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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 9/18/21

9/11 Our political and spiritual challenge

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9/11

OUR POLITICAL AND SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE


By: T. D. Duff


The domestic political fantasy life of the last twenty years finds us in an unnerving time loop of our own making in this country. Very much on its own, history seems to be running in reverse and knowledge is not seen as a public good, but as something suspect, dubious or even ungodly, as it was for example in Italy in 1633, when the church put Galileo on trial for his heretical view that the earth was in orbit around the sun.

These past years have produced a prison house of the mind, insidiously endeavoring to promote a fleeting fraudulent terrorist phantom and the darkness of ego. It has produced the degradation of the thinking mind, all of it in fear of what it knows. Our society has mentally transported the rank and file back into the darkness of tribal war and shrieking, far from the tolerance that came with American religious freedom and the liberty of our conscience.

What is good as opposed to evil? Does it mean the evil of specific terrorist organizations, or the evils of the political cultures from which they came about?

Our civil discourse has morphed into a "civil disguise," something akin to, "I have a great future behind me." People have been restored to passive apathy, while the intellectual language of righteous empire cravenly moves on. Life becomes a constant paradox and the best illusion wins, because we have been taught a lesson-less past, while everywhere we look today we see the price of unchecked power.

Our renewed civil and spiritual discourse must adhere to three basic principles: 1. Facts matter, even if we don't like them. 2. Universal moral principles matter, even if they have consequences we would prefer not to face. 3. Clarity matters, such as distinguishing between terror and the political culture that breeds it, and what lies uneasily at its borders; aggression and legitimate response to it.

The word emotion literally means "disturbance." It comes from the Latin word emovere, meaning to disturb.

Humans have learned to split the atom and instead of killing ten or twenty people with a wooden club now can kill a million people by pushing a button. Are we to call that real change? The pollution of our planet is an outward reflection of our inner psychic pollution. Millions of unconscious people do not take responsibility for how their inner mind works.

The bond that connects us with other people is the same bond that connects us with the person sitting next to us on the bus, or with a bird, a tree, or a flower. Only the degree of intensity with which it is felt differs. Our deeply human impulses must be harnessed to tap our greatest asset over wealth, a weapon against injustice and a tool against a rigged system; the love of people and community.

According to St. Paul, the whole of creation is waiting to become enlightened. For, if mental development and increased knowledge are not counterbalanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness, the probability for unhappiness and disaster is very great.

In the beginning, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds however the timid join him, because then it costs nothing to be a patriot. The first rule of any group mind and its dynamics is that it cannot adopt itself as an object of critical reflection.

To take the long view, American politics may be seen as the struggle between the idealistic secular democracy of self-renewing America and our great resident capacity to be in denial of what is intellectually and morally incumbent upon us to pursue.

There would be no tyranny and no wars if men did not ignore their conscience. Wealthy people are in large measure as ungrounded in the reality of their political beliefs as they are grounded in the reality of their fortunate financial condition. It is an opulent reality that shapes their belief system. Their brains have become calcified by intolerance and indifference and they are unable to see beyond their own bias.

They are involved in the "lucre fest" and in most cases their healthy paychecks and dividend distributions, demands holding the selfish positions that they do. When will the burden of their self-deception and their self-deceit become too great a burden for them to live with?

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Tim Duff Social Media Pages: Facebook page url on login Profile not filled in       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

I am a retired investment executive. I am a progressive activist and novelist. My novel THE FIND is due to be published this summer by Waterside Productions of California. I am working on my second novel, THE (more...)
 

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