The Lyceum Lecture,
August 6, 2006
First Unitarian
Church, Peterborough, NH
by Dr. Robin Meyers,
Pastor, Mayflower Congregational Church, Oklahoma
City
I am grateful for the
high honor of this invitation, and find it to be a remarkable coincidence, if
there are such things, that in my book I speak of Henry David Thoreau, who once
gave this lecture, as embodying the spirit and the courage that we must recover
in our time if we are to survive.
Not only his call to
simplify, and to be introspective, but to refuse to participate in madness if
one is living in a time of madness.
Thoreau was keenly
aware that idolatry and boredom were a toxic combination, and that the
“entitlement mentality” could have apocalyptic
consequences. Those who are not comfortable “alone with
themselves” and their “pretty toys” he wrote, can be the most
lonely and dangerous people on earth.
It was Thoreau who
foreshadowed our current ecological crisis when he wrote: “If a man
walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being
regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing
off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious
and enterprising citizen.”
And then, in another
line, mocking the true religion of our time (which is the fervent belief that
the marketplace can solve all the problems of life), Thoreau said, “To
have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.”
So, although it is
utterly presumptuous of me to say so, I wish to stand before you this morning
in the spirit of Henry David Thoreau, to remind you that of all his keenest
insights, his true genius was to understand that the way a nation loses its soul
is when her people, amused and distracted (kept busy with trivia and fed
patriotic propaganda), come slowly, but surely to accept the unacceptable.
So that instead of a
mounting rage, which these times call for, there is merely a growing
indifference, born of the ability of those in power to divide and conquer, and
of the images of war and suffering to numb us, rather than move us to act.
If was Thoreau, after
all, who gave us the essential definition of civil disobedience, and whose
lessons were an inspiration to Gandhi: “If the machine of government
is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to
another, then, I say, break the law.”
And when he went to
jail rather than pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state
“which buys and sells men, women, and children like cattle, at the door of
its senate house,” he was visited by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who
is reported to have said to Thoreau, “Henry, what are you doing in
there?” To which Thoreau responded, “Waldo, the question is what
are you doing out there?”
I have come all the
way from Oklahoma, and I have a written this book, to ask exactly the same
question: why it is that we are still “out there” going about
our daily lives as if this beloved republic is not perishing? I therefore ask
of you, what I ask of myself: why are we not all in jail?
In the book, I discuss
what I believe are the two kinds of time in which human being
live: organic time, when things unfold naturally and history seems to be moving
us toward stability and peace, and critical time, when the fate of the future
hangs in the balance and we are called upon to seize history and turn it in
another direction.
In critical time, we
forfeit the luxury of indecision and apathy, and we are forced to be mindful of
the cost of doing nothing, as well as the necessity to be politically informed,
active, and incredulous. Critical time puts critical choices before us and
then judges inaction or mindless acquiescence as a form of complicity.
These are critical
times. They are dangerous times. And yet, the greatest danger of all
may be that most of us have no idea what is really going on. We live in
the age of wall-to-wall corporate mass media-24 hour a day propaganda machines
like CNBC and FOX news, whose claim to being “fair and balanced” is
as patently pathetic as that banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
If Thoreau was right
when he said that “to have done anything just for money is to have been
truly idle,” then what would he make of news outlets which run the Dow
Jones Industrials as a crawler under every story, and speculate on how war may
be affecting the market? And here I thought all along that ethical human
beings were supposed to worried about how war affected children?
Or if Eisenhower was
genuinely concerned about the military-industrial complex (a warning that came
on his last day in office), he could at least still feel confident that those
two words ought to be separated by a hyphen.
Now that dash, which
held together, but distinguished the word military from the word industrial is
gone. The US
can now invade a country under false pretenses, destroy it, and then provide a
no-bid contract to a company run by one of the invaders to fix what we have
broken, even if that company engages in massive fraud. And apparently no
one has the nerve anymore to call this what it is: economic treason.
