Three Ways of Regrowing Democracy Despite an Anti-Democratic US Government

 [This is Part II of a  Shalom Report essay that began last week, entitled “Resist, Rethink, Recreate.”  You can review Part I at

<https://theshalomcenter.org/content/resist-rethink-recreate-part-i>

[In it,  I drew especially on two experiences:

• An energetic Philadelphia demonstration in support of the Sioux Nation at Standing Rock –-  a demonstration aimed against the Wells-Fargo Bank for financing the Dakota Oil Access PipeLine, and
• Learning from and with Martin Luther King’s most profound, prophetic, and provocative sermon: “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,’ given 50 years ago on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was murdered. In a multireligious, multiracial workshop at the Stony Point Center, our goal was applying MLK’s wisdom and courage to our own situation, in thought and action. See <MLK50.org>]

 We are facing a government that is beginning the process of shattering democracy and devastating the Earth, elevating what Martin Luther King defined as the deadly triplets of Racism, Militarism, and Materialism into the domineering reality of our lives.

That government is trying to make it become the new normal that our lives will be fearful, consumed by fake news and “alternative facts,” struggling to deal with worsening economic pressures and worsening ecological disasters, even life-spans shorter in years.

Three different sorts of energy have been stirred into a devil’s brew to fuel this anti-democratic political machine. They have three specific people as their embodiments:

First, a Leader – a Bully -- with a strong personal streak of narcissism, cruelty, and vindictiveness: Mr. Trump. What he brings to the amalgam is a “populism” that is not about policy but about an emotional connection with people who are angry enough to break the rules of decorum –- and welcome a leader who does break them.

Second, an array of corporate structures consumed with greed for constantly increasing their own wealth and power  -–  embodied in Mr. Pence and a Cabinet made up of Robber Barons;

Third,  an ideological vision of a “sacred” society that seeks to “return” to a Christian West of governmentally enforced “traditional” religion, family, sexuality, class structure, racial and ethnic hierarchy, dominion over and exploitation of the Earth. This white-male supremacist vision necessitates committed enmity to Islam and public secularism, to all diversity and all debate as dangerous. I know this is a staggering vision –-- it staggers me –- but that is what Steve Bannon embodies. 

What could and should we be doing in this moment of American and planetary crisis? We need to do three things:

Resist, Rethink, Recreate. 

1)   RESIST

We have already seen the beginnings of a vigorously empowered democratic resistance to the Trump-Bannon-Pence presidency.  We have seen the enormous Women’s March(es) of January 21 and the Airport Occupations shortly after on behalf of refugees and immigrants and the flood of calls and visits to Congress against racist, anti-public-school, anti-health-care, anti-labor, anti-Earth  Trump appointees and against plans to destroy all forms of public support for medical care.

Now, this very week, it is possible to Resist much closer to home. Congress is in recess this week, and it is possible to show up at our elected officials’ events, town halls, and other public appearances to demand answers to questions like whether our own members of Congress will pledge to protect and improve our health care, to protect the religious freedom of Muslims and to meet the human needs of immigrants.

Resistance is not only about the “content” of political demands, but about the “style” of holding officials accountable. If CongressMembers refuse to hold town meetings, we can hold our own with the Congressional chair empty -- to highlight to the public and the media the lawmakers who won't even meet with their constituents. These events are being called “Resistance Recess.”

Click here to find your local Resistance Recess event and RSVP.

So far, the least bold resistance has been defense of the planet that keeps us alive. This is sad, but not surprising. Health care for the sick, religious freedom, the human needs of immigrants and refugees can all be portrayed in human-interest stories, videos, photos. Despite multiplying hyper-droughts and hyper-floods, the connection between planetary scorching and human disaster is harder to see and feel. Yet it remains the Big Story of survival.

So on April 29, we intend to bring together in Washington DC and in support cities around the country a People's Climate March and Movement. I urge you, The Shalom Center ‘s members and readers, to join in that effort.

For many Jews and Jewish organizations, the fact that April 29 is Shabbat makes participation difficult. Plans are under way for a multi-religious prayer service like the one that led the 400,000-person People’s Climate March in New York City in 2014. And in some Jewish communities, there are plans for local Shabbat gatherings in support of the Washington March.

