The United States does have a substantial antiwar movement, and in fact, I spent the weekend representing NSP at the general assembly of the largest antiwar coalition in the country, United for Peace and Justice. Anyone who has spent time in a room with 300 progressives knows what kind of task the UFPJ organizers faced in trying to run that decision-making assembly, a task much like trying to get a jar of fireflies to fly in formation. They absolutely rose to the occasion. The conference was well-organized, the facilitation adept, the presiding committee both decisive and fair. We owe a debt of gratitude to the staff, steering committee, and volunteers who made the assembly happen, and the issues I raise below are not their fault but rather the fault of an American culture that offers virtually no models for making common cause.


Many diverse plans were made for fall mobilizations and for the next 18 months of the movement. In every plenary and breakout session, the same question came up: How do we move the silent majority that opposes this war to voice that opposition? Many activists cited as the most formidable obstacle to getting people to take action a pervasive doubt about the effectiveness of demonstrations and even Congressional advocacy. How do we overcome that doubt, especially now that the Democrats have disregarded the clear mandate of the 2006 elections by funding the war anyway? Others pointed out that demonstrations appeal to only a subsection of the population, most of whom have already been mobilized. How do we overcome the “culture of marginality,” as Tom Hayden put it, of the antiwar movement?

That culture of marginality was glaringly obvious at the assembly. T-shirts and tables touted socialism, a term that is (perhaps wrongly) anathema to middle America. Religion and spirituality were almost entirely absent from the assembly even though 80% of Americans consider themselves religious, and spiritual traditions offer our most powerful condemnations of war and violence. (In fairness, when I introduced an amendment to UFPJ’s strategic framework so that it included a commitment to reaching out to faith communities and avoiding anti-religious rhetoric, that amendment was embraced as friendly. The omission is unconscious, but it still needs to be remedied.) The antiwar movement is still out of touch with the mainstream.

Beyond that, though, there was little evidence of a positive vision around which assembly participants, as well as the rest of the country, could rally. The message of the assembly was pure opposition to the current state of affairs, with no attention paid to describing, much less modeling, a shared alternative. There was no attention to participants’ spiritual needs for connection to each other and to a unified, positive larger mission. In other words, there was no peace movement in evidence.

The result is that we remained a gathering of 300 individuals, each committed to our own organization’s agendas above our common cause. The amendments offered, arguments initiated, attempts to resist the leadership of the facilitators—most were motivated by efforts to advance an individual organization’s or individual’s agenda. The tension that resulted—a tension with which our whole culture is suffused—was evident in the guarded faces and postures of the participants and the anger that arose as people tried to exercise their right to shape the movement’s agenda.

It was hard to excite people about the Strategy of Generosity and the Global Marshall Plan in this environment. The spirit of that campaign was too far afield from the experience participants were living through. It seemed to them like a beautiful but unrealistic dream.

One brief but profound comment pointed me toward an alternative. In a Sunday morning breakout session, a UFPJ steering committee member related an experience she’d had the night before. She and another steering committee member had been talking with a delegation of Iranian cyclists who stopped by as part of their peace tour, and they discovered that all of them had been deeply moved by a YouTube video of scenes conveying the beauty of the Iranian people and their country. Suddenly, everyone in the conversation was crying and hugging, having discovered their shared humanity.

That is the spirit of a peace movement. That is the spirit that will bring us together into a real coalition. That is the spirit that will move the silent majority to action.

How would an assembly of the peace movement be different than this one of the antiwar movement? These are just a few ideas designed to spark a conversation. Please comment with your own ideas!

• Before the assembly began, participants would be asked to come in a spirit of openness, to try to overcome their shyness and fear of other people and really try to connect with and understand the other human beings who would be meeting with them.
• The assembly might begin with a guided meditation like Joanna Macy’s “Learning to See Each Other,” in which people pair up, silently look each other in the eye, and imagine the strengths, skills, brilliance, love, and courage that the other person possesses. People would then be asked to imagine how good it would feel to work in common cause with this person.
• The first speakers in the assembly would be chosen for their ability to evoke a compelling vision of a future in which love, compassion, generosity, and nonviolence are valued more highly than domination, power, money, and control. These talks might be followed by small group conversations further elaborating that vision.
• Time would be allotted for participants to sing, pray, meditate, make art, and dance together according to their own traditions and preferences.
• Training would be offered in nonviolence and in the facilitation of nonviolence trainings so that people could offer them back in their own communities.
• Participants would be encouraged to form small groups, or cells, to provide ongoing support after the assembly ended.

