue is not whether we have erred but, rather, what is God’s attitude toward human errors? What would He have our attitudes be toward error in ourselves and others?

Atonement is the release from fear, not a dive deeper into it. It is a corrective device, not a punishment, to admit the exact nature of our wrongs and to do our best to make them right. Atonement is essential to the healing of the United States, because there will be no new America until we have done everything possible to right the wrongs of the old one.

Our nation, for many reasons, has developed a public personality that has great difficulty admitting when we have been wrong. Politicians, who ideally should be our primary healers, seem particularly loath to offend any voters by pointing out America’s errors. This deeply obstructs our national healing because a collective, like an individual, simply cannot grow without taking responsibility for its mistakes.

This clearly annoys other nations, which find our sometimes constant finger-wagging in their direction while refusing to admit our own transgressions the stuff of outrageous nerve. Even this, however, is secondary to the fact “that, from a spiritual perspective, God Himself is not amused. “God shall not be mocked” means simply that He isn’t.

What is our resistance to saying, “We have been very wrong. We are sorry and we apologize,” in situations where it is so very clear that our capacity for error is as great as anyone else’s? Are we afraid our children will find us weaker for doing so? Should we not rather be afraid that we are teaching them a false sense of strength—one that does not admit mistakes or humbly ask forgiveness? Should our children not know that, in fact, we are a great nation, with much to celebrate and be proud of, but that has also made mistakes and must ever be on guard against making them again?

Atonement is more than a mere apology. To atone is to do more than say you’re sorry; it is to commit to never do it again. When we atone for past abuses toward someone, our prayer is that God remove whatever character defect within us led to the abuse to begin with, and transform us into someone not likely to repeat the error. And atonement includes the making of amends wherever and however possible.

Many people would say today, “Hey, I wasn’t a slave owner! It’s not my responsibility!” or even, “It’s tragic what they did to the Native Americans, but hey, it’s over.” Yet the concept bears a closer look. Are these things really over? Doesn’t the answer to that question have something to do with who you are and where you live? For poverty-stricken Native Americans living on reservations, or poverty-stricken African-American children living in the inner city, it could be argued that these situations are not over. Their legacies live on. The sins, or misperceptions, of the parents have been handed down to the children in successive generations, and while the original abuses no longer occur, they have “legs” that continue through the course of history. Contemporary poverty is the great-grandchild of abuses long past.

The abolition of slavery could be likened to the removal of a malignant tumor. The question for the doctor would not just be “Did you get out the tumor?” but “Did you get out all the cancer?” As long as there are any cancer cells left in the body, there is danger—because cancer spreads. An institution has been abolished, but the thinking that gave rise to it still lives. When it comes to slavery and racism, we got out the tumor but we didn’t get out all the cancer.

To do that, it would help to apply the tenets of holistic healing. We must address the deeper causal issues involved in racial and ethnic tension today, and then apply the powers of body, mind, and spirit to bring forth the healing of our national wounds. It was another generation’s job to abolish slavery from our country; it is this generation’s job to abolish racism from our hearts.

Forgiveness and Amends

Some people wish we were a color-blind society, but would that really be so wonderful? Homogenizing everyone so as to offend no one is hardly the way to true healing. It is both our unity and our diversity, after all, that underlies the American ideal. The only way we can become truly color-blind—that is, get to the point where we see each other only through the eyes of spirit, not even recognizing physical color—is if we first acknowledge the brilliance of the various colors.

Metaphysically, healing occurs when the darkness is brought to the light. You can’t just say, “Okay, everybody. Let’s love each other and pretend our colors don’t exist, okay?” and then expect everything to be great. Of course not. All that does is to force our issues down deeper, and thus to ultimately exacerbate them. If you go to the doctor with a broken arm, you don’t pretend you’re there to heal your leg. The doctor says, “Let me take a look at that arm.” And similarly, the divine physician says, “Let me take a look at that wound in your psyche,” not, “Let’s ignore that wound.” We need to show it to Him, not cower from Him.

Years ago President Clinton initiated a “national conversation” on race, and certainly with the best of intentions. But that conversation never went deep enough for genuine healing to occur. It remained shallow, for the most part, because most people involved in it did not feel emotional permission to get real, to be authentic, to tell it like it really is. Such a conversation, in order to be meaningful, must be facilitated by someone with the professional skill set to create emotional safety for everyone involved—including those with two or three hundred years of unexpressed anger burrowed deep in their cells. Each of us is carrying around not only our own issues but also the issues of our parents and grandparents and their grandparents before them; like the adult children of alcoholic parents, we are living lives tainted by unprocessed feelings belonging to people long since gone. Psychologically, the United States is like a dysfunctional family system in which huge secrets go undiscussed, unprocessed, breeding all manner of unconscious turmoil within various family members.

Within each of us, however, there is a reservoir of divine power that responds fully to our invitation to enter and restore us. Whether we call this force God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Jewish shekina, the Atman, the Oversoul, nonviolence, universal love, or whatever other words we wish, it is the all-powerful action of a “higher power.” This power cannot work, however, counter to our free will; it must be invoked or consciously invited into our thought system. Then and only then can the Atonement principle free us of the consequences of past mistakes.

Through the power of the Atonement, we summon a higher power to do what the mortal mind by itself cannot do. The hand of God comes upon us and heals our hearts. As we make amends to those to whom we owe amends and try to forgive those who have hurt us, healing forces are released. Through Atonement in the present, we both heal the past and release the future. As America atones for its mistakes, allowing itself the grief and sadness without which hearts cannot heal, love will replace the anger that underlies so much of our national life.

Spiritual understanding takes us beyond a traditional understanding of our problems, and beyond a traditional set of solutions. That is why it is such an important new addition to our political awareness. Some problems take heart work, not just head work. All the laws in the world can’t take a nation through its grieving or to its knees. Our wisdom will do that, or ultimately circumstances will. Those are our only two choices.

In the twenty-first century humanity is being challenged to bring our external realities into line with our internal ones. There are many uncried tears in this country, and every day we put off crying them, we simply create more tears for our children to cry later. Healing any area begins to heal them all.

DANCES WITH DEATH

Native Americans had lived on this continent for 1,000 generations before our European ancestors “discovered” it. The wisdom of the indigenous peoples of North America graced this soil for centuries before the white intruders arrived. It is estimated that in 1492 anywhere from 10 to 25 million indigenous people lived north of Mexico. Within 150 years, as a result of war and disease, there were fewer than a million Indians left here alive.”

Part of the irony of the devastation of the Native American population by white expansion is that the Western world is now near the brink of global disaster because we lack contact with the very quality of consciousness that so many of the Native peoples personified. We killed them, and now we need them. How much better off America would be today had our ancestors been wise enough to take advantage, on a mass level, of the extraordinary opportunity presented to them to marry European and Native American cultures. Using anthropologist Riane Eisler’s terms in her landmark book The Chalice and the Blade, they opted for the dominator rather than partnership model of human development. The only hope for humanity today is if we let go the dominator model and embrace the partnership model instead.

Americans love cowboys. We’ve embraced the myth of the brave pioneer, the explorer of strange lands, the conqueror of unexpected dangers. There’s an upside to that from which clearly we were born as a nation. But the myth has a dark side as well, and processing that myth is critical to our healing. Once again, the yang is extraordinary, but woe the absence of yin, of feeling and understanding. Whether the explorer cowboy pioneer we embrace is Christopher Columbus sailing to America, Buffalo Bill riding out West, or a modern CEO of a multinational corporation expanding uninvited into communities and nations around the globe, it should not be forgotten that that figure, despite his courage and self-sufficiency, is an outlaw. He is not known for his respect for other people, his honor of those who got there first, or his willingness to leave well enough alone when told that he can’t have his way.

The way consciousness operates is that a myth represents a part of ourselves. If we applaud in a myth what should not be applauded, then (1) we are stuck at that place within ourselves, and (2) we are at the effect of that place within ourselves. The price we pay for admiring the conqueror is that we will inevitably be conquered. The universe will make sure of it; it’s an area where we have something to learn.

Demythologizing this figure, removing him (or her) from his pedestal in our imagination, will help free us from his dominion. Our misplaced respect, as well as its dismantling, begins on a symbolic level. Our glorification of Christopher Columbus, for instance, is a mythological distortion, and repealing Columbus Day would be a move in the direction of national healing. For all the fiction created around him, Columbus was a murderer of indigenous peoples, and exalting him is a symbol of our neurotic attraction to violent outlaws. At our current stage of development, if someone violates one person, we can see that the person is a criminal. But if the individual violates many, the material power involved can weirdly obscure the horror of the deed. Part of our evolution involves healing our deadly unconscious connection between brute force and excitement. It is at the core of humanity’s problems, as evidenced by our national as well as personal politics. Once again, if just one person attacks another, it’s obviously horrible. But if a nation attacks another nation—and the attacking nation happens to be us—then all too often it’s a reason to have a drink and celebrate.

Given the fact that Columbus’s life was a model for the standard of enslavement and killing that came to characterize much of European settlement in the New World, to honor him is deeply insulting to our Native American citizens. Moreover, it stunts the collective psyche of the nation that we are so dishonest about our history.

In 1992, at the time of the quincentennial celebration of his “discovery” of America, there was a national rethinking of Columbus’s appropriate place in history. The National Council of Churches, the largest ecumenical body in the United States, called on Christians to refrain from celebrating the quincentennial, saying, “What represented newness of freedom, hope, and opportunity for some was the occasion for oppression, degradation, and genocide for others.” When it comes to celebrating Columbus or Columbus Day, we should just say no.

I have heard people acknowledge that Columbus himself poses a problem, yet they wouldn’t want to give up Columbus Day as a holiday because it celebrates the contributions of Italians to American civilization. If what we are excited about, and indeed we should be, is how many people from other lands have enriched America, then perhaps we could change Columbus Day to Immigrant’s Day; I realize how many people today would not want that, of course, but that’s all the more reason why we should propose it.

We are not so much undereducated regarding Native American history in this country as we are wrongly educated. For better or for worse, we are taught as much by television and movies as we are by textbooks, and in both cases, we have been fed misleading stereotypes regarding the “Cowboy and Indian” days. There was nothing romantic about that era from the Native American point of view. By the late 1800s, there was little left to do but clean up the mess after centuries of the white European’s complete devastation of the indigenous American culture. Native Americans by then were finished as a major civilization; their numbers were decimated and their cultural subjugation was nearly complete.

Brutish behavior toward Native Americans had started centuries before, but that behavior was codified into American law in the nineteenth century. In 1830, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, paving the way for the forced relocation of the Cherokee nation. What followed was an intense political controversy, in which many brave Americans—including the celebrated Tennessee Senator David Crockett—stood up for conscience against the injustice of the U.S. policy toward Native Americans. His words ring powerfully through the air today: “I would sooner be honestly damned than hypocritically immortalized.” Alas, however, he spoke them to no avail.

In his book Don’t Know Much About History, author Kenneth C. Davis writes:

Early in the summer of 1832, General Scott and the United States Army began the invasion of the Cherokee Nation.

In one of the saddest episodes of our brief history, men, women and children were taken from their land, herded into makeshift forts with minimal facilities and food, then forced to march a thousand miles (some made part of the trip by boat in equally horrible conditions). . . . About 4,000 Cherokee died as a result of the removal. The route they traversed and the journey itself became known as “The Trail of Tears” or, as a direct translation from Cherokee, “The Trail Where They Cried”. . . .

And so a country formed fifty years earlier on the premise “that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” brutally closed the curtain on a culture that had done no wrong.

While the Trail of Tears is the most dramatic single example of our nation’s violent behavior toward Native Americans, it was unfortunately part of a much larger historical pattern. What might have been a most glorious cultural partnership—we should remember how many Native Americans graciously welcomed their new white “friends” from across the ocean—became instead the most debased domination of one culture by another. It is left to us to atone for past errors, and seek to redress them.

While in some cases in our history it was death to Native Americans, in others it was merely death to their culture. “Helping” people become “more like us” is more oppression than liberation unless those people want to! And in so many cases, why would they? Native Americans could see, long before we did, the spiritual errors of the white man’s way, the insane brutality of an order that made the word “bigger” more important than the word “good,” and that values outer power over internal wisdom.

While the majority of Native Americans had sought to live peacefully with the white man, their proffers of peace had been met by murder, enslavement, and land theft. The basic suppression of Native American culture became an entrenched cultural phenomenon in America that continues to this day.

Throughout the twentieth century, Native Americans were the poorest of the poor in American society. In the early 1900s, Native Americans were concentrated in remote regions of the nation, distant from urban centers of economic growth. From 1890 to 1930, the federal government’s so-called allotment programs vigorously promoted farming as a means for Native Americans to become self-sufficient, but the farmland they were allotted was often arid and of poor quality. In some areas, many tribes were former nomadic hunters and had neither the knowledge nor the desire to become farmers. The history of this period is replete with examples of the most egregious violations of Indian rights.

After forty years, during which time Indians had failed to become self-sufficient, President Roosevelt created the Indian New Deal, trying to help reservations deal with the economic hardship created by the Great Depression. With the outbreak of World War II, however, the Indian New Deal was cut short and a new set of policies—“termination” and “relocation”—were designed to dissolve reservations and resettle American Indians to urban areas. Between 1952 and 1972, more than 100,000 American Indians were relocated to cities, under the belief, illusion, or pretext that exposure to urban labor markets would improve their standard of living. However, Native “Americans often lacked the education, skills, and experience to find employment and benefit from such relocation.

I am not a Native American, and so I can hardly speak for the Native American soul. But words like “relocation” are chilling to me. Forcing people who once roamed free and magnificently over lands they had called theirs for thousands of years, into little areas that we deemed unworthy of us and therefore good enough for them, or into the brash, clinkering maze of urban society on the pretense that “maybe they can find jobs there,” is culturally, spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically criminal. It warrants the grief and tears not only of Native Americans but also of all people of conscience and goodwill. Native American culture is not market based, but spirit based; that is not its primitivism but its sophistication. The sacred nature of all things is deemed far more important than the economic value of anything. We are the barbarians.

Since the early 1970s, the federal government has adopted a policy of “self-determination” that has allowed Native Americans to be more involved in issues affecting their reservations. Native American leaders have taken a variety of steps to increase economic activity, and many of the reservations are endowed with natural resources such as timber, minerals, and water. During the 1980s, many tribes established gambling operations, which have been lucrative for many, though understandably controversial.

Little we have done can heal the collective wound on the soul of the Sioux, the Navajo, the Cherokee, and others—peoples who bear the legacy of one of the most spiritually advanced races of people, now diminished in both stature and freedom. Today’s rates of alcoholism, poverty, and depression within the Native American community are understandable tragedies given the historical circumstances from which they stem.

If we’re interested in healing our national soul, we will officially atone to the Native American culture and its people. Among other things, this will have to include Atonement for the ways we continue to transgress today.

Now, of course, America is once again embroiled in a drama by which America’s shadow is threatening to obscure the light at the heart of Native American culture. The imperialistic tendencies of our ancestors never having been fully faced, and healed, we continue far too often to repeat the historical patterns by which we seem to feel entitled for no other reason than that we want to, to steal other people’s land, culture, and resources. Such is the reality today at Standing Rock, in North and South Dakota. Since 2014, Sioux tribes have been opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline, which would stretch 2,600 miles from Canada, through the United States, partially on land located above the Sioux water supply. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has reported more than 3,300 incidents of leaks and ruptures at oil and gas pipelines since 2010 and in 2017, 210,000 gallons of oil leaked from the similarly controversial Keystone pipeline, also in South Dakota. Sioux “water protectors” have been joined by thousands of others in protesting the Dakota pipeline, in defiance of gargantuan corporate and governmental efforts to ignore, and even trample on, Native American rights.