You can get fuller information here as the plans unfold, and you can register to receive bulletins by clicking here www.peoplesclimate.org/?source=theshalomcenter

2)  RETHINK

We need to rethink the assumptions of what American democracy means. Rethinking is necessary because the Trump-Pence-Bannon coalition is right about one thing –-- right enough to win an election under the Constitutional rules even while vastly losing the popular vote.  They are right that for important parts of American society, the globalization model in economics and culture is not working.

Even if they had barely lost instead of barely winning the recent election, American society would have had to keep living with a painful ulcer of fear and rage. That ulcer would have kept us paralyzed. If as a nation we had ignored it, we would have continued to be unable to heal our society as a whole while the ulcer grew and worsened.

Unable, as Dr. King warned, to conquer the triplets of Racism, Militarism, and Materialism.

And this is not only a politically profound issue, it is a spiritually profound challenge. Are those who voted for Trump not still our neighbors, deserving of our open ears and hearts, our striving to understand their legitimate needs and to craft both human connections and policy responses? This too is a question that Dr. King faced in his own day and calls on us to face.

The Trumpist answer to this crisis is even more domination, more top-down control, more repression of those energies that are refusing to keep living passively in situations that are abusive and oppressive. That is an anti-democratic, anti-human, anti-web-of-life response; but the status quo is not viable. So we need to rethink what democracy must mean in our generation.

We need to rethink the relationship between the “old America” that now feels cast out economically, culturally, and spiritually –- and the New America which thinks it is the wave of the future but feels disempowered in the present. Is it inevitable that both kinds of the “left-outs” are hostile to each other, or can we reach beyond the present barricades? 

We need to rethink our top-down political parties, the power of Hyper-Wealth over our elections, the precariousness of our voting rights, including the built-in blockages against democratic decision-making.

We need to reexamine the nature of coalitions between groups of people and organizations that may share some agendas but disagree on others.

We need to rethink the roles of neighborhoods, urban and rural, in giving life to democracy.

We need to rethink the nature of jobs, work, and income in our increasingly computerized and robot-enabled society.

We need to rethink how we think –- the processes of education, culture, media old and new.

We need to rethink even religion. Already, the proliferation of “interfaith” and “multireligious” prayer services challenges the very foundations of what the Abrahamic traditions thought Truth was for most of the last two thousand years. It has happened before in history –- under the tyranny of the Roman Empire and the tyranny of Pharaoh, for example --  that an overweening exercise of tyrannical power that shattered old forms of community has led through times of tumult to the birth of new forms of sacred community. Could that be happening now?

Or are they One Truth, One Tree, Root and Branch?

You might think that Planet Earth goes its sad or merry way without regard to the political systems of any of those nations whose boundaries do not even appear on space-based photographs of our vibrant blue-green marble.

And you might think that the political forms in any of those countries have no connection with the flourishing or perishing of life-forms that make up Eco-system Earth.

But in fact our social systems and our eco-systems are deeply intertwined.

The intertwinings have political aspects, biological aspects, and spiritual aspects.

To begin with, we are still trying to cope with the discoveries of how to burn deposits of fossil fuels in such a way as to provide powerful new forms of energy for use by human societies. Those discoveries led to the emergence of corporations that became enormously wealthy and powerful by controlling, extracting, selling, and burning these fossils. 

Scientists and then political decision-makers discovered that these corporate business plans were scorching the Earth, forcing climate turbulence, and endangering our planetary web of life. But by the time these facts had become known,  the Carbon corporate structures and their political supporters had become so powerful and so unwilling to change that healing the Earth against their wishes had become extremely difficult.

On this issue (and often on others as well), nations that label themselves democratic in effect become oligarchical – – ruled by the few, the hyperwealthy. And when their oligarchy is Big Carbon, the less likely are those nations to act swiftly and emphatically to prevent climate chaos. Politics becomes biology.

There is a deeper interconnection – – indeed so deep that it is more like unity than like connection.

In Dr. Martin Luther King’s most profound, most prophetic, and most provocative sermon – – "Beyond Vietnam: a Time to Break Silence" – – he named Racism, Militarism, and Materialism as deadly “triplets” afflicting America.

Why did he use the word "triplets"? He could have said "trio," "triad," "three." The word "triplets" points to the truth that the three deadly life-patterns share a great deal of DNA, as do biological triplets.

What is the DNA that racism, militarism, and materialism share? It is the impulse to dominate, to subjugate.

