This morning’s author will be speaking in my local community and working with us in the formation of CommUNITY. The following is reposted from his website.

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How Shall We Live?

Robert Rabbin

“Everything that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself.”  –William Blake

I experienced my first epiphany when I was eleven years old. It was a spontaneous realization that a conscious presence exists within all things. It was my first inkling that we all belong to this presence, that we are all alive and aware because of its power. Since then, I’ve experienced countless other epiphanies in which my sense of individuality was dissolved into this infinitely greater presence, into a reality that is greater than, and yet encompasses, the mind and the senses, a reality that is greater than, and yet encompasses, the phenomenal world.

I could try to recount some of these experiences, but the truth is that the experiences themselves have faded from their original color, like old photographs. But there is something of which I am now constantly aware, whose colors remain bright and vivid, as though each moment is a new picture, freshly developed, still wet to the touch. So, I will speak to you of these bright colors and vivid feelings in which I am immersed, for these are the living legacy of countless encounters with what is most truly beyond words. Ah, yes, the paradox! Real and unreal, transcendence and immanence, spirit and matter, mind and heart, time and eternity, space and emptiness, action and inaction! Beyond all of these polarities is the wisdom beyond words. Nonetheless, let us speak as best we can.

We are each expressions of a fundamental reality, an essence that some call God, some spirit, some consciousness, some love. It doesn’t matter what you call it. It doesn’t care. It is beyond names. But it is real, and thus we all belong to the same family. My blood is the same as yours, my heart is the same as yours, my body is the same as yours. We seem to stand apart from each other, but our essence is one. We only seem to be different, but we are all parts of a whole. Naturally, whatever any one part does touches and affects the whole. If we think that we do not effect the whole, we are wrong. We can say that whatever we do to ourselves, we do to each other: each action is a stone thrown into the pond of our common existence. Within minutes, or hours, or days we will feel the ripples of our actions wash over everything. This is why we cannot war our way to peace, because the killing keeps coming back. We have to wage peace, not war. And then peace will keep coming back.

Not only do we belong as brother and sister to other human beings, but we belong as brother and sister to all living things. We are not meant to have dominion over other creatures or the Earth, though we behave as though we are. This wrong thinking is based on the idea of separation, of being independent from the whole. This wrong thinking leads us to believe we are entitled to do anything we please, to usurp Nature for our own purposes. We are not entitled to do as we please. We must live within the law of universal truth, within the heart where we are all brothers and sisters under one roof, in one house, with one father and mother.

The crux of wisdom is the experience of Oneness. This is not an idea or a theory or an ideal. It is the most salient fact of the mystical experience and it is universally true. We each exist as expressions of the same fundamental reality. We are each unique expressions, yes, but of the same essence. This is both spiritually true and practically true: whatever we do to another, we do to ourselves. Every thought, every word, every slight touch of our hand sends energetic impulses racing outward on the trillions of strands of connective tissue that enfolds us all in the One. To believe otherwise is the source of all suffering and violence and pollution on this Earth.

It is not just the belief in separation that creates problems. Beliefs–in general–separate us from the whole of existence and lock us into the prison of our thoughts. Thoughts, beliefs, concepts–these are tools to navigate the limited, physical plane of reality. They are not in any way capable of understanding the limitless truth, which must be felt with the heart. We cannot think our way through life, we have to love our way through life. The biggest problem in the world today is that people have come to believe that what they think is what is real. This is wrong. Reality–truth–lies between thoughts, behind beliefs, before concepts. Truth is revealed in silence, and silence restores our connection to the whole. This is where my humility comes from: silence. Silence reveals that what we think is not what’s real, it is what hides reality. We must listen to Silence.

Silence is where our conscience is born, where we rediscover that love is our essence, and where we remember that true happiness lies not in personal fulfillment, but in service to others, and thus to our true Self, the Self in which all exist as One, in which all life is our life. Silence is where the arguments and arrogance of egocentric living are dissolved as salt into the sea of wisdom.

When we come to the end of our life, we are likely to have misgivings. This is because the purpose of life is to realize, consciously, that we are the embodiments of love; and many of us have not sought to realize this. When we realize that we are a manifestation and embodiment of love, we become full and complete from the inside. All of our materialistic pursuits are called into question, and we find that we need far less than we might have thought. We realize we don’t have to live in a state of constant becoming and acquiring. Within each moment we find peace and deep contentment, which are inherent in our essential being.

With peace and deep contentment filling us from within each moment, we do not need to manipulate external circumstances to attain happiness. We do not have to tear at the fabric of life. We do not have to be greedy. We do not have to be afraid we will not have enough, or be enough, or do enough. We can live simply. We can simply live. Once we recognize who we are–underneath all the thoughts, ideas, and beliefs we hold about who we are–this will happen naturally.

With peace and contentment filling us from within, we open without effort to the surrounding beauty. We have created a lot of ugliness to be sure, but underneath that is the natural beauty of life itself. Life is so beautiful. Everything is alive! The same conscious presence that lives within you lives equally within all. Is it not amazing to feel the living spirit in this way? You feel yourself in others. You feel yourself in all that exists. Feeling this, how can you harm others? How can you not feel the fear, or suffering, or despair of others? How can you throw ugliness onto beauty? We cannot do these things anymore.

Feeling is the key. Feelings and emotions are not the same. Emotions are mind states like jealousy, anger, and fear. Emotions are sponsored by thoughts. Feelings are sponsored by the heart and are signs of wisdom: love, awe, joy, wonder, beauty, connectedness. Feelings are the consciousness of the heart. The heart feels, the mind does not. The heart is alive, the mind is inert. The heart experiences, the mind conceptualizes. The heart joins, the mind separates. This is why we must emphasize heart, not mind. If we do not live from our heart, we will be unable to account for our own actions, because all our thoughts will be in the way. We will be victims of our own thinking, looking elsewhere for the one “who did us in.” It is no one but us.

Our thoughts are good servants, but terrible masters. Our thinking must reflect the wisdom of our heart. We cannot allow the mind and its constant stream of thoughts, beliefs, and concepts to persuade us that the heart is not real, or true, or useful. It is indeed the only thing that is. We have forgotten this, and now we must remember.

Why must we remember? Because of this:

Too many children are suffering.
Too many people are being murdered.
Too many species are being hunted to extinction.
Too many lakes and rivers, once pure, are now polluted and dead.
Too many forests, once pristine, are now cut and crying.
Too many people are hungry and afraid.
Too many people are tortured, broken into pieces and discarded like trash.
Too many mothers are crying for want of milk and bread.
Too many poor people are scavenging for food.
Too many are sick and dying from neglect.
Too many elders are alone and forgotten.
Too many orphans are living without love.

We are all born as embodiments of love. We are all born with this knowledge; it is not lost, only ignored; not forgotten, only disregarded. What we once knew can be known again, right now. We have only to enter our heart to remember who we are.

I entered my heart, and I remembered what I once knew. I remembered light coming from everywhere. I remembered peace coming from everywhere. And love, such love, the kind of love that dissolves all fear and separation and anger. The kind of love that fills us with forgiveness and peace and compassion.