Once again, this is not a new historical contest; it is the continuation of an ancient one, one that has in fact never ended. The good news, if there is any, is how many Americans do now recognize that this is a struggle not only for the Sioux, but for the soul of America. The task of every generation is to do our part to further manifest America’s First Principles. More than water is at stake here; the principle of equality before the law is at stake here. Whether it is Native Americans seeking to protect their water in South Dakota, or poor residents seeking to protect their children from lead in the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, it behooves every American to ask ourselves whether the problem would exist if these things were happening in one of America’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

In the last few decades, there has been a growing renaissance of regard for the genius of Native American culture. Hopefully, this will increase awareness among all Americans, not only of the debt we owe to Native Americans for what they gave to us but also for what was done to them as a result of the white man’s expansion westward. Native Americans themselves have been having a good long cry for the last three hundred years; when our hearts are touched by the tragedy of Native American history, by the obliteration of practically an entire civilization, then surely we, too, will cry. Americans need a good cry over things such as this. Our apparent insensitivity to the sufferings of people “not like us” is a national character defect, a part of our political personality unworthy of who we really are. If one suffering child, of any color, were to be placed in front of the average American, I believe that that American would care and act to assuage the suffering. But there is something about lots of people suffering that, quite counterintuitively, makes Americans tune out instead of tune in. Awareness of our tendency to deny what is too difficult to face—and asking God to heal us of this collective defect and wound—is part of our path to higher consciousness and ultimately our national healing.

Dear God,
Please forgive us our grievous errors.
We atone and ask forgiveness for
our early treatment of the indigenous people,
the natives of the North American continent,
who suffered devastation at the hands of our forefathers.
We atone and ask forgiveness for
the places where we dishonor them still.
Help us, Lord,
to mend our thoughts that we no longer
rebel against Your Spirit, which is Love.
Forgive us now.
Turn our darkness into light, dear God,
through Your power which does these things,
that we might awaken to a new America.
May hatred be replaced by love here,
and true justice prevail at last.
May we meet each other in reborn brotherhood,
and begin again in love.

Dear Lord,
Please compensate for the injustices done
unto the Native American peoples,
and use us to bring forth new good.
We atone for the past,
and ask that our hearts be opened now.

Dear God,
Please restore what has been harmed
and heal us all.
To our Native American brothers and sisters, we say:
Please forgive us
for the evils that have been perpetrated
against your people
in the name of the United States.
At last,
may the spirit of your ancestors
shine joyfully in your children.
Forgive us, God.
Amen

RACIAL ATONEMENT

The United States is like a torch that has, in various chapters of our history, both enlightened the world and burned the world.

A wound very much alive in America is the tortured relationship between blacks and whites. For this, atonement is only the beginning of what is morally demanded of us. “I tremble for my country,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “when I consider God is just, and that His justice shall not sleep forever.” With the abolition of slavery we began the road to political justice, and with the civil rights movement we continued it. The underlying conflict regarding racial tension in America today is between those who essentially believe that we’ve done enough—that we’ve created social equality for African Americans—and those who believe that while we have made strides in certain areas, in other ways the legacy of slavery continues and we are still in the process of making true amends for its evils.

Thought is the causal level of the universe. In abolishing slavery, we did not abolish racist thinking. Indeed, such societies as the Ku Klux Klan were founded after the end of the Civil War, in direct response to the abolition of slavery. While external legislative remedies are an aid to racial healing, spiritual forces are necessary to heal the terrible wounds to the heart and soul. Cellular memory of hatred and abuse has accumulated among African Americans to such an extent that it has become a generational resentment, leaving only two choices on the road ahead: greater love, or greater violence.

There are myriad reasons why so many Americans resist a deeper level of atonement toward African Americans, much of it having to do with an ignorance of certain facts about our history. Part of our job, then, is to better understand our past so we can heal our present and free our future.

There is much to understand, much to dissect, much to pray about, and much to do. America will not heal on the issue of race until we acknowledge our culpability in institutionalizing racism not just in the past but in the present, and seek to make serious amends for transgressions which have occurred throughout our history. While it is true that millions of African Americans now have opportunities their ancestors could only dream of, it is not just what people have experienced but also what their parents and parents’ parents experienced that often moves through our veins and erupts like hot oil. Have we done a lot? Oh, yes; the abolition of slavery, civil rights legislation, and so forth were hardly nothing. But do we still have a lot to do? Again, oh, yes; current issues regarding voter suppression, police brutality, and mass incarceration show an alarming trend in the wrong direction. Through Atonement we must heal the past, and through the making of amends we can heal the future.

While it’s true that great strides have been taken in the area of civil rights—I remember as a child seeing a sign at the doctor’s office building in Houston, Texas, that said “colored bathrooms downstairs”—in other ways, the darker shadow of racism within the American psyche has simply morphed into other symptoms. The racial inequity in America’s criminal justice system is an example; according to a report released by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, black men receive prison sentences 20 percent longer than do white men for similar crimes. America is now incarcerating a higher proportion of African Americans than South Africa incarcerated black Africans at the height of apartheid.

One in four black Americans lives in poverty—double the rate of whites. Half of all black children in America under the age of six live in poverty. Unemployment for African Americans is almost twice as high as it is for whites. For the same educational background blacks can expect to make 69 percent of the income of whites. Economic injustice toward blacks in America is a systemically racist phenomenon, and to minimize it is further racism. When African Americans understandably object to underlying racism in economic or criminal policies, they’re liable to be told in one way or another: “There you go—complaining again!”

We are saying to people who are as afraid of the police as they are of the criminals, whose children do not have safe schools, whose children are at risk even walking to school, whose children do not even have enough school supplies and textbooks at their schools, whose children have practically no chance of finding a job in the neighborhood even if they do by some miracle muster the courage and the inner strength to make it through that dangerous maze and graduate from high school, that you’d better fly right now and not make a single false step from here on out, because we’ve had it up to here with helping you. I’m not an African American so I can’t speak for anyone else’s feelings, but if it were me I would find that deeply insulting.

The problems run deep, and so must the healing. Many Americans now understand that we need an integrative approach to the healing of our political wounds—one that recognizes that how people feel about something is not just a secondary issue. And that is where the power of Atonement comes into the mix, achieving the “qualitative change in our hearts” to which Dr. King referred. All over the country, people are gathering in racial healing circles to talk out these issues, pray for reconciliation, and seek the power of genuine forgiveness.

In 1997, President Clinton offered a public apology on behalf of the nation to the victims of the federal government’s Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, an infamous chapter in the history of American medical research. In that study, starting in 1932, 399 indigent black men from Tuskegee, Alabama, were told that they would receive free medical treatment for syphilis, but instead were left untreated and carefully monitored. Even after penicillin was found to be a successful cure in the mid-1940s, the men were left untreated. “To our African-American citizens, I am sorry that your Federal Government orchestrated a study so clearly racist,” said the President. The government, said President Clinton, “did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens.”

It was very heartening to hear the President make his statement, but that was decades ago. It is also very important that we not use our apologies for specific instances of racism to help us ignore the larger issue of our society’s debt to a long-enslaved people. It is not enough to treat the symptoms of racism; we must treat the disease itself. Tuskegee was part of a larger pattern of abuse that stemmed from a general feeling that the lives of black people do not deserve the same respect and consideration as the lives of white people. For millions of black children today, the social diseases of poverty, ignorance, and substandard medical care are going every bit as dangerously untreated as was syphilis in Tuskegee all those years ago. The bigger problem is far from behind us.

I do not believe the average American is racist, but I believe the average American does not truly realize how tilted our public resources are away from America’s black communities and in the direction of America’s richer white citizens. Although the emancipation of the slaves gave African Americans their political freedom, their bondage was replaced by a more subtle but equally oppressive form of slavery: an economic slavery that continues to this day. Lack of educational opportunities, lack of health care, lack of job training, lack of economic revitalization measures, lack of mass transit, and lack of adequate housing among poor segments of the African-American population are all examples of white America’s failure to pay one of its most important debts. In fact—and this is the larger issue—we do not have in America today a consensus that there is even a debt to be paid.

What is this in our national temperament? Why is it that we resist the recognition of the tremendous moral debt we owe to a people brought here against their will and enslaved for centuries? Are we afraid that our feelings of guilt, were they to be authentically owned, would overwhelm us? Why are we avoiding what any individual knows: that cleaning up the past is a prerequisite for a fruitful future?

After the Civil War ended, America’s former slaves were just left on their own to try to make lives for themselves. But in many cases, because of the rise of the most heinous forms of white supremacy, they were not actually allowed to. From lynchings to Jim Crow laws to segregation, blacks in the American South, though no longer slaves, were denied the ability to truly move forward. This problem was not addressed adequately until the 1960s. Given the historical circumstances of the nineteenth century, one can understand why Abolition itself seemed such an extraordinary thing—which it was. But while many of the descendants of slaves have clearly forged lives of triumph and abundance, millions more now pack the inner cities of the United States. For them, the trauma is far from over. Those neighborhoods are, in many ways, new slave quarters.

Today, one is reminded of the words of Dr. King, “If it happens to white people, they call it a Depression. If it happens to black people, they call it a social problem.”

An apology is the yin we need, and serious restitution is the yang. When African Americans say the word “reparations,” you’d think they had suggested something completely outrageous. But the general concept is legitimate. Germany has paid $89 billion in restitution to Jews since World War II. The United States paid $20,000 to every Japanese American who had been sent to a concentration camp here in America during World War II. Nothing short of a massive investment in America’s African-American poor—the true legacy of slavery—is a responsible sign of America’s willingness to heal itself racially. The most depressed communities in America, which are primarily African-American, cry out for help and we act like it’s some major liberal coup every time we even throw them a crumb.

After World War II, the United States spent $12 billion over four years on the Marshall Plan, rebuilding the devastated economies of Western Europe. Why would we be less generous to citizens of the United States? The idea that helping people—particularly people whose ancestors we have wronged, and transgressions against whom we have not yet fully redressed—is some liberal conspiracy promulgated by political Progressives intent on creating a culture of dependency, is itself but propaganda created to justify unjust economic policies.

We need rituals of atonement and apology for American racism, past and present. I have experienced such prayers, and their healing power is profound. But we also need to make a serious and honorable amends, in the form of substantial efforts to economically revitalize a segment of our population that happens to be poor and happens to be black. Why should our national attitudes be so punitive rather than loving? Dr. King said that the American Congress was much less compassionate than the American people, and I think that is true today. We are a better nation than this. If we will devote the next ten years of our history to turning this area of national shame into an area of national atonement, the gift to our children and our children’s children—all our children—will be immeasurable.

AN APOLOGY IS so important because, without it, there is no real atonement. It releases the emotional truth of a situation. Certain Americans think that blacks just need to forgive slavery and move on with their lives—but isn’t it easier to forgive someone when he or she has had the courtesy to apologize?

A sincere apology is more than just “emotional symbolism.” An apology is an act of atonement, and only in a society that trivializes faith is atonement viewed as mere symbol.

Faith, for those of us who embrace it, is as real as a car, a house, or a piece of legislation. The power of God in our lives is no less real than technology, business, or money. The fact that the action of faith is invisible to the physical eye does not make it a mere function of our imagination or a metaphor or psychological child’s play.

The trivialization of faith by the political status quo—from the Left with its rolled eyes, to the Right with its hypocritical words of support—has created a huge void in the center of American political consciousness. Faith in God is not faith in a particular religious dogma. Faith in God is faith in love, faith in a higher power, and ultimately faith in each other. Atonement means turning back the darkness through a prayerful embrace of the light.

Human beings, on the level of spirit, are not separate but joined as one. In the words of Dr. King, “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” The reason the Golden Rule is essential to all religious thought is that what we do to others will be done to us, and if not to us then to our children or our children’s children. We will reap what we sow, and what we withhold from others will be withheld from us. Time itself is a trick of the mind. We must give justly, not merely because we’re “good” but because we understand spiritual Law. It is no longer possible to be realistically satisfied with our own circumstances, if the opportunities for the same abundance are unfairly denied to others. The day of reckoning is at hand.

There are those who would point to blacks who have behaved criminally or dysfunctionally, and try to use that as justification for not performing our ethical duty to the African-American community. Or, conversely, one can point to black stars who have triumphed, and try to claim that because they made it big in America, that proves there is no real problem. But neither argument is valid. Every group of people has its shadow element, and every group has its geniuses. Neither is an excuse for failing to live up to our moral obligations. America has a huge—not a nonexistent, not a small, nor even a medium-sized—problem on its hands. We should see this for what it is and act accordingly.

When it comes to institutionalized systems of racial injustice, there is a myth in the United States that what has merely lessened has in fact ended. White America has not yet given up our collective attitude, however covert, that we are a superior race and culture. While there are many millions of people to whom this attitude truly does not apply, it continues to permeate our social, political, and economic policies. God does not love anyone more than He loves anyone else, and His universe will not endlessly tolerate an attitude on the part of white-skinned people that we have, for any reason whatsoever, greater right than others do to the opportunities afforded us by this great land. It is astonishing to me that a culture that mass-murdered Native Americans and brought millions of Africans here to be slaves has the audacity to still say to those and those like them, “Make sure you don’t ask for too much.”

Psychologically, we are subconsciously afraid of those whom we have wronged. We are afraid that they will punish us, as we secretly feel we deserve to be punished. I believe that this psychological dynamic is at the core of much of white America’s attitude toward African Americans. We are afraid to truly share power with blacks because we are afraid of what they might do with such power if they had it. We are afraid that they might treat us as we have treated them.

Meanwhile, with this attitude—however unconscious on our part—we perpetuate the very forces that would make anyone angry, thus adding to the already raging fire that burns within so many hearts.

Today, we have issues in our criminal justice system that are as troubling as any economic transgressions against our African-American population. Mass incarceration now constitutes the single largest urban industry in America, as tougher sentencing laws instituted in the 1990s have led to an explosion of our prison population. Unfortunately, while African Americans make up 12 to 13 percent of the U.S. population, they make up 35 percent of jail inmates and are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites. Add to that the clear instances of police brutality against blacks that have occurred over the last few years in cities such as Ferguson, MO, and Baltimore, MD, coupled with the extraordinary failure of our criminal justice system to convict those whom we saw in video after video, with our own eyes, proactively assault unarmed blacks, and I don’t know how any white American can say, “I don’t understand what they’re complaining about.

America will come face-to-face with this shadow element in our national psyche, or we will continue to pass along its effects from generation to generation. There will be no healing of America’s soul until we pray for racism to be removed from our hearts, and for the strength and political courage it will take to remove its tentacles from our society. We must stop pretending there is no problem here; our denial and obfuscation makes a mockery of love. Meanwhile, there is a profound spiritual authority among those who have already forgiven us, in spite of the fact that we have not yet even asked forgiveness. It is particularly prevalent among certain black women—particularly older ones—and it is one of the sacred spots on the American psychic landscape. I have been personally blessed by it. The day will come when we will see things with our spiritual eyes, and when we do, we will stand in awe before the power of this love. It is a big love. It is a blessing on us all. It does more to keep this country from exploding than any of us will ever know.

THESE WORDS OF Robert Kennedy resonate today:

I urge you to learn the harsh facts that lurk behind the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves. Our country is in danger: Not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our own misguided policies, and what they can do to this country. There is a contest, not for the rule of America, but for the heart of America.

The universe will compensate us royally if we do what it takes to truly right the spiritual course of this nation. White America will not lose money or power if it pays off its moral debts: The whole country will become richer and more powerful beyond our wildest imaginations. We will take a quantum leap forward as a nation if we embrace the opportunity before us and genuinely atone.

“The holiest of all the spots on earth,” according to A Course in Miracles, “is where an ancient hatred has become a present love.” Let us imagine the glory that could be, and pray to bring it forth.

Dear God,
Please forgive us for the evils of slavery,
racism and injustice.
Please heal, dear Lord,
our hardened hearts.
We atone to God,
and ask forgiveness of the African-American people,
for the slavery in both body and spirit
of your men, your women, and your children.
To you who have lived among us,
and suffered the sting of our unfair dominion—
For the abuse of both your ancestors
and your children,
we pray for the absolution of the Lord.
We ask that God restore us all,
and use us as His instruments
for the resurrection of good.
We deeply apologize for the errors of the past
and ask that America’s heart be opened now.
If we could rewrite history,
we would.
We cannot,
but God can.

Dear God, please do.
To the African-American community,
we acknowledge the tears of your people,
the suffering of your ancestors,
and the brilliance of your culture.
We bless your children,
please bless ours.
May God in His glory
forge a brotherhood between us,
for brothers indeed
we are.

Dear God,
Please work this miracle.
Amen

“THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM AND IRAQ

ONE OF THE reasons we need to atone for our treatment of both Native Americans and black Americans is that it will help us break the chain with that part of our national character that still wants to grab for what it wants in the world, without regard for the life or livelihood of others.”