The impulse to treat every "other" as an "It,” never as a "Thou.” That is the spiritual aspect of the danger that we face.

In the crisis at Standing Rock, North Dakota, the oil companies and their pipeline accomplices rolled the three triplets into a single domineering battering ram.

First, Materialism in charge.The companies, ravenous for even greater profits and utterly uninterested in empathy

 I want to share with you my thoughts about what happened this past week, from two perspectives: 

I: Great public events, and II. My own work.

Then l will look at what the implications are for the work we all need to be doing to preserve and advance democracy and the very livability of our Earth -- when they are most seriously threatened.

I. Publicly, through the week there were protests after protests; a most danger-foreboding Inaugural Address; an outright lie by the new President Trump and his press secretary about the size of his inauguration crowd; and then the astounding turnout for the Women's March on Washington and its sister marches all around the world, all condemning Trump’s policies. Some estimates claim three million people marched in the US alone.

Lying about the Inaugural crowd served two Trumpian purposes: It expressed his own internally driven  hyper-narcissism, his inability to believe that he could ever be second-best; and strategically, since it was couched in an assertion that the mainstream media were lying, it served his political purpose of keeping his supporters contemptuous of those media and dependent on him alone for The Truth.

The personality structure of a bully, a narcissist, and a sociopath is brilliantly translated into a radically top-down, anti-democratic policy system set forth in the Inaugural Address and in the makeup of a Cabinet filled with Billionaires and Bigots.

Much of the media attention has focused on Trump as personality. The relationship between his personality and his policies is important. But now it is time to turn our attention to the anti-democratic policies and how they endanger all Americans but the hyper-wealthy  -- even, and especially, how they endanger those who voted to support him. That path will lead us to a successful expansion of our democracy, a transformative healing for ourselves and all of Earth.

The Inaugural Address was danger-foreboding because its dominant motif was "total allegiance to the United States of America, … our loyalty to our country, … patriotism…” “We will be protected by the great men and women of our military and law enforcement.”  “We all salute the same great American Flag. “

• What about those of us who seek protection in the Constitution's insistence on equal protection of the laws from racial, sexual, and gender discrimination; its insistence on a free press and freedom of assembly and freedom of religion and freedom from intrusions into our emails and phone calls  -- relying on those protections far more than on our military and our militarized police?
• What about those of us who salute the 13-starred Flag of a revolution against tyranny? Or the Rainbow Flag of sexual and cultural and religious diversity?
• What about those millions of us who are not “Americans” – citizens of the USA – and those of us who welcome those millions into our midst?

And THEN! --  there was the Women’s March and all its Sister Marches.  Three elements were astounding:

• Its sheer size;
• Its emotional and spiritual warmth, expressing anger focused into love and laughter  – so that among dozens of cities and millions of people, there was not a single act of violence and not a single arrest;
• Its multiplicity of identities, and of the issues expressed cheerfully and strongly by people from Identity X and Issue-concern X about Identities  and Issues Y, Z, M, Q, B, and many more. Marchers enjoyed, did not disdain, the signs that expressed concerns different from their own.

In this way the world-wide Women’s March absorbed and went beyond identity politics into what might be called “community politics.” Indeed, it embodied the Beloved Community that Martin Luther King yearned for. In the Beloved Community, diversities are crucial -- not each alone, but together like the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle: They fit together to make a larger Whole. We must become a people both diverse and indivisible.

And the Wholeness the March embodied said to all of us: We can defeat Trump’s effort to subjugate America.

II. For me, the week was focused on Martin Luther King  --  — a kind of healing antidote to Trumpery.

It began on Sunday, January 15 – King’s real birthday --with a multireligious activist prayer service to reawaken and reclaim his most profound and prophetic sermon -- “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” He spoke on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City, to an activist gathering called "Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam.”

 In that sermon 50 years ago, Dr. King warned against the deadly "triplets" of racism, militarism, and materialism that threatened  American democracy then and still do today. He spoke of “the fierce urgency of Now" – – and today the urgency is even fiercer. He called for a radical revolution in American values from a "thing -oriented society to a person-oriented society."

So to pursue the work of drawing on King’s wisdom to strengthen transformative change today, on Monday morning, the official MLK Birthday, we opened a new Website,  <MLK50.org>.  



