On Tuesday in this post I was a little critical of an op-ed by John Kenneth White that argued that the real reason it’s proving so hard to get universal healthcare is that even fairly conservative white middle class people in the 1970s actually did think the New Deal and Medicare were for “us”, but now think universal health care will be for “them” (the undeserving poor, the nonwhite etc.). So they don’t support it.

I felt that White presented this as an inevitability–that people will naturally follow their narrow “interests”–rather than a result of the way universal healthcare is being presented to them. (See Michael Lerner’s well argued take on what Obama could have done to present universal healthcare in the frame of “we’re all in this together.”)

Turns out he doesn’t think it inevitable, or at least not an insuperable problem in the long run. I sent John White the post and he responded:

In my latest book, Barack Obama’s America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era just published by the University of Michigan Press, I wrote that our present politics was one of discomfort–meaning that the demographic changes underway in the U.S. had made Americans uncomfortable about each other (thinking in broad racial and ethnic terms).

Myrna, Kristina, and an Afghan woman, together in friendship working for peaceful tomorrows

Something had struck one of the twin towers in New York. I got out of bed having heard that on the radio and went into the living room and turned on the TV. As I watched and listened to some TV news-people, I saw the second plane strike. Surely something terrible must be wrong…. radar systems must have gone crazy….. they’ve got to get all the planes out of the air and on the ground…. someone’s got to do something. Within an hour or so, we all knew that our nation had suffered a horrible attack.

Little did I know that within months, I would find myself sitting with two women who had lost loved ones on September 11th, and Afghans who had lost loved ones, lost homes, or had been maimed, in the world’s response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Our interfaith peace delegation sat in the rubble of Afghanistan and we shared our pain, our loss, our fear, and our hopes for a more peaceful tomorrow.

Last Night at Thursday Night is Health Care Change Night on Daily Kos, diarist Kitsap River posted The Lost Decades, a moving account of the three decades of life she can expect statistically to lose as a result of our current health care “system.” Kitsap wants to know why someone should be able to profit from decisions that ultimately cost her the functioning of her kidneys, and why they should continue to profit by denying her the transplant she needs in order to grow old with her lifelong lover.

Meanwhile, at streetprophets, ramara has posted the weekly D’Var Torah, Nitzavim – Va-yeilekh, the last reading in the book of Deuteronomy.

Moses has reached the end of his days. He has finished writing the scrolls of Torah, one for each of the appointed elders, and has offered the people a choice:

You can choose Torah, which is life, or you can choose the ways of other peoples, which brings with it a spiritual death. Choose life, he tells them, though he fears they will choose death. You can do it, it is not in heaven, it is not across the sea, it is very near to you. (ramara’s words)

Ramara reminisced about her own experience confronting cancer, when she was forced to choose between giving up, or finding a new intensity and meaning in life. She chose life through her newly conceived weekly D’Var Torah series at streetprophets. President Obama ended his speech on health care with a similar exhortation. While remembering Senator Kennedy, he offered us a moral choice: would we as a nation choose justice, and hence life?

Several years ago, someone I trusted let me down very badly, betraying not only me, but the people of my community in my name. For awhile, I mistrusted everyone around me, even friends I had known and worked with for years. I doubted the existence of G-d. G-d was not required to exist. There was, I realized, at least a 50% chance that S/he did not, and that my insistence in following an ancient text instead of looking out for myself was simply laughable.

I was surrounded on all sides by darkness…the “dark night of the soul.” Then I knew suddenly that I could be the person I wanted to be. I could choose to worship a just G-d even in G-d’s apparent absence, because doing so would help me to create the world I wanted to experience.

Nobody can take our lives from us. They can only intimidate us. Confronted with 9-11, our previous administration chose to abandon compassion. We can choose another path.

It is we who fail to live the lives we are given. G-d is resting within us. When we choose the compassionate path, we become co-creators of the world.