Robert McNamara, who was President Johnson’s Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, wrote in his memoirs that the war was “a terrible mistake.” More than 59,000 Americans dead, and 2 million Vietnamese, plus countless other devastated American lives, and it was all “a terrible mistake.” McNamara also mentioned that he, and others who planned and directed that war, had no knowledge or understanding of the religion, language, philosophy, or character of the people of Vietnam—and no one to teach them, even if they wanted to learn.

After hearing that, if we were an enlightened society, we would all have gone to bed for three days. We would cry, moan, get sick, scream it out, punch punching bags, do whatever it takes to get the pain up and out of our cells. There is an inestimable human tragedy stuck to this nation as a result of that war, a significant aspect of which is the ever-more-frayed bond of trust between the American people and our government.

The Vietnam War Memorial is a uniquely powerful place because it is emotionally true. It doesn’t lie. It pictures the war as a huge black gash across our landscape, which it is. It appropriately memorializes the lives of those who died such purposeless, tragic deaths in Vietnam. And it helps us grieve not only for them but also for who we were as a nation before that war so wounded us.

At a traveling exhibit of the Vietnam Wall, I saw the following letter posted by an ex-Marine. It reveals more truth about that war than most history books do.

At a traveling exhibit of the Vietnam Wall, I saw the following letter posted by an ex-Marine. It reveals more truth about that war than most history books do.

On the Second of July 1967, Alpha and Bravo companies of the First Battalion, Ninth Marines were on patrol just a few hundred meters south of the DMZ.

Bravo blundered into a well-set ambush at the marketplace; soon, Alpha, too, was in the thick of it.

The enemy consisted of a regiment of the North Vietnamese Army supported by artillery, heavy mortars, rockets, anti-aircraft guns, and surface-to-air missiles.

Charlie and Delta companies were rushed to the field in support, but the outcome had been decided. The Marines were overwhelmingly outnumbered.

But, worse than that, they were equipped with Colt M-16 rifles. Their M-14 rifles, which had proven so effective and reliable, were stored in warehouses, somewhere in the rear.

The M-16s would fire once or twice—maybe more—then jam. The extractor would rip the rim off the casing. Then the only way to clear the chamber and resume firing was to lock open the bolt, run a cleaning rod down the barrel, and knock the casing loose. Soon it would jam again.

This was the rifle supplied to her troops by the richest nation on earth. The enemy was not so encumbered. They carried rifles that were designed in the Soviet Union and manufactured in one of the poorest nations on earth—the so-called People’s Republic of China. Their rifles fired. Fired every time. They ran amongst the Marines, firing at will.

Sixty-four men in Bravo were killed that afternoon. Altogether, the battalion lost around a hundred of the nation’s finest men. The next morning, we bagged them like groceries. We consigned their bodies to their families and commended their souls to God. May He be as merciful as they were courageous.

Today, people are still debating the issue: Was it the fault of the ammo? The fault of the rifle? Neither. It was the fault of the politicians and contractors and generals. People in high places knew the rifles and ammo wouldn’t work together. The military didn’t want to buy the rifle when Armalite was manufacturing it. But when Colt was licensed as the manufacturer, they suddenly discovered it was a marvelous example of Yankee ingenuity.

Sgt. Brown told them it was garbage. Col. Hackworth told them it was garbage. And every real Grunt knew it was garbage. It was unsuited for combat.

There was no Congressional investigation. No contractor was ever fined for supplying defective material. No one uncovered the bribes paid to government officials. No one went to jail. And the mothers of dead Marines were never told that their sons went into combat unarmed.

To all outward appearances, those Marines died of gunshot and fragmentation wounds. But a closer examination reveals that they were first stabbed in the back by their countrymen. The politicians, contractors, and generals have retired to comfortable estates now. Their ranks have been filled by their clones—greedy invertebrates every one. They should hope that God is more forgiving than I.

Brave men should never be commanded by cowards.
First Lieutenant Harvey G. Wysong
0100308
United States Marine Corps Reserve
First Battalion, Nine Marines”

It was not just Johnson and McNamara who made a terrible mistake in Vietnam: the entire nation made a terrible mistake in letting them do it. One would think that, after such a debacle, America would no longer allow those in power, in uniform, in “command,” to so easily make absurd decisions on our behalf. And yet we do. What a tragedy, all that false respect we had—and still have—for the trappings and illusions of worldly power. We still have not opened ourselves collectively to the shame and horror of that huge mistake. We have not atoned to our vets, to their families, to God, to other nations involved; or to ourselves. Until we do, we shall remain in some way at the effect of that mistake. Even worse, when you do not atone for a mistake—when you do not allow the horror of it to penetrate your conscious awareness—then you are almost doomed to repeat it.

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, I was one of many Americans saying, “This is Vietnam all over again.” At the time, of course, we were described by officialdom as facile thinkers who simply didn’t understand the severity of the situation. What we did understand, of course, was that Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11; there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq, and in fact that country played the part of buffer with Iran; and even if Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, let us be adult enough to remember we do business with countries that have weapons of mass destruction every day. Oh, and Saddam Hussein killed his own people? So have the Chinese, and we did not invade them.

We need a miracle of God to remove from us what has become an almost pathological romanticization of the military. I have great respect for the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces, but their idealization as ultimate and exclusive saviors in times of national distress is a disservice to them and to us all. If America spent more time and resources waging peace, we would find ourselves waging far less war. In the words of Defense Secretary General James Mattis, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, I need to buy more ammunition.”

Yet our attitudes in this area, judging from our military budget and behavior, are if anything less enlightened today than ever. We seem to have a slavish devotion to the idea that brute force beats soul force, spending one dollar on conflict prevention for every $1,885 on the military. The increased militarism in contemporary America is part of a larger, deeply appalling glorification of violence. We must heal ourselves of this, and with God’s help we can. In the words of James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Dear God,
Please forgive us
for the wars in Vietnam and Iraq,
and any other military misadventures
that might have been prevented.
We deeply apologize
to other nations we have wronged,
and to ourselves;
to their people,
and to our own.
And most particularly, dear God,
to our veterans,
and to the spirits of those soldiers who lost their lives,
may they rest in peace.
To those who were sent there and survived,
may you be restored.
To those of you who lost your loved ones,
may you find peace.

Dear God,
Please remove from this nation
our militaristic illusions,
our temptation
to see more power in hatred
than power in love,
and to believe the lies
of a war machine
before the truth
in our hearts.

Dear God,
Please forgive us
for our violation of any nation
toward whom we have done wrong.
Please lift us up.
Please heal this wound.
Amen

To heal ourselves, we must grieve our past.

You cannot dedicate a nation to the high ideals to which this one was dedicated and not expect the soul to rebel in some way when you start acting as if you didn’t really mean it.

From the genocide of Native Americans to our systemic racism to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the United States needs, as they say in the twelve-step recovery program, to take a “fearless moral inventory.” We are not to spend the rest of our lives in an endless string of mea culpas, but as soon as we say at least a few sincere ones, the miracle of atonement will begin to release our collective soul.

God is merciful. I do not believe He is angry, but He’s not kidding either. He has asked us to love each other as He so loves us. And to Him, these are not just words.

Chapter 4 will be emailed tomorrow!

Preface and Introduction

Chapter 1: Mystical Power

Chapter 2: Dreams and Principles

CHAPTER 2
DREAMS AND PRINCIPLES

Most all Americans were raised to believe and continue to be inspired by the thought that America is a place where dreams come true. People came to this country and continue to come—from villages and cities, farmlands and mountains, every continent and religious orientation—in search of a better life. They have traveled, often against unimaginable odds, packed like sardines in ships and boxcars, with an almost superhuman perseverance. They have desperately climbed walls while soldiers shot at their backs. They have rushed, clutching babies, to cross superhighways without getting run over, knowing that even if they made it across, border guards awaited them on the other side. Whether they came two hundred years ago or two months ago, escaping religious persecution or crushing poverty, their hearts were hearkening to the same song of hope: “Get to the United States. In the United States, things might be better.

Unless your ancestors were slaves brought here from Africa, someone in your family came to this country in hopes of finding an easier life. Someone’s prayer—regardless of whom your ancestors were—was that you might someday have a better life than his or hers. That you might live the American Dream.

A most pertinent question at this time in our history is, “What is the American Dream?” How we answer that question goes far toward defining our relationship to citizenship and to democracy itself. Sometimes we cynically dismiss the idea of an American Dream, spitting at the suffering of millions to whom the concept meant everything, absolutely everything. Surely it behooves us to ask, “What is this thing for which so many have lived and died? What is this gift that I have been given, yet which I often treat as though it is no gift at all?”

We are used to politicians exploiting the concept of the American Dream, using the phrase casually as though all of us understand what it means. But in fact it can mean several things, and in the last few decades, we have clearly emphasized its material rather than its philosophical implications. Is the American Dream a social and political concept—that everyone here can be free? Or is it an economic concept—that anyone here can get rich?

Today, the American Dream is defined by most public leaders in primarily economic terms. Economic progress is deemed synonymous with social progress—if the economy is booming, then America must be doing great! But such an assumption bears a closer look. There are, in fact, powerful countries in the world today—China, for instance—that have adopted economic freedoms while suppressing social and political ones. Money—either the fun of having it or the stress of achieving it—can easily distract us from essential truths regarding the nature of freedom itself.

If our bottom line is money, then we are committed to materialistic values. But if our bottom line is the dream of freedom, then the most important things are not material, and many things are more important than money. Money, like tears, can easily blur our vision. It can seem that because we have money, the dream is alive and well by definition. Or because we don’t have money, we don’t have a lot of time to think about it one way or the other. Or while it’s true we don’t have much money ourselves, we keep hearing constantly how good the economy is doing, so the dream must be flourishing for someone!

In fact, there is much more to freedom than economics. If our dream is merely to make money, then we’re dreaming small—we’re not asking for too much but for too little. We were born, as Americans, into the philosophical promise that here, in these United States, humanity could make its dreams come true. And the highest state of dreaming, for a person or for a nation, is not only that we will get something, but that we will become someone. From that state of being flows all abundance. Money doesn’t control the flow; consciousness controls the flow.”

What our souls truly long for is a state of being, and contrary to the insidious lies of either consumer or political advertising, that state cannot be bought. Money cannot buy internal freedom. It can in many cases buy the things we think will make us feel free, but like Dorothy when she finally meets the Wizard of Oz, we will always at last be forced to see that things have no power to take us home. Home is what we long for; but home is not a material but rather a spiritual condition. We will not be home until we truly, deeply love one another. When that occurs, money will not be allowed to interfere with our commitment to love. Healthy competition, yes; exploitation and economic injustice, no. And from our spiritually rising up that way, we will counterintuitively learn the true secret of material abundance: that it flows more effectively from love than from fear. Thinking that we need the material world makes us slaves to the material world; knowing that we are not of the material world turns us into its masters.

The fact that the American Dream has historically been driven not by money, but by dedication to the creation and maintenance of liberty, is the spiritual blessing that has drawn to us such extraordinary material fortune. As we have sought to bless humanity, so God has clearly blessed us. Our dollar bill is inscribed with a mystical seal “bearing the symbol of brotherly love. Nothing threatens our social order—including our economics—more than a diminished commitment to the dream proclaimed on that seal.”

We are living at a time when the needs of the marketplace are placed so high above the needs of people, here and around the world, that we are known as much for our hypocrisy as for our genius. And this is what we must correct, as other generations before us have corrected the errors of their times. We are a nation that has sold our soul to the highest bidder. And now our economics must be brought into alignment with our goodness, or we will lose the blessing at the core of our democracy. We will no longer be able to bequeath it to our children, as others, at often such great cost, bequeathed it to us.

AS A NATION, we have a collective psyche, a common river of thoughts and feelings that runs through the soul of every American. That river runs beneath our dreaming like an underground source of nourishment and aid—America’s emotional Nile. The American Dream, when best understood, is the fact that we have the right to dream at all. It is the right to expect that our talents and abilities and diligence, not the prejudices of others, will determine the nature of the lives we live. That is a spiritual principle, and a radical thought, to which the nation was committed at its founding. While reality often contradicts the dream, and various forces would seek to squelch it, the American Dream stays alive within the collective mind.

A national dream, in order to remain viable, must be as a spark reignited in the heart of each generation. Otherwise, our river of hope dries up. A dream doesn’t rest on reason but, rather, flies on the wings of passion, and unfortunately, most modern education systems do not honor passion. We are not taught to love our great historical truths but merely perhaps to memorize them. For far too many of us, the embrace of essential democratic principles has not been the reenactment of a courageous, experiential response to the darkness of ancestral history, but merely a mechanical recitation of words. And yet poignantly, many millions of Americans would still willingly risk their lives for these principles. There is something in us well aware of an unutterably precious nugget of truth in the vision of our forefathers, which in some mysterious way still applies to all of us.

Our right to dream whatever life we wish for ourselves, and our responsibility to respect the dreams of others, is the fulcrum of the American ideal. Even in the most oppressive societies, some people have the right to dream. What makes a democracy different is that we are all supposed to have that right, and a reasonable opportunity to make our dreams come true.

Many people in America have lived lives of very limited, even cruelly squelched dreams not through any fault of their own but, through accidents of history and various forms of obstruction and injustice. That has been true in the past and it is true today. To deny this is not to honor the dream but to mock it. If any Americans are denied the right to weave their dreams, then America itself isn’t weaving hers. It is the job of every generation of Americans to further expand and fulfill the dream of freedom and justice for all.

In former generations, both bondage and freedom had mainly a material face. Slavery, oppression, and injustice were externalized, therefore our dreams of ending them were made external as well. In ending slavery, we committed to the dream. In passing child labor laws, we committed to the dream. In passing civil rights legislation, we committed to the dream. Every generation plays out the struggle between those who would expand the dream and those who would constrict it. Reinterpreting the American Dream to mean very little more than a job that pays well is to rob it of its deeper meaning. Now, in order to expand the dream of freedom for the times in which we live, our main responsibility is to re-examine the meaning of both freedom and bondage.

“Today, our states of bondage are not material so much as emotional and psychological and spiritual, and all states of material bondage still existing would disappear in a moment were we to free our hearts and minds. What we most need to be free of now is our tendency to distract ourselves from the pain of the world, our tendency to isolate rather than join with others, our own selfishness and narcissism and unforgiveness and greed. Those tendencies are not our sins, but our wounds. They are our modern prisons, and the modern version of the American Dream is to break free of these chains within ourselves.

THE AMERICAN DREAM began with those who came here to escape their nightmares. Some, in fact, found their nightmares here. Our Founders were the oddest mix of all: they both articulated the dream for themselves and their children and, in the case of those who owned slaves, perpetrated a nightmare on others. Now we find ourselves, as their descendants, with the job of maintaining and extending our national dreams, and awakening from the horrors of our national nightmares.

Our Founders were not perfect people—a fact to be neither whitewashed nor ignored—but they reached nonetheless for extraordinary ideals and encased them in a Constitution that institutionalizes our liberty. They risked their lives signing the Declaration of Independence, thus making a historic break from the past—a past they deemed an unworthy template for the human experience. They changed the course of human events, reaching beyond the accepted boundaries of what was to be expected from life, stretching the limits of human possibility. They left in their wake a compelling promise, not only to Americans but also to people throughout the world, that a society could exist in which the individual talents and abilities of free, self-governed people could come together fruitfully, harnessed in the service of a collective good.

They also left in their wake, of course, the tragic irony of the evil disconnect between a nation dedicated to the rights of all men, and the institution of slavery, the oppression of women, and the genocide of Native Americans. The juxtaposition of those historical realities lies at the crux of our ongoing narrative.

The founding of America is not a tale drawn from one-dimensional, perfect lives. Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Adams, and Paine were very real people—nothing in their day like the formal and official portraits of them that now hang in polite museums. The same is true of their successors—the great Ameri“can statesmen, political thinkers, social reformers, philosophers, writers, and artists who have helped us refound ourselves from that day to our own time.

In making wooden characters of very juicy people we have diminished our emotional connection to them. Lincoln would bury his head in his hands each time news reports reached him of massive casualties in the Civil War, sobbing, “I cannot bear it, I cannot bear it.” Polio victim Franklin D. Roosevelt clung to the arm of his son in a heroic effort to appear to walk on his own to the podium at the 1932 Democratic Convention, knowing that if Americans thought he could not walk they would never elect him. He succeeded, and was then described by a friend as having been “cleansed, illumined and transformed by his pain.

