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"religious" Left has begun to weigh in, and the results
aren't pretty. In the wake of the bombings, "we need to ask
ourselves," says Michael Lerner, the editor Tikkun
magazine, "what is it in the way that we are living, organizing
our societies, and treating each other that makes violence seem
plausible to so many people? And why is it that our immediate response
to violence is to use violence ourselves — thus reinforcing
the cycle of violence in the world?" Not why did the terrorists
do it, you see, but how did we make them do it. Naturally,
he has an answer: "We may tell ourselves that the current violence
has 'nothing to do' with the way that we've learned to close our
ears when told that one out of every three people on this planet
does not have enough food ... We may tell ourselves that the suffering
of refugees and the oppressed have nothing to do with us ... But
we live in one world, increasingly interconnected with everyone,
and the forces that lead people to feel outrage, anger and desperation
eventually impact on our own daily lives. The same inability to
feel the pain of others is the pathology that shapes the minds of
these terrorists." We can't feel the pain of others,
they can't feel the pain of others — heck, we're all
terrorists now.
The proper response to terror, then, is not "a new climate
of fear and intimidation," but a climate of "love and
caring, ethical/spiritual/ecological sensitivity, and an approach
to the universe based on awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation
(what I call an Emancipatory Spirituality)." Indeed, these
bombings provide an opportunity for America to wake up, look itself
in the mirror, and realize that "the best defense is a world
drenched in love, not a world drenched in armaments."
Alas, Lerner says, the wicked Republicans — abetted by craven
liberals — have already "manipulated our legitimate outrage
and channeled it into a new militarism and a revival of the deepest
held belief of the conservative worldview: that the world is mostly
a dangerous place and our lives must be based around protecting
ourselves from the threatening others." How silly, when everyone
knows that "protecting ourselves" and treating the world
as a "dangerous place" will only feed the "cycle
of violence." No, for Lerner and his dreamy ilk, what the world
needs now is love, sweet love — and, of course, a healthy dose
of "Emancipatory Spirituality."
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