Tann for President

There has naturally been a lot of furry around the latest round of DNC speeches and the Democratic’s platform in general. There is a lot of people saying extremely important things, pointing out significant discrepancies in dialogue, motivation, and action. There is excitement and anger, apathy, confusion, name-calling, and outrage. This time of year brings a lot of emotions to the surface and a lot of righteous opinions. It allows people to step into their voice when they often keep quiet. In short, election cycles bring a lot of collective contemplation to the forefront.  

With all the words flying around on the internet, the thing I never hear about in the  political debates is how are we incorporating spiritual principals into our world views and actions as a country. I am not talking about religion here, I am also not talking about patriotism. What I want to see is how politics can actually reflect the world I want to live in and that is one embedded with spirit. Spiritual principals ought to be the foundation of how we are running the country, not just platitudes on Instagram memes. There is often such a disconnect from the conversations we are having about politics and the actions we take in community where we are trying to actually live the words of our great spiritual teachers. 

On this note, something in particular really struck me while listening to the speeches at the DNC. There is always so much talk about the future. Everything is the future; we are fighting for the future, making the future better, leaving our children the future. On paper this sounds great. As consumers and capitalists we really do need to think about future generations who are the ones inheriting the world, and we really do need to think about how our actions, right now, are creating the future we are living into. I’m not saying we need to disregard this whole notion of the future outright. We often borrow from First Nations this idea of 7 generations back and 7 generations forward, but there is something in the manner in which we plan for the future that strikes me so deeply as leaving out the most important part of the conversation which is the present. 

 It almost feels like the future and the present got flipped on their heads and we forgot where we live. The problem with so much rhetoric about the future is that it leaves room for this future to never come because we aren’t living with the nowness of today. No spiritual text anywhere ever says we ought to spent more time thinking about what has not yet come to pass. Nor do they say to spend time dwelling it what has come before. But yes, we need experience to learn from, and foresight to move forward. 

What happens when we stay closely related to the present is that we get an opportunity to see what is actually happening, not just what we think is there. Being in the present is not something our culture is good at promoting because presence usually doesn’t require us to spent a lot of money. Living in the present means letting spirit guide us and that is often with beauty and creativity. Politics is no different than an advertising company in that it spends millions and billions of dollars selling us ideas that keep us squarely away from the present moment. In consumerism we are sold the belief that somewhere in our future, once we have this certain product or object, our dreams will be fixed. We will be happy in the future once we have the one thing that we don’t currently have now. Politicians are professional sellers of ideas in the same way. They are selling their image so that we forget about what is currently present in order that we pin our hope on something in the future that may or may not come to fruition. 

There is a synthesis between being utterly self absorbed in the greed of the now and placates of future outcomes, though. It is what happens when we invite the presence of today to what we actually have the capacity to change in the moment. Change is small and incremental over time and that leads to bigger change than the change that happens by force and self-will. In short, this is the notion of surrender, and it is the whole idea behind spiritual principals. I often say that spiritual principals are the exact opposite of the material world, like looking into a pond and seeing the world reflected back just a bit different. So, for instance, I must grip to the edge of a cliff if I do not want to fall in this world. But in the spirit world the more I grip the more stuck I become. I have to let go in order to go up. We need to surrender to go forward. 

Tai chi utilizes this principal, as do all martial arts. In these kinds of art forms you are not fighting force with force, but rather you taking the force that is already coming your way and redirecting it, getting out of the way, and using much less energy in the process. Politics does not do this. Politics main goal is to win and beyond that, it is directing a lot of energy into something that doesn’t even exist, the future. What happens in the present is that we have to listen to each other. This would mean, amongst other things, the DNC would have to listen to Palestinian voices and not just sound the platitudes of a future that doesn’t actually matter to children being bombed right now. 

Even if we strove for a low-hanging spiritual principal, one that is perhaps the most cliché refrigerator magnets of all time (which is also to say it is a good one)--“be the change you want to see in the world,”--then politics would have to rethink itself entirely. For most people the change that we want to be is so basic: being a safe haven for people we care about; not hurting (or bombing) our neighbors; listening to plants and trees; not hating others for being different; helping people flee from unlivable conditions that you may have (knowingly or unknowingly) contributed to the first place…you know, just simple things like that. None of these things involves an unnamable future that mostly serves the reputations of the Right-Now’s. 

And I realize this all may sound like fantasy in its own right. It would take more then some simple reform to instill this level of spirituality into our politic sphere. But still, let me ground this with an even deeper message of structural change, alas based in an unknowable future.  Quite frankly, we don’t need a two-party system or even a dream of a three-party system. What if we actually scrapped the idea of having a single president all together? Seriously, why even have one president these days? Of course its not like the presidency is really just one person anyway, but we elect these figure heads to represent us as if we are just fragmented pieces of dust and not the refracted light of a rainbow. How are we expected to put all our faith, trust and hope into one person? It’s asinine. In the same way polyamory is teaching us that it is impossible to expect one person to be our partner, our best friend, our perfect lover, our co-parent, our adventure-buddy, our roommate and our creative outlet, how do we expect one person to stand for our convictions around immigration services, carceral reform, climate justice, marriage equality, abortion access, global affairs, gun regulation and Gaza? 

So imagine for a minute if every four years or so you got to vote for like 7 or 8 people who you think would do the best job for each of the aforementioned topics? And maybe you would also get to vote from a pool of like 3 or 4 people, each vote counting one-to-one for the person you actually wanting to see elected? The world has gotten impossibly complicated since the founders of this country began this experiment of so-called democracy. It is not reasonable for us to vote for one person who is expected fulfill so many roles for our fantasy future world. I know this idea may sound ludicrous to some people who think we should just do away with government all together. But I don’t think that is realistic either. 

In used to be, and still is in some places, that community was actually a relatively small number of people, with a relatively even smaller governing body. There has always been, will always be, and needs to always be people organizing and helping structure society. I don’t know if that was easier or harder in smaller groups but I feel certain that governing hundreds of millions of people has a uniquely difficult set of problems. Either way, there has to be people selected to care for the container of the whole. There cannot be a collection of people anywhere in the world that does not self-organize and layout principals for people to live by. But self-governing with leadership guided by spiritual principals, and governing by control and force and law are very, very different things. I think of the world StarHawk creates in her incredible book, The Fifth Sacred Thing, where the community is mainly self-governed but has a counsel of elders who hold the container and nothing is done without their knowledge. In todays world it doesn’t have to be elders at the helm, per se, but we need people who can be objective and demonstrate a genuine care for all our kin, human and otherwise, in this set of arbitrary border lines and all the others. 

On a final note, it may be obvious to you that I started off this writing by criticizing politicians’ use of future-speak and then moved into my own envisioning of a different future world. I offer this as the difference between what is being scaffolded on to us and the world I want to live into: politics is trying to sell us an idea for the future, while what I am saying is to live into the future right now. Or more precisely, I am wanting to re-envision a world that is governed by humans who are in service to nature. Merely playing lip service to promises one does not intend to keep puts everyone to sleep and it does not stimulate the imagination. Imagination, rather counter-intuitively, lives in the present, the only place where actual change can occur. Change does not happen in the future, it happens now. So go listen to a tree, and then maybe listen to your neighbor, and then do something to change the world that you have the capacity to change in this present moment on this very day. 

Tann for President.