It was then that I came to understand a puzzling quote from the Zohar: “With Beginning, — created G-d.”

@laurenreichelt on twitter

Media analyses of President Obama’s health care speech were divided on whether he had indicated serious support for a public option or had, instead, cleverly tossed a bone of “recognition” to the progressives while simultaneously demanding that they drop their insistence that the health care reform undercut insurance company profits.

The confusion, for once, is not with the media but with the incoherence of a centrist politics. Obama wishes to relieve the suffering of Americans, but he does not wish to challenge the profit-uber-alles old “Bottom Line” of the competitive marketplace. Unfortunately for him and for most Americans, he can’t have it both ways. FDR recognized that — and so was willing to stand up to the vested interests of the class from which he emerged, not only rhetorically, as Obama is willing to do at some rare moments like his Health Care speech, but in the actual policies he promoted.

Goodness knows Obama has tried. He understands the suffering caused by the military-industrial complex’s insistence that American security can only come through economic, military and diplomatic domination of the world, and would like to alleviate it. He would prefer a world of peace. But he can’t get that without challenging the fundamental equation of security with domination and presenting an alternative, e.g. that security might best be achieved through generosity and genuine caring about the well-being of others around the world, manifested in the kind of G-8 funded Global Marshall Plan that has been introduced into Congress by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN). So, instead, he has escalated the war in Afghanistan.

Obama is aware that unless we can get down to not more than 350 particles per million of carbon emissions that life on the planet is finished. Standing up to the corporate interests that have resisted this and managed to eviscerate his environmental program into a corporate-giveaway called “cap and trade” would require championing a carbon tax that he fears would make him unpopular with the corporate polluters and with the public whose consciousness these polluter are able to shape through the media.

Obama knows that a single-payer program — extending Medicare to everyone — is far more rational than what he has proposed to Congress, but he also believes that eliminating the insurance companies, hospital chains, and other medical profiteers would require a battle beyond his current capacities.

Towards the end of his speech, President Obama said the following words: “…when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter that at that point we don’t merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.”

While Obama’s speech made some forceful observations about how Social Security and Medicare were sought to be blocked by many who claimed that this heralded Socialism (which was obviously such a bad thing in those days of the Cold War, but oh, wait a minute it still is), his own “public option” found its way into the speech only at around half-time. Can one say, almost timidly? Perhaps, it is Obama’s way of claiming wisdom? He wants this reform to pass. In some form. And maybe he will succeed in this. But, did he lose something essential about himself (his progressive self) in the process?

Congressman Joe Wilson shouting "You Lie" to President Obama. Photo from Fox News web site (credited to AFP)

As I watched President Obama address a joint-session of Congress, I couldn’t help but notice how many times the Republicans remained in their seats while the rest of the people stood up and applauded. I’m not surprised by that, of course. It is what happens to any President, Republican or Democrat during almost any joint-session of Congress.

Of course Congressman Joe Wilson’s outburst (You Lie!) was unusual. Where did he think he was? England? (Where they have universal health care.) Well…. There are plenty of other bloggers talking about Wilson’s outburst and apology right now.

One reason why so many people find it difficult to enthusiastically advocate for health care reform is that we still don’t know which bill and which proposals are being included and which not. The details matter.

In How the PUBLIC OPTION Measures Up to “A Faith-Inspired Vision of Health Care.” (downloadable PDF, from Faithful Reform in Healthcare, and we also posted the text here), we find an assessment from a spiritual progressive perspective of some of the key elements in what a “public option” might look like as articulated in one of the bills with greatest support.

When I first heard about the Network of Spiritual Progressives back in 2005 one of the things that most impressed and pleased me was a document in which they laid out their agenda and on each point contrasted their view with the typical liberal and conservative views. Here’s one of them. Pretty succinct, I think:

5. We will seek a single-payer national health care plan and also broaden the public’s understanding of health care. Our physical health cannot be divorced from environmental, social, spiritual, and psychological realities – and the entire medical system has to be reshaped in light of that understanding to focus on prevention, encourage alternative forms of health practice along with traditional Western forms, and insist that because human beings have many levels of reality, health care must reflect that rather than seek to reduce the human to the merely material.

CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA – Liberals seek the gradual addition of benefits for different sectors of the population but leave the whole system in the hands of the profiteers, thus guaranteeing that their proposed changes will be undermined by the insurance companies and drug companies who raise their costs to make huge profits and thus make these health care reforms unreasonably costly. The single-payer plan does not increase but, rather, will decrease the total amount spent on health care by the U.S.

CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVE AGENDA – Conservatives continually place private profit over public need when it comes to health care. They think of health care as something that needs to be earned rather than as a manifestation of the sacred obligation we have to care for each other.

For the rest, go here.

“We need some more visions about how in the light of impending disaster we can still strive for a better reality. I am neither a scientist nor an engineer. I am simply an artist. My job as a visionary is not only to focus on what is feasible today, but instead to imagine further, more ideal possibilities, and to inspire people to aim higher.” — Mona Caron

In 2006, the San Francisco Bay Guardian commissioned San Francisco muralist Mona Caron to illustrate the section headings of their annual “Best of the Bay” issue, where the editors ask readers to go online and vote for the best the city has to offer. Best Laundromat. Best karate school. Best art gallery. Best breakfast.

(To see the rest of Mona Caron’s Utopian San Francisco Series from The Bay Guardian’s Best of the Bay 2006, visit Tikkun Daily’s art gallery.)

Imagining the best that San Francisco could be was nothing new for Caron, who was already well known in the Bay Area for creating large-scale, utopian public paintings, often featuring optimistic imagery of the future of the city. For example, in Caron’s mural at the intersection of 15^th and Church Street she portrays a historical timeline of the street beginning on one end with an image of the early days of San Francisco and ending with a glimmering, futuristic vision of what the street may someday become.

Regarding healthcare reform, we are having the wrong conversation. We are having a consumer protection, economic, political conversation. We are talking about the nuts and bolts of legislation and whether or not President Obama has demonstrated the requisite leadership to achieve healthcare reform. We are debating whether or not a pubic option puts us on a slippery slope to socialism.

We are not having the moral conversation. We have not decided that it is time to come to consensus about whether or not we think health care is a human right that a government has an obligation to provide to all its citizens. We have not determined the values and virtues that define us as a people.

In his most recent book, The Healing of America, T.R. Reid tells the story of his travels around the world to compare America’s healthcare system with those in other countries. For countries that have decided that health care is a human right, they have found a way to provide universal coverage. The idea of someone going bankrupt to pay medical bills is unthinkable. In some countries, people get medical care and do not see a bill. They spend less of their Gross Domestic Product on healthcare than does the United States and achieve better outcomes.

It is the middle of July, and I am carefully layering sheets of pure gold over the statue of Saraswati that will sit in the centre of my altar. It is a finicky task, and while I’m trying focus my concentration, I suddenly notice a question flashing through my mind: what’s a good Jewish boy doing gilding a Hindu goddess for a Pagan altar?

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Jonathan Granoff, the author, attorney, and peace activist whose writing we featured earlier this summer:

Photo courtesy of FlickrCC/Per Ola Wiberg

May we know our connection with the living Earth, our connection with all lives, our connection within with the qualities that lead to wisdom, and with the omnipresent light that brings us upwards into the Source and Sustainer of all.

May our feet walk in beauty with softness on the earth and may we be at one with all life.

May we separate from ourselves that which separates us from our fellow human beings. What separates are qualities reinforcing the illusion of separation such as selfishness, anger, falsehood, jealousy, and pride.

Photo courtesy of the Center for American Progress Action Fund

This moment will be looked back upon as giving a signal of encouragement to some of the most fascistic elements in the American political Right.

