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Healding Ourselves and Our Nation
A sermon delivered September 29, 2002 by Reverend Rudi Gelsey
At the Unitarian Coastal Fellowship, Morehead City, NC
Healing ourselves and healing our nation go together,
just as it takes two to tango.
Healing ourselves and our nation are intertwined.
They are part of our seventh principle,
the interdependent web of existence.
It is hard for individuals to be sane and whole,
if the nation is under severe strain.
Conversely, a nation is in grave danger,
when its leadership is afflicted with illusions of grandeur,
also known as megalomania:
acting like a bully on the world stage,
and suppressing civil rights at home.
Historically, we have been a can-do nation,
confident in our ability to deal with any challenge.
Since the trauma of September 11th,
many among us have been shaken in our optimistic world-view.
When three highjacked planes
crashed into two symbols of American power,
President Bush declared "war" on terrorism,
though the term is at odds with its conventional meaning,
is a rhetorical flourish in the heat of the moment.
This is followed now by claiming world supremacy
and our right to go to war preemptively and unilaterally
against any nation, anytime, anywhere.
The Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld doctrine assumes
that as the planet's only superpower,
we are entitled to thumb our noses at international law.
The ancient Romans already had a saying:
Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi, meaning
God has privileges, that common mortals do not enjoy.
Dare we be so idolatrous as to assume a God-like posture?
We have been accused of arrogance.
Perhaps, underneath arrogance,
lurks another reality,
an awareness that we are not invulnerable anymore.
We are scared, understandably so:
Nightmare scenarios abound:
suicide bombers,
sneak attacks by chemical or biological agents,
the threat of a nuclear shoot-out.
When the Twin Towers collapsed,
the American dream of unlimited opportunities and power
also took a hit.
I suspect the concept of our unrivaled superiority
is not fueled by calm self-confidence and mature strength,
but by fear.
Witness wild, ruinous schemes like Star Wars,
and a "defence" budget greater than the sum-total
of the defence budgets of the next,
most heavily armed fifteen countries on the face of our planet.
Star Wars is a fascinating script for comic strips,
but a poor prescription for public policy.
To me the idea of a US missile shield
is as flawed as was the French Maginot Line,
supposedly a protection for France from German invasion
some six decades ago.
Our withdrawal from the ABM treaty
is part of a larger obsession,
the predilection of our executive branch
for unilateral action
and disregard for the opinions of the rest of the world.
Our exaggerated pride,
what the ancient Greeks called hubris,
determines our attitude toward the Kyoto protocol on the environment,
and International Criminal Court.
Then there is our refusal to sign a treaty banning land mines,
or even making genocide a crime against humanity.
Our diplomacy, position papers, and campaign speeches
are dangerously out of touch with common sense reality.
We tell the United Nations that they will be irrelevant,
if they do not do our bidding.
Meanwhile our government unashamedly is a billion dollars in arrears
in contributions to the U.N,
but willing to spend 100 to 200 billion on an Iraq invasion,
not to mention uncounted billions
on an Iraqi occupation and reconstruction.
Far from acting as a cooperative member
of the community of nations,
we parade our imperial, imperious power.
Past history should serve us as an instructive warning signal.
What happened to Greece, after the death of Alexander the Great?
All his brilliant conquests came to naught.
European crusades during the Middle Ages were pushed back by Saladin.
Spain's invincible armada was destroyed by the British.
For a while, Britannia ruled the waves,
but eventually had to give up its colonial possessions.
Krushev banged his shoe,
saying that the Soviet Union would bury capitalist States,
but was buried instead.
Napoleon and Hitler set out to conquer Europe.
We know what happened to them.
No matter how strong a military, a nation, an Empire,
unless they act prudently and responsibly,
sooner or later, after much bloodletting and suffering,
they will be cut down to size.
Ambitious schemes of reckless expansion and domination
have always come to grief.
It would be foolhardy to expect a different outcome.
What is a concerned citizen to do?
In totalitarian countries,
the charisma of its leaders,
a Hitler, a Mussolini, a Lenin
whips up superpatriotic or revolutionary zeal,
producing a mass psychosis.
People are asked to blindly follow a Fuehrer, il duce, a comrade.
Reason flies out the window.
Democratic countries are not entirely immune.
We can be led astray from the straight and narrow path
of fairness, openness, democracy, and justice.
