Listening Matters on "The Miracles Express"

One of a series of Resources Unlimited reports stemming from a year-long study sabbatical in 2009 on spiritual and social resilience. The research sabbatical—18, 000 miles of travel across 28 states—involved interviewing several hundred citizens across varied backgrounds, circumstances, and callings.
 
Optimism and PESSIMISM
June 28, 2010

Calling All Solutionaries

"Sure, we could be faced with a 'perfect storm' of catastrophes leading to a mass extinction [of the human race in less than 100 years], but I think it will be more likely that we'll adapt quickly, using technology not necessarily to reverse the damage we have caused, but to support life in a hostile new world."

That was said by Tobin Lopes, of the University of Colorado at Denver, in Discovery News, as quoted in the report by Ian O'Neill, in MSNBC News:  “Will humans be extinct within 100 years?”

An always-ever-hostile new world as the norm.  Really?

Or humans becoming extinct within 100 years.  Again, really?

What a choice! But maybe so, after all. Maybe not. God alone knows.

To be uncomfortably blunt, the telling signs of either horrible catastrophe are everywhere. We base this assertion on the extraordinary knowledge we gained from our having conducted lengthy recorded interviews and conversations on resilience, on bouncing back. After a year’s worth of interviewing, we arrived home in Oak Park, Illinois, both of us morbidly dispirited—profoundly so. Yet we remain a little hopeful nonetheless in our "maybe-delusional" and “insane” thinking.

These are grossly and manifestly dysfunctional times, nationally and globally, says the MSNBC report by O'Neill. We learned similarly depressing and defeating things over 12 months of Resilience Study Interviews: covering 28 states, driving 18,000 miles, interviewing hundreds of princes and paupers alike, along the byways and highways in what we called the "Miracles Express" mobile office/motorhome (miracles? strange irony!). Our own findings, in an odd way perhaps, more than merely echo much of what's said in the media of many nations, and in particular by scientist professors, and by the world-famous Australian scientist (95 years old) Frank Fenner, who sees "no hope for humans," as reported in The Australian.

The publication goes on to say in a better-pay-attention headline: "Frank Fenner doesn't engage in the skirmishes of the climate wars. To him, the evidence of global warming is in. Our fate is sealed."

In sabbatical interviews we ourselves noted the omnipresent hostility bred by just too much political and moral confusion and dysfunction in a world gone berserk, fast on its way to either extinction or heading toward some form of mass annihilation. In the spot-on and only-too-true real words of an Oklahoma couple interviewed, we learned that, "We can't smack-talk our way out of our common problems."

To provide one remarkably startling example of resonance, this one from the complicated matter of Immigration Reform. These days the distasteful attacks and counter-punches in the heated national public media discourse on Immigration Reform are lamentable, worse even. This is a sorry state of affairs in the culture. But we can do better and be more helpful, say many luminaries. Perhaps a way to start is to criticize less and facilitate more in solving and resolving. Can doing that help save the planet from extinction? What prevails now in some quarters is deeply troubling: a virtual ever-exponentially-expanding laundry list of manifestly unfair, markedly ignorant and gratuitous forms of name-calling and biased categorization.

Needed is a higher level of studies in public discourse to aid in getting good things done.

As example par excellence of both the negatives and positives in the level of discourse, the June 17 Washington Post/ABC News poll/article is accompanied by dozens (more!) of extraordinarily pointed responses. Reporters Jon Cohen and Tara Bahrampour were writers of the story: "Most Americans back new Arizona law, Washington Post-ABC News poll finds."

The link to the story is: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/17/AR2010061700008.html

In the article's posted responses, blatant name-calling and categorizing stand alongside bitter personal attacks, both nuanced and overtly demeaning. Astonishingly the 800-word article has generated written responses totaling an even more astonishing  100,000-plus words, as of June 22 (today’s date is June 28). One finds there too-numerous instances of what appears to be willful depersonalization. Several of the instances reflect misdirected, if justified, angers and frustrations, which circumstance leads to assorted bewildering confusions in search of genuine meaning and better understandings—ones less tendentious and better focused on the common good. In tumultuous times we seem to be transitioning to so-so-many new life-negating things in need of some positive life-affirming understandings. To our credit, we seem to be holding on (struggling) against the odds.

