The Ever-Changing Shape of Love

 

Ongoing events urge us to redefine and refresh that tired old used-up word—love.

 

Love is the only force strong enough to be the unifying energy that ties our broken country back together. Hate can’t do it. Hate and fear have polarized us. We need to choose: we can’t love and hate at the same time.

 

Love is difficult and takes effort. It is easy to love our children, because that is built into us, just as the fear which can lead to hate is built into us. But the consistent, firm love that gives us the patience to set limits on children that will help them grow into good citizens and good parents in their turn—and learn in their turn not to give into hate and fear and exasperated impatience—is not instinctive. It must be learned as we go.

 

Love is self-reflecting. It admits mistakes and learns from them. It’s no fun to realize we have been wrong or done something hurtful—just as it is no fun to be hurt. Love is about interdependence, the Golden Rule, the reality that I am not the center of the universe, that others and their needs are as real as me and my needs, and that we are all more alike than different. The tragedy of Donald Trump is that he still hasn’t realized these basic elements of being human.

 

Love is non-violent, by definition. Violence can never be loving. Period. Self-defense may be necessary, but it isn’t love, it’s self-defense. The mob in the Capitol hurting and even killing policemen was not defending itself, nor was it defending liberty or democracy. It rationalized its violence on the basis of misinformation about the results of an election that were proven false in ninety court cases.

 

Love does not preoccupy with enemies. If we are loving, we define ourselves by what we are for, not what we are against. If we are sufficiently against something or someone it can mistakenly justify violence. Instead love calls us to be constructive and look for common ground with adversaries as creatively as we can. Hate dehumanizes the other; love identifies with the other.

 

That means inclusivity is part of love. Hate separates into parts; love sees the big picture. To say we are one humanity on one planet is a statement of love–and also a demonstration of how the meaning of love really does evolve over time, because a hundred years ago we had not seen the earth from space. Back then only religious seers were motivated by this aspect of love; now it is accessible to all. Every day the news carries new proof that we’re all in the same boat.

 

So love inevitably puts us in a mode of learning and discovery. We’re in a place we’ve never been before. Love is self-education. What is the truth in any given situation? Love is honest and authentic in its longing for truth. So love overlaps with science—it searches for what works, what leads to life, to goodness, to truth, to beauty.

 

Self-education in love means learning to work cooperatively with other people toward whatever larger goal we can agree is important or even necessary for survival. Many in the U.S. House and Senate have demonstrated over the past weeks, and months and years, that they have much to learn about working together.

 

Love is conservative—it conserves life with responsible care. Love is progressive—it hopes for a better world.

 

Finally, love takes the larger perspective. It is aware that we are here for only an instant in all time, that others before us sacrificed that we could be here, and that we are the gateway to all the future. Love is acceptance of this condition, a willingness not to resist it. As David Attenborough keeps saying, what we do in the next few years will affect the next two thousand years of life on earth. That is a statement of how much we need to discover how to love.

  

Critical Patriotism

 

 

Jennifer Davis Carey and Winslow Myers

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise. —F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

If our country is going to mature into its next phase, we citizens must hold in our minds two ideas which too many Americans consider opposed: first, that the American democratic experiment is still the last best hope of the world, exceptional, a “city on a hill;” and second, that to fulfill its promise or even to continue to be called a democracy at all, America must push for deep positive changes in its cultural, political, educational, economic, and religious institutions. 

 

Remember Lynne Cheney’s tenure as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, when she advocated aggressively for a more optimistic perspective on America’s past, telling off historians like Howard Zinn for what she considered an overly critical picture of our origins—origins that for Zinn included Columbus’s horrific ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arawak peoples of the Caribbean. Behind Cheney’s rosy take on U.S. history is the false assumption that the only glue that will hold us together is “my country right or wrong.” 

 

When Senator Sheldon Whitehouse comprehensively laid out the correlation between the millions of dark money being poured into assuring the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett and the 80 recent Supreme Court cases resolved 5-4 for corporate interests, he was performing a profound act of critical patriotism—without abandoning his presumed allegiance to the American spirit of creative entrepreneurship.

