Those mostly fairly tenuous relationships resulted in our being able to accumulate 100 actions protesting the Obama escalation of Afghanistan, while keeping the 1,500 organizations apprised of the growing number of actions.  Just after the December 1 and 2 actions, I got a call from a North Carolina organizer wanting to know how we were different from United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), which had limited resources and was not able to organize around the escalation protests, other than sending out emails.  I responded that PJEP is sort of like a national organization’s outreach, communications and technology departments.  PJEP involves itself in no content creation or leadership articulation of the issues.  PJEP is mostly just process, process seeking to empower the actions and projects created by small, local organizations.  PJEP does not initiate or articulate.  We empower and encourage.

Empowering and encouraging involves access to and distribution of high quality information.  The closer to consensus reality we are, the better we’re able to perform our job of mapping out the landscape to achieve goals.  PJEP, by simply being in contact with 1,500 organizations, able to retrieve from them information on what exactly they are doing, allows us to share that information, empowering activists with knowledge of their place in the larger whole.  For example, speakers at local events could state with confidence that over 100 cities around the country were protesting a government decision.  Groups are not acting in isolation.

Just before the protests, one of the places I searched for high quality information was Twitter.  Conducting a number of different searches, such as “Afghanistan protest” or “escalation protest” or just “#protest” or “#Afghanistan,” I was shocked to discover there was very little activity around the 100 emerging protests across the country.  One activist posted his frustration with finding any information regarding the protests on Twitter.  That got more retweets than any protest posting.

Concluding that the protests were not generating heated conversations among youth, it was easy to predict, early December 1, that attendance across the country would be low, with mostly the usual older folks.  Indeed, that was the case.  The largest of the 100 demonstrations was in Chicago, with about 450 in attendance.  The folks in Chicago all considered this a healthy turnout.  I received many emails from organizers in other states that were disappointed by the low attendance.

Chicago was the very first city in the country to post that an action would occur at 5:00 p.m. the evening after the announcement.  Organizers worked hard to create the event, led by Andy Thayer, whose leadership has become integral to almost all Chicago Left mass demonstrations.  Chicago also has almost every Left organization on a single organizational listserve.  This dramatically speeds up the time it takes to put a spontaneous project together.  Most cities don’t display as much cooperation among organizations as Chicago does.  Then again, most cities don’t have activists like Andy Thayer.  Andy doesn’t only take responsibility for doing what other activists don’t step up to do, but he executes those things with efficiency, professionalism and a creative flare.

How could other cities have encouraged larger numbers to attend their 100 demonstrations?  Chicago was a unique situation.  Though Twitter was not engaged, Andy relied upon Facebook extensively, even posting links to the other demonstrations around the country from his Facebook page.  A heavier reliance upon social media like Facebook by other city demonstrations might have had a positive effect.

Still, I don’t think the low numbers around the country were about what organizers could have done differently.  Activists that worked hard for Obama mostly did not show.  This included many faith-based, union and African-American activists.  Clearly, youth mostly were not engaged.  That leaves me wondering what youth in the United States would be inclined to twitter about as regards political change.  Furious Twitter activity around the Iran elections engaged a massive number of Americans.  The Afghanistan escalation jolted few.

What in America would compel a powerful Twitter response?

“Fascist” suggests a one-party government controlled by a small elite, often with close ties to specific corporations.  Fascism is often characterized by an atmosphere composed of fear and reprisal.

“Socialist” seems to imply a government focused on the group instead of the individual, denying individuals their desire to do as they please while seeking ways to make the less economically advantaged individuals within the group more secure.  Implied is the denigration of individual rights.

In both cases, there is the implied “in” group and “out” group.  Republicans are seeking ways to have people who identify with being the out group identify with Republicans, who identify themselves as the out group.  Regarding fascism, Republicans work the meme that Democrats are in total control.  Declaring socialism, they imply that the individual has lost all ability to achieve success.