What else? Just this: Every human being wants to touch and taste the same happiness, the same goodness. And so we are all joined together, we are all as one in our desire for happiness and wholeness and love. This is ours, from the beginning. This is what I remember; this is what I know; this is what my heart teaches me: all things are sacred; do not harm or kill others; do not pollute natural beauty.

Love created this universe and it is the nourishing nectar of all creation. Love is heart and pulse, yes; but love is tendon, too, in that it binds all existence together into one body. I am one who has remembered that love is the power of creation itself, love is the world, love is the law to which we must all surrender. All of creation comes from love, is sustained by love, and returns to love.

As the embodiments of love, how shall we live? What shall we do and what shall we not do? How shall we live? How shall we demonstrate what we know, deep in our heart? How are we to make real in this world what moves silently within us all? It is not enough to answer Who am I? That is only half the equation of wisdom. The other half is to answer, honestly, How shall I live?

It is this second question that brings us from the mountaintop of inner realization to the valley of daily living. Here, in the valley of daily living, is where our realization is polished and tested.

© 2004/Robert Rabbin/All rights reserved

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Robert Rabbin is a writer, speaker, and “solution architect” whose passion for radically engaged spiritual wisdom is expressed in his lectures, workshops, and column of social commentary. MORE

Robert Rabbin will be speaking in Monterey, California to the local IONS group on July 19th at 7:00 PM. His talk is open to the public.

IONS-Insight into Action: Merging Spirit with Political Activism

Monday July 19, 2004
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm 
 
Event Location: Monterey Beach Resort , Pts. Cabrillo Room, 4th Floor
Street: Hwy 1at (218) Seaside/Del Rey Oaks Exit – on the Beach
City, State, Zip: Monterey, CA 93940
Phone: Anne Auburn 831-659-1424

Notes: Robert Rabbin, writer, speaker, and spiritual activist (http://www.robrabbin.com) will lead our first in-depth theme program on Spiritual Activism. This theme of expanding our spiritual lives to include personal responsibility for the state of the world will be developed over the next three months of meetings, all of which Robert will facilitate. This new format will include active participation by all attendees in dialogue, reflection, and the creation of specific projects we’ll initiate by way of turning “insight into action.” Suggested donation $5.00 and bring a friend.

My daughter saw Fahrenheit 911 last night. She said it changed her understanding of our world. The following article was fowarded by Ecopilgrim.

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The Next Evolutionary Hurdle

John Kaminski

Human history reveals a long tradition of killing the messenger who brings bad news, no matter how real that news might be. Pray with me for a moment that this doesn’t happen to the bearer of this all-too-obvious slice of reality.

I am neither a believer in Charles Darwin’s observation that humans gradually evolved from hairy hominids who climbed down from trees and started minting shekels, nor do I believe that some very large dude with a big white beard plunked down a hairless white male in a lush garden and then snatched one of his ribs to create his eternally cantankerous main squeeze.

Nor do I believe the species homo sapiens was placed here by extraterrestrial zoologists who tinkered with indigenous gorillas for commercial purposes and came up with the drecks in yarmulkes you see today patrolling the jewelry district in scummy mid-town Manhattan.

I do believe the spark of life that aspires to comfort and contentment in all species has always sought the best deal it could find under any circumstances, ever since blue green algae in a world swathed in methane congealed on the rocky shore of the primordial sea and farted out a waste substance that just happened to be conducive to the formation of both plant and animal life. You see, when blue green algae went to the bathroom all those countless eons ago, what they pooped out was oxygen. The rest is, as they say, history.

Yet, all life at its fundamental level is electric. The spark. All life has it. Back when the world was clothed in methane gas, blue green algae never died. They just kept growing. But there was no sex, as we understand that freighted concept now. Life in the world was truly one, an aggregation whose excretions changed the very nature of life, which, as it diversified and thrived in an oxygen-rich soup, brought both sex and death. The price of life became finitude, or death. Animals and plants reproduced, and then they died. But their progeny lived on.

This is where the idea that the biosphere, which possesses its own innate, unfathomable intelligence, actually helped life survive. Heck, they are one in the same, the earth that nurtures us and the beings that thrive upon that nurturing, and frolic gratefully during that brief time they have in the sunshine. In our comfortable condos and bosomy bordellos, this is something most of us have forgotten: that we are dependent on dirt to stay alive.

We’ve convinced ourselves in this so-called modern world that we live and survive on religion and politics, on money and entertainment, but really we survive because we are connected to an environment that nurtures and sustains us, and you can talk all you want about your soul, but you wouldn’t be here without the earth and the sun. The earth gives us shelter and nourishment, and the sun provides the spark that keeps everything alive. Without the sun, we would be very cold toast.

It should come as no surprise that the earliest human religions worshipped the sun, because early humans recognized the obviousness that there would be no life without the sun. They eventually gave it names like Ra or Mithra but it was still the sun they were talking about.

Just for a second, think about the sun. Think about how you wouldn’t be alive without it. Think about how everything you do depends on the sun shining.

So in this realization, the sun became a god. People have always been grateful for their good and joyous lives. It became both a practical matter and a sign of legitimate respect for us to thank the sun for our beautiful lives. For our ability to procreate! Yippie! As the years passed and more people began living together – for in community there is both ease of living and joy of life – the thanks we give for our beautiful lives was codified. The Sun God was worshipped in a ritual way.

Understand something right now about human perception. We anthropomorphize everything. As humans, we perceive things as humans, and it makes it easier to understand natural physical processes by anthropomorphizing them, or giving them human characteristics to better understand them. Perceiving natural processes as human interactions is what made the stars be given names – Orion the Hunter forever chasing the Seven Sisters across the sky, that sort of thing.

And it’s how the Sun became a god in our minds. Yet, as more time passed, and the cult of the sun worship became more of a big business religion, priests, as they will do, began to attribute aspects of human behavior to the sun, and other inanimate objects of worship – springs were always big, because water is essential; mountains were given names and became local personalities. Anthropomorphization, for purposes of worship and primitive understanding.

Somewhere around the time of Akhenaton, a maverick Egyptian pharoah, and Moses, the mythical founder of the Jewish religion, the sun had been completely anthropomorphized into a person, and the pharaoh became the embodiment of the sun on earth. Though he was only a king, he assumed the role of God in people’s minds. And religion has been completely warped ever since. Misdirected.

As Egypt began to molder after two thousand years of happy preeminence, the Jews escaped into a region filled with all these gods named after natural processes or landmarks: Enlil the storm god, Enki the God of water, Marduk the prodigal son, hundreds of localized regional deities whose pedigree was relevant only to the local tribe which had named him, or her. Wars between tribes became wars between gods. The gods of conquered tribes disappeared into the mist of history. The victorious gods lived on.

It was in this environment that the Judeo-Christian deity we have come to know as Jehovah or Yahweh developed into a bloodthirsty warmonger, really a god of hatred and murderous xenophobia. One needs only to casually leaf through the pages of Leviticus and Deuteronomy in what is now known as the Old Testament to realize this. History is written by the victors, as it was in the case of Yahweh some 2,000 years ago, and it involved a lot of blood. And theft. Righteous theft.