To hold the attention amid disturbing distractions is a challenge. We are trying mightily in these hard times to struggle through horrible suffering and adversity, in the hope of something better socially, economically, spiritually. But it may be too late, say some of those interviewed.

We were enabled (and equipped) to interview citizens from varied regions, contexts, callings, identities. Many of the interviewed were anxious, eager to hear and learn ways of doing more crossing of boundaries, yes, even while feeling somewhat hopeless. Some interview subjects were afraid or reluctant to try new things, to cross boundaries, to step out of the box in favor of something more purposeful, and for a range of subtle and not-so-subtle reasons. When articulated, the reasons sometimes made a compelling claim on our attention at deeper personal levels of civic engagement.

There was much conversation about the many socio-cultural failures in dealing with difficult issues—e.g., in economics, politics, religion. The failures identified most frequently included seven heartrending, agonizing concerns:

The deadly seven: (1) war and an ever-increasing militarism; (2) wanton corporate greed and irresponsibility; (3) environmental and ecological destruction; (4) the continuing urgent struggles for needed stability in the American family; (5) an off-the-charts joblessness (and under-employment) rate, to say nothing of those who, frustrated and operating under the radar screen, have stopped looking for productive work; (6) unintended yet harsh disparities in hospital medical services and in community healthcare programs; and (7) the still-deteriorated (and further deteriorating) neighborhoods from a yet-to-be-stabilized mortgage foreclosure crisis, which crisis further exacerbates what has been over the last decade an ever-burgeoning increase in the rate of homelessness, along with continuing deficits in growth of affordable housing.

Of course the discourse seemed always to include supplemental and welcome expressions of unadulterated filial and agape love. There were "less-than-perfect" stories of civic and nonprofit volunteerism, describing generous acts of service, kindness, justice, goodwill, of trying to make a difference at home and work, and in community. But is this really enough, given the problems confronting the world? One interviewing said, "Are you aware that the U.S. has been at war near constantly for the last 100 years?" No, we really weren't but are now.

The narratives were also frequently accompanied by, to us, shocking expressions of destructive hate and despairing bitterness, of crazy suspicion, of fear of neighbor, of deep angry cynicism derived from perceived (and most often unverifiable) "facts."

Vague reservations about the future were omnipresent. They were tied to agonizing worries over the seemingly intractable cultural dysfunctions and messes of our day. One interviewee, an accountant in San Diego, expressed unhappiness that we are fast becoming part of a "no longer can do" spirit of failure and systemic corruption—financial, social, political.

A retired museum docent from Birmingham, Alabama, said, "We seem captured right now in great doubt, and are in need of some certitude. We're searching after more faith in each other." Indications are that we are afraid: suspicious and thus deficient in trust of colleague and neighbor and friend. The discourse revealed how some of the nation's accepted and robust paradigms of conversation and debate and argumentation—whether in the media or in personal engagement—were actually intense, ardent pleadings for an improved sense of community caring-ness, along with a sturdy sense of reasoned (non-dogmatic) practicality.

Said one El Paso, Texas, interviewee, a person without a home for two years: "This ain't working. We know that. But we don't know where we're headed right now. We pretty much realize we have to go someplace better than what we've got now. We're in a national crisis of selfishness from fearing the future." He went on to explain, tragically, the literally dozens and dozens of citizens and officials who urged him over that time to be patient while "they" worked out solutions to benefit him. He is still homeless, without a place to call his own, his best efforts notwithstanding.

