Here's the column published by the Albuquerque Tribune Thursday, April 27, 2006:
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Perhaps it’s time to grab the reins of self-knowledge and stop thinking about what could be
By Arthur Alpert
Like a lot of Depression babies, I’m future-oriented. Life begins tomorrow. In fact, any day now I’ll whip out the great American Novel.
Stuff happens, though - this month my birthday, a death and the failure of a relationship got me looking backward. Inward, too.
Turning 74 was not only dull (next April, we’ll party!) but murmured softly of a looming final deadline.
Old friend Bill Beutel’s passing felt like a friendly elbow nudging me toward recollection and summing up. As readers of the Tribune obituary know, Bill was a cherished news anchor in the Big Apple. We met in ABC-TV’s first local newsroom there and learned a new medium while scrambling after American history – civil rights, Vietnam, Malcolm X and Cassius Clay. That’s hindsight; we were too busy, too innocent to notice.
Finally, the futile romance told me I’m ancient but not grown up. Certain fears - unexamined, unresolved - still get in my way.
Funny, isn’t it? Humans are deep and incredibly complex. Great novelists map the unconscious. Freud famously explored it. Yet we still try to ignore what lies beneath.
Like the moralizers. Condemning others actually depends on not knowing yourself; it’s harder to throw stones when you’re aware of your own flaws.
Or take well-educated people who work logically from premises they never examine. Economists, notably, who call their process "rational" and their discipline a science. It’s not, it’s materialistic religion. Blessed be the Market Deity, who inspires the selfish and blesseth all injustice.
Journalists, too, frequently cut themselves off at the chin. Denying everything but cortex may explain how Op Ed neo-conservatives enabled the White House powerholics. How else could they ignore the emotions that history, sectarian hatred and tribalism engendered in Iraqi psyches?
I was pondering all this – age, death, the denial of consciousness – as I listened recently to Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of "The Left Hand of God" ("Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right").
Lerner is pied piper of a young, national movement, the Network of Spiritual Progressives. He spoke to a crowd of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians (including clergy), Jews, Buddhists and spiritual-but–not religious New Mexicans overflowing the UNM Continuing Education auditorium.
The Rabbi immediately connected psyche and values – he said America’s bottom-line mentality undermines friendships and "loving relationships," leaving individuals painfully lonely. Then, adding politics to the chain, he admonished the Left for ignoring Americans’ hunger "for spiritual substance."
To my surprise, Lerner didn’t stress fear. Doesn’t Karl Rove’s alchemy lie in turning the base metal of fear into shiny political power?
I guess that’s because the Rabbi is hopeful, a believer in the Deity’s "transformational power." He quotes Teilhard de Chardin, the Roman Catholic priest-philosopher-scientist:
"Some day, after mastering the wind, the rains, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love…."
Maybe, but human evolution seems stalled today. Fear, not love, motivates. So what say we grab the reins of self-knowledge?
Imagine if George W. Bush understood his issues with Dad, if Dick Cheney pondered his paranoia and Donald Rumsfeld ruminated on male-pattern violence.
Might they have asked questions first, bombed later or not at all?
As for me, I find the rear-view mirror and MRI stressful. Tomorrow I go back to the future-orientation. And so what if I’m still childish at 75.
Arthur Alpert is a semi-retired Albuquerque newsman. Reach him at ArthurAlpert@swcp.com. His column appears the fourth Thursday of the month.