Perhaps there has always been bloodshed between groups of people, but the Old Testament codified it, sanctified it, and made murder and conquest by large groups of people the dominant form of human expression. The definition of a human is one who makes war and kills and destroys for no good reason.

Now, in the human zeal to anthropomorphize essentially inanimate objects and processes in order to better understand them, the concept of the Sun God morphed into a more human projection. In Egypt, first the Sun God became pharoah – or actually, vice versa – and later on in Palestine (at least as history records these events from the perspective of some 300 years later), the deity – that good feeling that people have about living beautiful lives – evolved into an anthropomorphized messiah, a personality that took human form but yet represented the seemingly eternal force that allowed us to exist, thrive and, with luck, be happy.

The Sun God had become a man, who, as it happened, was called the Son of God, further confusing the issue. But the central point to be followed here is that an ancient tradition of showing respect for the natural processes that allowed us to live our lives was fundamentally altered into focusing on a human-like figure who usurped the power from that big glowing ball in the sky to bestow upon our lives joy and satisfaction.

This was a big alteration in human perception. It was a big delusion that has not only diminished our lives (because of competing versions of who this guy actually is) and pretty much blinded us from appreciating the natural processes of the earth which are the real things that give us life. But this fundamental shift in perception also cut us off from accurately understanding our view of ourselves. Instead of being the products of an environment that should be worshipped and cared for, we became the progeny of a divine anthropomorphic personality. And we became slaves to our own limited perceptual skills.

Instead of perceiving ourselves as beautiful plants in an elegant garden, we became slaves to an anthropomorphic misperception. Now we are trapped in our own inadequate thoughtform, and at a crucial point in our evolution where we desperately need to see the difference between the psychotic projected shadow of a wrathful and murderous messiah and the bountiful goodness of natural processes without which we could not survive for more than ten minutes.

This is the curse bequeathed to us by priests, who have always thought it more important to maintain the revenue-producing idiosyncracies of their own dogma than just doing the job they are supposed to do, which is to remind us of the divine beauty that is all around us at all times in all places.

Now, as I so often say, I said all that to say this.

We all know that the one item that sets humans apart from all other life on this planet is our foreknowledge of death. The dimmer lights among you might aver that this knowledge is no big deal, but those who have traveled a few miles on tragic roads know for certain that our desire to survive our own demise under any and all circumstances is the primary motivational mechanism of all our lives. We will do anything to stay alive, and the primary purpose of religion is to convince ourselves – by whatever magic formulas necessary – to convince ourselves that we do, when in fact, reason and the obituary page show us clearly that we do not.

This foreknowledge of our limited run on this planet is exactly half of the existential trauma that makes the human race certifiably insane. We can´t cope with that pressure. It is said that the human mind cannot, in an actualized way, contemplate its own nonexistence, so strong and insistent is our survival instinct. It´s not that we can´t hypothetically contemplate our sparkless remains crammed into an urn buried under green grass marked by sculpted stone in some suburban enclave. It´s that we can´t contemplate the world with us not participating in it. Otherwise, how could we perceive it? It simply does not compute. The mind squirms to escape from that idea, and it will accept any kind of solution to that dilemma, no matter how farfetched.

This is the existential dilemma we all face, and damned few of us ever begin to contemplate it until we´re jammed into a hospital bed with the IV dripping, and we´re praying – some of us – that that heart monitor just keeps on beeping.

It´s like flying in an airplane in a thunderstorm – suddenly I get real religious.

But that´s only half the process that makes the human race insane. The other half is what we do to keep ourselves from thinking about it. And it´s the worst part. Religion.

For the fact is, religion makes killers of us all. If we would simply accept the fact that we die, and that all we get is this one chance to make an impact on the universe, we would kill far fewer people, because in that acceptance we would realize that they die too.

As it is now, with brave Islamic jihadists storming into battle knowing that by their brave deeds they are going to heaven, what fear do they have of dying, or of killing. No, religion is like a free pass to commit murder. Hey, just read the newspapers.

Ask any soldier who has killed someone and he´ll tell you killing lessens one´s fear of death. It´s one of life´s nasty truths. Ha. Death is one of life´s nasty truths.

If you believe you have a place to go after death, you can kill more easily. Hey, just ask George W. Bush. But on a more serious level (not that Bush´s mass murder spree is not serious), if you truly believe that some protective entity called God is going to forgive you for machinegunning an innocent family of Third World peasants, then you´re simply more likely to pull that trigger when that opportunity arises. Isn´t that clear?

Well, apparently it´s not clear to the world, because religions hold billions in their murderous mindlock, and the bodies just keep piling up.

Religion, really, is for cowards and killers. Anybody who needs the promise of an afterlife to motivate them to act morally is just an immature idiot to begin with.

Something I read recently said religion doesn´t teach people how to be morally honest, it teaches them to pretend to be morally honest. And in my own experience, I find religious people are as a rule completely dishonest, and worse, immune to reason, because they already have their answers written down for them.

This is demonstrably insane behavior, and the world – this beautiful garden that plushly sustains every other species except humans – suffers for it.

The great leap in the social evolution of the human species which is now just beginning to occur is the abandonment of false gods – and they´re all false if they´re preached by an existing religion – false gods who preach that it is right that the strong should prey on the weak, and the rich on the poor.

This abandonment of phony religions must include the realization that we die, that we are here for a certain amount of time and then, being organic, our bodies expire. Call it the curse of the blue green algae. It´s the way life is – temporary.

To not admit that, to hide in fantasy concatenations of heaven or reincarnation, is nothing more than psychotic delusional fantasy, because there is no evidence for it except self-serving propaganda, which is mostly exploited by profit-motivated holy men who don´t even believe the hypocrisy that oozes from their unctuous lips, but enjoy their privileged status and conceal both their perversions and their profits.

If you need a promise of eternal safety to be honest and caring and true and strong, then you´re a coward, a cheat and generally a bogus person. We get one shot at this, and if you want to spend your time on a scam, well, that´s your problem. Suffice it to say there are more important things to do, principally these days, to keep the planet from going up in flames.

Same with religion. There are more important things to do. Some of you will attempt to strike back and say, ìTake care for your immortal soul, young John.

To all of them I´ll just flip them the immortal bird and respond, ìThe soul takes care of itself by the the work that it does. And the illusion of glory is good for no one. It just detracts from the time we spend trying to make this place as nice as we can.

And if they keep on harping about how we should be loving and kind and respectful to the institutions that have brought us through these troubled millennia, I will turn to them and sneer, ìYes, and look at the world you have given us with your sadistic sanctimony, a world where everyone is dishonest, the animals are tortured and the environment is poisoned by our shortsighted greed.

ìThe reason this has happened is because we don´t admit that we die, and that beneath our glib facades, we are worrying every minute that we do. Small wonder that our world is being torn apart by this duplicity.

And when they ask me how I will face the reaper I will respond: ìNever fear what you may not avoid. I need no promises to make me seek to do the right thing. Religions were invented because people had no real faith. If you have faith you have no need of religion. Real faith is based on no thing but the obvious beauty of this world. Those who need promises from religion are cowards who have no faith at all.