For eight years now, I
have written a syndicated newspaper column for The Oklahoma Gazette, called
Rhetoric and Reality–because this is my life’s passion–to think about and
write about the relationship between what we say and what we do–between the
linguistically constituted world, and the real world.
By far the most
controversial column I ever written was published four years ago, entitled
“Using the f-Word.” In that column, I made the case that
something I call Christian Fascism is already far advanced in this country, and
if you doubt this, then you should read the concise list of 14 characteristics
that political scientist Lawrence Britt claims are unmistakable signs that any
nation is moving in a fascist direction.
Believe me, I know
what an ugly word the f-word is. My academic life is given over to study
of rhetoric. I am, after the fashion of George Lakoff, a cognitive
linguist-and so I care very much what words are used to accomplish what
ends. And yet I also believe that the most urgent warning came from George
Orwell, when he wrote that language becomes evil when it becomes a tool of
insinc erity, the full-blown manifestation of which is outright deception.
So while fascism
raises the specter of Nazis, and the Holocaust–their seamless propaganda, and
their absolute intolerance for dissent, I ask only that you listen to these 14
brief indicators that a country is moving in the direction of fascism, and then
make up your own mind:
1) powerful and
continuing nationalism, 2) distain for the recognition of human rights, 3)
identification of enemies and scapegoats as a unifying cause, 4) supremacy of
the military, 5) rampant sexism, 6) controlled mass media, 7) obsession with
national security, 8) religion and government intertwined, 9) protection of
corporate power, 10) suppression of labor power, 11) disdain for intellectuals
and the arts, 12) obsession with crime and punishment, 13) rampant cronyism and
corruption, and 14) fraudulent elections.
It is hard for me to
imagine that in this audience, there would be a single person who does not
recognize that each and every one of these indicators is both evident and ascendant
in American society–all fourteen.
A gaudy, knee-jerk
patriotism is back, flags are everywhere, and they are huge. People look
the other way when we torture prisoners, or send them to other countries to be
tortured, convinced than the threat of terrorism justifies the suspension of
our own legal standards, and lying to our own citizens.
Talk radio, which is
one of the most dangerous purveyors of outright propaganda in America, fills the air with hatred
against “enemies” within and without–and the enemy is anyone who
disagrees with the Right. Ann Coulter has written a new book calling
liberalism a “godless religion.”
Someone needs to tell
Ms. Coulter than the little black dress notwithstanding; she should not
practice theology without a license!
Besides the most
“godless” behavior around these days comes from the so-called
“God fearing.” Military spending soars, social spending dwindles, and
the cult of soldier worship is a national pastime. Yet macho intransigence
has not made better men of our boys. According to its own
internal study, the
Air Force Academy has admitted that 12 percent of its female cadets reported
being raped in 2003, and in many institutions, gays are the new scapegoat. Meanwhile, corporate media continues to rail
against a non-existent “liberal media bias” while engaging in
unapologetic right-wing propaganda. A color-coded system of
“threat-levels” keeps the civilian population in constant fear–fear
being a fascist’s best friend.
All the while, this
government wears Christianity on its sleeve while ignoring, or reversing, the
fundamental teachings of Jesus. I’ll speak more of this in a moment.
Big business now
supplies government leaders in a revolving door of mutual favors. Labor
unions are vilified, and so-called “right-to-work” legislation
weakens them under the guise of attracting new industry.
Intellectual acumen is
belittled as a form of elitism, and artists are portrayed as dangerous,
unpatriotic, and subversive (which is precisely the reason we need them so
badly), and in this administration in particular, personal friends are rewarded
with government jobs, no matter how unqualified or inept they may be
(“You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie”).
Meanwhile the
machinery of democracy itself, the system by which we cast our votes, gradually
disintegrates into confusion, allegations of fraud, and partisan manipulation
to suppress voter turnout or disqualify votes that threaten the status quo.
