In determining the origins of the United States, scholars have called this union “Nature’s Nation,” A country “invented by reason,” or “democracy in America” as a socially embedded desire to self-govern if not always exercise self-control.
This author, Terry T. Williams, in a series of essays based–on her unwelcomed remarks at a graduation ceremony given at an invitation to speak in her native state of Utah–is just one of the many stories associated with the brutal events of September 11, 2001. [A link to stories]

On that day when the nation awakened to terror, terrifying images and a confused response to attacks on our: airlines, New York City’s financial hub, and center of military power in Washington, emotions engulfed reason. Despite the confusion the nation’s vulnerability was self-evident in a country that runs on electronic media and automatic pilot. A wave of repression, torture, and military adventurism unsurpassed since the Civil War (1861-1865) swept the nation.

Williams recoiled, as did many writers, from the justifications for a war on terror that silenced differences in a sea of quiet conspiracies to spy on, search, and question citizens about their loyalty, ethnic identity and religious practices. For a Mormon woman, the signals were all too clear that we as a people were on the verge of reverting to prejudice, bigotry, and uncontrolled fear in pursuit of an internationally widespread and timeless “war on terror.”

Recall that Mormons throughout their history had been driven out of their farms in places east of the Mississippi River for their faith and social contract that seemed so divergent from the national Protestant norm. Mormons were not tolerated in the decades before they discovered refuge and settled on the Great Salt Lake.

This author also feared that under the label of “eco-terrorism” that those acts of civil disobedience to protect the lands, waters, and wildlife of our natural heritage would be swept up in the frenzy of arrests. People who had tried to stop logging of old growth forests were incarcerated as terrorists because of their destruction of property. Those who professed an allegiance to wildlife and resisting pollution were targeted along with “enemy combatants” as threats to the security, safety, and exploitive hunger of the nation to allegedly protect our values against an “International Islamic jihad.”

Wild lands once protected for their scenic, biological, and functional integrity were now thrown open to mineral exploration in the name of “freeing ourselves from dependence on foreign oil.” We nonetheless consumed imported oil at record levels throughout the war on terror (2001-2009) which Congress endorsed to the point of even creating a new national bureaucracy ominously call “Homeland Security.”

To many loyal and environmentally aware people the tone, the actions, and the consequences of excessive rhetoric were combustible fuel to an ongoing use of excessive force. That excessive use of military forces led to authorized invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan which have now been counted as the longest, if not most inconclusive, wars ever fought by the US.

In such an atmosphere of mounting alarm, creeping surveillance, and growing distrust, Williams addressed the graduating class of the University of Utah calling for sobriety in the use of our language, restraint in the use of our mortal powers to destroy entire neighborhoods, and a recovery of our national tradition of tolerance.

Only she was met with anger, disbelief, and accusations. Many people think that Williams made traitorous remarks and expressed anti-American sympathies in her speech. In contesting her loyalty and devotion to duty Williams was forced to continue the conversation in writing articles to further explain her motives and message.

“The Open Space of Democracy” is the collected justification for her reminding us about the importance of minority rights, the enduring necessity for tolerance in times of critical actions, and the sanctuary equally afforded all people by the natural heritage of the nation’s accessible preserves of land, air, and water.

648 words
J. V. Siry
Saturday, September 3, 2011

There are times when in all certainty what we believe to be so is just as certainly not so. What then can we describe, glean from and use when such a situation is manifest and we are at loss because our challenged beliefs are insufficient to meet the exigencies of a perilously new period?

What exactly occurs when a cherished notion confronts an undeniable reality?

• Denial, this can’t be happening.
• Bargaining, well if it is the case maybe I can figure some way out?
• Acceptance, inevitability is a harsh recognition.

Is an abbreviated set of steps we go through according to Elizabeth Kublai Ross[1] as we approach news of our own deaths, and what can be a greater challenge then to contemplate the sureness of your own mortality? For many, the loss of love, a loved one, or significant influence in ones life sets this dissonant process in motion. For most adults this seriously disturbing quarrel with events happens when they lose a job. Reality collides with personal ambitions that in our society include our self-respect since work in post-Protestant culture is regarded as a virtue.

