{"id":10958,"date":"2014-11-06T16:43:18","date_gmt":"2014-11-06T21:43:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/themagicalbuffet.com\/blog1\/?p=10958"},"modified":"2014-11-06T16:43:18","modified_gmt":"2014-11-06T21:43:18","slug":"the-politics-of-the-brokenhearted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themagicalbuffet.com\/blog1\/?p=10958","title":{"rendered":"The Politics of the Brokenhearted"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Parker J. Palmer<\/p>\n

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. \u2014 Theodore Roethke, \u2018\u2018In a Dark Time\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ I began this book (“Healing the Heart of Democracy”) in a season of heartbreak \u2014 personal and political heartbreak \u2014 that soon descended into a dark night of the soul. It took months to find my way back to the light and six years to complete the book. But as I fumbled in the dark, the poet Roethke\u2019s words proved true time and again: my eyes were opened to new insights, and my heart was opened to new life. The evidence will, I hope, come clear as this book unfolds.<\/p>\n

In 2004, I turned sixty-five. As I entered my \u2018\u2018golden years\u2019\u2019 and saw how much of that gold was rust, I found myself disheartened by the diminishments that come with age. Family members and friends were failing and dying. Visions I once held for my life were slipping beyond my reach. My body kept reminding me that I am just a tad more mortal than I had imagined I would be. And I was no longer able to \u2018\u2018read\u2019\u2019 American culture as easily as I could when my generation was helping to author it. It was as if I had lost the secret decoder ring I owned when I was a kid, and with it my ability to make sense of twenty-first-century life.<\/p>\n

As the shape of my personal life became less familiar and sometimes more frightening, the same thing was happening in American politics as viewed from my vantage point. Dismayed by the state of the nation, I began to feel like a displaced person in my own land. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had deepened America\u2019s appreciation of democracy and<\/em> activated demons that threaten it, demons still at large today. Wounded and overwhelmed by fear, we soon went to war against a country that had no direct connection to the attacks. Many Americans seemed willing to abandon their constitutional rights along with our international treaty obligations.2 Some Americans, including elected officials, were quick to accuse protesters and dissenters of being unpatriotic or worse, fragmenting the civic community on which democracy depends.<\/p>\n

I am no stranger to this democracy\u2019s moments of peril, which have been precipitated by Democrats and Republicans alike. I lived through McCarthy\u2019s communist witch hunts; the pushback to the civil rights movement; the political assassinations of the 1960s; the burning of our cities; Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate; and the electoral debacle of 2000. I have witnessed the rapid erosion of the middle class and the growing power of big money, an oligarchy of wealth, to trump the will of the people. But with fear and fragmentation becoming staples of our national life, and with the haunting sense that our \u2018\u2018booming economy\u2019\u2019 was likely to implode, democracy felt even more imperiled to me in the America of 2004.<\/p>\n

As our distrust of \u2018\u2018the other\u2019\u2019 beyond our borders hardened and we began making aliens of each other (a \u2018\u2018we\u2019\u2019 that included me), I fell into a spiral of outrage and despair. How did we forget that our differences are among our most valuable assets? What happened to \u2018\u2018we have nothing to fear but fear itself\u2019\u2019? When will we learn that violence in the long run creates at least as many problems as it solves? Why do we not value life, every life, no matter whose or where? Or understand that the measure of national greatness is not only how successful the strong can be but how well we support the weak?<\/p>\n

And where have \u2018\u2018We the People\u2019\u2019 gone \u2014 we who have the power to reclaim democracy for its highest purposes, unless we allow ourselves to be divided and conquered by the enemy within and among us? <\/p>\n

When things we care about fall apart, heartbreak happens. In my sixty-fifth year, it was happening, again, to me. I soon began to realize that this episode was darker than most of those I had known before: I was descending into depression, my third time down as an adult. Clearly I am predisposed to this form of mental anguish, so I cannot claim that heartbreak was the sole source of my misery. But neither can I attribute the whole of this episode to brain chemistry or genetics. There are times when the heart, like the canary in the coal mine, breathes in the world\u2019s toxicity and begins to die.<\/p>\n

Much has been said about the \u2018\u2018voice of depression.\u2019\u2019 It is a voice that speaks despairingly about the whole of one\u2019s life no matter how good parts of it may be \u2014 a voice so loud and insistent that when it speaks, it is the only sound one can hear. I know that voice well. I have spent long days and nights listening to its deadly urgings.<\/p>\n

Less has been said about the life-giving fact that, as poet Theodore Roethke writes, \u2018\u2018In a dark time, the eye begins to see.\u2019\u2019 During my sojourn on the dark side, it was hard to believe that my vision was growing sharper or to make sense of what I was seeing. And yet as I slowly came back to life, I found that I had gained new clarity about myself, the community I depend on, and my call to reengage with its politics and relearn how to hold its tensions in a life-giving way.<\/p>\n

During my recovery, I discovered a book that helped me understand how heartbreak and depression \u2014 two of the most isolating and disabling experiences I know \u2014 can expand one\u2019s sense of connectedness and evoke the heart\u2019s capacity to employ tension in the service of life. “Lincoln\u2019s Melancholy”, by Joshua Shenk, is a probing examination of our sixteenth president\u2019s journey with depression. What was then called \u2018\u2018melancholy\u2019\u2019 first appeared in Lincoln\u2019s twenties, when neighbors occasionally took him in for fear he might take his own life. Lincoln struggled with this affliction until the day he died, a dark thread laced through a life driven by the conviction that he was born to render some sort of public service.<\/p>\n

Lincoln\u2019s need to preserve his life by embracing and integrating his own darkness and light made him uniquely qualified to help America preserve the Union. Because he knew dark and light intimately \u2014 knew them as inseparable elements of everything human \u2014 he refused to split North and South into \u2018\u2018good guys\u2019\u2019 and \u2018\u2018bad guys,\u2019\u2019 a split that might have taken us closer to the national version of suicide.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Instead, in his second inaugural address, delivered on March 4,1865, a month before the end of the Civil War, Lincoln appealed for \u2018\u2018malice toward none\u2019\u2019 and \u2018\u2018charity for all,\u2019\u2019 animated by what one writer calls an \u2018\u2018awe-inspiring sense of love for all<\/em> \u2019\u2019 who bore the brunt of the battle. In his appeal to a deeply divided America, Lincoln points to an essential fact of our life together: if we are to survive and thrive, we must hold its divisions and contradictions with compassion, lest we lose our democracy.<\/p>\n