 

Our civic culture does not encourage the mingling of patriotism and national self-criticism in a creative dialogue. In recent decades, at least as far back as the Vietnam-era “America: Love it or leave it,” right up to the president’s inability to categorically denounce white supremacy, uncritical and critical love of country have been assumed to be irreconcilable opposites. Witness the outrage when Muhammed Ali said he had no quarrel with the Vietcong. Or when the Dixie Chicks, now the Chicks, were pilloried for saying that they were ashamed to come from the same state as the president who began the second Gulf war.

Or take the police. It’s not an either/or between supporting them or calling out racism in their midst—it’s a both/and. There are many good, professional police officers—and many police departments are enmeshed in racist structures and attitudes. They need help with this like the rest of us. 

 

Whites can learn a lot about love of country from those systemically excluded from that country’s benefits. In the most excruciating holding together of opposites, consider the depth of a Black patriotism forged in the fires of chattel slavery, mass denial of voting rights, lynching and terror, chronically unequal educational resources, red-lining, mass incarceration, and police murder. Consider that it is the movements for the rights of those excluded—African-American, indigenous peoples, LGBTQ people—that hold this nation to its espoused values and demand that those values be expressed through laws, policies, and practices.

 

In response to the devastating images of extrajudicial killings of Black people we are amidst a resurgent and evolved civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter, that once again demands adherence to proclaimed American values. And as with previous movements many whites have at last put their bodies on the line and accompanied Blacks into the streets in protest. 

 

Yet as has become sadly predictable, white racism has projected onto that simple slogan that galvanizes and summarizes a movement, the assumption of a threatening exclusivity, labelling it identity politics. This assumption ignores the truth that the movement is only one aspect in the work of Blacks toward full inclusivity in the American fabric. It is easy for many to carelessly place the emphasis in the simple slogan “Black Lives Matter” on the word Black rather than on the word Matter. No Black leader claims only Black lives matter, but rather that Black lives must also matter.

 

Those who make inclusivity impossible make identity politics inevitable. Too many white people cannot admit into the same mental space both love of country and the reality of how much they benefit from ingrained concepts of white supremacy enshrined in laws, practices, and assumptions in ways that require some hard rethinking of their identity. 

 

Three out of five whites voted to re-elect Trump. Trying to pin the racist label on all of them will not help the process of national healing post-Trump. But the brittle patriotism of some whites who feel threatened by the looming certainty that they are becoming a minority in our country may have motivated all too many of the white votes he received. Whatever constructive structural changes we may make to our system after he is gone, none will be more important than those that result in racial equity and acknowledgement of entrenched white privilege. Black Lives Matter is nested in a bigger context: Democracy Matters. Black votes were key to defeating Mr. Trump and elevating the first black woman to the vice-presidency. The difficult work of holding in our minds at the same time what our country is and what it might be continues.

Letter to a Judge in Georgia

 

The Honorable Lisa Godbey Wood

c/o Whitney Sharp

801 Gloucester Street, Room 207

Brunswick, GA 31521

 

Dear Judge Wood,

Especially given the amount of Covid 19 in prisons, I was deeply saddened to hear of the harsh sentence you imposed upon Carmen Trotta and Martha Hennessy for their trespass and pouring blood on Trident missiles—but I was equally happy that they got to state their case in open court, because they speak for me and the millions of others who may lack the courage to do what they did.

 

I understand your obligation to exact penalties when laws are broken. However, we are at an inflection point with nuclear weapons. In January, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will assume the full force of international law, having been signed by 122 nations and ratified by the required 50.

 

In other words, enough of the world’s people have realized that these horrible weapons belong in the same category as mines and chemical weapons—too destructive in their effects to function in any practical way to enhance security anywhere on the planet—to enable an international law of prohibition to come into effect.

 

The United States and the other 8 nuclear nations are for the moment on the wrong side of history, but with much more educational work, including that of moral heroes like Trotta and Hennessy, common sense will prevail and bring the nuclear age to an end.

 

Carmen Trotta and Martha Hennessey were not alone in your courtroom as you sentenced them. They represented the hopes of hundreds of millions of citizens in the countries that have signed on to the UN Treaty prohibiting weapons of mass destruction.

