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I’ve been silent lately: I’m doing overdue work inside and out toward letting go of poisonous anger and unforgiveness. I can’t very well counsel others to do this if I’m not willing to. I can’t very well fight injustice if I’m consumed by the belief that unrepented support of BushCo can never be forgiven.

Then today I read Cindy’s account of her forcible arrest at last night’s SOTU address — for quietly wearing a T-shirt that read, “2245 Dead. How many more?”

And again rage rises, and tears well up, at what we’ve lost. I feel with Cindy when she writes —

After I had my personal items inventoried and my fingers printed, a nice Sgt. came in and looked at my shirt and said, “2245, huh? I just got back from there.”

I told him that my son died there. That’s when the enormity of my loss hit me. I have lost my son. I have lost my First Amendment rights. I have lost the country that I love. Where did America go? I started crying in pain.

What did Casey die for? What did the 2244 other brave young Americans die for? What are tens of thousands of them over there in harm’s way for still? For this?

The enormity of the loss hits me, too. Then when I imagine myself in the shoes of a U.S. or Iraqi parent whose child is now dead, like Cindy, I nearly fall down in grief.

Beyond the presenting problem of a nation enthralled, huge as that is, there’s a deeper, more enmeshed problem that threatens despair: How have we as a people become so dissolute as to not only allow this dismantling of America, but also that a substantial percentage of us still support it?

I have much more work to do.

Lincoln’s words have been haunting me lately — thanks to Al Gore for reminding me — words that speak powerfully to the present as well as to the time into which Lincoln spoke them (State of the Union, 1862, during the U.S. Civil War):

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. … The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. … We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. … The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just — a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.

Supporting the present powers, endorsing today’s systemic injustice that is fueled by fear and sustained by deception and violence, casts a shadow over one’s whole life. I’ve already experienced friends and acquaintances die while still praising these powers, and my memory of them is ever shadowed by their choice.

I think this is what “we can not escape history” means. I don’t want to be remembered as complicit. I don’t want my friends and family to be, either.

What if here in the last days of the Republican Party, its players returned to the values of its beginning? Honor, responsibility, peace, generosity, justice?

What if we all do? What if we “think anew and act anew” to solve our problems? [instead of lashing out in age-old ignorance and vengeance]

I cannot yet forgive, but I can at last pray for conversions on the way to Damascus — whacked-out-of-the-saddle transforming flashes of insight — for all of us.