FW: [TheGardeners] A World Out of Touch With Itself

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: tully [mailto:tully1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2001 5:21 PM
Subject: Fwd: [TheGardeners] A World Out of Touch With Itself


A World Out of Touch With Itself
Where the Violence Comes From
Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor TIKKUN Magazine | 09.12.2001 There is never any
justification for acts of terror against innocent civilians it is the
quintessential act of dehumanization and not recognizing the sanctity of
others, and a visible symbol of a world increasingly irrational and out of
control.
It's understandable why many of us, after grieving and consoling the
mourners,
will feel anger and while some demagogues in Congress have already sought to
manipulate that feeling into a growing militarism (more spies, legalize
assassinations of foreign leaders, increase the defense budget at the
expense
of domestic programs), the more "responsible" leaders are seeking to narrow
America's response to targeted attacks on countries that allegedly harbor
the terrorists.
But though the perpetrators deserve to be punished, in some ways this narrow
focus allows us to avoid dealing with the underlying issues. When violence
becomes so prevalent throughout the planet, it's too easy to simply talk of
"deranged minds." We need to ask ourselves, "What is it in the way that we
are living, organizing our societies, and treating each other that makes
violence seem plausible to so many people?"
We in the spiritual world will see this as a growing global incapacity to
recognize the spirit of God in each other what we call the sanctity of each
human being. But even if you reject religious language, you can see that the
willingness of people to hurt each other to advance their own interests has
become a global problem, and it's only the dramatic level of this particular
attack which distinguishes it from the violence and insensitivity to each
other
that is part of our daily lives.
We may tell ourselves that the current violence has "nothing to do" with the
way that we've learned to close our ears when told that one out of every
three
people on this planet does not have enough food, and that one billion are
literally starving. We may reassure ourselves that the hoarding of the
world's
resources by the richest society in world history, and our frantic attempts
to
accelerate globalization with its attendant inequalities of wealth, has
nothing
to do with the resentment that others feel toward us. We may tell ourselves
that the suffering of refugees and the oppressed have nothing to do with
us that that's a different story that is going on somewhere else. But we
live
in one world, increasingly interconnected with everyone, and the forces that
lead people to feel outrage, anger, and desperation eventually impact on our
own daily lives.
The same inability to feel the pain of others is the pathology that shapes
the
minds of these terrorists. Raise children in circumstances where no one is
there to take care of them, or where they must live by begging or selling
their
bodies in prostitution, put them in refugee camps and tell them that that
they
have "no right of return" to their homes, treat them as though they are less
valuable and deserving of respect because they are part of some despised
national or ethnic group, surround them with a media that extols the rich
and
makes everyone who is not economically successful and physically trim and
conventionally "beautiful" feel bad about themselves, offer them jobs whose
sole goal is to enrich the "bottom line" of someone else, and teach them
that
"looking out for number one" is the only thing anyone "really" cares about
and
that anyone who believes in love and social justice are merely naive
idealists
who are destined to always remain powerless, and you will produce a
world-wide
population of people feeling depressed, angry, unable to care about others,
and
in various ways dysfunctional.
Luckily most people don't act out in violent ways they tend to act out more
against themselves, drowning themselves in alcohol or drugs or personal
despair. Others turn toward fundamentalist religions or ultra-nationalist
extremism. Still others find themselves acting out against people that they
love, acting angry or hurtful toward children or relationship partners. Most
Americans will feel puzzled by any reference to this "larger picture." It
seems
baffling to imagine that somehow we are part of a world system which is
slowly
destroying the life support system of the planet, and quickly transferring
the
wealth of the world into our own pockets.
We don't feel personally responsible when an American corporation runs a
sweat
shop in the Phillipines or crushes efforts of workers to organize in
Singapore.
We don't see ourselves implicated when the U.S. refuses to consider the
plight
of Palestinian refugees or uses the excuse of fighting drugs to support
repression in Colombia or other parts of Central America. We don't even see
the
symbolism when terrorists attack America's military center and our trade
center we talk of them as buildings, though others see them as centers of
the
forces that are causing the world so much pain.
We have narrowed our own attention to "getting through" or "doing well" in
our
own personal lives, and who has time to focus on all the rest of this? Most
of
us are leading perfectly reasonable lives within the options that we have
available to us so why should others be angry at us, much less strike out
against us? And the truth is, our anger is also understandable: the striking
out by others in acts of terror against us is just as irrational as the
world-system that it seeks to confront. Yet our acts of counter-terror will
also be counter-productive. We should have learned from the current phase of
the Israel-Palestinian struggle, responding to terror with more violence,
rather than asking ourselves what we could do to change the conditions that
generated it in the first place, will only ensure more violence against us
in
the future.
This is a world out of touch with itself, filled with people who have
forgotten
how to recognize and respond to the sacred in each other because we are so
used
to looking at others from the standpoint of what they can do for us, how we
can
use them toward our own ends. The alternatives are stark: either start
caring
about the fate of everyone on this planet or be prepared for a slippery
slope
toward violence that will eventually dominate our daily lives.
We should pray for the victims and the families of those who have been hurt
or
murdered in these crazy acts. We should also pray that America does not
return
to "business as usual," but rather turns to a period of reflection, coming
back
into touch with our common humanity, asking ourselves how our institutions
can
best embody our highest values. We may need a global day of atonement and
repentance dedicated to finding a way to turn the direction of our society
at
every level, a return to the notion that every human life is sacred, that
"the
bottom line" should be the creation of a world of love and caring, and that
the
best way to prevent these kinds of acts is not to turn ourselves into a
police
state, but turn ourselves into a society in which social justice, love, and
compassion are so prevalent that violence becomes only a distant memory.

=======
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message