[Dialogue] An urgent letter from Michael Lerner

[KroegerD at aol.com]

The letter below articulates exactly how I feel about the "war on  terror".  
I hope you will take time to read it and consider your  participation and 
support. 
Dick Kroeger 

Dear Richard, 

I know I don't have to convince you that  Bush's plan to escalate the war in 
Iraq is yet another amazing blunder by a  president who seems determined to 
prepare us for yet more escalations, probably  in Iran or Syria before he leaves 
office. His intention to dump the mess in the  lap of the next (likely 
Democratic) president who will then take the rap for  Iraq's further disintegration 
when the U.S. pulls out makes a certain political  sense to 
ultra-right-wingers who may use the old fascist "the liberals stabbed  us in the back" rhetoric 
to rally support in the next ten years. Yet, if you  take one step back, you 
can see how totally insane the role our country is  playing in the world, from 
torture to modeling the destruction of human rights  to environmental 
insensitivity to economic selfishness. The Bible and its  prophets taught what the 
modern social theorists and psychologist teach again:  this path will lead to 
self-destruction. I write to you because I know you  already know this, and, like 
me, want to change the direction of our society  which has truly lost its 
moral center and spiritual direction. 

I know I  don't have to tell you that there is a big problem with the 
Democrats making  this newest escalation the center of their attack—namely, that in 
so doing, they  can present themselves to their constituency as "courageous" 
and "having tried"  without ever getting to the nub of the issue, which is not 
to prevent a new  escalation only, but to get out of Iraq totally. In the 
current issue of Tikkun  and in George McGovern's book on the topic, we explain how 
this can be done  without making matters worse. 

We need to make sure that the focus is not on stopping  escalation, but on 
getting out of Iraq and getting out now. The Democrats may  unintentionally be 
giving Bush far too much leverage by not sticking to that  demand as the 
central one and making its case to the country about why leaving  Iraq is what is 
needed, not just constraining the military madness at the top.  It will find a 
receptive audience—over 70% of the public now believes that we  are heading in 
the wrong direction. But it needs the articulation of a clear  alternative.

That's why the central issue at this moment is getting a  clear alternative 
vision, and unfortunately we are not getting that either from  the Democrats or 
from the radicals in the anti-war movement. The truth remains  that there is 
a real danger to the world in various radical ideologies that are  catching on 
and generating terrorists and assaults against the U.S. Withdrawing  troops 
is, in my view, a first and essential step, but if that's all we have to  say, 
it's not enough.

Our job, and by this I mean mine and yours,  Richard, must be to provide our 
fellow citizens with a  different framework to think through the current world 
realities. The strategy  that I and many others in the Network of Spiritual 
Progressives (NSP) propose is  this: we need to popularize a fundamentally new 
vision of what brings safety and  security. For right-wingers and for 
far-too-many liberals seeking to find an  elusive "center" from which to base their 
politics, the fundamental paradigm  that they hold, what I describe in my book 
The Left Hand of God as "the right  hand of God," is that real security comes 
from domination and control and  manipulation of others, and that the only 
realistic path is to be savvy and  cynical in advancing one's power to dominate 
the other before they dominate us.  They may debate whether the best path to 
domination is through military means or  through diplomacy backed by military, 
but they agree on the goal: security  through domination. We, on the other hand, 
need to advocate for a very different  path: security through generosity. It 
is through showing people genuine caring  for them that they begin to feel 
o.k. about caring for us, and when that  happens, those who want to undermine us 
in other parts of the world suddenly  find that the previous climate of 
support has disappeared and that is they,  rather than we, who are isolated and 
viewed as crazy and destructive to the  interests of their own people.

We've proposed the Global Marshall  Plan—having the U.S. take 5% of the GDP 
of the U.S. each year for the next  twenty years (and using its leading by 
example to pressure other G8 countries to  eventually join this) to end once and 
for all global poverty, homelessness,  hunger, inadequate education, inadequate 
health care and to repair the physical  environment of our planet earth. Of 
course we know that this can't be dumped  into the laps of dictators or corrupt 
democracies—the monies have to be  carefully allocated, through 
non-governmental agencies (NGOs) and various  international agencies (and, if the UN can 
separate itself from its own  corruption and sectarian politics, then also 
through UN agencies). Market  mechanisms are part of the answer (small loans in 
rural villages have been  proved useful in some cases, as one example). The idea 
is to work this out  carefully, involve the people in the planning, be 
environmentally sensitive and  culturally sensitive, as the plan gets implemented.

We are not stuck on  the 5% figure, nor even on the Global Marshall Plan 
itself, except to model how  generosity is not an empty category, but one which 
could be intelligently filled  in. We will also support the Millenium Goals, and 
other plans to take steps  toward eliminating global poverty, though we 
actually believe that we will be  more successful and mobiize more people if we 
back a plan that is more visionary  than one that has less scope. But what we are 
committed to is getting people to  understand that it's not just the war in 
Iraq that is misguided, but the whole  way we orient toward each other and 
toward the whole world that is deeply  perverted, spiritually and ethically 
bankrupt, and actually self-destructive in  the not-too-long-run.

