Category: democracy

King Year

A person holding a bouquet of colorful flowers, wearing a brown beanie and traditional clothing with rich textures and earth tones.
https://dhammacetiya.com/walk-for-peace-the-venerables/

Buddhists walk for peace in my Carolina Winter while I, a Baptist/Quaker, walk their Monks’ Trail in Chiang Mai. Here in Thailand it is hard to see the mountains through the blizzard of campaign signs for their election February 8th. The campaign is skewed by live fire border conflict with Cambodia that makes this Buddhist nation think more about their military than their monks, but nothing remotely as brazen and raw as my own country. The people here will vote and the government will be who they choose.

I am not sure that will happen for my people as the increasingly brazen, desperate man coming apart in real time on world screens simply can’t afford one. After losing 43 out of 43 smaller elections since the presidential squeaker a year ago, every poll signals that the light at the end of our authoritarian tunnel is a very fast moving train that will take the House and Senate like hitting a bug on the tracks.

They have no other man and no other plan than to stop the elections from happening. Like a bizarre version of Thelma and Louise they accelerate maybe taking another mother on the way off the cliff. They will try to claim insurrection, posting goons at every polling station. Black People have seen that before and stood in lines winding down the streets. I doubt that Brown people will have any less courage. White people are too dim to understand the threat, so will show up with breezy optimism as the People take the House and Senate. But then we have a true knife fight in the mud for two years more.

A tranquil view of a still water pool surrounded by lush greenery and trees, reflecting the clear blue sky.
Wat Pha Lat, over Chiang Mai (tourists cropped out)

With troops in Caracas, untrained  goons in Minneapolis, soon Charlotte and Winston-Salem, we have to ask what faith has to do with raw power.

We know that any faith can be frivolous and silly. Yesterday on the Monk’s Trail was like Buddha-rama, a tourist conga line up the hill and through the sacred spaces. Christians have singing Christmas trees and incredibly stupid museums of the Bible down the street from where the Department of Education is vacant.

But….every now and then the Spirit stirs with power.

For faith doesn’t have opinions about power; it is power. Faith has no fear of what simplistic violence can take away. Death? Pain? Jail? Our best theology from Paul, Bonhoeffer to King was written there shaming the timid Bishops outside counselling patience. Bull Connor raged against the children raised in Sunday School for courage who marched—beat them, jailed them and bombed them in their church. And still they walked, shaming the by-standing adults until even the reluctant Feds had to cave.

King Day is over; King year just lifting off.

Said he: “The past is strewn with the ruins of the empires of tyranny, and each is a monument not merely to man’s blunders but to his capacity to overcome them. While it is a bitter fact that in America in 1968, I am denied equality solely because I am black, yet I am not a chattel slave. Millions of people have fought thousands of battles to enlarge my freedom; restricted as it still is, progress has been made. 

“This is why I remain an optimist, though I am also a realist, about the barriers before us. Why is the issue of equality still so far from solution in America, a nation that professes itself to be democratic, inventive, hospitable to new ideas, rich, productive and awesomely powerful?

“The problem is so tenacious because, despite its virtues and attributes, America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially.”

That was with Bobby Kennedy sitting where Stephen Miller now poses while his boss watches TV shows that making him think Greenland is bigger than Africa.

The little people surrounding him know it’s over. The only question is how many more dead mothers it will take. How many children?

Haven’t had any dead preachers, yet, but there are plenty on the front lines, running for office, building the protest and electoral machinery already running like a train in the tunnel. William Barber marching in NC Feb 11th. Talarico, a seminary student running for senate drawing thousands in the dust of Plano. Vote Common Good aimed like a laser at the 40 house seats most likely to flip Blue. Bishop Budde as clear as a newly forged bell sounding with grace and clarity in the morning. And, if you need a soundtrack, Jesse Welles.

No wonder the goons are hiring more goons.

Faith does not blink when God turns on the lights. Granted, faith can snooze through an approaching storm piddling and fiddling, doing not much until it hears the voices of its prophets, the young ones rising up on wings, the old ones giving voice to dreams long held waiting, waiting, waiting.

Says William Barber, our modern King, “Only when we refuse to accept the mythology around King and the Movement can we comprehend the legacy they entrusted to us. They did not leave us a perfect union. They inherited from those before them and passed down to us a way to challenge injustice and become what we’ve never yet been through moral force. They showed us the way up and out of the mess we are in.”

A group of monks in orange robes and brown hats walking along a road, some carrying flowers and displaying peace signs.
https://dhammacetiya.com/walk-for-peace-the-venerables/

Not one day. This is King year.

We are seeing what we’ve been waiting for. Indeed, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Now.

Live, the People

Historical industrial building at dusk, flanked by greenery and a pathway.
Belle Vue Cotton Mill used to dominate for miles with thread wove of slave-raised cotton. All gone, but the building is good for techies now. Our boat way down in the lower left corner on the canal that used to bring the cotton.

We live only if we are connected.

The FaithHealth networks in Winston Salem were so woven into the neighborhoods that somebody on the team knew every single homeless person by name. And where the Mayor ate lunch (West End Cafe). Thin filaments of trust, subtle as the forest mycelia, threaded every neighborhood including even into the Sherriff’s Office and, yes, ICE. Every now and then we’d host a lunch with ICE agents and Hispanic clergy so that the humans knew each other, not as cartoon characters.