What is important is not merely that we record history, or that we understand it, from a seemingly objective perspective. What matters is that we take it personally, that we own it in the deepest part of ourselves, that we might solidify its power where it is something to be proud of and try to transform it where it is not.

The great figures of American history still reach us from the grave, having said and done things that affect each of us in a practical manner, every day of our lives. Their stories illuminate not only what happened before but most significantly what is likely to happen again. We are challenged by an adequate knowledge of history to measure our lives in relation to it, to succeed where others have faltered, to run the race that others ran, to try to keep the wheels of history moving in a positive direction. The past teaches us, most important, that the movement of history in a positive direction can never, ever be taken for granted.

Yet our generation did take it for granted. As inheritors of our Founders’ vision, we just seemed to assume that the vision was being looked after by someone. We acted like heirs to a huge financial fortune who didn’t seem to think that we needed to look after the accounts. We figured showing up to vote every four, maybe every two years would be enough; we didn’t seem to realize we were also going to have to think about what was happening. We figured “political people” were doing that.

But the Founders’ vision is of a country governed by its citizens, and citizens who do not vigorously think about their government will end up governed by someone else. And that is exactly what has happened.

Having lost our revolutionary fervor—bought off, in the end, so easily—we became like the royalists who did not support the revolutionaries, who chose to remain in the yoke of serfdom, trading the sometimes uncomfortable quest for freedom for the comfort of false security. Our Founders asserted the dramatic proposition that if ordinary people are deliberative and responsible, then they can run the affairs of their nation. But decades ago, too many of us stopped doing that. With our voter participation among the lowest of any democracy in the world, we have allowed an unholy alliance of government—like a new monarchy—and corporate influence—like a new aristocracy—to take control of events in a way that would have made our Founders shudder. Surely, were they here now they would worry for the dream of liberty that they weaved for their posterity. We have not lost our rights, but neither are these rights profoundly secure. We are much like a massively bleeding person who has not died yet. That person will die unless transfused. And we will lose the precious blood of our democratic freedoms if we do not wake up and act.

We became a distracted nation, knowing more about the lives of celebrities than of our great historical figures, and more about the way our toys worked than the way our democracy works. Yet now, with the experience of the last few years, millions are waking up to the crisis this has created. There is a hunger rising among us to get back to the things we forgot along the way.

Revisiting the First Principles of our democracy are an essential tool in reclaiming it. The principles that our Founders elucidated in the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights, then continuing with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, are the sacred powers at the core of American democracy. They are not rules but values. They act as pillars upholding the dynamic energy of American democracy, and they can handle “any assault except the people’s diminished commitment to them. It is seriously detrimental to our individual and collective good that the average American citizen can’t quite tell you what those principles are.

Our democratic principles are the essential ingredients in the American Dream. They protect the dream and stave off the nightmares. They are the light at the center of our democratic hopes.

FIRST PRINCIPLES

America’s First Principles are simple and basic. They are undergirded by an even more basic idea: that we are a democracy and thus govern ourselves. These principles are guideposts for the process of doing so. They are the keys to our freedom and the freedom of our children.

We must reclaim our passion for these principles. Citizenship means more than voting, paying taxes, or obeying laws. It is, when we choose it to be, a powerful expression of self, the absence of which makes it easy to steal from us the powers we have been granted.

America’s First Principles are not partisan issues. They are the things on which we have agreed to agree. We agree that all people should be equal before the law. We agree that power in America shall stem not from the government to the people but rather from the people to the government. We agree to seek to balance individual rights with protection of the general welfare. And we agree that people shall have the right to freely practice and share their religious, social, and political beliefs without threat of external tyranny.

A nation “so conceived,” in the words of Lincoln, is divinely inspired by the universal blessing inherent in these First Principles. Divine inspiration is not a metaphor. From a spiritual perspective, it is a literal power to transcend and subsume all lesser ideas.

There are dramatic examples throughout our history of contests between those who would commit the nation to its stated principles and those who would compromise those principles for short-term personal or economic gain. The Civil War, for instance, pitted those who chose to hold the nation to its principle of equality for all against those who tried to secede from the Union rather than give up slavery and comply.

In other words, our governmental principles are often more advanced than we are, owing to the extraordinary prescience and genius of our Founders. In 1801, the newly elected President Jefferson admonished the nation to make “periodic recourse to first principles,” relying on their power and the power of our collective agreement to adhere to them, to guide us as beacons through darkened times.

It is extremely rare that an issue comes up in American society that does not have light cast upon it by our First Principles. They form America’s political bedrock. Today, our problem is that most Americans do not know what those principles are. We were either taught them at school (where, in many cases, they’re not even taught anymore!) and have forgotten them, or we actually never learned. We therefore tend to think of political negotiation as a fight between competing opinions, rather than a process by which we all work toward a higher realization of principles on which we already agree.

Our First Principles stand outside of time, providing a stillness that keeps our nation centered through the centrifugal tides of historical change. Referring back to them collectively is an exercise of democratic authority. We have allowed the stresses and merchandising of modern life to lure our attention toward lesser things, creating a crisis in American democracy.

The First Principles are our tools; every citizen needs to have them in his or her mental pocket. You don’t have to be a lawyer to understand them; James Madison was the leading spirit among those who wrote the Constitution, and he was not a lawyer. You don’t have to be a college graduate; George Washington was not a college graduate. You don’t have to be a so-called expert to have a valid opinion. You don’t have to be anything but a citizen to be the source of power in the United States. In fact, that’s the entire point of our power: that it belongs to “We, the People.”

These principles are planted firmly in the soil of human conscience, and they are important for their spiritual as well as political significance. They hold power not only for us but also for people throughout the world, because they reflect the tenets of a higher law. Hearts around the world have hearkened to these principles, from French Revolutionaries in the eighteenth century to Chinese dissidents in Tiananmen Square.

And yet, for this country, only one thing matters: do our hearts hearken to them now?

I once said to my then six-year-old daughter, an avid Barbie fan, “Darling, Barbie looks anorexic. Someone with a body like that would be in the hospital with a very bad disease. Her hair is stupid and her values are questionable. Do you think she ever does any charity work?” My daughter looked me squarely in the eye and said, “Mommy, I love who I love. I’m not going to change my thoughts.” I gulped. I didn’t agree with my child’s opinion, but I was glad she was so quick to defend her right to have one. You’re never too young to learn that you have the right to your opinions, and to your freedom to express them.

You’re also never too old to make sure that no one ever, ever gets away with compromising that freedom, as long as you’re around.

PRINCIPLE 1: EQUALITY OF RIGHTS AND OPPORTUNITY: That all of us are equal before God and should be treated that way by the American government.

The higher point of our equality as Americans is not just that it reflects our Founders’ thoughts but that it also reflects God’s thoughts. To commit to equality is to align with the will of God, that we should love each other as He loves us.

The wording of the Declaration of Independence is as follows: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

This principle is easy to take for granted, until we remember exactly what it means. It means that in this country, it is not the circumstances of our birth, but the fact that we are American, that determines our rights and opportunities to pursue happiness. Note that the Declaration says it is the responsibility of government to secure those rights.

James Madison, the father of our Constitution, wrote, “Who are to be the electors of the federal representatives?” His response defined the ideal meaning of equality in America: “Not the rich more than the poor; not the learned more than the ignorant; not the haughty heirs of distinguished names more than the humble sons of obscure and unpropitious fortune.”

The ideal of equality, and our progress toward its full manifestation, is central to American democracy. Regarding both rights and opportunities, equality as a first principle is seriously threatened in America today—yet the threat is largely underestimated. It is couched in words that imply we take equality for granted here, that of course we all believe in it, and therefore we need not be vigilant on its behalf.

Routinely today, however, this first principle is made to stand second or third in line. Yes, we have made strides—in civil rights, women’s rights, and so on—but no, this is not the time to relax. Those with money today have become, in reality though not in principle, more “equal” than anyone else.

Corporate welfare (tax subsidies to our wealthiest corporations) increases to the tune of billions of dollars, while programs that support the health and well-being of our own children are obliterated or turned over to already overburdened private charities. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr: “If they give it to the rich, they “call it a subsidy; if they give it to the poor, they call it a handout.” The American public is being asked to acquiesce in an unethical arrangement whereby we withdraw support from poor children to make sure that the children of parents more well off are taken care of in an even more privileged fashion. If we believe in the principle of equality, then the rich should not be granted greater opportunity than the poor.

Every time we take support away from nutritional, medical, educational, or job training and creation programs that benefit those who need them most—then give tax breaks or corporate subsidies to the far more privileged—we are attacking the first principle of equality in America. Yet that is the basic trend in American government today.

The most dramatic form of inequality in America now is economic inequality. The gap between rich and poor has been steadily increasing in this country for more than twenty years. In the words of the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “We can have a democratic society or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.” Thomas Jefferson said that we must endlessly struggle for, and never be complacent until we have achieved, equal opportunity for modest prosperity and equal treatment before the law of every American citizen. And economic inequality extends its unjust influence: criminal justice, for instance, is statistically biased in the United States. If you’re poor in America today, your chances for justice are far less than if you’re rich.

Where there is little adequate education—as in the inner cities of America—there is no equality of actual opportunity. Where there is little adequate health care—as among America’s poor and even some of our middle class—there is no equality of actual opportunity. Where there are very few opportunities for true professional advancement—as is also true among America’s poor—there is no equality of actual opportunity.

Many issues look different when seen through the lens of the first principle of equality—universal health care, education, and criminal justice, to name a few. The fear-based thinking of the world gives emphasis to our differences, and thus our separation. Such thinking diminishes our commitment to equality; the right of any American is the right of every law-abiding American.

It’s impossible to appreciate that our rights matter, without appreciating that our personhood matters. Every person matters; in that single thought lies the moral authority of American democracy. Our rights to free public education, free speech, a free press, freedom of religion, and free association among ourselves—all of these freedoms exist to create and maintain our equality as citizens.

It is very important that we teach our children what this means, and why it matters. Our rights matter because people matter. No one is supposed to get to tell you what you can do or say in the United States, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Anyone who understands history, or current world affairs, knows what an awesome blessing this is, and what gratitude we owe those who have given their lives to secure it, that we can assume in this country even minimum compliance to the principle of equality. Throughout the world, there are people living in fear that they might “disappear” if something they say or do offends the official order. Women in Afghanistan today, in areas still under Taliban control, risk torture or death if they even wear the wrong clothes. The principle of equality is a very, very serious issue indeed.

Our equality before the law, theoretically, is not up for discussion. It is the birthright of every American; it is a given. But just because something is encoded in law doesn’t mean we can take for granted its constant enforcement. The only way a legal principle remains safe is if it remains alive in our hearts. We must be ever vigilant that the law, and the principles which uphold it, are not compromised while we’re not looking. To think otherwise is not “being positive,” but childish.

Martin Luther King, Jr., used to say that he was not going to Washington to ask for rights for black Americans, but to demand the rights they had been given already. To threaten anyone’s liberty is to threaten everyone’s liberty. As my father used to say, “What they can do to anyone, they can one day do to you.

The political question, for instance, should not be, “What do you think of LGBTQ people?” but rather, “Do we or do we not remain committed to the principle of equality for all, and how does that principle apply to the quest for LGBTQ rights?” Whether someone in America likes someone else in America is irrelevant to what both of their rights should be before the law. The only way we can be vigilant on behalf of our children’s freedom is if we are vigilant on behalf of everyone’s freedom.

In the words of Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor who was imprisoned by the Nazis for eight years because he spoke out against Hitler, “First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, but I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

PRINCIPLE 2: E PLURIBUS UNUM: That within our diversity lies a national unity—that we are at the same time a people who reflect and embody diversity, yet are united in our fealty to these treasured First Principles.

Our Founders were students, directly and indirectly, of a wide-ranging body of ideas and information. Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were careful and respectful students, for instance, of the government and politics of the Iroquois Confederation and other Native American peoples.

In the Iroquois Indian Confederacy, different Native American tribes retained their individuality yet created a common network for the sake of progress and mutual protection. In that sense, they were progenitors of our republic. They were different, yet in certain ways they were one. Echoes of that governmental philosophy can be found in America’s first principle called E Pluribus Unum, or “Unity in Diversity.”

There are people in America who emphasize our unity yet fail to appreciate our diversity, just as there are those who emphasize our diversity yet fail to appreciate our unity. It is important to honor both. It is our unity and our “diversity that matter, and their relationship to each other reflects a philosophical and political truth that democracy requires.

Unity and diversity are not adversarial, but rather complementary elements in American society. Both make us better. We are woven from many diverse threads, yet we make one piece of fabric; we are many and one at once. You’re Catholic and you’re an American; you’re gay and you’re an American; you’re black and you’re an American. Neither identity is to be sacrificed for the sake of the other.

When the country was founded, our diversity was determined mainly by our geographical dimension. Massachusetts was very different from the Carolinas; they remained true to their individual identities while at the same time forging one American culture. Our statehood now is less a critical geographical concept than an ideological one; our ethnicity, beliefs, and economics define our differing “states” today. We are different colors, different religions, different beliefs, and different cultures. Yet we are united in our fealty to these common principles. It is not our weakness, but in fact our strength, that we are represented in this country by citizens from literally every other nation of the world. Our power lies not in excluding each other but in including each other, not only legally but also emotionally and spiritually. We are all Americans, and we are involved in a great experiment together. No group of Americans are the “normal” Americans, no group of Americans monopolize truth or wisdom or righteousness, and no group of Americans deserve more or less protection or opportunity from the American government.

“It is when we have a healthy experience of our individual identity, that we can then most easily accept sharing a larger one. But that first step cannot be skipped; it’s wrong to expect someone to play down his or her religious or racial identity in service to a larger identity until he or she has first been shown honor for what that individual identity is. I’ll stop going on and on about being a woman once I feel you respect me as one. At that point—once “we have all been acknowledged as individually significant—it’s important that we turn our attention to the betterment and preservation of the nation we all share.”

Unity in diversity is a principle demanding our personal maturity. We must develop the ability to tolerate the creative chaos of many voices and opinions all expressing themselves at once; to not seek control over the thoughts or behaviors of others just because they are different from us; and to listen with respect and recognize the dignity of those with whom we disagree. It is not a First Principle in America that any one group gets to be right. It is a First Principle that each of us, and each of the diverse cultures living together here, has valuable things to say and to contribute. Allowing everyone to do so is central to our liberty, our genius, and our progress toward a greater good.

As children of God, it’s not just our equal rights that should be stressed but our equal brilliance as well. During the spring of 1998, I was invited to speak at a gathering hosted by the Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, in Memphis, Tennessee. The event was called a Unity Banquet, held as part of the celebration of a Season for Nonviolence, in which eight different local ethnic groups shared some unique expression of their own cultures—dance, song, clothing, food, and so on. Young Muslim women did a magnificent performance piece, Mexican women modeled dresses from their native communities, small Chinese children gave a martial arts demonstration, Ukrainians shared ethnic foods, and the like. Before the event, I had no conscious prejudice against any of those groups. But neither had I the deeply profound respect and admiration for their cultures that I gained that day. I had never before been moved to tears by their unique contributions to the human spirit.

“James Madison once said that “tolerance is not enough” because, psychologically, tolerance still implies judgment. In order to experience the highest possibilities of American culture, the social fruition of the ideal of E Pluribus Unum, we will need to do more than merely tolerate each other. America won’t fulfill its most noble dream until we actually come to admire each other for the glorious characteristics of our uniquely individual ethnic identities. It is only when we have come to the point where we genuinely bless each other’s children, and recognize their potential brilliance, that we will be on the path to the possible America.

There are many people in America today who “tolerate” others through clenched teeth, who “respectfully disagree” with a look that is chilling. Their look seems to say, “Until we take over, I accept that we haven’t yet.” America belongs to all of us. Equality means that none of us is inherently more valuable than anyone else. Freedom means that we actually like it that way.

PRINCIPLE 3: BALANCE OF INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY AND PROTECTION OF THE COMMON GOOD: That it is the responsibility of government to protect the general welfare, yet with enough checks and balances

America ideally seeks to balance the needs of the individual with an appreciation of our common good. This principle is central to our greatest achievements, but also to our greatest political battles.

Sometimes we’re appalled because the government is getting into our business and we think it should keep its nose out; other times we’re appalled because we feel the government hasn’t adequately taken care of the collective good. When American politics is at its best, we create a healthy balance between the two.

