Everything That Comes Down Must Go Up

As I was carrying boxes and dresser drawers full of 20 years of stuff downstairs, I thought of that old saying, "Everything that goes up must come down." I was living in reverse since everything I was carrying downstairs eventually would have to be lugged back up after our new carpet was installed. Of course, we could throw a lot of it out and make our load a whole lot lighter and probably not miss all that much. This still wouldn't make me look forward to the trek back up the steps, even if I was enjoying the carpet, which I expect to enjoy.

I have been living in reverse a lot recently and I really hope that everything that has been coming down will go back up pretty soon. But now I am shifting to an entirely different metaphor, the one that says if you're at the bottom, the only place to go is up. I'm not sure we're at the bottom yet. From where I view things, inside my mind and on TV, the bottom could be a long ways off and there might not be any up once we finally get there.

Okay, yes, I am talking about the state of the nation and the state of the world. Recently, five or six retired generals announced a campaign to capture the Department of Defense and take out the embattled leader of that civilian institution. Like a lot of people, I wish they had fought their good fight several years ago, though I am not sure it would have done any real good. Their boss is not a good listener, nor is his boss. I know angry divorcing couples who listen better to the opposition than these guys do. I also am uneasy with a military overthrow of civilian oversight, even though I agree 100% with their assessment of their boss and the necessity of his departure. This whole thing brings us ever closer to this awful bottom that we have been spiraling toward for several years now.

Where to begin? 9/11. Following a brief bubble of unity created by tragedy, shaped by compassion, and filled with all the colors and religions (and non-religions) of our society, we have been devolving toward a temporal hell. Believe me, I am describing and not swearing, though I have been swearing a lot more recently, especially at the TV. I have temporarily regressed to where I was when I was a private in the Army and a reporter for a newspaper. I guess I swear because I can't seem to find a way to change things.

I am watching my nation do things that make me curse and make me break out in night sweats. I never thought we would openly wage a pre-emptive war. Maybe that is more honest than faking a first strike, but what a precedent for the wide-open future when other nations take the lead and we recede. What history of an empire doesn't include the rise and fall metaphor?

How many thousands of lives, American and all the rest, will be destroyed, maimed, and marred before this is over? The epidemic of PTSD alone will keep a legion of psychotherapists in business for years. I hope some of them speak Arabic or Farsi or Dari, not just English and Spanish. And there are doubtless tens of thousands of adults (here and there) and children (there) who will need prosthetics in order to lead an abnormal but tolerable life. The kids especially tear at our hearts. Okay, so every now and then someone feels intense compassion for one of these kids who then gets plucked from the war zone and flown to the US to be treated for free. Thank God. But, who will treat all the rest of the kids in Iraq and elsewhere?

Then, what about all the terrorists we are recruiting with our sheer presence not to mention our actions? I once saw a bumper sticker that said we are creating enemies faster than we can kill them. I am afraid this is true. No one with real power seems to understand that the flip side of shame is rage and that we are shaming millions of people by our arrogance and our brutality. If you "dis" a man over coffee, you can tick him off for a day or two. If you thoroughly humiliate a whole society of men and women for years on end, you can make them hate you for generations.

What kind of barbarians put naked people in chains and make fun of them and threaten them and torment them? Oops, it is us. What kind of sadists turn human beings over to others to be tortured in a bestial fashion so we won't have the mark of the beast on our hands? Oops, it is still us.

Certain of the most effective advisors to our national leaders appear to behave in a manner that suggests the end (winning an election, passing radical legislation) justifies the meanest of means: smearing your opponent with whatever works whether it is true or not, whether it is important or not -- just make him or her look like a scummy, weak, dangerous person. This also has meant giving appealing and absolutely contradictory names to legislation and major programs. Our first inkling of this on a national level was the delightful term, compassionate conservative. I confess this had some appeal to me when I first read it. I figured even conservatives can be and are compassionate. But I didn't realize that this really meant, "I feel your pain and I ain't going to do anything about it." By the time we had gotten to the "Patriot Act," I had wised up. If our nation's Patriots had acted like this bill requires, we would be enjoying Queen Elizabeth jokes just like our brothers and sisters in England do. The only Brit in our tabloids would be those members of the House of Windsor.

