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

The (Christian) Book of Revelations portrays Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse –-  War, Famine, Death, and Pestilence. The Book says they will bring on the apocalyptic End of Days.

President Trump is doing his best to bring on the planetary disaster of climate chaos, the End of Days for the web of life in which the human species has lived its entire history.

Indeed, unprecedented droughts and floods are already bringing on Famine and Death,  planetary heating is spreading tropical diseases into much broader regions endangered by Pestilence, and climate-caused hunger is bringing on civil Wars like the one in Syria.  Worse is on the way.

So to make sure that new attacks on Mother Earth are thwarted, we too must do our best.

This letter to you invites you to an unusual number of explorations of our own and other websites. You may not need to pursue them all. But your own efforts to heal our wounded Mother Earth and defend American democracy from its worst attackers since the Civil War -- will be stronger if you connect your heart-felt passion with knowledge in your head.

There are two avenues open to us in challenging the Trumpist attack on Mother Earth.

One is bring our own energy into direct opposition: our votes, our letters to the editor, our prayers and public vigils, our bodies on the line in civil disobedience.

The other is to  create Islands of Transformation in myriads of our neighborhoods, in many of our cities, and in states like New York, California, and Massachusetts. Transformation groups that pursue real flesh-and-blood alternatives :of reducing CO2 emissions through energy conservation and renewable energy, while making neighborhoods neighborly, ending local epidemics of  asthma and cancer, and building  a political  base for taking back the people’s government for the People.  

In the second half of this essay, we willl explore in more unfolding, these different ways of challenging Apocalypse. First let us face what it is we need to challenge.

To make sure that this real Apocalypse goes forward for the sake of multiplying corporate Super-Profits, Trump has begun by issuing his own decrees:

• He is trying to reinstate the Dakota [Oil] Access Pipe Line that violates US treaties with the Sioux Nation, violates US law that requires environmental impact statements, and may poison the Missouri River from which millions of Americans drink, while transporting oil to worsen the burning of earth, our common home.  
• He is trying to reinstate the XL Pipeline  that is intended to bring the most CO2-filthy oil on Earth, Tar Sands oil, to refineries in Texas for burning Earth by multiplying CO2 emissions.

Both were halted by the Obama Administration –- but only, let us remember and take note to guide our future -- in response to enormous public pressure.

Trump also appointed real Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to his Cabinet: four Cabinet members who are ready to carry out as policy their master’s contempt for climate science and his passion for the Carbon economy that is heating up the Earth.

The new Cabinet is full of Robber Barons --  an enemy of public education in charge of education, an enemy of racial justice to head the Department of Justice. Yet it will have more Carbon Pharaoh Arsonists than any other kind of  anti-democratic mogul.

For Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson from Exxon  -- the Big Oil corporation that has known since the mid-‘70s (from the work of its own in-house scientists)  that burning oil threatened the planet, but chose to lie and purchase lies in public rather than change its business plan.

Their lies prevented effective public action for an entire generation – public action that could have prevented the climate crisis, and could have saved many lives from flood and famine. There is simple truth to the slogan, “Exxon lied and people died. Homicide or genocide?”

In his confirmation hearings, Tillerson expressed reservations on climate change and said that he did not view it as the imminent national security threat that the Pentagon and many other experts do.

So dishonest, destructive, and disastrous have Exxon’s actions been that even the Rockefeller Foundations -- built on the money that came from the Rockefeller ancestors of Exxon  -- have taken on Exxon’s lies.  For a full explanation of Exxon’s perfidy, see two excellent articles in the New York Review of Books:

“The Rockefeller Family Fund vs. Exxon” at --

<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/08/the-rockefeller-family-fund-vs-exxon/>

“The Rockefeller Family Fund Takes on ExxonMobil” at --

<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/rockefeller-family-fund-takes-on-exxon-mobil/>

And a dozen State Attorneys-General, led by New York’s Eric Schneiderman, are investigating whether Exxon’s lies constituted crimes of racketeering.  Congressmen who feed hungrily at Exxon’s trough have tried to subpoena several of these Attorneys-General and such Earth-protective organizations as 350.org and Friends of the Earth, to intimidate them from pursuing the truth about Exxon.  See details at --

<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13072016/lamar-smith-exxon-climate-probes-subpoenas-state-ags-eric-schneiderman-maura-healey>

Continuing on Trump’s real Four Horsemen of the real Apocalypse:

 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