Yes, it’s true that we should protect the environment and the children, our most precious resources—but yes, it’s also true that an individual should be free to pursue his or her own economic goals with as little interference or obstruction as possible. Yes, it’s true that law enforcement officials should have the necessary power to protect us—but yes, it’s also true that the individual should be protected from too much police or governmental interference. Collective welfare versus individual rights; this is the dynamic tension underlying most political debate today, and it’s amazing how passionate we get when we’re revved up about one or the other.

Don’t you dare try to take away my right to own a gun” versus “Can’t the government get all these guns off the street?” “How dare the government tell me how to regulate my business” versus “Why won’t the government protect us from the chemicals in that pesticide?” What so often shows up as violent competition becomes, when we truly learn to listen to each other, the stuff of creative synergy. Freedom doesn’t mean we will always agree; it means we all have important points of view to contribute to the mix.

President Eisenhower once said that the American mind at its best is both conservative and liberal. We need to conserve those things that are eternally true and still retain the ability to respond liberally and spontaneously to the immediate demands of our time. What’s so lacking in American politics today is people showing adequate respect for those who disagree with them. An intelligent person can understand that both individual and collective rights are important to the nation. Depending on the issue, liberals and conservatives stress different sides of the equation.

A true liberal doesn’t think government can fix all our problems, and a true conservative doesn’t believe that whatever is good for corporate America is always good for Americans. Yet there are many on both sides of our political debate who would stereotype their adversaries as thinking that way. What is lacking, obviously, is a dignified, civilized center. We have too little “golden mean” in politics today. Somebody is always pointing a finger, it seems, saying “He,” “She,” or “They” are the enemies of America, when in truth, our greatest enemy is that pointed finger.

After the hardest-fought presidential election of his time, Thomas Jefferson reminded his countrymen, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Civic life in America should include vigorous debate between liberals and conservatives as well as everyone else; that is democracy in action. But the debate must remain within the bounds of mutual respect and dignity or our civil life is no longer civil. Those who view political debate as merely “your needs and desires versus my needs and desires”—with no respect for America’s need to balance individual liberty with the common good—bring down the political process.

Individual liberty matters as well as the collective good. I’m as guilty as the next person of giving in to anger when I feel strongly about an issue and someone else either doesn’t share my passion, or works to thwart the goals I feel are important. In the Preamble to the Constitution, it says, “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” To me, “promoting the general welfare” includes the care and protection of America’s children.

I’m passionate about the fact that one-fifth of America’s children live in poverty, that millions of our children go to schools in which there aren’t even working toilets, in slums where the social and economic conditions are as dire as during the worst days of the Great Depression. In many cases, these kids are living with circumstances as desperate as any war zone, daily dodging bullets; meanwhile, Congress gives more and more economic largess to the richest among us while failing to provide food support, universal health care, access to higher education, adequate job-training programs, small-business loans, or other resources to millions who need such things to lift themselves out of poverty. To add to that, the funneling of our material resources ever more consistently in the direction of those who already have them is often couched cynically and insidiously in terms of service to the American people.

But as passionately as I feel about those things, I also know this: as outraged as we might be at the sight of injustice, we must remain equally excited by the possibilities for a better world that lie on the other side of it. In God, all things are possible. The enlightened activist is fueled by the faith that another kind of world is reachable, and that it is the purpose of our lives to bring it forth. That, to me, is the American Dream.

Optimism is an essential part of the American character; out of it we were born, and only with it shall we repair. Our national soul depends upon it. We must not allow cynicism or anger to warp us. As long as I’m working against something I hate instead of for something I love, I’m of the old and not the new. The politics of a healed America is a love for what could be and a reach for the possible.

And none of us has a monopoly on truth. It’s hard at times to develop a nonviolent, loving, and respectful attitude toward our political adversaries, but anything less keeps us stuck on the political wheel of suffering. Saint Thomas Aquinas once wrote, “We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in the finding of it.” I’ll write that out and put it on my bathroom mirror, if you’ll write it out and put it on yours.

PRINCIPLE 4: RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: That every American shall worship how he or she wishes, if he or she wishes, according to the individual’s own conscience and with no governmental interference in that right.

The separation of Church and State was not meant to religiously constrict us, but rather to religiously free us. We were all taught as children that early Americans came to this country fleeing religious persecution, committed to the creation of a society in which no one could be told by the government either how to worship or even whether to worship. And neither would their new government be constricted in any way by an official religious dogma. Both government and religion are thereby protected from interference by the other. A thick line between Church and State keeps our religious lives free of any government pressure and our government free of religious pressure. It is an enlightened and enlightening concept.

Our Founders did not seek to block the religious path but rather to free it of all obstruction. They recognized that religious dogma can be as detrimental to the human spirit as political dogma, and can often be used to restrict the rights of others. That was not to be allowed in the United States. Our Founders themselves were men of spiri“tual conviction, though many of them would be hard pressed to meet the standard of what some people call religious today. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against any form of tyranny over the mind of man.” He recognized religious tyranny to be as oppressive as any other.”

But separating the State from the undue influence of religious institutions was in no way meant by our Founders to be an impediment to the search for higher truth, within the individual or within society. They embraced the Creator while refusing to pay homage to specific dogmas claiming to monopolize religious truth. That stance was in support, not rejection, of the true religious experience. The separation of Church and State was intended to support our spiritual flowering by guaranteeing its freedom.

Spirituality, to many of us, is as important to the soul as is oxygen to the body. Without it, the world can make sense to the mind but it can never make sense to the heart. But the spirit is an internal phenomenon, and civilization has always suffered when any particular dogma or doctrine has sought to impose itself upon the peoples of the world. The highest, most spirit-filled religious consciousness is a living water, and that water is poured into the world not through religious doctrine but through the human heart. Love itself is the highest religious experience. No religion has a monopoly on God because religion itself has no monopoly on God. God is looking to us for more than words alone; He is looking for our forgiveness, mercy, and love. Ecclesiastical, orthodox religious systems are not the only arbiters of spiritual force. They are not the only spiritual guides. We will not be renewed by a worldly religious authority, but by the spirit of love at the heart of all the great religious traditions.

Religious freedom, as an American first principle, means no one in America has a right to monopolize the religious discussion. Even today, people throughout the world face torture and murder for not seeing God the way someone else does. It is one of the cornerstones of American liberty that we make a stand for religious freedom. Jefferson wrote, “Toleration is not enough. What we need is liberty, fully protected by the law, to believe or not “believe as you see fit.” America was not founded to protect the definition of God as proposed by any one group or individual; it was founded to protect our liberty to think however we wish to think.”

We must not indulge any group of Americans who seek to ban other people’s conception of spirituality from the public sphere on the basis that “it is not of God,” when in fact it simply isn’t in line with their conception of God. We are not a Christian nation. We are not a Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu nation. We are not a Buddhist, Sufi, Baha’i, or any other officially religious nation. We are not an atheistic nation. We are a religiously pluralistic society in which one’s freedom to worship as he or she wishes, or not to worship at all, is fully protected by law. Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Obviously, the principle of religious freedom is as relevant to our politics today as it was over two hundred years ago. Such issues are never truly put to bed; they simply come around again and again until human consciousness has evolved to the point where they are no longer an issue at all. As Americans, we have the blessing of our First Principles to guide us at times such as these, to give us the moral authority, the courage and conviction, to make a stand for our essential freedom at times, like this one, when forces are arrayed against them.

THERE ARE THOSE in America today who seem to distrust the mechanics of liberty. Democracy is indeed a radical proposition. It is posited on the notion that each of us, from the depth of our own wisdom, brings to society the unique and precious gift of our own viewpoint and experience. We do not, and will not, always see things the same way; that is not a bad thing, but a good thing. Nowhere does this hold true more than in the area of religion.

In making a basic study of comparative religion—reading such books, for instance, as Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions—we see the universality of basic religious themes. Throughout the world, from Ireland to Bosnia to the Middle East, and increasingly in the United States, violence comes from fear born of ignorance of another’s religious viewpoint. There is one God, and one God only. He pours Himself into many vessels, expressing His Truth in many ways, but still His Truth is one. And that Truth is love.

Religious pluralism is a most crucial issue in the world today. We should be learning more about our own religious traditions and the traditions of our fellows. In this way we will come to know the unity in our religious diversity, without which we cannot appreciate the full genius of our American system of government or the greater glory of God.

RELIGION CAN BE a confusing concept. The word itself comes from a root that means “to bind back.” The actual religious experience is a “binding back” of our hearts to the truth within. An example of a spiritually based political force in America was the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Although emanating from Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, its call reached not only Christians but all people of goodwill, for its message was one of brotherhood and nonviolence. That’s what made it so radical and also so purely religious. King’s goal of achieving the “beloved community” is a vision at the heart of not one but all religious faiths.

There is an important distinction to be made between a religiously based and a spiritually based political impulse. While religion is a force that either creatively or noncreatively separates us, spirituality is a force that unites us by reminding us of our fundamental oneness. The religionization of American politics is dangerous; the spiritualization of our political consciousness is imperative.

When violence erupted in Israel in September of 1996 over the Israeli opening of a tunnel near the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the clear difference between religious dogma and spiritual passion was obvious. For three of the great religions of the world, this particular piece of land is holy: Muslims believe that Muhammad ascended to heaven from there, the Jews believe that it is the spot from which God created the universe, and the Christians hold that Christ walked past there on his way to the cross. While a strictly exoteric religious perspective tempts us to compete for land, a genuine spiritual experience joins our hearts.

The authentic teachings of all the great religious perspectives reveal that it is not land that matters but love itself. God’s call is not that we build His temple on a particular piece of land, but in our hearts. This is where the Rock is.

Many people in the world today use religion to divide us. They cite a particular book, whether the Bible, the Koran, or any other religious text, and claim that herein lies a universal prescription for all human behavior. Such fundamentalist mentality is more about God than of God, and the distinction between the two is one of the most important issues in world affairs today.

Of the People, By the People, For the People

America’s First Principles are inscribed not only in the Declaration of Independence and in our Constitution but also in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. President Lincoln declared at Gettysburg that “this nation . . . shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” What a radical concept that is—a government of the people, by the people, for the people. It means, of course, that not only will the government consist of our citizens, elected by our citizens, but that its mission shall be to serve our citizens.

We should take a good look at that sentence—especially the part that reads “for the people”—and ask ourselves if we have decided to be the generation to repudiate Lincoln’s words. President Rutherford B. Hayes once lamented that we were becoming a government “of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations.”

If ours were a government for the people, wouldn’t all our children receive the best education in the world? If ours were a government for the people, wouldn’t we have universal health insurance? If ours were a government for the people, wouldn’t we have massively committed to a green economy by now? What has happened to us, that so many have been lured into believing what’s good for huge corporate forces is inherently what’s good for us? And what’s happened to the rest of us, that we at times so weakly resist?

America’s most fundamental problem is a crisis of our democratic process. We are being asked, as we were asked over two hundred years ago, to decide for ourselves and our children what it is worth to us to govern ourselves. While it appears that we have problems very different from those faced by earlier generations, in fact it is not the complexity of our current problems but rather the simple drama behind them all that should be garnering our attention. What we call the issues are not the issue. The issue is the disengagement of the average American’s heart and mind from the democratic process. We have stopped participating in droves, and in our absence, forces not always in favor of the greatest good for the greatest number have exercised their own rights, often leaving the average American at a distinct disadvantage in our own country.

The greatest issue that confronts us now, as it has confronted every generation to some degree, is this: Is America to be ruled by all of us and for all of us—or has the American government in fact become a government of, by, and for a relative few?

A mean group of selfish people did not just decide to steal America; what happened is that we gave her away. We were not vigilant on behalf of our own good. We failed to make periodic recourse to First Principles, allowing ourselves the disempowerment of ignorance and distraction. We turned our eyes away from things that, in a free and democratic society, the citizenry cannot afford to turn our eyes away from. And now we are in a crisis of democracy that could easily have been predicted; in fact, with the first publication of this book, it was.

Yet what we chose to ignore before, we can choose to look at now. Let us look with courage and conviction at the principles that alone not only make us great, but also make us free. Our Founders strove to overthrow the very notion of aristocracy, creating a system in which anyone could rise according to his or her own abilities, talents, and efforts. What they strove for then, we must strive for now. Jefferson thought democracy was humanity’s best antidote for what he referred to as the “general prey of the rich on the poor”—rebellion against which he considered natural and good. And what his generation rebelled against in their time, we must rebel against in ours.

In a society where selfishness and greed have become the accepted ethos, a commitment to social justice is a rebellious mode of being. We now need more, not less, of the Jeffersonian spirit of true rebellion. While a market-obsessed corporate mentality lords over us like a new ruling class, we act more like royalists than like our own Revolutionary forebears. This time we are not being assaulted directly, as the colonists were by the English through endless taxes and other burdens, but rather through an endless dripping stream of pleasure that the system is able to provide us, much like a low-grade morphine pump pushed into our veins, making us think we can’t live without it. Pleasure can be used to enslave a person as effectively as pain.

Let us not be so addicted to the pure adrenaline rush of contemporary culture that we fail to rebel against the erosion of our democracy. Let this moment of awakening, despite the pain that it renders, be a moment of national renewal.

We cannot dream the American Dream as long as we are sleeping. In order to dream the American Dream, the dreamer must be passionately, powerfully, consciously awake.

Chapter 3 will be emailed tomorrow!

Preface and Introduction

Chapter 1: Mystical Power

Chapter 1
MYSTICAL POWER

Politics has become the active involvement of an increasingly smaller subset of the American people. Out of 163 democracies in the world, we reportedly rank among the lowest in democratic participation. Instead of a broad-based citizen involvement, politics has become more of a spectator sport—a separate activity in which only some among us participate. This is hardly the sign of a healthy democracy. People have disengaged from the democratic process for many reasons, not the least of which is that the average person seems to feel that his or her personal involvement doesn’t really make much difference. And those who for that reason no longer vote—who to the casual observer might seem not to care, who feel that there is no point in trying because some powerful elite has it all sewn up—are increasingly correct in their assessment.

Cynics have a point, after all. One look at the evening news, and it’s clear that politics has become more of a mean-spirited pursuit than a noble pursuit; the will of the people seems not to be the driving force of American policy; the general welfare of the people is arguably not the primary motivation of most governmental behavior. But if the American people don’t take our government back, re-engaging a process we have chosen to ignore for a while, then we have no right to complain about those who would take it over in our absence. Those who can see what’s wrong with the process are the last ones who should be sitting it out.

Yet where does one start? Many of us haven’t been involved in political action for the last ten or twenty years, or more. Most Americans are so stressed out just trying to survive. The economic tension that pervades most American households—quite contrary to all the official protestations that the economy today is so good (yes, good for a few, obviously, but not good for the many)—makes cynicism about politics seem reasonable. People have had it with the government. It’s not that we’re apathetic about our country, but merely that we’re disgusted with politics today. It’s obviously a corrupt and sullied process, and how can fresh flowers grow in dirty water? That is what we need to find out.

THOMAS JEFFERSON WROTE to James Madison in 1787, “I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” Healthy rebellion is not a negative emotion, but rather a politically legitimate expression of justified dissatisfaction. Dissatisfied people are often dissatisfied for a reason, and where we have no taste for rebellion, we have no taste for freedom.

If we do not rebel in some way against conditions that arouse our anger, then often the anger turns inward, becoming depression or even physical illness. Failing to question the root of the anger, our standard response these days is to merely mask the pain. And the same system that we might otherwise be angry at has myriad ways of turning our pain into a profit center. There is nothing serene or transcendent about allowing ourselves to be distracted from looking at the rot now permeating our democratic system; to do so is essentially a slave mentality.

So what, then, are we to do with our anger? All anger stems from a sense of limited freedom—freedom to be, to say, to feel, to do. In the United States particularly, people unconsciously rebel against restrictions on our freedom because we are aware this is supposedly the land of the free. Yet whether our anger and resentment is funneled through Right-wing or Left-wing politics, anger is a low-level energy that ultimately re-creates the conditions that fueled it to begin with. The enlightened activist is looking to love, not to anger, to solve the problem. And that is our task at this time.

So what would love do now, if called in to help us? Would, it transform the anger? Yes. Would it lead to destructive behavior? No. Would it lead to rebellion? Yes, in a way. It would lead to “divine rebellion. To nonviolent revolution. To the complete transformation of how we live with ourselves and how we live with each other. To a re-envisioning of the entire world.