At our 2005 founding conference for the NSP, Van Jones pointed out that Martin Luther King, Jr., didn't build a movement around a speech called "I Have a Complaint." Now is the time for the articulation of a compelling dream we can all work for.

King's message, and the only real hope I see for changing America’s course, is to love this country and its people into changing. We need to build a movement that is so loving, so filled with joy, and so deeply rooted that it draws people, not because they think it will “work,” but because it’s simply the most deeply satisfying, meaningful, joyful place to be. In that movement, which the NSP is committed to building, the Strategy of Generosity and the Global Marshall Plan will be embraced as the centerpieces of a new foreign policy. This is the New Bottom Line for the antiwar movement.

The following blog grows out of a Christian service I attended on the Sunday before Pentacost and out of a conversation I had with Rabbi Michael Lerner a couple days later about the Jewish holiday of Shavuot.


The Christian lectionary text for last Sunday (Acts 16: 16-40) tells the story of how Paul and Silas were beaten and then arrested and thrown into a maximum security prison cell in Phillipi. According to their accusers, their crime was advocating strange customs, but that isn’t really what got them in trouble. What really got them in trouble was interfering with someone’s ability to make a profit from another person’s suffering. Earlier that day, Paul had driven a demon out of a slave girl who had been following them, a demon that had given the girl fortune-telling powers that were making her owners a great deal of money. Her owners’ cash cow had dried up. That’s when Paul and Silas were dragged into the marketplace, beaten with rods, and thrown into prison. Anyone who is awake at all in twenty-first century America knows the power of an addiction to profit. And we know the risks that come with getting in its way.

But the story doesn’t end there. Later that night, Paul and Silas are in their prison cell near midnight, singing and praising God, when suddenly there is an earthquake that breaks the prisoners’ chains and causes the doors to the cells to swing open.

This is a story of God’s power to right injustice, to set us all free from whatever chains bind us, keep us shackled to The Way Things Are. Here are these two guys from a faraway place, hidden away in the innermost chamber of a prison in a strange land, with their feet bound in chains. Things look pretty grim. Yet they are freed by this “mysterious” natural event, this earthquake that shatters all the locks in the place.

Note that Paul and Silas weren’t passive in this process. They hadn’t fallen into a depressive lethargy, despairing of their situation. They weren’t sleeping. They weren’t even engaged in self-righteous protest against the injustice of their situation. Instead they were singing their praises to a God whose power they trusted even though their situation belied it.

This is the spirit that made it possible for Martin Luther King to call out, amid opposition and oppression and violence and threats on his life, “I have a dream” (not, as Van Jones memorably pointed out at the 2005 Spiritual Activism Conference, “I have a complaint.”) And this is the spirit our movement needs to embody if we are serious about transformation.

It’s hard to sustain a belief in the possibility of transformation when sometimes it feels as if so much is working against us, including our own fear and doubt. Sometimes I wonder if my own despair keeps me from noticing the earthquakes that may be happening all the time. Are those shackles still in place, or have I just given up moving my feet?

It’s also telling that the story in Acts doesn’t end with the transformative release. It goes on to relate how Paul and Silas comforted the jailkeeper and recruited him for the new Christian movement. (The jailkeeper nearly killed himself with his own sword when he saw that the prisoners had been freed, but Paul called out to him that they were all still there and then went to his house to save him and his family.) Paul’s natural response to God’s gift of freedom is an act of love and compassion for the man who had been his oppressor. As Jesus says in John 14:15: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” In the face of the loving God, one has no choice but to love.

Likewise, in the Jewish tradition, acting according to God’s commandments is a natural outgrowth of having experienced the Exodus, the transformative release from bondage. According to Rabbi Michael Lerner, the revelation of the commandments at Sinai is simply the first articulation of the unavoidable response to having been loved so deeply. This coming to consciousness is what Jews celebrate this week at Shavuot.

