Only Love Can Conquer Hate

I have been thinking a lot lately about the potential political implications of a philosophy of love. Over the past few months I had found myself so consistently angry about the state of affairs in the world, I felt I needed to do something to counteract the resentment and bitterness that was growing inside me. To that end, I began meditating again after a long hiatus, and I added a component of lovingkindness to my daily practice.

At first I found it painfully difficult to wish my enemies well. It felt fraudulent to ask for happiness and peace for Dick Cheney, or that no harm befall the Koch brothers. But as I continued on this path, very much in “fake it ‘til you make it” mode, it started to make sense to me that if these men were at peace and were deeply happy, they would not feel the need to bomb other countries and rob them of their resources, or gather to themselves all the riches of the world while actively seeking to impoverish others.

I know this mode of thought sounds incredibly naïve. It reminds me of a time during a Nietzsche seminar in graduate school when I noted that, in his laser-like focus on power and power relationships, Nietzsche seemed to be leaving out an examination of love as a force that moves us, as a force for change. The professor sort of smiled and did the verbal equivalent of patting me on the head, and as the only woman in the room, you can bet that I didn’t bring up the question of love again.

But it seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that a singular focus on power and how to exercise power over others is an impoverished way to live, for everyone involved. And that the politics of love is a truly revolutionary politics that can have long-term impact in ways power-politics simply cannot.

A politics based on love doesn’t doesn’t mean sitting around holding hands, singing “Kumbaya” while the tanks roll. It means staking out a moral and political position based on commonality and justice and an open heart, one based on solidarity and not dominance. We have seen this approach effect real and lasting change in the material conditions of people’s lives without the blowback of “bomb your enemies back to the stone-age.”

Ghandi saying “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” was revolutionary, and borne out of a philosophy of love. I can’t but feel that Martin Luther King, Jr. was right when he said, “through violence, you may murder the hater, but you do not murder the hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

It is hard work to love your enemy. It is a profoundly radical act. It is the only hope we have for a just and peaceful world.

99 More Just Like Her

Charlie Pierce has written a great profile of Sen. Elizabeth Warren. It's a long read, but worth it, because it leaves you feeling hopeful. She leaves you feeling hopeful, because she's a fighter who wins. One of our employees, a guy in his late 20s who is smart and into politics, says to me every time Warren's name comes up, "I want to marry her and have her kids." I know how he feels.

ELIZABETH WARREN IS THE TEACHER 

She has come to remind us who we are, or at least who we once were. She is the only one warning that conditions in the financial sector are in some ways worse now than before the collapse of 2008. Her message has gained her many powerful enemies. And it has a lot of people very eager for Elizabeth Warren to run for president.

A Clean Getaway

The other day I had a post about Matt Tiabbi's new book, The Divide, which looks at the ways economic inequality translates into unequal justice being meted out to the poor and the wealthy. For another example of this disturbing phenomenon, check out Catherine Rampell's column in The Washington Post on wage-theft being practiced by some of the country's largest corporations against their low-wage workers.

Over the past year, low-wage workers and their supporters have protested, struck and polemicized for a raise of some kind, a proposition that has support from the White House and most Americans, if not Republican politicians. But low-wage workers face an even more upsetting affliction that both parties should feel comfortable condemning: Employers are stealing from their employees, often with impunity.

“Wage theft” is an old problem. It can take many forms, including paying less than the minimum hourly wage, working employees off the clock, not paying required overtime rates and shifting hours into the next pay period so that overtime isn’t incurred. Unfortunately, reliable data on the magnitude of the problem are scarce. Workers can be afraid to report the theft for fear of losing their jobs altogether, especially in today’s terrible economy, and many don’t know their rights. Often workers don’t even realize their pay is being skimmed.

It's the same issue with the bankster thieves: white-collar criminals can steal with impunity, while the guy who commits a smash-and-grab goes to jail behind it. Unless and until people in positions of power in corporations that break the law are forced to do time rather than pay meaningless financial penalties, nothing will change. Fines for defrauding customers, or polluting waterways, or laundering money for terrorists and drug cartels are just the cost of doing business for these guys. They don't pay for their illegal acts, we do, and I for one am sick of it.