 

If more protesters witnessing the evil of nuclear weapons come before your court, I hope you will consider their actions within this new context of international law.

 

Respectfully,

Winslow Myers

Militarism

With the horrific police lynching of George Floyd, militarism has been freshly perceived as a universal affliction, a planetary tragedy. In America, young whites and blacks march peacefully together, only to come face to face with nightsticks, pepper spray, and tear gas. In Delhi a Christian father and son are arrested by Hindu police for violating curfew and end up tortured and dead. In places like the Philippines and Brazil, mass extra-judicial police killings continue unabated.

Militarism—the use of overwhelming force as a first resort—rarely works, either as an instrument of domestic control or as an international system of security. It may help power and wealth succeed in temporarily pacifying the unruly poor, but it does nothing to strengthen the web of equal opportunity that lessens the need for control in the first place. It has not built democracy in Iraq or Afghanistan. Chinese militarism cannot contain the desire for freedom in the hearts of the citizens of Hong Kong or Taiwan. Russian militarists, Iranian militarists, Syrian militarists will not be able to control the democratic aspirations of their own citizens. Israeli militarism will never resolve the conflict with Palestine. And on the nuclear level, a militaristic arms race continues unabated, toward an apocalypse that no one wants, a conflagration that will burn millions of men, women and children to ash and leave no victors.

The militarism of international armed forces has much in common with domestic police militarism. Only the scale is different. The extent of America’s global military reach is impossible for the average civilian to comprehend. We have had almost zero debate about what size our military ought to be in a world of limited resources, including open discussion of the strategic usefulness—or uselessness—of nuclear weapons. This just doesn’t come up, even in entire Presidential campaigns, let alone debates. That very silence shouts the extent to which militarism’s infection may have weakened us. Pentagon accountants are apparently unable to plumb the mysterious depths of their own budgets. The juggernaut rolls on, unopposed except by a peace movement which, while robust, remains too small.

No one would argue that soldiers and the police do not sometimes exemplify duty, courage, and sacrifice. But in a more enlightened world, the police would be trained and equipped to put emphasis on tactics that de-escalate violence rather than to use violence to preserve an artificial and unjust “law and order” that only applies to certain people. If the armed forces of nations were motivated by the same spirit of de-escalation and not control or conquest, there would be all the more opportunity for heroic courage. There have been situations, like ending the Bosnian war, where diplomacy backed by military force was essential, just as there have been failures to intervene where loss of life could have been prevented, like the Rwandan genocide. Peacemaking is a high calling, blessed by the sages of the world’s religions.

Mr. Trump, though expressing it with his usual tone-deafness, was onto something when he said that the death of George Floyd was a great day. With that horrific video, something cracked open around the world. The curtain was drawn back upon the naked face of “law and order,” for all to see that it was often crude, selective, malign, corrupt with power for its own sake, systemically unfair. The violent militarism of police forces all across our country unleashed upon mostly peaceful protesters rubbed our noses in something usually more distant and abstract, especially for white people.

Militarism has always been rationalized by the ancient Roman bromide: if you want peace, prepare for war. With the deaths of George Floyd and too many others, this has become a deeply questionable notion. Are the trillions presently pouring into weapons systems like the Lockheed Joint Strike Fighter, or the renewal of our nuclear arsenal, really the best way to strengthen our nation and overcome the perpetuation of racist injustice? Doesn’t our renewed strength lie in diverting some of those bottomless resources into schools, hospitals, Medicare for all, free college for all, mass transit, putting people to work on infrastructure renewal, and conversion to sustainable energy sources? That kind of shift would encompass reparations that would benefit everyone, not just those whom our violent history has deprived of the blessings of liberty. Such movement toward an equal-opportunity society would ultimately make the demanding work of the police far less difficult, as well as making America stronger internationally.

Protesters are not only pulling down statues of generals and statesmen because they abetted a racist political system. The statues are also the symbolic embodiment of militarism, in all its hollow mythic glory, a militarism which suffuses our civic culture, visible in the millions of guns we own. Militarism is found in the rhetoric of all those, from the president to Rush Limbaugh, who push a joyless, simplistic us-and-them worldview that tries to negate the existential reality that we are in this together, all challenged to acknowledge our interdependence and steward the life-support system that sustains us. For this great task, militarism is obsolete.

