MUST FEAR & SEPARATION RULE IN
POST-ELECTION CULTURAL DIVIDE?
The headline on the front page of USAToday two days after U.S. President Barack Obama was returned to the White House for four more years said it all:
“POST-ELECTION DIVIDE SURFACES/Partisan pledges sour conciliatory remarks.”
Could we have expected anything else? Certainly not from the mainstream media, which only considers that which reflects conflict and struggle to be “news.” And probably not from people themselves, who have been raised having been told that “fear” is the most desirable primal power, not love.
Instead of celebrating the American political system that produced yet one more decision without violence about who shall be in power, the mood of the country, stoked by opinion-makers and the media, exudes not celebration but consternation, not joy but judgment, not happiness but hatefulness — as if, in a world full of economic downturns, conflict, and killing, the United States was not, in fact, still one of the best places on Earth in which to live.
Did the USAToday article point out that last Tuesday’s election gave President Obama, House Republicans, and Senate Democrats a “new chance to resolve issues that they could not give in on before, because of the upcoming election”? No. It said that the election gave all parties “a new lease on strife.”
Why point out the grandest possibility when you can help create the worst?
Ours is a civilization craving negativity. If there is a positive story in the news that the media just has to report, you can count on it being on page 37. Yet why does humanity have such an appetite for that which it fears? The New Spirituality says it is because we have been told that God wants us to fear Him. Indeed, in many circles the highest compliment you can give a person is to say that he or she is “God-fearing.”
And so, as it has been explained in Conversations with God, we have equated “fear” with that which is good. We’ve even confused “fear” with “love,” imagining that the second must be based firmly in the first.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
There is another way to be human. In this new way, we do not fear God, we do not fear life, and we do not fear each other. We live without fear. Or at least, without fear driving the engine of our entire experience; without fear running rampant over us; without fear ruling our every choice and decision.
There is another way to be human, but it takes great courage. The new way is to imagine a God that has no reason to judge or condemn us. The new way is to understand and embrace fully who we really are. That is, our True Identity as aspects and individuations of the Divine. In the moment we accept our True Identity, we easily and joyfully let go of fear. And then, our differences no longer have to divide us. Contrast no longer has to produce conflict.
The people of the United States face a great opportunity right now. They can demonstrate to the world that while they differ in their opinions, they do not differ in their determination to find and create answers to their society’s biggest problems from a place of mutual respect and of willingness to compromise and to forge collaborative solutions.
