Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Love and Forgiveness

A friend of mine got some tickets to see a taping of CMT's Crossroads with Rosanne Cash and Steve Earle last night. I have to tell you, it was a profoundly moving experience. I love Steve Earle and I primarily went to the show to see him, but Rosanne Cash's performance was fantastic and I am now a big fan. Her band was top-notch, her singing gorgeous beyond belief, and the music was fun and funny and heartfelt and poignant and rocking and sad and happy all at the same time if you know what I mean. A great show all around.

In fact, I enjoyed the show so much that when I came home I went over to her website to read about her latest album, Black Cadillac. I saw that she posts a web columns entitled "Mrs. L's Monthly," and she has some very interesting things to say about matters political, environmental, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. Her latest is about war and hate and it contains a bit of wisdom I'd like to take with me on the road. This excerpt I'm posting is long, but it's really worth reading:

I grew up with the Vietnam War, as I know many of you did. I came home from school to turn on the television and see War, live and in color. I had a deep interest in the draft numbers of the older brothers of my friends, and I remember riding around town in the car of my aunt when I was about 12, flashing the peace sign to everyone I saw, in camaraderie with all the longhairs and counter-culture-ites, in opposition to war in general, and the Vietnam conflict in particular. Around the same time, my father spoke out against the Vietnam War, and then promptly went over to sing for the troops. This made a profound impact on me, and left me with a dual desire and outlook that is so deeply imbedded in me as to be a permanent feature of my character: Peace and Unity. Non-Violence and Patriotism. Many, many years later I sat with my father in his little study, in March, 2003, and we watched CNN together in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. He began reminiscing about his trip to Vietnam, almost forty years earlier. He recalled a sleepless night in Vietnam, lying beside June, listening to faraway, and not so faraway bombs. He said, "Once you hear the bombs dropping, you never want there to be war anywhere, ever again."

I have thought of that statement a thousand times lately. But does it take firsthand experience to reject the violence? I don't think so. I had a small taste of it myself on 9.11. I was in Lower Manhattan on that day, in a parent's meeting at my daughter's school, and the first plane went over our heads. It rattled the building and shook us in our chairs. We looked at each other, and one mother said, 'That plane is going to crash'. A few minutes later, someone came in to say that, indeed, a plane had crashed into one of the towers at the World Trade Center. I watched the towers burn from the street outside my daughter's school. I was standing with a friend of mine, while they rounded up the kids inside, and we stood shaking as tears streamed down our faces, holding each other's arms. She said, staring at the burning tower, "All this in the name of God". Incredulous, unbelieving. But I did not have a feeling of revenge. I did not have a feeling that I needed to vindicate my hometown. I did not have a sense that retaliation was the only option. What I felt was that it was possible that it could stop there. No one should ever experience this; hatred is a false illusion. Love, in fact, underpins the entire universe. But we don't see it. If we had had a visionary as a leader, the response to 9.11 might have been, 'We need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. We need to sign the Kyoto Protocol. We need to mind our affairs at home. We need universal pre-school, and universal health care, so we can raise up some more visionaries."
Instead, we had a leader who spoke in cowboy rhetoric about 'gettin' em dead or alive' and decided to invade a sovereign nation on false pretenses, while the perpetrators of the crime remain at large, to this day, five years later.

Yes, Bono, I've come here to play Jesus to the lepers in my head.

It's been a hard summer, all around. The conflict abroad mimics the conflict in my own heart. And vice versa. But what do I have the power to heal, what is within my control? I meditate every single day, and every single day I say, "I surrender my will to the will of the Absolute". And then I go out and try to inflict my will on every damn thing I cross. Those stones I fill with my heartaches and toss in the ocean come back, as meteors.