So I use the f-word
without apology, but only because those who seek an American Theocracy, as
Kevin Phillips has so forceful argued in his new book by the same title–have
made no bones about what they want, nor about what they will do to get
it–including declaring war on the judiciary.
Kevin Phillips, a
moderate Republican who once served the Nixon administration, and pioneered
what is commonly called the “southern strategy” (by which disaffected
white males in particular were wooed away from the Democratic party after the
civil rights movement)–is absolutely right when he makes the claim that the
current Republican Party is “America’s first religious party”.
My book explores a
different question altogether, however, namely, not whether the Christian Right
has taken over the country — they have — but what gospel are they reading,
and how can anyone, whether he or she is religious or not, remain silent when
both religion and politics have been so fundamentally corrupted in the pursuit
of power?
A year and a half ago
(the verdict regarding exactly what went on in Ohio notwithstanding) we
apparently re-elected a president who had already confessed that the premise of
this misbegotten war in Iraq, this horrific downward spiral that has already
killed or maimed tens of thousands, was false. No WMD’s, no imminent
threat, no connection whatsoever to Al Qaeda, or 9/11.
This president, who
said that Jesus is the philosopher who has had the most influence on his life,
went on to mock this deception he helped to engineer by crawling around under
his desk and joking that perhaps he would find the WMD’s there–this as
American soldiers were being blown to bits–and innocent Iraqis watched their
nation slide into outright civil war.
Now we have what I
called from the beginning, in my pulpit, “a war in search of a reason.” Constantly
being retrofitted to conform to the latest attempt to find some noble reason
why so many are dying–the latest, and most maddeningly abstract of which is
that we are “spreading freedom and democracy in the troubled Middle East.” What we are actually spreading is
murder and mayhem–and this apparently requires that we systematically destroy
the democracy at home that we are reputedly spreading around the world!
If the president, who
admits to not being a reader, were only to read some basic history, he would
know that no successful, autonomous democracy has ever been established in the
history of the world through invasion, occupation, and the installation of
puppet governments-democracy, in other words, has never succeeded as a colonial
project.
One can only wonder
how one president can be impeached for lying about an affair in the White House
(exceeding stupid as it was), while another can remain in office after lying
the whole nation into war? The dominoes that are falling in the Middle East are not the last vestiges of Islamic
fundamentalism, but all remaining hope that Arab moderates could win the day.
Perhaps the American
people are in a forgiving mood because this president promised to “restore
honesty and integrity to the White House?”
There are, after all, still people saying that while they don’t always
agree with the president, he’s a “straight shooter,” and we
“know where he stands.”
Indeed, the national
media reported, just after the election, that exit polls indicated voters named
so-called “moral values” as having played the decisive role in their
decision to give the president a second term.
This to me was the
most astonishing disconnect of all. I have some considerable interest in
moral values, having been an ordained minister for almost 30 years. But I
could not, for the life of me, figure out what moral values people were talking
about?
Because whether we are
liberal or conservative, or like most Americans someplace anxiously in-between,
we don’t get to make up moral values as we go along, or claim Jesus is on our
side regardless of what side we are on.
In fact, although many
of us are committed to tolerance as a kind of uncritical virtue, it is patently
absurd to assume that simply pronouncing oneself moral makes one
moral. Kierkegaard understood this as the difference between concept and
capacity.
Those of us still in
the church now see insult added to injury.
Because it is equally absurd to surrender Jesus to all possible moral
positions without objection–as if the gospel itself had no essence, no real
message–but is rather like a lump of play dough–a kind of infinitely
malleable form of neutral energy. Fragrant and harmless–even edible!
Now, you may be
thinking at this point: Well of course you would say these things
Robin–you are a liberal. But in fact I wrote this book for more than just
liberal Christians. I wrote it for all Americans who can recognize the
theft of both their country and the church if they will just open their eyes.