Republicans and Democrats are mirror images of each other in many ways, particularly as regards the military, military contracts, lobbying-based government, foreign relations and both parties agreeing on how the majority of government assets are dispersed.  There is a drift left in hard times that reflects an assignment of government assets to those with the least ability to influence government policy.  In severe downturns, there tends to be less an emphasis on making it easy for the wealthy to become wealthier.  At this time, the Republicans represent those so wealthy that even a moderate turn left represents a potential decrease in an ability to increase assets.  Hence the words “fascist” and “socialist” seem to be emerging easily from their lips.

Both fascism and socialism seem “un-American” and so are used to generate feelings that support an entitled Right status quo that has deeply stratified the nation.  The Right is focusing on the wrong place entirely.  The Right is behaving like the Democrats are their enemy.  They think they are targeting the meme that opposes their interests.

What is changing is the way that humans view themselves, communicate and prioritize.  The massive wave of horizontalization that is underway represented by Internet communication, cell technologies, massive online gaming communities, virtual worlds, interactive entertainment and the destruction of traditional news distribution vehicles is resulting in the democratization of society.

People are feeling empowered.

This is not in the Right Wing’s interest.  It’s not particularly in the interest of mainstream Democrats.  It is in the interest of destratification and lives not consumed with want.

Republicans can continue to call the Obama Administration fascist or socialist.  It’s not unlike yelling at the pitcher in a baseball game, not even from the stands, but through the TV.  Screaming at the actual medium carrying the information might be addressing the changes more directly. Except, in this case, it’s not coming through the TV.

The shift occurring is not represented by differences between the two political parties. The words “socialist” and “fascist” fail to marshal the associations that make clear where we could be headed. Republicans need new epithets. They need to be hurling their slurs in new directions.

Only the transformation, the evolution is so deep, so pervasive, so subtle and sophisticated that so far, we’ve few words that have been able to describe it. Clay Shirkey comes close. Howard Reingold intuits the direction. Ken Wilber describes where he believes we end up. None have coined the word that grasps it.

“Fascist” or “Socialist” don’t do the trick. We’re talking evolution, not revolution. Republicans are locked in a political paradigm. This is a social transformation.

It was the amateur linguist Benjamin Whorf that noted that without a word, we often fail to notice a thing’s existence.

We are noticing. It’s clear that many of us don’t know what to say.

Kings of old were able to afford the best in entertainment, which included frequent visits from the most talented storytellers. Today we have to merely turn on the TV to experience finely crafted tales. One thing has changed. The powerful today hire wordsmiths to design tapestries of tales that support their controlling the looms of power, which they call free markets, when the markets are only free on TV.

Free markets are free of government oversight, free of transparency, free of union intervention, free of accountability, free of the social costs of equal pay for women and day care, free of safety constraints, free of the costs of environmental destruction and often free of the costs of robust health care and protected pensions. Loss of health care and pensions are often the case when a corporation goes bottom up.

Untie a species from its environment, reduce the number of interconnections a biological unit has with its surrounding community and inevitable destruction will result. Free is a myth. We are all connected. To believe in free is the same as to worship being alone.

Right now the rest of the world is muddling through how it is going to deal with the crashing American concept of freedom. American financial vehicles have been designed to flourish unconnected to the real needs. Soon, real needs will be in all the headlines. Rage at “free markets” will be all the rage. The American stock markets, redesigned in the 1990s not to crash, will instead watch American assets slowly disappear. Having designed our financial instruments to enhance risk and our markets to protect risk, this awful combination will leave us in the end with little left to risk.

The Victorian Age interpretation of Darwin’s theories led to the concept of Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism was “scientific” support for the entrepreneurial excesses of the Industrial Revolution. One aspect of one part of how evolution operates was embraced as an example for us all. The fittest surviving was hailed as an economic model.

Little has changed. The fittest can be the cleverest. Our hailers of “free markets” have been most clever in their manipulation of words to make them free of society’s demands.

Evolution is not about the fittest surviving. Economic health is not about disengagement from the society that supplies support. Our economic model has been built upon the ancient Indo-European patrifocal dominance model of might makes right. Holding onto a portfolio of worthless assets, we must realize it’s time to face the fact that change has arrived.

Might is not right.

It’s time to evolve our government to serve.

