No less a person than the President himself has reminded us that (aside from breaking the racial barrier) his election is not so much the desired change as a chance to work for it.  This is no small thing, that we now can work for it (to put it in perspective, just remember President Bush’s advise to us after 9/11: ‘go shopping, take the kids to Disneyland’).  Even more significant, if somewhat less public, he himself also said that we the people have to make it possible for him to live up to the full interpretation of his own promises.  At a small fundraising event in New Jersey about a year ago, he himself told the story of how A. Philip Randolph, the civil rights activist and union organizer asked FDR to grant the largely African-American railroad porters the right to organize, whereupon the new president said ‘I’m convinced that it’s a good thing: now go out and make me do it.’  (The Railway Labor Act came into law in 1934).

So let’s take the President at his word.  We private citizens of progressive communities like Berkeley (or West Marin, where I now live) have a greater role to play in the direction of our country than we have had for many dismal years — probably greater in proportion to our numbers than many other locations across the land.  How shall we play it?

First, by appreciating what the President has already done.  For eight years we have been living through a national version of those Stanley Milgram experiments on ‘obedience to authority,’ where a national authority figure reassured unsuspecting people from all walks of life that it’s OK to torture.  President Obama pulled us back from that disgraceful abyss with a stroke of his pen.  And he framed it brilliantly: “we’re going to defeat terrorism on our terms.”

Second, by not condemning him for what are undeniably many and harsh disappointments — the silence on Gaza, the refusal to stop drone bombings in Afghanistan (in which 22 innocent people have recently died), his encouraging speech at a Caterpillar plant in IL over the objections of human rights groups and others (Caterpillar supplies the machines that illegally level Palestinian homes, in one case crushing to death an American peace activist), and of course the ringing words of his inaugural address that America is “ready to lead” again.  If you’re like me, you don’t want anyone to be world leader any more; if there’s any leading to be done, it should be toward acceptance that the world a multipolar system; even, dare we say it, toward a real international community.  Am I disappointed?  Yes, but I’m also trying to be realistic.  Public figures, elected by majorities, are not expected to be prophets of a vision that only a tiny minority can understand, much less desire.  In this sense, to be political is to ‘swindle’ at least some of the people much of the time. Instead of calling him a cheat for not giving us everything we want, and doing it right away — which will only deprive him of badly needed support and further terrify his (and our) considerable opposition — let’s appreciate what he’s up against, give him the benefit of the doubt (which is a good idea to give everyone, while we’re at it), and get to work.

Which is my third point.  I understand that in my own town, Tomales, 80% voted for Obama.  I’m ecstatic — but I’m also thinking about the 20% who didn’t; who, let’s face it, are probably 80% of many less blessed locations between here and the Atlantic.  We have to reach out to them; and we can.  Some years ago I was having a rather tense discussion about terrorism and how we had provoked it ourselves with my politically conservative brother-in-law.  At one point he blurted out, “Well, I don’t think we’re so terrible!”  I put in, “Stan, this has nothing to do with being good or bad; it’s about how we are going to live safely in a world with lots of different people.”  His anger deflated immediately, and I’m not even entirely sure he didn’t vote for you-know-whom in November.  So go to coffee shops, or bars, to the next cubicle (if you’re lucky enough to still have a job), and talk to people who disagree with you, always being aware that they have the same moral feelings that we do, if they apply them differently.  Take a workshop in compassionate listening or nonviolent communication, if it doesn’t come naturally to you, and enjoy the conversation. Explain your own values with confidence, but at the same time reassure them that there is a place for them in the new world.  Above all, don’t make them feel guilty (they do already), and don’t gloat.  That’s the surest way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

It’s not the President’s job to convince Joe the Plumber that the new world will be good for him.  It’s our job.  Let’s remember what awaits us if we fail.

Neither Oren nor I were able to reach our mutual friend El Sarraj, a psychiatrist and co-founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme — the facility had been heavily damaged by bombing the night before.  But on the latter’s recent blog he described the terror of his children as the U.S.-made bombs fell perilously near his home.  Sitting comfortably here in Tomales, it made me very angry.  I am not sorry that it did.  If more of us were angry and had a constructive way to turn our anger into the ingredients of a saner future, namely by nonviolent methods, there might be a silver lining even in this disgraceful episode.