Dissonance is the result of a clash. The collision is a result to two disharmonious elements experienced simultaneously. A conflict arises from our attempt to reconcile two or more contradictory feelings that arise from and perhaps sustain our beliefs. Brought from music theory, the term is applied to mental tension with the term cognitive dissonance. Everyone who is reflective experiences such tensions from clashing beliefs sometime in their lives. Many of us, probably experience this feeling of being at odds with what we anticipated multiple times in our lives if we are curious about life and experiment on the edge of acceptable behavior. One can welcome such disagreements between the expected and the actual outcome, because it promotes our deeper comprehension of the paradox in which the world, so often resides.

The richness of the Book of Job arises from this very quarrel inherent in our beliefs about our own worthiness in a just and orderly world and the experiences that jar our emotional and rational composure. Whole groups can experience such a situation as occurred in Salem Village in the seventeenth century when matrons were charged with evildoing witchcraft, like countless experiences in European villages before and during the Reformation. Personal upheavals are perilous, but social dislocation is dangerous as was the case in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, The Rwandan civil war, Stalinist Russia, or Nazi Germany. In many historical situations when social order changed reorganization from the initial disorganization of beliefs, behavior, and sympathies was the inevitable condition in which people had to live. Epidemics are particularly nasty examples of the process whereby we call into doubt everything we had once believed about our personal value and views of the world’s complexity.

What is this process of cognitive dissonance that leads to a reconsideration of our situation? Influenced by technology of nuclear reactors, some call it a “meltdown.” Popular in the 1940s and 1950s was the phrase “nervous breakdown,” Both terms suggest an unhealthy –as opposed to natural sequence of events—condition to which unstable people are prone. Weakness is at the heart of these and other terms for such personal and society-wide convulsions. Depression is an example of the pejorative association between instability and the incapacity to cope with unexpected challenges to one’s self-composure.  Personally many view this process of reappraisal as debilitating and associate it with signs of emotional disorder. However physicians at the Mayo Clinic point out that “Nervous breakdown isn’t a medical term, however, nor does it indicate a specific mental illness.”

So, what should we call a process of reevaluation based on a sudden, shocking or difficult to believe situation? The context is at once personal and social in that abrupt realignments happen, as in people’s lives when faced with unanticipated losses and in nations, such as South Africa when ethnic cleansing and apartheid –twin policies of the regime–were replaced and Nelson Mandela, once imprisoned for his opposition, became the nation’s President.

The setting wherein one set of beliefs was reinforced is altered and a very different set of assumptions becomes the norm, this some would call a revolution, but that is not precisely accurate. While complete changes can be revolutionary for a society, quite often, political revolutions retain much that is unchanged and unchallenged. Clearly the word we need here is not associated with pathology of mind. Instead there is within many people confronted by unanticipated tragedy for which there is no valid explanation, a willingness to face new realities in a resilient and emotionally reassuring manner. In search of neutrality some have used the phrase “paradigm shift.” The suggested meaning, though open to doubt, here is that an entire way of thinking about something is altered. Paradigm–meaning an archetype underlying the changing surface features of our world, or a model of reality, or a theory of how the social and natural order ought to work–can be misconstrued. The word and its associated phrase seem inaccurate, pretentious, and wildly subjective. Important changes deserve clearer language than a word that may mean three different things. While the author of the phrase Thomas Kuhn is precise in calling these shifts ” tradition-shattering,” the misuse of the term paradigm since his application of the term to serious scientific changes has been trivialized. So what would accurately depict the shattering consequences of abrupt changes in our emotional, cognitive, and spiritual lives?

Mystics have argued for the word epiphany because it means a moment of sudden revelation tinged with a different insight from any we have previously experienced. Is such a change of hearts and minds in a society, or in the core beliefs of any person really an epiphany, where the heretofore “hidden qualities” are manifest for all to see? I do not think so. Clearly St. Paul on the road to Damascus, or Charles Darwin on the death of his daughter Annie experienced profound changes in their lives. These if anything are threshold moments, where the capacity for people to retain once cherished beliefs is challenged and we pass on to some new outlook. Critical events Aristotle told us for in the drama the climax occurs when the very ground of the narrative shifts bringing with it a new understanding about which we were earlier mistaken. Oedipus has not, after all, avoided his fate and we see in the tragedy his recognition of his hubris, his culpability, and his need for reconciliation. While epiphany is more accurate than paradigm shift for these threshold moments the axial quality of their importance is not fully conveyed by “epiphany.”

