“Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.” – Excerpt from Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty, or give me death” speech to the Virginia Convention, March 23, 1775.
I cannot conclusively prove everything that follows here, but this is my sense of things so far…
Considered rationally, “Majesty of Heaven,” the way Patrick Henry used the term, probably means the ordinary, cosmological disposition for universal being more commonly referred to as “god!”
God cares, but not the way most people want, and expect, god to care.
It is nothing personal!
For personal caring, god has given us each other. Accordingly, people are naturally inclined to need others to care about people, to care about them!
To show us the way, in the image of god we humans possess a conscious awareness of the natural order of all things here and now. This is not god, per se, but rather god’s love as the real world of the coherent well-being and unified belonging of others as ordained by god.
To make it all work for us as Americans, we have given ourselves the Constitution of the United States. The alleged President of the United States, George W. Bush, has contemptuously scorned the U. S. Constitution as being “just a piece of paper!”
In reality, our American Constitution is much more than that! If followed, it helps prevent us from contributing to the on-going project of species suicide by guaranteeing life-affirming well-being and democratic belonging to all Americans in correspondence with the truth of the world according to god's love here and now.
God’s love as the truth of the real world here and now is the natural process of the indeterminate, spontaneous and open-ended meetings-relationships between all things in mutual, interdependent freedom as All in All and All as All in and as god’s love. As the truth, god’s love works the same way for everything and never changes the rules! That is what makes it truth!
As derived from the U. S. Constitution so informed, our American Creed of democratic freedom and equal justice for all under the rule of law then follows.
Unfortunately, most Americans today seem to be a lot like Mr. Bush. They seem to resent god’s love here and now, rebel against it for being the real world. Sometimes, no doubt, they even hate god for it. For these individuals, god’s love appears to be just too threatening to bear – it is too excellent, too virtuous, too constant, too faithful, too indiscriminate, too inclusive and too all-empowering – it is not ideological, human or tribal enough! It is not personal! It takes away the scapegoating option for fun and profit!
The proof that to a large degree some, if not all, of these anxieties are hard at work in the American psyche these days is the fact that most Americans today no longer even care to think, feel, believe and act for themselves like Americans. Indeed, Americans today care almost nothing for themselves, each other, their god or the world at large as Americans.
Given the national spiritual vacuum at the heart of this woeful turn of events, the uses of self-serving ideological dogma have entered to fill the void with a fatal vengeance in America.
Ideology emerges in the world when human beings have so alienated themselves from god’s love that they really have nothing true or real - i.e. nothing excellent or virtuous - going for them because they simply refuse to think, feel, believe and act for themselves here and now in the real world according to the natural order of things.
From ideology, come denial and deceit. From these, all things become strictly political. From the strictly political, polarization is born. From polarization, self-righteous bigotry and retribution emerge. From self-righteousness, all abject mediocrity and calamity flow.
Today, the operative ideology in America would seem to be that of her pretend commander-in-chief, himself, AWOL George W. Bush. As far as I can determine, Mr. Bush’s ideology seeks to establish two, non-negotiable imperatives:
(1) Regardless of cost, ultimate control of all Middle Eastern oil drilling, extraction, refining, distribution and profit vested in Western oil interests friendly to Mr. Bush.
(2) Regardless of the cost, the precedent of waging of wars of choice, and the wholesale annihilation of others that goes with them, being virtually sacrosanct in America so that the profits from war coming from the American taxpayer may continue to flow uninterrupted to the Bush family and its friends everywhere in the most abundant and expeditious way humanly possible.
Apparently, this transfer of Middle Eastern wealth and public monies from the U. S. Treasury into the private bank accounts of the family Bush and its favorites seems to agitate most Americans not at all. Maybe they are all having too much fun scapegoating others or the events of the world, even though they do not actually profit from it themselves. Indeed, many of them end up only dying from it!
In any case, most seem content to keep the mouth and mind shut so they can sit back and just think, feel, believe and obey the way their ideological leader wants them to.
For an American to covet gratuitous suicide in this way strikes me as not being very American at all, though!
Then again, I suppose it does offer the convenience of being a whole lot easier than making an authentic commitment to the natural excellence and virtue of god’s love here and now in order to be able to think, feel, believe and act for one's self like an adult American in the real world.
Well said. What do you think could be done to help change the paradigm of denial, deceit, etc?
Posted by: UJ | October 13, 2007 at 02:07 AM
Hi, UJ
Thanks for your question,
A good start, I think, would be free, open, uncensored public debate in the media...like a return to the "Fairness Doctrine" abandoned during the Reagan
years because, I believe, it helped enable us all to talk to eachother like adults.
Today, our media is just one huge, gigantic denial machine! All we get from our media these days is propaganda...what the powers that be want us to think, feel, believe, love, hate, etc. Welcome to Reagan's "Morning in America!" (Remember that?)
God help them if we ever began talking to eachother like grownups ever again...we would all start thinking for ourselves without fear of being ridiculed...then more direct democracy would break out...and SHAZZAM - "the great decider" and all his minions would be exposed as the dedceitful, power-hungry, scapegoating, psychotic enemies of America that they really are.
As always, in subversive insubordination, democratic freedom and equal justice for all under the rule of law,
Robert
Posted by: Robert | October 14, 2007 at 06:44 PM