White Supremacy and World Supremacy

Recently the Equity Leadership Steering Committee associated with an almost entirely white school district in Maine came out with a strong letter asking citizens to acknowledge not just the anodyne “white privilege,” but the actual “white supremacy” pervasive in our nation. Not unexpectedly, they received some kickback. Fortunately the Superintendent of Schools had the courage to back them up.  

Selective listeners heard “you’re accusing me of Klu-Klux-Klan-level racism.” But “white privilege,” compared to “white supremacy,” has the ring of a garden party to which I somehow deserved an invitation. “White supremacy,” enforced by the police and structures too long set in cultural concrete, is closer to the truth. The events of the past two weeks, especially so many young whites demonstrating alongside blacks in the streets, have made it easier for whites to acknowledge the depth of the injustice in which they play an integral part.

We humans are selective listeners. We hear what we want to hear, because it “fits” our mindset. When Donald Trump hears “defund the police,” he thinks “anarchy, chaos, abandonment of law and order.” When the millions of American protestors hear the same phrase, it means “the militarization of the police only brought out their worst tendencies. Reform is a failure. Time to reconceive the police, and put far more funds into social services that meet human needs directly.”

A pervasive paradigm never dies a painless death—in this moment the real deaths of far too many black people. While we’re on the subject of defunding an overmilitarized police corrupted, perhaps from the beginning, by invulnerable power, structural racism, a code of conspiratorial secrecy, and resistance to reform, let’s also remember just how big a paradigm shift we are undergoing in our historical moment—bigger even than racism. Because in this shift, everything is connected.

When Mr. Trump hears “Green New Deal,” he thinks “radical socialism,” where Ocasio-Cortez thinks “new job opportunities and a more sustainable living system; what’s not to like?” Pushed out of the headlines by the pandemic and the police lynching of Mr. Floyd, international challenges like climate change do not abate.

When Donald Trump hears “full spectrum dominance” or “we have more nukes than any other country,” he hears that the “strength” of supremacy enforces law and order internationally as well as domestically. A growing number of the rest of us hear foreboding elements of weakness, decay, misappropriation of limited resources, double standards, and possible nuclear catastrophe.

It isn’t just the police that are overmilitarized; it’s the military itself. Not just in the United States, but the United States is a case in point. The Lockheed F-35 Strike Fighter is expected to cost a trillion dollars over its sixty year lifespan. The plan to renew our nuclear arsenal over ten years will cost us taxpayers 1.6 trillion—leaving aside our futile and unnecessary wars, including the racist one in Vietnam and our indecisive long-running campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine the trillions expended upon bloated military programs and stupid wars that end up diminishing our security repurposed to give everyone in our nation authentic equality of opportunity, equal access to health care, equally well-funded schools.

We, and not just in the U.S. but also in other autocracies like Brazil or Hungary or Russia or China or Iran or Myanmar, are invited to rethink the age-old question of fundamental relationship between the state and the individual citizen. Is the purpose of the state to control, or is it to support human dignity and equal opportunity and clean air and water?

The U.S. Declaration of Independence says that citizens will create an ideal society and government by “laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

The people in the streets yearning for something new and hopeful, not only in the U.S. but all around the world, including Hong Kong, don’t want to be controlled by an intrusive state; they want to be free from the state unless it is repurposed to more effectively champion their needs and rights.

Nuclear weapons, like our over-armed police, are also the expression of a brutal, dysfunctional, obsolete attempt at supremacy and control. Defund and reconceive the police. Defund subsidies for fossil fuels and support alternative energy systems. Defund and reconceive international security by forging new arms agreements which lift the anxiety of being annihilated off our necks. “I can’t breathe” has more than one meaning.

The End of “Othering”: Another Kind of Global Climate Change

  

There is another kind of climate change, a mental one, we are undergoing, catalyzed by the combination of the pandemic and the gruesome lynching of George Floyd. Mr. Trump’s non-leadership is a classic example of the mental climate that is dying. His way is division—into the Us of his base, and the Other: the left, minorities, protestors.