But.
Something is shifting. I feel it. Aren't you sick to death of waste and misery, violence, hatred and UN-Love? As a nation, we revel in fear and vengeance, and a warped idea of our omnipotent power. We invade other countries in the name of high-minded principles, poorly assimilated, and turn right around and become the very thing which we revile. We are obsessed with the iconographic particulars of religion, and we pummel each other with what we THINK is in back of the symbols. We elect leaders who are telegenic, because we can't be bothered to think about anything but our own gratification for more than twenty seconds at a stretch, which is not long enough to peel away the layers of spin and polish and artifact. We want our Hummers and our Big Gulp at any price, even the price of the destruction of the entire planet. We do not think about how our actions will affect the next seven generations, as the Native American maxim dictates; we don't even think how they affect US.

My friend Dan Schwarz sent me a fantastic article about a psychiatrist who heals mentally ill people by first healing them in his own mind, by looking through their files and saying to each one that he is sorry, that he loves them.

Can I tell Hamas and Al-Qaeda and Saddam and Scott Petersen and Dick Cheney that I'm sorry, that I love them?
No, probably not. Yet.
I have to start smaller.
I can tell my husband, my children, my sisters, my brother, my dead parents, my friends, the taxi driver, the band and crew, the deli owner, the members of the board, the manicurist, the committee to re-elect, the dry cleaner, the police officer, the receptionist, the postal worker, the audience. Myself.

I'm sorry. I love you.
Nothing you have done is irreparable, nothing cannot be healed in the light of infinite Love.
Some day the rocks I toss, imbued with the concerns of my heart, will fall to the bottom of the ocean. They will stay put. Some day all 200 million of us will go into rehab. We will wake up. Sooner than we think.
Don't agree with me, it's fine. I don't need you to agree with me in order to say
I'm sorry. I love you.

I struggle with the anger I feel toward George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Hastert, Delay, Karl Rove and the rest.

I was never particularly politcally active UNTIL this administration.

I grew during the Carter years, I came of age during Reagan, I grew politically liberal in the 80's and have supported the Democratic Party (for better or worse) throughout my voting life. I was interested in politics but not obsessed.

But these motherfuckers who lost the 2000 election and then governed like they had won a Reaganesque mandate, these cynical bastards who used the 9/11 attacks for partisan gain (and don't kid yourself, Karl Rove was one happy guy on September 12th 2001 as he began to map out the 2002 campaign strategy), these chickenhawk scumbags who lied to the American people, conflated Saddam with 9/11 and started a war of choice in Iraq that has killed or wounded thousands of Americans and countless Iraqis, squandered the fiscal health of the country for the fiscal health of Bush administration crony companies like Halliburton, and made the world and the United States less safe than before, have politicized me like no one could have or would have before. But I don't just want to beat these fuckers in the ruling Grand Old Party. I want to see them humiliated, decimated, exposed as the charlatans and hypocrites and cowards and cheats and fools that they are.

Sometimes the emotion of it all - the disdain, the hatred, the anger for where they have brought the country and the world - can carry me away and infect how I feel not only about the administration and it's allies in and out government but also how I view the rest of the world and more importantly how I view the future. And I know that living with anger and fear and hatred and disdain is not a healthy way to be.

So for today, I'm taking Ms. Cash's words with me as I go through the world: Love and forgiveness. Not for Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Rice, Rove et al. I'm not well enough for that yet. But for the rest, for my girlfriend, my deceased mother, my father, my sister, my extended family, my friends, my colleagues, my students, myself and the people I come in contact with today as I go about my life, I will try and treat them with love and forgiveness.

And then, we'll see about tomorrow...

Comments:
Sounds like a good plan.
 
I have to start smaller.
I can tell my husband, my children, my sisters, my brother, my dead parents, my friends, the taxi driver, the band and crew, the deli owner, the members of the board, the manicurist, the committee to re-elect, the dry cleaner, the police officer, the receptionist, the postal worker, the audience. Myself.