Because there have
always been arguments about matters of faith and doctrine, even though I happen
to reject completely the idea that Christianity has anything to do with
doctrine. I refuse, as I have my whole life, to believe that faith has
anything to do with pretending to believe things you know are not true:
Things like the virgin
birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the
bodily resurrection, and the second coming–none of which I believe. I
don’t have to believe those things, because I believe Christianity is a way of
life, a way of being in the world–not a set of creeds or doctrines demanding
total agreement.
And yet it is not my
liberalism that drove me to write this book–as if only liberals can recognize
the hijacking of the Christian moral tradition. Indeed, I believe that whatever
one’s position on the virgin birth, for example, most Christians would find it
strange to enlist Jesus of Nazareth in the cause of an unjust war wrapped up in
an elaborate and choreographed deception. Jesus was, and is, the Prince of
Peace. And as for bearing false witness, he said, “Let your speech be
a simple yes or no, for all comes from evil.”
I think it’s safe to
say, especially in a room full of Unitarians, who are nothing if not rational,
that regardless of one’s position on the miracles reported to us in the Bible
(that is, whether they are supernatural events, or merely the loving and
well-intentioned exaggerations of disciples who loved Jesus so much, and
believed so deeply that he had opened the heavens for them), there is not a
single one of you who could read the Sermon on the Mount and misunderstand
Jesus so completely that you could conclude that he really didn’t mean to say
we should pray for our enemies, but, rather, that we are supposed to taunt
them.
If George W. Bush is
truly a student of the philosopher Jesus, then the teacher needs to recall the
student–issue a kind of spiritual stop work order. I mean this is an
emergency.
Because although Mr.
Bush once bragged about being a C-student at Yale (an institution founded along
with Harvard by my Congregational ancestors), it is more than just an
embarrassment when you mangle the gospel beyond recognition. It’s
dangerous.
In a complete reversal
of the time-honored principles of leadership, we now have a leader who
encourages his followers, by word and deed, not to think too deeply, or
critically, about anything!
As it relates to
acting on the wisdom of Jesus, this is like picking Shakespeare to endorse a campaign
against reading. Just imagine a true disciple of Jesus saying to the
enemy: “Bring ’em on!”
Or, since
simple-mindedness is the enemy of both common sense and compassion, what excuse
has any disciple of Christ to peddle dangerous false dichotomies in the name of
Jesus?
As if the world were a
kind a ripe watermelon that can be sliced neatly in half by dropping the
rhetorical machete of ignorance on top of it .. Ca thump!. . .One side is the
axis of evil, the other the axis of good? I don’t think so.
Regardless of what
your theology is, or what your religious beliefs might be, any thinking person
who is alive and paying attention knows that we don’t live in a bipolar moral
universe. If we did, Jesus of Nazareth would probably have stood on the banks
of the Sea and Galilee and said, “Either
you’re with us, or you’re with the Gentiles!”
And by the way, if I
believed in such a world, I’d be standing squarely, and blindly behind Israel right
now–and I refuse to do so. Blind allegiance to any nation, including one’s
own, is a recipe for disaster.
“My country,
right or wrong” is a tragic distortion of the idea of patriotism.
Just imagine for a
moment, what it is like for me to be a liberal minister in Oklahoma, where apparently the biggest threat
facing the church is a movie called The Da Vinci Code. Not poverty, not
hunger, not AIDS, not continued second-class citizenship for women, not
homophobia, or the destruction of the environment, or the way we have chosen to
fight a losing battle against terrorism–but a second-class movie based on an
entertaining but half-baked novel! That’s the “real threat,” say
my evangelical brethren.
Why? Because
someone might get the impression that Jesus was human, which he was of course,
and may have fallen in love with Mary Magdalene and had a baby.
And this would be a
bad thing? Sounds to me like the greatest boon to the idea of marriage and
family values since Ozzie and Harriet!
