My brother wrote to me today to describe his view on how we are following the same path as ancient Rome, the descent into the dark ages and other bad things that are happening. I won’t post it all here but he draws some very good parallels about the Senate of Rome and our Congress today and the aristocracy of France in the pre-1787 Revolution days. I hope that my response, which follows, helps both of us to vent.
After reading, as always I welcome your responses and feedback. Read, think and discuss… it is how we learn, change and grow…
There are two fundamental issues at hand… our Framers saw the Constitution as a living, breathing document with specifics included and specifics omitted. Unfortunately, slavery was one of three issues that were omitted and that has been rectified. But the other two were omissions by the Framers for very specific reasons. The first omission was any mention of corporate of business “rights and protections”. The Constitution and its subsequent form of governance envision the people’s interests as first and foremost. The change began with a Supreme Court CLERK’S notation in the header of a ruling in the late 1800’s that began the era of “corporate personhood”. SCOTUS has gone so far beyond the scope of the rights of personhood in the Citizens United case that this must be changed (Read a book called “Unequal Protection” by Thom Hartmann for the full scope of the issue). Super-PACs are already showing what an uninterrupted and unaccountable flow of cash can do to an election. ONE MAN has written $10 million dollars worth of checks to a Super-PAC for Newt Gingrich. If that isn’t buying an election, I don’t know shit from shinola.
The second issue the Constitution intentionally omitted was any mention of religion. Religion is mentioned exactly once in the phrase (as part of the First Amendment), and I quote “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ….”
Based on this statement, the Framers intended that our country and its government remain free from influence of ANY religion and tolerance of ALL religions. This is also going by the wayside as the GOP especially, goes after the “Fundamentalist” or “Evangelical” vote. That is an entirely different debate but you can see by just the debate over the “Ground Zero Mosque” (which was not even close to Ground Zero) how intolerant we have become of other religions. My religion should be of no concern to the state and the debate as to teaching creationism in the classroom which has resurfaced in Indiana this week, should be moot. It is a religious “theory” based on Biblical (read Jewish) doxology and therefore has no more business in the classroom than Christian/Moslem/Hebraic or no prayer. It is not relevant and yet has become a very real litmus test in every election… who will win the evangelical vote? who will Pat Robertson endorse? what will the “moral majority” (which is neither) have to say in this election? On top of that, there is very little tolerance for anyone who doesn’t toe the “Christian right” line. Goes right back to the “godless communist” bogeyman if you remember is the reason why the words “Under God” was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950’s along with the phrase “In God We Trust” was made our national motto. We were going to force those nasty heathen commies into the open by forcing them to acknowledge God one way or the other… still working on that same premise today with all the fear and hate mongering and talk “being correct in your religious beliefs if you want to win an election”.
So how do we change this? Well, for one thing, never stop trying. If you go back to the example of the Constitution as a “living, breathing document” you will see the phrase “breathing”. Every living thing has a cycle… we breathe in, we breathe out. We feel up and happy and we feel down and depressed. The economy is up and then it is down… look at an EKG waveform or a respiratory waveform… there is a peak and a valley in both… that is the natural rhythm of the universe. It started with a “big bang” and will eventually begin to contract to an huge black hole. Stars grow, supernova, then collapse. Every age in our history follows this pattern. We learned it as a “bell curve”… there must be as much on both sides as the up in the middle. But the curve has been thrown out and everyone wants to just see the “uptick” side… there is no tolerance for a loss of any kind any more. Johnny has to be passed to the next grade level, not based on what he has learned, but because it will make us “look bad”. We cannot harm his self esteem, we can only support him and not criticize him. That line of crap needs to go away There are winners and losers and not everyone gets a trophy at the soccer tournament.
The second thing we must do is stop thinking in Newtonian terms. Think of your standard geometry graph with the x and y axis. Newtonian thinking starts at the (0,0) point and measures everything from there… up and to the right is positive, up and to the left is Positive, negative, down and to the right is negative, positive and down and to the left is negative, negative… see? Three quadrants require you to have negative thoughts and influence and input. Years ago, Robert J. Lifton proposed in a book called “Boundaries” that there is a Protean man who changes as he needs to change in order to survive (Proteus was the Greek god who could change his appearance). Lifton further postulated that in order to become Protean in our thinking, we must develop an “Einsteinian” approach as opposed to Newtonian.
Simply put, Einsteinian thinking says the world exists in three axes, X, Y and Z and not just the two of Newton. Think of a sphere or balloon. A piece of information is at (0,0,0) where the three axis meet. That piece of information can be viewed from up, over and behind; it can be seen from below, to the right and over… in other words, it can be viewed and interpreted from millions of point that are neither left or right and positive or negative but accounts for millions upon millions of combinations. Einsteinian thinking allows me to call myself a conservative liberal with libertarian influences, for example (that is a good description of my personal viewpoint). In my “Einsteinian” universe, there is room for everyone and every viewpoint. I am not restricted to positive/negative/left/right. Remember how people have said the right and left have moved so far to radicalism that they actually agree with each other? That is because they have “come around” in a full circle to meet which is Einsteinian thinking in its best form. They have moved around the sphere to a common point of agreement.
Now that I have bored you to tears, let me try to put all this in a simple thought…
It is called tolerance for all views. We have become more and more sheltered without human interaction. Why did Face Book and other social media cause the Arab spring? Because it called for people to put down their game controllers and come back to the outside… to the streets… to gather to make their voices heard. Fortunately for them traveling to Cairo is much less a trip than traveling from LA to NYC for the Occupy movement. We need to “occupy” our minds on the whole to make things better. Remember the phrase “Think Globally, Act Locally”? Nothing better could be said for right now. Get involved… write a blog, call your Congressperson and leave a message (don’t get pissy if you get an answering machine… you can call it countless times). But the main thing is to get involved and stay “Einsteinian” in everything you do. You will understand more, seek more and gain more if you realize that there are millions of points of view and every one of them is correct. Our singularity is our unity. Our country’s slogan of “E Pluribus Unum” needs to be the anthem of today…”From the many, One…” Live it, breathe it and pass it on.
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