Where does power come from??
Fri Jun 22, 2007 at 06:43:07 AM PDT
I think the world is seperated by those who think that changes in life should come from kicking ass and those of us who face reality by recognizing what we can control and what we cannot. It seems to me that this is what seperates the liberal from the right winger. My neighbor is an evangelical, we walk together every day, and she hates her inlaws and she hates her husband. She if full of judgement and recrimination and she wants badly to make these folks see their sinful ways. She believes she is right, thinks she can control the behavior of others, and will punish them with judgment and recrimination to make the changes come. Me, the sinful liberal. I just love her. I also love my inlaws and my husband. Follow me over the fold for a discussion about power over, and the lesson that Jesus, Mahatma Ghandi, Buddha, and Martin Luther King demonstrated so courageously for us.
Kicking butt to facilitate change only emulates what is not working in society. What you focus on grows. I am tired of the liberal view being presented as if the concept is about being "nice" and "wimpy". I can't imagine how the right wing sees "jesus". He must look like a wimp to them. To me, Jesus was the ultimate perveyor of wisdom and truth. The one thing we can control is our own dignity, our own response to humiliation and degradation. Jesus role modeled this to us and in his behavior made himself a hero for over 2000 years. To me that is the ultimate power position.
The concept is about "truth" and "honesty". It's not about "nice". You can't make a serial killer not a serial by being "nice". But you can make sure that you don't lose your own dignity or your life when you deal with a serial killer. And my humble guess is that far less serial killers would exist if power and control were not the dominate mechanism of change in civilized society. Yes, there would always be a genetically based pyschopath, but power and control, violence, is the variable that most often correlates with anti social behavior. That and invalidation. The un-truth.
Our positions are multilinear while the right wing lives in flat land. If you "be mean and bad then the world will fall into line, you will be in control and no harm shall come your way, and if you die fighting to make others do it your way you are a hero". (that's how they talk, too.) Ugh, I'd rather be dead. I would be spiritually dead. And that position has within it the two variables most often found in the anti-social. Violence and the untruth. In fact america is almost spiritually dead. The leader of our country presents as if he has a connection to god when in fact, he is the exact opposite. In that sense Bush's behavior fits revelations and fits the sociopath. He is the fake, he is the phoney.
Over and over again, the universe has shown us that the Bush way is the way to destruction. America was blessed by god, the universe (mother nature, higher power, pick your word) because of it's self evident truths. We were not validated because we kicked ass, or took over the american indians, or tortured people or made the world fear us. God did not validate slavery, or the subjugation of women. In fact, god continued to validate america because we changed these things.
We were attractive to others because we upheld certain truths in our constitution and the way we approached disagreement(democracy). Once we lose that which the universe ordained was effective we lose our position in the world. We have lost our vision, we have lost our attractiveness. And we have lost our truth.
It hurts my heart to hear the words of the muslim extremist when they talk about the corruption of our country. There are kernals of truth in their position. Denying it won't make it go away. Only validation will set us free. We don't have to validate the method, but we sure as heck need to valid truth when we hear it. And if we could do that, we would not need to be bombed because we would have heard the message without need of the terror. We used to teach the world that terror is not the only way to get a message across. But today we are validating the position of the terrorist and for this the consequences will be grave.
Perhaps the right wing just does not have the brain capacity to process the concept of truth. There are things we can control and things we cannot control without damaging our integrity, our values and our morals. For the liberal, those values are more important than control, more important than the short term picture. For liberals, the solutions are about what is best for the long run, the big picture, the universe. And most liberals understand that the solutions do not lie in power and control over other people. We have a true faith that says we don't need to do that. That our way will be validated by the universe with or without violence.
This is not a matter of just faith, it is a matter of fact.
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