I have a very strange
way of looking at Jesus, I suppose. I’m interested in what he taught, and
how he lived, not whether he is an alien who can be safely worshipped from a
distance.
Every Easter, all over
this country, thoughtful people in the church struggle to understand what it
means to say, “He is Risen!” But while there has always been,
and will always be, differences of opinion about it, most people would agree
(inside the church or out), that you can’t dress up greed, plain old-fashioned
avarice as a Christian virtue, instead of one of the Seven Deadly Sins!
So that any
administration that pours all its energy into trying to completely eliminate
the estate tax on billionaires while failing to raise the minimum wage now for
nearly a decade, cannot call itself either moral or Christian.
Jesus was a friend of
the poor–not because you see it that way, or I see it that way, or Jim Wallis
sees it that way–but because he was!
People are always
running around these days saying that we ought to live a more
“biblical” ethic. But that’s a dangerous thing to say – Not
only because none of us wish to go back to slavery, or exorcism as medicine, or
the ability to buy and sell one’s daughter to the highest bidder. But
because in the Bible, the ultimate ethical test is how the strong treat the
weak.
So you simply cannot go
around claiming that this Friend of the Poor is the Lord of your life, and then
do everything in your power to make the rich richer, while the poor get
poorer–without someone getting up and saying, “The Emperor has no
clothes. The Emperor is naked!”
And yet, to my way of
thinking, one the saddest legacies of this reputedly Christian administration
is the way it has used gays and lesbians as political scapegoats. Knowing
that issues of human sexuality operate at the most visceral level for human
beings, homophobia as a political strategy, works in the dark mind of Karl
Rove.
Playing the anti-gay
marriage card, and then putting it back on the shelf until the next election,
hardly strikes me as either moral or Christian. That is, unless you
believe that politically motivated hysteria
is now a Christian
virtue.
And by the way, this
so-called “threat” to the institution of marriage that gay marriage
represents–it’s a threat that nobody can find or describe. I’m waiting,
waiting, waiting for someone to tell me how my
marriage of 30 years
to my wife is threatened if two gay people I don’t even know decide to elevate
the status of their relationship to the level of sacred covenant. This is
a bad thing? What’s the matter with us?
But now that I’m onto
things I don’t understand, let me confess another: that it does not seem
to me to be particularly moral to accelerate the destruction of the only planet
we have by being both the world’s largest polluter, and its most recalcitrant
player in the international effort to turn back global warming–just so that
born-again bandits can make more money than they can ever spend–even if they
have to steal their worker’s pensions.
Dirty air, poison
water, and toxic vegetables–this is pro-life?
Nor does it seem right
to put the giant millstone of debt around our children’s necks, when Jesus
seemed to care so much about little ones-and Republicans seem so enamored of
the idea of family values. It’s a strange way to love your kids when you
think about it–by mortgaging their future.
So I have begun to
wonder what people can possibly be expected the think a follower of Jesus
should look like, act like, sound like? When I close my eyes and imagine
a disciple, I see a humble person, not an arrogant one. I see someone who
resists the idea that God is their co-pilot, but rather remembers the wisdom of
the Tao: that when you think you know, that is when you do not know; but when
you know that you do not know, that is when you know.
People who are
petulant, impatient, suspicious of their critics, and paranoid to the point
that they will destroy their enemies instead of praying for them may call
themselves Machiavellians, or neoconservatives or Tories, or whatever seems
right to them, but they should just leave Jesus out of it.
When the president
says, “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them
here,” he has introduced a truly extraordinary new approach to dealing
with the enemy: preemptive killing. You’re not likely to find this in
the Sermon on the Mount.
And what are all of us
in the church, and I do mean all of us, to make of the public comments of
high-profile televangelists like the Rev. Pat Robertson–calling for the
assassination of Hugo Chavez?
Or James Dobson, head
of Focus on the Family and the nation’s most powerful Christian Right lobbyist,
describing elected federal judges, most of them Republicans, as “vermin in
black robes?”