The very first of the Leading Causes of Life is connection because all life flows across relationships, as real as the grittiest street in the toughest neighborhood.

Once, local ICE agents rescued a woman being trafficked and didn’t know where to put her safely. FaithHealth paid for a hotel (I didn’t ask the hospital CFO!). And when we convened the undocumented, we had enough trust to tell the ICE folks which church to stay away from. I am sad for these friends’ as they are debased by venal “superiors.”

Every human structure—church, hospital, university, Marines and ICE exists like honeycomb for the bee to help us attain our God-given capacity to thrive. This behavioral structure is hard-wired in the bees; no queen ever goes rogue to subvert her hive. Humans go rogue all the time debasing themselves and those with less power they coerce. Jonas Salk wrote, The Survival of the Wisest, about how our lack of hard wiring made us capable of adaptive choice. And, of course, it makes possible the corruption of power you can now see at your neighborhood Home Depot. Bees don’t have to think about being true to their purpose; we do.

Walter Wink observed that a) all human structure is designed with a Spirit for good that b) always tends to be corrupted and twisted against good so that c) the work of every human is to redeem and restore the structure to make mercy and justice possible.

When a damaged person obtains power, they can debase structure built for good and twist it to serve perverse ends. Social Security—one of the moral icons of the last two centuries—can be twisted into a weapon against vulnerable working people whose payroll deductions leave a trail. This is what Musk was doing. In the same way, our highest principle of free speech makes it possible for Journalists trained to articulate the truth debase language to confuse, distort and inflame. Marines trained to risk their lives to defend democracy become like Halloween clowns, threatening citizens who are protesting the violation of the Constitution they swore to defend.

This happens. Most of us just didn’t think it could happen in the constitutional democracy of the United States. At least most of us who are white. I don’t know anyone Black or Hispanic who is even surprised by the amoral vacuity of Musk/Bannon/Miller/Marco, serving a guy who hasn’t even read the constitution, much less a whole book about it. They have seen this for centuries.

This happens. But it never sticks.

TC and I live for now, for a season, in northern England on a canal dug by shovel 250 years ago by poor people who were valued little more than the sheep shorn for wool. The workers were guided by exquisite engineers working for rich families. They were digging for the same reason the container ships come to LA and deliver all the Chinese tools and Canadian lumber to the Home Depot that is put on shelves by people who mostly speak Spanish. I doubt if anyone in the White House has ever shopped in one personally. But they might wonder where their golf balls come from. Same ship.

It was—always has been—one world. But in the last two hundred and fifty years, the pace and scale has escalated profoundly. Even in those simpler times the relationships were woven in cotton and tobacco. Slave grown cotton from the Carolinas traveled to Liverpool on the same ships that had brought them from Africa to work the clay soil. Just west of Winston was the largest plantation in the state developed by British bankers from Liverpool. Our canal is known as Leeds to Liverpool, but it really runs to the hot fields of the Carolinas, across the South to Mississippi. A Manchester cotton company still owns thousands of acres of cotton land surrounding where TC was born, including the barn where Emmett Till was killed by some thugs way down the debased food chain of power.

A Venn diagram illustrating the concept of 'LIFE' at the center, surrounded by five overlapping circles labeled 'connection,' 'conference,' 'agency,' 'blessing,' and 'hope' in varying shades of orange and yellow.
Leading Causes of Life leads with connection. If you want to kill something–say, a democracy–disconnect it.

We grow ever closer to each other, which makes some afraid and thus easy for those who twist power to inflate those fears. LA shows us one structure of power in a last desperate ill-considered rush to hold on to its privileges, debasing all and everyone to the very last Marine.

Webs of power never last because the soil wears out or some technical gizmo changes everything again. The Belle Vue Cotton Mill behind our boat dominated everyone for miles around, spinning slave cotton into thread that was shipped around the world, even unto India where they conspired to make it illegal to spin cotton themselves.  The rich built big houses thinking they would be lords of industry forever but did not imagine Gandhi who taught the people to spin for themselves and be free. Today the mill is full of flats and offices with people wearing shirts made in Vietnam spinning little bytes around screens built in China.

Human structure dissolves when it ceases its proper work and is bent to evil. The Marines pointing guns against citizens violate their own oath and become something else, sadly. Many in my family took that same oath, some buried at Mt. Vernon. They swore to serve only the People. So did all the people in Our White House, but you expect more from a Marine.

Why such a rush to scour the Home Depots anyway? There is more violence at an average English soccer league game. The desperation is so obvious as to be sad. They have already lost when they have to pretend that Home Depot needs the Marines.

Statue of Liberty illuminated at dusk, holding a torch and a tablet, with a sunset background.
Stand strong lady in the harbor. We will not debase you.

They have to finish their debasement quickly before the People can vote again. Once we get within a year of voting, even the most emasculated Republicans will hesitate to risk everything for a 79-year old lame golfer. So they are right to hurry. It is said that if you go at the King, you must kill him. And what if the wanna-be king goes after democracy? He must kill it, too; and so completely that we will not remember it. Our job is to follow the Constitution and make it clear that the only insurrection is the one behind the Resolute Desk in the People’s House.

Things that cannot continue don’t.

But they do until people look up from the screen, move into the physical world and behave differently. Find your local Interfaith Alliance witness and act like a citizen.

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If you or a family member are in the National Guard or active-duty military and you believe you are being ordered to violate the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, call the GI Rights Hotline for advice and support, at 877-447-4487.