I awoke this morning at 4am - which happens more and more these days - and while trying to drift off for a few more hours of slumber, began thinking about one thing and another.Suddenly the face of Barack Obama floated into my mind's eye. This may have been because since the moment he was declared victor last Tuesday night, I've been intending to add my own two cents to the millions of dollars worth of words that have been written in this country and around the world over this quite unbelievable and historic event.
My intention was to write a very pithy and profound analysis of what the election of this man means to America and to the world; about how his job now is to lead our foundering Ship of State away from the shoals of internal self-destruction and almost inevitable economic disintegration. But the pithiest thing I came up with was that our newly-elected President is perhaps the defining African-American. He is, in fact, perhaps one of the very few black people in this country - a country that horribly abused black people for so long in so many ways and through so many generations - that is pure African/American. His African heritage is indeed African, with his father having been born in Kenya, East Africa. His American heritage , on the other hand, is the most American of American, as his mother was a white woman born in America's fabled heartland, Kansas.
What Barack Obama represents, then, is a black man whose karmic heritage has never included the horrors of slavery, nor one that included the rape of young negro women by white men driven only by their own lust and savagery.
Perhaps, this utterly unique African/American can help cleanse our nation of those terrible sins because his heritage only includes the pride and strength of two strong and powerful people who found each other, and through love alone were able to ford the turbulent river of hatred and intolerance that a black man and white woman had to cross in America in the early 60's.
Perhaps the greatest thing these two people had going for them, besides their own unique strengths and love for each other, was that they had the good fortune of meeting in Hawaii; a place which has always been the true melting pot of America.
In an Amazon review of his wonderful book, Hawaii: A Novel, I found this, which truly does reflect author James Michener's love for his adopted state:
This book is the history of Hawaii. It's well arranged, first there are 17 pages of geology, then the Polynesian settlers get 100 pages. Next, we head forward a thousand years and the first Christian missionaries from the east coast arrive (and insisted on wearing wool clothing!) Then came the Chinese, and leprosy. Next the Japanese, and Pearl Harbor. Finally, the golden man emerges a mix of all these races and a good dash of Aloha spirit.I see Barack Obama, then, not as black nor white nor (a term I feel is quite ugly in sound and meaning) mulatto. No...I see Barack Obama as being a true representative of Michener's golden man and in a very real sense, perhaps the perfect alchemist to transmute the dross of fear, hatred and violence which are the base elements of our world today into a golden future where humanity will finally work together towards its own true evolution and the ultimate realization of what Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere.
As we all know, the horrors of September 11, 2001 created an amazing and quite wondrous global response of love, sympathy and phenomenal good will throughout the world. Then in an instant, it seemed, all of that was squandered by a few self-important people whose immense sense of fear and xenophobic hatred created an environment that became increasingly ruled by Jung's concept of The Shadow.
But there is no doubt that we witnessed a brand new global phenomenon emerge on November 5th, as spontaneous joy, hope and unbridled exuberance became manifested in people of every color throughout the world.
It seemed that everyone could take a bit of pride in our election, but especially those from the disparate areas that helped form the heritage of this golden man: the tiny hamlet in Ireland from where one of Obama's Irish ancestors hailed, to the ancient, primeval grasslands of Eastern Africa where proud Luo tribesmen now celebrate one of their own ascending to become the most powerful chief in the world.
While I was writing this post, however, I decided to put it aside as I celebrated the joyous online reunions of three old friends. After I finished that post, it was once again time to tell those who stumble upon this blog what this election meant to me.
However, while I was writing my post about reacquainting with my old friends, something quite remarkable and unexpected happened that made me question if I really wanted to continue this as I had intended.
What happened was that my younger brother, Rick, wrote an email to friends and family dated 9am the morning after the election. In it, he related what the election meant to him. But more than that, it was about how we must now become partners with President Obama and work to create the kind of society that was envisioned by those amazing visionaries who got together in Philadelphia on May 15, 1775 and over the next 12 years created the principles of the most revolutionary and evolutionary political confederation of humans in the history of mankind.
Then after reading his email, there seemed to be no real reason for me to write what I had planned to because Rick had said all I'd wanted to say and more.
These, then, are the few paragraphs I read the morning of November 5th, 2008 that seemed to encapsulate what I had intended to say so much better and more concisely than my usual prosaic wanderings.
