Obviously this title is provocative and it will immediately stir emotions among members of DailyKos and anyone that happens upon this rant that range from:
1. Yeah all those others out there need to immediately become me and share my terrifically balanced view of religion, philosophy, politics, history, blah, blah, blah….
2. Yes grow up all you people that aren’t a follower of ________________. It is the only enlightened path.
3. He’s obviously only talking about that small subset of avid Trump supporters out there. Nobody I hang with supports that idiot so we’re all just fine examples of what Americans should be.
4. I’m a veteran so therefore he couldn’t mean me and instead should be thanking me for my service. My time playing real world video games absolves me of all the sins of my continual childhood.
5. Jesus/Mohammad/L. Ron Hubbard/Joseph Smith are a vital part of my (eternal) life and my devotion to their teachings and the holiest of books makes me an exemplary human being. My opinions and actions are beyond reproach because I’m the right kind of _______________________.
6. I’ve taken part in a Democratic caucus, have phone banked, sent money to ___________________, walked through my neighborhood and had doors slammed in my face. Surely he’s talking about someone else.
7. I’m black/Latino/Pakistani/…., an absolute second class citizen in this nation, been spat on, beat up, imprisoned at a far higher rate than the white majority so I’m exempt from any criticism.
8. I’m a woman who’s grown up a victim of misogyny and sexual harassment. I’ve struggled all my life to break through the glass ceiling. Obviously I have a get out of jail free card in all of this.
Well here’s the problem with every one of those statements. They (AND I) all share one common flaw in our place in human evolution. We are all Americans and live in the most spoiled nation on Earth. Every last one of us within our boundaries shares a privilege unheard of in human history, one we daily take for granted. Our most downtrodden individuals live lives that some people on Earth would consider luxury. Below, I’ve listed some things that I think we should all consider. Please, if reading the action items below and you’ve already addressed the issue within yourself, skip on to the next one and let’s have this much needed conversation about how to improve ourselves. If something I say offends you then tell me WHY I’m wrong and if I have my facts wrong and give your own explanation and your own ideas on how to address the issue. If you simply attack I’ll not answer back. I have no intention of attacking any one individual or group with any of these ideas. Let’s talk about humans in general, our potential for greatness and our weaknesses.
Let me acknowledge first that I’m fully aware that our spoiled nation has some serious flaws that create pockets of abject poverty and suffering and many of us are stuck and failing. I don’t want this devolving into some ridiculous discussion about how if we only embraced single payer health care or our military budget was used for good all our problems would disappear. The point to this essay is that unless fundamental changes happen to the character of our citizens, none of those things matter or in my opinion can be enacted. They are bandaids for a wound that will never heal. We are stuck in a cycle that can only be broken by absolute tragedy or a major step in American human and societal evolution.
Below is my list of things I think are vital for America to move forward and evolve our national character at this time in our history. Luckily we have some clear examples around the world to follow.
1. Every last one of us needs to get off our asses, turn off reality TV, sports spectaculars, celebrity worship, etc. and pick up history books. Read until your eyes bleed about the paths humans have embarked in and what worked and what didn’t. Study in detail how a nation full of intelligent people (that many of us have deep roots in) watched as a charismatic mad man slowly turned their country into a vile cesspool of hatred, bigotry, and aggression. If you are a lazy reader there are countless stunning documentaries detailing any era you can imagine. Even regular movies and series throw in wonderful history lessons as long as you are discerning enough to throw out the embellishments thrown in for purely entertainment purposes. Over the last few days the movies I watched all dealt with the era around the fall of the Ottoman Empire. I consider myself a student of history and yet I was embarrassed that my knowledge of the horror of the Armenian genocide was so poor. I watched a terrific movie the other day about the early years of FDR when he first had to deal with the devastation of polio. It also gave an insight into what a spoiled life he began with. Always amazes me when diaries on here idolize him leaving out his obvious 1% white male privilege and the rock bottom he went through before becoming a social advocate.
