Today is July 4th. It is the day that we celebrate America. This year in particular, we might be more introspective than in years past, looking perhaps at what America has become and how it sees itself in 2007 and looks towards 2008.
Two things have happened this week that make me think that America is preparing itself for a healing crisis along the lines I predicted in my book, A Radical Incarnation, written in 2003. I had pointed out then that when we begin to heal deeply repressed shadow material, parts of it begin to come to the surface for healing. I see evidence of some of that appearing at this time. I think Michael Moore and Scooter Libby have both been instrumental in bringing it forth. Moore, in his film, "Sicko" is showing us our guilt about how we, as a society, take care of each other, while Libby’s case has brought forth our shame about our inhumane treatment of people caught up in the justice system.
My wife and I went to see "Sicko" today. We were shocked. I doubt that any American could sit through this movie and not feel the shame associated with how we as a society take care of the sick, the elderly, and others in need, and how corrupted the health-care system has become. It sure does look like a healing crisis to me and an opportunity to heal the part of the American collective psyche that must think of itself as cruel and uncaring. Otherwise why would it create such a system?
I should stress this is not an anti-American film. Moore goes to great lengths to say that Americans are compassionate, caring people who will always rise to the occasion to help others at great sacrifice to themselves. But he does show how corrupted the health-care system has become and how it puts American way down the bottom of the list in terms of infant mortality, life expectancy, general health, etc, in spite of its great wealth. He does not focus a whole lot on the uninsured either, but shows how people who thought they were insured regularly get screwed by the system in general and the insurance companies in particular. He takes you to Canada, England, France and Cuba to show us what a universal free healthcare system can be like. I’m English and can personally attest to the system there. He points to other socialized sections of even the American system, like the Fire Department, the Police Department, the Postal Service and many others that we take for granted. But we have demonized socialized medicine in order to support a money-based system that makes a lot of people rich but fails the majority of our population.
I urge you to see this film and look beyond any judgments that you hold about Moore. Of course it is skewed towards his point of view — documentaries always are — but not as much as in his previous films. If you have an ounce of compassion for people who are unlucky enough to fall ill and become ruined because of the system, you owe it to yourself to see this film. Why? Because it could easily happen to you, whether you are insured or not. It’s a wake-up call for everyone, but it is also a film about love for others, compassion for our neighbors, willingness to see beyond differences and our need to care for each other. It will touch your soul, I promise.
It is truly a spiritual film, one that all people who profess to live by spiritual principle should see. I say that because we as spiritual people should always be asking the kind of question that Moore himself asks in the film. "When we see what happens to people like this who are denied basic care, who have we, as a people, become?" That is a spiritual question and we need to ponder it deeply.
The other issue that caught my attention as a possible healing opportunity if we could get beyond the political rhetoric, is President Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s 2-1/2 year sentence. I think it highlights how when, instead of demonizing criminals, we actually give them a human face and identify them as friend, family member or colleague, we realize how inhumane and ineffective it is to imprison them for long periods of time, no matter what they have done. (There are far more effective ways of ‘correcting,’ them but that’s another story.)
Yes, Libby was a friend of the President and well connected to other important people who felt compassion for him and who lobbied for clemency on his behalf. Yes, they were probably the same people who supported all the "tough-on-crime" policies that over the years have resulted in absurd sentences and treatment like that of the poor guy who got a mandatory 10 years for consensual oral sex with a 15 year old girl at a party, or the guy who petitioned Bush for a pardon having done 10 years of a 20 year sentence for having two ounces of crack in his possession. (Bush denied it.)
The popular interpretation is that Libby got off because of his position, race, class and connections. That’s true as far as it goes, but suppose Bush really got to know, at a deep personal level, some of the other 4,000 people for whom he has recently denied pardons. Would he then have the same compassion for them as he had for Libby? I feel sure that he would. Once we connect to someone’s humanity, it is almost impossible not to forgive them.
Personally I am happy for Libby that he doesn’t have to waste two and a half years of his life in some stupid prison, even though it would have been in a very light security one, no doubt — and he probably would only have done a few months anyway before being released. But I grieve for all those hundreds of thousands of people whose lives are utterly wasted having received very long demeaning and dehumanizing sentences for crimes far less serious than Libby’s and for whom there is not the slightest hope of mercy, least of all from George W. Bush who is not known for giving pardons.
What part of the American shadow harbors both of these forms of injustice and chooses to ignore them? Where is our protest and our outrage? Do we really not care? What makes us so passionate about preventing a frozen embryo from contributing to life-saving research that would otherwise be thrown down the sink, while at the same time so callously ignoring the pain and suffering of our fellow human beings — that is, unless we happen to know them personally?
The only solution I can offer is Radical Forgiveness. It is a technology for healing our own shadow material and I contend it offers the best chance we have of healing the shadow of America. Let’s start by facing up to what we have created in both the legal and healthcare systems and forgiving ourselves for doing so, for we are all complicit. Then we can begin putting something in their place which reflects the principles for which we stand and which are enshrined in the Constitution. Eventually we might have something we could be proud of.
Colin Tipping. July 4th, 2007
