Welcome back to Engaging Faith, a weekly(?) series of Street Prophets. Here, we seek to have a conversation between the broader progressive community and us religious progressives. This conversation is intended to help us all work together on our shared goals in helping this nation, and this world, become a better place.
This forum is open to respectful questions and concerns on anything within the broader mission of the series. Need details on how to work with the religious left? Want strategies for how to work against the religious right without alienating the religious folks who aren't your enemies? That's what we're here for.
Today I am tired and too foggy to come up with a coherent topic, so I'll just discuss briefly a broad theme that has been coming up repeatedly over the past while, impermanence.
Engaging Faith is a forum to help the broader progressive community connect politically with religious progressives for our mutual benefit, and to help the progressive community as a whole better address political issues that involve interaction with religion and religious groups. We are offering this forum as a place for respectful engagement, we never fully understand each other, we may not completely agree with each other, but we share many of the same goals. To that end, it's important to be able to ask each other questions (and listen to the answers), share our viewpoints with each other (and observe the points of view around us), and that's where I hope this series comes in.
For this to work, however, I want participants to remember that we're not here to debate, not here to change people's minds, we're here to express our minds, understand others, and learn how to work together to everyone's benefit. When I share my views, I consider it important and helpful to be mindful of the fact that they're my views, not anybody else's, regardless of how much I identify with a group. To remember that my experiences are limited, and I shouldn't make overly broad characterizations. To recall that people have been truly hurt by the actions of people who identify as religious or political, and when someone lashes out from that pain, lashing back only makes things worse.
This forum lies within the Street Prophets community, you are welcome, but please remember that our community rules for respect apply here, and are in place to permit dialog among people with a wide diversity of views, not to suppress anybody's opinion. Don't act like a jerk or a hater.
For more about what I'd like to see here, and what I wouldn't, I go in more detail in the first post of the series.
Impermanence
Understanding impermanence is an important facet in my faith, Buddhism, but you don't need to be Buddhist to understand that things generally don't last forever. The moment when you started reading this diary is gone already. Beauty, strength and memory all fade as we age. Your mood will change, people move away and die. The debt ceiling crisis has started to remind people that the unofficial world empire our nation has created, built upon our economic and military might, will not last forever, it might not even last out the decade.
On the home front, there are no guarantees that we can maintain the standard of living we've grown accustomed to. The efforts we've put forth as a community such as public education and our transportation infrastructure are not sacred nor unassailable. What passes for a social safety net in this country, things like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, while well defended, are not impregnable.
Everything we've worked for, individually and collectively as a nation will be gone sooner or later. It's just a question of when and how, and what comes next.
Effort
And what determines when and how? Our efforts, the actions each of us do in the context in which we act. If you don't maintain a car, then it becomes an immobile ton of metal and plastic far faster than if you do maintain it. The same thing goes for an economy, whether it's a national economy or a home one. The same thing goes for a community, whether it's a group of neighbors, an online community, a legislative body, or even an entire nation.
The debt ceiling crisis makes it pretty clear to me that a lot of effort is needed to maintain the community of our nation. A number of people are angry and scared (and I'm not just talking about the Tea Party here), which brought us to the brink of one economic disaster. The "compromise" that saved us from that appears to flirt with the brink of another economic disaster.
All these brinks seem to be brought to us by the fact that our nation has devolved into groups of angry and frightened people who can't seem to figure out how to talk to each other. Will talking together fix everything? Of course not, but it has to beat glaring at each other over the aisle and getting nothing done. It has to beat the Left blindly flinging concessions at the Right in hopes that they won't hurt us.
Sorry if I got a little preachy here, but like I said, I don't have a topic today so much as a theme.
The main question I see is, where do we go from here. How can each of us, given who we are and where we are, move forward? How can we help things suck less for the people we care about, for the people around us? How each of us help each other live in a nation that isn't fractured into irreconcilable factions; factions not communicating at all until a crisis sparks a fight? Just to be clear, I'm not concerned with ideas on what Obama can do, what Reid can do, what Boehner can do. I'm looking for brainstorming on what you can do, what I can do.
The floor is also open to any other question or concerns on the broader topic of this series. Welcome to Engaging Faith...