Letter to Obama

Dear President Obama,

Watching your web address last weekend, I could not help but notice your struggle to stay patient with the message of fairness and accuracy in facts relating to the health care debate. Thank-you for your patience with our obstinate nation. Thank-you for your humbleness even in the face of deeply prideful attacks. Thank-you for your equanimity in the midst of seemingly constant crisis. You have embodied these noble traits admirably in your first months as President, as you did throughout your campaign.

It is precisely that embodiment which makes me cry out to you, "You know better!" You are not only in a position to bring deeper change to this country than anyone else, you are eminently capable of doing so. That makes every passing week when you do not all the more frustrating for me as a fellow reformer. Based on the work of Peter Dunlap, I would like to provide a context for you to do the important work of helping to elevate our national consciousness. You are in a unique position to perform this work, based both on your position of power and your special, highly developed level of emotional intelligence.

Dunlap writes in "Awakening Our Faith in the Future" that a progressive political leader is most effective when he realizes his "capacity for destiny". He defines capacity for destiny as the process in which a felt sense of the future transforms a leader's experience from a passively lived experience of that future into an actively created one. Your autobiography indicates that your time as a community organizer helped you to realize your own capacity for destiny. During and since that time you have brought into the political arena an awareness of and commitment to the notion that we live in a society which places too much emphasis on individual liberty and too little on collective responsibility to each other. Your policies have been based on a commitment to fairness and equality that invoke that belief from taxes to health care to international relations. Your first day in office you placed our nation's morality on a pedestal where we could be proud of it by beginning the process of closing Guantanamo Bay. I have hope that you will continue to both guide us in a more moral direction, one which brings more people into the sphere of freedom and privilege which modernity has granted many in our country, and to make us aware of what that direction is.

You have, to a greater extent than your predecessors, gone through this discernment process already. Dunlap quotes Stephen Daedalus in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in describing this process as one during which: "Within the smithy of my soul I create the uncreated future of my soul." It is apparent that you have undergone such a process in your own soul. That apparency gives me hope and expectation that you will carry the lessons forged in your soul outward to the rest of the nation. The capabilities and awarenesses that you have gained by submitting your soul to this forging process have given you an emotional intelligence previously seen only in Abraham Lincoln among American Presidents.

That emotional intelligence also gives you a greater responsibility in dealing with the problems you encounter as a leader. It compels you to transcend the status quo in reaching for transformative solutions. Because of your capacity for analyzing the psyche of America on a deeper level than previous Presidents you have and must make use of that enhanced capacity by enacting policies that will be in line with the highest ideals of that psyche. Simultaneously you must engage the public in a dialog about the process in a way that will support and cultivate a heightened awareness on the part of the electorate. These are immense challenges, but as I have noted, there is reason to have confidence in your abilities. Americans associate your election most closely with the word "hope", which contradicts the conventional wisdom that politics is the art of the possible, and suggests we can achieve such lofty goals with your leadership.

Do you need a starting point from which to begin this challenging national dialog? I suggest a poem that Dunlap quotes by Rainer Marie Rilke in passing along the wisdom that:

"You must give birth to your images

They are the future waiting to be born.

Fear not the strangeness you feel

The future must enter into you long before it happens

Just wait for the birth, for the hour of new clarity." (2007)

You have the capacity to act as midwife for the images of a nation, the embodied ideals that we have only dared glimpse in our minds. Right now, however, you are demonstrating a great fear of the strangeness you feel. You are allowing the strictures of conventional wisdom to fetter both your policies and your messages. The strangeness that you felt towards advocating for a single-payer health care system got in the way of that proposal. The strangeness crept in once again when it came to releasing photos of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan and you placed priority on appeasement over justice. Now is the time to step up and put those fears aside, to engage the nation in genuine, honest and progressive dialog about what is truly necessary for us to embody the generosity and balance that our era requires from us.

"Kairos" is a Greek word meaning "right moment", classically the right moment for a metamorphosis of the goals and fundamental principles and symbols by which we live. Your Presidency represents a kairos for America to move from a conventional morality based around recognition of the other only within our own traditional spheres of self-definition to a post-conventional morality that embraces a broader definition of the other and extends inclusivity and integration to a worldwide point of view. Within the framework of Kohlberg's levels of moral development, this would represent a transition from the fourth to the fifth level. We have glimpsed this transition at certain historical points, but we are still a fundamentally conventional nation. With your leadership, we can become a fundamentally post-conventional nation in our morality.

