[Dialogue] Fifth day of 2009

Sat Jan 3 08:14:17 EST 2009

Wow Jaime, you have certainly captured the essence of Order wisdom and 
set it into a secular environment.  Thanks for you "Monday musings."

Jim Baumbach

SVESjaime at aol.com wrote:
> School reopens Monday and I am on a roll.  The following should be in 
> the Monday Saipan Tribune edition.
>
> Usual disclaimer: those interested in my Monday musings, you're 
> welcome; those not, move on.
>
> *A RITE OF ACCOUNTABILITY
>
> *One of my treasured fantasies is an imagined scene at the government 
> center up Capital Hill in one of the buildings, maybe the covered 
> assembly hall just behind the Legislature.  It would be at the end of 
> the calendar year, or the first week of January, when the legislative, 
> executive and judicial officers would convene in a brief ritual of 
> accountability.
>
> But first, a context:  In life, structures of accountability abound.  
> Driving lagoon-ward from San Vicente down the hill to lower Dandan are 
> three stoplights.  Careening down at 35 miles per hour can easily lead 
> to accelerated speeds from gravitational momentum, and the lights 
> serve as an effective reminder of limits and possibilities. 
>
> Whether it be in the political, economic and cultural realms, there 
> are usually two valid perspectives that people adhere to, which are 
> often labeled 'conservative' and 'progressive.'  The first one 
> reflects the understanding that life is bounded by limits, and society 
> is best served if social constraints are in place so that everyone is 
> clear what and where the boundaries are, and people refrain from doing 
> what is consensed /verboten/.  This view is very rule oriented, and 
> people try to conserve the gains from the past to ensure that wisdom 
> learned are not lost, and mistakes made are not repeated.
>
> The second perspective focuses on possibilities, the adventure of 
> moving beyond proscribed boxes in order to explore the frontiers of 
> progress and discover the cutting edge that makes the unknown known.  
> The human journey is in fact served by a wedgeblade of those who dare 
> use their bodies and social groupings to further push the gains of 
> human culture to realms where no one had gone before, to stand as it 
> were between the no-longer and the not-yet.  The dialectic between 
> these two seemingly opposing forces constitutes the Hegelian 
> synthesis, thereby acknowledging the essential function of each in the 
> waltzing journey of the whole.
>
> Thus, in the ritual of accountability, someone like the Bishop Thomas 
> A. Camacho, or another symbolic figure outside the three branches of 
> governance, would stand in front of the gathered assembly of public 
> officials, and ask the question:  “Have you been faithful to your 
> covenant to serve, defend and promote the well-being of the 
> Commonwealth this past year?”
>
> The specific oath in the Commonwealth Constitution, Article XVII, 
> Section 1 reads: /I do solemnly affirm (or swear) that I will support 
> and defend the Constitution and laws of the Commonwealth of the 
> Northern Mariana Islands, the Covenant To Establish a Commonwealth of 
> the Northern Mariana Islands in Political Union with the United States 
> of America, the applicable provisions of the Constitution, laws and 
> treaties of the United States of America, and that I will faithfully 
> discharge my duties to the best of my ability (so help me God).
>
> /Were this rite be led by a religious cleric conversant in the 
> tradition of confessions and absolutions, then s/he may let the same 
> dynamic apply, only in secular terms.  Confession would be a lucid 
> acknowledgment of what had transpired and not be the guilt-ridden 
> moralistic condemnation that often accompanies self-righteousness piety. 
>
> Obviously, the authentic answer to such a question would be a “Yes and 
> No,” or “No and Yes,” i.e., everyone begins with a decidedly positive 
> or negative (or, proactive or oppositional) stance but that in the due 
> course of serving one's functions, one either by commission or 
> omission, deviates from original intents, one performs its opposites, 
> or resign to passive indifference that allows inaction itself to 
> become the active choice. 
>
> There would be those fanatic absolutists who will insist that they 
> were 100% faithful to their covenant, and proudly defend in their 
> minds every thought and action they had taken during the year to be in 
> full conformity to the oath they made in the assumption of their 
> offices, its roles and functions.  Self-deception being an unshakable 
> human habit do get some folks stuck in extremes, but the honest and 
> conscientious person would stand present, with not a little bit of 
> humility, to the ambiguity and mystery of human wisdom and behavior.  
> To be sure, each could translate each response to a quantitative scale 
> so that one may imagine that the “Yes” was 70% of the time while a 
> petulant “No” was 30% of the time, or vice-versa.  But one would 
> understand that quantity is not what's being assessed, rather, the 
> quality of one's consciousness and understanding is what is being held 
> accountable.
>
> Now, in the old European understanding from which objective 
> assessments evolved, confession without absolution is tyranny, and 
> absolution without confession is libertinism.  This is where a Bishop 
> Camacho, or one of symbolic standing, could pronounce the secular 
> metaphors of absolution.  The pronouncement would be a recognition 
> that whatever had transpired the year before, it is done, /finis 
> infinitus.  /There is no way that the past can be undone, save in 
> sci-fi imaginations of parallel universes.  To be sure, there are 
> objective audits and performance evaluations built in to systems, as 
> well as laws and prohibitions that result in consequences when 
> violated, but the point of the absolution would be the affirmation 
> that wishing things had happened differently is a futile exercise, or 
> worst, blame seeking is irreversibly counter productive.  The 
> absolution would be a declaration that where we are in the present, 
> just as we are without apology, is an adequate point of new 
> beginnings, that it is in the nature of the future that it is open to 
> innumerable choices and that one only needs to decide to create that 
> which is new!
>
> Imagine that some dynamic like this is programmed into our 
> neurological and social networks, and that social organizations and 
> individuals can indeed begin at zero, and a /tabula rasa, /an imaginal 
> clean slate accompanies the launching of a new year.  This is not a 
> novel idea. The Government of Singapore during Lee Kuan Yew's time 
> practiced zero budgeting where a department begins every fiscal year 
> at zero regardless of how they functioned during the previous fiscal 
> year. 
>
> Brain/mind research is discovering that human behavior follows rites 
> and rituals that it had created, and that normal and abnormal 
> functioning (e.g., obsessive-compulsive disorders) is determined by 
> our adherence to those human-made rituals.  When there is 
> intentionality in the performance of the ritual, then it is healthy.  
> If the ritual puts consciousness in a reflexive mode so that the 
> ritual determines behavior rather than the other way around, then 
> ritual becomes master rather than servant to the adherents.
>
> On the last Friday of the month in my 6th grade class, we eat lunch 
> together, and we lift up the birthday celebrants during the month.  We 
> practice an accountability ritual of a sort.  The celebrant is asked 
> what the highlight of the year had been and what expectation s/he has 
> for the coming year.  Then s/he is asked: “Have you been faithful to 
> being the one, unique, unrepeatable /(the student's name)/ in history 
> that you are, of which there has never been one like you before, and 
> there will never be another one like you ever again?”   The students 
> are still getting used to the yin-yang of the “Yes and No,” and “No 
> and Yes” answers, but intuitively, they recognize the authenticity, if 
> not accuracy, of the responses.
>
> Litigation and its adversarial nature has become the mode of our 
> accountability structures, and its artifice is deadly.  Would that we 
> discover again the naturalness of being held accountable, and the 
> glorious reality that the past brooks no malice, the present invites 
> affirmation and celebration, and the future remains wondrously open 
> and free.
>
> Jaime R. Vergara
> Saipan
>
>
> **************
> Stay up-to-date on the latest news - from fashion trends to celebrity 
> break-ups and everything in between. 
> (http://www.aol.com/?ncid=emlcntaolcom00000024)
>
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