Tread lightly on the things of earth

Well. I still sometimes feel like a stranger in a strange (and crazy) land.

We continue to witness clashing worldviews here in the U.S. that seem to me less like disagreements and more like we’re from different planets.

For example, the current U.S. health care reform conflagration. As I see it, I’m thinking, who in their right mind wouldn’t want the U.S. health care system changed, improved, made more effective, made more sustainable? (Even if it takes more than one try to get it right.) Yet many of us, including ones who stand to benefit the most from health care reform, are nevertheless violently opposed to any change¹.

Most of my explanations for this so far are fragmentary. “These people are stupid,” for example, tempting though it is to think, is not a comprehensive — or helpful — explanation.

I am absolutely determined to grok this multiplanetary-views-on-one-planet situation before I die.

Because, my thinking goes, if we really are all children of one God, as lots of us claim we are, then even my most batshit insane incomprehensible brothers and sisters deserve my attempt to understand where they’re coming from. (Why yes, it would be way easier to not give a crap. That has crossed my mind. But turns out I’m just not wired that way.)

So … I’m studying the Spiral Dynamics model at the moment, “a way of thinking about human nature [that] explores what makes us different and alike at levels deeper than the demographics of age or gender, economics or ethnicities.”

It’s a seriously big-picture understanding of human motivation and behavior.

(Here’s an excellent starting-point text-, and another graphical, description.)

I think it’s helping.

later in the day …

I’m reminded that the idea of a spiral of development has resonated with me for a long time. See Inconsistency has its place from May 2003.

next-day addendum …

It is important to try to understand each other, as I’m advocating here. It is simultaneously as important not to shy away from pointing out the extreme social and spiritual consequences of bearing false witness in hateful and ridiculous ways, as these townhall-protest teabaggers are doing. (“By their fruit you will recognize them.”)

¹Note that violently opposed is no exaggeration. When citizens attend U.S. representatives’ town halls yelling “Liar! Liar!” and displaying signs that accuse “Hitler! Nazis! Socialism! Fascism!” — and it’s significant that many of these yellers are older white folk, like me, who I charge should damn sure know better than to believe and propagate this illogical nonsense — then you know something is catastrophically flawed with the information distribution system in this country.

Four years later,

Today is the day that the curse is lifted.

Dear God, I can breathe again for the first time in eight years!
We have demonstrated to the world now that we are not, in fact, eat up with stupid.

I think this nation is going to come back to life now. As of tonight, immoral and ignorant are no longer cool. Decent and bright and informed are the new cool, no longer objects of ridicule and derision, but back in their rightful place as worthy values.

As a result, for the first time in years [because we will finally be bringing decency and informed clear thinking to bear on them], we will have traction when we face our problems. Now we can move forward.

Yes we can. Yes we have. The world is changed.

2008-12-19 update: Of course, even a curse lifted doesn’t imply we’ll immediately escape a tribulation of our own making. I take from Judeo-Christian scripture that, no matter to what degree God intervenes in human affairs, God almost never relieves anyone — individuals or peoples — from deeply experiencing the consequences of their actions [where in this case actions = having embraced self-proclaimed “conservative” thoughtlessness, self-righteousness, and the immorality that inevitably arises from all thoughtless self-righteousness]. Thus, for starters, seems to me, the [consequence of] deep recession is upon us.

Back on Election Day 2004 I wrote —

Let today be the day that the curse is lifted.

Same prayer today. What’s changed? Today more of us recognize the curse as curse and are ready to have it lifted.

Remember Not One Damn Dime Day? Great name, I thought.

I want today to carry more heft. Because of promises broken, diety blasphemed, accountability scorned, budgets busted, and blood shed, let today be

Not One Damn Republican Day

For everyone’s benefit.

Amen.

Concerning passage of yesterday’s U.S. torture legislation, a Friend whom I respect wrote —

You are, so long as this law is on the books, now in a dictatorship.

