I grew up in rural Tennessee in the forties and fifties, managed to go to a Presbyterian college despite my family’s financial struggles to present as middle class (I was the first to receive a college degree in my family), went on to get a master’s degree in social work, got married, bought a house and had a child. I have lived the “American Dream.” My family of origin was fundamentalist Christian, members of the Evangelical United Brethren Church. In college, exposure to new ideas about spirituality, religion, and God led me to consider atheism possibly as the truth. But I have eventually grown to a liberal Christian perspective.
I worked for over fifty years in a variety of positions, mostly in mental health. The work was challenging, often stressful and depressing and frequently rewarding. My belief in the values of a democracy – social justice, self-determinism, equality of opportunity, and the social work principle that people can change, anchored and guided my professional identity and family life. I believed that most people of this country held similar beliefs, and underlying these beliefs was that honesty was a cherished value.
I have since learned that this was naive. I became the “angry young man,” based on the betrayal by mainstream news media which excluded much of the truth about what was happening in the world.
St. Augustine’s warning about libido dominandi (lust for power) [The City of God – 413-426], has been the prevailing drive of the rise of civilizations throughout world history. Despite America’s attempts via mainstream media to instill the values I grew up with into its cultural framework – the United States Constitution, the educational institutions of this country, as well as Jesus’ teachings (“Love thy neighbor”), libido dominandi has persisted. This has become more and more evident over the past few years.
The advent of emerging technologies has broken the hold on mainstream news and allowed a chaotic frenzy of “information.”
What has been surprising has been the emergence of a passionate disregard for the values of this country’s constitutional and religious beliefs. No longer does it seem to matter to some that hostile name-calling and degradation of the character of political opponents is not respectable, not only for politicians but “thy neighbor.” A lack of respect for the human dignity of “the other” seems to have replaced ‘the news” with sensationalism, driven by hateful vitriol. But maybe that lack of respect was never there in the first place.
Slavery is the example. It was accepted in all the thirteen colonies at the time of the constitution, even though it was heavily debated at the constitutional convention. The founding fathers were continuing a practice that was embedded in the evolution of civilizations since ancient times.
After the civil war and Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation, black folks became free agents legally. But the segregated culture in which I grew up was a strong message that black folks were so different that they needed separate communities, which were obviously less than the mainstream communities.
Because I believed in my country and my parents and my religion, I accepted this as the way things were, even though deep within there was a nagging, uncomfortable question I was afraid to allow myself to face . . . until the mid-sixties when people began to rebel against the hypocrisy embedded in our constitution. It was then that I began to openly question the messages I had received. I needed the permission of a large group of people whom I respected to allow what I knew deep in my heart was an understanding about how all people of the earth should be considered – that we should “love our neighbor.”
To love our neighbor means that we should consider every human being worthy of love. To love your neighbor is to love yourself and to love God. To love your neighbor despite his wrong decisions, his different beliefs, his tendency toward cruelty, his “lust for power” is to relieve suffering, to will the good, to “lift up.”
During the past several years mainstream media has become an arena for the drama of libido domanandi. Many politicians and those in the electorate have resorted to nasty name-calling and attempts to degrade their political opponents to gain power and domination. The hypocrisy about America as a classless society without discrimination has persisted since that constitutional declaration that “All men a created equal;” even then, many of the founding fathers practice owned other human beings.
Today systemic racism is pervasive, often blatantly enacted and most insidious via the collective unconscious, a shadow in the American psyche. The past few years allowed this shadow to emerge via a large portion of the American population, seemingly without shame, planning to dominate those who do not agree with their agenda through religion and false patriotism. The lust for power is manifested by those who dominate via large corporations and the hoarding of wealth through laws which encourage them.
But this doesn’t invalidate the progress we have made. The election of Barack Obama to our presidency and then his reelection is proof of that. People of color have become prominent in our commercials and mainstream movies. More and more non-white men and women have been elected to congress. A strong and powerful movement to initiate laws to protect folks who are different from the founding fathers has emerged and continues to influence.
And now we have a democratic nominee for our presidency who is of Black and Indian heritage. Many of us are jumping with joy at the prospect that we will continue this evolution of fighting against what the founding fathers excluded from the constitution. The hypocrisy of “All men are created equal” is now embedded in the American unconscious.
