SENTIENT TIMES Feb/Mar 2003

Finding Answers in Community Meetings

By John Darling

In this winter of ire, hundreds pack meetings about peace (both the inner and outer kind), about our culture of violence and consumerism and about civil rights. We haven’t seen this spirit here in Ashland since 1969.

At the solstice, the moment of the birth of the light for the new year, the spectacle of Native American sacred dance at the Jewish Havurah Shir Hadash was followed by Rabbi David Zaslow standing up with Islamic peace activist Pete Seda and saying: It’s not hard for me to make peace with Pete—he’s a good man and I love him. The hard thing is to make peace with those we judge harshly.

They showed a video of Sulcha, an extraordinary new, but amazingly simple process where Jewish and Palestinian people get together and pray, sing and dance till they not only don’t hate each other, but see each other as “humans-like-me.”

“Politics, so far, has led mostly to more fighting,” said Zaslow. “But in prayer, they’ve been able to lubricate the wheels and open their hearts. They find they’re praying to the same God and celebrating the same values of love of family, home and land. They find God has a purpose to them and it’s the same purpose.”

It was to be a “town meeting” but it became a town soul-baring, a mass stepping across that line that keeps us isolated and suspicious of those who seem “unlike ourselves.” Zaslow and Seda gave solstice celebrants a sentence completion chore—stand up and begin your statement with, “I need to make peace with …”

The ritual took hours. A woman said she would call her mom the next day and make peace after ten years. A man will call his brother tomorrow and do the same. A friend I’ve wronged, Christianity, George Bush, polluters, the list went on and on. One’s “foes” began to shape-shift into, my gosh, real people like me, people with hopes, dreams, fears, families, people who’ve mostly tried, like me, to do right in this life.

After the ritual people hugged and congratulated each other for “getting over it.” How amazingly comfortable it is, people remarked over and over, to feel one is right and on the “good” side. But peace can’t be made that way. And how amazingly different it feels to break out of that imprisoning ego-shell in which only oneself (and those like me) make sense and are of good heart.

It’s been a magical time, this year three of the millennium. Labyrinths spring up all over during Yule and New Years. Rev. Alicia Wolski makes one of electrical tape on the linoleum floor in Medford’s First Christian Church, saying, “You come with an intention, a question or a prayer or maybe a request for help with a problem or a project. As you walk, the Spirit leads you where it wants to lead you.”

Three Rivers Hospital in Grants Pass builds a permanent labyrinth of granite. Its facil-itator, Chaplain Martha Shonk-wiler, says, “It’s part of a spir-itual revolution in the world in which religions are coming to see how much they have in common, including meditation as a path to finding God. That’s what’s going to help with peace in the world.”

I take my children, now a cynical 14 and 12, to the fourth annual labyrinth at Ashland’s Unitarian-Universalist Church. Wary of anything uncool, they sit in chairs waiting for me while I walk it. What is it about the labyrinth, which people have walked for at least 4,000 years now? It takes you the longest possible route from the outside to the center—and at the center, you find nothing, just a space. Ah, that’s the soul, isn’t it? The space at the center, empty, waiting to be filled by you after your long journey on a path you might resist at first, as you marvel at how tortuous it is, how filled with seemingly meaningless backtracking—like life. You’re supposed to carry a thought, a hope, a question, a prayer. So I do. I’m tired of asking for things all my life. I realize, as I walk that I not only don’t know what I should ask for, but if I get it, it’s as likely to be the wrong thing, but since there is no wrong thing and they’re all growth experiences and all want to be embraced unconditionally, as if the Universe knows what it’s doing … oh, I get it … the labyrinth has already answered my question. And opened my heart. At that moment, I see my kids abandon their cool and start walking the labyrinth, winding their way round the chaotic spaghetti till finally I meet my boy coming at me laughing and saying, “I may be lost!” Children speak the truth so simply. We finish and sit listening to the space of the soul. They will always remember this. So will I.

Right after New Years, Ashland town folk hold a meeting to talk about the culture of fear we Americans live in—this in response to Michael Moore’s film, “Bowling for Columbine.” They expected 40 or 50, tops, but 250 cram the hall, all spilling over with eager stories—yes, Moore nailed it! We’re different here in America. There’s no one like us. We kill each other at the rate of 11,000 a year, Moore documents, but just across the Detroit River in Canada, where they have the same amount of guns, see the same violent movies and video games, have 13 percent minorities (not unlike us) and have twice the unemployment, they do not kill each other. Maybe a murder in the big town of Windsor every decade or so. They leave their doors unlocked, even in downtown Toronto. We wouldn’t dream of doing that. They tried to track the reason—maybe it was the news. Ours is lurid, dripping with mayhem and gore, home invasions, carjackings. We’re a cruel people, pictures at 11. Or maybe it’s our long, survival-of-the-fittest history, fraught with slavery, Indian wars, race riots. But most countries have had that and don’t have the murders we do.