On the opposite side from mystical language is the terminology from science “a quantum leap,” as if the world of the infinitesimally small could have some application to people, or socially shattering circumstances. People use the term quantum leap to suggest a big change in something we observe. It implies an abrupt, coherent, and circumscribed change, because as Einstein and Bohr theorized–and experiments bear out–the light quantum exists in measurably separate and distinct states; that is electrons are not just spread out around the atomic nuclei, but instead stick to one place or another. How the reference to the smallest imaginable behavior of electrons was shifted into a term meaning big changes may be because quantum mechanics revolutionized physics, but that is speculative. Societies or people do not behave like electrons, despite the seductive power of the simile.

If meltdown, paradigm shift, revolution, epiphany, or quantum leaps all miss the point is the absence of a word to best describe these radical adjustments in hearts and minds that occur as we are confronted by the unbelievably unexpected conditions of the world a paradoxical oversight? That is to say, we are confounded when trying to express the contradictory patterns of how we perceive the world and then change our minds. Each of these words approach but never fully capture that anxiety ridden threshold when we, for no rational reason, have –in the words of W. H. Auden and Ghandi– “a change of heart.” In some deep sense both men grasped the emotional depth that comes with shattering transformations in beliefs, behavior, and comprehension. At the core of any threshold moment is an authentic awareness of our own culpability, gullibility, and inability to know. At the very limits of our understanding we become open to the enriching possibility that if we are wrong, we can change.  The Japanese suggest that the word is “satori.”[2] The sudden emotional recognition accompanying enlightenment means to see passed the surface fascination to the pit of existence and liberate our illusions. Jammu Krishnamurti calls it “freedom from the known.” And Karen Horney suggested it is a healthy step in overcoming the neurosis of perfectionism in that we cannot know without uncertainty and due to this “tyranny of certainty” we seek in life can mislead us into comforting delusions that are, none-the-less, an illusion.

Just how one learns to feed our curiosity and pursue these thresholds to exercise our capacity to transform what we think, feel and interpret is one important aspect of an educated, or at least an educable personality. Anyone can learn to reinforce his or her prejudices and call it knowledge. In freedom from the known Krishnamurti argues that we are biased by personal doubts and reinforced in our illusions of certainty by society. The willingness to pursue contradiction, understand the paradox of knowing, and walk down a forking path of mounting uncertainties is the first step to satori. But this passage in search of threshold moments is no guarantee that we will become enlightened.

It is merely a down payment on an insurance policy that we will not forever be deluded by our fictions, fantasies, and fables.

1643 Words

8:45–3:44 PM

Wednesday, August 4, 2010; 8:57:40 AM

A shorter list is proposed by Dr. Roberta Temes:

Numbness (mechanical functioning and social insulation)

Disorganization (intensely painful feelings of loss)

Reorganization (re-entry into a more ‘normal’ social life.)

[2] Satori (悟り?) (Chinese: 悟; pinyin: wù ) is a Japanese Buddhist term for enlightenment that literally means “understanding”. In the Zen Buddhist tradition, satori refers to a flash of sudden awareness, or individual enlightenment, and is considered a “first step” or embarkation toward nirvana. Satori is typically juxtaposed with the related term kensho, which translates as “seeing one’s nature”. Kensho experiences tend to be briefer glimpses, while satori is considered to be a deeper spiritual experience. Satori is an intuitive experience

The moment when our nation changed forever.

JVS

Not since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has a person been elected President at a more propitious time in the history of the Republic; that he is of African and American descent marks this day November 4, 2008 a watershed in the nation’s political culture. As an urban, educated, Christian and Black Senator, President-elect Barak Obama will define this era of engagement, of hope and can do spirit for our troubled nation in ways that will defy our old categories of partisanship.

It has been said that President Lyndon Johnson, when he was signing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, recognized he would change the complexion of the country’s electoral alignment and seal the fate of the old segregationist-prone Democratic Party in border and Southern states. But yesterday’s election reveals that Johnson’s vision also enabled this fragile democratic process to work and to effectively deal politically with the nation’s troubles by electing Barak Obama, yesterday. We and he stand now together to face among the greatest threats we have ever encountered: war, financial collapse, scandal, rising social inequality, a deteriorating technological infrastructure and ecological support system.

