Election Reflection #12
Conclusion: Why I’m Hopeful
I offer no predictions on the coming elections. While I think the election offers a crucial choice for our future, I do not pretend, or claim, that it will settle the crisis that this country and world are in. I have tried to show that “it’s complicated.” Why? Because the tensions and contradictions are woven into our social fabric, our historical context, our cultural inheritances, our educational receptions, our economic structure, our political constitutions, our international institutions, and, I have been so bold to say philosophically, our very existence.
I repeat. I see us in another Great Disruption through which will come a new synthesis that transcends all the parties and factions and lead humanity and our world on.
Why I’m hopeful I think comes through in what I have just said and repeated maybe much too often. It rests on faith so that are willing to not only to die for each other, but more to live here and now, with whatever time we have left, for each other. We come from star dust to which we will return. We believe in our future. Not necessarily my future, but our future.
We believe in our past in which we have become distinct individuals with our special but limited abilities through our interaction with each other, our caregivers, our parents and siblings, our teachers and coaches who believed in us, our friends and colleagues whose common path to human fulfilment we all sought together. My hope for the future then is due to my past with others who taught me to never stop learning. It is that ability to learn that makes us perpetually new persons on the path to individual and, ultimately, collective self-actualization.
I am hopeful because I have learned about and from millions of people who have struggled with their lives. They taught their children; they had fun with their friends; they wrote poems and essays; they produced art to prod us; they tried new ways even when they failed with old ones; they never stopped learning. I am hopeful because I see and feel, that even with all our limitations and stupidity, we are a remarkable species. Though everyone of us is different, we are all equal in dignity because we have the evolved or, if you want, divine ability to imagine and so to use symbols to speak, act, and communicate with each other.
We all have different ways of saying how and why this is so. But if we are committed to life, we will feel it and be it. It! We need to keep working on it, keep thinking about it, keep listening and reading about it, keep arguing about it, through all the great disruptions in our personal and communal life.
Faith is not believing that we have the Blueprint, the Answer, the Truth, the Way. When we believe that we have, we have lost the faith. When we give up the striving, the joy of continual practice, the effort for the next prize, and the fun of it all, well then, we have already died.
We have great heroes some well-known, but most unknown, to teach us. Every one of them was joyful, happy, immersed in our world not just theirs, even in the pain of their struggles. They kept their sense of humor. They are serious about the world but not so serious that they take the fun out of it. They can laugh with others without disrespect, put-down, name-calling, anger, and hate. And most of all they can laugh at themselves.
My advice in these election reflections is first to vote and get others to vote. Secondly, vote for the happy warriors not the morose and angry ones. Thirdly, vote for those who are not going back to some golden age of the past, but those looking forward to problem solve our common issues, not just those of plutocratic oligarchs. And fourthly vote for those who understand that ruling in politics is not like managing a business in a pyramidical structure but creating a free and open society where people can assemble, speak, and act locally, nationally, and internationally.
I have hope in humanity’s capacity to transcend, to become and use their higher power. Let’s have the workers directing business. The congregation oversee the faith community. The citizens rule the government. And democracy, We the People, direct the economy.