Dear friends,
On this morning after the Barack Obama win, I was heading up to my studio to begin another work day as if nothing of real importance had just taken place, when my emotions took over. I realized -not without some previous awareness- that I had been suppressing any hope or excitement over the Obama candidacy throughout these many long months of Presidential campaigning. This -in part- was due to the overwhelming disappointments of the last two presidential elections, and also because I know that Obama, like anyone else, is just a person. I was also concerned with the fact that the last administration has left this country so torn and disabled that all failures to repair the problems (post haste) will be blamed -not on the administration in cause- but on the administration in office ... and four years later we might be blessed with a warmed over Bush administration in the guise of Sarah Palin.However, aside from any complacency I might feel about these next four years, another -stronger- feeling has bubbled to the surface. No matter what happens from here, no matter what President Obama might (or might not) accomplish, no matter what scandals might erupt; in this moment right now I feel proud -again- to be an American. I have not felt that for some time, and I am going to indulge in it for a little while. Not only have we shown each other and the world that as a society we really can overcome hundreds of years of civil strife and racism (no: racism is not dead, but it really has officially been relegated to the most primitive part of our societal brain), but we have also spoken loud and clear that we really do want someone with obvious intelligence, self-control, and vision (and not just someone we feel comfortable to drink and yip with) to lead this country into an uncertain future.
President Obama may not have all the answers to our most troubling problems, but it seems that he has the intelligence and vision and -hopefully- the will to search for and implement ideas to help us get there. Help us get there. Barack Obama's job starts in a couple months ... ours starts now. If we really think we have any chance of accomplishing some of the work that needs to be done now, we really need to be ready to participate ... in the same way that many worked to get him there ... which I think means -first and foremost- keeping our elected officials accountable and on the right track by becoming involved ourselves in whatever way we can. If nothing else by being informed and contacting our government representatives whenever an issue we care about arises. Maybe to let go of some of our smaller, more self-interested concerns right now, and focus on community and the larger environmental problems that possibly affect us more deeply and crucially. Are we still -as a society- able to create the equivalent of a moon project or Manhattan project for something that will really make a difference -not necessarily right now- but in the future? Can we build an alternative energy infrastructure and get off foreign oil in the next ten years, for instance? Can we create jobs with living wages, re-vitalize a middle class in America, and reduce poverty and destitution? Have we finally learned that unfettered consumerism may not be the noblest form of Americana, and does have terrible repercussions? Can we offer health care to all Americans as a right and not just a ruse? Can we repair our broken relationship with the rest of the world? Can we find innovative ways to work with all the world citizens in finding solutions to world problems? Can we do all this and strengthen our economy as well? Can we do it without continuing to damage the environment and our health? These are the dreams that Obama was expounding during his presidential race, and must be the dreams that we who voted for him hold on some level. Do we believe it? Do I believe it?
Well, I guess I am going to allow myself to be hopeful about it today. I know it means I have to get over my complacency and lethargy and do something about it, but what the hell ... it feels good to be excited again.
As Rick's wonderful words sink in, I must take some time here to relate a little about him. I know that he will not be thrilled that I do this because he is a very private man. Yet, his life has been filled with more adventure, drama and change than any three lives I know.
As the older brother - the oldest of seven, actually - I spent a great deal of time tormenting Rick while we were kids. And to be honest, tormenting is too mild a word for some of the crueler aspects of sibling rivalry I fomented on him.
For reasons still hidden in the deepest recesses of my psyche, I was an angry child as early as I can remember, and Rick became my whipping boy for a long time. Until, in fact, we both ventured off - one summer when I was seventeen and he was sixteen - to become lumberjacks in the great verdant forests of the Wisconsin Northwoods.
But we soon discovered that the lumber industry wasn't too eager to hire a couple of city kids from Iowa with no experience to help fell old growth trees for the paper industry. We did, however, find work as farmhands with a 900-head dairy corporation just outside of the resort town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. So for three months we labored in the fields driving tractors, baling hay and filling barns with those heavy bales. Sadly, we never had the energy, after our long days, to enjoy the fruits of our labor in pursuit of the sensual pleasures promised by all those nubile, young Chicago area girls who flock to Lake Geneva's sandy beaches every summer.
