Summary: An enthusiastic reader wrote to ask me questions about what makes me tick, "Are you trying to make people think? To make them think a certain way? Do you just enjoy the writing?" All of the above, but on the second question, yes I am a man with a mission. I am a missionary. I'm trying to put a leash on those Godawful narrow-minded right wing, Sarah Palin, Tea Partying, manipulative tricks we all use, me included. Before my current missionary work, I was your basic idealistic left wing activist moving from issue to issue looking for leverage. I lived for six years on The Farm, the world’s largest hippie commune whose mission statement was “We’re out to save the world.” I ran water development projects for villages in Guatemala. I researched and wrote for Food First and Ashoka Foundation, Fecundity Fund and GBS Foundation. I co-founded 20/20 Vision, a D.C. based peace/environmental organization that lasted for 28 years. I ran the public affairs department for The Body Shop International, invited by its legendary environmentalist founder, Anita Roddick to help “radicalize the company.” I designed political campaigns for Ben and Jerry’s. I was on a mission. Throughout my 20-year first career as an activist, I had a sense that progressivism would just keep on progressing. Sure there would be bumps in the road, but the overwhelming trend would be toward less dogma and more pragmatism, less fear-mongering and more freedom, less waste and more efficient resource management. In my naiveté, I thought the US was free and clear from the lure of fascism, and I didn’t foresee the Republican Party becoming the sneering, ranting know-it-all crazy uncle who won’t stop bullying folks into submission at the family dinner. I didn’t foresee that while he ranted, rallying the nation’s natural-born ranters to his side, the family’s goose would be cooked. In the 80’s there were a few big causes. Now there are so many it is hard to know where to the leverage is. But I know where. I’m a man with a mission at home and abroad, a mission that pertains as much to our daily personal interactions as our global negotiations, a mission to curb a tendency not just in Republicans, but in all of us. Of all the problems we face, here’s the biggest: We humans tend to translate "ouch" into "you're bad," "I want" into "you owe me," "I'm uncomfortable" into "It's all your fault,” “I’m disappointed” into “You’re evil.” In hundreds of ways, specific and vague, forceful and gentle we instantly, automatically, sanctimoniously, self-servingly, and selectively summon moral principles to support our personal preferences. There’s no reason to expect us to be any different. We’re all born as babies and babies have to whine to get attention. For newborns, crying is survival. And there’s no reason to assume that, just by growing up into our meager human power of reason, whining would disappear. We are what you’d get when you cross strong feelings with modest powers of abstract reasoning. You’d get abstract reasoning tripping all over itself in a desperate lurch to support our strong feelings. The Republican Party didn’t start out as the “Always Right” Wing. Buried in the party’s history are a few laudably well-reasoned and substantive principles. Chief among them was a strong commitment to the rational design of a well functioning Republic, a hierarchical hybrid form of government in which individuals, states and the country as a whole share power. Ironically, Edmund Burke, the father of conservativism was on a mission like mine. In reaction to the excesses of the French Revolution he argued that abstract ideas and political theories are dangerously likely to be ill-conceived and self-serving and therefore rarely better guides to the design of governments than the weather-tested syste