We observe the manifestation of heterochrony in society, neoteny and its reverse, through the two social structures that seem to manifest these two evolutionary trajectories. Neotenous, cooperative males and commanding, accelerating females reveal themselves in matrifocal or matristic social structures. A social structure with commanding, accelerated males and cooperative females inclines toward patriarchy or a patrifocal orientation.

Matrifocal and patrifocal social structures come with either commanding, high-testosterone males mating with cooperative, low-testosterone females or cooperative, low-testosterone males pairing with commanding, high-testosterone females.

Over time, in a matrifocal context, with males focused on artistic exhibition as opposed to hierarchical display, society mirrors the hormonal constellation of the cooperative males and commanding females, revealing a constellation of features characteristic of matrilineal, matristic or partnership societies. Society evolves in particular fashions with the female choosing her mate.

In a patrifocal context, with males striving for hierarchical ascendancy, offering enhanced procreation opportunities, with females cooperating with the winners, society mirrors the hormonal constellation of commanding males and cooperative females manifesting in a society with specific features that mirror the hormonal constellation and social structure proclivities of its individuals.

Stephen J. Gould describes the several-million-year neotenous trajectory that the human race has been running. There are physical, neurological, psychological and hormonal repercussions to following a matrifocal or patrifocal path. I’m suggesting that matrifocal bands selected for neotenous males for perhaps three million years, with likely occasional forays into patriarchy. Sometime before the diaspora from Africa, maybe 50,000–100,000 years ago, brains split, language surfaced and culture emerged.

Few societies are exclusively matrifocal or patrifocal but instead exhibit aspects of both. Most societies can be fairly easily situated within one or the other frame by examining how mates are chosen, how sexual selection unfolds. How much choice does a woman have when she chooses or is assigned her mate? Is the ideal male loved or feared?

Social structures and their participating individuals exhibit evolutionary trajectories over time. Societies and cultures mirror these trajectories, revealing their own evolutions, operating according to the same dynamics. Societies, like ancient bands weaving between matrifocal and patrifocal loci, fluctuate between highly hierarchical, male-domination models and societies revolving around a commons with a horizontal frame. In the West, we’ve observed a surge of Indo-European patriarchy lasting almost 6,000 years with infrequent influxes of matriarchy and occasional hybrids birthing unique cultures like the ancient Greeks.

What has resulted, over time, looks like a specific trend. Of course. We are still observing the influence of social structure upon evolution. Anthropic or teleological arguments suggesting that an interventionist god is responsible for the clear and universal patterns we observe seem unnecessary. It comes down to hormones and what attracts us to our partners. It’s about love.

I would suggest that this evolutionary argument undermines a theological interpretation of societal or cultural evolution. Heterochrony, neoteny and acceleration describe species and societal evolution. Biological principles directly apply to social transformation. There are just over 200 species of primates. We’re the ones that can’t decide how best to mate.

Stephen J. Gould was Dawkins’ opposite. Instead of suggesting that evolution occurs at a single location, Gould argued that evolution was influenced by selection at multiple levels at the same time. Biologists often have a favorite scale of selective influence. Classically, evolution was believed to occur at the scale of the individual.

This argument is not an arcane argument. Recent discussions in evolutionary developmental biology focus on the influence of the environment on the individual before and after birth. A consensus is emerging that the environment does not just influence evolution by killing individuals that can’t compete, but that the environment helps install the useful features or characteristics that an individual will exhibit to survive. With the environment so influential at the beginning and end of life, it becomes less clear how the individual is defined. As the individual becomes defined by environmental influence, it becomes necessary to define the environment, which is a very multiscale, multilevel affair.

Dawkins would argue that a gene acquires a proclivity to take environmental cues into account. It’s still about the gene. From an evolutionary developmental biological perspective, the Dawkins view becomes nonuseful. There seems to be many scales integral to evolution. What predictive power is offered by just focusing on the one?

I observe a similar argument in play as political organizers and social change advocates seek the best way to achieve social transformation. Individuals often focus on a particular scale or level within society as the place most vulnerable to outside impact or deliberate intervention. This selection often has to do with the number of resources at an individual’s command.

