"We have met the enemy, and they are us"
But, Pogo left out 1/2 of that equation :
"And, we have met the solution also - us too."
It is quite understandable when those who have been warning mainstream society ( for years in some cases ) of the very real threat of the Christian right fall into language which evokes fear. It has been hard, no doubt, frustrating and probably infuriating for those working to bring an awareness of the problem into the public mind.
Coming to an awareness of the Christian theocratic right, whether at a personal or a societal level, bears many similarities to Kubler Ross' stages of death and dying. Many, now, on the American left - and those all along the political spectrum who support religious freedom and oppose theocracy - have by fits and starts and while doing the "two steps forwards one step back" shuffle, moved into a new stage of awareness. The cognitive blindness of simple incomprehension is gone, to be replaced by more active behaviors, denial and avoidance, and - for some farther along in the process who have moved past active denial and also avoidance, by reactive emotions : fear, and panic.
Too much of the attention paid by the left to the Christian theocratic movement involves panicky gesturing towards a big and scary monster painted in dark and garishly menacing hues, monolithic and unassailable.
But when we fall into fear we forget our power. We are all mortal - the precondition of our existence. We will all die, and none are given to know when. What do we chose to do with the time we have at our disposal, right now ?
I have recently seen the results of a study which concluded that the American left watches, currently, slightly more network television than the right. If the American left truly values religious freedom and Democratic pluralism - the foundational values of American government - it will turn off those televisions and get out the door to reengage with politics.
Should one be afraid of the Christian theocratic right ? Yes. Yer' darned tootin' one should. But the reasonable and healthy procession, in moving on past the initial recognition of threat, is to roll up one's sleeves and get to work. To be fully, deeply, passionately engaged in not just "opposing" or countering but in building a political movement infused with a vitality that comes from within, from one's own constructive vision for the future.... To do that is to lose one's interest in the voyeurism of fear : it's no longer necessary. When one is fully engaged in life, that is exciting, alive, and real and spectatorship seems dull and flat.
If all the energy spent in fear, and dread even, of some vast and inchoate bogey monster called "theocracy" - that gets gestured at but which is rarely subjected to the rigorous analytical scrutiny that cuts the monster down to comprehensible and solvable dimensions.... If all that energy had been spent not gesturing in panic, festering in depression and fear and - fleeing those feelings - endulging in avoidance and denial, the American political equation would now be very different.
Well, that's in the past - a lesson, yes, and that lesson still points towards the real work - and excitement too - of political reengagement.
When people truly engage with problems, on whatever scale and whatever those problems might be, they enter the realm of the mundane and the practical which - oddly - tends to banish fear. Reactions of fear towards the American Christian right melt away as the dreaded thing becomes comprehensible and so mundane. Fear dissipates as the dreaded thing changes, with knowledge, into a known and worthy adversary - and, fear dissipates as the challenge of meeting that adversary, in the realm and playing field of politics, becomes reduced to a simple course of practical steps - tasks or chores even - designed to produce tangible, concrete results. One foot in front of the other, one step at a time.
Take the example of this website - whatever it is, whatever it does, it did not suddenly pop magically into existence. It was a lot of work - toil, drudgery, tedium.... learning. Many of the details of making this site happen had little or nothing to do with the Christian right. But for the subject matter, Talk To Action might as well be a community knitting, or pet care, site. The work would have been the same : constructing and designing the site, learning to use the software, finding knowledgeable people to post on the site.... details, work.
In the end, even, the very concept of "fighting the religious right" can begin to seem a bit silly or distracting. Well, the Christian supremacist right - to give the "enemy" some usefully tighter definition - needs to be countered. Yes indeed. But at this point the spirit of George Lakoff wafts down into my argument, here, to ask this :
"So, you're against something. OK. But, what are you for ?"
A subtle question indeed - for to be "against" something is to get impossibly caught up in the ontological tarball of the thing one is "against" . To even enter the territory is to feed the thing and, in doing so, to lose.
One thing humans crave beyond the physical necessities of air, water, and food - one thing they crave even beyond sex - is attention.
To be set "against" something is to give the vital energy of one's attention to that thing. Those who populate the widely varied ecology of the Christian right movement, do they spend much time worrying about the left ? Well - from the gassy fussilades of rhetoric emitted by the movements leaders, on the "threats" of secularism and homosexuality, one might think so. But what do those who actually advance the movement on the ground do ? Well, they work. They build. They don't spend their time as passive spectators - no, they work to reconstruct American society. One might reject the underlying premises of that project - and this site does - but it's important to notice that the project is positive, constructive. It does not watch, or fear, or worry - mainly, it builds.
So to be set in "opposition" to a social and political movement can merely feed that with attention - assigning it significance. Our attention - the use of our time - expresses our values, or it should.
And, there is another aspect of paying attention to that we say we oppose which is perhaps more insidious - at it's worst our "opposition" can devolve into a passive spectator sport, a sort of voyeurism in which the demons and stalkers and slashers of Hollywood pop films are replaced by a menace far more titillating for being real. The Christian theocratic movement can be very scary, yes : BOO !
We like to be scared, a for little while, because the adrenaline rush makes us feel more alive. We love to get good and scared, popcorn and soda at hand, and then file out of our cinemas or terror, all alert and tingly, to go home and bask in the sense of relief at not being scared, that demonic chainsaw wielding fiends are not at the door just yet : cozy and safe for the moment.
From Hitchcock's ouevre on down the line, a thousand monster and slasher flims have accultured us to associate fear with titillation. Hollywood has built a multibillion dollar industry on our love of being frightened, and maybe that has warped our sense of how fear - in terms of our instinctual, biological makeup - is supposed to function. When we feel fear, that feeling is accompanied by a hormonal cascade - as Adrenaline and other compounds designed to help us to fight or run away flood our bodies. Our fear is meant to alert and ready us to cope with a potentially dangerous situation.
In the short run, fear is meant to spur us to emergency problem-solving. But if the problem to be addressed and averted is a longer term one, fear has no place.
Nor reactive "opposition", panic, voyeurism.....
Instead, let us try these on for size :
: Reengagement - with poltics, with culture, with ourselves.
: Excitement - of giving our values real expression as politicians who share them channel resources towards those things and causes we hold dear.
: Envisioning and imagining, then bringing those into planning, then pushing them along towards the practical, towards implementation.
I could go on further, and I'd certainly like to. But for now I need to go and do another practical task which cannot be denied. Thank you for reading this.
by Bruce Wilson on Wed Dec 28, 2005 at 11:41:03 AM EST
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