This is the time, and this is the place. The twenty-first century. A new America . . . or else, just more of the same.

“DURING THE 1960S, America experienced its last rebellious generation. I was there, and much of what is happening today harkens back to that.

During that decade, people were politically engaged, taking to the streets to express our deepest passions about this country and its behavior. As with protestors who took part in the Occupy Wall Street movement or the Women’s March or the March for Our Lives, their energy created an electricity that affected the entire culture.

Yet the rebellious generation of the 1960s was ultimately quieted. For something happened then to take us off the streets and to keep us off. That something was violent threat and collective trauma, perpetrated on one generation and bequeathed to each one since as a legacy of those times.”

The baby boomers were young at that time, and the young respond to dreams and visions. Those who carried aloft the most eloquent visions of a possible America during the 1960s were literally shot and killed in front of the eyes of the young who so adored them. For my generation, carrying a brilliant dream of a noble collective future meant putting oneself in the line of fire. From President Kennedy, to his brother Bobby, to Dr. King, to the students at Kent State, the primary articulators of positive change, of dreams for our democracy in this stunning age, were permanently silenced—and the bullets that shot them psychically struck us all. Millions of us became in many ways like the son of Robert Kennedy, who having watched his father murdered on television, got stoned and never recovered.

The invisible order that shot our heroes did not keep shooting, but began providing goods and services as quickly as possible to distract a grieving generation from our psychic pain. They did not leave us out of their conception of what America should be; quite to the contrary, they used us as their fodder, luring us into their planned environment of endless material consumption. We have been relatively quiet about anything meaningful ever since. Our leaders assassinated, our ranks dispersed, our generation received loud instructions: go home now, scatter, go to your rooms, and enjoy yourselves with all the toys we sell you.

We received a loud, silent message from those assassinations, an unconscious imprint that has become what psychologists call a “sponsoring belief” for an entire generation: “You can do pretty much whatever you want within the private sector. You will still be free, of course—to buy the red one or buy the blue one. But leave the public sector alone.” And no one had to say what sentence comes next: “Or we might kill you, too.”

And so we did what we were told to do, and taught our children to do the same. We poured our prodigious talents and indisputable genius into the private domain. We left the public sector, which is essentially the political sector, to those—whoever they were—who wanted it so much that they were willing to go to such lengths to control it.

And thus we became a class of rich slaves. Our fear that what had happened to our slain leaders might happen to us, our naïve and immature preoccupation with drugs, and ultimately our complete seduction by a consumer society conspired to turn us into the greatest fuel source for the status quo that America has ever seen. Given our previous, youthful repudiation of the downside of American materialism, the irony here is almost grotesque. We who sought to heal America once before have helped to run her into the ground.

We have countenanced the undermining of our political system; we have tolerated the widening gap between rich and poor in America to levels deemed unsustainable by serious economic indicators; we have sold the health and welfare of our children and our environment to the highest bidders. Like Esau in the Book of Genesis, we have sold our birthright for a mess of pottage. Even more important, perhaps, we were so stoned on our very way of life, so distanced from our own authentic human knowing, that we hardly seemed to realize what a black hole these things were forming in our national soul.

With every generation since the Sixties until now, Americans became more cynical, weary of politics, and too tired to dissent. Our frantic productivity created the illusion of functionality, and as producers and consumers, certainly we were as active as ever. But as citizens we became anemic, not so much energized as propped up by artificial highs. Behind all manner of false merriment lay a river of pharmaceutical and other efforts to buffer us from our legitimate pain. We told ourselves these were the best of times, but in many ways we were slowly becoming collectively depressed. The children of God have not been shining our lights at anything close to full wattage.

The baby-boomer generation became like a logjam in the river of American history; as long as we were psychologically stuck, everyone behind us remained somewhat stuck as well. We were born to proclaim that a better world is possible, yet then were warned that to do so is not a good idea. We were thus distracted from our spiritual mission. We are not separate but one, and we long, at the deepest level of our being, to gift each other with our internal abundance, not manipulate each other for mere external gain.

We disengaged from politics after the 1960s because of a blow to our essential selves, and in the absence of that engagement, power was usurped by the interests of a relative few. This was, and is, a spiritual crisis first and a political crisis second. America’s real problem is our fear to express ourselves. Fear to be who we were born to be, and fear to do what we most long to do. We do not break through that fear by further disengagement. We break through the fear by embracing love.

What we longed for before, and what we long for now, is to love each other. And that is what the heroes of the Sixties were saying. Looking back at the speeches of Dr. King or Robert Kennedy, one is struck by both the genius and the tragedy of their lives. They did not just say, “Let a man love his wife, or parents love their children.” They said, “Let us love all life.” That is what made them so dangerous to the status quo. For that they lived, and for that they died. They pointed to the next step in America’s moral evolution—the expansion of our compassion—and that is a step that by definition repudiates oppression and injustice.

Those of us who were young when our older heroes were murdered then aged ourselves. We sometimes ask ourselves, “What will I say to myself on my deathbed? Will I know that I did what I came to earth to do?” And the answers don’t always please us. For millions of people today, the thought that we might die knowing in our hearts that we didn’t really do what we came here to do is actually scarier than the thought that they might kill us if we do. Secrets still lurk regarding the political assassinations of the 1960s and they continue to haunt our collective psyche. But we have processed much in the years since.

The baby-boomer generation finally matured emotionally. We grieved, and we began to heal. Younger generations now contribute their own unique drama and genius to the maelstrom of American society. There is a window of opportunity now for Americans to reclaim lost ground.

There is new possibility in the air today, a miraculous awakening and a change in the way we live our lives. It is a spiritual renaissance with social and political implications. Restoration and hope appear all over, as a rising environmental, community, and spiritual consciousness resurrects the dreams of former times. Civic brotherhood is beginning, in many places, to replace the false gods of self-centeredness and greed. There is a yearning among us to make right the world.

Will this become a broad-scale social force for good or merely isolated cases of cultural sanity? An America intending to heal itself will unscramble the information from which we have been systematically distracted for years, atone for and grieve our national errors, and consciously restore the political process to its role as an enlightened tool. It will take a miracle to do this, but miracles are always at issue in any great movement of history. Was not the American Revolution a miracle? Was not Indian independence from Britain a miracle? Are not miracles what our hearts most long for now?

Out of the ashes rises the phoenix. It has been almost half a century since the end of the Sixties, and Americans are again taking a deeper look at societal issues. Yet many are doing so through the filter of a higher awareness, unshackled by the mechanistic prejudices of the twentieth century.

There is darkness without; but no darkness, limitation, illusion, or fear can stand before the force of uplifted consciousness. Perhaps we are set to embark on a new chapter in our evolution as a nation, rededicating ourselves to the transcendental nature of democracy, declaring en masse our intention to have it rise at last to the level of its true potential.

“We have in our hearts,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., “a power more powerful than bullets.” It is time for us to use that power now, to free our nation and to free ourselves. Mystical power is the greatest power, in politics and in life. It reveals to us that bodies die but ideas do not, as long as people’s hearts embrace them. It is time to resurrect the ideas that truly make this nation great.

“I ONCE SAID to a friend of mine, another author who writes on spiritual subjects, “We really should be addressing political issues.”

“Yeah,” he responded, “I think you’re right.”

Then a pause, an angst-ridden silence.

But there’s only one problem,” he said. “I really hate politics.”

It’s a conundrum: we don’t want anything to do with politics because it’s such a dirty business, yet turning away from it altogether has gotten us where we are today. Anyone who looks at the last few years and still says things like “It doesn’t really matter who we vote for” is living on an alternative planet.

Many people would love to feel that politics can be a high-minded effort, but it’s hard to see how, in today’s political climate. Particularly when looked at from a spiritual perspective, political involvement seems tawdry and low. It’s the last place any of us look anymore for hope or inspiration.

“I just want spirituality in my life,” a friend said to me recently. “None of that other stuff matters to me.”

And yet, what is spirituality? Is it just another compartment in our lives, like relationships, career, money, or health? Or is it something all-inclusive—the soul’s oxygen, the life-giving agent meant to grace and revitalize all of life? If spirituality is relevant to anything, then it is relevant to everything. How can we speak seriously of a God who cares what happens to you and me, but somehow would not have us care about what happens to each other?

So how do we make spirituality relevant to politics? Ten years ago, if I asked that question, I would receive answers such as these:

• From political types, that “Spirituality is not relevant to politics. Don’t start with all that spiritual stuff. It has nothing to do with politics. Politics is about the real world.”

• From spiritual types, that “Spirituality makes politics irrelevant. Think about more positive things. Politics is just a low-level, addictive power game. Forget it. Real change can’t come from there.

But such voices have begun to give way to a more spiritually sophisticated perspective. Just as the Sixties generation sought a blend of political and philosophical relevance, so a new generation is doing the same. It’s popular in some circles today to say, “Face it—the Sixties didn’t work.” But in many ways it did work (we ended a war, among other things), not the least of which is the permanent mark it left on the souls of so many of us still here, still kicking, and ready to once again take up the mantle of enlightened activism. For millions of Americans whose souls were branded forever by the magic of that time, to say it didn’t work is a rather obvious attempt to kill whatever remnants of its audacious spirit might still remain alive.

To blend love and politics is indeed audacious. Politics is a fear-based pursuit in America today, and love is the only thing that fear fears. Love is the ultimate political rebellion. During the 1960s, love and politics were uttered in the same breath and sung in the same song. “All You Need Is Love” was a song we sang at political rallies.

We have not forgotten that, so much as we have lived with the wound that was left on our hearts when the music died. For by the mid-Seventies, the paths of love and politics diverged. They would no longer seem even distantly related. Many who stayed interested in politics would come to trivialize the consciousness movement, and many of those interested in consciousness would start to ignore politics. Both sides then tended to smugly, self-righteously dismiss the other as irrelevant, thinking that they and they alone knew what it takes to change the world.

The consciousness movement concerns itself with addressing the causal level of events. All things in the outer world are reflections, or effects, of consciousness; mere changes in external conditions are thus seen as temporary palliatives, at best, for the problems of the world. Enlightened laws can be passed, but then repealed. Only when the mind has itself transformed does the world achieve any permanent change. The search for higher consciousness is the effort to attain a level of mind from whence only peace can flow, and in the presence of which only peace can exist.

Those interested in traditional politics, on the other hand, are primarily focused on the world of effects. They argue that we cannot afford to just sit around meditating while so much human suffering goes unchecked. They use the means of the material world to solve the problems of the material world, and are apt to see the issues of enlightenment as airy-fairy when applied to politics.

Those interested in traditional politics, on the other hand, are primarily focused on the world of effects. They argue that we cannot afford to just sit around meditating while so much human suffering goes unchecked. They use the means of the material world to solve the problems of the material world, and are apt to see the issues of enlightenment as airy-fairy when applied to politics.

Today, it is the remarriage of our philosophical and political passions that holds the key to our political renewal. It is not either/or, but both—both cause and effect, mind and body—that need addressing in order to create a positive, effective politics for the twenty-first century. It is the political process itself that lacks, and that is because neither our hearts nor our higher minds are currently particularly active there. We need to re-create politics now as a mystical pursuit, bringing our souls to bear on the effort to make the world a better place.

And that is what is happening now. Many political types are saying, “Maybe politics really does need some deeper roots, some way to get past all the hatred,” and spiritual types are saying, “We need to extend the principles of enlightenment into social and political realms.”

From the early American Quakers to Henry David Thoreau, to Mahatma Gandhi, to Martin Luther King, Jr., the effort to bridge the inner-outer duality has been one of the high points of human philosophy and endeavor. America has been fertile ground for such philosophy since our earliest days. It is the message that our spiritual and political evolution are not separate, but intimately and potentially even gloriously connected. It’s the suggestion that we can’t give to the world what we have not achieved within ourselves, and we can’t keep for ourselves what we have not yet given to the world. And ultimately, it’s the message that maybe, just maybe, love will someday rule the world.

IN THE MOST advanced stages of ancient Egyptian culture, the pharaoh was not just given his job for life. At regular intervals, he had to prove to his people that he still had what it took to do the job, displaying physical, moral, and mental strengths for all his subjects to witness. Similarly, statues of ancient Egyptian gods were reconsecrated yearly through prayer and rituals, as though it could not be taken for granted that the genuine force within material substance would remain fully active without a regular reassertion of human devotion.

So it is that while Americans still go through the rites of democracy—political campaigns, elections, inaugurations—there is among us the sinking feeling that these rites are losing their spiritual force. Anything, no matter how initially pure, becomes corrupted if it is no longer connected to people’s hearts. And that is how so many of us feel today. Democracy, we know, is still a vital concept—in fact, more so now than ever. But American democracy today is like a beautiful treasure housed in a decrepit building; our democratic principles are too good for our politics.

The state of our politics reflects the state of our humanity. In order to renew our politics, we’re going to have to take a good look at the principles, or lack of them, that underlie our society today. As long as our social order rests on obsolete principles—obsolete because they are spiritually blind—there will be no real breakthrough in our political realities. In the words of Gandhi, “The problem with humanity is that we are not in our right minds.

The principles underlying our social, political, and economic conditions deem us purely material rather than spiritual beings, economics rather than relationship-oriented, and separate bodies rather than united hearts. We view competition as the primary motivator of human creativity, which it certainly is not. We view the creation of wealth as the primary goal of human work, though it should not be. We treat each other as anything but brothers, though that is what we are. These misperceptions of who we are and why we are here are central to the problems of the world. They are illusions holding back the human race, keeping us limited to the lower energies of dense, material-plane consciousness at a time when we are ready to expand to new levels of awareness and joy. In withdrawing our attachment to them, in rejecting their claim on our imaginations, we can transform our experience of life on earth.

A philosophical shift of historical importance is occurring throughout the world. Yes, we know that we are rational beings. Yes, we know that the physical world is based on the laws of science. We also know—or remember at last—that in fact we are spiritual beings, too.

We are each of us divine essence, placed on earth to create the good, the true, and the beautiful. That goal is a compelling force that motivates us to higher heights than any contest or economic stimulus could ever come close to matching. There are within each of us God-given talents that do not respond to market pressure, yet spring to life in the presence of honor and respect. The spirit within compels us to serve each other rather than compete with each other, bless each other rather than condemn each other, and place our primary attention on the extension of brotherly love.

The twenty-first century is a crossroads for the human race. We are living at a time of both intensified fear and intensified love, both encroaching barbarism and spiritual renaissance. Our consciousness now is backed by so much material power that whether it is attuned to fear or attuned to love affects the future of the entire human race.

The spiritual renaissance of our time is like a mystical revolution of human consciousness, a surge of energy from the subconscious of a species that registers threat yet is intent upon survival. Love, like fear, is contagious. Unlike fear, however, love has ultimate authority over the forces of the world. It proceeds in spite of all obstruction. Every day, like the inevitable dawn, more spiritual light seeps into the world.

Awareness of spiritual tenets already colors our philosophical outlook in the new millennium—in time, it will dominate our politics and economics, too. Either love will begin to rule the world, or we will suffer the consequences of continued resistance to the supreme law of the Creator—that we love one another—too long past the point when as a species we knew better. To run counter to love is to run counter to life. One cannot do so forever and survive. That is true for a person and it is true for a nation.

In the 1960s, these words were written by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

We are witnessing in our day the birth of a new age, with a new structure of freedom and justice.

Now, as we face the fact of this new, emerging world, we must face the responsibilities that come along with it. A new age brings with it new challenges. . . .

First, we are challenged to rise above the narrow confines of our individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. The new world is a world of geographical togetherness. This means that no individual or nation can live alone. We must all learn to live together, or we will be forced to die together.

. . Through our scientific genius we have made of the world a neighborhood; now through our moral and spiritual genius we must make of it [a] brotherhood. We are all involved in the single process. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. We are all links in the great chain of humanity. . . . We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.

The love so many of us would like to see injected into the veins of civilization must first pour into us. Society will not transform until we transform; what’s wrong “out there” is but a mere reflection of what’s wrong “in here.” This is liberating news if we see it that way. Once we recognize that our minds are the causal level of worldly events, then we are free to seek to change the world by changing our thoughts about the world.

