America seems to be paralyzed by hostility between two cultural and political groups of nearly equal power who hold seemingly profound differences on many issues. That seems to include the climate crisis and especially the use of federal governmental power to address a necessary shift to renewable energy. Is there any way to dissolve this paralysis on at least this one issue?

At one level, the problem is cultural.  Seen from afar, the two clusters seem easily to fall into demonized stereotypes of each other depending on whom they vote for, what TV they watch: Racist, fascist, vs. globalist, socialist.

When by accident, through friends-of-friends, or actual family ties, the two clusters meet each other, they seem unaccountably lovable. Ready to bake a delicious meal for someone whose father is dying of The Virus, ready to play checkers and tell stories. How turn this humanity into an ability to address a problem Humanity is facing?

There is an ancient biblical tradition for a rhythmic healing of intra-Human and Human-Earth hostility that calls to us in a crisis of this sort. It is the seventh year of Shabbat Shabbaton – sabbatical rest raised to its own exponential power – or ”Shmita”   -- “release” of Earth and human beings from unbearable burdens. In that year, there was a pause from organized agriculture, releasing Earth from overwork, and there was a release from debt that was preventing a new start for part of the human community. (See Lev. 25-26 and Deut. 15: 1-11)

According to the ancient count, the next Sabbatical/ Shmita Year begins in the fall of 2021. If we do not act to make Shmita happen when it should, Leviticus 26 warns that Earth will rest anyway – through disastrous floods, fires, famines, plagues, and “exile”  -- that is, masses of refugees. The year 2020 has already given us a taste of that disorder, resulting from Shmita undone for decades and centuries; we must begin now.

I am not saying we must do this “because the Bible says so.” I am saying we must pay attention to the wisdom of an earth-based community precisely we have mostly ignored that wisdom for so long, and that we must modify what they taught to meet our own needs in the light of their wisdom.

How to dissolve these boiling hatreds that paralyze the United States from meeting the needs of Earth and Humanity?

We propose a program of Federal grants to neighborhood co-ops in all sorts of neighborhoods –- rural, small-town, metropolitan center, middle-sized cities, and suburban –- to initiate and support solar and wind energy co-ops.

The new energy systems would radically reduce the costs of electricity; radically increase the rapid spread of renewable energy and its jobs; reduce asthma and cancer rates in neighborhoods near coal-burning plants and oil refineries.

 Infusing national money into this local transformation would create millions of new “green jobs” in communities now hollowed out and dying. And the new solar systems would greatly reduce CO2 emissions that are scorching and burning our home –- our planet.

For some, the co-ops themselves might become grass-roots political challenges to the Corporate Carbon Pharaohs that are making hyperwealthy  profits by burning Earth, sowing the anti-life seeds of enormous floods, hurricanes, droughts, fires, and famines. They might even for some secular folks bring back almost forgotten memories of biblical plagues they thought were only legends, until Covid 19 came along.

And for others, the co-ops might mean not global change but serious jobs and serious money in the pockets of people whose factories were shuttered, windows broken; who couldn’t afford the taxes to pay for the schools to educate their children; who couldn’t afford the seed to plant the crops next spring.

Perhaps for some farmers these solar or windmill co-ops would nourish a memory still vibrant, for some still present in their lives -- the Rural Electrification Act, by which the New Deal through farmer co-ops brought electricity for the first time to farms in the 1930s – would open some emotional and political doors. And perhaps in some situations, the REA co-ops themselves are ready for a revitalization through wind or solar power.

I sketch this approach as a model of what a community-based, compassionate, justice-seeking America –- simultaneously “global” and “neighborly” – simultaneously committed to personal responsibility and social responsibility, and not requiring the devotees of one to believe in the other –- might look like. I suggest that it could be good practical politics as well as good value politics -– appealing as a Green Neighborhood New Deal to people who might have started out opposing the national program for the Green New Deal, just as Obamacare when it actually went into effect appealed to people who started out opposing it.

The point would be to emphasize neighborhood co-ops. That would be the crucial difference from almost all existing massive Green campaigns—deliberately funneling money and attention into the heavily Republican rural areas, only for renewable energy rather than for tariff relief as the Trump Administration did.  The possibility of energizing folks who live down the farm road instead of a suspect Federal bureaucrat who appears out of nowhere could make a great difference, and the same dynamic with different faces could make a similar difference in poverty-stricken North Philadelphia.

If Republicans control the next Senate, could the initial money be appropriated at all?   Possibly, first of all if agro money could be shifted to that purpose by executive order without breaking the Constitution. Secondly, if enough grass-roots energy for such an infusion of money and jobs at the neighborhood level could be ginned up in the rural/ small-town mostly Republican areas in the states of Republican Senators who are campaigning for reelection in 2022 to make them rebel against a hostile Republican leadership. Or failing that, to tip the balance in those states to elect Democrats who can respond to despairing farmers and small-town neighborhoods as well as  dead-end big-city neighborhoods.