It takes courage and wisdom to resist propaganda,
brainwashing by the media,
official misinformation like the Bay of Tonkin resolution,
that ushered us into the disastrous Vietnam war.
Saddam Hussein has proven to be a resourceful, dangerous adversary,
but so was Krushev during the Cuban missile crisis,
when the stakes were much higher.
How do I wish we had at the helm
a President of the calibre of John F. Kennedy.
Surrounded by able advisors, JFK used his smarts
to outmaneuver his Soviet counterpart.
When Krushev sent a message to President Kennedy,
threatening a dangerous escalation,
along with a conciliatory proposal,
Kennedy jumped on the positive, ignored the negative.
A breakthrough was achieved.
War with its immense suffering was averted.
Sad to say, that when Saddam Hussein blinked
and offered unconditional access to his country by U.N. inspectors,
President Bush poopoohed the positive opening,
and set humiliating conditions
that would encourage rejection.
It looks as if our administration's goal is not disarmament per se,
that might be achieved through peaceful inspection and enforcement.
What we have now is that under the cloak of high sounding ideals,
like security and freedom,
our President is on a personal vendetta against his father's nemesis,
and ultimately trading blood for oil.
Since our Congress seems intimidated,
it is the urgent responsibility of We, the People,
to step into the breach.
Let our elected representatives and the world know,
that we the people do not want the misery
of another brutalizing war.
We stand by the United Nations, of which we are the proud co-founders.
We are satisfied with the elimination
of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
through peaceful and thorough inspection.
We also want an end to the charade of our self-righteousness.
We have excellent reasons to be humble.
As a nation, we have been complicit with Saddam Hussein.
According to testimony before Congress
by a defected Iraq leader of the country's nuclear program,
80 to 90% of its nuclear supplies did not come from usual suspects
like Russia, China, or some axis of evil,
but from our very own United States of America.
We are morally outraged, rightly so,
by Hussein massively gassing Kurdish villagers.
Who was in Baghdad at the time,
sipping coffee with Hussein, and never bringing up the subject?
No other than our current secretary of defence Rumsfeld.
Who had the major contract for past rebuilding of Iraqi oil fields
and is likely to profit from the next such effort? Cheney's Haliburton,
the same Cheney who received five deferments during the Vietnam War.
As a government and as citizens with a conscience,
it is not time to confess our shortcomings and misdeeds as a nation?
Confession, after all, is supposed to be good for the soul, for our health.
Individually and collectively, what is the most important lesson
we may be able to garner from current developments?
It is to cease and desist from what the eminent Swiss psychologist,
Dr. Carl Jung, calls the projection of one's shadow.
This is how the blame game works.
When Iran during the hostage crisis,
called the United States the Great Satan,
it was projecting its own shadow upon us.
It was an effort to legitimize the fanatical fury of Iranian street mobs.
When hawks and chicken-hawks in our country
demonize the regime of Saddam Hussein,
we are projecting our shadow upon our foreign adversary,
masking our own culpability and complicity.
This is not to say that Saddam Hussein is free of guilt,
but neither are we.
As long as we project our arrogance upon Iraq,
as long as we are hooked on our addiction to oil,
as long as we harbor a desire to dominate the world,
we are not doing the healing work required of us.
The same, of course, is true at the individual level.
As long as we play the blaming game,
our troubles are the fault of our parents,
our spouses, our bosses, whoever,
we are failing to deal with our own share of responsibility
in overcoming creatively and constructively
what may be dysfunctional, wrong, or even sick in our lives.
There is a paradox inasmuch as we live in a tourist paradise.
People come from all over to enjoy the beach and the ocean.
The atmosphere is one of leisure,
sailing, fishing, and delicious seafood.
Yet TV and the papers remind us
that the United States and the world are in a deep crisis,
that cries out for our attention, help, and healing.
Especially in the midst of turmoil,
we need to be into a healthy life-style, exercise,
relaxation, breathing consciously, meditation,
the practice of compassion and right relations.
There is more.
We better be mindful of our heritage of democracy and freedom.
We are called to be activists on behalf of our values.
Let us be in touch with our higher selves,
and commune with the larger Self,
with nature, our fellow-citizens, indeed the world.
Under the impact of September 11th,
we see and hear everywhere God bless America.
How about being truly inclusive?
God bless America and all nations,
or for that matter,
God heal America and all nations.
May you and me be active participants in that healing.
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