No deep thought is required to recognize he’s right:

If one person, or a small group of persons, can accuse then torture anyone he or she chooses and/or put the accused person in prison indefinitely without provision for due process under the law, then the result is indistinguishable from a dictatorship.

Think about what’s happened apart from its serious ethical, moral, and Constitutional implications. Look at it practically:

As an engineer, if I build an electrical, mechanical, or process flow system with a glaring single point of failure — as, in this case, hinging everything on the discernment and judgment of one human being, every one of whom is subject to error — then I’ll be drummed out of the engineering profession. And appropriately so: when any system depends on one breakable link to function, that link will eventually break. And when it does, the power grid fails, the bridge falls, the plane is misrouted to Fargo — or falls out of the sky.

Put another way:
In any complex system on which lives depend, wherein failure means fatal, there must always be failsafe upon failsafe upon failsafe. This legislation strips away all the failsafes.

If our democracy is to survive, this legislation cannot stand.

Resources:

• Senate Approves Broad New Rules to Try Detainees
• Rushing Off a Cliff, editorial listing bill’s flaws
• Many Rights in U.S. Legal System Absent in New Bill
• U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes on S. 3930
• S. 3930, Military Commissions Act of 2006 (PDF), Senate bill “to authorize trial by military commission for violations of the law of war, and for other purposes”

2006-10-19 update:
Mr. Bush signed this act into law on Tuesday, October 17, 2006.

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley reminds of James Madison’s alternative imagery about our system of government to mine about broken engineering design:

OLBERMANN: Does this mean that under this law, ultimately the only thing keeping you, I, or the viewer out of Gitmo is the sanity and honesty of the president of the United States?

TURLEY: It does. And it’s a huge sea change for our democracy. The framers created a system where we did not have to rely on the good graces or good mood of the president. In fact, Madison said that he created a system essentially to be run by devils, where they could not do harm, because we didn’t rely on their good motivations.

Now we must.

I remain surprised at the overlap between Calvin-influenced Protestant Christians for whom “the depravity of man [who is therefore dependent on God’s grace]” is a central doctrine — a doctrine I understand and am significantly influenced by — and those who support the party who supports this notion that the depraved human being — that is, any human being, present or future — occupying the office of President of the United States is immune from error.

Powerhouse commentary. Keith Olbermann delivers a tour de force comment on this loss of habeas corpus on the Wednesday, October 18, 2006 Countdown (alternate Quicktime version here).

I expect this video to achieve historical significance in future years in future classrooms. Well worth seeing now.

Wow, watching Keith Olbermann’s special comment tonight [“Are YOURS the actions of a true American?”] <deep breath> I felt for the first time in years <hairs standing on end> that the nuclear warhead of truth has finally been detonated inside the alien mothership.

What happens next is the slow-motion annihilation of this ship of death, its fiery chunks falling to earth, the sun washing the sky of its brooding malevolence, and just in the nick of time.

On the one hand, after year upon grinding year, saying this out loud now sounds like unwarranted hope. OTOH what I experienced during this comment I experienced viscerally, and to me an unconscious whole-body response like this reveals more has happened than just words being spoken.

PastorDan has it right about today’s U.S. torture legislation, “a Republican deal on terrorism trials and interrogations [that] would give President Bush wide latitude to interpret standards for prisoner treatment” (CBS News).

What is happening on Capitol Hill today is plainly evil. …
Anyone — anyone — who accommodates torture takes part in evil. That might not make us all equally responsible, but it does make us all guilty.

Yes: Torture is evil. This legislation is evil. Illegal, immoral, evil. There is no excuse for torture under any circumstance. There is no defense before God for accepting it.

For each of us, this is not a Republican/Democrat thing. It’s not a conservative/liberal thing. This is a human thing: are we, or aren’t we?

Unless we turn, all of us now, this spiritual cancer is going to kill us.

EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL.

God, help us turn from this evil. God, forgive us for being its host.