You revealed that you are aware of the way in which some people in this country are scared and on the defensive by alluding to gun-toting pick-up truck drivers derogatorily in a speech in San Francisco. This showed that you know many people in this country have not yet attained the awareness necessary for making the transition to a higher level of consciousness. Unfortunately it also showed that you are susceptible to the same impatience with that fact we all are. If you promote a genuine and honest dialog based on your awareness and capacity for giving birth to new images, this can indeed be the kairos for transformation.

According to Peter Dunlap, Eric Erikson "describes how visionary leaders go through a process of 'identity' formation in which they submit their personal identities to the collective forces of their time, and, as a result, have some new piece of knowledge and leadership to bring to the world." This, he posits, is the process whereby Gandhi and Martin Luther came by their capacities for transforming the future. I am optimistic that you have gone through such a process for reasons I described above, but it also seems that you are becoming too identified with the "collective forces of the time", and have yet to integrate them as fully with your personal identity and the moral probity thereof as you might. By stepping out of the fear of strangeness that has characterized some decisions in your Presidency so far, you could enhance our nation's collective capacity for destiny.

The window for implementing this kind of change is still very much open. Ian Bremmer, noted scholar of international politics, recently stated on a Planet Money podcast that "There is no Obama Doctrine," right now. Observers of the international political scene are unsure of how you would react to a new situation arising in that realm, what principles you would apply. By taking this opportunity to lay out a foreign policy that is line with the valance of generosity and care for the other that has at times characterized your domestic policy, you could simultaneously achieve two important goals. You could give assurance to such observers as Bremmer that, indeed your reactions will be based on coherent principles. At the same time you could help to give birth to the highest ideals of our nation's vision for achieving a more peaceful world. You have the intellectual and emotional foundation for such steps within you, as you showed in writing about nuclear disarmament as an undergrad at Columbia. Now the stage is yours, and bold, decisive leadership could deliver the goals that you and I have long envisioned.

You can help make the necessary process of transformation more explicit for the American people by having an honest, trusting dialog about the areas in which we need to grow. When it comes time to make the case for a public option in the health care reform bill this fall, do so based on an ethos of generosity and caring for the other. You will help Americans to have faith in the images within them of a world based on those important and necessary values. It will give progressives footing on which to establish a new generation of confident and successful politicians and policies. My Facebook account is littered every day with postings about necessary health care reforms from friends in their 20's. They would erupt with passion and joy if you were to give them a moral basis and argument for implementing such changes because it is a way in which we can live up to our highest ideals as progressives. Thank-you again for all your courage and humility up to this point in your Presidency. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on what the smithy of America's soul has created for its uncreated future.

Many blessings,

Bucky Rogers

Podcast post

The conversation-starter "So I was listening this This American Life podcast..." is now ranked second in my life, behind "Do you think Michelle Bachmann is secretly employed by the Colbert Report?" More impressively, the This American Life podcast is the highest-ranked podcast on iTunes. Coming in second is the Adam Carolla Podcast. To me, these rankings represent a hopeful trend.

This American Life is, to my listening, a morally post-conventional radio show. By that I mean that it is integrative of an array of different worldviews. It is integrally aperspectival. It does so in a more flat-land, morally neutral way than I personally agree with much of the time, but it nonetheless epitomizes the integrated diversity public radio listeners so nobly crave. For example, a recent episode chronicled a House subcommittee hearing on rescission in the health insurance industry. The fact that they covered a little-heralded hearing in which health insurance CEOs were lambasted for instances in which their companies rescinded the coverage of patients needing expensive care was laudable enough in and of itself. Hearing one CEO getting hung out to dry by not knowing conditions mentioned on his own company's policy application form provided sufficient satisfaction to justify the segment.

But then, This American Life played clips of the CEOs responding. Particularly, it emphasized their statements that that their "rescission" of policies was not illegal under state laws, and that therefore they wouldn't pledge not to do it in the future. You could almost hear in their beleaguered exasperation a plea to MAKE IT illegal for them to pull such immoral shenanigans. A plea to give them an incentive to NOT commit those kinds of indecencies against fellow human beings for the sake of their shareholders, as they are currently obligated to do. In so doing, they revealed the duplicity of law-makers who grandstand in these kind of hearings yet refuse to introduce or even support legislation to change the underlying conditions that are fundamental to the situations which they decry. And it implicitly indicted the listeners, we constituents who fail to make our voices heard loudly enough by our elected representatives that they will support such necessarily transformative legislation.