This is the next evolutionary hurdle that needs to be overcome if we are to survive as a species. It is time to put away our fear, accept our temporality, and do the work. There are so many more important things to do than worship some imaginary God whom you can´t comprehend anyway.

For your journey, suffice it to say that your conception of God is simply the echo of thought bouncing off the wall of death. Your soul will take care of itself by the work that it does. Just do the work and all will be well. Ultimately, there is nothing to worry about it. Nor is there anything you can do about your fate, so why worry?

Treat the world like your mother, because it is.

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John Kaminski is the author of ìAmerica´s Autopsy Report,” a collection of his Internet essays published on hundreds of websites around the world. More recently he has published ìThe Day America Died: Why You Shouldn´t Believe the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001,” a 48-page booklet written for those who still believe the government´s version of events. For more information about both, check out http://www.johnkaminski.com/. You can write John at: skylax@comcast.net

Adversary relationship originates on earth in the animal world. Earth supplies limited space for the animals. Space is finite. Good space is even more finite. Thus, it is very limited. There is only so much good water, so much good grazing land, so much good shelter, and so much good potential food. There is not enough to go around. The space-binders must compete for this limited amount of good space. They compete adversarily. They compete by fighting and flighting. They compete by attacking and killing other space-binders. They compete by devouring the energy-binders.

Animal survival depends entirely on finding others to eat. The herbivores depend on finding plants to eat. The carnivores depend on finding other animals to eat. The animals inability to utilize sunlight to synthesize organic tissue means they must eat. Animals survive by eating either plants or animals. Animals are completely dependent on other for survival. This fact makes animals the dependent class of life – dependent on other.

Imagine a fox chasing a rabbit, if the fox is quick enough, it will win a meal, at the expense of the rabbit who loses its life. On the other hand, if the rabbit is quicker, the fox loses a meal, and the rabbit wins its life.

The adversary world of animals is a game of with losers and winners. This is a world of fighting and flighting – of pain and dying. To win in this game someone must lose. Winning is always at the cost of another. All animals, from the smallest insect to the largest whale are struggling to avoid losing – struggling to avoid being hurt.

CONFLICT –def–> The struggle to avoid loss – the struggle to avoid being hurt.

The animals must fight and flee to stay alive, and they do. Always ready at a moments notice to go tooth and nail to avoid losing – to avoid death. Losers/winners is the harshest of games. Winning is always at the cost of another’s life. The loser tends to resist with all of its might occasionally prevailing by killing or wounding its attacker. So both parties can lose, turning the game – losers/winners into losers/losers. If we analyze adversary relationships, we discover that individuals are less after the relationship. (1+1)<2. In the animal world where the loser forfeits its life (1+1)=1. Or in the end game of losers/losers, both adversaries may die in battle, then (1+1)=0.

Although most of us humans never give it a thought, most of our human “food” is a product of this adversity. As this morning’s author explains:

 “From early childhood, Americans are taught to dissociate picture-book scenes of cows and sheep grazing in a pasture from rows of plastic-wrapped cuts of meat lining grocer’s shelves. We eat “pork” not pigs, “veal” not baby cows. Animals aren’t killed in slaughterhouses but “processed” in “packing plants.”

Reposted from the Orion Magazine.

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The Adversary Way

Dena Jones

TO SATISFY THE PUBLIC’S ever-growing appetite for meat, slaughterhouses in the United States killed ten billion animals last year. That’s 27,397,260 animals every day, 1,141,553 every hour, 19,026 every minute. Most Americans, largely disconnected from their food supply, assume these animals met a painless end, if they think about it at all. Even readers of books and articles about conditions in factory farms may not be aware of what happens to animals at slaughter. But every now and then that reality flashes briefly across the public consciousness, as it did during last year’s news stories about mad cow disease, when television viewers glimpsed a sick cow being dragged along the ground to a slaughterhouse. The media attention was on food safety, not the welfare of the animals, but for a brief moment the veil had been lifted on the brutality of the process that turns living creatures into meat.

And why should anyone want to inquire further? Can’t we just assume that the same industry that maximizes profits by confinement so extreme that chickens can’t flap their wings and pigs are prevented from turning around will also routinely mistreat animals at slaughter? What sense is there in focusing on the final hours of animals whose entire short lives are often a study in misery?

Mohandas Gandhi said that a nation’s moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals. Animal behavior scientists have proven unequivocally that animals are not machines but sentient beings that experience feelings of pain, fear, anxiety, and despair. These feelings matter to the animal and they should matter to us. If Gandhi is right, we have an obligation to know what happens to animals when they are killed to feed us, and to let that knowledge inform our actions. Yet from early childhood, Americans are taught to dissociate picture-book scenes of cows and sheep grazing in a pasture from rows of plastic-wrapped cuts of meat lining grocer’s shelves. We eat “pork” not pigs, “veal” not baby cows. Animals aren’t killed in slaughterhouses but “processed” in “packing plants.”

Upton Sinclair’s classic novel The Jungle, published in 1906, exposed the brutal conditions for both animals and humans in Chicago slaughter plants at the turn of the twentieth century. He likened the slaughterhouse to a dungeon where horrible crimes were committed, “all unseen and unheeded.” The uproar over the disclosure of what people were really eating prompted passage of the nation’s first food-safety law. There was to be no relief, however, for the workers who toiled long hours under dangerous conditions for little pay, or for the animals who were mercilessly bludgeoned to death with sledgehammers. Sinclair was disappointed. “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” he lamented.

GAIL EISNITZ HAS STRUGGLED for the last fifteen years to compel the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to enforce the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (HMSA), the forty-five-year-old federal law requiring humane handling of animals killed in federally inspected slaughterhouses. The law specifies the ways by which animals must be made insensible to pain before slaughter. The most common method is stunning. Electricity or gas is used to stun pigs, sheep, and goats unconscious; horses and cattle are shot with a device known as a captive bolt, which is designed to penetrate the skull and incapacitate the brain.

Eisnitz was working as an investigator for the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) in 1989 when she received a tip from a USDA slaughterhouse inspector about conditions in a Florida cattle plant. The man said he had personal knowledge that the plant was skinning cattle while they were still alive. Complaints to his superiors had gone unanswered. After querying the USDA about the matter and receiving no satisfaction, Eisnitz traveled to Florida, where she frequented bars that swelled with slaughter workers at the end of each shift. She listened to their stories about what was going on inside the plant. What she learned propelled her on a long, lonely journey through the American slaughterhouse, which she describes as “the darkest place in the universe.”

U.S. animal advocacy groups had campaigned to improve slaughter practices in the 1950s, when HMSA was passed, and again in the 1970s, when the law was amended to provide for enforcement. But no one was actively working the issue when Eisnitz came on the scene. This was due, at least in part, to the fact that access to slaughterhouses is severely limited and animal advocates were unaware of much of what was going on inside. It’s not clear to what degree, if at all, the treatment of animals at slaughter improved after the 1978 amendment. In fact, in the late 1970s a revolution took place in the slaughter industry, led by Iowa Beef Packers (IBP), which eventually became the largest meat producer in the country. IBP busted meatpacking unions by moving plants into rural areas and recruiting immigrant workers from Mexico. Wages fell by as much as 50 percent, and meatpacking went from one of the nation’s highest-paid industrial jobs to one of its lowest. At the same time, productivity — as defined by the number of animals slaughtered per hour — doubled. The combination of an increase in productivity and a decrease in worker qualifications had dire consequences for animal welfare.

