[Dialogue] A Psalm for our time on Good Friday

[David L. Thomas]

Living in the same world, I am not so pessimistic.  Around the world, the
number of conflicts and people killed, maimed and refugeed by conflict is
down markedly from Cold War days.  People power is becoming an important
strategy for removing corrupt dictators.  Telecommunications are allowing
people throughout the world to imagine new possibilities.  Rapid economic
development is occurring in East Asia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere, but not
in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Europe and East Asia are developing new forms of
morally based free enterprise.  In spite of U.S. resistance, the rest of the
world is moving forward with the International Criminal Court, global
warming prevention treaties and other measures.  The Bush Administration's
unilateral preemptive policies only hasten the end of excessive U.S.
political dominance while budget and trade deficits are bringing soon the
end of U.S. economic dominance.

While it is early in Bush's second presidential term, his likely failure to
implement almost any of his major proposals (even with Republican control of
both federal legislatures) and the approaching Medicare, Medicaid, Federal
deficit and trade deficit crises may well divide Republicans and bring back
Democratic control of our government.  And where the Federal government has
failed to act, states are implementing many proposals (i.e. auto emissions
and mileage limits, stem cell research, k-12 education, health care for
children, and many more).  Private initiatives such as The Nature
Conservancy are successfully addressing many environmental and other issues.
More people are becoming involved in voting and contributing money for
political campaigns.

This is not to say that everything is positive or to deny that some negative
trends may be worsening.  I am particularly concerned with the increase in
permissive parenting which teaches children that their satisfaction is the
most important value and with our mass merchandising media which stimulate
irresponsible personal behaviors.  I am also concerned that liberals are
failing to produce local social communities analogous to conservative
Christian churches.   Dave Thomas

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <kroegerd at aol.com>
To: <MICAH6-8 at topica.com>
Cc: <Dialogue at wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Friday, March 25, 2005 6:46 AM
Subject: [Dialogue] A Psalm for our time on Good Friday