But the world of “Othering” is dying to make way for the world of “We Are All in this Together.”

As one who benefits from white privilege yet still believes in the power of loving, trained non-violence, I revere the example of Martin Luther King Jr.—not the cleaned-up King of the holiday, but the “radical” King who not long before he was assassinated, spoke truth to the triple evils of American militarism, racism, and materialism, the King who made uncomfortable connections between the war in Vietnam and poverty at home.

I wish all the protest was disciplined in the Gandhian tradition, because that would be a further expression of the new world in the making. Such creative protest, exemplified by the Chief of Police of Flint, Michigan who put down his baton and walked with protestors, heading off mayhem in his city that night, makes it harder for Trump to sustain his tired Us-and-Them schtick.

But that is too much to ask at this further moment of pain for African-American citizens, one more link in an endless chain of injustice and deprivation going back to the slavery that was written into the Constitution. Obedience to law is liberty, but if the law is perceived to be structurally unjust, then, as President Kennedy said in 1962, “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

I have the honor to be the grandfather of five mixed-race grandchildren ages 15 to 2. In my country, if it does not fundamentally and quickly change, these children are going to undergo a transformation in the eyes of our systemically racist culture. As they enter puberty, their adorable qualities will mysteriously evaporate, replaced by the reality that too many white people will see them as a threat, especially too many of the police. They will require “the talk,” about how to respect police officers as a matter of survival. To have to explain to the innocent why they are an “Other” is a kind of madness, one that fuels the rage that is pouring into the streets of our cities.

My grandchildren also have the opportunity to be citizens of a possible new world of which we see faint signs, a world in which whites will finally accept that their coming status as a racial and political minority in America need not be threatening—that whites will no longer need an Other to help us define ourselves as superior. That challenge must be met entirely by us whites—a change of mental climate indeed.

But this cultural tendency toward “Othering” encompasses so much more than the present racial divide in the United States. It explains and connects so much of what is wrong and false and dying in our world, and what is right and true and being born, a birth upon which depends the very survival of us all.

In the world I hope is possible for my coffee-colored grandchildren, citizens will have made the intimate connection between all of the big challenges facing the planet: ecological degradation, nuclear weapons, world-encompassing pandemics, the polarizing divide in our politics made worse by sneering demagogues like Rush Limbaugh. All of these huge challenges emerge from the human tendency to “Other,” a fire upon which Limbaugh and Trump happily pour gasoline.

Out of our fears and desires to maintain an illusory control, we humans have created world-ending weapons to keep the Other at bay.

Out of their fears and desires to maintain an illusory control, the super-wealthy, enabled by the president and his legislation-burying Senate toadies, enjoy far too much influence over our government. Often they pay no taxes at all (surely a kind of welfare, if not outright looting), and have “Othered” ordinary citizens, forgetting that these ordinary citizens are the interdependent source of their wealth.

Big Pharma and Big Insurance have “Othered” Americans into health care haves and have-nots, when for the cost of a few less aircraft carriers and F-35 fighters, we could all afford preventive and curative care.

Out of our desire to control and monetize our industrial food-supply, we have “Othered” nature itself, when nature is telling via pandemics and many other signs and portents that we ourselves are an integral, interdependent part of the living system.

There is no Other. As someone once wrote, “the earth is a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side.” True self-interest has become what is in the best interest of all, not the nations, but this small planet. At this moment of pain and destruction in America, obviously we’re far from being all on the same side. Still, the sentiment of seeing the earth as a one-sided sphere means a lot more than some easy Kumbaya bromide. It is a reality that grounds us in interdependence, and points toward a mental climate change where “Othering” of all kinds is obsolete.