Or the Pentecostal
preacher Jimmy Swaggart’s line in a recent sermon, in which he told his congregation
that if a gay man looked at him the wrong way, he’d kill him, and “tell
God he died.”
With friends like this
in the church, who needs enemies? With the nation’s first fundamentalist
Christian unrecovered alcoholic in the White House, who needs a real leader?
We do. We all
do. In a country that was founded on the magnificent wisdom of the
separation of church and state–which leaders of the Christian Right are now
calling a myth–we need to face what Bill Moyers calls the
“fiercesome” truth:
“One of the
biggest changes in politics in my lifetime,” Moyers wrote, “is that
the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to
sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress.”
We need the truth now,
because whether you’re in the church, out of the church, or just in therapy
(which covers most Americans), you know that without confession there is no
recovery. Without an end to deception, whether your own, or the collective
deceptions of the nation, there is no healing, no hope, no reconciliation.
The fiercesome truth
is that we have set in motion terrible forces that threaten all life on the
planet. In the name of religion, of all things, we are pursuing the
anti-gospel, the most irreligious of all ideas–that violence saves–when in
fact, as Dr. King tried to tell us, violence is a downward spiral.
Now, without a draft
like we had during Vietnam,
rich old men can protect their own children while cheering poor young boys on
their way to the killing fields to preserve their way of life, and then refuse
to let the rest of us see their flag-draped coffins. Look away, they say
… and keep on shopping!
I do not disparage
anyone their faith, even if it is configured very differently than mine, but
what person of faith in this country would ever have dreamed that we would
actually be having a debate in this country about whether we ought to torture
people? Or leave a president in office who has spied on us without
judicial warrant–and who daily reveals that he considers himself above the
Constitution and above the law?
If this truth is
painful, so be it. It is our own hope. “You shall know the
truth, said Jesus of Nazareth, and the truth shall make you free.”
To put it in the
language of the 12-step program, we need to do an intervention on ourselves!
As for these United States of America,
the most important quote I’ve read in a long time came from Kurt Tucholsky.
Quoted in Harpers a few months ago in that magnificent article by Lewis
Lampham called, The Case for Impeachment: Why America Can No Longer Afford
George W. Bush, Tucholsky said: “A country is not only what it does,
it is also what it puts up with, what it tolerates.”
So, my dear friends,
to make a long story short, I wrote this book because I find this present
situation intolerable.
I love my country and
I love the church-but I hardly recognize either one these days.
We live in what one
author called “crazy-making times.” Paul Krugman recently wrote
in the New York Times that we voted to return to the White House a man whose
entire domestic agenda was “to save us from gay married terrorists.”
So how, I wondered,
how on earth did these men, and this administration persuade so many Americans
that a vote for them was a vote for moral values?
That was the question
that was on mind when I sat down in a coffee shop in Norman Oklahoma, to write
a brief speech that might rally like-minded students at the University of
Oklahoma to start thinking differently, to stop believing the lies they were
being told. To start asking the question,
“Who Would Jesus
Bomb?” as something more than just a rhetorical exercise. That speech, only ten minutes, and just over
1,400 words long was the beginning of something whose ending has yet to be
written, and whose arc was, and is, entirely a mystery to me.
That speech is the
reason that I’m here talking to you–in this pulpit where Thoreau, Emerson, and
Whitman all held forth.
That speech given on a
rainy Sunday evening to about 150 people in a college town in one of America’s most
conservative states somehow ended up becoming an internet phenomenon, a speech
heard round the world.
After I had given the
speech, a couple of students, bless their hearts, came up and asked for a copy
of my remarks. I gave them my notes, and they must have taken them back to
their dorm rooms and typed them up on their computers and started sending out
the speech as an email attachment to their
family, friends,
professors–anyone they thought might need a second opinion on the state of the
world from, of all things–a minister in Oklahoma!
