{"id":3111,"date":"2011-09-11T12:00:21","date_gmt":"2011-09-11T19:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/?p=3111"},"modified":"2011-09-11T12:00:21","modified_gmt":"2011-09-11T19:00:21","slug":"still-committed-to-us-and-no-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/11\/still-committed-to-us-and-no-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Still Committed to Us and No Them"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>With the remembrances today of the events of 9\/11 a decade ago, I want to call out something that I think is an important part of the continued processing of that event and the path forward from it into a new century of human development. In my previous piece, \u201cMoving Beyond Us and Them to Only Us\u201d<\/strong><\/a>, I wrote about what I see as the key transition we humans are going through…<\/p>\n

That transition is what I often describe as from \u201cpatriarchy to partnership\u201d, or alternatively from \u201chierarchy to a circle of equals\u201d. If those terms don\u2019t resonate with much meaning for you, maybe our human societal evolution could be described at its most basic as moving from \u201cus and them\u201d thinking towards thinking instead that there is no \u201cthem\u201d and there is only \u201cus\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Though I don’t think I know anyone that was killed or injured on that day, watching and pondering that day’s events brought great sadness to me. I had such hopes for the symbolic power of a new century, a new millennium even (arbitrary markers, I know) to inspire us to look and move forward from the massive wars (hot and cold) and genocides of the 20th century. It had felt to me that with the fall of the Berlin Wall, perhaps the last remnant of the negative trajectory of nationalism, colonialism and calculated violence as a tool of power – that culminated with World War I, leading to World War II, the Cold War, and so many systematic exterminations of people \u2013 was finally over. There was no longer \u201cus and them\u201d and now only \u201cus\u201d.
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\nBut the events of 9\/11 and the subsequent events they catalyzed seemed to dash those hopes and create a new \u201cAxis\u201d of evil, and a new 21st century over-arching violent conflict between world-views. Lives would be lost, others ravaged by severe injuries, and so much of our resources and psychic energy would be focused on the conflict and its collateral damages rather than continuing to build the human infrastructure and understanding to move forward. It was depressing for me to contemplate that perhaps we humans were not as far along on our evolutionary path as I thought we were.
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\nFrom my reading of history, just as World War I had demoralized the world to the extent of bringing on the Great Depression, 9\/11 and the subsequent wars on \u201cterror\u201d, Afghanistan and Iraq again crashed our human civilization’s \u201cimmune system\u201d and brought on the Great Recession.
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\nThe \u201cGreat War\u201d was a conflict that had no compelling justification behind it (as far as I can see) and was instead a calculated exercise of organized technologically-enhanced violent statecraft leading to the senseless slaughter, particularly of an entire generation of our young men who were bravely \u201cserving their countries\u201d as soldiers. There were no winners of that war, only guilty or na\u00efve losers left alive in the wreak of human civilization as we had known it. It is no wonder in my thinking that the self-perceived disability of human civilization would lead to economic collapse, genocide, \u201cround two\u201d of total war and a new ideological divide of the world into hostile camps. (I am at least grateful that we did not have \u201cround three\u201d with all our nuclear weapons!)
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\nWith the fall of the Iron Curtain and renewed hopes of a new era beyond all that, the events of 9\/11\/2001 and the subsequent invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in response again took their psychic toll on all of us. The perpetrators of the carnage of 9\/11 and subsequent attacks against civilian populations, were in my opinion engaged in their own cruel and calculated \u201cstatecraft\u201d of sorts.
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\nFor years now we have lived with every new day bringing more of our courageous young people dead or maimed, and our government encouraging us to \u201ckeep shopping\u201d despite the carnage. Perhaps many of us medicated ourselves by turning our homes into ATMs and allowing unscrupulous practitioners in the finance industry to exploit that fact until it became psychically unsustainable. Finally it all crashed with the \u201cGreat Recession\u201d, nearly a century after the \u201cGreat War\u201d, but not an unrelated legacy of that earlier conflict. 1914 to perhaps 2014 (hopefully), a hundred year story arc and a lesson hopefully learned.
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\nAgain from my earlier piece… <\/p>\n

Looking at \u201cus and them\u201d thinking in our human history, it was all about how we divided people up by age oar gender, clan or tribe, and later by more abstract concepts such as race or nation. However the dividing was done, there was an in-group within which there was at least a degree of mutual respect and care surrounded by outsiders that generally engendered fear. To mitigate that fear, often the in-group would define itself as somehow privileged or otherwise superior to the outsiders and justified in exercising a degree of separation from and control over (including violence against) those outsiders.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am hoping that we can at least begin to be done with this! I for one am ready to accept that there are no \u201cthem\u201d. The religious extremists, the jihadists, and the tyrannical regimes are all \u201cus\u201d… and we have to come to grips with that!
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\nEasy for me to say… since I have not been personally and deeply wounded by loss of family, others close to me, or the entire ancestry that I am born from, in these cataclysms, and really don’t have the proper \u201cstanding\u201d to speak. There is still so much justice and restoration that still needs to take place, the continuing legacy of violence and particularly calculated and organized violence. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the remembrances today of the events of 9\/11 a decade ago, I want to call out something that I think is an important part of the continued processing of that event and the path forward from it into a new century of human development. In my previous piece, \u201cMoving Beyond Us and Them to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17],"tags":[1578,1055,1584,1582,1585,1581,1170,1580,1583,1013,1579],"class_list":["post-3111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-that-deeper-level-however-you-define-it","tag-1578","tag-capitalism","tag-colonialism","tag-communism","tag-fascism","tag-great-depression","tag-great-recession","tag-great-war","tag-nationalism","tag-world-war-i","tag-world-war-ii"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t