The far Left or hard Left advocates agitating as low as is possible, signs in the streets. With the fewest resources, the far Left has least access to power. They can touch people one by one. Media attention is as close as they can get.

The Progressive or soft Left seeks strings that they can pull. Relationships are established with elected officials, often by working on their campaigns. They get to have conversations with those elected officials. They can threaten withdrawal of support.

Some advocates of deep and lasting social change choose to work for liberal, elected officials, and these advocates seek to influence legislation by influencing the legislator.

Many are lucky enough to exhibit talent with words. As free lancers, bloggers or employees of mainstream media, authors pen opinions and observations that can influence legislators and voters.

Perhaps most of the Left believes that what most influences elected officials is the money they receive. Those with the resources can make sizable campaign contributions, seeking to offset what corporations contribute. At the highest level of the intervention hierarchy are those with money that can marshal the support of others with money, and these allies can get the focused attention of an elected official.

I hear arguments supporting one level or another. As an organizer, I hear most often that it’s feet in the streets that make the biggest difference. This argument would be equivalent to a Dawkins argument in evolutionary biology. It’s odd to associate a reductionist position with the American Left, but when a Leftist suggests it’s only demonstrations that make a difference, that Leftist ignores the same thing that the reductionist ignores–the influence of the environment on all levels of a multilevel, evolving system.

Observing a biological system and seeking to influence a social system are not equivalent interventions, even though in both systems a multileveled environment is in play. Most of us on the Left, seeking change in society, carry an underlying faith that society is evolving toward equality, quality of life and equitable distribution of resources. By most evaluations, no such social teleology has its equivalent in biology. Still, there are those that believe that biology has goals.

With the forces of change engaged at all levels, it is difficult to evaluate where intention lies.

The contemporary Right has a process characterized by an allegiance to the belief that the ends justify the means. Though this belief would seem to suggest that the issues are so important that any action justifies the goal, the opposite is true. What is occurring is that an emphasis is being placed upon process over the goal. Right Wing process, as it is mediated through its most heralded practitioners Lee, Atwater and Rove, is about success by any means that work. Being on top is the core principle of the Right Wing. Right Wing ideology has less to do with its various issues. The Right Wing is about winning. And so, the Right has been deeply process-oriented, a process congruent with its behavior, though we’ve often believed that it was the specific issues that were central to Right Wing core values. The issues, supporting corporations, supporting male control of the female body, supporting wealth and health for the wealthy, little for the poor, are all about winning. A reason the Right has been so adept at controlling message and creating powerful stories is that the Right is all about a process that includes controlling message and creating stories. We’ve all been fooled into thinking that for the Right there were issues more important than winning.

The Left has not been about process. The way that the Left has behaved, its process has had little to do with the goals the Left has been seeking to achieve. Whereas the Right has been about winning, a process congruent with its goals of controlling resources by those on the winning side, the Left has been about sharing while engaged in a process with no obvious connection or congruence with that goal.

The Left seeks to share resources with those with less access to resources. The Right seeks to protect resources, making sure that those in control maintain control with an enhanced opportunity of achieving more. The Right has been playing a game with a goal to win. The Left has not been playing the game as much as it has often been sitting on the sidelines demanding that the rules change. This focus on sharing-related issues while engaged in a process incongruent with its goals has left the Left a loser.

The rules are changing. The Left is becoming engaged in process. The process and the process goal are both becoming about sharing. Congruence is moving toward the left.

People crave congruence.

It’s all about process. The Right Wing, doing anything to win, puts money and resources into one-to-many communications, mostly TV, to drive their message. The Left has discovered sharing. Specifically, the web, social networking and cell phone technologies are the processes congruent with the message of the Left, the message that we are in this all together. We are at the beginning of a convergence of process and issue characterized by congruence between process and what the process seeks to achieve.

The Left to date has tended to focus on a goal, the goal of sharing, as the most important thing. Ironically, this is the Right paradigm, the paradigm of winning, of achieving a goal. At an astonishing speed, society is changing, changing in the direction of a sharing process, changing without most of those identified as Left even being involved, because the traditional Left is focused on issues, not process. Most Leftists don’t even have a social networking page. Most Leftists don’t text message. Most Leftists are over 50.