Nuclear Clouds on the Horizon

Nuclear Clouds on the Horizon

A series of ominous signs point to the reality that President Reagan’s warning—“a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”—has not sunk into the thinking of the military establishments of the nine nuclear powers. The U.S. is signaling its abandonment of arms control left and right, most recently the Open Skies Treaty, a stabilizing agreement that allowed Russian and American planes to do flyovers of each other’s territories. The U.S. and others continue research on both hypersonic missiles that will reduce the time for sensible decision-making in a crisis.  We are also developing smaller-yield warheads that make the transition from conventional to nuclear war more likely. Mr. Trump and friends are thinking again about more nuclear tests and the weaponization of space.

We knew very well a worldwide plague could occur but we didn’t think it would. We were taken by surprise and unprepared. The pandemic struck impersonally at obsolete conceptions of nationalist autonomy, reminding the international community of all the other challenges we can only solve together.

Nuclear weapons remain one of those challenges. There is only one way out of the corner we have painted ourselves into: mutual, verifiable agreements to get rid of the weapons and control the materials that go into them. So what do we need to know that will have the momentum to carry the world through to this end, the momentum of truth? A few fundamental realities:

The first is the unreliability of deterrence.  Deterrence works—until it doesn’t. It didn’t deter 9/11. It didn’t deter Russia’s stealth invasion of Crimea. Realists embrace deterrence, Mutual Assured Destruction, as a tragic necessity. The reality is that it purports to prevent a third World War when in fact it only postpones one. Why? Because the mother of all paradoxes is built into the system: in order to never be used, the weapons must be kept ready for instant use. With no mistakes. Forever.

Which brings us to a related reality—the inevitability of error. I participated back in the 1980s in a citizen initiative to bring together Russian and American scientists to write papers on the technical background of accidental nuclear war. The papers became a book, Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking, the first book published simultaneously in the U.S. and the then rapidly changing Soviet Union. Gorbachev read it. Even today more than thirty years later, the book retains the capacity to make one’s hair stand on end. All the problems that the scientists agreed in 1986 were dire are even more dire today.

The layered systems of computers and missiles, some of the equipment modern and some frighteningly worn and obsolete, are coupled with the familiar human error that we have seen unfold in technical failures like the Challenger, Chernobyl, and the Max-8s. There are too many stories of early warning systems mistaking the rising moon or a flock of geese for incoming missiles, nearly initiating a retaliatory launch. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the equivalent of our playing pistol roulette with the world. There was a bullet in the chamber and we pulled the trigger, but miraculously the gun misfired. As Robert McNamara said, only luck, not expertise, has saved us. How far can we afford to push our luck?

Another piece is what we have learned about the possibility of nuclear winter. Scientists have modelled more and more precisely how few nuclear detonations on cities would be required to raise enough dust and ash into the upper atmosphere to change the planetary climate, making fatal changes in agriculture and our ability to feed ourselves. Thus even a so-called “limited” nuclear war contains no possible victory, and very possibly would lead to the suicide of the nation that initiated it. It is startling to admit that, much as we reserve our deepest fear and disgust for suicide bombers, our taxes and investments subsidize just such a system on a world-ending scale.

We cannot fool ourselves that our weapons are good because we are good and North Korea’s weapons are evil because they are evil. A Hindu bomb or a Muslim bomb or a democratic bomb or a totalitarian bomb are all equally adequate to cause nuclear winter.

Unless we change direction, the ultimate tragedy of nuclear war will emerge from the status quo. Experts know this, and yet the drift toward the waterfall continues. Not one of the nine nuclear powers has signed the 2017 United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which so far 81 nations have already signed and 37 ratified—an international expression of the democratic spirit we value in our own country.

The only way out—the only way—is a permanent conference, sponsored by the U.N., where the stakeholders pledge no-first-use, take their weapons off hair-trigger, and work out protocols of mutual, verifiable reductions of all weapons. Even if it takes a decade or more, positive incremental steps along the way will build confidence that the job can be completed.

An extraordinarily hopeful precedent was provided by the Nunn-Lugar Threat Reduction Initiative in the 1980s and 90s— a bipartisan achievement. The project resulted in the disassembly of 7000 nuclear warheads in the territories of the now former Soviet Union. That is nearly half of all the nuclear weapons deployed worldwide today. In one crucial sense these weapons are not like a virus: we built them, and if we can truly see their surreal dysfunction, we can, and we will, unbuild them.