President-elect Obama deserves our uncommon support for unifying the nation to face the twin domestic and international fractures that threaten to bring down the very rights we all cherish as free people. His opportunity –in light of our history, our Civil War, and our political culture– is a watershed moment. That is, a defining period in which we will never again be the same because we have crossed an invisible barrier in the flow of events.

Savor this moment, invest in our national success and demand a renaissance of freedom that this new opportunity gives to us all. In the narrowest of views based on our political history, the Senate of the United States, by offering up three of its own members in this now finished presidential race, re-asserted its proper right to take back this nation’s power from those who had squandered their mandate, sullied the constitution, and bankrupted two generations of working Americans.

The wave of change you are feeling today is a convergence of desires for a fair and constitutional nation, a people resisting racial prejudice, and an electorate expressing its fatigue with the politics of distraction while a foreign policy of unilateral-preemptive war robs us of our allies in a world too small to tolerate provocative policies that divide us.

Congratulations Mr. President-elect and all 100 million plus Americans who voted — together all of us made history.

<!–[if supportFields]> TIME \@ "dddd, MMMM d, yyyy" <![endif]–>Wednesday, November 5, 2008<!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–>

What was in the air that a German doctor and psychoanalyst and a Mexican diplomat while in Paris would both pay such attention to this matter of what it means to be a human being? They were living in post fascist, cold-war torn Europe and America, subjected to the brutality of war, the holocaust and the iron curtain. The conclusion of both the World Wars certainly had a profound impact on my parents and their parents generations. I suspect the questions raised by these basically European civil wars –and savage conflicts they were, where people were reduced to insignificance first my machines and then by the “dogs” of war only to be turned into slaves and commercial products in concentration camps– can never be fully answered. Clearly, Paz and Horney , like Jung, Fromm, and dozens of writers were appalled and assaulted by what had transpired in the twentieth century. The irony of senseless wars amidst some of the most astounding technological achievements and scientific discoveries were not lost on historians, cultural critics, or the reflective personality.

As we approach the memorial month of VE or Victory in Europe day, I am reminded by the readings I assign that identity or the loss of a tangible and comprehensible identity is a preoccupation of the post war period.

Being concerned about your identity, is at first glance, the apparent preoccupation of –well, someone with time on their hands. The very fact we have the capacity to ask the question, suggests a certain level of comfort that more pressing questions such as what should I work to achieve, how can I survive, with whom should I confess my sincerest doubts, and for whom do I serve are all questions that have been answered.

Horney insists that we are capable of losing ourselves and that some neurotic people suffer from a syndrome called “psychic fragmentation,” which is a sort of loss of integrity because you do not experience yourself as a unified or integrated personality. There are many aspects of life such as demands made upon us by others, or the desire to escape some real or imagined hideousness about our character that we may desire to avoid and thus we become detached, even from ourselves.

I am not sure that people living from hand to mouth have such preoccupations, but clearly the people of the leisure class and those of us with secure work can fall into the “loss of identity” preoccupation. And if it is true that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” then I suppose self-reflection may be turned into an attribute. For Paz the diplomat and Horney the therapist humanity and not the individual was their motivation for understanding why humans behave so badly to one another. Each understood that personal drives are dialectically complicated and that we are composite beings, neither fully one kind of person nor fully another. Both recognized the fact that we tend to externalize the “other” from wich we are estranged in our own beings and then place blame on that externalized other so as to relieve our own responsibility for the things we do.

This externalization is I would argue part of what is needed to survive in a war and that every combat condition or each assault on enemies an civilians brings out this need for people in a society to externalize the deamons they perceive and to suggest that the “other” deserve to be degraded even to the point of erradication.

We of course, today are in a war, and I help pay for that war everyday I go to work. Every time I fill up my car’s tank with petrol I cast another stone at my externalized enemy, who really is me. Why — well because I need this car and its precious fuel to get to work, to pay the bills and to keep my taxes flowing into the machinery of dehumanization and war.