Both Shavuot—the revelation of the commandments at Sinai--and Pentacost—the descent of the Holy Spirit to empower the early Christians—mark moments of profound communion between God and human beings. They also mark our entrance into a relationship with God in the healing and transformation of the world. That transformation is underway now. The prison doors are ready to break. What are you doing to help it happen?

Something happened to me on Wedneday that did a lot for my faith in human beings and maybe even in God.

I had a raging cold and had planned on taking the whole day off, but then I had to go into the office because we had another new employee starting, and then one thing led to another, and it was almost one by the time I left.

I was so exhausted I decided to drive rather than walk the six blocks to Whole Foods to get a salad for lunch. I noticed on the way that my car, which I hadn't driven in a couple weeks, seemed to be straining, and there was this strange flapping noise that seemed to be associated with my accelerations and deccelerations, but I just couldn't summon the energy to worry too much about it, until I got out of the car at the store to find that the left rear tire was completely flat. Like a pancake. Crap. So I decided to go in and get lunch and then sit at the tables outside and try to think what to do.

So I sat and I ate and I admit I even said a sheepish little prayer for help. I just couldn't imagine summoning the energy to change my tire, something I'd only done once in my life.

Finally I decided there was nothing to do but try to change the tire myself, so I went over and started unloading stuff from my trunk to get the donut out, and I hear this voice behind me: "Can I be of some assistance? I'm pretty good at changing tires." It was a somewhat dissheveled looking older African-American man. "Sure!" I said,  and stood awkwardly by while he jacked up the car, took off the bolts, and yanked on the tire. Which didn't budge. Even when we both pulled on it together. So then he offered to go over to the service station to get some WD-40. Without even thinking about it, I handed him the only cash I had, which was a $10. Then, a moment later, I admit that I wondered if I'd see him again.

But back he came with the cash and said that they recommended instead that we hit the tire from behind with a big hammer, but they wouldn't loan him a hammer without a $60 deposit, so I went over and got them to loan it to me for $10. (Even in Berkeley these differences in treatment pertain.) That finally worked, and we got the tire changed, and I asked him if he'd ride with me to the nearnest ATM so that I could give him something "for his trouble."

He said yes, and then in the car he told me his name was Glen and that he didn't know what had made him come around that side of the store earlier, that usually he walked down and around the other side to sell his papers. (That was the first point at which I realized he was homeless and had been going to sell the Street Spirit paper.) We also had a great conversation about my bumper sticker, the one that says "I think when Jesus said 'Love your enemies,' He might have meant 'Don't kill them.'" He said he thought the whole problem with our world is that people have all this anger that is right at the surface and ready to explode out at any moment. Can't argue with that. I gave him $60 because I figured that was what I could do for him, and changing tires and sharing his philosophy was what he could do for me, and I probably got the better end of the deal.

For three full days now I've been singing to myself, and the song that is staying with me is "Siyahamba," with English lyrics "We are marching, marching; we are marching in the light of God." This was the opening song in the interfaith service we planned to kick off the March on Washington on Saturday, and boy did that choir belt it out, until all 600 or so of us were on our feet singing, clapping, and dancing. That hour and a half early Saturday morning felt to me like a revival. And what we were reviving was our faith that the world can change, that we can build a world that operates on generosity and love.

Here's what I said in my welcome:

"We are here today to pray with our feet, to march in the light of God and in the Buddhafield of compassion, to stand for our fierce commitment to love in the face of violence, to mourn the dead and grieve with the wounded.

But I think we are also here to celebrate. We are here to celebrate the birth of a new consciousness in America, a consciousness that acknowledges that we are all one people, that what grieves you also grieves me, that abundance is more fun when it is shared than when it is hoarded, and that is is open-heartedness and not hatred, generosity and not domination, shared creativity and not shock and awe that will bring lasting peace to the United States and around the world."