Racial tension, decivilization of our cities, violence and drugs among our youth and in our neighborhoods, economic disparity between rich and poor, global strife, threats of terrorism at home and abroad—the most serious problems we face as a nation are not solvable through traditional political means alone, because they are the wounds of an internal disease. To simply imprison more criminals is not going to stop crime; to raise interest rates more or less is not going to make the American economy both abundant and just; and no amount of military might can ultimately control the bonfire of ethnic hatred erupting like wildfire all around the world.

A mere treatment of symptoms is not an adequate response to the diseases that plague us. A more enlightened politics will address the causal issues of our societal functions as well as their effects. We need a nonviolent assumption of the power of the soul to heal the pain of a world that has forgotten it has one.

Internal forces are bubbling up today like volcanoes of spiritual light. Extraordinary technological changes in our society are mere adjuncts to an equally powerful explosion of possibility within the human mind. It is not only the interconnectedness of the Internet but also the interconnectedness of our hearts that offer new and miraculous opportunities to mend the broken pieces of the world.

The bridge to a better world is a shift in mass consciousness, to a part of ourselves we have tended to keep out of the public realm. That part of us is not interested in traditional politics. It is neither a bridge to the past nor a bridge to the future, but a bridge to who we most deeply are.

It is who we are when we are hushed in church, near tears when they blow the shofar on Yom Kippur, honest and vulnerable with our therapist. It is the part of us least acknowledged, maintained, or seemingly even valued at all by the social order we have created around us. It is the part of us that still hopes for miracles and at times can even see them.

That place in each of us is the place of our true power; it is the key to our personal and political salvation. For it is from that inner, sacred place that we genuinely join with others. From elsewhere in the personality we can forge alliances, but we cannot merge. And from joining we emerge truly changed, having fertilized the garden that could yet become our Eden. We turn our backs on our lower natures, allowing the angels to breathe within us.

In every area of human endeavor, we see the reflection of a basic spiritual and psychological principle: where people join, breakthroughs occur. Where we are separate from each other—angry, polarized, and defensive—breakdown and disorder are inevitable. The way to heal social disorder, domestically or internationally, is to find our spiritual oneness. We don’t need deeper analysis of our sicknesses so much as we desperately need a more passionate embrace of the only thing that heals them all.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, America was poised to experience either a rebirth or a catastrophe. We had lost our spiritual rudder, and without it we had neither individual nor collective wisdom. Our culture had lost its sense of sacred connection to any power or authority higher than ourselves. Our national conscience was barely alive as we slithered like snakes across a desert floor toward any hole where money lay. Nothing short of an internal awakening could heal us. Our children were prey to violence more vicious than that of most civilized countries, scientists were already warning of the urgent danger to our biosphere, and millions of Americans could barely contain their rage much longer in the face of continued social and economic injustice. Both major political parties steered the discussion of what truly ailed us away from that which actually does, for they had no context for a higher discussion. They were already more alike than different, and neither any longer home to truly serious political alternatives. They had become a game unto themselves.

On September 11, 2001, that national catastrophe came. The United States has been an injured giant struggling to regain our footing ever since. We have tried Democrats and we have tried Republicans, but something more than what either has come to symbolize is needed now.

Our political salvation will not come from our political system as it now exists. It will come from deep within us.

JUST AS DR. King spoke of the interconnectedness of all beings, we are also more conscious today of the interconnectedness of all aspects of our being. The brokenness of the outer world reflects a brokenness within ourselves.

The awareness of an internal oneness posits the unity of mind, body, and spirit. Mind and body are not separate, machinelike components of a compartmentalized self, although the thought that they are has permeated our present age. It has influenced our politics, our medicine, even our relationships to one another.

Such a mechanistic worldview, exalted in the Age of Enlightenment, was the philosophical outgrowth of Newtonian science. Sir Isaac Newton deemed the world to be like a great machine, which could be understood, and then mastered, through rational thought. At its time, the Newtonian scientific revolution represented a liberating advance in how human beings viewed their world, repudiating superstition and false mystification in favor of the exercise of reason. Several of our Founders—James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams among them—aspired to be the Newton of politics and government, and the glories as well as the limitations of our American political system are rooted in their rationalistic sensibilities.

But the world is now awakening from the false premises of a mechanistic worldview, representing one of the most profound revolutions in the history of human thought. In time, that awakening will be brought to bear on every aspect of our lives. For science has now corrected and improved upon Newtonian physics. Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein, and others established the principles of quantum physics, proving that reality is not quite as solid or objective or deterministic as Newton thought. As British physicist Sir James Jeans proclaimed, the world now turned out to be “not so much a great machine as a great thought.” Some “unreasonable” things are now proved to be true: time flows at different rates for observers moving at different speeds, solid atoms are largely empty, subatomic phenomena are both particles and waves, particles seem to affect each other at a distance even in the absence of a known causal connection, and, according to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, an object is affected by the act of being observed. Adding to the astounding conclusions of modern physicists, contemporary biologist Rupert Sheldrake has posited the notion of “morphic resonance,” suggesting that there is a unified field of consciousness connecting all life.

Quantum physics gives human consciousness a much more central role in the larger scheme of the universe than did Newtonian science, and this influences our philosophic as well as our scientific outlook. How we perceive and how we interpret things are clearly more than mere symbolic powers, opening the modern mind to a more spiritual interpretation of reality than has been intellectually in vogue for centuries. “The more I study physics,” said Einstein, “the more I am drawn to metaphysics.” Ironically, science has both deprived the soul of its centrality in modern consciousness, and now has given it back.

Our Founders were revolutionary and, for their time, modern thinkers, applying the then cutting-edge science and philosophy of Newton to the politics of their age. Should we not apply, in our time, the principles of modern physics and philosophy to the politics of our own? John Adams ascribed to be this nation’s political Isaac Newton; perhaps someone needs to come along and become our political Rupert Sheldrake

In the words of Thomas Jefferson:

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances “institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

Today, the rationalism of the European Enlightenment is being repudiated by a more soulful worldview, just as in a previous age, Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophy repudiated the overly mystified thinking of the Middle Ages. In every historical era there ensues a creative argument with the past, moving humanity either backwards or forwards depending on who’s in charge. The progress of thought determines the course of human history, and our understanding of both the Newtonian hold on the era now passing, and the quantum possibilities of the age now upon us, provide the tools we need to create a more enlightened future.

TRANSCENDENT DEMOCRATIC FORCES have always been in the American air, with deep and penetrating roots in our history. The Quakers of early Pennsylvania, for example, fostered many of the enlightened attitudes inherent in the U.S. Constitution toward religion, freedom, and the rights of the individual.

Pennsylvania Quakers held profoundly inward-turning spiritual beliefs. They had no ministers, but rather believed in a universal priesthood of all believers. They believed God’s spirit is alive in every human being, this spirit to be accessed not through the written word but through the exercise of conscience. In order to live a life of true religious purity, they claimed, we are to constantly look inward to what they called the “Inner Light.”

This mystical philosophy was the guiding influence on Pennsylvania Quakers during the earliest days of this country; as such, it is as traditionally American as anything can possibly be. Quaker influence continued and spread. During the 1800s, Transcendentalism became a major philosophical movement in the United States. Inspired by the Quaker notion of an internal source of light, its main thrust was the exaltation of the role of intuition in connecting the individual to ultimate truth. American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman created the glory and poetry of the Transcendentalist movement. They formed a counterforce to the materialistic worldview of the approaching industrial era, seeking in whatever way they could to preserve the power of the American soul in the face of an industrial onslaught.

In addition to the role of intuition, and in keeping with the Quaker emphasis on conscience, Thoreau, in his essay called “Civil Disobedience,” put forth the historic proposition that following the dictates of one’s conscience is more important than following the dictates of one’s government. That groundbreaking assertion became the basis for many subsequent political developments, including the prosecution of Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials following World War II.

In India in 1929, Mahatma Gandhi wrote in a letter to a friend that Thoreau’s essay had “deeply impressed” him.

Inspired in part by the message he garnered there, Gandhi founded the Indian Independence Movement, organizing a massive resistance to the British colonial occupation of India. He developed an entire political philosophy—calling it the philosophy of nonviolence to harness the “soul power” of the Indian people as an instrument of their common good.

Gandhi, himself a Hindu, believed in a universal spiritual Truth reflected in all the great religious teachings of the world. He wasn’t seeking to use spiritual power to achieve a political end; rather, he exalted a state of spirituality from which political healing naturally results. Today’s spiritual renaissance echoes that idea. Political healing flows from spiritual experience because all healing flows from spiritual experience.

According to Gandhi, a nation has a soul just as an individual has one, and living for others is the key to the deliverance of both. An early holistic thinker, Gandhi claimed that if a nation’s soul is healthy, its politics will be healthy as well. He promulgated the notion of sarvodaya, that spiritual power can socialize human relationships and be used as a political force. He claimed that spirit works through matter and makes it harmonious; that it leads to the total blossoming of the individual, physically, mentally, and spiritually; and that the force of spiritual truth is greater than any army, weapons of destruction, or political authority (satyagraha).

Gandhi said politics should be sacred. That is not to say that it should be religionized: it should be infused not with dogma, but with faith in the power of love to heal and sustain all things.

In the words of Gandhi, “Is not politics a part of the dharma too?”

Gandhi wrote:

Non-violence is the law of our species as violence is the law of the brute. The spirit lies dormant in the brute and it knows no law but that of physical might. The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher law, to the strength of the spirit.

Non-violence is a power which can be wielded equally by all children, young men and women or grown-up people, provided they have a living faith in the God of Love and have therefore equal Love for all mankind. When non-violence is accepted as the law of life, it must pervade the whole being and not be applied to isolated acts.

The very first step in non-violence is that we cultivate in our daily life, as between ourselves, truthfulness, humility, tolerance, loving kindness.

Non-violence is an unchangeable creed. It has to be pursued in the face of violence raging around you. The path of true non-violence requires much more courage than violence.

The restoration of India’s independence was secondary to Gandhi; what he wanted was the restoration of India’s soul. Gandhi, and later Martin Luther King, Jr., sought first to address the battered spirits of their people and then to treat the external wounds that the battering produced. They recognized that all political problems were rooted in spiritual wounds.

Just as Gandhi had been influenced by Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Jr., would then be influenced by Gandhi. Finding great inspiration in Gandhi’s teachings, Dr. King traveled to India and then enthusiastically applied the principles of nonviolence to the crusade for civil rights in America. According to both, nonviolence is the love of God alive in every human heart, permeating every aspect of life, whether immaterial or material. There is no wound it cannot heal.

Dr. King said of Gandhi, “He was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful effective social force on a large scale.” Gandhi asserted the notion—and both men displayed it—that “soul force is more powerful than brute force.” He claimed that nonviolence carries more power than any external force; what we lack is belief that this is so. It is mental and spiritual weakness, more than external weakness, which holds us back. Having been trained to focus our eyes outward, most of us are apt to lack faith in the internal powers. Yet, while invisible to the physical eye, nonviolence awaits our decision to use it as a social and political tool. It is the endless and all-powerful love of God, active in the affairs of humanity when it is channeled through us for that purpose.

What Gandhi saw in British colonialism, and Dr. King saw in American institutionalized racism, were superior worldly powers. Yet they knew that because those were powers of might but not right, they would bow in time before the power of love. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” said Dr. King, “but it bends toward justice.” The nonviolent political movements working for independence in India and civil rights in the United States called for the power of love to triumph over the forces of hate.

A cornerstone of nonviolent philosophy is the notion that violence cannot defeat violence. The opponent is not someone we seek to defeat, but someone whose conscience we seek to arouse. Our conscience is never aroused by someone who hates us, but only by someone who honors us.

In his book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story Dr. King wrote the following about nonviolence:

Non-violence in the truest sense is not a strategy that one uses simply because it is expedient at the moment; non-violence is ultimately a way of life that men live by because of the sheer morality of its claim. . . .

It is not a method of stagnant passivity. The phrase “passive resistance” often gives the false impression that this is a do-nothing method in which the resister quietly and passively accepts evil. But nothing is further from the truth. For while the non-violent resister is passive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive toward his opponent, his mind and emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade his opponent that he is wrong. The method is passive physically but strongly active spiritually.

It is not passive non-resistance to evil, it is active non-violent resistance to evil.

Our dedication, then, is not just to a political goal but to a new way of life. While the desegregation of the American South was the political goal of the civil rights community, Dr. King said that its ultimate goal was a redeemed world. More than mere political change would be necessary to bring that about. “Our goal is to create a beloved community,” he said, “and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”

That, of course, is the hard part. For both Gandhi and King, the “coherence of ends and means” is a first principle of nonviolent philosophy. This means that who we are is as important as what we do, that how we go about change determines what ultimately will be changed, and the process itself is as important as the goal. The end, therefore, does not justify the means because, in fact, the goal is inherent in the means. In the words of Dr. King, “The means must be as pure as the end, for in the long run of history, immoral destructive means cannot bring about moral and constructive ends.

Transforming our own hearts is thus a prerequisite for transforming the world. We will not achieve any higher-minded political goals until we transform the political process, and we cannot transform the political process without transforming ourselves. We need less to get the message out than to get the message in. As Gandhi said, “My life is my message.” We cannot change the world if we are not willing to change ourselves.

IT IS THE transcendent power of God within us that will “doeth the work” of healing the world, but only if we will devote ourselves to the emergence of that power. Gandhi said that the leader of the Indian independence movement was not him, but “the small still voice within.”

According to Dr. King, the steps of nonviolence demand that “self-purification precedes direct political action.” We can’t be instruments of peace if we ourselves are full of emotional violence. The difficulty this poses for spiritual seekers is that to be interested in politics at all today is to be tempted to indulge our rage.

Watching many of the actors on our political stage today, it is obviously very tempting to judge those who disagree with us. Yet it remains our spiritual task to purify ourselves of the temptation to personally demonize. We must resist injustice and criticize how systems operate, without personally attacking individuals within it.

And finding that sweet spot is the work of the enlightened activist. What supports us here is not a personal love but an impersonal one, as we stand up to oppression without demonizing the oppressor. I am reminded of Dr. King’s comment that he was grateful God didn’t say we have to like our enemies! King was inspired by the notion in ancient Greek philosophy of the varieties of love: eros, philia, and agape. Eros is romantic love, which alone won’t save the world. Even philia, or love among friends, lacks the spiritual power to block the world’s decline; it is easy enough to love people who agree with us. Rather, it is agape—our capacity to love even those whom we do not like—that has the power to restore the world to its innocence and grace.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, Jr., said we need “tough minds and tender hearts.” Many tough-minded thinkers in America today seem to lack heart, yet many of the most tender-hearted among us need to toughen up! It’s in the blend of the tough and the tender, the mystical marriage of our minds and our hearts, where we find the key to both our personal and political healing.

The most important thing for us to consider today is how to harmonize our internal and external changes. When I met the Dalai Lama in India in 1996, I asked him, “Your Holiness, if enough of us meditate, will that save the world?” He leaned toward me and said, “I would answer you in reverse. If we want to save the world, we must have a plan. But no plan will work unless we meditate.” I then asked His Holiness another question, to which he responded in a powerful way. I asked him how to apply his philosophy to the state of American politics. “That,” he said pointedly, “is something you need to figure out.”

Indeed, we must.

Chapter 2 will be sent tomorrow!

Preface and Introduction

Dear Friends,

This year is the 250th anniversary of the founding of our country. With our President’s propensity for all things gold, one can only imagine the types of celebrations we’ll be seeing on full display.

Some of us want to foster a different, quieter kind of celebration, however - one in which we’re thinking and feeling deep into the pain as well as the glory of our history in order to reconcile, repair, and help us begin again. I hope you’ll feel TRANSFORM is of use to you in doing that.

This is not a moment to limit the reach of a more meaningful political conversation. So I’ve decided to do our upcoming book club for all subscribers, based on my books HEALING THE SOUL OF AMERICA as well as THE POLITICS OF LOVE. We will be sending you the contents of both books daily over the next few weeks, starting today.

As I’ve been having some chronic throat issues, I’m afraid we need to postpone the zoom sessions where we’ll discuss the material. I’m thinking June, but we will get back to you about that. For now, I hope you’ll enjoy the books. America’s story is long and complicated. There is a lot to think about and a lot to sort out. I think our patriotic duty is to try.

