Honesty

Yesterday’s [Daily Inspiration] proclaimed the sufficiency of self-acceptance as a basis for personal transformation: Know and accept yourself thoroughly and change will take care of itself.

I speculate that the same is true of social change: That spreading truth is both necessary and sufficient for the transformation of society.

It is said that ‘Truth is the first casualty of war’. The converse is that exposing lies can create peace. When we understand the truth about foreign peoples and ways of life, they are no longer threatening to us, and we cannot sustain hatred for them.

Every despot has had his propaganda machine, saturating the channels of communication with myths and distortions. He knows that his hold on power hangs on the success of his lies.

The Quakers practice ‘bearing witness’ to injustice. The only thing Gandhi was ruthless about (in his personal discipline and in his political stance) was the truth.

Today’s revolutionaries and utopians may forgo the strategy debates: all that we need do is to study what is actually happening in our world, and to get the word out.

There's a truly great Irish poet. His name is Brendan Kennelly, and he has this epic poem called the Book of Judas, and there's a line in that poem that never leaves my mind, it says: "If you want to serve the age, betray it."

What does that mean, to betray the age? Well to me betraying the age means exposing its conceits, it's foibles; it's phony moral certitudes. It means telling the secrets of the age and facing harsher truths.

Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will.

Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as it was — which was ungodly and inhuman. Benjamin Franklin called it what it was when he became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.

Segregation. There was another one. America sees this now but it took a civil rights movement to betray their age. And 50 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court betrayed the age. May 17, 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education came down and put the lie to the idea that separate can ever really be equal. Amen to that.

What are the ideas right now worth betraying? What are the lies we tell ourselves now?

Humanity’s resort to violence
To settle ego’s conflicts makes no sense,
For everything we claim to be humane
Bids us to be compassionate and sane:

To love our neighbors as we love ourselves
And stash our grievances on basement shelves
Once we’ve resolved our conflicts peacefully
With justice, honor, truth and equity.

That’s our ideal, proclaimed by saints and sages
In wisdom texts and scriptures through the ages,
And yet in all this time we’ve still not learned
The arts of peace for which we’ve deeply yearned.

Only a peaceful Spirit saves the day:
“There is no way to peace. Peace is the way."

When people lost sight of the way to live
Came codes of love and honesty,
Learning came, charity came,
Hypocrisy took charge;
When differences weakened family ties
Came benevolent fathers and dutiful sons;
And when lands were disrupted and misgoverned
Came ministers commended as loyal.<o:p></o:p>