I signed the same statement on 9/11 that Van Jones signed, and there was nothing immoderate about it. It didn’t say what the Right claimed it said (and the mainstream media chimed in without investigation). I’ll explain below.

Jones’s resignation is bad for the country and for the Obama administration. It’s bad for America when progressive views are an excuse to purge someone from the administration while extremist right-wing views of past administrations were always given a “pass.”

Van Jones’s forced resignation is a huge defeat for the forces of sanity and humanity, and represents a deep failure of the Obama-ites to understand the nature of the challenge they face from an increasingly fascistic Right wing.

Jones was the first African American environmentalist to have become a national figure (his book became a national bestseller), and was brought into the administration to help enlist minority communities in the struggle to save the environment from decades of abuse.

Right-wingers pounced on him for a speech in which he allegedly called Right-wingers assholes, though he used the same word to describe himself and the Left. But what gave them a supposedly clinching argument was that he signed a statement calling for an objective investigation of 9/11. See my article in Tikkun’s online “Current Thinking” section to read the full text of what it really said — not what the media claimed.

The forced resignation of Van Jones demonstrates the lack of backbone of the Obama administration.

I’m attracted to any article with that kind of title because — probably like you if you are reading this — I am so distressed that so many Americans who would benefit from universal health care are against it. This article, by political prof John Kenneth White in this Sunday’s SF Chronicle, seemed plausible to my liberal self at first sight.

The title online is “Whose America?” but in print it was “What the debate is really about: changing America,” and that referred to an America that is already rapidly changing, like it or not. His take is that white middle class people felt in the 1970s that America was theirs, but — this was the part that was interesting to me — that the New Deal had been theirs too. Social Security and Medicare were benefiting them. They were not against government programs that helped them and theirs.

But any major extension of those programs would benefit all the people who are “not us” and those people now appear to be taking over America: other races, yes, but also other cultures (especially Hispanic) and of course all those supposedly infected by feckless liberal amorality who have children out of wedlock and get high and so are poor and needy, whatever their color or ethnicity. The nonwhite or undeserving poor will benefit. So large numbers of white people, secure in their Social Security and Medicare, have turned against government programs in the last forty years.

Of course, many middle class people in the 1930s and 1960s thought something similar about those the New Deal and then Medicare were designed to help. They thought many of them — the parents, grandparents or great-grandparents of today’s white middle class — were undeserving. But memories are short.

So what’s not satisfying about this analysis? It blames at least half the population who don’t seem to be capable of seeing “the other” as part of “us.”

I am left speechless by Senator Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) response to a sobbing woman, begging for help because her insurance company will not pay for a feeding tube for her brain-injured husband.

Coburn instructs her to call his office, blames her situation on her neighbors, and then lectures that it is not appropriate for “the government” to intervene in her health care. (Hat Tip Jeffrey Feldman).

I have several questions for the Senator:

1. You are a Christian and you align yourself with the Christian Right. Did your version of the Greek Scriptures not include the Sermon on the Mount? Or was it redacted, leaving out all mentions of service to the the needy and the poor?
   
   

Van Jones earned his law degree from Yale.  As an African American he would have been heavily recruited by many major law firms with offers of large salaries, but instead chose to go work with the minority communities in California.  He was asked to speak at the first conference for the Network of Spiritual Progressives.  I have a tape of it, and his speech was one of the highlights of the event.   Van Jones wrote a nice commentary praising the NSP that appeared in the Huffington Post in 2005.   More recently he has become very active in the environmental movement, and combined it with his earlier social work by promoting green job programs for poor minority communities.

In 2008 the Unitarian Universalists asked him to be the key note speaker at their annual General Assembly conference.  I had the privilege of listening to him give that speech in person, and remember it as one of the most thought provoking and inspiring speeches that I have ever heard.  I wrote a brief summary of his talk here.  I was thrilled almost beyond words when Obama asked him to serve in the White House Council on Environmental Quality.  He was one of the few people I looked towards as a hero.   I was heart broken at what happened in the past few days though.

