To the extent that we aspire to bear witness to beloved community, our hopes for America, its citizenry, and the rest of the world won’t be dictated by any government or political party. Beloved community is a call to embody a more comprehensive patriotism wherever we find ourselves. Like discipleship, the practice of democracy is a widening of our capacities for moral awareness and an expansion of our sphere of respect. If we have a steadily narrowing vision of people to whom we’re willing to accord respect or if the company we keep is slowly diminishing to include only the folks who’ve learned to pretend to agree with us, we can be assured that we’re in danger of developing around ourselves a kind of death cult, a frightened, trigger-happy defensiveness that is neither godly nor, in any righteous sense, American. Or as one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s characters famously asked, “What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry?” Might beloved community come to serve as a norm, the core ethic of what we mean when we speak of America as a hope?
This one pierced me like an arrow. Having played the part of the “angry activist” for many years, fully engaged in the oppositional and dualistic paradigm of “us vs them” (we, of course, being the good guys and the somewhat vague and amorphous category of “they” the bad- usually involving the manipulations of corporate entities and dark money), I nearly castrated my own psyche trying to move the other way and subdue my moral outrage. Maybe I have found some needed balance, but your writing on this theme was a direct hit, and a direct call to action for me to not mistake fear-based suppression / complacency / surrender with genuine peace.
Your writing is brilliant. The Thoreau quote was perfect. I’m back in school and cannot afford to support you now, but I greatly respect and appreciate your work and your insights.
Thank you, Susan. This Substack is free and I'm not accepting pledges or compensation through it. That said, if you want to direct a library to order my books or post a positive of any of them somewhere, I bet it'll come back to me somehow. Deep thanks for the kind words.
“Blind faith in any institution does not make one honorable.”
—Ro Laren, Star Trek Picard, s03e05
This one pierced me like an arrow. Having played the part of the “angry activist” for many years, fully engaged in the oppositional and dualistic paradigm of “us vs them” (we, of course, being the good guys and the somewhat vague and amorphous category of “they” the bad- usually involving the manipulations of corporate entities and dark money), I nearly castrated my own psyche trying to move the other way and subdue my moral outrage. Maybe I have found some needed balance, but your writing on this theme was a direct hit, and a direct call to action for me to not mistake fear-based suppression / complacency / surrender with genuine peace.
Your writing is brilliant. The Thoreau quote was perfect. I’m back in school and cannot afford to support you now, but I greatly respect and appreciate your work and your insights.
Thank you, Susan. This Substack is free and I'm not accepting pledges or compensation through it. That said, if you want to direct a library to order my books or post a positive of any of them somewhere, I bet it'll come back to me somehow. Deep thanks for the kind words.