Well...let's just leave the self-love out of it, shall we. :-)
 
The challenge will be to stick the plan when I return to work next week. It's one thing to practice love and forgiveness on vacation, another thing to practice it with 175 students, 200 colleagues and the thousands of New Yorkers I come in contact with every day.
 
oops, I must have been replying to praguetwin when you posted, kvatch.

I think I know what she means when she includes herself in the list of people to receive love and forgiveness. I dunno about you, but I'm often my own worst enemy and am harder on myself when I make mistakes than almost anybody else would be on me. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I'm human and am imperfect. Often that's when self-love and self-forgiveness is most needed.

Anyway, that's what took from it.
 
Good luck with it. First plan wiould be to ignore the news.
Blogger would be helping me chill, if I didn't hate it so much! I switched to beta and now their new server is down.
I can't vent there it seems, but it doesn't fill me with love all the same.
 
OK, thta's what happened, cartledge. When I was replying to your comment on my Lieberman post, I asked what happened to your site when I tried accessing it this afternoon. Now I know.

As for a news moratorium, I've thought about it, believe me. I tried one after the '04 election, but it did'nt work well and by a week or so later I was back to watching Hardball and reading First read and going over to all my favorite blogs. I guess I'm just a news junkie who hasn't hit bottom yet!!!
 
reality, you wrote:

"She said, staring at the burning tower, "All this in the name of God"...If we had had a visionary as a leader, the response to 9.11 might have been, 'We need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. We need to sign the Kyoto Protocol. We need to mind our affairs at home. We need universal pre-school, and universal health care, so we can raise up some more visionaries."

Are you serious? Are you claiming if we bought less oil from the middle east Osama bin Laden wouldn't have attacked?

The Kyoto Protocols? Are you claiming Osama bin Laden and his fellow muslim terrorists are environmentalists who only kill innocent citizens of non-muslim and muslim countries because they're wasteful with oil?

Instead, we had a leader who spoke in cowboy rhetoric about 'gettin' em dead or alive' and decided to invade a sovereign nation on false pretenses, while the perpetrators of the crime remain at large, to this day, five years later.

You said "we need to mind our affairs at home." Does this mean we were deserving of 9/11 and muslim terrorists were right to kill thousands of innocent people in New York?

And how in the world is universal pre-K and health insurance tied to muslim terrorism?
 
reality, you wrote:

"Aren't you sick to death of waste and misery, violence, hatred and UN-Love?"

Yes. Whenever I think about my friends who were murdered on 9/11 by muslim terrorists I get a bad feeling. They hate us so much they come here to kill us. Yet we willingly buy their oil at any price, no questions asked. We build their water-treatment plants, their computers, their cars, virtually everything they have, and still they come here to murder us. I get a bad feeling because of that.

You wrote:
"As a nation, we revel in fear and vengeance, and a warped idea of our omnipotent power."

You must be speaking for yourself. But, you should know the US is probably the only truly responsible nation in the world when it comes to demonstrations of power. Like right now, as we offer Iran the chance to suspend its plans to build nuclear weapons in exchange for vast assistance for every part of its crappy economy.

You wrote:
"We invade other countries in the name of high-minded principles, poorly assimilated, and turn right around and become the very thing which we revile."

Says you. Personally, I don't want my office blown out from under me again. A little pre-emption is a good idea when you're dealing with people who are willing to die to destroy us.

You wrote:
"We are obsessed with the iconographic particulars of religion, and we pummel each other with what we THINK is in back of the symbols."

Maybe you are. Most people aren't terribly interested in the religious thoughts of others as long as the thoughts of those other people aren't manifested in murder.

You wrote:
"We elect leaders who are telegenic, because we can't be bothered to think about anything but our own gratification for more than twenty seconds at a stretch, which is not long enough to peel away the layers of spin and polish and artifact."

This societal weakness must have affected you too. Or are you one of the visionaries? Meanwhile, Bush is not terribly telegenic, yet he won two elections, three if you count the Texas governorship. Kerry is not telegenic either. While Bush and Kerry look okay on camera, their speech is problematic. Kerry could put anyone to sleep. Bush isn't glib.