I think it is so important to focus more energy on what we are FOR than on what we are AGAINST. So many of the signs I saw in the march, so many of the speeches I heard at the rally, were about how bad the Bush administration is and how much we need to end this war. I have no quarrel with those sentiments, but I also think we have to offer an alternative vision. To me, that vision is a foreign policy of generosity. We will make ourselves safer by expressing our concern for all the peoples of the world and by working with them to build a safer and more loving world for all.

Rabbi Michael Lerner wrote a more thorough report on how this message might permeate the peace movement. You can find it at http://files.tikkun.org/current/article.php?story=20070129014029798

That's me. You can see my 8 1/2 minutes of fame here.

I watch myself and I think not only "Wow, how alarming it is to see my head that big!" but also, wow, I really sound like what they'd call a "bleeding heart liberal."

But then I hear stories like the one I heard last night about a little boy I'll call James, and I think there ought to be a lot more hearts bleeding.

James is eight years old and has been in foster care since his birth here in Oakland to a mother addicted to crack cocaine. Shortly before Christmas, James was playing at recess with other kids in his special education class, and he leapt from the top of the sliding board, shattering his femur and his hip.

It's not easy for an eight-year-old to break a hip. Unless they have no calcium in their bones. Unless they haven't been fed at all for years except through the school lunch program.

After his fall, his teacher (and one of my personal heros, inner-city special ed teacher Katherine Fishman-Weaver) carried him into the office and spent more than two hours, as James lapsed in and out of consciousness, calling his foster family, trying to find someone who cared enough about him to okay medical treatment.

Eventually, the principal made the call to send James to the hospital without a guardian's okay. He was placed in a cast from his knees to above his waist, rendering him unable to sit up. It was then that his foster mother of eight years decided she didn't want him any more.

So James is recuperating in a group home, a ward of the state, with no one to bring him stuffed toys or comic books, no one to play games with him, no one even to help him turn over.

And we wonder why Oakland is the murder and crime capital of the country, when this is what happens to the kids who are trying to grow up there.

Yeah, there ought to be a lot more hearts bleeding. We ought to be drowning in blood and tears, as far as I'm concerned.

21,500 more troops, despite a mandate from the American people to end the bloodshed in Iraq.

For a sane strategy for dealing with this, see Rabbi Lerner's latest:
http://www.spiritualprogressives.org/article.php?story=20070110184703996

Much of the liberal political struggle of the last one hundred years has revolved around the acquisition and defense of a set of rights that we believe to be inherent to the dignity of every individual. Perhaps our greatest victories have emerged out of the women’s rights and African-American civil rights movements. The struggle for the civil rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered people as well as the defense of human rights for peoples around the world continue to demand our work and care, as does the protection of rights we have already won in the face of neoconservative attempts to erode them. I also find some of the arguments for extending rights to nonhuman animals compelling. The discourse of rights is essential to our understanding of freedom and self-determination, so what I’m about to say is in no way intended to imply that these struggles have not been significant or can now be abandoned.

            What I do intend to suggest is that the conventional discourse of rights is necessary but not sufficient to the progressive movement. In mainstream liberal thinking, each individual is free to live in any way he or she chooses as long as whatever he or she is doing does not infringe on another person’s right to exercise the same freedom. In theory, this approach may sound good, but in practice, it presents a number of thorny problems, the most familiar of which may be the issue of abortion. When viewed as a “rights” issue, the ethics of having an abortion comes down to an irresolvable dispute between the rights of a woman and the rights of her unborn child, a dilemma that forces those of us committed to reproductive freedom to argue that a fetus does not yet qualify as “life” and therefore does not have rights, an argument that that doesn’t seem to be very persuasive to a majority of Americans. The truth is that, because human beings are interdependent—maybe more so than ever, or maybe just more obviously than ever—there are few decisions any individual can make that don’t affect the rights of some other individual somewhere, or more likely, the rights of many individuals. Do I have a right to buy clothing made in a sweatshop? Well, in theory I do, but doing so will affect the rights of the people who work in that sweatshop and the rights of their family members. Do I have a right to look away as I walk by the homeless woman on the corner, as I am always tempted to do because to acknowledge her is so painful? Certainly I do, but my decision to do so absolutely has an effect on her experience (not to mention the effect that it has on me to deaden myself in that way). I think we need to move from thinking of ourselves as individual rights-bearers to viewing ourselves as relational beings always inextricably bound up in the web of life. The current globalization of extreme self-interest and greed may be the furthest logical extension an individualistic worldview.

