Being Radically Awake in a Roy Moore Alabama and a Donald Trump U.S.

Walking with a cane the over-70 gray-haired lady named June wore a “Doug Jones for Senate button” to a meeting I frequent. I struck up a political conversation with her one evening. With an eloquence betraying her pre-retirement profession for many years at a Birmingham college-prep high school, she opined,

“No matter who wins the Senate seat, we have much work to do here to strengthen a community that promotes humane values in the State of Alabama.”

Her words have occupied my thoughts these days after the historic election in which a Democrat defeated a Republican in a state-wide election in culturally conservative and politically red Alabama. Some commentators noted that one reason Doug Jones prevailed over Roy Moore is because a significant number of Republicans voted Democratic for the first time in their lives. A large turn-out of African American voters and offended women helped immeasurably. Howell Raines, native Alabamian and former New York Times Executive Editor, noted that the New South phenomenon seen in other Deep South states had taken a significant step toward moving Alabama past the grip of the defiant racism of George Wallace. Much more will be written about the complex and systems-thinking causes of the Doug Jones victory as well as what that victory’s significance is for the tribalistic polarization of Alabama and the nation. But what has most deeply taken root in my mind is my educator/friend June’s opinion that the real work now is about strengthening community; community that promotes humane values.

A second notion taking deep root and bearing fruit in my mind is that of being “radically awakened.” Public intellectual, Anand Giridharadas, introduced this idea in his evocative address opening the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago, October 31, 2017.

The gist of his speech, if I understand it correctly, is that you cannot be politically and culturally #WOKE (aware of injustice and oppression, committed to pluralism, willing to fight for it) unless you use “wokeness” not as a test for “belonging” to the community and certainly not as a requirement for being redeemable and worthy for the enlightened elite to engage with you. Rather, being in a culturally and politically awakened state must be expressed as attractively inclusive good news which the enlightened and awakened aspire to spread.

The question of being authentically awakened is whether you are in persuasive relationship with the “still-waking” or even with those who have a pro-Roy Moore and pro-Donald Trump mentality. Giridharadas notes,

“Today, there are millions who are ambivalent between the politics of inclusion and the politics of exclusion — not quite woke, not quite hateful.”

He speaks to me who as a native southerner has relocated with my wife from Pasadena, California to Alabama a year ago to spend my retirement years near our grandchildren. We are discovering hundreds of new friends who identify as “conservatives;” they shudder at our pro-gay marriage and prayerfully pro-choice stances but these conservative friends actually do not have horns and a tail.

What’s more, as most southerners know, conservative neighbors and colleagues are indeed very kind persons on the interpersonal level who are (with us all) caught up in very oppressive systems on institutional, cultural, and religious levels but without a sense of cultural critique. This dynamic pertains to the benighted and unawakened Atticus Finch, searingly described in my favorite novel of Harper Lee, Go Set A Watchman.

Lest any of us sneer at those in unawakened denial about their unearned privilege. Lest any of us also barricade our relationships against those who are angrily and unattractively aggrieved at losing status, Giridharadas wisely tutors us in the basics of Citizenship 101. He says,

“Unearned privilege is still our problem. The burden of citizenship is committing to your fellow citizens and accepting that what is not your fault may be your problem. And that, amid great change, it is in all of our interest to help people see who they will be on the other side of the mountaintop.”

Giridharadas calls for listening to the pain of all stripes. Listening is of course the condition for genuine understanding of another person. Remember that in the Parsifal myth, the Fisher King’s wound cannot heal until the right question is asked: “What ails thee?” When we attain some significant degree of understanding of another, we take the step required to win someone over rather than simply resist them. Giridharadas correctly notes. “It isn’t enough to be right about the world you want to live in. You gotta sell it, even to those you fear.”

One final point for those who wish to build community that promotes humane values and wish to be radically awake. It’s the issue of local involvement.

Giridharadas concludes,

“Finally, there is the illusion that you can change the world without being rooted in it. You can’t be a citizen of nowhere as Britain’s Prime Minister notes. When you seek change at home, you have to deal with all you have voted for, done and not done, and quietly benefited from….The woke illusion tells us to circle the wagons. But real change is missionary, seeking to expand the circle….The global illusion tempts us to be thinly everywhere, not thickly somewhere. But real change is rooted and comes through bargaining with your fellow citizens as equals.”

I join Giridharadas in noticing hope all around. Of course I am excited about Doug Jones’s election, but the deep hope I perceive is coming from the realization both in Alabama and in the U.S. of Giridharada’s vision of “radical awakening.” “All around, I see people awakening to citizenship,” he says. In the end, “Democracy is not a supermarket where you pop in whenever you needed something. Now we remember that democracy is a farm, where you reap what you sow”

I passionately believe that the myth of the separate self or even of the separate political or cultural or religious group is a delusion. “We are all one even though we imagine that we are not,” Thomas Merton famously said a month before his death in 1968. That means that the Moore voter in Alabama and the Trump voter in the U.S. and I are one. We are siblings in the same human family. Until I relate to them as such I will not do my part to strengthen a humane community. I will not be awakened. I will not be impacting my geographical neighborhood.

So here’s the concluding example of my argument. It comes from another recent viscerally satisfying political victory. In beautiful poetic justice, Danica Roem is the transgender first-time politician who successfully ran against the Virginia State Senator who had authored anti-transgender legislation. An interviewer asked her, “What would you say to your opponent after a night like tonight? It must feel very vindicating.” Senator-elect Roem responded, “I have nothing but nice things to say about Bob. I would never attack one of my constituents and Bob now is one of my constituents.”

Being genuinely awake requires treating those we consider asleep as colleagues essential to our aspirations for a humane social order.

I don’t know if that’s what June, my educator friend and Doug Jones-voter, meant. But that’s where her statement and Giridharadas’s thinking are leading me.

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Ed Bacon is an Episcopal priest, speaker, and author of 8 Habits of Love. Now, after decades of leading churches, he travels from his Alabama home, teaching across all spiritual paths as well as in non-religious contexts how our Oneness in Love overcomes our separateness in fear. He also works to help save the Pando forest in southern Utah.

I welcome candid responses in that these posts are prototyping my new book on the topic of Oneness.

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