You wrote:
"We want our Hummers and our Big Gulp at any price, even the price of the destruction of the entire planet."

Do you have any idea how few Hummers have been manufactured? The annual production of the H-1, which went out of production a few months ago, was about 400. The other models have larger production runs, but they are nothing compared to fast-selling cars. Meanwhile, what's it to you if people buy Big Gulps? Is buying a quart of expensive water a better use of discretionary cash?

You wrote:
"We do not think about how our actions will affect the next seven generations, as the Native American maxim dictates;"

Where'd you get that one? A Kevin Costner movie? Indians willingly killed each other all over the US. They killed recent arrivals from Europe too, including a forebear of mine. And they lived for centuries in backward societies focused on little more than survival. Is that a lifestyle you would prefer?

Based on all you wrote, you really must hate all your fellow Americans. You've accused us all of many crimes against humanity, yet you live here. That doesn't make sense.
 
n_s, everything you quoted me as writing was actually written by Rosanne Cash. You wrote:

"Based on all you wrote, you really must hate all your fellow Americans. You've accused us all of many crimes against humanity, yet you live here. That doesn't make sense."

Actually, had you read carefully, you would have seen it was Rosanne Cash who "really must hate" her fellow Americans. And had you read really carefully, you would have realized that the point of Ms. Cash's piece was to get to the root of the hatred and find away to stop spreading it, even if it was just in her own little part of the universe.
 
reality, you wrote:

"Actually, had you read carefully, you would have seen it was Rosanne Cash who "really must hate" her fellow Americans."

I know whose words you chose to represent your feelings on the various subjects addressed in your post.

You are either totally disingenuous or unaware that when you offer someone else's words to express your views that those words become yours.

You favorably and warmly quoted Cash, therefore you agree with her statements. Hence, Americans disgust you as much as they disgust her.

I find that point of view deeply insulting -- not merely to me -- but to all Americans.

There's plenty of issues for Americans to debate. But her/your revulsion for the nature, practices, beliefs, biases and indulgences of Americans expresses such contempt for the range, complexity, and plurality of our society that you insult every one of your fellow countrymen without even trying.

Meanwhile, I think you blame 9/11 on America, which goes off my scale for outrage.

You're worried about a few people who might have some mortgage problems, but you couldn't care less about my poker buddy who was murdered on 9/11 on his first and only trip to Windows on the World for a morning meeting that ended when he died. He left a wife and three kids. Scott O'Brien, if you need a name.

There were many others who were friends of mine or business acquaintences. You can be sure they did nothing that would warrant their murders and their removal from the weave of their family cloth.

Unfortunately there is a measurable willingness to blame America for attacks coming our way. Worse is the fact that the blame is coming from Americans -- who think if we bought less oil from middle eastern despots we would avoid mass murder.

You really need to drop the idealism and recognize that violent factions exist in the world and they do not intend to co-exist with us under any circumstances.
 
n_s, you have no idea what you're talking about. I too lost friends, high school buddies, at the WTC on September 11th. There is a five year anniversary mass for them this year which I will be attending. In addition, my father is a retired Port Authority cop who worked at the WTC for five years. He lost friends too. You don't have a monopoly on the meaning and tragedy of 9/11.

In addition, your way (which sounds an awful lot like the preznit's way) of fighting terrorism is not the only way. I, for instance, wish we had gotten ALL of the murderers who planned and perpetrated 9/11, but as you perhaps know, we had Osama at Tora Bora and let him go through some twisted logic that Pakistan ought to be the ones to capture him. And then let's not forget how we attacked Iraq (a country that had NOTHING to do with the 9/11 attacks - Bush said so himself this week at a press conference) instead of finishing the mission in Afghanistan and capturing Osama, Zawahiri and the rest of the Al Qaeda braintrust.