The new Left is deeply involved in process, a process characterized by sharing, a process congruent with Left goals. The members of the new Left are mostly children. They are Obama supporters that use these new tools. They are young activists organizing through the web. The new Left are conservatives using the new technologies to spread horizontal, diverse and transparent principles through their ancient, one-to-many, winning-obsessed political structures.

McLuhan noted that the medium is message. It is also the case that the medium is the issue. By seeking a culture of sharing, we can follow a media path that shares. We are at present building the bridges that all will walk.

Bridges first. Walking after.

The process is the thing.

Monkeying with our regulatory system evidently helped make us what we are. By engaging in neoteny, or the prolonging of infant states into the adults of descendants, we have evolved ourselves large brains, small jaws, a proclivity to wonder, a compulsion to play and an inclination to be dependent. Altering regulatory systems can have profound positive effects if creativity is your goal.

With the economy quivering on a brink, there has been no small amount of talk about the effects of the last generation’s adjustments in the regulatory system of the American economy. Much discussed is how much freedom large corporations are allowed and if transparency and accountability are necessary if large corporations prefer they not have to be so constrained. Social Darwinism has a new name. Free markets have allowed those with the most power and the greatest wealth the opportunity to write the laws and manage the agencies that were designed to monitor and regulate how America conducts its business.

Regulatory legislation over the last thirty years provided the older, established, more powerful corporations within American industry the advantages that they requested to make them more “competitive.” With fewer constraints, less government oversight, fewer inhibitions to growth, less accountability to labor, consumers or the environment, corporations found it easier to make money. Free markets meant an opportunity to be less impacted by those factors in their environment that informed their growth and their existence. Evolutionarily, corporations lobbied for and received a less free market, one with far fewer interconnections with contiguous areas in their environment. As in Social Darwinism, business wanted and received special treatment, legislation targeted to inhibit the effects of competing influences, such as labor, environment, safety, consumer rights and taxes, so that there would be an infrastructure that the corporations could freely use.

Opaque to the interconnected, interdependent nature of evolution, “free markets” behave as if entitled to freely destroy the ties that bind them to a healthy society if it results in their short-term gain.

Inevitably, disconnected from their environment, they wither.

Regulation is not only central to our biological evolution; regulation deeply informs how our society evolves. Deregulation is another name for regulating from the top down. It’s time to regulate from the bottom up. Adjusting regulation to unfold features existing at the bottom to appear at the top is what is called neoteny. This way is how human beings evolved. This way is how society evolves.

Regulate to encourage growth at the level of the individual, the family and small business. Offer resources to the lowest level of authority, and creative surges will result. Free college education, free health care and free child care are deregulating in a direction that puts power in the hands of the formerly powerless, powerless because government regulation preferred to provide corporations no constraints and allow them to be separated from their environment.

Social Darwinism and free markets are not natural. They are philosophies that support disconnecting business from their environment to achieve short-term business gain.

Free services such as health care, education and child care all combine to encourage interconnection and interdependence by providing healthful forms of interaction. By encouraging the lowest level of societal authority, we invest in the area where we are most creative, our children, at the level where we can have real impact, the individual.

We evolved from a chimpanzee-like progenitor by encouraging the features of the youngest to manifest in adults by picking mating partners that were young at heart. We evolve as a society by manifesting the characteristics of the individual in our institutions, by encouraging businesses that respect individuals. Re-regulating business to care for the individual is our evolutionary imperative. We do so by regulating business to have a heart.

Radio and television, democratizing forces before co-option by corporations, offered an experience of the commons. Though these were one-to-many communications, content often served the many instead of the few. There was a shift as the few successfully guided the message of media to be about how profits could be best achieved.

Radio and television learned to encourage a common frame of reference–a personality-based consumer culture–that offered none of the experience of the commons. Producer/advertiser and consumer formed an exhibition/evaluation feedback loop, not unlike the dynamics of runaway sexual selection. Producers/advertisers created mountains of consumables as consumers exercised discrimination choosing amongst what seemed like an infinite display of alternatives.