In contrast to the achingly insightful and nuanced reporting of TAL, The Adam Carolla Podcast provides hours of solidly nationalistic, racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc. humor. The AceMan, as Carolla calls himself, recently bragged that the US Army is so bad-ass, we have incurred more friendly-fire casualties in recent engagements than we have suffered casualties inflicted by the enemy. Carolla recognizes the other only in his own in-group of white, heterosexual, American males, and as such is (at best) quintessentially conventional in his morality.

The fact that TAL is currently ranked ahead of the AceMan shows me that for the first time in our civilization, we have an emerging media form in which the popularity of a post-conventional entity within that form outstrips that of its conventional counterparts. We are looking, of course, at a very skewed segment of the media-consuming population when considering only podcast downloaders, and the overall number of downloads for conventional podcasts still probably exceeds those of the post-conventional ones. But next time you are toasting, raise one to Ira Glass and Adam Beckwith and the team at TAL for helping to propel the popularity of morally post-conventional media.

Patience

"Patience is the greatest of all virtues"- Cato the Elder

"Argh! Argh! Argh! Argh!!!!!!"-John Lennon

Impatience is one of the most difficult emotions to be aware of.  Its existence in the psyche is particularly nebulous.  The degree to which it is tied up with other emotions is on a par with that of overly-leveraged debt in AIG's books.  And it can be just as toxic.  Just as many financial companies have been brought to their knees by debt-leverage ratios close to the odds on this year's Kentucky Derby winner, many a soul has been crippled and twisted by chronic impatience.  

Look at the fidgeting going on in the room next time you are in a group meeting.  As each person is consumed with impatience for his turn to speak or her next appointment, knuckles are pulled, fingernails are scraped and pens are tapped.  So rarely does one return to his or her center to find calmness in a day-to-day context that when it happens it is seen in an epiphanic light.  And such moments of inner peace should be upheld as miraculous and insightful.  But you cannot just wait for them to come; you have to make a habit of returning to a continually cultivated core of patience and awareness.  

Awareness makes patience simultaneously more difficult and more necessary.  As a society we are having a harder time than ever being patient because of global warming and related threats like population growth and creating a green economy.  Yet without having patience with each other globally (all other nations, we in the US who are not employing the ostrich strategy these days thank you for your patience) no solution can reach its potential in terms of comprehensiveness and appropriacy.   

On an individual level, increased awareness makes patience exponentially more difficult.  When you have twice as many things to worry about, they interact and overlap and create stress, fear and anxiety not at twice the rate of the smaller amount of worries, but at a SQUARED rate.   A tidal wave of impatience in the face of such escalations is entirely understandable and, to live a responsible adult life, in some sense necessary.  The response to such impatience should not be repression or melodramatic outburst, but rather a mindful moment-to-moment appreciation for the present.  A healthy confidence in your own future self to be as concerned and capable as you are is helpful and reassuring as well.  But that is a topic for future Bucky to muse on.

Twitter postings

A few quick hits here from my Twitter feed before I go back to being productive on the one precious day I have in the office here this week:

Steele sounds sensible, or steps in it, depending on vantage: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2009/03/steele_steps_in_it_again.html (from The Fix, one of my favorite politics blogs, by Chris Cillizza of the WashPost)

Michael Pollan would be proud: http://tinyurl.com/bsdwxg

Almost set to gain "aspirant" ministerial status :)

Still riding the high from the Activist Right There concert at UCB. Brwn Bflo, K'Salaam, Bambu and Los Rakas worth a listen!

following Shaq on Twitter is like driving by a car crash- it's awful but I can't look away.

Sign of the apocalypse: The Economist agreeing with SSDP- http://tinyurl.com/d7zz46

Well if you hate the genie so much explain why one of our kids is blue! http://tinyurl.com/a8eyrc

museum guy: we have bugs and dinosaurs! (Bucky gets excited) museum guy: well, dinosaur bones... (Bucky gets let down...again...)


So, yeah, the primary advantages of Twitter are for sharing links and one-liners. A lot of media attention has focused on the vapid "status" updates, which I try to avoid. I stopped following Shaq because he got annoying, but he did offer free tickets at one point for a game to anyone who could locate him on Miami Beach while he was eating lunch, thought that was pretty cool. At any rate, that's something that I'm doing with my life at the moment so I thought I would share.

