Giving Up Hope for a Deeper Hope
One of the joys of my profession is the opportunity to meet and connect authentically with amazing people. Our Larkin Painting team is composed of incredible individuals. Every day I get to work and create with clients and all sorts of people who have their own unique stories and perspectives. My life is richer and fuller for them. I am grateful for this daily gift of connection with people-clients, employees, contractors, designers and associates. It is a blessing. I am a lucky man because I get to live and work in an open and creative part of America. In my little “corner” of America, the people I meet share and give to one another freely. We make each other better. However, when I leave my little “corner”, I am confronted by an American Empire that appears to have neither a heart nor a soul. I used to have hope in our empire, but watching my country over the past three years, I have come to believe that America, the Empire, is in collapse.
Unfortunately, the painful reality of the American Empire is: that it was born in criminal violence as it devastated the native populations; it built its wealth on the backs of humans trafficked and held in lifetime bondage; it has practiced predatory capitalism since its inception. The privileged few have been preying on the many to build enormous wealth so that today we have 80% of hardworking Americans living paycheck to paycheck.
As I look for hope in our institutions, I have trouble naming one significant American institution that is working for the benefit of everyone in this country. The presidency? No! The Congress? No! The judiciary? No! The churches? No! The press? No! Our educational systems? No!
The operative phrase here is “working for everyone.” I cannot name a time in our history when our esteemed institutions were working for everyone; however now it feels as if our Empire is speeding backwards to our past. Witness how our chief executive is the president of the Confederacy, instead of the entire country, our Union. Witness our Congress in complete gridlock with fickle, everchanging rules and ignored procedures that are meant to protect the checks and balances of our government. Our highest and most esteemed court now seats two sexual predators. Many American churches are morally bereft, blind to the harm that has been done to children and glibly defending their mistreatment and abuse. Our educational system punishes kindergartners with suspensions and by criminalizing behavior, thus setting the foundation for a school to prison pipeline.
Do we have any non-negotiables? In other words, something that we believe all people in this country should share in and have a right to in “Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty for ourselves and our Posterity”? No, we have no non-negotiables! Access to affordable healthcare? A quality education for all of our children? Safe schools? Clean air and water? We believe in none of these, otherwise we would have them.
This is the cold truth about America the Empire: it does not care about its people; and it probably never has. We have always put “things” before people. We as an Empire prey upon people for social and material gain. We don’t think of other people’s children as our children, or even as essential to our posterity. Everything is “me first” and “me and mine only”, as we breathe in and absorb the America First rhetoric.
So where is my deeper hope in this despair? My deeper hope is: you! I have met so many incredibly good, decent, and generous people as clients, friends and in my own company. My hope is that we find each other and create what Meg Wheatley, calls “islands of sanity.” Every day I see courageous loving people. These are the people who are the cultivators of hope and love. These are the people who deliberately and proactively resist the destructiveness of disconnection and “me first”. My hope is in the incredible goodness and preciousness and beauty of each person and their ability to create islands of sanity.
The sooner we let go of hope in the American Empire, the better able we will be to put our energy into creating islands of sanity. The collapse is happening as I write, and people are suffering. We need islands of sanity to help alleviate the suffering. My hope is in the ever-new possibilities that people inspire in me. But for those new possibilities to happen the Empire as we know it must collapse and make room for a more perfect Union.
Be well,
Bill