Native Plants I Love

Fothergilla major (common name: witch-alder)

Fothergilla is a deciduous shrub native to the southeastern U.S. As its common name suggests, it is a relative of our native witch-hazel. I love this plant because there is nothing else like it, with its bottlebrush-like, white flowers that bloom in April here in the Piedmont of N.C.

Close up of flowers taken this morning

Witch-alder can be planted in sun or part shade and is very low maintenance. We use them as  foundation shrubs in front of some evergreen Japanese hollies (ilex crenata) put in by the previous homeowners. The dark green of the hollies creates a great backdrop for the Fothergilla's white flowers and striking fall foliage. The flowers also have a lovely honey-like scent, which is nice to have by the front entrance.

Fall foliage adds another season of interest

The genus is named for John Fothergill, an 18th century Quaker physician from Essex, England who was an early collector of American plants.

Relatively Recently Read

The Wheel on the School is a book I have loved ever since it was read to me as a child. I have read it many times since then, completely taken in by its quiet story and the the way DeJong narrates the complex lives of children. The brushed ink drawings by Maurice Sendak also add to the book's charm.

My older son has reread The Wheel on the School a number of times, and I just read it with my younger son, who seems to be another convert. It is funny to me that this book, set in an era before computers and cars, about some children in a Dutch fishing village trying to find a wheel to put on their school to attract a pair of nesting storks, should hold their attention like it does. But I'm glad they feel moved by this story about the importance of imagination and courage and community. I'm glad we can share a little visit to this world with each other.

Eat the Rich

We are well and truly rogered:

Looking at 1,779 national policy outcomes in the United States over a period of over twenty years, Gilens and Page found that:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.

The differences between the influence of average people and moneyed elites on the policy-making process were not small, either. Bartels says that the preferences of economic elites (defined here as citizens at the 90th percentile or above of the income distribution) were fifteen times as important in affecting the government policies that were enacted on the national level.

The same pattern held for interest groups. “Mass-based interest groups,” says Bartels, mattered “only about half as much as business interest groups.” As the authors note, their findings reflect not only “the ability of actors to shape policy outcomes on contested issues” but also “their ability to shape the agenda that policy makers consider.” In other words, the wealthy have massive influence on which issues policymakers will even take into consideration in the first place. The power to rule an issue off the nation’s political agenda altogether may be the greatest political power of all.

How bad is it going to have to get before this dynamic changes? Without the looming specter of Communism hanging over the heads of the ultra-rich in the 1930s, the New Deal would never have come into being. What on earth is there today to force the .1% in this country to more evenly distribute the wealth created by all of us?

Black and Green

I have really enjoyed reading Tom Levinson's posts at the Balloon Juice blog, and he recently posted a really insightful piece at The Atlantic illustrating the ways in which various decisions by the Roberts court have strengthened institutional racism. Levinson is a science writer and educator by trade, but he  applies his thoughtfulness and intellect to a good many subjects.

Levinson's fellow writer at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates, has been doing amazing work on race and racism (among other topics), and I feel like I am getting a much-needed education reading the conversations over there. It's not so much that the facts are new to me, but more that I didn't make enough of an effort to understand the real history of white supremacy in America, and the way that white privilege permeates everything. Once the scales fall away, as it were, the next question must be what do we white people do to destroy this system that gives us such privilege? If you believe at all in a just society, that question is imperative.

Getting rid of lawmakers and a judiciary that reify white power would be a good place to begin:

Once you start seeing American history through the corrective lens created by the generations of scholars and researchers on whose work Coates reports, then it becomes possible—necessary, really—to read current events in a new light. Take, for example, the McCutcheon decision that continued the Roberts Court program of gutting campaign-finance laws. 

The conventional—and correct, as far as it goes—view of the outcome, enabling wealthy donors to contribute to as many candidates as they choose, is that this further tilts the political playing field towards the richest among us at the expense of every American voter. See noted analyst Jon Stewart for a succinct presentation of this view. 

But that first-order take on this latest from the Supreme Court's right wing misses a crucial dimension. It isn't just rich folks who benefit from the Roberts Court's view that money equals speech. Those who gain possess other key identifiers. 

One guess as to what those other identifiers might be.  The piece is a devastating indictment of the Roberts Court.