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A Thousand, Thousand, Thousand Points of Light


July 2014

Just Thinking

A Thousand, Thousand, Thousand Points of Light

by Phil Damon

Philip Damon taught writing and literature at the University of Hawaii for 34 years, and his fiction, non-fiction and social commentaries have been published widely. Among the mystic and holistic traditions, he has followed many practices. His “Sacred Democracy” columns appear monthly in readthedirt.org.

If you’re anything like me, you get a half dozen or so emails a day, each one soliciting your signature on a political petition. Usually you favor the position and add your name to the list. Though rarely informed of results (among notable exceptions is avaaz.org), you don’t hold it against these non-profits petitioning petitioners, who make it easier for you by completing your name and address once you type a first letter or a number into the box. Some supply the info automatically, and you simply click “submit.” After doing so you feel a degree of satisfaction…until the following request pops up.

This time they’re hoping you’ll donate money to the cause you’ve agreed with sufficiently to enlist your name on its behalf. Options for the amount are modest — at two, three, maybe five dollars — but they appreciate whatever you’re able or willing to contribute. At this point, with troubled mind, you do the math.

Lest we forget, this is one of six or more daily petitions, each critical enough to sign. They’re heart-rending to rank in importance, since you can’t donate to them all. At say $15 a day, they’d add up to around $3,600 a year, and it isn’t as if your donation list starts and ends there. Who do they think you are, the Koch Brothers?

The mere mention of whom brings us — you, me, the 99 per cent of us — to the crux of the problem. We aren’t the Koch Brothers. Nickle- and dime-ing it hardly gets it done, if we hope to buy back our democracy or a revitalized environment on the open market.

And there’s no mistake about it, democracy and nature are both up for sale. Clearly the environment has long been own-able, as evidenced by the charter of King Charles II to William Penn in 1681, itemizing domain over every imaginable waterway, mineral, plant or animal that existed in the territory now bearing his name. (Or even earlier in 1493, when the Papal Bull of Alexander VI divided ownership of the world, from pole to pole, between Portugal and Spain, paving the way for a colonial era that spelled the death of the commons, which had provided a livelihood for the indigenous populations about to be colonized.) Yet, though privilege of ownership would remain sacrosanct under the ideals of our precedent-setting democracy, the last thing anyone considered for sale was democracy itself. Nonetheless, with worship of property firmly established, is it any wonder “democracy” came to be defined as “capitalist society”?

In 1988, George Bush the elder introduced his (soon lampooned) “thousand points of light” metaphor to the country, referring to people “doing good throughout the nation” whose voices he promised to join on the nation’s behalf. In the same nomination speech, he pledged to superintend the foreign policy of a “kinder, gentler nation.” Steeped in cynicism as I was at the time regarding politicians in general and Republicans in particular, I couldn’t help but deem these admirable ideas. What better way to describe the domestic and foreign policies of a democracy — in fact, and not just in name only?

The thousand points of light have literary and spiritual antecedents, from which Bush aptly borrowed to shrink the metaphor from all beings in creation to the citizens of our own democracy. Yet in a polarized society such as ours, other literary allusions come to mind, especially George Orwell’s Animal Farm, for the line, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” The same can be said for those thousand points of light, since “people” have been tortuously redefined by the Court to include corporations, which in capital are more equal than any of us. Since the Court has equated money with speech, moreover, when it comes to a voicing of First Amendment rights, their thousand points of light now equal thousands of thousands of thousands of dollars — exponentially more numerous than ours could ever be. And that is a shameful way to run a democracy.

It’s shameful enough that voters’ opinions are shaped by slanders, slogans and pejorative labels instead of responsible sources of reliable fact and reasoning. But it’s far more so when they are underwritten by corporate “persons” who benefit lavishly at the expense of those they demagogue all the way to the ballot box, not to mention the nature their billions enable them to possess and plunder. As poor and minority citizens are detoured from voting by statutory trickery, “conservative” acolytes queuing loyally at the polls become poorer by the day. Their resources dwindle as they cultishly scoff at liberal voices of concern. They’re so polarized they’re ready to believe anything of others.

What’s left then for us others but to fight back? Yet how can we do so except “in kind,” which is to say, with money? It’s a classic land-grab, only democracy itself is up for grabs — before it’s completely sold off to speculation, development, and industry. So as we sign our names and pony up donations to high-minded non-profits lobbying law-makers with petitions on behalf of justice on particular issues, we are truly those scattered “thousand points of light” Bush promised would become united as one. There are, of course, more than a thousand of us — maybe a thousand thousand. But as we donate our fistfuls of dollars, the Koch Brothers and their peers consider scores or even hundreds of millions of dollars a pittance, since a million dollars is a thousandth of a billion and they have many billions, and rake in many more billions every day. How to compete with that?

Well, really only one solution remains for us to reclaim our democracy. And, it’s the very solution we revolted to gain the right for way back when. Yes, we have to voice our thousand points of light in the classical democratic way: as thousands times thousands of votes. Which means we Americans have to hold our noses and cast those votes for the Democrats. Because like it or not, they’re the only hope we’ve got.

Just thinking….


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