From 1989 through the mid-1990s, Eisnitz, a determined woman in her forties with a background in natural resources management, crisscrossed the U.S. documenting slaughterhouse abuses. She learned about cattle slaughter plants where cattle were hoisted upside down, the lower part of their legs snipped off, their thighs and bellies cut open, and their skin stripped from their legs up to their necks, all while the animals were still conscious. She investigated pig slaughter plants where inadequately stunned and fully alert animals were dragged through tanks of scalding water, kicking and struggling until they drowned. From coast to coast she recorded accounts of animals being trampled, dragged, and shocked with electric prods placed in their mouths. At plant after plant workers told her that this sort of treatment was business as usual in the slaughter industry.

Where, she wondered, was the USDA, the agency charged with regulating slaughter practices? In Washington, D.C., it seemed, or in regional offices — everywhere but on the slaughter lines where the abuses were taking place. Eisnitz heard many excuses for government inaction — too few government inspectors, too much industry control, too little funding, too much pressure from meatpackers and Washington bureaucrats to turn a blind eye. Whatever the reasons, humane handling of animals was not a priority.

Eisnitz set out to make it one. She compiled hundreds of hours of worker interviews and thousands of pages of government reports and documents into a book, Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry, published in 1997. Shortly after the book’s release, Eisnitz organized a Washington, D.C., news conference, during which one former and one current USDA inspector told reporters they had frequently witnessed plant workers dismembering still-conscious animals in order to keep fast production lines moving. Also present were members of the federal union representing some seven thousand U.S. slaughterhouse inspectors, who denounced the USDA for not allowing them to enforce the law. Still, outside the animal protection movement, the response to these revelations of abuse was modest at best.

Eisnitz employed a new tactic. Now working for the Humane Farming Association (HFA), she investigated conditions at a slaughterhouse operated by meatpacking giant IBP (since acquired by Tyson Foods) in Wallula, Washington. As before, Eisnitz obtained dozens of employee affidavits attesting to the torturous conditions prevalent at the plant. This time, however, she found a worker willing to videotape the abuse and fitted him with a “shirt cam” that could be slipped past the watchful eyes of managers. The video camera yielded hours of disturbing footage that was promptly turned over to the state’s attorney general and a local television station. A reporter from the Seattle station airing the IBP story was a friend of Washington Post writer Joby Warrick, who picked up the story and wrote a lengthy front-page article about the Washington State slaughterhouse titled “They Die Piece by Piece.” It was the second in a Post series on problems with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.

When the story appeared in April 2001, many Americans were outraged, including Senator Robert C. Byrd (D., WV), then-chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Three months later, Byrd, a former hog farmer himself, stood on the floor of the Senate and delivered one of the very few speeches in congressional history on behalf of the animals killed for food in the U.S.:

	The law clearly requires that these poor creatures be stunned and rendered insensitive to pain before this process begins. Federal law is being ignored. Animal cruelty abounds. It is sickening. It is infuriating. Barbaric treatment of helpless, defenseless creatures must not be tolerated even if these animals are being raised for food — and even more so, more so.

That summer Byrd sponsored a one-time allocation of $1 million to hire veterinary specialists to improve humane slaughter enforcement. This was the first congressional action on the issue since the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act was amended in 1978. The appropriation was followed shortly by a congressional resolution calling on the Secretary of Agriculture to enforce HMSA, and in 2003, Congress directed the USDA to spend $5 million to hire additional humane inspectors.

The Humane Farming Association, which focuses on investigations and working with whistleblowers, sees increased funding for government inspectors as possibly the best hope for making the slaughter of farmed animals less inhumane. But the USDA’s history of lax regulation of agricultural practices doesn’t support that hope. Even after the agency was directed by Congress to improve its oversight, there were few instances of enforcement of HMSA. In 2002, only 6 facilities out of 900 inspected by the USDA received any formal reprimand based solely on incidents of inhumane handling. In its 2003 report to Congress, the USDA acknowledged that most of its enforcement actions under the HMSA were related to facility shortcomings, such as slippery flooring and gaps between pen bars, while “very few infractions were for actual inhumane treatment of the animals.”

Nothing better illustrates the failure of the USDA to provide for the humane treatment of animals raised for food than its position on downed, or nonambulatory, animals. Images of animals too sick to stand being prodded, pushed, and pulled to slaughter has sealed many an animal advocate’s decision to eschew meat. Yet for more than a decade the USDA ignored pleas from animal protection groups to halt the marketing of downed animals on humane grounds. The agency continued to do nothing even after research conducted in Europe showed that downed animals presented the greatest risk of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, entering the U.S. food supply. Only after a BSE-infected dairy cow was reported in Washington State last December did the agency ban the slaughter of these animals.

The USDA’s handling of the downer issue reflects its close ties to the livestock and slaughter industries. Secretary Ann Veneman and many of her top deputies came to the agency straight from jobs lobbying on behalf of agribusiness. In a New York Times op-ed piece, Fast Food Nation‘s Eric Schlosser made a telling observation about the USDA: “Right now you’d have a hard time finding a federal agency more completely dominated by the industry it was created to regulate.”

PARTLY OUT OF SKEPTICISM about the government’s willingness or ability to address problems, some animal-advocacy groups have turned to the food-service corporations in their campaign for more humane slaughter. In the 1980s, civil rights activist and union organizer Henry Spira began negotiations on animal welfare with McDonald’s Corporation, one of the largest purchasers of beef, pork, and chicken in the U.S. Spira’s previous victories on behalf of animals included the organization of a coalition that eventually pressured the cosmetic industry to phase out product testing on animals.

Little came of Spira’s meetings with McDonald’s until 1997, after the huge fast-food corporation brought a libel case against British environmental activists who were circulating a pamphlet critical of the company. A London judge in the case found McDonald’s to be “culpably responsible for cruel practices n the rearing and slaughter of some of the animals which are used to produce their food.” Soon after the verdict, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) initiated a high-profile protest campaign against the corporation and McDonald’s invited PETA into negotiations concerning better conditions for animals raised and slaughtered by its suppliers. When these negotiations broke down two years later, PETA launched a second campaign that featured more than four hundred demonstrations at McDonald’s restaurants in more than twenty-three countries.

In September 2000, PETA called off its protests after McDonald’s agreed to require its suppliers to meet basic on-farm animal-welfare standards, and to continue to conduct audits of cattle, pig, and chicken slaughterhouses begun the year before. The food-service industry has declined to credit the animal-protection movement for its recent stand on animal welfare, claiming it merely wants to do the right thing. But PETA’s Bruce Friedrich notes that no company has implemented welfare standards without being prodded. “PETA has had to campaign against each target,” he said. Friedrich is responsible for hatching PETA’s provocative, youth-oriented stunts, and was recently named by Details magazine as the fifth most influential male under thirty-eight — placing him just behind Eminem and ahead of Leonardo DiCaprio.