            There is a real danger in what I am saying. Like many women, I’ve sometimes struggled to carve out my own life from the set of expectations that accompany my relationships; for many people in this country and around that world that effort is a life-or-death matter. We cannot afford to lose the freedom for self-determination for which we have struggled long and hard.

            Rather than thinking in terms of relationship or rights, I want to suggest that we think of our evolving liberal/progressive worldview in terms of a dialectic between these two, from which we now need to emerge into a synthesis of relationship and rights. One of the most compelling images for me of how such a synthesis might be imagined was elaborated by philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in his description of the ethical moment as the “face-to-face with the Other.” According to Levinas, each of us is, by the very nature of our being, by the fact that we are here taking up space, indebted to everyone else. We are from birth to death always already in relationship and bound by an ethical imperative to respond to other beings. However, the relationship is with what he calls “the face of the Other,” which in his conception is always mysterious, sacred, and in some way unknowable, and must be allowed to remain so. This mystery is the source of the Other’s right to self-determination. The Other is irreducible to any conception I might have of her or him.

This takes us into messy ethical territory and pretty much ensures that we can never know with self-righteous certainty that we are doing right by each other. For example, according to this model, the abortion issue becomes a complex meditation that demands equal consideration of the sacred, mysterious existence of both this individual woman and this unborn child. This is uncertain territory, which is, I think, exactly where the abortion debate belongs. Our insistence that the “right to abortion” is a simple, open-and-closed case is getting us exactly nowhere in contemporary America. We have to be willing to consider complexity, which means we have to be willing to engage in respectful dialogue with people who consider themselves pro-life. That may be the only way we’re going to prevent an all-out, categorical reversal of Roe v. Wade and the disastrous consequences that would entail.

As is almost always the case with these columns, this is just some preliminary thinking on my part, and I welcome feedback of any kind. How do you think we can both protect individual freedom and simultaneously take seriously our interdependence? Please email me your thoughts.

There are certain words and phrases that trigger in me a Pavlovian fury, and “family values” is one of those phrases. I suspect I’m not alone in reading this phrase as right-wing code for the hatred of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people; opposition to reproductive choice; discomfort with sexuality in general; preference for male-dominated households; stigmatization of single people; and even uneasiness with women in the workplace. What’s more, families are hardly the sacred refuges the right would make them out to be; far too often, the mores associated with the “sanctity” of the American nuclear family serve to conceal an array of physical, emotional, and sexual abuses, as well as myriad less egregious ways that family members damage each other.

            Still, the family is one institution in our culture in which the highest acknowledged goal is not the pursuit of money and power but the sharing of love, kindness, and nurturing. In other words, families are among the only entities currently trying to operate, even imperfectly, according to the new bottom line of loving and caring that we in the Network of Spiritual Progressives are advocating for the whole culture. For this reason, I’m wondering whether the concept can be saved. What would our communities look like if they truly supported the nurturing capacity of families? The following are some preliminary answers to that question.

            First and most obviously, no family would be discriminated against on the basis of the gender and sexual orientation of the parents. Legislating against stable, loving families because they are headed by adults of the same sex is simply counterproductive.

            Second, our culture would need to acknowledge that in order to thrive, families require the support of a larger community. Visiting my hometown in Ohio this weekend, I was reminded of how important people outside the bounds of my immediate family were to me as I was growing up. The time I spent with the family of my seventh-grade English teacher, Mrs. Berring, acted as a tension-release valve for our small family by giving me somewhere else to be during the worst of my middle-school chaos. I lived for the weekends I spent with my grandmother and her partner Margaret near the shores of Lake Erie. No family can sustain itself without support from people around it. This truth is openly acknowledged at Unitarian Universalist commitment ceremonies in which the officiating minister leads gathered friends and family in vowing to support the couple as they vow to support each other.

