In the midst of ever-growing disappointment among progressives, Tikkun editor Rabbi Michael Lerner issued a clear and powerful challenge today. Here is how he begins:
"While making a deal to protect billionaires from $145 billion in taxes that they might otherwise have used to solve pressing domestic problems or to create over 3 million jobs at $30,000/yr., some Democrats and their advisors pointed out that the progressives who dissented from the deal Obama had worked out with the Republican leadership -- and which, despite the non-binding vote in the Democratic caucus on Thursday to oppose the deal, is likely to retain most of its giveaways to the rich -- had really no place to go in 2012 but to blindly support Obama, so why take seriously all their huffing and puffing about Obama's list of betrayals?
"Sure, they said, Obama had led peace and justice-oriented liberal and progressive movement people to believe he would end rather than escalate middle east wars, punish rather than ignore those who had lied us into the Iraq war and those who had ordered or carried out torture, end discrimination against gays in the military and elsewhere, secure rather than undermine domestic civil liberties and human rights, fight for rather than duck serious changes in immigration and in environmental protection, and insist on at least a public option in health care and lowered prices for pharmaceuticals. But, hey -- those people who paid attention to these details were only a small minority, and they would rally around Obama no matter what, giving him no incentive to listen to them. After all, Obama was just being 'realistic' about the limitations of his power."
Lerner goes on to call for a new vision: "Lets start with the vision, a new New Deal, and call it simply this: The Caring Society -- Caring for Each Other, Caring for the Planet. To get this, America needs a New Bottom Line! Replace the ethos of selfishness, narcissism and materialism rooted in the money and power orientation of the capitalist marketplace with a new ethos of love and generosity. Lets start judging corporations, social policies, government actions, our educational system, our economic system and even our personal behavior to be 'productive, efficient or rational' to the extent that they maximize our capacities to be loving and caring for each other, generous and kind, ethically and ecologically sensitive, capable of seeing every other human being on the planet as equally precious and sacred as ourselves, and capable of responding to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of All Being."
He then presents details of what we can do as a nation, what we really can be. I won't attempt to summarize those details here; the full article can be found on The Huffington Post, Copy and paste the following link into your browser (or if you follow me on Twitter, I have put a clickable link there.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-michael-lerner/why-progressives-should-r_b_794927.html
