Metta’s Opinion

“I feel like his campaign swindled the people of the USA into believing his administration would be something it surely will not be. “

On my 72^nd birthday I stood in UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza where, many years before, I was passionately involved in the Free Speech Movement, and watched Barack Obama become the 44^th President of the United States.

I had said earlier, “If that man becomes president I will weep tears of joy — but I won’t have any great expectations that that alone will change things.”  Both were true.  However, I don’t entirely hold with the sentiment expressed above that someone recently wrote in to us here at the Metta Center.  Here’s why.

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Dear friends, the following sections are from an email from Kathy Kelly, Co-Coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, January 19, 2009:

Dr. Atallah Tarazi, a General Surgeon at Gaza City’s Shifaa Hospital, invited us to meet him in his home, in Gaza City, just a few blocks away from the Shifaa Hospital.

“One of the worst aspects of this war,” says Dr. Tarazi, “is the lack of respect for the UN.  Three United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools were bombed.  In Jabaliyah, more than 45 people were killed at a UN school; F16s bombed UNRWA supplies and stores.”

“In Shifaa Hospital, we saw plumes of smoke for day and night. All Gaza, every day, was covered with smoke and chemicals.  We don’t know how it affects the health.”

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A bit over thirty years ago I was listening to the news of the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, where 900 Americans committing suicide and murder, in some cases on their own children, at the behest of a deranged ‘charismatic’ cultist promising them rewards in Heaven.  Memories of this shock came back to me in an odd way when I heard what happened on Black Friday at a Nassau County NY Wal-Mart- turning it very black indeed: crowds who had waited, in some cases, all night for a few bargains broke down the door before the store was ready to open, and when a temporary employee tried to stop them they surged in to do their shopping and, in the process, trampled him to death. That may seem like a rather different kind of mob hysteria from Jonestown – But they have something in common.  They are wakeup calls.  As one radio personality talking about Guyana said then, “Well, there’s 900 bodies down there and the FBI is cleaning it up.  Now here’s the real question: who’s going to pay for all this?”

Is that the real question?  Isn’t the real question more like, ‘Who are we?’ What kind of people have we become, that a deranged egotist could lead a thousand Americans to their death with fantastical promises of heaven?  Not, perchance, a people eerily reminiscent, to us now, of fanatical jihadists?  But let me get back to the more recent and, in terms of numbers, much smaller disaster.

Chris Johnnidis of Metta just sent me a photo of road signs outside a shopping mall in Emeryville, CA, that displayed the words, “as long as we both shall shop . . .to love and to cherish,” and “to have and to hold.”   On the other side they said, “happy – happier – happiest” with increasing numbers of shopping bags. All this might be mildly funny were it not for the fact that once again, with the tragedy in Nassau County, we are staring into a chance revelation of something deeply wrong with American culture – and once again some of us are running away from the right questions.

Nearly half a century has passed since Martin Luther King warned, in his famous speech against the Vietnam war in New York’s Riverside Church, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.”  By not heeding his advice – even when there are shocking examples of what happens when we do not – some of us have become so crazed by consumerism (Americans are exposed to between three and six thousand commercial messages a day) that when aroused by the idea of saving a few dollars they forget their humanity – and of course, in the process, that of others.  One onlooker commented that the 2,000-strong crowd waiting for Wal-Mart to open behaved “like animals.”

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This year we had a particularly good apple crop, more than we could eat in any form, so when we found ourselves between crops for our staples (kale and chard), we took a bushel or two of granny smiths and winesaps down to the nearby community-supported farm, and traded. The aroma of fresh wine saps is subtly intoxicating, which added to the stark contrast: while something called the economy was going through its vertiginous descent – trillions of dollars disappearing overnight – there we stood, chatting with our neighbors as we exchanged real apples for real greens. Our produce was as solid and as local as the strange events of Wall Street were remote and abstract.

The meltdown, who or whatever caused it, is of course a disaster; but some disasters are opportunities. Shortly before the devastating events of 9/11, someone on the President’s team famously complained that it would take “a new Pearl Harbor” to galvanize the country into accepting their agenda of militarism and domestic authoritarian control. They got their disaster, and made thorough use of it. And maybe now we have ours. The economic meltdown should be telling progressive-minded people that the time has come, not to shore up the old, top-heavy system that turned the wealth of the country into a vast gambling operation and exploited people and planet alike, but to create an economy that endures. Though we do not object to some stopgap measures to save innocent people from the worst of the damage, more importantly we call for shift to an economy of scale in which, as E.F. Schumacher said long ago, “people matter.” The words of Martin Luther King, Jr. are ringing in my ears: “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.”

Every component of such an economy is already there: the community supported farm up the road, local currencies, ‘natural capitalism,’ sustainable farming practices, ‘closed-loop’ manufacturing — all the way out to ‘capitalism with a human face’ in the Mondragon cooperatives of Northern Spain — or even the ‘gift economies‘ that render money itself once again irrelevant. They have been there all along, but the general public never hears about them or is made to understand that they are the economies of the future, as well as the past.

We do not have to reinvent the wheel: we only need to reassemble it.

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An old gospel song kept running through my mind as I was driving home last night:

The long night it is ending,

The long night it is ending,

The long night it is ending,

Day is a-breaking in my soul.

Amid the euphoria, I did detect a cause for concern in the reports that I’ve been hearing and reading: all the analyses of the Republican losses are being couched in strategic and personal terms: will Gov. Palin run in 2012, where are the former Republican moderates, etc. No one, to my knowledge, is saying the obvious: the Republicans lost ground because they have horrible ideas. They cling to a drastically outmoded concept of the world and people, and the last eight years of neo-con domination were (how good it is to use the past tense!) finally brought this out, because they are the ultimate, definitive expression of those ideas of hate and egotism. If he were physically with us, Martin Luther would probably warn us to avoid triumphalism.  We should be reaching out to our Republican friends now more than ever, and in a spirit of reconciliation. This was not a ‘victory,’ but a successful change. And an opportunity; and a responsibility.  Gandhi would probably say that the second worst thing would be complacency.

Happily, what I’ve been hearing – from about 90% of the individuals or organizations weighing in – is, ‘let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work’!  At the Metta Center, we have not been idle!  But now we should be finding a more responsive world out there in which our efforts can more fully resonate.

I said long months ago that if Obama became the President of the United States I would weep tears of joy – but I would not have too much hope that this alone would get us to a culture of nonviolence and unfolding human possibility. This is just where I am at.