Even Glenn

I've had a thought on my mind now and again over the past few weeks-- a thought I had a little more opportunity to take out and examine during my two days of "quiet" last week, to sit with. I've had a thought on my mind now and again that goes something like this:

If me, Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. were all in a room together, the others would all have something in common that they would not have in common with me.

They would all love Glenn Beck.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean to suggest even for a second that they would be Glenn Beck "fans." I take it as a given that they would find Glenn's ideas troubling. Wrong-headed. Offensive, disappointing.

But they would love Glenn Beck. They would love him, I think, not "because of" or "in spite of," but they would simply love him.

I can't say that.

Me, I can't say that I love Glenn Beck.

And we don't have to just pick on Glenn here. There's a whole host of people that you could put in his place. You could talk about the Sarah Palins and Rush Limbaughs of the world, the various pundits and politicians that have had me riled up so often on this site; the tweaked out sick sons of bitches whose depravity generates headlines daily, in this country and around the world; or the people closer to me, who don't make headlines, but whose names, whose voices, stir the same reaction as a Palin or a Beck or a Limbaugh.

Jesus, Gandhi, King. They'd love those people.

Me, when I hear them talk, when I run into them by some unhappy chance encounter, when for whatever reason my mind is drawn their way, when that vein in my neck starts bulging, when the language I use gets coarser and uglier, when my heart beats just a little bit faster, when I start to taste bile and feel like I could spit venom... what I'm feeling isn't love.

And I think that that's too bad for me. I think that I'm missing something here.

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I've talked a lot, over the past few years, about the whole "vision, not programs" concept.

That concept-- a centerpiece of Daniel Quinn's writing, but also a concept shared by the New Environment Association and like-minded groups-- is essentially this: if we want society to change, to get "better," what we need is not new programs, but a new vision, a new way of thinking. Programs developed out of the old vision will only ever "tweak" the system, will only ever by minor adjustments, temporary fixes. Programs developed out of the old vision will take the same things for granted, will instinctively serve the same ends. With new vision, however, actions will flow, whether we mean them to or not. When we look at the world in a different way, we will not be able to help acting in a different way. Our values, our understanding, will be changed, and we cannot expect that this won't play out in our lives.

So... if you want people to "go green," then what you need is to have people come around to a new, "green" vision. Embracing old ideals and trying to put a green spin on them simply will not work. Really "going green" will require new values, new concepts, not more recycling programs, hybrid SUVs, and organic frozen entrees.

It is, basically, the whole "Leaving Egypt" notion that I've so often ranted about on this site.

This is what society needs. Not programs. Vision. Not things to do, but rather a new concept of who to be.

And this isn't just what we need collectively.

"Vision not programs" is an individual thing, too.

I've thought that for a long time, and I've tried to build on that, live as if I really, truly believed that. I often focus too much on the externals, have tried to change my own life, make it somehow "better," but adding to the to-do list, or maybe to the don't-do list. From working on the organic farm and preserving my veggies, to selling off or giving away possessions, to canceling cable and getting a library card, I've often found myself trying to simplify or live "sustainably" by embracing externals. I've reminded myself, when I've caught myself doing this, that the externals are all well and good, but that the most important thing is to understand it all differently, to approach it from a different place.

I've done alright with that, but I've missed some of the big stuff.

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Here's a radically different vision, the kind of vision that can change an individual life, the kind of vision that can change us collectively. Here's a very different way of being, one that we all nod along to, but that very few of us actually embrace. One that I've promoted, but have never actually, truly, really allowed to shape my life.

It goes like this:

I've seen too much hate to want to hate, myself... and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: "We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good, and so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you...

There are other ways of putting it. That's my favorite, though.

As much as I've always loved that passage, I haven't ever really seen fit to make that a part of my life, to live that out.

Not that I haven't been mostly all about "love."

My sister has a shirt that I like. It says "love thy neighbor," and then it goes on to break it down, to remind people who their neighbor is, to remind people who they're supposed to be loving... thy homeless neighbor, thy black neighbor, thy gay neighbor, thy Muslim neighbor, and so on.

I like that shirt.

I think that I mostly like that shirt because I've never had any problem at all loving those people. I can read it, smile, and hold some sort of moral high ground. I can feel more loving than my hateful fundamentalist adversaries. Hell, I don't just "love" these people in some abstract way, most of the time, given the opportunity to actually know them, I like these people.

Loving the disadvantaged, or the oppressed, or the victims, or the powerless has always just seemed natural. It's not difficult at all.

The advantaged, the oppressors, the victimizers, and the powerless have always been another story.

I don't love them.

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Thich Nhat Hanh, in Being Peace and No Death, No Fear and other books, tells the story of a girl and a pirate.

It's part of his discussion of "interbeing," the concept that we are all connected, that in some real way we are all part of one another, of everything that is around us.

He writes about his experiences working with boat people in Southeast Asia. He describes the brutal pirate industry that grew up on the waters to prey on the boat people as they fled their homes, to take away from them what little they'd managed to salvage from their former lives.

And then he tells the story of the young girl who was attacked and brutally raped by a pirate, and who then threw herself into the ocean to drown.

Thich Nhat Hanh asks us to realize that in a real sense, we are that girl. As I have put it myself in other places, "not there but for the grace of God, but there go I." We are her. Her suffering is our suffering.

Understanding that is a step toward real love, toward real compassion. Embracing the suffering of that young girl can be painful, but powerful.

But Thich Nhat Hanh doesn't stop there. He reminds us that if in some real way we are that girl, then we are also the pirate. We are not only the victim, but we are the victimizer.

In Being Peace, he follows it with a poem, part of which goes like this:

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,

and I am the arms merchant,

selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year old girl,

refugee on a small boat,

who throws herself into the ocean

after being raped by a sea pirate,

and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable

of seeing and loving.

I've been okay with being, on some level, that girl, or that Ugandan child. Loving them is easy.

I've never been okay with being, on some level, that weapons dealer, that pirate. Loving them hasn't even been an option on the table, hasn't been a consideration.

There are those that it would take heroic amounts of forgiveness to love. Impossible amounts.

The truth is that sometimes, that much forgiveness feels sort of like dying. It's ugly and it hurts.

But here's the thing... if I think that Jesus and Gandhi and King and Thich Nhat Hanh and others have all been on to something, and if what they were on to seems to have been at least in part "love them all, always," then maybe it's time to love them all, always. Even Glenn. To not do that, to expect to find that certain kind of peace and strength and goodness that they've all found without taking seriously what they've had to say about getting there, will only keep me running in the same (angry) circles forever and ever and ever.

And so I've decided-- as much as this really sort of sucks, as much as my gut is resisting it, as much as the mere notion makes me tense up and grind my teeth-- that I'm done with the hating. I've decided-- and I know, this sounds lame-- that I'm going to love people. All of them. Not because of or in spite of, but just love them.

I have no illusions that this will be easy. I think it is going to take a lot of hard work, and that I will not be good at it for a long, long time. But lots of good things aren't easy. We have to do them anyway.