To glean from the interviews a sense of national and local strivings is useful. Even amid a sense of failure there was expressed wishes for improved qualities of friendship and lend-a-hand neighborliness. This was sometimes communicated ardently, revealing a passionate yearning for a deeper generosity of spirit in times of grossest insecurity and uncertainty. Some of the spoken strivings—many remarkably sincere, some delusional, yes, and some hideously misdirected. Often, however, they remained hopeful and in service to larger good. The interviews revealed a non-bureaucratic hunger for a renewed American sense of the unifying power of neighborhoods and neighborliness.

But then, there quickly erupted odd contradictions and paradoxes, revealed often spontaneously by scatter-shot dissing and by unnecessary, sordid, cheap shots of "gotcha" contrarianism—a kind of undisciplined striking out in all directions at "whomever." These expressions were in addition to the all-too-prevalent condemnatory characterizations of what, generally, are somewhat unknowable human motives. Always there is guesswork involved in understanding we humans—variously marvelous, enigmatic, thorny, and mysterious.

Are we talking here an example of the "infamous" American rough-and-ready demonstration of rugged individualism? Do we dare (some do dare) to say decisively why someone didn't—or did—say or do something questionable? But how can we be sure of motives? Where—and what—is the "proof" of the complex inner workings of human motivation, which workings generate unique attitudes and behaviors? Typically people hold back and feel threatened, sometimes justifiably, when someone unthinkingly claims special knowledge of another's multi-part motives. Indeed.  "How would you know?" is one edgy phrase deployed to counteract the presumptuous practice of a false smartness.

As well, there is the all-too-normative, very real, sometimes irrational and unrestrained rhetoric of panic and urgency and emergency in the national discourse on immigration. There also are ever-persisting worries about the future, in general. "How can we possibly fix so much that has gone so very wrong?" was an earnest response to questions asked in a small-group conversation, at Bellarmine University in Louisville. In some instances in both sabbatical interviews and much of the media commentary on immigration issues, there were indirect intimations of (and forthright promptings toward) violence and other brutalities against presumptive enemies—e.g., "we" good peaceful and law-abiding citizens against "those" invading evil ones of little or no account.

At an unplanned, impromptu gathering in Kansas of a dozen "RVers" in the Walmart parking lot in Topeka, there were decisive yet nonetheless ill-considered urgings—the spirit of the law be damned—for use of unethical and even illegal measures and tactics, including small-minded deployment willy-nilly of martial restraints against the "invaders," whether settled here already legally or trying to get here, legally or not, by hook or by crook. In blunt and unexpected (and somewhat humorous) reply, said one energetic teen traveling on vacation with his family, "Now just stop all this madness." Out of the mouth of a "child" came timely and needed provocation.

Some of the more forceful directives clearly discriminate against (and degrade) the basic rights of human personality. They denigrate the abiding sense of the sacred dignity of persons, and of the responsibility of all to choose wisely. The common-good warrants of human dignity are stipulated not only in the Bill of Rights and U.S. Constitution but also in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In partial summary, this laundry list of naked, unfiltered sabbatical responses similarly surfaces, as well, in the responses to other pressing issues mentioned here. One finds posted online in many internet media quite disquieting commentary. Nevertheless, in the interest of fair play, we report with some smidgens of satisfaction that a few helpful comments lodged there are hopeful, practical, and blessedly grounded in an even-handed American sense of compassionate realism and pragmatism.

 But is it enough, given all we know about the prevailing and worsening conditions of the planet?

Sabbatical interviews along with the products of public media communications—print, electronic, broadcast, podcast—reveal more than a few hauntingly disconcerting insights into the present state of American discourse. No surprise in an assertive, bouncy culture that matters is typically controversial because sometimes overwhelmingly complicated!

The list of seven bedeviling and agonizing concerns mentioned earlier (war, unemployment, homelessness, etc.) tells of social and moral and political dislocation. It is a benighted list to be sure. But not the whole story, hardly, at least for now while we still have time to consider our future fate. No matter what, always is there more to tell and some light to share, as revealed in sabbatical interview conversations.