I have been searching desperately for some silver lining in the deepening tragedy in Gaza, and what finally came to me was the chilling words of the poet Aeschylus:  “And slowly, even against our will, wisdom drips against the heart by the awful grace of god.”

If there is a distinguishing feature in this latest round in the sixty years of reciprocal violence — something other than its ferocity — it’s that the futility of the attack was clear as soon as it began.  Already, to no one’s surprise, painfully won progress toward accomodation in the moderate Arab countries is evaporating, while Israel is clearly generating another round of “retaliation,” this time with that much less sympathy from the international community.  Even if Hamas’ fighting ability is effectively abolished by the time the carnage is over, will Israel achieve the security we all desire her to have, and which is the rationale for the attack?  Only in the very shortest term.  Before too long, the seething hatred in the Arab world, and the increased revulsion amongst the onlooking world at large, must boil over into action.  (A similarly “devastating” blow has just been landed on the major rebel faction in Sri Lanka, and a suicide bomber took revenge within the hour).  Before it even revealed the full scope of its cruelty, the massacre was styled Lebanon II or (by Jakob Rieken) the “mideast version of the Bay of Pigs.”  And as Israel’s wisest analyst, Uri Avnery, said of this carnage, “logic has little influence on politics.”

This realization is small comfort, given the terrorization of a million and a half people, the children blown apart on their way to school, the devastation crashing into homes and hospitals; but it could just possibly, if we choose to build on it, become much larger.

We could realize that this is what happens when people are so locked into antagonism that they become blinded to one another’s needs in the confusion of their own hopeless fear.  This is what happens when we arm one side against another (or both against each other), and reinforce  the tenacious myth that security can be acquired through domination.This is what happens when we concoct peace treaties and ceasefires around conference tables while- thousands of miles away- real people on the ground are being humiliated, degraded, and enraged.  This is what happens when small nations let themselves be used by so-called “great powers,” shielded from the human reality of their own actions.  This is what happens when, as Mikhail Gorbachev just pointed out, the international community has nothing in place to absorb the impact of these mad conflicts and interject the logic — and the plain humanity — that the combatants have forgotten.

And we could, just possibly, go further than that. More and more of us are in fact beginning to realize that the problem is not just this war in particular, not just this kind of war, but war itself.  War is a counterproductive atrocity left over from the prehuman past.  “If you want to go East, don’t go West” said a remarkably simple sage some hundred years ago:  If you want peace, prepare it.  Build up all peacemaking institutions, from the cultural level — peace education, peace journalism, sane entertainment choices — to real alternatives like the nonviolent intervention teams that have already saved so many lives at so little cost, in Central America, the Balkans, and now Sri Lanka, Colombia, Northern Uganda, and the Phillipines.  As Martin Luther King said, we are all “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”  We will never become secure, not one of us, by doing things to tear apart that mutuality. But there are many ways to peace through peaceful means that harmonize with and reinforce it.

To survey our globalizing planet geopolitically today is to see a mixture of hopeful developments alongside very disheartening ones: on the one hand the election of an intelligent president in the United States (which is possibly even more important than the election of the first black president) and the publication of ‘Charter 08’ presaging, just possibly, the democratization of China; but on the other hand, ongoing horror in places like Darfur and Burma.  Perhaps, if we can understand its lessons, Gaza will prove to be a bit of both.

Our economic system is part of a whole culture. Even if we were to widen our mental horizon to embrace the Gross National Happiness that the kingdom of Bhutan goes by instead of the standard GNP criterion of economic success, we would find that other elements of the standard model, or “story” that we live by these days won’t match the new economy and even though it would be more stable, more realistic, it would not survive unless we can stop not only overconsuming but:

• relying on overwhelming military force in situations that can only be resolved by human understanding — the very thing military force sweeps under the rug.
• incarcerating millions in a failed system of ‘justice’.
• allowing our schools and colleges to lose their compass — and their funding, thus feeding more young people who could otherwise be leading meaningful lives into that criminal justice system.
• letting health care get into the hands of profit-makers (while an unhealthy life styles turn more and more of us into patients) and
• turning up the violence throughout society by powerful (and again, profit-driven) mass media.