2. Pick up a science book. Watch and share the amazing documentaries dealing with our planet and the universe around us. Sir Richard Attenborough, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, JPL scientists should be far more dear to Americans than any of our sports or entertainment stars. Instead of posting your pictures of your damned cats on Instagram, go look at the latest pictures and science results from the Mars spacecraft. Marvel at the fact that nations around the world are orbiting comets and asteroids, landing once more on the Moon. Learn about the advances in medicine. As Crosby, Still, Nash and Young so brilliantly wrote “Teach your children well...”
3. Acknowledge fully your advantages and take steps to scale them back or share them with others. Admit that in all of us there is an attraction to riches and a desire to be among people of power and fame even if you live a somewhat austere lifestyle. I asked myself recently how I’d have responded if I had been showered with money, fame, and power years ago, let’s say a chance to mingle with the rich and famous (including Trump) before we discovered his desire to be Mussolini. Even though I thought he was a sleaze ball long ago when I stumbled onto his ridiculous TV show, had I been invited to some party he was throwing where I knew the movers and shakers of the world were going to be in attendance, I probably would have been excited to go. Why? For the same reason I wanted to see the yachts in the harbor and marvel at their size and opulence when I visited Monaco. While politically we detest the division of wealth in the world, there’s something in us that is fascinated by it all. Identifying that in ourselves is a vital step in our political and social evolution. It always makes me laugh when I hear liberals and progressives shouting about increasing teacher’s salaries and yet on every weekend spend tons of dollars watching overpriced movies with millionaire actors and directors and supporting sports teams where outrageous amounts are payed to men playing a game. The world is grey. Humans are imperfect. Get over yourselves and your claims of purity.
4. Stop with the hero worship of political leaders especially the ones that have a gift of gab but very little practical experience or evidence of effectiveness. Know that our political opponents will ratfuck everything we’re engaged in. They have the ability, the time, and the resources to do this because they could care less about governing and the richest and most powerful people in our nation want them to destroy the government and oversight of their excess. Suspect any person that has some astronomical political rise far beyond historical norms. Nearly the entire media is complicit and not on our side especially at critical election times.
5. Ok, here’s where the hairs are going to go up on the back of many of your necks because I’m going to be very critical of something that is incredibly dear to many of you, something that most liberals embrace and use as they believe a force for good. Know before I start this that I am talking about the dominant religion in America, the umbrella faith of Christianity but I hold equal disdain and concern about all the major god based religions. The others simply don’t dominate our nation. Let’s get some things out of the way first. I am an atheist since early adulthood, was raised in a Methodist family and was a believer through the entirety of my youth so I get the enormity of what I’m suggesting here which is essentially that America must join the secular world and reject the passionate faith of nearly all our beloved ancestors. If Christianity is to remain a force in America, it must evolve to a relic of history, a warm place for the traditions and pageantry it provides, a study into human nature. As long as its magic is taken seriously as some possible reality, despite whatever good it might create for some, its harmful effects are helping to destroy us. Of course the immediate response is always “but wait, the evil is coming from people that are not ‘real Christians’. They are ignoring the teachings of Jesus.” I heard this extensively from one of our Presidential candidates the other day.
Let’s get to this argument which ends up circular and logically invalid. Christianity is based on the Bible which unfortunately is not only the New Testament. For every humanistic ideal one can find in the NT, the OT is brim full of things that can be interpreted (if one takes them as literal) as indicating that God is down with misogyny, rape, slavery, racism, and murder. Now before this ridiculous idea is started that my distaste for the OT is an attack on Judaism, let’s bring up the fact that the vast majority of the Jews do not take the OT as literal and in fact a great many are considered secular. The book to them instead gives them a root to their historical and cultural origins and they have derived very humanistic ideals from selected parables, view the outrageous stuff as exactly that. Even so they though are plagued by a subset that take their text to fundamentalist levels.