It seems that everywhere I look these days I see more about the BDS, (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement. Today I was sent links to the debate here in Toronto over the about to open TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival). The festival, a perennial jewel in TO’s cultural crown, is the centre of a huge row between those who support a boycott over the festival’s choice of Tel Aviv for the first “city-to-city” showcase and those who oppose it. Both are powerful statements; both are well worth reading before deciding.

The richness of the internet is a two edged sword: it allows us to find more people who share our views, and it allows us to not have to submit ourselves to the idiocies of anyone who has a different view. And so our views can get more and more ingrained, until we believe swine flu vaccinations are a government plot to kill off inferior races, as an email I got last week claimed. (Really, you don’t need that link.) Yesterday’s Doonesbury is sadly accurate on the rise of conspiracy-believers. One would hope that sites (such as the Tikkun Daily Blog) that allow feedback have a built in correction factor from our readers.

But perhaps we don’t. Aside from the tendency of blogs to attract those who agree with them, there’s a new Israeli program to help lead online debates to the “right” conclusion….

Today we celebrated our annual water service at First Unitarian Society. Pouring water together that we had brought back to Madison from vacations in other spots, we celebrated our community gathering again after a summer spent apart.

Like rivers running to the sea,/We’re coming home… (UU hymn)

The worship service also commemorated water as the holy necessity it is in our lives: the sacred water that runs through our veins, the water we drink to maintain our lives, the water that brings the earth alive, the life-giving liquid flow that cycles through the clouds, the rain, the springs, the lakes, the streams, the rivers, finally streaming to the oceans, where it evaporates to become rain again. Without water, there is no life.

The ocean is the beginning of the earth./All life comes from the sea. (Wiccan chant by Starhawk)

Van Jones (right side of photo) resigned last night after an onslaught of attacks led by Fox News’ Glenn Beck.

Being involved in the peace movement, and specifically the anti-war movement, since soon after September 11th, I’ve had many opportunities to hear amazing people speak. Van Jones was one of those people. The first time he spoke he was promoting “books not bars,” a movement to consider alternatives to the prison-industrial complex that cost so much money per prisoner and provided such dismal outcomes. He talked about models being used in other states and countries that dealt with youth crime but, instead of turning out adult criminals at the end of imprisonment, were turning out productive citizens who didn’t end up in jail again. Wow! He showed both the immediate economic incentives for trying these models (the cost per offender was cut in half) and the long-term social incentives, we ended up with productive citizens and the rest of society ended up safer.

"Edward Carpenter was a pioneering socialist and radical prophet of a new age of fellowship in which social relations would be transformed by a new spiritual consciousness."

A memorable moment in my education as a straight man and a writer happened for me back in the 1970s at a Gay Sweatshop production of Noel Greig’s Dear Love of Comrades, a play about the upper class British socialist Edward Carpenter and his working class lover(s) in the 1890s. After the play others remarked on how the challenges of gay relationships were so similar then and now. But what had struck me was not how different but how similar Carpenter’s issues were to my own in my relationships with feminist women: the power dynamics between two lovers, the issues of class, of relating our own lives to the political struggles of the day.

By washing Carpenter’s dirty laundry in public, as it were, instead of trying to portray gay relationships in some more idealized way, the playwright had brought out the universality of the human problems involved: love, power, desire, neediness. If the play hadn’t convincingly portrayed the particulars of the people involved–British, gay, upper and working class, and so on–it wouldn’t have worked half as well to tell a universal story. I had thought I was going to a play about gay men, and found I had come to a play in some degree about myself and all people. Later I felt the same way reading Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland about African Americans. At some level I (a white Englishman) had assumed Shakespeare was universal but expected a gay writer or a black writer to be particular to their communities: so I learned something about my own heterosexist and racist outlook on the world.