> I think it would be interesting to complete this Psalm in the classical
style with a final verse.
>
> Here is mine:
>
> "And  that speck of light will become as the warming and healing light of
the sun.  Let it shine upon the peoples of the earth, that they will forsake
their darkness, move toward the light, brighter and brighter; until all of
th earth's children are cleansed and healed, and unite in joyeous praise of
the bountious mystery to which they belong."
>
> Dick Kroeger
>
> Is This A New Dark Age?
> Little proof to the contrary that we are indeed in a very long, bleak
tunnel. Is there any light?
> - By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
> Friday, March 25, 2005
>
> Then come those times when you read about a 16-year-old girl slashing the
throat of a 75-year-old woman for no apparent reason, a woman who was merely
walking with her husband near a Berkeley public garden and it's right next
to the one about the 16-year-old kid smiling and waving and donning a
bulletproof vest before shooting nine people and himself to death in a
remote, poverty-stricken region of Minnesota and you can feel the numbness
like a wave.
> And alongside that is the morbid and insipid case of poor Terry Schiavo
and the equally insipid Bush evangelicals who trumpet the backward morality
of maintaining her vegetative brain-dead state and the sad, tormented
parents who can't face reality and the insidious GOP that has zero shame in
using her decrepit body as a political football and that kowtows to its
pseudo-religious contingency by making humiliating and rather illegal
congressional maneuvers to try and keep a feeding tube in place and you just
go, oh my God just stop already.
> And it all seems to line up with one of those weird phases when everyone
in your own life seems to be getting hit by something tragic or sad or
somehow ridiculously painful -- a sister with a neck trauma, a best friend
going through major depression, a parent struck by illness, certainly almost
everyone on the progressive Left feeling sucker-punched and morally
eviscerated -- friends and family and loved ones all seeming to suffer in
ways you don't want to imagine and it's all against a backdrop of more war
dead and more violence and the most bleak and Bush-ravaged era in recent
American history and you say to yourself, what the hell is going on?
> Because something in you knows. Something in you senses there is more at
play right now in the world than mere depressing coincidence, that all the
war and disease and brutality has more surrounding it than mere chance or
fluke. Do you think? Do you feel it?
> Proof? All you have to do is spend five minutes with any true healer or
energy worker or divinely connected spiritual teacher in the world right now
and they all say the same thing: This is not a good time. This is not the
lightest, not the brightest, not the best period to be a human being. In
fact, it's one of the darkest. Fiercest. Meanest.
> It is, in other words, a low period in human, and especially American,
history. And it's only getting lower.
> We are in dark times. Five years of economic bloodshed and three of brutal
warmongering and the worst environmental president in American history and
you simply cannot deny that as the ruthless American agenda goes, so goes
the populace, so goes the collective attitude, the shared vibration, the
health of the planet and the feeling that this particular karmic sinkhole
has no known bottom.
> In other words, it is all connected. It is all of a piece. There is a
direct correlation between the violent and heartless tone and attitude of
our country and the mental and spiritual health of its people and by way of
comparison just look at the Clinton era, which brought eight years of
unprecedented prosperity and peace and a nearly balanced budget and high
economic flush.
> It's true. There was, we forget, a decided lack of sexual anxiety and
uptight moral rigidity in the nation, minimal pseudo-religious puling from
the uptight Right and much moderate lawmaking and I don't care a whit for
what you say about the man's personal moral compass -- under Clinton,
America had deeply supportive allies, intelligent foreign policy, more
genuine concern for the planet and the health of our forests and oceans and
air, and we had a president who was incredibly articulate and deeply
intelligent and greatly beloved the world over and the nation enjoyed one of
its most prosperous and nondivisive and peaceful periods in its history.
> And now, the exact opposite. Everywhere you look, the culture is fractured
and divisive and mean. Everywhere you look it's war and pollution and more
toxins, red versus blue, good versus evil, more garbage and less concern
where to shove it, fewer restrictions on industrial polluters and fewer
controls on corporate abuse and an administration that has so shamelessly
leveraged the worst tragedy in American history to further its brutal and
hawkish right-wing agenda it would embarrass Mussolini.
> The sad fact is, there are a great many among us who believe we have
entered into a new Dark Age, that it will be a long and brutal slog indeed
and BushCo is merely the precursor, the devil's handmaiden, and that we have
a long way to go into the bleak and the bloody and the environmentally
devastating before the pendulum begins its slow swing back toward the light.
> Just look around. No one anywhere, not priests, not nuns, not healers or
mystics, not Christians, not pagans, not Repubs or Demos or Libertarians, no
one anywhere in this country is saying, hey, doesn't it feel like we're
entering into a new era of health and healing and positivism and spiritual
rebirth? Aren't our schools just teeming anew with eager students who seem
to be getting smarter and more articulate? Isn't the air getting cleaner and
aren't we proud of our government for protecting the health of future
generations by pushing for more natural foods and signing on to the Kyoto
Treaty and advocating antitoxin regulations and by protecting our forests
and improving school textbooks and revolutionizing the hideous national
health care system?
> Doesn't that tone of enthusiasm and hope sound just completely silly,
wrong, out of place, like so much Prozac-grade bulls--? Damn right it does.
> There's a reason for that. We are not headed for light. Not yet, anyway.
The coming years are not going to be about friendship and repaired foreign
relations and a sense of our shared humanity, about equality and sexual
freedom and a renewed sense of human rights. To believe this is to believe
in fairy tales almost as insidious and hopeless as evangelical Christians
who are right now stuffing themselves with Cheez-Its and pink wine and
praying for Armageddon.
> So, you do what you have to do. You focus inward and work on the self and
radiate as much love and open-hearted support as possible, grit your karmic
teeth and hope you survive this dark house of mirrors without cancers or
tumors or bloodshed or getting stabbed in the garden by a vicious teenage
girl as you ignore the fact that in all of North America, from Mexico to
Canada's Prince Edward Island, there exists only one state, province or
territory that does not yet have a McDonald's. (Nunavut, in northern Canada,
inhabited by the Inuits at a density of one person per 3,300 square miles).
Small solace, indeed.
> So you pray your ass off to a forgiving and ambisexual and dogma-free
pantheistic feminine god and you digest the increasingly nasty headlines as
best you can, ever seeking that pinpoint, that tiny speck of light way, way
down, at the end of this rank and desperate tunnel. Do you see it? Is it
even there? It's one of those things you just have to believe.