Christianity’s Achilles Heel is that in order for the NT to make sense and for the central premise outside of the humanistic teachings of Jesus to be valid, the prophecies of the OT must be considered to be fact and the notion of original sin embraced. Because of this, Christianity has the fatal flaw of having to be inclusive of the cherry pickers that embrace the horrible parts of the OT just as the kind and giving Christians choose to cherry pick out those parts. Ultimately though both subsets get to legitimately call themselves Christian and are both legitimized by the sheer numbers of the various flocks. We are caught in a Catch 22 in this nation as long as the majority of our citizens view any of the Bible’s teachings as fact. In fact modern science and historical knowledge show us clearly that the book has not aged well when exposed to the light. Nearly all the stories of the birth, life, and death/resurrection of Jesus were told of other previous pagan deities centuries earlier. The Romans, meticulous record keepers, don’t mention anything about Jesus or anyone like him. The NT was written over a hundred years after his supposed death by people compiling together CHERRY PICKED scrolls under the direction of a human ruler more concerned with his own power than any truth.
Whether you believe Jesus was an actual being/son of God/one third of a confusing trinity though is immaterial to my central point here. The Bible, if taken as a whole and used as the common link behind all of Christianity, is a forceful, judgmental and non-inclusive entity. It, like many other religious texts, tries to tie morality and ethics with the added burden of a reward/punishment system for some eternal afterlife which immediately excludes all others that don’t embrace it. It is the prime example of exceptionalism or in more easy to understand terms simply being spoiled rotten. Couple it with being born American and you get to not only have the wonderful luck of growing up in the richest country on Earth, one with abundant natural resources, secured by huge oceans on either side, vast tracts of fertile land, etc., etc. AND you’re also in an exclusive club where Jesus loves you and keeps you safe and alive until the end of time.
Here’s the much more simple truth backed by logic. You need none of that magic and structure to be a good and productive human being, to be earnestly liberal and progressive, to give back more to the Earth and humanity than you took and have a content life. The motivations for that behavior are simple common sense in the tribes society puts us into. The Golden Rule is universal and not just a Christian concept. In fact embracing Christian faith and trying to tie it to ethical behavior (in my opinion) is holding us back and is the number one obstacle to any true political evolution. We have a Congress full of right wing bigots that most Americans would shun away from if they came up to you as a used car salesman because these men are crafty enough to intersperse their speeches with references to Jesus and their Christianity. We have huge numbers of voters that should be in the liberal subset that stay away from voting because of wedge issues like abortion or gay marriage, neither of which would be an issue without fundamental CHRISTIANITY.
I see two paths the nation could take to do away with this problem. Christian sects need to seriously consider decoupling the NT and OT even if it means coming to grips with the problems that arise in simple logic if you remove the ancient prophecies of the OT and the notion of original sin. Let’s face it, even with them still there, the magic parts of Jesus’ supposed life and this whole get out of jail free card if you simply stop asking questions is pretty hard to swallow to anyone casting even the tiniest doubt and analysis. Why not instead start embracing just the humanistic parts, giving equal admiration to other human beings throughout history that have preached kindness and compassion. I think the label “Christian” needs to be retired so the association with the extremes are gone. The other option is simply for the majority of the nation to simply walk away from faith and move fully into the secular world.
6. If you’re still following this rant, thank you. I know I lost a lot in the previous point but it needed to be said. My final point is that those looks into history are pretty chilling because the parallels of today’s march into madness eventually ended well but only after millions of people died or were hurt badly. We are not far from that tipping point where that process all begins again with a descent into financial ruin and global warfare and it was complacency during these exact same past dynamics that allowed it to get so bad. People believed someone else would take care of the problem. There is a political solution and I’d be greatly optimistic if I believed our nation would actually quickly evolve in the ways I detail above to accomplish that. I’m not holding my breath for that. Maybe I’m being alarmist as I can be guilty of but, if not and my intuition is right, we are in for the fight of our lives, perhaps for the very survival of our species. I would urge that everyone prepare for whatever worst case you can imagine. With luck and inspiration we can avoid that worst case and come out of all this in a society built upon reason, compassion, and this wonderful quest humans have for knowledge and creativity.