I did not know this
was happening, until after a few weeks, I started getting e-mail letters from
people all over the country. At first it was five letters a day, then ten
a day, then 20, then 50, and finally, I was receiving a 100 a day–so many that
the university set up an automated response mechanism to keep their server from
crashing!
I ended up receiving
letters from every state in the union and dozens of foreign countries–and I
printed them all out and started filling boxes in my office. All from
strangers who said, in one way or the other, “Thanks for putting what I
have been feeling into words. Now I know I’m not crazy.”
Then the phone rang
one night, and an elderly woman with a wonderful Jewish accent asked me if I
was the minister from Oklahoma
who wrote what she referred to as “the speech.” I said
yes. And she asked me again if I was really a minister. I said yes,
and then she said, “And are you really from Oklahoma?”
She said, “You
don’t know me, but I’m the literary agent for Barbara Kingsolver, and
everywhere I go in New York City
people are talking about “the speech.” Then she told me that she
had taken a copy of the speech to visit a death row inmate, and read it to him
through the bars, and he kept interrupting her to say, “Amen!”
Then she said,
“you need to do something more with the speech–like turn it into a
book.” Just draw up a proposal and we’ll shop it around.
So I did, and then, by
this mysterious process that continues to amaze me and was never under my
control (which is how the best things seem to happen), a young editor from San
Francisco named Julianna Gustafson saw the proposal, believed passionately in
what the book was about, and sold it to her publisher, Jossey Bass, a division
of Wiley and Sons.
I signed the contract
a year ago–agreeing to write a 240-page book and have a completed rough draft
done in 14 weeks–so that the book could come out in time for the crucial
mid-term elections.
It is my dissent over
both the theft of the essence of the gospel to which I’ve given my life, and
the dangerous redefinition of America’s role in the world based on West Texas
rhetoric, neo-conservative fantasies, and the most irreligious of all ideas–that
you frighten the world into submission by killing more terrorists than you are
creating–all in the name of Jesus. The book is a manifesto, meant to build a
fire under those of us who have been silent too long, or feared that if we
fought back we would begin
to resemble those with
whom we disagree. Its thesis is that silence is a form of complicity, and
complicity with a government this corrupt would make us all accessories to a
crime.
It was Reinhold
Niebuhr who said once: “Sometimes the worst evil is done by good people
who do not know that they are not good.”
And it was a man I
have long admired, Ramsey Clark, who captured the mood of this book perfectly
when he said, “The immediate question [given the threat we are facing to
our way of life and our most cherished values] is whether We, the People of the
United States of America believe the future of our country is a spectator
sport, or whether we will players.”
This book is my answer
that to that question. It calls on us all to dare not sit out this period
in American history-but to be players.
We can play fair, and
we can play hard–but we must also play to win–because in the end, this about
the future we make for our children; it’s about fairness, dignity, human
rights, and what will become of this imperiled experiment in freedom we call
the United States.
All I ask is that, if
you agree with me (or even if you agree mostly with me), you will not do nothing. Promise
only that.
The time for doing
nothing has passed It’s time to march again, my friends, no matter what
your age. Time to form what I call “communities of dignified
indignance.” Time to withdraw our compliance. Even time to
commit acts of non-violence civil disobedience if you believe that you are
called to do so.
It’s time, in the
spirit of Henry David Thoreau, to make trouble for the right reason. And
to “fear not,” because fear is the enemy of the moral life.
I have it on good
authority that the opposite of love is not hate. It’s fear.
If in trying to take
back what belonged to us in the first place, we appear to be acting strangely,
and the world begins to peer at us through the proverbial bars that have always
separated those of conscience from those of mere opportunity–asking,
“What are you doing in there,” we can answer them now, without
hesitation.
“What are the
rest of you doing out there?”
Time to march again my
friends.
I love this country. Let’s
take it back.
Thank You.