Some will say it is a defensive war –whatever that means– since Germans in 1939 thought they were defending themselves from Poland. But I am complicit. I am guilty and I inflict carnage at arms length on a people in Afghanistan and Iraq whom I actually have nothing against. So I write of a profound sense of fear that I cannot fit things together anymore, unless I realize that I am responsible for the carnage, the boken lives and the 4,000 Americans who died to keep me driving around in senseless circles of consumption, just so I can keep from understanding the world and in the meantime get paid to talk about how writers in the twentieth century have felt that we suffer from a loss of identity and we lack coherence as psychologically healthy beings.

Both Horney and Paz –for different reasons– believe that the greater purpose of people is to strive for something greater than their own preoccupation with their fractured souls. Both decried the emotional narcissism and externalized alienation that were so characteristic of their times and mine. Horney felt there was a sort of evolutionary gyroscope that enabled people to be more whole and moral beings, to recognize the actual conditions of the world and our place in that cosmos. Paz believed taht we could transcend the “nightmare” that is our collective and personal histories and unite to make sense out of the “senseless, torture chambers of reason.” I would, of course hope they are correct. But my generation, far from improving the world, is going about fracturing what little is left of humanity and devouring the natural capital that keeps us alive. That is, the natural storehouse of services we extract from the biological world. These storehouses of capital –accumulated over centuries– are all that stands between nature foreclosing on our hyper-industrial culture and from calling in our debts to the millions of other species with which we share this planet. So my need to fuel my car is an even greater egregious act than I can be aware of, because I am unravelling the fabric of nature so that my country can unravel the fabric of Iraqi society.

If there is an order –as Darwin suggested there is an order, or as Einstein insisted there is that order external to our perception of the world– then I have been tearing up parts of that order to fit them into my needs, as opposed to fitting better into the order of the world that created me. By that I mean the world that I am born into, live in and the ecology that sustains my needs and nourishes my curiosity. All of that world helps to create me.

I cannot keep breaking up the world’s ecological and social order. I must change and in so changing, I must consider a means of restoring, even a piece of the world, so that I –in the end– don’t break-apart something really important. For if, by my actions, something really vital to the functioning o fthe world could be harmed, then I destroy my nest, my niche, and my noosphere. If my actions and those of others end in destroying the resilience of the world and not just the social comity that binds me to you and you to me, then what have we done?

As John Donne insisted, “everyman’s death diminishes me.” Four thousand deaths later I am not a better person for having ignored the immoral war my nation engages in and which I work to support. Blessed are they who can worry about their identity for they shall be unable to see that hey, like we all are responsible for a great wrong. My life has been diminished by their deaths and I must in some way make amends, that is all I know to do, since there appears to be no way out of this hell. And the diversions will not last. So will I act and repair the damage, and if so when?

I dreaded going back to New Orleans, I feared the emotions that flooded over my soul the first time I saw the Ninth Ward six months after the deluge. Then too, I dreaded the odor I had consumed last year this time when we gutted houses. It was a fragrance of shame. Shame that I was going through the personal effects of those missing in the deluge. There was the despair I felt at picking up a young boy’s soiled jacket caked with the mud of carelessness, That is the carelessness of politicians and Army engineers who could not ensure the safety of these people due to the poor design and quality of the flood walls and storm surge barriers that these people had constructed.

Because the extent of the disaster was so large we were unable to build houses and re-establish homesteads. The dread sustained the fear and this fear grew to nourish the dread;Møbius strip of reinforcement, because there is no other side of this story–there only appears to be two sides to the same calamity. Here the levees failed and with their breech came the choice to rise to this challenge and re-invent a city and its neighborhoods. That is a story that folds back upon itself in an endless repetition of loss and real suffering. Connected here are twin themes in the same story of loss and recovery because they are part of the same inside that turns into an outside and as it does we lose our sense of proportion, then eviscerating our sense of dignity for the civic life that once sustained these neighbors and harbored their hopes for their children’s and all children’s future.

This place is one endless monotony of empty, abandoned, or still damaged homes that stand as cenotaphs of our capacity to ignore the obvious, burden the victims and put obstacles in the way of those who seek to improve the conditions of those who need and desire to re-inhabit this, now hallowed ground. The lower Mississippi delta has been sanctified with deaths and reinvigorated lives of these –once fortunate residents– for whom luck also evacuated when the swift advance of the great gulf storm of August 29, 2005 forever altered this watery deposition at the edge of a warm inland sea.