All of these unwanted features hang together in an unspoken philosophical framework that runs something like this: we human beings are separate from each other and our environment, which is mainly a collection of ‘resources’ we might as well exploit for our own benefit, and even — why not? — enter into fierce competition with one another, group against group, nation against nation, to do so. Happiness is scarce and if I’m going to get my share, I just might have to take away yours.

We could be doing three things to fix the economy and the rest of the picture: (1) be really clear about the prevailing story that’s gotten us into this mess; (2) articulate the new story, which is no fairy tale but based on more and more scientific evidence, not to mention our own experience in life: we are all deeply interconnected: Our happiness does not come from consumption and never did once we took care of the basics. Our happiness comes from having a purpose in life, and that purpose nearly every time has something to do with being of service to one another. Which is why Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented civilization to a person-oriented civilization.” And (3) systematically redraft the institutions of healthcare, defense, security (and others I may be forgetting) along the lines of this new story.

This may sound like a daunting challenge, but the fact is, every one of these areas has seen inspiring experiments akin to those we’ve been seeing in economics: Nonviolent Peaceforce is putting trained volunteers into conflict zones around the world, often stopping violence where military force would not be workable (or would make things worse); Restorative Justice experiments go forward in prisons and out, by non-governmental groups like the Quaker-based Alternatives to Violence Project and, slowly but surely, government agencies as well, all with great success; experimental schools and free clinics sometimes work much better than the mainstream versions — many of the millions of non-profit, or rather ‘social profit’ organizations listed off by Paul Hawken in his book Blessed Unrest are quietly building the more stable institutions that the new story needs.

There are times when it’s easier in the long run to be more ambitious than less, and this is one of them.

Some shoppers, of course, were deeply shocked when they heard what happened; but an eyewitness, Ms. Cribbs, told the Associated Press, that not all of them were that alert: “When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling ‘I’ve been in line since yesterday morning,’ They kept shopping.”

Detective Lt. Michael Fleming, who is in charge of the investigation for the Nassau police, said that some “criminal charges are possible” (though it is just about impossible to identify exactly who stepped on the still-living body of Jdimytai Damour, 34, when he went down).  The police have their job to do – but so do we.  Our job is to weigh the choice we have made as a culture to so exaggerate the power of things and the buying of things to make us happy that we forget the only thing that can actually do that, which is relationships of love and compassion for one another.  The relationships that, as King said, make us “person-, not thing- oriented.”

So Lt. Fleming is partly correct when he charges,  “I’ve heard other people call this an accident but it is not. Certainly it was a foreseeable act.”  Not foreseeable that a Wal-Mart employee would be trampled to death on a Black Friday; but yes, foreseeable that if people go on believing in things instead of one another there is going to be violence and misery somewhere.  Indeed, in the psychological sense, there already is.  This kind of materialism is violence to the human spirit.

Still looking for answers from his own perspective, which is correct as far as it goes, Lt. Fleming also said of the store that there “wasn’t enough security.”  If we don’t wake up to the dangers of materialism, there never will be.

The core principle of these economies I’m tempted to call real is, they are economies of needs, not of wants. They supply and exchange things that real people really need – like kale and apples – rather than dangle in front of them things that make them have wants – like the latest iPod.

The idea behind that principle is, as Gandhi understood and many studies now are documenting, that once certain basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter are met (and the bloated economy we have now does not meet them for all of us, by the way), human happiness is not served by more stuff.
In the mysterious metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly, scientists say that there is a stage when the contents of the cocoon is completely liquid – it could become anything. Let us sieze the ‘liquidity’ of this moment to strike out on a new course.

The ‘economic miracles’ of Japan and Germany after the devastation of those countries in WWII were due in part to the fact that with the infrastructure of their manufacturing systems virtually demolished they had the chance to rebuild something much more modern and appropriate. We now have a ‘software’ version of the same opportunity – for the whole concept of our consumerist economy is now in question.

We have not asked for this shocking event but, as a famous American patriot of old said, “let us make the best of it.” And that means calling up the stable, simple economy based on local networks — and designed to fulfill human needs — rather than depending on artificially inflated wants. Let’s adopt a saner economy that is already there and that can give us a security of basic needs so that we can get on with the human experiment, which is not about who can acquire more but how we can all develop our highest potential.
Michael N. Nagler