The seven bedevilments can also serve as seven "bewitching" opportunities for growth through new and energetic and task-oriented insight. We have a lot to do and we cannot be sure it will be enough. Still, any spirit-killing national problem desperately in need of life-affirming solutions by solutionaries seems to call forth dedicated workers who care, from within cities and towns and neighborhoods almost everywhere and anywhere.

Solutionaries are certainly "out there," already working hard, always. Most of us can easily name some we know. Their stories are legion. Most of the people we interviewed drew out their own compelling (sometimes weird) stories of helping, of volunteerism. Still to ask in all this: How—how really—did the awful things we face today happen in the process of "progressing" from there to here?

Exactly what is the "something" that has happened, based on sabbatical interviews? One thing is that we have grown pathologically obsessed with making too-facile, "trendy," all-too-clever formulations of human purpose. And unhappily, this seems to be human purpose increasingly detached from the everyday routines and tasks at home, work, in community. Ordinarily the tasks have robustly called us to work hard in partnership on behalf of common good. Yet we now seem, the interviews indicate, more deeply enmeshed than perhaps ever before in the rough beast of hardly flexible "either/or" limitations. Needed, interviewees said, are more open constructs of a more educated and wholistic "both/and" thinking. Yes, but is all that too late?

We seem stuck. Our capacity for supple, thick compassionate regard has thinned. Personal and genuine regard for others is ebbing, maybe adrift. Expressed in still other figurative ways, we have shut down, closed up shop, turned unsympathetically inward and narcissistic. We have become perilously affected by the seductions in "hip" things of distraction and, now we know, in a dangerously extreme way. In the practice of an excessive enjoyment of diversion, we have become less humane, self centered, more destructive and hardened, less constructive. To some degree we have even become anesthetized from our own sufferings and pain. In turn, this situation will morph into a detachment from a certain sympathy with the travail of others around us, including loved ones.

In more than a few intimate stories told of personal boundary-crossing, we learned that the distractions and diversions are intended to ward off—to escape and avoid—the constant pain of living existentially without some beneficial sense of a transcendent good, one beyond the sometimes overwhelming pressures and stressors of the present. In conversation in Syracuse, New York, with a small mixed group of senior citizens and their juniors, we learned that escapism through "me-ism" is seen, notably, as but one antidote to despair against the hard rigors of sustained, unresolved family conflict and dysfunction. Even amid dysfunction, "family" of all kinds remains the basic social structure of our culture.

Some of these life-denying limits are self imposed, we learned. They disallow by despairingly saying no intentionally to more imaginative and hopeful possibilities. We've given up. The disallowance can (and does) work to murder a spirit of kindness and the civility that energizes temperate critical inquiry. The "how did this all happen" state of affairs also has to do with an unwholesome adoption over time of a less fluid, slavish, near-dogmatic adherence to rigid, unyielding and self-centered identity politics. We are awash in extremist political and religious ideologies—a sad kind of robust "niche marketing" run amuck, out of control, making mayhem, producing still more consternation and vain-glorious destruction.

The devolution is but one consequence of losing our way along a less than peaceful path. We have somehow forgotten in a class-driven, get-the-money-now culture of insatiable greediness how to empathize with the weaker, the less fortunate, the disinherited, and the poor. In the process we have exposed our own frighteningly narcissistic, self-hating vulnerabilities. The politics of resentment stares back at us in the mirror. Still to their credit, the poor-ers inconveniently remind that they are here....and that they count. How dare "those people" make indignant presumptions of their own inalienable importance!

If so convicted in this egregious matter of broken and disordered social justice, then we can ask this question as possibly one of several starter questions about the poor: Have we conceivably turned from a national "War on Poverty" in the more socially-conscious 1960's to a war against the poor in more rapacious year 2010? If so, then may a renewed civic spirit of community goodwill (and lots of new thinking and contemplating and reading) somehow lead us, guide us, help us along the way to be more sensitive by doing better on behalf of others and self.