Moore finally pointed out a demon, maybe the demon: we’re an ambitious, profit-mad, bottom-line people who brand it bad (“recession!”) if we don’t consume more than the quarter before. It’s like this: I fear, therefore I shop. We live in fear, we acquire, we feel better, therefore buying is culture-wide addictive behavior. We slather ads with sex, too, so you’ve got that pleasure wired in with consuming and, as you have more and better stuff, you just feel better all over.

“My sense is that there’s a real connection between a widespread sense of anxiety in our culture and commercials that offer a product that can help,” said Carl Griesser, regional director of the ManKind Project, a men’s service group. “We’ve decided fear and danger sell and we absorb it more because we watch a lot more tv and internet than other cultures.”

“Fear is pushed in our society so we go eat, shop and buy—or get security systems and guns—so we can feel better,” Ashland counselor Bill McMillan said. “It fits the description of an addiction in that it’s out of control, detrimental to self and others, you do it whether you’re aware of it or not and you live in denial that it’s going on. A prime example, he said, is Americans’ increasing desire for large vehicles in the face of evidence that this increases greenhouse gases and causes more dependence on foreign oil, thus contributing to the cause of war.

As if in agreement, headlines that week told of two elementary kids nabbed with a loaded pistol in a Medford school. But hey, we need these guns because this country is full of people with guns and you just never know. And, in the end, the president himself models problem solving with weapons and force, which, as one participant said, is central to the American myth. Strong, brave, free Americans (often acting alone, as Bush is) finally have to settle things with force, whether at a frontier watering hole or on the global stage. And, by the way, the myth also says the lone cowboy is always right and always wins.

Within days, other citizens gathered again in Ashland to craft a city law barring police from helping feds conduct secret surveillance, wiretapping, internet snooping, unwarranted searches and detentions without due process, as allowed by the USA-PATRIOT Act.

“We’re all justifiably scared about domestic terrorism, but we don’t feel that gives the federal government the right to overturn traditional freedoms of expression and dissent,” said organizer Paul Copeland. “We expect and demand unanimous passage of these protections by the council.”

Calling themselves (with a nice touch of irony) the Ashland Patriots, the group asks the city council to pass a law that will bar police from:
• Handing over prisoners to feds without written assurances they won’t jail anyone without counsel.
• Spying and gathering info on political, religious or social view associations of people without suspecting they’re involved in an actual crime.
• Investigating based on profiling as to race, religion, ethnicity or national origin.
• Secret searches where the suspect has no advance notification.
• Helping with dossier-building (ala TIPS—Ashcroft’s Terrorism Information & Prevention System) or encouraging Ashlanders to spy on their neighbors.

Mayor Alan DeBoer argues that the anti-PATRIOT act will split the city, embroil citizens in a long, harsh debate and take time and energy away from important stuff like affordable housing, which seems about as likely to happen as a townful of men in black. But while no one can stop the G-men, no one can stop a citizenry that decides to wake up, read and learn and above all, vote and run for office.

Like senior Ashland council member Don Laws, a retired political science professor who’s been on the council for decades, who understands civil rights and has stopped many a scoundrel in his tracks. He calls the Patriot Act “abominable, ignorant, and probably unconstitutional” and says, hey, if you want to stop it, use the process. If you’re not going to become a precinct committee person and do voter registration and “get out the vote” and make trips to Salem to testify on bills, at least write and call your Congress folk.

Meetings are important, but being only with people who think just like us, and righteously spiting the feds, or any other group, creating another despised “them”—that’s subtle violence. It’s better to remember the lesson of Sulcha. By recognizing the humanity in all of us we can open our minds, and our hearts.

John Darling, M.S. is an Ashland counselor and writer. He writes for the Medford Mail Tribune, the Ashland Daily Tidings, S. Oregon Public Television and has been news director of KOBI-TV, journalism teacher at S. Oregon University, correspondent for The Oregonian and assistant to the Oregon Senate President.

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