But instead of doing those things, we attacked Iraq wihtout a reconstuction plan for the peace, got bogged down in a civil war, are stuck there for the forseeable future (the preznit told us so at his press conference this week) and have watched terrorist attacks and support for terrorism in the Muslim world INCREASE over the last five years.

There are different ways and strategies to defeat Islamic extremism. The administration has decided trying to kill all the terrorists is the way to go. Unfortunately, they keep creating more as they try and kill them. Every terrorist attack in the years since the Iraq attack (3/11, 7/7) have been perpetrated by homegrown terrorists inflamed by the Iraq war. perhaps at some point the administration and its wingnut supporters will realize they have more tools in their foreign policy arsenal than the army and marines, particularly since the army and the marines have been stretched beyond their means in a war of choice that has made the U.S. more vulnerable to its enemies (Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea), not less. The United States won the Cold War by winning the hearts and minds of the people enslaved by the Soviets. We are currently losing the war for the hearts and minds of Muslims. This is not to say that there will not always be some extremists and terrorists who will want to hurt us. of course there will. But it surely would be nice to win over the majority of the Muslim people away from backing these terrorists up as they try and kill us here and abroad.
 
reality, you wrote:

"In addition, your way (which sounds an awful lot like the preznit's way) of fighting terrorism is not the only way."

Despite writing a lengthy response to my comment, you offered ZERO alternative strategies for ending muslim terrorism.

Your inability to deliver a coherent response is typical of those suffering from the anti-Bush animus.

Meanwhile you live with the delusion that muslims want a world in which they co-exist with non-muslims. No muslim government leaders and no muslim religious leaders believe in plurality or sharing the religious stage.

Don't take my word for it. They are insanely vocal about it. Moreover, they are very vocal about their hate for Israel and their desire to destroy the country.

Hamas and Hezbollah are dedicated to the destruction of Israel. This is beyond outrageous. No civilized society arms a militia to exterminate a segment of humanity.

But you seem to think negotiation is a process by which you can make the world safe from muslim terrorism.

On what is your belief based? Certainly not experience. All experience with muslim leaderships shows their willingness to break virtually every agreement and resort to wholesale and retail murder of innocent citizens.

Meanwhile, although I believe it's important that we catch and kill osama bin laden, his death won't end terrorism. His death is probably worth the deaths of 100 of his subordinates, but you can be sure there are plenty of ambitious terrorists hoping to replace him.
 
reality, you wrote:

"Every terrorist attack in the years since the Iraq attack (3/11, 7/7) have been perpetrated by homegrown terrorists inflamed by the Iraq war."

Says you. Osama and virtually every other attacker has stated on tape that the US, the West and Israel are under attack for what the intrinsic characteristics of each.

Muslim terrorism is not rooted in retaliation for specific grievances. It stems from an anti-west hate and islam's ambition to create a global caliphate.

Once again, I'm only repeating what muslims say. No detective work is necessary to encounter the obvious.

But muslim terrorists thank you for your willingness to misinterpret them.
 
reality, you wrote:

"The United States won the Cold War by winning the hearts and minds of the people enslaved by the Soviets."

YOu must have missed the Cold War if you believe your statement. First, "winning the hearts and minds of the people" is a phrase originating in the Vietnam War. And it didn't lead to much in that war.

The Cold War was won for many reasons, including our huge military buildup which the Soviets matched and which finally drove the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. But the final straw came when we hired osama bin laden to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

The Soviet's Afghanistan experience, which we orchestrated, pushed the Soviet Union over the edge.

The Cold War started when Kennedy came into office. Thus, we waged that war for about 30 years before declaring total victory.

But, unlike the Soviet Union, muslim governments, like the Iranian leadership, are not deterred by the threat of a nuclear counter-attack in response to a pre-emptive nuclear strike of theirs.

Therefore, we have no choice but to develop a pro-active strategy to defeat them.
 
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