Charlie Brown says that brothers and sisters can learn to get along. He says they can get along the way mature adults can get along. And he says that adults can get along the way nations get along.

At this point the analogy breaks down.

The failure of humanity to ‘get along’ ascends along the axis of size and maturity and resources.  Yet maybe the principle works in reverse as well and nations and adults must learn to get along the way children do.

If you have not read ‘The Gospel According to Peanuts’ I highly recommend it as a remarkably sophisticated and insightful exploration of theology via the Peanuts universe.  I have included a link to it in my Amazon Store.

This compartmentalization of thinking in relation to finance explains a lot about people’s behavior regarding money.  An alumnus of a school may feel happy to volunteer time (social donation) but not money (financial donation) to that institution.  People feel bad about homeless people on the street but are reluctant to actually give money.  It is one of the challenges of living a wholisticlally ethical life to try to overcome this barrier and integrate our financial thinking into the rest of our lives.

Link

Britten was comissioned to write the piece to dedicate Coventry Cathedral, which has been destroyed in World War II and was to be rebuilt. Britten, a pacifist, wrot the requiem, using the full Mass texts intersperced with poetry written by Wilfred Own, a soldier in WWI (who was killed a week before the end of the war). The consequent piece is the most dramatic and emotionally charged attacks on the institution of war in human society that I have ever encountered. Every poem underscores the absurdity of war and its ultimate futility. Britten artfully mixes the poetry in with the latin texts for an extremely powerful effect. Musically the piece is a spectacular modern, dissonant and atonal meandering structure. It is surprisingly listenable but yet still qiute profound. I particularly liked the part where the Dies Irae was introduced by the Trumpet and trombone sections playing horn calls that mimicked at the same time the bugle call of the cavalry and also the call of the Last Judgment. War is Hell. Literally.

I have never considered myself a pacifist. I do not like violence or condone it (outside of video games and movies of course ) but cannot categorically say that I am opposed to all violence at all times. I’m very torn on this position. In studying German history in my years studying German, I learned a lot about the evils that humanity is possible of achieving. WWI and WWII encompas both of these and in a sense are the dialectic of violence. World War I was the quo et demonstratem of pacifism.

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenched there,
And streched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! and angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so,
but slew his son, -
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

The first world war war underscored the pointlessness of war in general. Why were these particular youths who had nothing against these other particular youths killing each other over disagreements that other unrelated leaders had with each other? It was all so pointless and evil. World War I I think represents the evil that humanity is capable of even when it is not trying to be evil.

World War II on the other hand represents what humanity can do when it does try to be evil, and I think it is the counterexample to the pacifist. The Allies were by no means saints going into save the Jews from the death camps, and many of their motivations and tactics were by no means honorable. Yet still, when you go to one of the concentration camps or study the history of Nazi germany you quickly come to the conclusion that this had to be stopped and by force.

Links:

• War Requiem Text
• Some Background on the Requiem

Many decisions we make daily do not seem to have much of an ethical component to them. They do not involve interaction with, let alone harm to another person. They do not harm us. They seem to be simply actions. Let us make this a bit more concrete with an example about urban sprawl. Urban sprawl is a growing societal problem in the U.S.. It is a large environmental concern, destroying habitats, fueling erosion by crating ground cover, and leading to water shortages. It is deeply related to the growing class-ification of our society. It destroys community and aesthetics through mindless copying of housing designs. Needless to say it is a problem that the U.S. faces. It is also a problem that has moral consequences and is to some extent a moral issue.

However the factors that lead to urban sprawl do not seem to be ethical at all. Individual families want large homes that are not ‘in the goonies’ but also in a place with open spaces and fresh air. Consequently there is a huge demand for the suburban housing market, which then expands (and along with it, the size of our sprawl). This same effect can be seen in a huge number of societal problems: global warming, globalization, recycling problems, white-flight, immigration. The list goes on. It seems as though awide swath of our society’s most endemic social evils have their origins in relatively minor acts of individuals.

This provides a framework for an additional level of meaning in Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which states that we should Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. When I encounter a moral dilemma, I must proceed in a way that I could rationally assent to becoming a law for all times, places, and people. However, we can see also now that the categorical imperative also tells us what situations are in fact moral dilemmas. In fact every situation turns out to be a moral dilemma because every situation will look different when we examine how it would be if everyone were to act that way.

This actually can be helpful to us. There are many situations where we have some inkling of an idea that it is a moral situation, but it does not seem to be particularly important. Recycling comes to mind. Keeping in mind the categorical imperative (and the empirical fact that oftentimes everyone else will do the same thing in that situation), we can learn to see the broader context and ethical significance of such acts and hopefully be further motivated to live them out.

