As hard as I try, in the privacy of my own being, not to get caught up in the scathing absurdities of the moment — e.g., the presidential election, America’ looming fascism, our love of money and war (to name a few) — yikes, here I am, caught up in it all.

And all I can do is reach for a larger truth . . . peace will prevail, the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. And it so quickly feels like a cliché. Welcome to cynicism!

I swat at it, push it away, but it’s always there. So calm down, I tell myself. I’m doing so right now. In the context of a Biden blank stare and a looming Trump presidency, here I am, reaching for a sense of hope and transcendence — a sense of belief, a sense of joy, that humanity is evolving, that the present is just a necessary flicker in our becoming.

I invite you to join me as I reach for a larger context in which to put this flickering moment. I begin by quoting Peter Bloom, 's latest essay in Common Dreams, addressing the looming presidential farce:

Hmmm . . . This opens up a line of thought oh so easily disparaged and dismissed, at least by the corporate media (“the bouncers,” as I call them), whose job is to keep complexity out of our collective national consciousness and reduce politics — national and even global — to a simplistic, win-lose game. This, of course, maintains the present two-party system: evil vs. lesser evil. And those who challenge it, attempting to transcend spectator democracy by participating directly and complexly in the process, are nothing but “spoilers.”

What a joke, eh? Thinking we can build a political system based on the concept that we’re all in this together.

In contrast, let me snatch a quote from Rupert Ross’s great book on Restorative Justice, Returning to the Teachings. Ross quotes Anne Fausto-Sterling: “Modern textbooks still like to talk of cutthroat competition, of the survival of the fittest, as the overriding force that drives evolution. . . . Yet research in the past two decades shows that cooperation among species plays at least as big a role as violent struggle. … And suddenly, it seems, you can find cooperation in plants and animals wherever you look — suggesting a whole new view of evolution and interdependence among all forms of life.”

Working together? Building society as a collaborative........

© Common Dreams