What that summer meant to the relationship between my brother and I, however, was that Rick went from a rather frail and skinny 135 lb kid to a well-muscled 165 lb man, and never again would I be able to bully my "bean-pole" of a brother. Although, truth be told, Rick and I bonded a lot that summer. We were more friends than brothers when we returned home just in time for school. And over the years, that friendship and brotherhood has developed into a great mutual love and respect for each other's talents and personalities.
Somewhere in the mid '70's, I believe, I began searching for something other than the dead-end jobs I was hopping between after leaving college without my degree.
I became very impressed with the book Autobiography of a Yogi (click here for full online version) and the life of Paramahansa Yogananda. So I began looking into moving with my wife to Ananda Village, a Hindu community located in California's Sierra foothills and begun by Yogananda's closest disciple.
But before that came to pass, my wife became pregnant with our first child and we put the idea of moving onto the back burner until the new baby was born. Well, that notion eventually disappeared from the stove top altogether, but by then Rick became enticed by the same idea of moving to a community of idealistic and spiritually-minded individuals like himself. So he was the one who would move to Nevada City and live as a Hindu disciple of Yogananda for a couple of years.
That, however, was only the first of his unconventional lifestyle changes.
When he left Ananda - and like many other seekers of freedom and Truth - he ventured a few hundred miles west to the Golden Gate City of San Francisco; where for centuries dreamers, vagabonds, losers, saints and sinners have all found a place of refuge filled with people whose wonderfully non-judgmental attitudes have made The City by the Bay a creative and cultural mecca for millions - and the continuing object of derision by the more narrow-minded and hateful of our brethren.
Rick hadn't ceased searching, however. Instead, he wanted to experience a different kind of spiritual community, and in the late 70's there was one group of people who had an uncanny ability to find and approach these bright, idealistic and questioning souls who had migrated to the Bay Area.
This group consisted of members of perhaps the most notorious cult in America: The Unification Church, which was founded and is still led by a man who considers himself (as do his millions of followers) the 2nd coming of Christ: the new Messiah. This man is 88-year old Korean billionaire Sun Myung Moon, who claims that he is here on earth to do nothing less than fulfill Jesus' unfinished mission.
Well, it didn't take long for these folks to zero in on Rick, and the next thing his family knew, he was living in a big home in San Francisco with a number of other Moonies - which was what the members of the Church were non-affectionately known as by the heathens outside the Church.
As an aside, after my wife and I moved to the Bay Area in 1975, we were driving around looking for work, and while parked in front of a hospital in San Francisco she had applied to, we were approached by a very friendly couple of young people who were about our age. They engaged us in conversation by noting our license plates, which were still from our home of Wisconsin.
This attractive young man and woman were very warm and welcoming, and knowing that we were new to the area, invited us to a place - a farm, they told us - not far north of San Francisco where we could meet some of their friends and have dinner with them.
Now it could have been just my general, somewhat anti-social tendencies, but for me, all sorts of bells and alarms were going off. I had only the most cursory knowledge of cults at that point (I would learn much more later), but something made me wary of their sugar-coated friendliness.
So while my wife, I'm sure, would have liked to have had a nice supper with people other than me by that point, I begged off.
Still, they kept at us, and they were very good! They kept saying how they knew exactly what it was like to be new young people in a big, impersonal city like San Francisco and that one good meal with good people would be a fun and friendly experience for both of us.
Finally, as is my habit when I feel like I'm getting backed into a corner, my hackles were raised and I had to get bit nasty to finally get rid of them. (Car salesman have met this darker side of my personality many times!)
Driving back to our new place in Berkeley after that, my wife was a little upset with my stubbornness. But I told her that there was just something about them that turned me off.
I said to her at that point, "I think that they were Moonies, and there's no way I want to get mixed up with those wackos!"
I was really only speculating about who they were, but when I talked to my brother much later about this incident, he confirmed that, yes, this was the first step in recruiting members into the Moonies, and that The Farm was indeed a Moonie outpost where the first level of love-bombing began the process of psychological "brainwashing" or programming.
So while my wife and I had dodged the bullet directed at us, Rick had been hit directly in the heart and for the next few years became a loyal foot soldier of the cult: selling flowers on street corners and doing his own recruiting of new members.
