reality-based educator

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...