Let me be totally serious for a moment. The bottom of this long descent that I see could well be created by another pre-emptive attack, this time on Iran and this time using nuclear weapons. No matter how you pronounce "nuclear," it is a horrible possibility. My night sweats involve scenes of Slim Pickens riding the bomb on the way down to the end of the earth as we know it. God, I hope this is not going to happen because if we go there, this will be a bottom from which we cannot go back up. To change metaphors again, there will be nothing left to carry back upstairs.

Everything that has been happening has made me realize that my values are really very traditional. I believe in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I think part of the reason we are in this mess is because no one knows any more what those documents say. Or, if they know, they don't believe it is important any more.

Okay, that is an exaggeration, but not enough people in enough places must understand and passionately believe in what these venerable documents say or we would have more dead heroes on the side of the road, people who struggled to fight the good fight here at home where the real war against human rights is being fought. I guess you could say that a lot of us who know better have been chicken and that includes me, I am embarrassed to say. I don't yearn to be dead literally or metaphorically. But I am more like those generals than I would like to admit. Or, maybe I am more like Bilbo Baggins than I have realized, preferring to stay in my warm Hobbit home, watching the Lord of the Rings on DVD, rather than venturing out with Gandalf and the dwarfs into the cold to do battle with power-hungry Sauron.

Not only my American values are being destroyed these days but so are my Christian values. Jesus was concerned extraordinarily with the poor and the outcasts. I don't think he would be very happy with the annihilation of our social safety net in order to provide money for the wealthy or with the attempts to polarize people around issues of "right belief," sexual orientation, and the like. Jesus dined with the local scum of the day. If you hate 'em, Jesus didn't. Doesn't matter who 'em is.

Jesus, with his heart informed by and filled with God's abundant and unending love for all, instructed his followers to not return violence with violence. I don't know which Jesus is in the minds and hearts of some of our national and religious leaders, but I don't think it is the guy from Nazareth. Just because the Jesus from Nazareth said don't strike back didn't mean he wanted us to strike first instead. This Jesus would not have said to track down terrorists "and kill them in the name of the Lord," as one of our nation's prominent reverends said on CNN. Maybe their Jesus is from some other town in Galilee where they only practice eye-for-eye justice. I would be open to meeting this other Jesus, but I think I'll keep my distance from him unless he has a change of heart.

In my most hopeful fantasies, I see the end of all of this, with throngs of people rising up to elect and persuade enough members of Congress to bring all of this to a screeching halt and to reconnect our national energies to the power source found in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. On the religious front, I see the 80% of Americans who define themselves as Christian as finally taking the challenging teachings of Jesus seriously and striving to act in accordance with the God of the Gospel, the God who loves all of us in all our incredible diversity and all our immaturity and all our imperfection, a God who wants peace over war, harmony over destruction, love over hate.

To get there will take courage on the part of many of us, courage to speak out about truth as we see it, something too many of us have been reluctant to do. When we do, some of us will be hurt and even have our lives destroyed, though today mostly not actually killed. We only have to go back 50 years to the McCarthy era to see how many lives were wrecked when people tried to speak out against that tragic and buffoonish hate- and fearmonger. The recent move Goodnight and Good Luck is an excellent window into that period.

If we can take our nation back, and for those of us who are Christians, take our religion back, hopefully we can start the long climb out of the hole into which we have been disappearing. This will have to include holding those responsible for the worst of the crimes against society and crimes against humanity accountable in some fashion. At the same time, we have to keep in mind that their failings are human failings, ones to which any of us can be subject. This is not said to excuse but to reinforce the idea that responsibility for the kind of morality we need - compassionate concern for the common good - must be rooted internally in each of us individually and that it is an enormous struggle to maintain when we are handed the ring of great power. To accomplish this, we must grow wiser and more mature than many of us are even today.

Well, I got all of this by carrying some boxes and dresser drawers downstairs. I wonder what I'll get when I carry everything back and put it all away. I'll let you know.

-David E. Roy

Copyright 2006 by David E. Roy, All Rights Reserved.

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