Since the beginning of last year, it’s as if our nation has received a strong, constitutional homeopathic remedy for the worst in ourselves. Issues of racism, greed, and narcissism, now so flagrantly in evidence, have been here from the beginning of our country and far before: the belief that some are more equal than others, hatred and suspicion of differences, and the entitlement to use people and Earth for our own gain. Yes, we have operated as a democracy, and as a people, we have believed ourselves to be fair and good. Now we see the larger picture.
The threat of war has been with me most of my life. I was born three years after World War II ended. When I was two, the Korean War began, and it ended when I was five. I remember my mother coming through our front door with a newspaper, reading the headline aloud: “The war is over.” I wasn’t sure which war, but I saw my mother’s relief.
In grade school, I was terrorized by the duck-and-cover drills in our schoolroom around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. When I questioned my mother about our safety, she said we were safe. We lived in the middle of the country, and any attack would come to either coast. But I knew this was a band-aid answer on the rupture of the truth.
I remember our beloved AFS student’s high school graduation in 1964. Everyone in the auditorium cried as he described returning to a place of uncertainty. Within five years, on December 1, 1969, my sister and I sat with our future husbands, listening to the radio as birthdates were drawn in the draft lottery.
All these wars involved an external enemy we fought, some for dubious reasons. This time it’s different. Now here we are in our country, witnessing our own government fighting and killing American citizens for expressing differences of opinion, something I never imagined could happen. And here we are, seeing the horrors of entitlement, racism, and greed, using our flawed immigration policies as a tool for political power. Suddenly, we see the enemy is from within our country– and from within ourselves.
Psychiatrist Carl Jung once said, in a widely published quote, that the world hangs by a single thread, and that thread is the human psyche. How do we survive?
In homeopathy, if a remedy is correct, things often get worse before they get better. The remedy is one that generates the symptoms being treated, supplying the system with what the symptoms are trying to heal. Like cures like.
I am heartened by what I see in Minnesota, across the nation, and around the world. Is this a shift, a healing response? From where I sit in California, I see the green shoots of democracy pushing up from a fallow, sometimes sleepy landscape. People from differing political persuasions are joining to protect and protest this illegal war on free speech, the right to assemble, and to resist nonviolently. I wonder, if you live in Utah or Texas, Florida or Wyoming, do you also see the sprouts of sanity pushing through? The voice of the people saying NO to the horrors in the streets? Remember, the elected do so at the pleasure of the electorate. (DON’T FORGET TO VOTE!)
We do not have to be a mean people. We may disagree, but that is important in a democracy. We don’t need to agree, but we need to listen, even if we disagree, and tolerate the confluence of ideas and needs. We have a diversity of people, cultures, and ideas. Our greatest hope is to make room for all. Only then can the best decisions be made. The tolerance of our diversity is our salvation in this changing world and climate.