Ok, so what do I want from you?

Well, I want  you to enlist in our campaign to spread this way of thinking. 
If you are not yet  a member of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, I want 
you to join. If you  are, I want you to bring in new members. If you can't do 
anything else, I'd like  you to send us money to help with this campaign so we 
can buy ads in media, hire  staff, and otherwise build the campaign (you can 
donate on line at  www.spiritualprogressives.org, or by sending a check to 
Tikkun/NSP at 951  Cragmont Ave, Berkeley, Ca. 94708). STRETCH YOURSELF BEYOND 
WHAT YOU'D NORMALLY  GIVE--THIS IS A CRITICAL MOMENT AND WE NEED TO BE ABLE TO 
ACT DECISIVELY,  INTELLIGENTLY, AND IN A WAY THAT IS CONNECTED TO OUR HIGHEST 
VISION OF THE  WORLD. 

Yet there are more active ways to help.  
1. Bring this message and come to the demonstration against the war being  
sponsored by the United for Peace and Justice Jan. 27th in Washington, D.C.  
March with the NSP contingent and come to the spiritual/religious celebration we  
will be holding immediately after the march. More details will come to you 
the  week of Jan. 21st. 
2. Help us build Generosity Sunday, April 15th. So many  Americans will be 
experiencing deep distress this year for having to spend so  much of their tax 
dollars to support American militarism. So we are using Tax  Day to build local 
events around the U.S. focused on the idea of a new paradigm  of safety: From 
Domination to Generosity—a New Path for Homeland Security. We  are asking you 
to organize an event in your local church, synagogue,  mosque,
labor union, community center, college or university or theological  school. 
The event should take the form either of a public march or a teach-in or  some 
other way to get out to the public the notion that people are organizing  for 
Security Through Generosity. If you live in a city with many such  
institutions, you might try to pull some of them together to do a larger  city-wide 
teach-in or march. And you might have people at the post offices that  entire 
weekend as Americans rush to pay their taxes at the last minute—and  remind them 
of how good they'd feel if they felt that these taxes were actually  going to 
eliminate poverty and suffering around the world, instead of, as now,  
increasing the world's suffering through war and economic and political  domination. 
I'll send you more info about how to do this if you want—just  contact 
Nichola at tikkun.org and let her know that you want to help build this  activity in some 
sphere of your life (work, school, neighborhood, religious or  community 
institution, whatever..,) We are encouraging people in Canada and  other countries 
to do this same kind of event on the day that their taxes are  due! 
3. Build an on-going chapter of the Network of Spiritual  Progressives in 
your community.

So, yes this might seem far away from the  immediacy of our anger at what 
Bush is doing with his escalation of troops in  Iraq. But anger alone will not 
bring us the world we want. It has to be mixed  with a hopeful vision of a 
different kind of world—and with people who are  willing to work for the next 
several years to undermine all the denial and all  the cynicism that keep so many 
Americans from going for the kind of world that  they'd actually love to see 
happen but don't believe possible.

You might  be saying "I'm not so optimistic about the American public." I 
hope you'll read  my editorial in the newest (Jan/Feb) issue of Tikkun magazine 
(if you haven't  yet subscribed, joining the Network of Spiritual Progressives 
gets you a year  sub). I'll show you why there is plenty of grounds to be 
hopeful, and how the  cynicism about other Americans is one of the things that 
makes us less impactful  even when they agree with our ideas. Recognizing how to 
understand the  psychodynamics of American society, and the goodness of many 
people who don't  initially agree with us or who assert values with which we 
disagree, is one of  the main projects in my book The Left Hand of God—so please 
read it if you are  feeling cynical about what can be accomplished.

I hope you'll never say  in the future: "I didn't know what to do when faced 
with Bush's intransigence."  This is what to do, and it's a path that can 
actually make a huge difference as  our ideas start to permeate the political base 
of the Democrats, Republicans,  Greens, the labor movement, the women's 
movement, the civil rights community,  the human rights activists, and the peace 
movement. But it won't happen if you  just wait for someone else to do it—you 
have to take some steps to make it real,  and this is how. There are tens of 
millions of Americans who disagree with Bush,  but they always get stuck on not 
wanting the U.S. to just abandon the world to  the crazies that are daily 
acting out terrible things in Iraq,Iran, and  elsewhere. But a strategy of 
generosity doesn't abandon the world, it involves  ourselves, but not with a desire to 
control but a desire to care for others in  any way that we can find to do 
so. Nothing will work if we don't approach this  whole venture with that spirit. 
And it is in that spirit that I offer these  ideas and this invitation to you 
to work with me and us (the 5,000 members of  the NSP). 

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