For almost three generations, American personal empowerment has been about our ability to make choices among the many alternatives we’re being offered to consume. We’ve developed a highly refined sensitivity to nuance and a culture able to serve up content for our craving to materially embrace what was offered. Allowing the corporations the power to mediate the experience has been easy for us since corporations have been so responsive to our signaled desires, yet they’ve controlled the commons. They have controlled the conduits through which communication or information travels.

In just the way that the waters broke through the Bosporus, a commons has come crashing into our consumer culture, interrupting the relationship between producer and individual. Whereas until recently we felt empowered by all the consumables we perceived we were being offered, other kinds of choices are now emerging. The Internet is suggesting a different kind of relationship. Experiencing many-to-many communications, we are having experiences not characteristic of profit-driven, one-to-many communications. We are discovering that there are deeply rewarding features of the commons.

A dam is breaking. Such a geologic nanosecond is the time in which we live. Except, instead of destruction, new territories are being uncovered and explored. Populating spectrum, occupying bandwidth obliterates no species, murders no aboriginals. We bring with us no diseases that cut down civilizations that have no written language. Nevertheless, this is an age of exploration with staggering ramifications for our species and the world.

A new Black Sea is forming, but this time it’s an ocean, with no clear limits to its reach. Millions of trained, highly discriminating, former consumers are being empowered by an ability to create and control content in their own communications; find unique content that wasn’t created specifically to sell to a large number of people; form evaluations unrelated to purchases; and have an experience of feeling mirrored by other individuals, not a message on a screen.

This is a space not controlled by family, church, school, corporations or government. It is the commons. It is where we go to be renewed.

Several years ago I ended up at a Leo Burnett executive’s Christmas party in the home of the head of that agency. Our daughter was part of a small high school choral ensemble with the CEO’s son, Phil. Marcia and I had known Phil for maybe ten years. A high school student, Phil was training me in his spare time to design websites. I was starting a business in web design. Marcia and I were offered the opportunity to listen/watch the performance. The music was charming and beautiful.

Still, it felt creepy. But as is usually the case in social situations where I feel foreign to the scene, I concentrated on the food. In the room were some of the most creative people in the United States, artists dedicated to the craft of message-making to accomplish corporate goals. The chorus began singing, beginning with the number “Let It Snow.” At the conclusion of the piece, Phil’s dad looked out the window and exclaimed, “Oh, look! It’s started snowing!” There were guffaws around the room. I looked out the window. There was no snow.

Relativistic Humor.

Leo Burnett has the Army as a client. It is the agency that comes up with military slogans such as “Be All You Can Be” or “Army of One.” A good friend of ours invited us out to dinner. A good friend of his, and that person’s lover, were visiting our friend from Britain. Conversation turned to politics. Everyone at the table was gay except for my wife and me. We all loathed Bush. Then it was revealed that the Brit was a Leo Burnett contractor. In fact, he was the very guy that wrote the Army tag line for Leo Burnett.

I asked him, “How do you reconcile your political beliefs with crafting propaganda for the enemy?”

“This is my craft. This is what I do,” he replied.

Germany has experienced an astonishing succession of social environments over the last one hundred years. It would be fascinating to track the changing, guiding stories or foundation myths as words transformed during epochs of hubris, then horror, then shame, two times for two wars, and then the emergence of the present zeitgeist that might be characterized as a kind of synthesis or wary wisdom.

Evidently there was that period of time before and during WWII when the government propaganda machinery said whatever was necessary to accomplish the leaders’ goals. Ethics, morals, rules were not relevant. There was a purity of communication characterized by there being absolutely no moral barriers to achieve a goal.

Carl Rove’s stepdad lived far outside traditions of established norms. He was a widely respected peon in the exhibition body piercing world, a masochism giant, an innovator beyond the boundaries of convention. Young Carl observed that barriers to behaviors are relative, that morals are choices. Carl Rove became a visionary able to see past the need to follow a rule, adjust to a convention, or regard a moral. Then, he crossed a line. Ethics became relative. Carl Rove could do or say exactly what was necessary to accomplish his client’s goals.