Nevertheless, there are hopeful signs to report, though perhaps not as many of those signs or indications have been articulated widely, as necessary, in these our neediest of untamed times. "Less stupidity and more stability and coherence, please," is one of many mournful cries among poignant entreaties heard everywhere—in the media, among friends, with colleagues, from extensive interviewing. To which we can now add all we are learning from the Ian O'Neill analysis and posted comments here. He asks and posits answers to whether "the clock of doom [is] ticking for mankind?"

In response, based on sabbatical interviews. On the positive side, there is also much salutary talk these days in classrooms and board rooms and on public commissions (as well as in neighborhoods and at home). Much of the talk is of a widespread spiritual impoverishment, finally acknowledged broadly, put on a much bigger table. One recommendation out of all that kind of deliberation is that we now must confront nearly overwhelming psychic and emotional exhaustion.

The wretched state of affairs comes largely and lately from two "developments" most unwelcome—developments which are now disastrously insinuated into the social systems: (1) Just too many citizens caught up in, even imprisoned by, much too many unrelieved personal and family stresses; and (2) citizens dispirited by an excess number of negative experiences with seemingly inert bureaucratic (and political) arbitrariness. One off-putting result of these kinds of unfeeling, disempowering experiences is more conflict. Of that, most agree, we need much-much less. The world is awash in conflict.

And we are also awash in dogmatic absolutism. Where is the sense of fluid flexibility needed? One dreadful consequence of the travail and the suffering and the pain, say prominent ethicists and other opinion makers, is that we citizens seem to be holding desperately, tightly, to extremes of reactionary reductionism and over-simplification. Who was it that said this: That too many of us are "reactionaries about what we know." We're trying to get a hard grip, of course, understandably. We're attempting to hold on, while loath to give in (capitulate) to a cynical, if ersatz, "truism" which sorrowfully declares: Life is hard and then you die.

Is there a better alternative, even when things seem somehow patently hopeless?

Can that grim declaration of "nothingness" be real, correct, accurate? Is there a more gentle and less callous alternative? There are the quizzical lyrics to consider of American pop singer Peggy Lee's 1969 existential song of disillusionment. This is a song of dissonance, one sung as well by famed recording artists even up the present. She asks/sings, "Is that all there is?" More than many prefer to think in hope fully (some say delusional hope) that the answer is: "No, there's more—much more."

Maybe, indicate sabbatical interviews. People of all backgrounds and lifestyles, of course, know and experience life as more rewarding socially and economically, more satisfying spiritually. The unique stories are particular, manifold in meaning, often absorbing. Whence come more stories of grace under pressure, of real transformation, of adverse winds transformed into fresh breezes and more comforting winds of new life, all needed to help overcome defeat and possible total destruction.

In this regard, can we each do better (and help a few others do a little better) in order to make for a higher quality of life at home around the dinner table? And at work and in our neighborhood? A female physician and her bricklayer spouse from Norman, Oklahoma, opined that, "We can't smack-talk our way out of our common problems."

Smart questions of common purpose are ones that we ought to ask and answer often. These are questions which each of us can try to ask and answer, God willing, with a hoped-for sense of new and determined determination. To continue trying to achieve an improved sense of renewal in the American social enterprise is an always-there national (and international) goal, the interviews revealed. This task, admittedly writ large, lies before us searchingly. Can we respond? Overcome the doubts and fears? If yes, how? If no, why not? Can things of consequence in our neighborhoods be nudged into a little less brutality and a little more tolerance and understanding, and humaneness?

However you can, if at all, try to read and reflect on and to study, learn from, and act upon some of the pointed comments—even those regarded as openly contemptuous—as contained here in the wide-ranging MSNBC postings. Some of the more grandiose comments may funnily feel like airing in public the nation's "dirty laundry" on vital social, political, and more issues of agonizing concern. And note in posted offerings (whether MSNBC or elsewhere in other media outlets) the vast, often fascinating commentary on the post-ers: Comment-makers making comment about comment-makers!

The compilation, one among many others "out there," is in this PDF, titled "Impossibilities, Perplexities, and Complexities of Immigration Reform."