Recognizing and Valuing Our Own Contributions

Another quick hit from a day when transcribing last week's Torah study session has sparked a few thoughts: "Teruma", the gifts people brought in building the tabernacle in Exodus 25, was translated in the context of our group's session as "free will offering". Each person in the group was asked to ponder their own free will offerings to the world. Several people said they were proud of the time they had contributed to Beyt Tikkun and found that to have been most rewarding for them in different ways.

Students, like the retirees more broadly represented in our synagogue, are generally in a position to better contribute time than money as well. Our brains and enthusiasm cannot be overestimated in their importance to creating and sustaining movements to transform the world. Even lending our mere presence to burgeoning groups an have its own meliorative impact, letting organizers and those tentative about their own participation know that there are more people out there who care enough to spend time in meetings about a cause. So often I have heard the question, explicitly or implicitly, "OK you're going to a meeting for sds, but what are you going to DO?" And I have come to realize that if there were more of an emphasis on incorporating BEING into our DOING we could enhance both.

The Quaker meeting style exemplifies this well, linking the importance of silently being with one another in worship, and practical, logistical and political stuff that gets worked out in the same setting. I witnessed this both at Friends Camp and at the Berkeley Friends Meeting on MLK.

My own contributions to groups that I am proud to have participate in have often been modest, but I feel that even humble contributions are significant in small group organizing and am proud of the little things I have been able to do. Sports coaches often laud the indispensibility of players who "do the little things well", like hitting the cut-off man (less violent than it sounds, Will) or filling the lane on a fast break (on the basketball court, not in the bedroom). Movement organizers should recognize this and promote it as a theme of their groups as well, because such contributions really are integral to activist communities.

Holy Speech and Humor

In reading Exodus 23:1, "Thou shalt not raise a false report; put not thy hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness" (sorry that was the only translation at hand here as I write this) last Shabbat (Mishpatim got read along with Teruma due to schedule re-arrangements), one of our congregants called us out collectively on having made a joke about Rod Blagojevich right after, and thus having violated the spirit of the commandment by speaking ill of someone when they were not there. Another person present made the case that holy speech should include humor and laughter.

I agree that humor must be included in the realm of holy speech, that it is an integral part of the balance we each require in maintaining a healthy emotional and spiritual state for knowing the world. When we cannot laugh at ourselves or at others, we create a situation in which it is much more difficult to overcome the obstacles of tension and fear that stand between us and the world we want to create. Just as there are moments when it is difficult or impossible to explicitly preserve joy or optimism there are times when humor finds itself an unwelcome guest; but we run as much risk to our long-term capabilities for creating transformation in banishing humor as we would for banishing joy or optimism or other indispensable aspects of our communities and ourselves that we must actively maintain in order to persevere effectively.

Besides, if Blaggy wants to contribute positively to the public sphere at this point, his options are pretty much either do it as the butt of some jokes or as a human mop. And I'm guessing he prefers the former.

Why settle for a national electronic health database?

I'm not sure what other ways the case for universal single-payer health care in the US needs to be made. My personal favorites are the historical/economic perspective Malcolm Gladwell provides in his 2006 piece for the New Yorker that remains one of my favorite non-fiction works of this decade (you know, the only one in which I've been able to drive so far and stuff), and Michael Moore's documentary SiCKO (which I feel OK plugging on Facebook because taking pot shots at the Flint haruspex has reached the level where he, like Manny Ramirez, has become unfairly undervalued as a contributor to our society). The human rights aspect of the discussion is self-evident. And yet, the best that Obama and his highly touted if not entirely novel National Coordinator of Health Information Technology have given us is promises of establishing a national electronic records system.

Even my beloved Progress Report never mentions the promised land of universal single-payer in its on-going coverage of the struggle to get a national electronic records system. Instead, they are focusing on the duplicity of right-wingers like Elizabeth McCaughey. Come on, that's so 2003 even Al Franken and I have moved on! Where are the prophetic voices continually calling out for this much-needed change? They are not on the fringe, yet they are not in the MSM. They are lost in the realm of ideas that are acknowledged to be valuable but "unrealistic", like evolving past the electoral college, legalizing marijuana, and getting rid of the designated hitter.

I leave you with another set of prophetic words, from the great Walter Sobchek: "Hey dude, don't go away man. Come on, this affects all of us man. Our basic freedoms! I'm staying. I'm finishing my coffee. Enjoying my coffee."