Love, Truth and Thinking for Yourself

The polit­i­cal scene in the Unit­ed States is so deeply frus­trat­ing. We are polar­ized, embat­tled, insult­ed and insult­ing, tired of fear but still feel­ing it — often as a kind of mid­night despair and pow­er­less­ness. What the hell hap­pened? Now we are so eas­i­ly out­raged, con­temp­tu­ous and seem­ing­ly des­per­ate for rad­i­cal change that means our side is vin­di­cat­ed, our side wins.

Under­neath so much of this, it seems to me, is the sense that we — who­ev­er we are — have been treat­ed unfair­ly and that the oth­ers — who­ev­er they are — start­ed it. The oth­ers are the cause of all this pan­ic and pain, whether they are the rich, the poor, peo­ple of dif­fer­ent her­itage or reli­gion or skin col­or, the racists, the con­ser­v­a­tives, the lib­er­als, the politi­cians in Wash­ing­ton, the gov­ern­ment, the media, the greedy cor­po­ra­tions, whomev­er, what­ev­er — those oth­er peo­ple, the ones who pose the threat — the ones get­ting away with mur­der, the ones vic­tim­iz­ing us, treat­ing us unfair­ly, the ones who must be stopped. Those peo­ple, the ones who must be to blame.

Who has the dis­cern­ment to know what to do under such cir­cum­stances? To even explain what is hap­pen­ing, and why? With­out sim­ple answers, all we seem to be able to do is rage and con­demn. We divide things, peo­ple, up into a world of clear goods and clear­er evils. We become like aban­doned infants, cry­ing in the crib of our absolute enti­tle­ments and unmet needs.

Dis­cern­ment in this con­text is such an impor­tant word. It means to see into events and to begin to dis­tin­guish things in that dark­ness. It means step­ping back to view and rec­og­nize what is real from a larg­er stand­point. None of us, obvi­ous­ly, are per­fect in our dis­cern­ment. Nev­er­the­less to dis­cern is an incred­i­bly valu­able skill when the emo­tion­al field of soci­ety seems to be, as it is today, crazy and crazy-mak­ing. Dis­cern­ment is all about notic­ing the pea soup envelop­ing us all. It’s about notic­ing, in par­tic­u­lar, that peo­ple have now divid­ed them­selves into camps at war with oth­er camps, that dog­ma is run­ning the show, that we are deeply dis­ap­point­ed because no par­ent­ing voice of lead­er­ship seems near­by to com­fort us or save us.

It appears we’ll have to get out of the crib on our own. Nobody, no leader, is going to res­cue us.

This, it seems to me is an awk­ward first step, a first truth. We have to be our own best lead­ers and self-par­ents. We have to grow up, now rather than lat­er, even if we are not sure how.

Per­haps this whole thing is about a start­ing point. If we are feel­ing that we are being treat­ed unfair­ly — or see that so many peo­ple are, in fact, being treat­ed unfair­ly — per­haps yelling into the void about that isn’t going to do any par­tic­u­lar good. Maybe we have to look at what is. Maybe we can’t just go around shoot­ing inno­cent peo­ple out of frus­tra­tion, out of not being rec­og­nized for who we are. Killing inno­cent peo­ple, would­n’t you say, is the ulti­mate unfairness?

We are not going to go back­wards. Prin­ci­ples, per se, if they are only part of our home group’s dog­ma aren’t going to save us. His­to­ry, as much as we might need to under­stand it, isn’t going to give us a com­mon answer for cur­rent dilem­mas. We have rather to unlearn and relearn and maybe invent an entire­ly new learn­ing. Such is the nature of crisis.

Real­ly, it seems to me the only thing we’ve got is dis­cern­ment, and that to my mind is made up of these three parts: love, truth, and our abil­i­ty to think for our­selves. Love and truth com­bined are the only way we can see and hear things dif­fer­ent from what we want to see and hear, the only way we can share in a dif­fi­cult dia­logue, the only means at our dis­pos­al to gen­uine­ly under­stand or influ­ence any­one else. And the abil­i­ty to think for our­selves, rather than let­ting some group iden­ti­ty or affil­i­a­tion or label think for us, is the only way we can bal­ance what oth­ers say with what our own hon­esty and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty tell us is so. 

It would be so easy to weep — to say that our lead­ers have betrayed us, that soci­ety has betrayed us, that life in the form of “those oth­ers” has cre­at­ed this unfair­ness that is our hurt and deep­est pain. I encour­age you to feel free to acknowl­edge the pain and every bit of the unfair­ness you have expe­ri­enced. I encour­age you to express all of how unfair­ness is in con­trol of this soci­ety and what that means. And then, please, come think with me, under­stand­ing that we’ll nev­er get rid of it all, how we go about chang­ing the game — with­out pre­tend­ing, with­out walls between us, with­out cre­at­ing more and more of the very unfair­ness for oth­ers we say we hate so much. Come think with me about the cre­ation of this risky thing called, “a good country.”

RSS and email sub­scrip­tion, occa­sion­al Unfold­ing Lead­er­ship newslet­ter, search and oth­er func­tions may be found at the “Fur­ther Infor­ma­tion” tab at the bot­tom of the front page.

Pin­ter­est users, you can pin pic­tures from this weblog via this Board.