[Dialogue] Symbolic Impeachment

[chagnon at comcast.net]

Valentine's Day 2007

Jann, 
   Thank you for sharing the reflection of your friend from the University of Creation Spirituality.  I must confess that I decided to read it mostly out of curiosity.  I did not stop until I had gone back and also read the very lengthy and increasingly compelling Common Dreams article by Bill Moyers whose URL your colleague inserted part way through his internal dialogue (http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0212-31.htm).  In fact, before reading the Moyers article, I read the briefer article highlighted at the beginning of that same Common Dreams page "Cheney's the One" ...who should be impeached--and why that would better serve the public interest.
   It recently occurred to me that perhaps our violence-focused culture needed to go this far down the road to perdition together to realize that we are on our way to our collective hanging and begin to do something drastic and profound about it .  My next thought was:  I'm copping out; that's too simple an answer.  There are other roads to enlightenment than collectively falling off a cliff into a hell of our creation.  However, as a culture trained in the classroom to sit down and shut up for 12 long years, we've given Washington a free hand for many decades.  Many good people may find your colleague's spiritual focus a cop out, as they might dismiss the focus of thousands of protestors or Transcendental Meditators.  It's scary to see criticism of spiritual focus while violence in movies, on TV, and in video games seems rarely questioned, almost taken for granted.  And it's interesting and encouraging that Moyers and Newsweek below tell it like it is:

            "Furthermore, if we nurtured the higher affections of our intuition—what has been called our “inner tutor”—might we be more resolute in sparing our children from the appalling accretion of violent entertainment that permeates American life—what Newsweek described as “the flood of mass-produced and mass-consumed violence that pours upon us, masquerading as amusement and threatening to erode the psychological and moral boundary between real life and make-believe?”

    What percentage of our population is aware of how much the images we fill our minds with really do create our story about life and our place in the world around us, our knowing, doing, and being?  Now I have to decide what I need to do to be a more powerful part of the collective unconscious besides sending e-mail petitions to Washington via Common Cause and MoveOn and complaining about W who doesn't have a clue and the Neo-Cons who got their puppet elected.
   Thanks, Jann, for the prodding and the sharing.
Lucille     
on the 23rd anniversary of the arrival of two blond six-year-olds, our twin sons, at our home in Collingswood, NJ.

--
Lucille T. Chagnon, M.Ed.
Literacy Acceleration Consultants
408 River Road, Wilmington, DE 19809-2731
302-762-0282    fax -0285
chagnon at comcast.net      www.teachtwo.net