The Step You Don't Want To Take

START CLOSE IN

Start close in,
don't take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step you don't want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people's questions,
don't let them
smother something
simple.

To find
another's voice
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don't follow
someone else's
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don't mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don't take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step you don't want to take.

~ David Whyte ~

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Fred / Slacktivist

Shine a light

Racism, bigotry and xenophobia are immoral, of course, but they are also, just as fundamentally, They are untrue.unreal. They provide a theory and a framework for living in the world that cannot be reconciled with the reality of this world. The person who chooses to accept that unreal framework is thus constantly forced to choose between unreality and reality, between the theory and the facts. To hold onto the unreal framework, they must continuously reject reality. And every time they do that, they get a little bit dumber.**

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The truth is that unreality is simply unsustainable. Maintaining one's belief in an unreal and untrue theory takes too much work. The vigilant rejection of reality has to be, on some level, exhausting. Even the elaborate support structures provided by Fox News and AM radio cannot wholly shield one from the constant intrusions of the world that is. Denying the existence of that world requires more help than even the voluminous right-wing echo chamber can provide.

This, I think, is part of why we're seeing such desperate vehemence at the Palin rallies. The crowd realizes that the unreality it has chosen cannot long survive if the majority of their fellow citizens and neighbors refuse to play along. As long as the entire crowd is choosing to "see" the emperor's splendid new clothes, then it's relatively easy to go along with that choice. But once the crowd reaches a tipping point, once the majority are choosing reality and the truth, then the emperor's nakedness become impossible to deny. For those who have chosen bigotry, racism and xenophobia, this election represents just such a tipping point. They're watching unreality slip through their fingers and they're trying, desperately, to grasp it even tighter.

After this election, part of our task -- yours, mine and our new president's -- will be to find a way to gently invite and welcome these folks back into the real world. My suspicion, or at least my hope, is that eventually, once they are unburdened by the need to constantly choose unreality and therefore stupidity, they will find this a great relief.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* I'm not here discussing more structural or institutional forms of racism, nor am I talking here about the more general self-justifying mythologies that every privileged people repeats to itself as an apologetic. Set aside here the question of whether or not bigotry is a pervasive, endemic reality in American culture. For the sake of this discussion, let us recalibrate our tools to discount for whatever pre-existing base level of bigotry there may be so that we can here focus on the exceptional bigot -- the sort of person who stands out as more bigoted than the surrounding/underlying culture as a whole.

** At this point you may be suspecting that this post is little more than an elaborate attempt to repackage the argument of the book of 1 John in non-sectarian terms. Well, yeah. Did it work?

Posted by Fred Clark on Nov 03, 2008 / Permalink

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"...There's no one to fret, no one to condemn, no one to bless me for being a good girl, no one to punish me for being wicked. Heaven was empty. I didn't know whether God had died, or whether there had never been a God at all. Either way I felt free and I didn't know whether I was happy or unhappy, but something very strange had happened. And all that huge change came about as I had the marzipan in my mouth, before I even swallowed it. A taste--a memory--a landslide . . ."

"In one way it was hard to leave the Church . . . but in another way it was easy, because it made sense. For the first time ever I felt I was doing something with all my nature and not only a part of it."

--Philip Pullman, *The Amber Spyglass*, pp. 398-399

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"The trouble with trying to make yourself stupider than you are is that you very often succeed."

--C.S. Lewis

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saying no to lesser gods

Learning to say no is how we clear space for a few carefully planted yeses to grow. Saying no to lesser gods is part of saying yes to God...

Barbara Brown Taylor, author of Leaving Church

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