            A natural outgrowth of this community acknowledgment would be increased funding for family support services, including outreach, parenting education classes, family support groups, eldercare, and crisis nurseries. We must begin to acknowledge publicly that family life is challenging, that no parent is perfect, and that families need not be ashamed to seek help when they are having difficulty. Only by breaking down the walls of secrecy around family life—by making family stress an acceptable topic of conversation—can we begin to address the epidemic of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in American families.

            Teaching students family coping skills as part of public school curriculum would also help ease family stress. In schools and family support centers, family members could experiment with empathizing with each other’s point of view.

            The most significant change we could make to enhance family life, however, would probably be to change the bottom line in the rest of the culture. Much of the stress affecting families is created when family members bring home from work and school an unconscious attitude that other people are means to an end rather than sacred unto themselves. One effect of this attitude is that partners view themselves as consumers looking to get their needs met in relationships, and when one partner isn’t sufficiently meeting those needs, the logical decision (according to the old bottom line, the old way of deciding what is rational) seems to be to search for another partner who will. This view of a “marketplace of relationships” creates tremendous insecurity even in committed partnerships and in the families that those partnerships ostensibly support. The religious right might be correct in decrying the instability of marriage, but by scapegoating same-sex couples, feminists, and women who work outside the home, they avoid confronting the fact that the very economic systems their political representatives support are largely responsible for that instability.

            A new bottom line at work would naturally involve childcare and eldercare support, ample maternity and paternity leave, active cultivation of work-life balance, family days, and other programs designed to enhance workers’ family lives.  

            These ideas are just a starting place for thinking about what a progressive, family-friendly culture would look like. I welcome discussion and disagreement; you can email me. If you are interesting in discussing these sorts of ideas, please consider joining the Network of Spiritual Progressives. For more information, visit www.spiritualprogressives.com.

 

            I am returning tonight from four days at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) convention in Pittsburgh. There is nothing quite like spending a weekend with 3,000 people who believe that poetry and stories can change the world. The many conversations I’ve had with teachers in the last few days have me thinking about the demands liberals and progressives typically make with regard to education: primarily better funding for our schools and higher pay for teachers. The economic issues are certainly important, but, coming out of this conference, I wonder if pursuing those goals is enough. Should a spiritually progressive movement address the content of education as well as its funding?

There are good reasons, I think, that liberals haven’t said much about the content of education. One of the fundamental principles of traditional liberal political philosophy is that each individual should be free to choose his or her own values, beliefs, and way of life, so long as those don’t harm anyone else. As a result, we’ve worked to keep schools and curriculum “value-neutral,” insisting that instilling values is the work of parents and not of our schools. Much about this argument is compelling.

Still, I don’t really believe that our schools are value-neutral. In fact, I think that in this age of assessment, the values we are most effectively rewarding in children are competitiveness and thinking that is objective, detached, divorced from feeling. (Witness the cutthroat competition in many high schools for class rankings, which has in some cases even led to lawsuits.) The belief in scarcity very much shapes the way in which we talk about education; it is a commodity that will enable our kids, our states, and our country to compete in the global economy. Much hay is made of the ranking of U.S. graduates as compared to graduates of schools in other countries. While excellence in math, science, the arts, and the humanities should certainly be encouraged, shouldn’t we also be actively helping students develop the ethical sense that will allow them to use their academic prowess in humane ways?

The following are some ideas, most of them adapted or borrowed from Rabbi Michael Lerner’s “politics of meaning,” that might give us a starting place for thinking about how education might be reformed to emphasize the kinds of values that will enable us to live in more loving communities:

·         Assess schools not only on the academic performance of their students, but also on the ability of their students to demonstrate empathy and make ethical choices.

·         Regularly and publicly reward students who demonstrate compassion and sensitivity to the needs of others.

·         Likewise, make empathy and ethical sensitivity criteria for college admissions and for hiring.

·         Provide students with direct instruction and practice in developing self-discipline and responsibility.

·         Expand service learning programs.

·         Implement critical literacy programs that help students take ownership of their own learning and adopt a critical stance toward messages created by people and organizations in positions of power, including the media.