So glad to be on this journey with you,

Marianne

HEALING THE SOUL OF AMERICA

PREFACE

Many people are going around today saying, “In any situation, I just ask myself, ‘What would Buddha, or Jesus, do? What would the Torah tell me to do, or the Koran, or the New Testament?’ ” Thinking about such things is a perfect test, reading the news today. Would Jesus, if he were a citizen of the richest nation on earth, choose to feed the poor or fatten the rich? It’s certainly an interesting question.

All of us are better off when contemplation of holy principles is at the center of our lives. But it is in actually applying those principles that we forge the marriage between heaven and earth, whereas merely dwelling on principle falls short of the human effort needed to carry out God’s will. Just as we need the light of the sun yet looking straight into it can blind us, looking straight into the inner light can begin to blind us as well.

There is a point in everyone’s spiritual journey where, if we are not careful, the search for self-awareness can turn into self-preoccupation. There is a fine line at times between self-exploration and narcissism. One way to see how we’re doing is to measure the fun factor: spiritual growth that’s too much fun all the time usually isn’t growth at all. Anything that has become too comfortable cannot ultimately be comforting. The universe is invested in our healing, and healing is a fierce, transformative fire. It is the product of human willingness to change, and change is often hard.

For years, I thought I only had to heal myself, and the world would take care of itself. Clearly we must work on healing our own neuroses in order to become effective healers. But then, having worked on our own issues a while, another question begs for an answer: how healed can we ultimately become while the social systems in which we live and move, and have our earthly being, remain sick?

Years ago, we realized that people’s psychology is intimately bound up with the psychology of their family units. Today, it is very clear that the family, too, dwells within a larger psychological and sociological system. It’s not just our childhoods or families whose dysfunctions influence us; our education system, government, and business structures are often dysfunctional as well, and in a manner that affects us all. None of us lives in isolation anymore, from anyone or anything.

The principles that apply to our personal healing apply as well to the healing of the larger world. First, all healing principles are universal because they come from God. And second, there actually is no objective outer world, for what’s out there is merely a projection of what’s in our minds. The laws of consciousness apply to everything. Anything, when truly seen for what it is and surrendered to the higher mind, begins to self-correct, but what is not looked at is doomed to eternal re-enactment, for an individual or for a nation.

Politics, ideally, is a context for the care of the public good. The word “politics” comes from an ancient Greek root politeia, meaning not “of the government,” but rather “gathering of citizens.” The source of power in America is not the government; the source of power is us. And millions of us, citizens of the United States, have begun to see life in a less mechanistic, more enlightened way. The consciousness revolution has already transformed both mainstream medicine and business: Harvard Medical School has hosted symposiums on the role of spirituality and healing in medicine, and highly paid corporate consultants call on business executives to turn their workplaces into “sanctuaries for the soul.” Politics is the only major corner of America that doesn’t yet seem to have heard that the world has unalterably changed.

There are new ideas on the world’s horizon, as different from the twentieth-century worldview as the twentieth century was different from the nineteenth century. We are ready to apply principles of healing and recovery, not just to our bodies, not just to our relationships, but to every aspect of life.

World conditions challenge us to look beyond the status quo for responses to the pain of our times. We look to powers within as well as to powers without. A new, spiritually based social activism is beginning to assert itself. It stems not from hating what is wrong and trying to fight it, but from loving what could be and making the commitment to bring it forth. A nonviolent political dynamic is once again emerging, and it is a beacon of light at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Its goal, as in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., is “the establishment of the beloved community.” Nothing less will heal our hearts and nothing less will heal the world.

It is a task of our generation to re-create the American politeia, to awaken from our culture of distraction and re-engage the process of democracy with soulfulness and hope. Yes, we see there are problems in the world. But we believe in a universal force that, when activated by the human heart, has the power to make all things right. Such is the divine authority of love: to renew the heart, renew the nations, and ultimately, renew the world.

Amen.

INTRODUCTION

When a country obtains great power,
it becomes like the sea:
all streams run downward into it.
The more powerful it grows,
the greater the need for humility.
Humility means trusting the Tao,
thus never needing to be defensive.

A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy
as the shadow that he himself casts.

If a nation is centered in the Tao,
if it nourishes its own people
and doesn’t meddle in the affairs of others
it will be a light to all nations in the world.

—LAO TZU, TAO TE CHING (TRANSLATED BY STEPHEN MITCHELL)”

THIS BOOK IS about the story of American history: the miraculous combination of vision and politics that gave rise to our beginnings, their ultimate rending at various times due to unbridled error, and the current yearning of the American heart to put them back together.

Our Founders embodied the ideals of an extraordinary moment in time, and with the success of the American Revolution they created one of the miracles of modern history. Heirs to the European Age of Enlightenment—a movement proclaiming the inherent goodness of man—our Founders expressed their philosophical vision in the Declaration of Independence and their political genius in the U.S. Constitution. Their balance of philosophical vision and political acumen created a doorway in a seemingly impenetrable wall of history. The Western world was stuck, and they unstuck it.

The founding of the United States was a dramatic repudiation of the ancien régime—a social structure that dominated all of Europe for centuries, placing power in the hands of monarchs and aristocracy, and relegating the masses to serfdom and servitude. A worldview so entrenched as to leave the common masses of humanity little hope of rising above the station in life into which they had been born was abolished forever by a group of young Americans who stood up to what was then the most powerful military force in the world and said, “No. We have a better idea.” They were young and rebellious and—like all revolutionaries—in the eyes of some, quite out of their minds. Their audacity is part of our national heritage. Their hypocrisy, in some cases, is part of our national shame.

Today, many Americans are too cynical, or tired, or both, to even approximate our Founders’ courageous repudiation of injustice. Where they claimed their rights to assert power, we have routinely countenanced the diminution of our own. Yet there is among us a collective realization now that this must change. Looking at what other generations did to broaden their freedom helps inspire us to reinvigorate ours.

Our Founders’ primary genius was to rethink political power. They transformed political authority from government to citizen, in keeping with the exaltation of individual goodness so prevalent during the Age of Enlightenment.

The concept of democracy remains a transcendent notion, positing that power flows not from an external but from an internal source. It was not to be the wealth or power of one’s outer circumstances, but the spirit of intelligent goodness which resides inside us all that was entrusted with the authority to rule this nation. While clearly their view of exactly which citizens were to be empowered was severely stunted (the majority of signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners), the ideals they ushered into manifestation remain a light unto the world.

DEMOCRACY, EVEN A representative democracy such as ours, is radical. It was a radical notion in 1776 and it is radical today. Radical, yet fragile. You can’t just set yourself up as a democracy and that’s it from then on. A chain depends on every link. Every generation must relearn and recommit to the foundations of democracy, as they are something that can never, ever be taken for granted. The strength of the democratic concept has not gone away—but neither have the forces of narrow-mindedness, authoritarianism, and fear that would threaten its existence.

After our extraordinary beginnings in a burst of democratic fervor, we turned our attention to other matters. Within a hundred years of our founding, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution raged throughout Europe and the United States. Railroads, electricity, and factory production were the order of the day; scientific experimentation and technological prowess came to embellish our dreams and define our ambitions. As this rush of industrial expansion unfolded, the yang of human assertion and physical manifestation was extraordinary. It’s easy to see how the Western mind became obsessed with America’s material success.

Yet we lost something very precious as the jewels of collective wisdom and understanding were subtly pushed to the side. Intoxicated by technological possibilities, we slowly lost our focus on the light at the center of everything. By the beginning of the twentieth century—despite the valiant efforts of some of our greatest poets and philosophers—attention to our souls had been marginalized by a materialistic focus sweeping across the plains of America’s consciousness like a windstorm that wouldn’t stop.

Money began to replace justice as our highest ambition, and the authoritarian business models of the Industrial Age came to replace democracy as the main organizing principle of American society. The elements of higher truth that so imbued our founding—the stunning declaration that all men are created equal and should share equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—were insidiously exiled to the corners of the American mind. They remained in our documents but began a slow and tortured exit from our hearts.

The very tyrannies from which we had fought to be free would reappear among us, and often we were the oppressors as well as the oppressed. With every generation, we’ve waged a fiery personal and political contest between our most noble and our basest thoughts. Which would control the destiny of our country? Even now, the contest rages.

Over the years, we’ve expanded our physical territory, pushing back against our basest instincts and applying our highest ideals as we abolished slavery, gave women the right to vote, banned child labor, ended segregation, legalized gay marriage, and in many other ways remained true to the goal of an expanding liberty for all. Had the Industrial Revolution, with its gargantuan focus on material power, not occurred, then the magnificence of our original ideals might have continued to pull us upward and out of the devolutionary lure of history. But it did occur, and while it allowed the world phenomenal opportunity for the eradication of material suffering, it also clearly fostered our spiritual forgetfulness. Material progress became an American god.

To look in our national mirror is to see both glory and shame. Born of a stunning assertion of the human spirit in the face of tyranny, we then built a nation on the blood of Native Americans and slaves from Africa. We endured the horrors of a Civil War, heroically fought two World Wars, brilliantly helped defeat Hitler—and then imperialistically devastated both Vietnam and Iraq. We are blessed with more money and more technological resources than any other nation in the world, yet we give only 1 percent of our budget away to nations less fortunate than us. We are a nation that loves to say how much we love our children, yet children are less well cared for in America than in any of our industrialized counterparts.

America has always been a land of contradictions. We have been both slave owner and abolitionist, conscienceless industrialist and labor reformer, segregationist and civil rights worker, corporate polluter and world-class environmentalist. Sometimes we have embodied the most brutish attitudes and at other times, in Lincoln’s words, “the angels of our better nature.” But no matter what any of us have chosen to manifest at any particular time, the American ideal as established by our founding documents remains the same: the expression of humanity at its most free and creative and just. That is the point and purpose of this country as represented on the Great Seal of the United States. This mystical seal, designed by Franklin, Adams, and Washington, pictures the capstone returned to the Great Pyramid at Giza, a Masonic symbol for wisdom. The Eye of Horus, representing humanity’s higher mind, dazzlingly proclaims that here we will achieve Novus Ordo Seclorum, a “New Order of the Ages,” the age of the universal brotherhood. That thought, regardless of how corrupted and bastardized it has been at various points in our history, remains our spiritual and political mission. The power of the ideal continues to shine like a beacon for all Americans, exhorting us to become what we originally committed to becoming.

Clearly, our original principles of human justice and freedom—that here, mankind would find sanctuary from the institutionalized tyrannies of the world—have never been fully manifest, but that does not mean that we are bad or even hypocritical. It simply means we are still in the throes of a greater becoming. Our Founders began a process that every generation is challenged to further. A nation is not a thing so much as a process; we’re not a particle, but a wave.

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail—these are like ancient tablets on which are inscribed our fundamental yearnings and highest hopes. At the same time, slavery; the Trail of Tears; the Vietnam and Iraq Wars; systemic racism and economic injustice; mass incarceration; official hypocrisy; violence and exalted militarism all form a dark and seemingly impenetrable force field acting like a barrier before our hearts, keeping our hands from being able to grasp those tablets to our chests. It is the task of our generation to break through the wall before us, to atone for our errors, and to reactivate our commitment to the promulgation of our strengths. It is not just that we need our sacred tablets; our sacred tablets, to be living truths, need us.

Greed is considered legitimate now, while too often brotherly love is not.

In America today, 40 percent of our citizens have a difficult time affording the basics of food and rent. More than 45 million people—14.5 percent of all Americans and more than a fifth of America’s children—live beneath the poverty line in the richest nation in the world. That is a number equal to every man, woman, and child in the largest twenty-five cities in America. Millions of children go to school each day in buildings that do not meet minimum safety codes, do not have enough school supplies, or do not even have working toilets. A hundred and thirty-five thousand of them take guns to school each day. Millions more are abandoned, neglected, abused. With less than 5 percent of the world’s people, we have 25 percent of its prison population, where racial disparity in arrest and sentencing is rampant. As is usually the case when a nation has a very high percentage of its citizens behind bars, a tiny portion of our population controls the vast majority of our wealth. Today, we are not so much doing well at manifesting our highest ideals as we are encased in a great philosophical and political struggle over the depth of their violation.

While we politically broke free of serfdom over two hundred years ago, perhaps we have not yet achieved the psychological and spiritual and emotional conditions necessary to sustain our freedoms. The needs of our business institutions are consistently placed before the needs of our people, and the trend is getting worse instead of better. Corporations have become a new aristocracy, while the average American is a new brand of serf. The difference now is that it is possible to buy one’s way into the aristocracy; that, however, is a far cry from removing the institution.

We have exported democracy around the world, yet here at home we are in need of a democratic renewal. From thinly disguised efforts at voter suppression, to industrial agricultural giants practically forcing genetically engineered food into our food supply and trying to outlaw efforts by anyone to let us know, there is a specter of Big Brother in the air that’s growing uglier every day. What happened to Americans, that we have become so easy to seduce with a tax cut here or distract with a sex scandal there? What happened that we are willing to place the good of corporations before the good of our children, that we have been willing to countenance the corruption of our political system by the dominance of corporate wealth? What happened to the “spirit of rebellion” without which, according to Thomas Jefferson, democracy cannot survive? We, the citizens of the freest, most powerful nation on earth, gave up our power as too often we gave up our principles. As short-term economic gain became so solidly our bottom line, we failed to question the moral damage this was doing to America’s soul. The corruption did not stop there, however. Now it aims for our democracy.

Though the hour is late, the American legacy of independent thought is rising once again. Independent thought is a rebellious act, not always appreciated. Throughout human history—from Jesus to Galileo to the Founders of the United States to Martin Luther King, Jr.—the status quo has never embraced the harbinger of its demise. While our nation was literally created out of the rebellion against an entrenched and tyrannous status quo, for too many of the last fifty years the average American was more apt to rebel against a tennis shoe not coming in the right color than against the slow erosion of our democratic freedoms. Now we are having to catch up.

It is always inspiring to bear witness to great spirits who preceded us, who lived as we do in both exciting and difficult times, and whose lives bore witness to the hunger for some transcendent good. There have been those in history who personified perfectly, or nearly so, the balance of soul and political intelligence necessary to right the wrongs of history. From our Founders, to Lincoln, to Mahatma Gandhi, to Martin Luther King, Jr., there are those that humanity can point to and say, “There, they got it right.” They, like us, did not have perfect childhoods or face simple problems. They, too, had obstacles to their full becoming. Their significance is all the greater because they transcended them.

Our Founders had a job to do: to win freedom from the English and forge for the United States our own political identity. Lincoln had a job to do: to preserve the Union and make it a nation worth fighting for. Gandhi had a job to do: to lead a nonviolent crusade for India’s independence. Dr. King had a job to do: to lead the struggle for American civil rights. These people didn’t whine; they acted. They didn’t give in to despair; they created revolutions. They didn’t curse the darkness; they became the light—passionately intelligent people in service to the job at hand. They put aside their childish inclinations and served a process larger than themselves. They were not without pain, nor were they perfect people—any more than we are perfect—when they heard and responded to the call of history. They answered the plea for democracy and justice made throughout the ages, and having answered it, were given all the strength they needed to bring forth the resurrection of good. These were not geniuses who just happened to care about the human race; they were people who cared passionately about the human race, and out of that passion their genius emerged.

Love is its own brand of genius. Our only true enemy is neither people nor institutions, but fear-laden thoughts that cling to our insides and sap us of our strength. Yet love casts out fear, the way light casts out darkness. Our greatest political power, now, is to fear nothing and love everything; then all things will heal. Love is the only power strong enough to lift the chains of bondage from the human race and cast them off for good.

When the material world has been won by the opponent, go otherworldly to find your victory.

The words of Abraham Lincoln, in his 1862 Annual Message to Congress, echo to us now: “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We . . . will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the last generation. . . . We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth.”

Americans have the intelligence; it’s time to retrieve our souls. We have a political democracy still; it’s time to reclaim our commitment to keeping it, and live up to the historical challenge to make it even better for our children and theirs. We will be given, as every generation before us has been given, all the divine aid necessary to further the principles on which we were founded. Democracy is profoundly relevant to the evolution of humanity, and as such it carries the psychological momentum to create miracles in the strangest places.

“To some generations,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared in 1936, “much is given. From some generations, much is expected. This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.”

So does ours. And we are accompanied on that rendezvous by invisible companions who were there for our forefathers and will be there for our children. Today, if we open our eyes to see, we will see that they are here for us…

Tomorrow we’ll send Chapter 1!