Many  inspiring and informative ways to reclaim Dr. Kingare already on-line there, and the whole panoply of our January 15 responses to that sermon will soon be.  My own talk is at

<https://theshalomcenter.org/AW-IMACJan2017>

From Monday through Thursday I taught for a retreat  and conference at the Stony Point Center on " BEYOND ‘Beyond Vietnam’:  Reclaiming King’s Courage for Movement Building Today.”

My co-teachers were Imam Al-Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid, imam of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem; and Rev. Anthony Grimes,  Director of Campaigns & Strategy for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who is also intimately involved with Black Lives Matter.

Among our gathering were a wonderful range of spiritually rooted activists --- for example, Rev. Aundreia Alexander, associate general secretary of the National Council of Churches; Bernice McCann of the Berriganian Catholic movement; Rick Ufford-Chase, former Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and now co-director of the Stony Point Ceenter; and Sharon Stout, of the Friends Meeting in Adelphi, Md.

Our goal was both to translate the meaning of Dr. King’s 1967 sermon for our own generation, and to begin planning how to turn his wisdom into action for the year ahead: MLK + 50 — A Jubilee Year of Truth and Transformation.

Three most important activist tactics to emerge from our work during this past week were these:

1. On Tuesday, April 4, exactly the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's "Beyond Vietnam" sermon, there will be a major all-day gathering at  New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, three blocks from the White House.  We are tentatively calling  that gathering “Clergy and Laity Concerned About America," or perhaps "People of the Spirit Concerned About America” -- echoing the gathering to which Dr. King spoke 50 years ago: "Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam.”

We look toward filling the church with 1,000 people from all across the country, responding to the sermon of 50 years ago with workshops through the day on how to address in our home towns everywhere the deadly triplets of  racism, militarism, and materialism  as they take new forms in our own generation.

 The gathering will then walk to the White House to carry out an activist vigil, demanding forward-moving  action to move past these deadly triplets into specific policies toward a more democratic and more compassionate America.

 There is already in existence the beginning of a planning committee to organize this event on April 4 in Washington. It includes leaders of the National Council of Churches, PICO -- the national umbrella group for religiously rooted community organizing all around the country – – The Shalom Center,  and New York Avenue Presbyterian Church itself. The planning committee will swiftly be expanded,

2. We will reach out to houses of worship, prayer, and meditation and to such community groups as labor unions, PTAs,  neighborhood associations, and public libraries throughout America  to gather on one of the days during the weekend before April 4  (Friday, March 31 to Sunday April 2), to read and/or watch and listen to Dr. King's prophetic sermon and to work out activist responses  to its teachings.

3. Once a month from April 2017 to April 2018, we will send out a single sentence or very brief passage from the “Beyond Vietnam" sermon, and with it a suggestion for a specific vigorous action to embody and carry out the teaching in that passage.

There is more to learn from this past week at every level. We will of course keep unfolding it. We welcome your comments and responses – and your help!

Comment on this article through the Comment sites below. Please share this article with others (tgrough the FaceBook, etc. icons above.. Please remember to check out <MLK50.org>.

And please help The Shalom Center continue to work for a fuller democracy and heal the deep wounds of our society, by making a contribution through the maroon "Contribute" bannner on the left-hand margin of this page.

May there be Blessings for all of us and for our common home, this Earth! -- of the fusion of truth, freedom, compassion,  and justice into wholeness -- shalom, salaam, true peace -- Arthur

Or Are We Stuck with Trumpery  --
Fake Populism and Real Robber Barons?

Leonard Cohen is no Pollyanna. When he sings the path through which “Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.,” you can see and hear the dark places, the deaths and infamies along the way. And yet, AND YET!!   This is not mere “hope.” It is determination. Commitment. Covenant.
Please join me on this journey by first listening and watching here:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU-RuR-qO4Y&feature=youtu.be>

I have included the words below to make sure you can hear them all. Please do actually watch and listen to Leonard Cohen sing them.  

After that, we will look honestly at what we are facing now.

It's coming through a hole in the air,

from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don't pretend to understand at all.
It's coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the women and the men.
O baby, we'll be making love again.
We'll be going down so deep
the river's going to weep,
and the mountain's going to shout Amen!
It's coming like the tidal flood
beneath the lunar sway,
imperial, mysterious,
in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on ...

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

*** **** **** **** ***
So what is standing in the way, Brother Leonard?