CHAPTER ONE: A POLITICS OF LOVE

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

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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!