Eventually, his fortunes within the Church began to rise and he was given the responsibility of starting branches of the Church's Collegiate Association for the Research of the Principle (CARP) at a number of colleges and universities across the country. One of his duties during this time was to debate everyone from religious leaders to college professors over the relative merits of Moon's theology vs Christianity, atheism or whatever. Rick would take on all comers.
I wish I'd had the opportunity to see him in action in those days. Knowing him as a child and long after he'd left the Church, it is hard to believe that he would ever have been assertive enough to intellectually do battle with such able adversaries. I'm sure I would have had very mixed feelings: proud on the one hand, yet saddened that he was spending so much of his time and abilities on such a megalomanic fraud and all-around schmuck as Reverend Moon.
In the course of Rick's years in the organization, my mother became very active in the anti-cult movement. And more than once, she flew out to San Francisco to try to reason with Rick about his strange new beliefs.
She'd done a lot of research about Moon by then and felt that she had a lot of ammunition that Rick would respond to if he would only hear it. But getting him alone to confront him with this information was difficult at best, as the Church was extremely protective of its members; especially when they were to meet with the "devils" they once called their families. The Unification Church, you must understand, was their family now and their former families were a dangerous source of evil and misinformation which could lead to the ultimte destruction of their eternal souls.
By then, however, Rick was secure enough in his new belief system to insist to his "protectors" that he would not be influenced by anything this woman would tell him. So they let him meet her alone in a park. Yet my mother noticed during their conversation that just a short distance away was a van with people in it ready to rescue Rick from the clutches of this evil slanderer if they felt he was weakening in his resolve.
Well, he didn't do this, and while he was pleasant enough to my mother, he gently told her that he must be about Father's (Moon's) work and that he appreciated her concern for him, but that she should not worry. He then asked her not to contact him again in the future. They had had their last meeting.
With that statement, he was, in fact, divorcing his birth family.
Heartbroken, my mother returned to her life in Wisconsin. But now it was as if her second son had died. She truly wondered if she would ever see him again.
Then, in June, 1981, my father passed away after a long, slow decline in his health due to diabetes. Someone in my family contacted Rick, who by that time had been doing the college recruitment thing for awhile. When he told his associates in the Church that he was going to go to his "former" father's funeral, his status had become one of absolute trust, so he was free to go to the funeral without any kind of supervision or apparent concern.
This, of course, was something we'd all hoped for. Now, finally, we'd have the chance to sit down with him and confront his crazy new beliefs. But after so many years with the organization, we wondered if he was too far gone, too brainwashed, to hear us.
It was a wonderful and bittersweet reunion. Rick, at times, seemed like his old self. The family grieved and reminisced together. We caught up on what we were doing in our lives and Rick was proud of what he was accomplishing on the college campuses.
Yet as soon as we began to say anything whatsoever against Moon or his beliefs, he closed up. He told us that if we wanted to have any kind of continuing relationship with him, we were never to question his belief system.
Still, when those sad days were over and done with, we felt that just our re-connection would be good in the long run and we never gave up hope that he would one day see how the right-wing, ultra-conservative, faux-Christian, narrow-minded and bigoted religiosity espoused by Moon was the antithesis of everything Rick had once believed. We could only hope that the Rick we'd once known would one day re-emerge.
The next event that shocked our family was a year later when Rick contacted us and told us that he had just been married.
"What!", was our common response; none of us quite believing the words.
He told us that he had been married the previous week in New York City at Madison Square Garden along with 2200 other couples Reverend Moon had joined together for the purpose of creating many thousands of new mini-Moonies with which to create his new religious world order."And what about your new wife", we asked?
He told us that she was Korean and that he'd only met her the morning of the wedding. As far as he knew, he said, he wouldn't see her again for quite awhile, since he had work to do on the campuses of America, while she had already returned to Korea to continue her own work in the Church.
Sadly for Rick - at least it would have been for me since I've always found Asian women quite attractive and alluring - there was no time for even Moon-approved connubial bliss. As I recall, all brides in these massive Moonie weddings - and they still take place - were and are Asian. This is part of Moon's own eugenics movement, since he believes the Asian race to be far superior to all others on earth.
The incredible and happy ending to this low period in our family's history occurred some time after the wedding, Rick suddenly resurfaced in our lives as a free man; free physically and free psychologically from the restraints he'd lived under for so many years.