Whatever the shortcomings of third-party audits, they seem to have accomplished what forty years of government regulation did not. The meat industry apparently became serious about improving the treatment of animals only after McDonald’s removed or suspended individual plants from its approved supplier list. For a slaughter plant, losing a major client like McDonald’s has far more impact than having operations suspended for a few days, the strongest penalty invoked by the USDA for a humane slaughter violation.

	Photograph ¦ Helen King/CORBIS

But the food-service industry’s influence on slaughter operations could also lead to the formation of a two-tier market, where the relatively few corporate plants are routinely audited and held to a higher standard of animal welfare than the more numerous smaller, independent plants. Even after five years of audits, most of the nine hundred pig and cattle slaughter plants in the U.S. have never been subjected to a review. The effect of corporate audits may also lessen over time, as both plant management and auditors become complacent about enforcing standards. As Eisnitz has pointed out, the results of corporate audits are not available to the public.

Most of those involved in working for humane slaughter share the view of Bruce Friedrich, who contends that progress has been made, although the extent of and the commitment to improvements are debatable. “No one is naÔve enough to believe that what goes on most of the time in slaughter plants meets the standards,” Friedrich said. “But we think it’s important to support their attempts to do better.”

Still, while things may have gotten somewhat better for cattle and pigs, “nothing has changed for chickens,” according to Friedrich. “Every moment of their lives is characterized by such unmitigated suffering; they are subjected to a level of cruelty and abuse so far beyond anything we can imagine.”

The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act does not protect chickens and other birds, which represent 90 percent of the animals slaughtered for food each year in the U.S. Three attempts during the 1990s to amend the Poultry Products Inspection Act to include a humane slaughter provision failed. Chicken slaughterhouses currently shackle birds while they are conscious and then drag their heads and upper bodies through an electrified water trough called a stunner. Because of concerns for carcass quality, the voltage is often intentionally set too low to stun, and the birds are simply immobilized enough to keep them from thrashing about as their necks are cut. Some birds are still alive when they are plunged into scalding tanks for defeathering. PETA is pressuring restaurants like Kentucky Fried Chicken to make slaughterhouses increase the voltage so as to kill the birds outright, or to use a less inhumane killing method, such as argon gas. In the meantime, says Friedrich, chickens qualify as “the most abused animals on the face of the planet.”

APOLOGISTS FOR THE meat industry say they’re merely giving people what they want — lots of meat at low prices. Adele Douglass of Humane Farm Animal Care believes it is up to American consumers to demand something more. Douglass has partnered with two of the country’s largest animal-protection groups — the Humane Society of the United States and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals — to develop the “Certified Humane” labeling program, which establishes some of the country’s strictest animal welfare standards for auditing producers of meat, poultry, egg, and dairy products. The American Humane Association operates a similar certification program under the label “Free Farmed.”

Certified Humane, which currently has about a dozen producers participating, conducts its own audits of slaughterhouses. While its auditors use the same standards as the food industry for evaluating cattle and pig slaughter plants, their sole interest is animal welfare. Chicken slaughter facilities applying for Certified Humane endorsement must meet specific requirements that include the appointment of at least one trained animal welfare officer responsible for making frequent checks on how animals are being handled and taking prompt action to address any problems. Certified Humane also recommends the installation of closed-circuit television to make the slaughter of chickens more transparent and allow officials not present in the kill areas to monitor the process.

Beyond the certification programs offered by humane groups, consumers have very little to go on if they want to purchase meat from animals that have been killed humanely. Some labeling terms such as “natural” have virtually no relevance to animal welfare; others like “free-range” have some limited animal-care significance but provide no assurance as to the manner of slaughter. The government’s “organic” program, which mandates that animals be allowed access to the outdoors, offers no specific requirement regarding humane slaughter. Even if the meat industry were able to consistently meet the highest standards it has set for itself — properly stunning between 95 and 99 percent of animals — the remaining 1 to 5 percent represents millions of animals every year that would still suffer, some of them tremendously, when slaughtered. Knowing this, many animal advocates have concluded that the only way to be assured one is not contributing to the suffering of animals is by not eating them. Upton Sinclair probably suspected as much when he first pried open the dungeon door.

     Copyright 2004 The Orion Society

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DENA JONES is a consultant on farm animal protection who has worked with Farm Sanctuary, the Humane Farming Association, and the Animal Protection Institute. A former nurse, she now advocates for the planet’s nonhuman inhabitants.

Reposted from the Orion Magazine. While elsewhere I recommend synergic mechanisms of governance, I still found this endorsement of democracy worth reading.

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Engagement

Terry Tempest Williams

IT IS UNUSUALLY STILL. I am standing in Mardy and Olaus Murie’s living room in Moose, Wyoming. It is the first time I have entered their home since Mardy passed away on October 19, 2003. She was 101 years old.

My eyes travel around the cabin. A Presidential Medal of Freedom is perched on the mantle of their stone fireplace. On the far wall is a piece of calligraphy, the words Mardy spoke at the Jackson Hole High School commencement in 1974: “Give yourself the adventure of doing what you can do, with what you have, even if you have nothing but the adventure of trying. How much better than standing in a corner with your back to the wall.”

I am standing in the corner with my back to the wall. Never have I felt such dismay over the leadership and public policies of our nation. Never have I felt such determination and faith in our ability to change our country’s current direction. How to reconcile these seemingly contradictory emotions in an election year when we appear to be anything but united states?

Snow is banked against the windows, melting. Last night, there was a conversation between great gray owls on the ranch. I think of all the conversations that took place in the warmth of this log home in the middle of the Tetons; imagine the stories told, the secrets shared, and the strategies developed to safeguard wildlands in this country. I recall the cups of tea poured and the plates of cookies passed at my own visits and how I always left believing what was possible, never doubting what was not.

The Muries and their circle of friends challenged the ethical structure of the United States government and institutions such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Olaus and his brother, Adolph, changed the public’s perception of predators through their research on coyotes in Yellowstone and wolves in Denali. Olaus supported his colleague Rachel Carson when she was under fire from the Department of Agriculture following the publication of Silent Spring. Mardy campaigned endlessly for the protection of wild Alaska; they changed laws and made new ones, even the Wilderness Act of 1964.

What I wish I could ask Mardy now is, how do we engage in the open space of democracy in times of terror?

I believe she would send me home.

CASTLE VALLEY IS A SMALL desert community in southeastern Utah. Large cottonwood trees shadow the creeks that flow from the high country down through the juniper, piÒon, and sage. The Colorado River creates its northern boundary; the LaSal Mountains rise to the south; Castleton Tower stands to the east, next to a geologic formation locals call “The Priest and Nuns”; and Porcupine Rim runs due west. The town is surrounded by 9,000 acres of Utah School Institutional Trust Lands, the blue squares that appear on state maps across the American West like a checkerboard. These school trust lands were created at statehood by the U.S. Congress with the understanding that they could be sold to generate income for education. And beyond the trust lands, three wilderness study areas frame the valley: Morning Glory, Mary Jane, and Fisher Towers. The valley now supports around three hundred residents. If you drive in for a visit you will be greeted by a sign that says, “caution: falling sky.”