It is really amazing to watch his creations as they walk across the beaches of Holland. There is something delightfully eerie about them. They look like living skeletons of some crazy sort of machine and yet there is something peacful about the way that the wander along, powered only by the wind.

As one who works with technology on a regular basis, I really like his quote that the only difference between art and technology is in our minds. Why can not technology be considered beautiful and expressive the way art is. And why must art be limited to the traditional forms that it has held for the last millenia or so?

Obviously in order be really ‘art’ it needs to go beyond simply ‘looking cool.’ This is where I think Theo’s work really stands out. While he is a bit crazy (he talks about them coming alive in an interview on GoodExperience.com), there is something to them that forces us to look deeper at our own biological existence. The movement of the creatures captures a beauty in our own movements that is difficult to simply describe and that by its commonplace nature we hardly ever recognize. In this way it also pushes the boundries of
art, by (as must kinetic sculpture does) a sense of movement in non-staticness into the art. Particularly, it makes the movement itself the art form rather than the thing that does the moving.

And yet…

And yet, something in my conception of ‘church’ seems missing. I found this at college where I met people who were super active and excited about helping the poor, the needy, the oppressed. I found people who sought deeper meaning and were always questioning and re-examining their beliefs and thoughts, lest they had made some error and invited falshood into their understanding. I encountered a richness and life that paled my high school youth group. This was not limited either to the ‘secular’ part of campus. In fact, my fellowship seemed to be on the forefront of issues of race, oppression, social justice and through them I found a richness in my Christian heritage that I had never seen before.

How did I miss this? How could I have read the Bible cover-to-cover, supposedly under the principle that its existence was intimately tied in with the voice of God, and missed so much? I have begun to feel that there is something missing in the world of church that I had before college. I go back to my church from high school and feel like there is an energy and life that is missing there.

In short, I am emerging. I am caught in the paradox of affirming the incubator that raised me, and yet feeling its gross inadequacies. Apparently, I am not alone. There is an entire community of people like me, coming from all sorts of backgrounds who feel like Christianity has become often stagnant in the modern (or rather postmodern) age and that something must be done. What this ‘something’ is unclear, but a conversation has emerged as to how we must change in order to continue to best strive towards the ideal laid out by Christ.

‘Conversation really seems to be one of the best ways of describing this ‘movement.’ The growth of the ‘social web’ (or to use the buzzword – Web 2.0) has made for an ideal ground for individuals, leaders, theologians, authors, and skeptics to share thoughts, ideas and exercise this conversation. This blog is my own little participation in this endeavor. My prayer is that it will be useful and informative to all who read it (and to its writer) as I attempt to struggle to find understanding, truth and meaning in a complex world.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education — least in my own case — is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Given the huge moral blunders that the U.S. has made in its foreign policy and the rather sad state of democracy in the U.S. today, this position is (rightly) seen as largely hypocritical, lacking in real content, and extremely dangerous to the well-being of the world. For many people in the U.S. today, the flag has become a symbol of shame, hypocricy and blind imperialism. It is something for which the proper purpose is to display upside down, burning or juxtaposed with some image of American shame.

This needs to be reversed.

I think that part of the motivation for getting away from American symbols and patriotism in a feeling that those symbols are tainted by the neo-conservative hypocrisy and American imperialism. Another factor is that those symbols are seen more and more to be symbols, not of American ideal, but of American power and might. Certainly many of the uses of the flag can point to that.

However the response should not be to shy away from the symbols them selves, but to change the meaning of the symbols and the role that they play in our society. The strong association of such American symbols, especially with military and nationalistic overtones does in fact promote the sort of pro-American cultural imperialism that liberal America finds so distasteful. So in a sense we need to not only take back the symbols but the very meaning of patriotism in the U.S.

Patriotism is not nationalism and when the two become confused then the national identity becomes very hypocritical and dangerously conceited. Nationalism is the ferver to support what the nation is. Given America’s power and nebulous moral position in the world today this is certainly somthing to be avoided. However, a proper liberal patriotism should be concerned with the ideals of the U.S., particularly the liberal ideals of social justice, equality, environmental justice, etc. This form of patriotism looks critically at the U.S. today and can even be ashamed of the U.S. and its actions. However it is patriotic in relation to the ideals of American Liberalism. Symbols are needed as points around which to rally. Especailly in the realm of thought, it is hard to rally around subtle and complex issues. I think that the loss of American symbolism in liberal thought has lead to the strange trend of isolationism in American liberalism, especially foreign policy.

So my message today is that Liberals need to take back the flag! Let it fly no longer for imperialism, armies, corporations, closed-minded bigotry or the like. Let it fly for social justice, the environment, the equality of peoples and cultures and paradigms, the inherent rights of all peoples. Let it fly not for what America is but for what American was intended to be! Let it be not a self-congratulary picture to where we are, but a goal on a mountaintop to where we must always struggle towards.