            At dinner Friday night, I had the opportunity to discuss educational philosophies with Ed Farrell, former president of NCTE and professor emeritus of the University of Texas at Austin, and he said something that has stayed with me throughout the weekend: “First we have to imagine what kind of society we want to have twenty years from now. Then we need to imagine the curriculum that will equip students to create that society.” How might we begin to advocate for schools that foster empathy, curiosity, respect for all peoples of the world, stewardship of the natural world, a healthy skepticism toward media messages, and a deep commitment to nonviolence?

The coincidence this year of tax day with Easter and Passover celebrations has gotten me thinking. Is there anyone for whom tax preparation is truly a celebratory occasion? I couldn’t agree more with the idea of pooling resources to pay for services none of us could provide for ourselves alone and to take care of each other when times are hard. When I lived in the state, I was, as the lawn sign said, “Happy to pay for a better Minnesota.” In theory, paying taxes is an act of solidarity, an expression of caring. Still, this year as every year, I looked for every possible tax deduction and totaled up the numbers with a sense of dread, and I can’t say, as I dropped the envelope in the mail, that I had any real sense of adding to the wealth of love and caring in American society.

 

It would be easy to write off resentment of taxes to some innate selfishness in human beings, but history indicates that such resistance was not always in place. In ancient times, people willingly came together several times a year to sacrifice livestock to the gods. Moreover, in many cultures, people unquestioningly tithed a portion of their yield to support priests or other religious who owned no property of their own. These sacrifices and tithes were received during joyful community festivals accompanied by ritual and celebration.

 

It’s pretty hard to imagine similar festivals and celebrations around the paying of taxes, but why is that the case?

 

Part of the problem, I think, is that receiving government services hardly feels like being cared for. It’s hard not to be depressed by a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles, where crowds of tired people stand in line to be served by overworked, stressed out government workers whose job it is to move people through as quickly and impersonally as possible. A friend, one of the most compassionate people I know, works as a social worker for Hennepin County and tells me that it would be physically impossible to see all of the clients she’s supposed to see, so she finds herself hoping that some don’t show up, even though missed appointments are almost always a sign that things are not going well for that client.

 

Because receiving government services is generally unpleasant, and because there is such a stigma attached to many of those services, few who benefit from them feel grateful for them, much less express that gratitude, and this lack of appreciation from those who receive services makes it even harder to feel good about paying for them with our taxes.

 

What if, next year around this time, or even before that, as part of our election strategy, progressives organize a large-scale campaign focused around tax-supported services as acts of love of Americans for other Americans? Beyond a media campaign to counter the right-wing antipathy toward taxes, this action could include setting forth an initiative to make interactions with the government more rewarding. This initiative might include

 

• Funding social services sufficiently to permit adequate staffing, allowing social service providers more time to spend with clients, as well as enough time between clients for processing the emotions such work calls up
• Putting real energy into making the places where these services are delivered more welcoming
• Insisting that preference for government positions be given to people whose backgrounds indicate exceptional compassion, patience, and commitment to public service
• Conducting research into ways of making social service programs more effective, since part of the hesitance to pay taxes is doubt about how well our investments are paying off in making people’s lives qualitatively and quantitatively better, and also better publicizing the ways in which they are having that effect

 

The funding for these changes would come from insisting that all Americans, including the wealthy, pay their share, and from closing up corporate tax loopholes. (If anti-war sentiment continues to grow, it might also come from shifting even a small percentage of military funding into social services.)

 

Another reason that paying taxes doesn’t feel like tithing is that most of us have less faith in how the government is spending our money than we do in how charities or churches are spending it. This distrust of government is a signal that something is very much awry with our democracy. Government is not felt to be “of the people” anymore. For that reason, serious campaign finance reform would have to be part of any plan to improve how we feel about taxes. Only individuals—people with heartbeats, not corporate persons—should be permitted to make campaign contributions, and even those should be strictly limited to prevent the wealthy from having disproportionate influence. 

While measures like these may not meet with immediate success, they could serve to start a national dialogue about how to bring more love and compassion into our public life. If you have other ideas about how to further such a dialogue, please get in touch with us at the Network of Spiritual Progressives (www.spiritualprogressives.org) and help us make this happen!