Brooke and I moved to Castle Valley from Salt Lake City in the fall of 1998. The silence was both welcome and unsettling. The wind was a constant reminder that this erosional landscape is still in motion. The only thing we found we could count on was changing weather — the extreme heat of summer and extreme cold in winter. Fall and spring were seasons aligned with heaven. The daily tides of deer became our cue to when we awoke and when we retired. Our neighbors were both warm and solitary. We all shared a love of quiet and a sense of community, within reason — people largely left each other alone.

In the spring of 1999, the Utah School Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA) sold eighty acres at the base of Parriott Mesa at a public auction to a developer in Aspen with a partner in Moab, without proper notice to the community of Castle Valley. The developers assured the town that the land was bought for a dwelling for one of their daughters. But within a matter of weeks, a large for sale sign was placed on wooden stilts and hammered into the red desert, the price of the land tripling. Parriott Mesa was now slated for a subdivision.

Castle Valley is not an affluent community. Most incomes fall below the national average. There was concern about what a high-end development would do to taxes and everyone knew water was a serious issue, with the Castle Valley aquifer dropping due to drought. The community panicked, and within days a meeting was called. The small adobe home belonging to Susan Ulery was packed with people: Mormons, non-Mormons, Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, attorneys, carpenters, climbers, artists, teachers, and old hippies — the full range was in attendance.

	Our foreign policies seem to run counter to the rising global awareness of a world hungry for honest diplomacy.

We recognized Castleton Tower as the flame of America’s Redrock Wilderness. We talked about how the ecological integrity of the Colorado River Corridor was at stake if the SITLA lands were to be developed; we acknowledged the hundreds of oil and gas leases that could be activated. We believed there had to be viable alternatives. Out of our shock, anger, and affection for each other, the Castle Rock Collaboration (CRC) was formed. We had no money. We had no power. We had only our shared love of home and a desire for dialogue with the open spaces that defined our town.

Meanwhile, under the cover of darkness, the large for sale sign disappeared — only to reappear the next morning beneath Turret Arch inside Arches National Park, complete with telephone number. Shortly after dawn, both the developer and the Park Service received calls from numerous tourists enthusiastically interested in purchasing the arch. The developer was delighted, having thought he had missed something spectacular at the base of Parriott Mesa. The park rangers were baffled until they took a drive and saw the sign for themselves. Photographs were taken. The point was made. These developers would sell anything if they could, even our national parks.

The story rocked Castle Valley. Panic was replaced by humor. Nobody knew who did it; Coyote had entered town. This is, after all, Abbey’s Country.

A few weeks later we learned that the developers were going to strip the land on Monday, May 24, 1999. But an anonymous donor came forward literally the day before the bulldozers were set to roll and wrote CRC a check. With the help of Utah Open Lands, we were able to make the developers an offer and buy back the eighty acres as our first act in the name of community trust.

Suddenly, the Castle Rock Collaboration was taken seriously.

Suddenly, we did not feel so powerless.

PAINTING (DETAIL)¦ GATHERING, BY MARY FRANK/COURTESY OF DC MOORE GALLERY, NYC

After arduous conversations, SITLA agreed not to auction off any new parcels of land until the planning process was complete. Together, we hired a planning firm from Boulder, Colorado, to help lay out a strategy for responsible land use. With the help of companies like Petzl, Patagonia, and Black Diamond, and through the support of The Access Fund, the Castle Rock Collaboration was able to raise the money necessary to purchase the wide sweep of land at the base of Castleton Tower.

In the five years that we have been engaged in this process with SITLA, the Castle Rock Collaboration and its partners have protected over three thousand acres and raised nearly four million dollars. But perhaps the most important outcome has been the creation of an atmosphere of engagement with other committed individuals who live along the Colorado River Corridor. We are learning that a community engaged is a community empowered.

If we listen to the land, we will know what to do.

IN THE OPEN SPACE OF DEMOCRACY, we are listening — ears alert — we are watching — eyes open — registering the patterns and possibilities for engagement. Some acts are private; some are public. Our oscillations between local, national, and global gestures map the full range of our movement. Our strength lies in our imagination, and paying attention to what sustains life, rather than what destroys it.

	And I know that what is popularly called politics is only a tiny part of what causes history to move.
		– W.H. Auden The Prolific and the Devourer

IN THE FALL OF 2002, I was living in Italy. There was a growing fear that America was going to wage war in Iraq. There was also a growing resistance throughout Europe to the militant Bush-Blair partnership. An estimated one million people gathered in Florence; they walked the streets of Firenze, creating a body politic seven kilometers long.

This news was not being reported in America.

I wrote a letter home in the form of an op-ed piece for the Salt Lake Tribune. I wanted my community to know about this calm manifestation of willful resolve demonstrating a simple fact: Even if our political leaders cannot read the pulse of a changing world, the people do. The European Social Forum had just held its meetings in Florence, where issues ranging from health and the environment to international trade to the possibility of a war in Iraq were discussed. It ended with this gesture of movement, much of it along the banks of the Arno River, creating a river of another sort, a river of humans engaged in a diverse dialogue of peace.

Train after train stopped and emptied itself of the working middle class. Men, women, and children from Italian towns and villages gathered to participate with citizens from all over Europe. Massimo Sottani, a former mayor of Regello whom I had met in the village where I was staying, had invited me to join him with his family and friends. “It is not only our right and obligation to participate in civic life, it is in our best interest,” he said as we stood outside the station waiting for more of his friends.

Lorenzo Becawtini, a businessman in Florence, joined us. “Antiglobalization is not a slogan,” he said, “it is a rigorous reconfiguration of democracy that places power and creativity back into the hands of villagers and townspeople, providing them with as many choices as possible.”

With antiglobalization in Europe often tied to anti-Americanism, there were the inevitable placards of George W. Bush disguised as Hitler next to banners that read “drop bush not bombs” and a Big Mac being driven on top of a hearse. But for the most part, the focal point of this massive demonstration remained on positive changes for a changing world.

At one point, an elderly Florentine man who held memories of Mussolini stepped out on his balcony above the wave of people and draped a white bedsheet over the railing in support of peace. As participants waved to the old man, the crowd spontaneously began singing “Ciao, Bella, Ciao,” the song of the partigianos, the Italian resistance against the fascists in World War II. Neighbor after neighbor repeated the gesture, draping white sheets and pillow cases over their balconies until the apartment walls that lined the streets appeared as great sails billowing in the breeze.

Albertina Pisano, a twenty-five-year-old student from the University of Milan, said, “My generation in Europe doesn’t know what it means to be at war. I came to the forum to listen and participate.” When I asked her if she thought this would make any difference, she answered, “It is making a difference to me.”

Looking over my shoulder from the rise on the bridge, all I could see was an endless river of people walking, many hand in hand, all side by side, peacefully, united in place with a will for social change. Michelangelo was among them, as art students from Florence raised replicas of his Prigioni above their heads, the unfinished sculptures of prisoners trying to break free from the confines of stone. Machiavelli was among them, as philosophy students from Rome carried his words: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” Leonardo da Vinci was among them, his words carrying a particularly contemporary sting: “And by reason of their boundless pride… there shall be nothing remaining on the earth or under the earth or in the waters that shall not be pursued and molested or destroyed.”

