Day 70 Culture War, Drug War, Civil War; and, The Real Common Denominator

In my lifetime, there’s been a War on Drugs, a War on Terrorism, even a War on Illiteracy. In the history of the United States, the Revolutionary War is the matrix out of which the country was forged. When we managed to handle our exterior enemies enough, we turned to the differences within our own borders, et voila! The American Civil War.

Then there are the Culture Wars.

In this morning’s Times, San Francisco-based technology commentator Farhad Manjoo, a self-confessed optimist, writes, “Let us not squander another crisis. We need to take a long, hard look at all the ways the pandemic can push this little planet of ours to further ruin—and then work like crazy, together, to stave off the coming hell.”

Whoa! What’s happened to Mr. Manjoo? I can tell you. He’s flipped polarities.

Identifying as an optimist, he’s kept his optimism in the face of a lot of negativity in the past decade until his internal balance of optimism was drained enough by external events that he switched to the flip side of the coin—pessimism. It happens to all of us. Not necessarily on the optimism/pessimism spectrum.

Reality on Earth is based on the principle of polarity. What goes up [Enter Law of Gravity, stage right] must come down.

Natural and self-identified introverts are butting up against the loneliness of long-term solitude and flipping polarity to wanting [some] contact with others.

People who were fashion plates when they went to work have slipped to the polarized end of the spectrum and cannot be bothered to get out of their sweat pants.

In one way or another, I have read and heard repeatedly that the world has gone topsy-turvy, that everything is upside down, and backward, that nothing is as it was and will not likely be again.

On a Cosmic level, we’re getting a collective lesson here, Beloved.

We are living out what author of The 48 Laws of Power Robert Greene cited, “In a speech Abraham Lincoln delivered at the height of the Civil War, he referred to the Southerners as fellow human beings who were in error. An elderly lady chastised him for not calling them irreconcilable enemies who must be destroyed. ‘Why, madam,’ Lincoln replied, ‘do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?’”

There’s another spectrum for you: enemies/friends.

Look around, Beloved. You’ll see that I’m right. Here on Earth, everything has its opposite. Sir Isaac Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

I realize that I’m not really telling you something you don’t already know, but I am drawing your conscious attention to something that most of us take for granted, and therefore, don’t really think about.

On Instagram this morning, one of my favorite artists, Brad Heckman, posted his portrait of Josephine Baker. hecksign “To realize our dreams we must decide to wake up.”

We need to wake up to the polarities we’re all expressing, and make some awakened, in fact wide awake, choices about whether we like them, and what we want to do about them if we don’t.

I, for one, have a knee-jerk antipathy to War as a metaphor. Every cell in my body screams some version of No! Nope! No way! Not now! Not ever!

It’s one of the reasons I’ve had such a hard time with the demonstrations in Lansing, Michigan with their unmistakable element of threat in their automatic weaponry. Governor Gretchen Whitmer, like her decisions or her policies or her politics or not, does not deserve “credible” assassination threats. No one does.

I’ve had the same hard time with the silencing of the C.D.C. and Dr. Anthony Fauci. At long last, over the weekend, the C.D.C. finally issued its guidelines for reopening the country—to no fanfare, no news coverage, really, no notice. Find it, albeit somewhat toothless, here: “The 60-page document, which a C.D.C. spokesman said was uploaded over the weekend, but which received little notice, adds great detail to six charts that the C.D.C. had released last week.”

Nancy Pelosi sent me an emergency email yesterday asking for a signature to allow Dr. Fauci once again to speak to the American people after The Medical-Idjit-in-Chief silenced him.

Here’s another one. I am grateful for the Stimulus Relief Check I received; it helped. But I was nauseated by the [insert: campaign] letter I received on a [simulacrum] of White House stationery in an envelope from the Internal Revenue Service more than two weeks after the money. It was signed by the Toddler who plays at being our President—when he feels like it.

The worst. The best. The most. The least. We’re inundated by extremes again and again. The underlying metaphor, Beloved, is war.

Even Our Lady of Whimsy, artist Mary Englebreit is done. Here’s her Instagram this morning. maryengelbreit If you are going back to work or are opening your store again, you might need this sign to help fragile, inconvenienced, down-trodden white people to remember to wear a mask. Many of them seem baffled by being asked to think of other people. This is a free download on my website. Click on the red bar that says “ The Queen Is Out.” [I didn’t know if I would trespass on her licensing rights so I’m not including the image, but go to www.maryengelbret.com and click The Queen Is Out red bar, and you’ll see her magic at work.]

War as fact. War as metaphor. War as guiding principle doesn’t work, Beloved. I’ll tell you how I know—because since its very nativity, our country has struggled and straggled and zigged and zagged from war to war to war and all it’s done is leave us depleted, dejected, distracted, and incapable of even noticing the grays in life. We want it black. We want it white. And heaven forfend that any of us see what’s in between the two poles.

