February, 2003 In This Issue: Lenten Program: A Survey of Faiths Tikkun Community: New Light for America Dear Abby's Oft-Requested New Year's Resolutions New Year's Prayer Chart Your Spiritual Journey at The Women's Retreat

(Reprint)

To retake American politics, what the forces for peace, justice, and ecological sanity need is a whole new kind of voice and worldview. And that's what we've been developing in our new national organization, the Tikkun Community. Here are some of the elements that could be central to A New Light for America:

• A New Bottom Line. Instead of our excessive focus on money and power, let's demand that our social policies and economic and political institutions be judged efficient, productive, and rational not only to the extent that they maximize wealth, but also to the extent that they tend to produce loving and caring human beings, ethical and ecological consciousness, and a capacity to respond to the universe with awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation. Use that as your New Bottom Line and you'll quickly see how badly we need a New Light for America-because so few of our institutions are efficient or productive by this criterion.

  A significant step toward a New Bottom Line would be the adoption of a Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Under this amendment, every corporation with income above $50 million a year must receive a new corporate charter every ten years, which will only be granted to corporations that can prove a history of social responsibility, as measured by an Ethical Impact Report, to a grand jury of ordinary citizens chosen at random. Employees, investors, and community groups would be allowed to testify to the jury about the record of social responsibility to the workers, the environment, and the well-being of the community (both where it is located and where its products are sold or used).

• Generosity and Open-heartedness as the Path to Security. No amount of wars with Iraq or Korea (or who-ever else Bush designates as our next enemy) will be able to protect us from the anger about American selfishness that provides the foundation for recruits to terror.

  The United States contains only 5 percent of the world's population, but owns 25 percent of the world's wealth. Meanwhile, two billion people live on less than $750 a year, and one billion live on less than $375 a year. Does it surprise you to know that every day over ten thousand children die of diseases related to malnutrition? This picture will only change when the United States adopts a new foreign policy whose central goal is to end world hunger and homelessness, create a global system of health care accessible to and affordable for everyone, and participate in a worldwide crusade to save and enhance the natural environment (rather than, as now, participate in its destruction).

  A New Light for America must be a light of peace and hope, challenging the fantasies of those self-described "realists" who imagine that they can beat terror with power (look at how dramatically that strategy has failed to produce safety or security for Israel). It is as the force of kindness and generosity, not as the force with the most effective military (which we are already), that Americans can create a world in which we are truly safe.

  Let's start by taking the $1.5 trillion dollars the Bush tax cut gives to the rich and upper middle class and use that instead to fund the building of the infrastructure for ending global poverty and illness, homelessness and hunger. That will do more to dry up the cesspools from which the fundamentalist and ideological haters recruit their followers than any amount of "counter-terrorist" violence will ever do.

  If the Democrats are too scared to speak this truth, don't expect them to ever have anything important to say about terror except some form of "me-too-ism" mixed with some wimpy civil libertarian doubts that will appear to most people to confirm their suspicions that the Democrats are just like everyone else, except less so.

• Education for Caring, Gratitude, and Awe. Instead of rewarding students solely for how many traditional skills they can accumulate, we need to teach three central values in schools: an attitude of caring for others, an ability to feel and express gratitude for the many blessings we have received from past generations, and a sense of awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation. These compassionate and spiritual attitudes can be taught-as Waldorf schools, religious schools, and many private schools have learned. We need to make sure public schools teach these values too (in non-denominational ways, of course) so that low-income minority parents have the same choices as other parents in how their children are taught.

• Nature is too precious to be sold. Our task is to honor it, preserve it, restore it, and stand in awe of it. This is a spiritual attitude toward the universe and it stands in sharp contrast to those who primarily want to sell nature for private profit. We are opposed to the efforts to privatize all parts of nature (for example the recent efforts to sell rivers and other drinking sources to private corporations) and we want to repair the damage done by over-commercialization and the narrow utilitarian attitude toward nature. This is partly about ecology, and partly about a sense of reverence for all that is. We must share a sense of responsibility based on our role as stewards for all of creation.

Copyright © 2003 St. Augustine by-the-Sea