SPIRIT IN MATTERS: Taking a Higher View of Life on Earth
By Dianne Eppler Adams

Vol. 2, No 13– September 26, 2004
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NOTE:  The distribution method for this eNewsletter will be changed by the next issue.  This is the last issue you will receive through Topica.  Instead, your next newsletter will sent from newsletter@spiritinmatters.com.  You may want to add this email address to your address book so your spam filter will not prevent you from receiving it.

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FROM THIS VANTAGE POINT...

     Hello!  How are you?

These are the words of greeting we hear several dozen times a day.  Could the fact that they’re spoken so frequency be the reason we commonly offer a passive response, “Fine. Thank you,” or brush off answering at all? 

I have been noticing lately how often I merely say “fine” even when I am feeling tired or down.  Am I being dishonest?  Okay, you say, what about just being cordial?  Why dump your troubles on a passer by?

I agree, in principle, that there are different levels of intimacy and that you may not care to share your troubles with a passer by, but what about honesty? How do you respond with honesty when you are asked, “How are you?”

The Toltec shaman Don Miguel Ruiz, writing about successful living in his book, The Four Agreements, identifies the first agreement – “Be impeccable with your word.”  This means we must speak with integrity, saying only what we mean.

Taking this as my goal, I would say “fine” if I were fine and I would say “tired” if I am tired and if I didn’t want to share that I was feeling down, I would be more impeccable and said nothing.

Clearly, what we say has impact.  Our words are not insignificant. Consider that even the offering of a shallow response to a greeting from a passer by has a result. One result is the prevention of the development of relationship with that person.

And by the same token, as you pass someone, do you really want to know how they are?  If you don’t want the truthful answer – “terrible actually, I’ve just been diagnosed with a fatal disease” – then perhaps it would be more impeccable to just say “hello.”

In fact, how would all our conversations be different if we were mindful of being impeccable with our words?

(Your comments are always welcome at SpiritInMatters@aol.com.)
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FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION...

THE OPTOMISM OF UNCERTAINTY
By Howard Zinn
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040920&s=zinn

In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?

I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.

There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. A revolution to overthrow the czar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II--the
Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German Army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?


And then the postwar world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone.

No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda. Spain became an astonishment. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone.

The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres of influence and control, vying for military and political power. Yet they were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence. The failure of the Soviet Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision to withdraw after almost a decade of
ugly intervention, was the most striking evidence that even the possession of thermonuclear weapons does not guarantee domination over a determined population. The United States has faced the same reality. It waged a full-scale war in lndochina, conducting the most brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In the headlines every day we see other instances of the failure of the presumably powerful over the presumably powerless, as in Brazil, where a grassroots movement of workers and the poor elected a new president pledged to fight destructive corporate power.

Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars:
moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience--whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.

I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go, I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of one another's existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.

Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don't "win," there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.

An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.


IMPENDING U.S. DEBT DISASTER - No Mention of Fiscal Gap Estimated as High as $72 Trillion
by Carolyn Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/09/12/MNG2S8NOI21.DTL

[Dianne:  I offer this article not to raise fear but bring awareness as a step toward a solution.]

The first of the 77 million-strong Baby Boom generation will begin to retire in just four years. The economic consequences of this fact -- as scary as they are foreseeable -- are all but ignored by President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry, who discuss just about everything but the biggest fiscal challenge of modern times.

Yet whoever wins the 2004 race will become the first U.S. president to confront what sober-minded experts across the political spectrum describe as an impending "fiscal catastrophe" lying right around the corner.

Astronomical federal debt, coming due as the Baby Boom generation collects Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, is enormous enough to swamp the promises both candidates are making to voters, whether for tax cuts, health care, 40,000 more troops or anything else.

"Chilling" is the word U.S. Comptroller General David Walker uses to describe the budget outlook.

"The long-term budget projections are just horrifying," added Leonard Burman, co-director of tax policy for the Urban Institute. "I've got four children and it really disturbs me. I just think it's irresponsible what we're doing to them."