When reality does not constrain, one becomes a relativist. Clearly, the propagandists of our time are relativist thinkers. Incredibly creative, breaking boundaries, they have a feature of their experience that makes their relativistic frame of reference unique.

They are not connected.

American neo-conservative, capitalist elite, Nazi extremists, creative’s claiming no responsibility for the repercussions of their craft, all these people behave like they are not members of a network. They are cut off. They serve either a very small group of people or they just serve themselves. They are relativists, but they are alone. They experience one, not One.

Consider a very similar relativist perspective. Unconstrained by morals, ethics or rules, the wise man behaves according to understandings derived from an internal experience characterized by connection to the world writ large. This person experiences the world as being barrier-less. He or she does not break down barriers to achieve specific goals.

It fascinates me that those most sensitive to the veils of reality are both the war criminal propagandists and the saints. Whereas one feels how we are all separate, the other experiences us as all the same.

I expect those folks that had difficulty telling the imaginary from the sense-based world did not often live to procreate. The transition to a gesture or oral language that was grounded in a fertile imagination was no doubt difficult for many. Imagine a civilization of two- and three-year-olds.

In high school gym class, the boys attending the swimming unit at New Trier were all required to swim laps naked. We showered before class, jumped into the pool with no suits and proceeded to paddle back and forth with no clothes on. The school didn’t have to pay for suits and laundry. It was humiliating. It was what it was.

Mr. Robertson was the swim coach and the tyrant of the New Trier pool. Mr. Wolf was his assistant. Their barked commands echoed around the cement, glass-and-tile cavern. I was skinny and almost always shivering. Back and forth across the pool kept me warm.

A whistle alerted me to something different in the routine. Pausing, I noted every boy being commanded to line up by the wall. There was murmuring. We were yelled at to be quiet.

Almost forty naked boys standing, then sitting, were assaulted with a furious Mr. Robertson, screaming about the turd at the bottom of the pool near the diving board drain. The perpetrator was commanded to step forward or we all would suffer the consequences. Mr. Robertson was going off the deep end. I’d never seen an adult this upset that wasn’t on TV.

I watched an Obama speech yesterday on Youtube. It was the speech he gave during the Rev. Wright blowup. Crying, I experienced myself deeply moved. This politician was giving a speech and I was being moved. I’m not a big Obama supporter. As a Leftist, this was an anomalous event. Speeches have never influenced my opinions.

Still, Obama lied. Hearing the lie, I let it lie, until thinking about it later. It being later, I’m trying to let the lie make sense.

Obama’s speech was unusual in that it sought to tell the truth by creating connections. He offered a historical arc that lined up a succession of influences over time while he described how separated groups in our society had integral issues in common. It was an astonishing display of nonmagical thinking–a rarity among politicians–where we were offered a vision of the world that unfolded in exactly the way that we as individuals compel it to unfold. Obama treated his listeners like responsible adults.

Yet, he said that Israel, the policies of Israel and the U.S. support of Israel had little to do with the radicalizing of Muslims in the Middle East.

There is wishful thinking and there is lying. The line between the two can be very thin. Our ancestors had to wrestle with the impact of having imagination. We are still grappling with our ability to make things up and then know when we have done so. Not being able to tell the difference can result in death. Not being able to tell the difference–or lying–can result in wars.

The shit in the deep end of the pool offers revelation. A completely transparent environment offers immediate repercussions. Imagine if our government and economy were designed to reveal inappropriate behaviors when they occurred. Granted, people would get upset. But it prevents people from swimming in their own, and other people’s, shit.

The shit in the pool of world affairs is the occupation of Palestine and the Israeli government policy toward Palestinians. Our politicians and media engage in magical thinking, convincing themselves that the Israeli government is almost always right. Obama has proved to me that he does not naturally engage in magical thinking.

An ability to follow long-term historical narrative arcs while noting the connections between the many competing and complimenting forces in the here-and-now demands transparency, or we are engaged in storytelling and in lies. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, enough of us survived to tell a story. It is now necessary that we learn to tell the truth.