[Dialogue] FW: America has had a non-violent revolution. Praise God. By Marianne Williamson

Sun Nov 9 13:39:57 EST 2008

An amazing analysis - one we are not likely to ever hear from the media
pundits famed for THEIR analysis.

Sunny

Sunny Walker

303-671-0704

Cell: 303-587-3017

 <mailto:sunwalker at comcast.net> sunwalker at comcast.net 

Opening windows that fresh ideas may revive us and our lives have meaning

  _____  

By Marianne Williamson

           America has had a non-violent revolution.

          As long as there are historians writing about the United States,
this moment of fundamental re-alignment of our national purpose will be
remembered, pored over and analyzed. It will be seen as one of the shining
points along the evolutionary arc of the American story. Yet it will never
submit itself to being summed up in a nice little package that reason alone
can understand.

         It's been noted before that Americans get excited about politics
every forty years. Then, in the words of comedian Will Rogers, "We have to
go sleep it off."

             We were certainly excited in the l960's. And this is 2008;
exactly forty years since the most dramatic and violent year of the Sixties
decade: the year when both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were
literally killed before our eyes.

             At that point, a generation of young people -- looking much
like the youthful army so out in full force today, only grungier -- marched
in the streets to repudiate an oppressive system and to try to stop an
unjust war. And then bullets stopped us. The shots that killed the Kennedy's
and King carried a loud, unspoken message for all of us: that we were to go
home now, that we were to do whatever we wanted within the private sector,
yet leave the public sector to whomever wanted it so much that they were
willing to kill for it. And for all intents and purposes, we did as we were
told.

             According to ancient Asian philosophers, history moves not in a
circle but in a spiral. Whether as an individual or as a nation, whatever
lessons we were presented once and failed to learn will come back again but
in a different form. For the generation of the Sixties and for our children,
the lessons of that time -- as well as its hopes and dreams and idealism --
came back in 2008.

             During our forty years in the desert, we learned many things.
Then, we marched in the streets; this time, we marched to the polls. Then,
we shouted, "Hell no, we won't go!" This time, we shouted, "Yes, we can."
Then, we were so angry that our anger consumed us. This time, we made a more
compassionate humanity the means by which we sought our goal as well as the
goal itself.

             In the words of Gloria Steinem, "I feel like our future has
come back." And indeed it has. For in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
"No lie can last forever." What Bobby Kennedy tried to do, and was killed
for trying; what Martin Luther King tried to do, and was killed for trying;
what the students at Kent state were trying to protest, and were killed for
daring to; Barack Obama and his army of millions of idealists with the
audacity to hope have now succeeded at doing.

             Praise God. Praise God.

             And that praise to God didn't just go out last night, when
Obama's election to the Presidency was finally achieved. That praise was
part of what allowed the waters to part here in the first place. Millions of
Americans have been deeply aware that this kind of historic and
fundamentally positive effort has not gone well in the recent past, and the
spiritual understanding of this generation of Americans -- an understanding
not yet fully formed forty years ago -- created an invisible light around
the Obama campaign. How many people over the last twenty-one months have
posted, in their own way, angels to Obama's left and angels to his right,
angels in front of him and angels behind him, angels above him and angels
below him? I know I have, and so has everyone I know. Hopefully we will
continue to do so.

             The Obama phenomenon did not come out of nowhere. It emerged as
much from our story as from his -- as much from our yearning for meaning as
from his ambition to be President; as much from our determination to achieve
collective redemption as from his determination to achieve an individual
accomplishment. And those who fail to recognize the invisible powers at work
here -- who see the external drama of politics yet fail to discern the
profound forces that moved mountains by moving the American heart -- well,
they're just like Bob Dylan's Thin Man to whom he sang, "You don't know
what's going on here, do you, Mr. Jones?"

             Back then, Mr. Jones didn't know what was going on, but many of
us did. We knew what was going on then and we knew what needed to happen; we
simply weren't mature enough and we were too wounded then, as people and as
a culture, to pull it off.

             This time, we both knew and we did. We knew who we had to
become and we knew what we had to do. The violent American revolution of
1776 entailed separating from another country. The non-violent revolution of
2008 -- a non-violent revolution that did not quite fail, yet also did not
quite succeed in the l960's -- has entailed separating from who we used to
be.

             In the l960's, we wanted peace but we ourselves were angry.
This time, after hearing Gandhi's call that we must be the change we want to
see happen in the world, we came to our political efforts with an
understanding that we must cast violence from our hearts and minds if we are
to cast it from our world; that we must try to love our enemies as well as
our friends; and that when a genius of world-historic proportions emerges
among us, we cannot and we must not fail to do everything humanly and
spiritually possible to support him. For his sake.and for ours.

             Having gone to a higher place within ourselves, a higher level
of leadership began to emerge among us. A higher level of leader now having
emerged among us, he calls us to an even higher place within ourselves. And
from this spiraling dance, these two forces together can and will, as Obama
has told us, truly change the world. Having moved one mountain, we will now
go about the work of removing the ones that remain.

             With God's help, yes we can. Yes we did. And yes we will.

-- by Marianne Williamson, author of Healing the Soul of America

Visit www.marianne.com <http://www.marianne.com/>
<http://mariannewilliamson.c.topica.com/maamr8MabLIxGchSPPBcafpOmF/>   

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       Copyright C 2008 Marianne Williamson. All Rights Reserved. 

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