The Me and We Conflict

When I reach the last days of a year, for me, it has significance. It's not meaningful seasonally as that is about Solstices and equinoxes. It's just an artificial calendar devised by man; but we can use a time (arbitrary or otherwise) to stop and take stock. It is the time I often revise my goals for the year to come. I don't call them goals so much as intentions. Who do I want to be? What do I want to do? What actions will help me be the woman I want?

This year, I've been thinking of something else: how do these goals apply to me and we? It can be a basic, political and philosophical difference that goes beyond families or cultures to religions where some believe we each face god's judgment alone while others believe we are reincarnated as soul fragments and how we treat our brother might end up part of a next lifetime in a lot more real way than a reincarnation of the whole soul. Culture or individual?

In our two main political parties, there is also a different way of seeing me and we. How many times have we heard Republicans say you can manage your money better than the collective we through government. How effectively, you will build bridges, airports, highways, schools, railroads, power grids, has been shown through the last eight years when none of that was done and we are facing a deteriorating system.

Right wingers like Rush Limbaugh have pushed an agenda of me as a way to build their own power bases. They say-- as I make me strong, everyone else will be too. If this doesn't work out to be true, it's the other guy's fault for weakening individuals. To those who think this way, only through individuals does power come.

The opposing party's claims can be just as misused when it becomes somebody else can do it for me and I don't have to do anything but wait. We then means somebody else. Where we working together is strong, me either only thinking about me or waiting for someone else to fix something, is damaging.

So I cannot ignore my personal goals, but also must think what 'we' goals are important to support. Theoretically I might convince myself I don't have to do any of that because someone else will. I could take care of my own little community, my own family, my own impact zone, the areas where I receive praise for what I do; but is that enough? It seems to me we have seen how well that works when we are uninvolved on the larger scale. Can each little community stand alone or must each concern itself also with the broader community?

Okay an example of how I see this applied is in the recent imbroglio of Obama choosing Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration. This isn't going away any time soon and how important is it to me? Where does it impact we?

To start, Warren has some good qualities. He has put 90% of his income back into good works, and it's not just evangelizing but actually working on things like poverty and disease. He even gets it that there are global climate questions, and that the environment is a spiritual responsibility.

Christopher Hitchens expressed his reservations at the invitation based on the fundamentalist angle, which Warren pretty clearly is. Warren has stated Jews won't get into heaven. Most christianists would also say that admittance is only through accepting Jesus which lets out anybody but themselves. That's no surprise nor is it news.

Warren's worst quality to those who supported Obama is a biggie, and it's the reason for the brouhaha. He has the christianist view of homosexuality. He has taken some parts of the Bible, as many others have along with him, and equated it with meaning all homosexuality is forbidden, sinful and must be fought against by penalties that, if no longer criminal, are still punishment oriented.

Warren and people like him are as bigoted about the homosexual as at one time similar types were about racial differences. They all ignore nature and use the Bible like a hammer based on their own interpretation of its verses. Warren has gone so far as to compare gays with those having sex with beasts or children (he has recently taken that text out of his site but it was there). It's not surprising that homosexuals are feeling as though Obama just slapped them in the face.

It would be possible to be neutral on this if it doesn't impact me individually. I mean I am not a gay; so should I care? Why I do and should is the we that impacts us all. It is why those, who see it differently than I do, also care. I wrote quite a bit on this earlier, during the campaign, because I have looked at these scriptures that christianists are using and I see there is another way to interpret them-- a way that to me makes more sense.

[This is for those who use the Bible as gospel and can be skipped by anyone who doesn't believe they must do something based on a preacher's interpretation of it. I am going to skip over the Old Testament. If you are living your life based on it, you aren't reading my blog anyway.

Instead take a quick look at Romans 1:22-32 (you can find it online if you do not have a home Bible). If you look at it without prejudice and without an assumption as to what it has to mean, you will see that what Romans is talking about are people doing a lot of very bad things-- greed, malice, murder, strife, deceit, and the list goes on. This isn't about same sex people who are living a quality life together as couples. This is about rank promiscuity and the opposite of what gays are fighting to attain.

I believe there will come a day when that scripture will be re-evaluated by even people like Rick Warren. It already has by many ministers to see that what most homosexuals want is the very opposite of what this scripture is talking about.

This penalizing 'we' are trying to deny people ordinary lives, the respect and legal rights of society at large. And why has this happened? Because little 'me' has the idea that it either threatens him/her or makes them more righteous somehow.

What has gone on where it comes to homosexuals is crazy. If you know homosexual couples, you know how crazy it is. I believe it will be seen as as crazy someday as it now is to deny blacks and whites intermarriage based on misinterpretations of other scriptures. In my opinion, the christianist interpretation of the scriptures is ignorant and wrong.]

Before Obama's debate with him, about all I knew about Rick Warren was he'd written a best-selling book, The Purpose-Filled Life, which I didn't like when I scanned over a bit of it.

President-Elect Obama is a young man who has looked for meaning in his life and found it through Christianity. He has not appeared to me to be a christianist but that is yet to be seen for sure. He has sought out various spiritual mentors. Rev. Wright, was another who preached alienation in some ways but also had a message of good works. Obama's talking about his Christian faith has never been a plus where I am concerned. I understand that his belief is bound to impact some choices-- like the Warren one-- or maybe he knows something about Warren that the rest of us will learn.

After I wrote most of this, I saw a column by Frank Rich in Sunday's New York Times criticizing Obama for the choice; and one by Melissa Etheridge saying the choice is now ours and let's see where this goes with a totally different slant.

This applies to we/me thinking because we are impacted by unfairness to anyone. Denying homosexuals the right to adopt children, as Arkansas just did, or to have legal marriages or unions as we recently saw with Florida and California but many states like Oregon earlier, to me, that's been flat out wrong. Unfairness hurts all of us.

Obama may have made a mistake in inviting Warren or maybe his invitation will lead to Warren looking again at those scriptures; but it will be what Obama does next that matters most. He now has the power to work to right some big wrongs. It will be the good for all of us if he does. If he doesn't, then I think we all have to stand with our gay brothers and sisters against this unfairness and make it politically untenable to treat one group of people as inferiors. If it has profited some to take on a christianist view of marriage, then we need to see it stops profiting them.

That was just one example of how me/we works. I am not leaving behind my 'me' concerns as I make goals for 2009 that reflect things taking me closer to being who I want to be; but I also am not going to forget the we issues that matter to our culture as a whole, that will impact the world in which my grandchildren grow up. The election is over, but the real work has just begun. Concerns can't just be about what benefits me but what is good for us. When we think that way, that's when we will see real change and it will benefit me/we as it happens.