What these numbers portend are crippling tax increases on workers, slashed benefits for retirees, gutted budgets for homeland security, highways, research and everything else, and an economic decline or a financial collapse that devastates the middle class, as happened recently in debt-strapped Argentina. Eventually, analysts insist, someone -- today's children or tomorrow's elderly or both -- will pay this debt.

Traditional budget measures used by politicians and the press give what Walker and many others call a highly misleading view of the U.S. debt. These focus on publicly held debt already incurred, now at $4.5 trillion, or 10-year budget forecasts like the one released last week by the Congressional Budget Office showing a record $422 billion deficit this year and a $2.3 trillion 10- year deficit.

But these figures, worrisome enough, are deceptive because they ignore future liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare payments to the Baby Boomers. An array of government and private analysts put the actual U.S. "fiscal gap," which means all future receipts minus all future obligations, at $40 trillion (Government Accountability Office) to $72 trillion (Social Security Board of Trustees).

These are not sums, but present-value figures, heavily discounted to show in today's dollars what it would cost to pay off the debt immediately. The International Monetary Fund estimates the gap at $47 trillion, the Brookings Institution at $60 trillion.

"To give you idea how big the problem is," said Laurence Kotlikoff, economics chairman at Boston University, who has written extensively on the subject, to close a $51 trillion fiscal gap, "you'd have to have an immediate and permanent 78 percent hike in the federal income tax."

These obligations are not imaginary. And unlike the 1980s and 1990s, economic growth cannot bail out the government because the Baby Boom retirement is at hand. Those born in 1946 will reach age 62 in 2008, allowing them to take early retirement and receive Social Security benefits.

"It's a number that's so large that people find it implausible, and so they don't think about it," said Alan Auerbach, a UC Berkeley economist who studies the issue and consults for the Kerry campaign. "But it's based simply on the projections we have for Social Security and Medicare. People aren't making these numbers up."

... "If you look at financial crises, they occur seemingly overnight," said Kotlikoff. "More and more pieces of straw drop on the camel's back, and all of a sudden, the camel collapses. ... Nobody knew exactly what day Argentina was going to go south or exactly what day Russia was going to default. The timing is up for grabs."

But early signs of a problem are now appearing, analysts said, starting with the mounting deficits under Bush caused not just by the recession and terrorist attacks, but also by enormous spending increases and tax cuts. The brief window of surpluses that appeared during the late 1990s economic boom offered a chance to address long-range liabilities, but those surpluses now are gone.

"Maybe the public doesn't want to hear it," Kotlikoff said. "Maybe politicians think ... the American public can't understand the truth or hear the truth or bear the truth. I think this is garbage. I think that people care about their kids and grandchildren and need to know the dangers facing them -- and us."


CHOICE AND CONSEQUENCES
By James O’Dea, Shift magazine
http://www.noetic.org/publications/shift/issue4/s4_odea.pdf
[Strongly suggest you follow link to complete article]

Many of us have experienced the feeling of a buzzing sensation in the center of the solar plexus, a little like a phone ringing as the body signals to us the importance of a choice we are about to make. Reason, emotion, intuition, moral conviction, and spirit can each prompt us to make choices.

Whatever the source or rationale for our choices, they reverberate. They manifest consequences. Our choices invariably affect others. Some choices echo far into the future and determine the options for generations to come. There is always something at stake. But just how much?
Examining the consequences of choice can help us learn and grow, develop accountability, provide insight, and spur more skillful action. But it can also induce fear, paralysis, or other forms of escapism.

As daunting as it is to interpret or analyze, the mirror of consequences should not be avoided, particularly in the name of spiritual detachment. At the same time, overplaying the game of consequences is futile and can lead to heady intellectual speculation, self-justification, or judgmental condemnation of others. Choice would appear to be the guardian of balance and the keeper of discernment!

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Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
---Thomas Carlyle

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©2004 Spirit in Matters: Taking a Higher View of Life on Earth
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