Transition

There are many things to say about what is happening right now, and that will, with any luck, continue to happen.  

They didn’t happen by themselves and, if we don’t continue to push, they will stop happening.

Ten years ago, I listened to Democracy Now on MLK Day and heard for the first time King’s speech from the Riverside Church on April 4, 1967.  It was part of a political awakening for me that began with reading David Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World, followed by many of the books by Boston’s Dynamic Duo – Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn – as well as Jerry Mander’s In the Absence of the Sacred and The Case Against the Global Economy.

Mainly what I’ve been feeling this past week is joy and relief, but also pride that we rid ourselves of the Bush error through the electoral process, without violence.

Many people have worked hard doing what they could – in a spirit of non-violence – from whatever circumstance they were in to change this country.

When I taught at Hopi High School, I learned that the Hopi believe that we are in a period of transition between the fourth and fifth world.  They say that the form of this transition is up to us.  If we make this transition about taking care each other and working together to make it through tough times, then the end result of this effort will reflect that intention.

If you’ve never heard King’s Riverside Church speech, youtube has a good clip of it here. (audio only)

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Let’s hope that we can work for a civic, political and spiritual renewal together.