The hundreds of thousands of individuals who walked together in the name of social change could be seen as the dignified, radical center walking boldly toward the future. As an American in Florence, I wondered, how do we walk with the rest of the world when our foreign policies seem to run counter to the rising global awareness of a world hungry for honest diplomacy?

AS I LOOK BACK OVER the story we have been living in Castle Valley, it does not begin to convey the power and empowering nature of the process. It is through the process of defining what we want as a town that we are becoming a real community. It is through the act of participation that we change.

This is not simply a story of not-in-my-backyard. It is the unfolding tale of how a small community in the desert is rising to its own defense, saying, we believe we have a stake in the future of our own community, which we choose to define beyond our own boundaries of time and space and species.

A crisis woke us up. A shared love of place opened a dialogue with neighbors. We asked for help. We found partners. We used our collective intelligence to formulate a plan. And then we had to search within ourselves to find what each of us had to give.

In my private moments of despair, I am aware of the limits of my own imagination. I am learning in Castle Valley that imaginations shared invite collaboration and collaboration creates community. A life in association, not a life independent, is the democratic ideal. We participate in the vitality of the struggle.

	The time has come to demand an end to the wholesale dismissal of the sacredness of life…. At what point do we finally lay our bodies down to say this is no longer acceptable?

Social change takes time. Communities are built on the practice of patience and imagination — the belief that we are here for the duration and will take care of our relations in times of both drought and abundance. These are the blood and flesh gestures of commitment.

In thousands of local narratives being written around America, enlivened citizenship is activated each time we knock on our neighbors’ doors, each time we sit down together and share a meal.

IN OUR INCREASINGLY fundamentalist country, we have to remember what is fundamental: gravity — what draws us to a place and keeps us there, like love, like kinship. When we commit to a particular place, a certain element of choice is removed. We begin to see the world whole instead of fractured. Long-term strategies replace short-term gains. We inform one another and become an educated public that responds.

Here in the redrock desert, which now carries the weight of more leases for oil and gas than its fragile red skin can support, due to the aggressive energy policy of the Bush administration, the open space of democracy appears to be closing. The Rocky Mountain states are feeling this same press of energy extraction with scant thought being given to energy alternatives. A domestic imperialism has crept into our country with the same assured arrogance and ideology-of-might that seem evident in Iraq.

It is easy to believe we the people have no say; that the powers in Washington will roll over our local concerns with their corporate energy ties and thumper trucks. It is easy to believe that the American will is only focused on how to get rich, how to be entertained, and how to distract itself from the hard choices we have before us as a nation.

I refuse to believe this. The only space I see truly capable of being closed is not the land or our civil liberties but our own hearts.

The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions. Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up — ever — trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?

	PAINTING (DETAIL)¦ VOICE, BY MARY FRANK/COURTESY OF DC MOORE GALLERY, NYC

The heart is the house of empathy whose door opens when we receive the pain of others. This is where bravery lives, where we find our mettle to give and receive, to love and be loved, to stand in the center of uncertainty with strength, not fear, understanding this is all there is. The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the presence of power. Our power lies in our love of our homelands.

The heart embodies faith because it leads us to charity. It is the muscle behind hope that brings confidence to those who despair.

Democracy depends on engagement, a firsthand accounting of what one sees, what one feels, and what one thinks, followed by the artful practice of expressing the truth of our times through our own talents, gifts, and vocations.

Question. Stand. Speak. Act.

We have a history of bravery in this nation and we must call it forward now. Our future is guaranteed only by the degree of our personal involvement and commitment to an inclusive justice.

In the open space of democracy, we engage the qualities of inquiry, intuition, and love as we become a dynamic citizenry, unafraid to exercise our shared knowledge and power. We can dissent. We can vote. We can step forward in times of terror with a confounding calm that will shatter fear and complacency.

It is time to ask, when will our national culture of self-interest stop cutting the bonds of community to shore up individual gain and instead begin to nourish communal life through acts of giving, not taking? It is time to acknowledge the violence rendered to our souls each time a mountaintop is removed to expose a coal vein in Appalachia or when a wetland is drained, dredged, and filled for a strip mall. And the time has come to demand an end to the wholesale dismissal of the sacredness of life in all its variety and forms, as we witness the repeated breaking of laws, and the relaxing of laws, in the sole name of growth and greed.

We have made the mistake of confusing democracy with capitalism and have mistaken political engagement with a political machinery we all understand to be corrupt. It is time to resist the simplistic, utilitarian view that what is good for business is good for humanity in all its complex web of relationships. A spiritual democracy is inspired by our own sense of what we can accomplish together, honoring an integrated society where the social, intellectual, physical, and economic well-being of all is considered, not just the wealth and health of the corporate few.

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government,” said Edward Abbey. To not be engaged in the democratic process, to sit back and let others do the work for us, is to fall prey to bitterness and cynicism. It is the passivity of cynicism that has broken the back of our collective outrage. We succumb to our own depression believing there is nothing we can do.

I do not believe we can look for leadership beyond ourselves. I do not believe we can wait for someone or something to save us from our global predicaments and obligations. I need to look in the mirror and ask this of myself: If I am committed to seeing the direction of our country change, how must I change myself?

We are a people addicted to speed and superficiality, and a nation that prides itself on moral superiority. But our folly lies in not seeing what we base our superiority on. Wealth and freedom? What is wealth if we cannot share it? What is freedom if we cannot offer it as a vision of compassion and restraint, rather than force and aggression? Without an acknowledgement of complexity in a society of sound bites, we will not find the true source of our anger or an authentic passion that will propel us forward to the place of personal engagement.

We are in need of a reflective activism born out of humility, not arrogance. Reflection, with deep time spent in the consideration of others, opens the door to becoming a compassionate participant in the world.

“To care is neither conservative nor radical,” writes John Ralston Saul. “It is a form of consciousness.” To be in the service of something beyond ourselves — to be in the presence of something other than ourselves, together — this is where we can begin to craft a meaningful life where personal isolation and despair disappear through the shared engagement of a vibrant citizenry.

     Copyright 2004 The Orion Society

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TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS lives in Castle Valley, Utah, with her husband Brooke. Her most recent books, Leap and Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, continue her exploration of people in place.

All three essays in this series will be made available in a book, The Open Space of Democracy, in August 2004. Terry Tempest Williams will be embarking on a speaking tour across “swing” states this fall. For more information about tour dates and locations, contact Patrick Kelly.

Last night I watched the ending of the 1996 movie Independence Day. You remember the one with Humanity forced to work together to defeat the invading aliens from space. As you know I am a big fan of working together so this film interested me. My favorite quote from the movie is by the American President Thomas Whitmore:

“Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. “Mankind.” That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it’s fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom… Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution… but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: “We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight!” We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!”

I pray that this day will be safe for all humanity. Isn’t it time we changed our minds and made the whole world the land of the free and the home of the brave?

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God Bless Humanity!

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Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines on the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner! O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wiped out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner forever shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Francis Scott Key
1814