Opinion columnist Thomas L. Friedman points to another way. “On Easter, as the coronavirus was rapidly spreading, NPR’s ‘Weekend All Things Considered’ carried excerpts from sermons from across the country. I was particularly touched by the way Presiding Bishop Michael Curry ended his talk at Washington National Cathedral, singing, ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands, he’s got the whole world in his hands. …’

“It was a powerful close that left me thinking: Just substitute ‘She’ for ‘He’ and you’ve defined the core problem we’re facing. For the first time in the life of our generation of human species,  Mother Nature has the whole world in her hands. The entire planet is collectively facing the same challenges from the same coronavirus at the same time.”

Gilda Radner died 31 years ago today. Brad Heckman is stellar about remembering these sorts of anniversaries. Here is his Gilda portrait from Instagram. hecksign “Life is about not knowing, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.” RIP, #GildaRadner.

We don’t know what’s going to happen next. We can’t. But we can begin to focus on what we want to happen next, and how we’re thinking about what will happen next. I can guarantee you that’s it not best done in terms of black-&-white polarities. Consider the lowly gray scale.

I’m sure you thought that I would recommend that instead of war as our prime metaphor, we ought to try peace for a change. Indeed, that is a polarity in itself, but I think our definitions of peace are too Caspar Milquetoast for that purpose. So’s you know: Caspar Milquetoast is a comic strip character created by H. T. Webster for his cartoon series The Timid Soul. Webster described Caspar Milquetoast as “the man who speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick.”

I would definitely prefer a prime peace metaphor to a prime war metaphor, but I think we have to add a prism to the black-&-white world we’ve come to inhabit because of our own addiction to the outrage—faux or real—of the media, and our own lazy thinking habits, and step out of the black/white spectrum with its gray-scale middle into the world of prisms and light.

So let’s ask it. What does peace mean to you?

Dr. William O’Neill, an interventional cardiologist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who is studying hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic in health care workers, said, “The virus is not Democrat or Republican, and hydroxychloroquine is not Democrat or Republican, and I’m just hopeful that people would allow us to finish our scientific work, The worst thing in the world that would happen,” he added, “is that at the end of this epidemic, in late September, we don’t have a cure or a preventive because we let politics interfere with the scientific process.”

If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if you’re a research scientist, you want your version of peace to include proper scientific research protocols, reporting, and measured action.

If you’re a fan of polarity, you will want peace to be at the “good” end of the spectrum and war to be at the “bad” end of the spectrum, but the point of a spectrum is that it isn’t good or bad. It’s both ends and the middle.

The OED states the etymology of war is Old High German meaning to bring into confusion or discord. The first definition of peace is I. 1.I.1 a.I.1.a Freedom from, or cessation of, war or hostilities; that condition of a nation or community in which it is not at war with another.

This is not peace. Peace per se is not freedom from ... anything. It’s freedom to ... anything.

Spectrum, from the Latin, means to look, to see.

So let us agree, for the moment, that where we are starting is in a consciousness of war. Look closely at the polarities we are manifesting everywhere, Beloved. In the long-term, none of them work, not if we want a world that works for everyone.

Now look at the spectrum. One of its OED definitions is 3. a.3.a The coloured band into which a beam of light is decomposed by means of a prism or diffraction grating. That's science-speak. In common parlance, it means rainbow.

There are a lot of options—a hundred zillion, squillion, gazillion options of all colors—before we get to the other end of the spectrum.

Once again, Mary Engelbreit, Our Lady of Whimsy, comes to my rescue. She’s drawn a stunning image of a little girl to go with this Aberjhani quote, “Dare to love yourself as if you were a rainbow with a pot of gold at both ends.” Your neighbor, too.

Mr. Friedman’s essay on the power of Mother Nature is not to be missed. Here’s a little more of it. “All that registers, all that she [Mother Nature] rewards, is one thing: adaptation. She doesn’t reward the richest or the strongest or the smartest of the species. She rewards the most adaptive. They get to pass along their DNA. ...

“Mother Nature also rewards leaders whose adaptive responses are the most thought-through and coordinated. She evolved her viruses to be expert at finding any weakness in your personal or communal immune system. ... Also, because Mother Nature is entirely made up of chemistry, biology and physics, she rewards only adaptation strategies grounded in those same raw materials. If your adaptation strategy is grounded instead in ideology or election-year politics, she will mercilessly expose that.”

And that, Beloved, is how polarity throws us to its opposite so that our psyches become storm-tossed, ungrounded, and antagonistic to everyone and everything not like ourselves. but, as Mr. Friedman so eloquently warns us, “We’re not up against each other. We’re all up against Mother Nature. We need to reopen and we need to adapt, but in ways that honor Mother Nature’s logic, not in ways that court a second wave—not in ways that challenge Mother Nature to a duel. That is not smart. Because she hasn’t lost a duel in 4.5 billion years.”

Mother Nature is a remarkable force. We’re all subject to her. Viruses included. Polarity junkies included. I quibble with Mr. Friedman’s idea that we’re up against her though. That’ll never work. Instead, we need to turn our eyes toward the spectrum she herself created—the rainbow of diversity and wonder that is life here on planet Earth.

And Mr. Manjoo? Hang in there, the polarity will flip again.

Dr. Susan Corso is a metaphysician and medical intuitive with a private counseling practice for more than 35 years. She has written too many books to list here. Her website is www.susancorso.com  

© Dr. Susan Corso 2020 All rights reserved

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