The link is:
http://resourcesunlimited.org/Impossibilities,%20Perplexities,%20and%20Complexities%20of%20Immigration%20Reform%20June%2021,%202010.pdf

It runs about 120 pages, offering almost every plausible complaint and solution, whether perceived or real, practical or no, arrogant or kind, pretentious or simplistic, and anything else in a more haunted and reassuring middle ground.

The document altogether offers a unique and somewhat imaginative mix of reasonable actions for Citizen Solutionaries. Pick and choose we do, inevitably, historically, humanly. The entirety of the mix, not unusually, crosses a number of boundaries within a context that speaks to the interdisciplinary dimensions of a more generous decency—decencies economic, social, political, religious, moral, ethical.

What is the right answer in all this? Only God knows, is one answer. Is there just one answer only? Don't think so, say many smart people, without any hesitation. Who decides what's right and how to choose from among the ostensibly valid range of options for solutions that are available (and imagined by) solutionaries?

How to make your case reasonably, tolerantly, graciously? How to avoid personal and prejudicial (and debilitating) attacks on "the other?" How to ask others in observance of the Golden Rule not to attack you? How to decrease the social and psychic and physical violence. In these ongoing challenges, how are responsible American citizens of our clearly troubled democracy to help lead the way, step out in front? More is there to do, yes, no matter what.

What more is there to do for you? What is a first step among many steps you are to take? Both the sabbatical interviews and much media commentary on compound-complex concerns about our future vitality demonstrably avow, here and there, a more civil and constructive "Dialogue of Differences" regarding efforts to reform our broken world. We must try to fix the world, while there s till time, assuming we have time. Relatively, one-hundred years is not all that far off.

Still, one grave caveat in all this: No easy task is it to live (and learn to live better) in the tension of differences. Nevertheless we American citizens, in awareness of our documented can-do expansionist
history, may yet be able to summon more courage to choose more peaceful, hopeful, and satisfying solutions. Will the future be: No, we can't. Will the future be: Yes, we can.

The sense of new possibility goes along with the idea of us (meaning many, many more of us) helping to choose the financial means as well as the resources (the human wherewithal) to achieve some workable, even if typically imperfect, solutions. They may work, some of them, and they might not, some of them. It's hard to know the future completely.

Therefore, we are to do the best we can, however we can, say some of the media "commentators" as well as some of the hundreds of citizens interviewed on sabbatical—citizens legal and "otherwise."

It is best to end here strong, with a restatement taken from Mr. O'Neill's analysis: "But this is as speculative as Fenner's gloomy forecast. I suspect the realities of living on a warming planet with a spiraling population and dwindling resources will remain unknown for some time yet. However, if our continuing abuse of resources continues at this rate unchecked, we can be anything but optimistic about our species' future."

Respectfully,
Jim Boushay and Rickey Sain
New Orleans
June 28, 2010, 3:45 p.m.

Additional references

Recommendation for further reading and reflection is Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann's essay "Counterscript: Living with the elusive God."
The link is http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3307

Second recommendation is eminent religious historian Martin E. Marty's June 28, 2010, "Sightings" column, titled "Extinction." The link to the column is:
http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2010/0628.shtml

Jim Boushay and Rickey Sain are trustees of Resources Unlimited Foundation, an education institute in social justice and civic engagement, based in Oak Park, IL, USA.

A shorter version of the above report is available at
http://www.resourcesunlimited.org/Immigration_Reform_Calling_All_Solutionaries.htm

See the Boushay/Sain related article on Immigration Reform, posted in the May 3, 2010 issue of America magazine, Posting # 7.
The link is: http://www.americamagazine.org/content/signs.cfm?signid=407&comments=1#readcomments

Link to the original “Optimism and PESSIMISM,” posted in its entirety at NewsVine.com:
http://technology-science.newsvine.com/_news/2010/06/24/4556878-will-humans-be-extinct-within-100-years?commentId=15159619#c15159619