This event was so unusual, in fact, that for weeks Rick experienced his own 15 minutes of fame. During this heady period, he appeared in People magazine; on the Phil Donahue Show, on the Today Show and was interviewed in various other magazines and media.
The reason for all this attention was that no one, it appeared, had ever just walked away from the Moonie organization before; at least not as publicly. And everyone wanted to know just how and why he did it.
Then, after that brief period of media madness was over, Rick decided that he had a different, very important job to do, and that was to help others who'd been programmed like himself to have the chance to have their own beliefs challenged and to escape their psychological chains.
To this end, he spent the next few years as a deprogrammer: a controversial practice that got a number of these people into legal hot water as it involved basically kidnapping an adult and holding him or her in a locked room for some time as he or she was made to confront ideas and beliefs that had been instilled into them under the cults' sophisticated methods of psychological duress.
In this role, Rick not only dealt with people who'd been psychologically assaulted by the Unification Church, but also by many other cults, and even toward the end, he helped an increasing number of Fundamentalist Christians escape their psychological chains as well, because at the level at which all these groups operate, freedom of thought and ideas are anathema and a danger to the organization itself.
I believe that Rick, like me, believed by then that freedom of thought is the greatest gift of the Divine. It is what makes us all humans with the obligation to evolve to the highest level of spiritual attainment possible.
And it is only through the freedom to discover Truth that our beliefs merge with that Truth. At that point, faith becomes not just a system of beliefs, but is transformed into a spiritual reality that is pointed toward the eternal bliss that is our Divine birthright.
After a number of years doing that work, Rick longed to return to a kind of simple, idealistic, but less autocratic, community lifestyle he'd known in the past. He discovered just such a community nestled in a lovely valley in the beautiful Kickapoo Valley region of western Wisconsin's Driftless Area.
Since then, he has returned to his first love: being an artist. While he was a wonderful painter in his youth, as an adult he turned to photography and for many years, he has been selling his beautiful work each summer at art shows and festivals throughout the Midwest. Along the way, he has received much acclaim and many honors for his work; which depict the sublime, majestic and even mystical qualities of the natural world.
I am, and have been, quite in awe of this man over the years for his many talents. And if truth be known, I'm now in awe - and just a little jealous - of his newfound ability to paint with words.
In a goodnatured jibe to what he wrote above, I simply said this in an email reply to him:
DAMN YOU!! You’re already an incredible artist. What the fuck are you doing in my world???I realize I had nothing really to do with how he grew and developed into the quite remarkable man he is today, but I do take a warm brotherly pride in Rick, just as I take pride in my other five brothers and sisters. They all have unique gifts and I am filled with love and awe for each of them.
Kudos, bro!
Being part of a large family can be trying at times and can limit many of the material benefits that smaller families can get more easily, but as I get older - as we get older - we've found that what we've all experienced from the day we were born has created bonds of love and support that no amount of money can buy.
As adults, our lives have taken us all in very different directions and to different parts of our state. But it was due to the wonderful feminine spirits of our sisters that, as we aged, there became an increasing need to re-connect with each other and to re-establish those familial bonds that started our journey of becoming the people we would eventually become.
So at least once a year, for the past decade or so, we've gotten together for a special long weekend we call our Sibling Weekend. Without spouses or children present, this get-together has been a place to laugh, to cry, to feel joy and to share with each other the sorrows that our lives have presented to each of us. It is a place we can all truly let our hair down (those of us who have any hair left, that is) and be ourselves; safe in the knowledge that we all shared an amazing experience growing up together with parents who themselves were quite remarkable people, yet troubled in their own ways.
Well, I've gone quite far afield from my intended topic for this post, but that is how life works, isn't it? From the global to the most personal, life is a continuous ebb and flow of ideas and emotions. It is the manifestation of the yin and yang and all we can hope for, it seems, is that all that is important, from the hopes and aspirations of our new President to those of myself, my brother, Rick, and our other brothers and sisters are being guided by Spirit to move toward the Divine that is inside us all.
I know that the Divine is inside all of us. I know it because I know my brothers and sisters and have experienced their love as a most important part of my life.
Thank you all for sharing your Selves with me in this incarnation, guys!
Just in case you were wondering, this is Rick...on a good day!