You can't write about thinking about something without thinking about it!
I've been working on some Feng Shui, western style, today and while my creative self is busy arranging and rearranging I did do some struggling with those items in my last post: peaceful protest and what that means, We The People and what that means, this polarized situation and some potential ways to respond and what all of that means. Kind of Feng Shui for the political self! After all, the principals of Feng Shui are to energize one's personal space, encourage health and healing and to allow contemplation of the process of change and inner growth within a space of beauty. It's a tall order and we westerners are newcomers to this form of ancient arrangement.
I grew up on a steady diet of classical music. My piano teachers taught only classical music and when I was young I listened to that music exclusively. I was allowed to belong to the Columbia Record Company and choose the records each month. I always chose classical music with the exception of three musicals - Oklahoma!, The Student Prince, and South Pacific. I still gravitate to classical music when I need some quiet, personal space in which to think. I'm prone to the Romanticists: Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Shubert and always Wagner. But I also love Chopin because he was The People's composer, he wrote for revolution, for The Common Person's struggle. Just listen to The Grand Polonaise.
When I began my Feng Shui alterations I knew I needed my favorite composers to provide the container for deep thought. Hands busy, working both sides of the brain. Good energy, positive motion internally and externally. Let's see what it produced.
Peaceful Protest. I hold to that as I do not know of another way to speak our minds than in the streets without violence. Peaceful protest does not mean not raising our voices or speaking our outrage. It means not resorting to violence even in the face of abuse. It means taking the spirit of peace and justice when we go out in to the streets to ask, demand, speak out for our rights. Peaceful protest is not something from 60's America. Those protestors learned from others over thousands of years, they didn't make that up right then. Peaceful protest is not a guarantee that everything will fill with flowers and the day will be won. On the contrary, Ghandi died from a gun shot in a crowd. Our personal center is what encourages us to remain peaceful in our hearts while we are speaking truth to power.
When I came home from Mexico in 1987 I read everything I could get my hands on about Liberation Theology. During that time I also had the great honor of seeing Bishop Tutu and Allan Boesak in Madison. Dr. Boesak had written Comfort and Protest which was very much like Dr. King's Letters from the Birmingham Jail. Dr. Boesak meditated on John of Patmos and stated that his meditations brought him to the understanding that the gospel was written from the vantage of the poor. After being in Mexico I felt I was reading the truth. The people I visited, the people who lived in cardboard shacks and Dow Chemical tin houses were holding study groups called Base Ecclesial Communities. They didn't seem to have difficulty translating the scripture to their circumstances or feeling a power in the words that they felt were written for them. As did Dr. Boesak in Africa. My parallel experience in the church we attended at the time was far different. The congregation seemed to have a very hard time translating the gospel in to anything that remotely spoke to their lives. They were wealthy, they prospered, they were business people and country club members. It seemed that they struggled to identify themselves as poor in spirit and therefore somehow the gospel was for them. Perhaps that is also true, it certainly is an impoverishment to be disconnected. But I have hung on to my own experience of poverty and wealth and the dichotomy is plain to see. Dr. Boesak's book spoke loudly to me and I remember it still. Comfort from guidance, protest for justice.
We The People. I think that means all of us in whatever form and belief system we find ourselves. I can't say The Palin is not a We The People although I want badly to argue with that. The tea party folks standing behind her Saturday were folks, too. They work, they hope, they want to celebrate freedom and somewhere we might be able to find some common ground in appreciating the fact that we agree on one or two things. It is possible. I discovered two faces when I looked at this one though. I must be honest. I hold to We The People being the worker bees, all of us who do not make over hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, who struggle with the rising price of gas, of food, of education for our kids. By We The People I want not to mean the Koch Boys and their corporate agenda or the corporations who now have the same rights as we do! So, of course, as a Progressive We I want only those of us who believe the way I do to claim the We The People banner. But that isn't the way things work is it? We The People include those repubs who think differently than I do even though I think they are terribly misguided, have been drinking the Kool-Aid and think Michelle Bachmann has something intelligent to say. That's what is so maddening! And it's frustrating and hampering our national dialog because that stuff has dragged us far from middle and to the rightist edge.
I think one way to wade in to this polarized territory is to talk, talk, talk. We've got to talk to one another no matter how tough this is. We've got to find out why we think the way we do, each of us. We've got to hear others say why they think the way we do. Bigger than that - we have to have conversations where we work hard to locate some common ground. What does the right think about handing over freedoms to corporations? Why would they support that? What is at the root of anti-union beliefs? Do they consider themselves wealthy and if they don't, how does trampling the poor and middle class fit with their self-identification? An area that is painful and ugly to look at is racism but that is where we truly need to go with one another because that is what has raised its head. If Obama were white we wouldn't be constantly listening to the "birthers" rail on and on. It's much more systemic than that of course but it shows us where the tough conversations need to go.
Nothing about peaceful protest or tough talk is easy. Not by a long shot. It's work that has all the potential to divide friends and family. I have experienced that in my own family. We can speak only a fraction of what we each mean, beyond that we are, all of us, afraid to wander. Why? I don't know all the answers to that but it has something to do with fear of anger and loss, judgment and punishment, far worse than having a messy conversation with a causal acquaintance. That's the sticky talk to have, with family who know you perhaps but not as well as others know you.
We heal each other one at a time. It is messy work, that healing, if the patient even survives our effort. There are no promises on that side of peaceful protest and sharing. It's a wide open place, scary and rumbling with thunder. Anything could happen when the safety of the crowd is gone. It's just one on one with someone who might be totally opposite of us. Who knows what either of us might say or do? We could get lost and not be able to find our way back to where we started.
I have thought today about connections as I've been thinking about protest, truth, what to do. I have learned from native peoples that we are all related. It's something I try to understand each day with more clarity. I suppose that's why I hold to Peaceful Protest and encourage myself to risk confronting my fears and pick someone to talk to who doesn't agree with me. It might change the world. It is possible.
Power To All The People!
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