Hope For Respect

My thought for this day, although still early, is respect for hope. Respect for our interdependence and respect for our challenging differences, important, yet hopefully not as powerful as our interdependent love for healthy life. Yesterday I noticed a brown cardboard box in the corner of a reception area for our Infectious Disease Clinic with a black marker sign above "Books--Free to Give and Take" There were only two books to take, hard to estimate how many might be given. Both of these current residents of the box, waiting for their next conversational partners, were written by a Senator Barack Obama. One, a biographical heritage journey about living between society's generous giving and sometimes breathtaking taking and stomping on differences within primarily interdependent identities. The title of the Senator's other book, "The Audacity of Hope" grabbed me in part because, by the time it was published, the author was also a candidate for the US Presidency, and in part because of the way we are now living in response to an AntiAudacious Hope Administration reading from a script to incarnate the reverse side, "The Mendacity of Hopelessness" Against Making America Great spelled MAGA of crippling despair, of shallow and empty nihilism, of wounded fake-piety, of false nationalistic AntiEarth hubris Marketed in red, white, and blue gift wrap as [AntiMatriotic] Patriotism, with sales remaining somewhat more pathological in Red States than Blue and Green, maybe Turquoise, or AquaMarine, but defined as not-Red as Red is confined to not "The Global Audacity of MultiCulturing Hope." Susan Werner lyrically asks How do you love those who hate you? We see some response in teachings of Jesus; to turn the other cheek, to walk a second enslaved by force mile, to turn rifle associations into farming and gardening tools for good, although this last one was a remix from Old Testament Prophets. Tools for respecting interdependence but also multicultural differences still in creolizing process. It is easy to hate Donald Trump, or to see him as the Emperor without AudaciousClothes of Grace for Healthy Faith as his unfortunate choice and lot in life. Even easier to go back and forth between these two, blaming and shaming. It is harder to hate those who voted for him. Although I have an obsessively troubling place in my dissonant heart and mind for those who profess to be evangelists for a God of LiberaLove and Peace but also profess their eager willingness to vote yet again for The Nakedly Supremacist Apprentice. Like the Body of Christ continuing to empower the Head Pharisee. How do you respect those who build their futures on disrespecting you and yours and your healthy futures? How do you play Win-Win with those who persist in the delusion our only RealTime life option is Win-Lose or Lose-Lose? I suspect it is this Lose-Lose non-option that disrespects our mutual economic and political and personal and vulnerable fears, our lie-group proving what Win-Win would invite toward respect. It is in witnessing what happens when we take this risk of turning our appositional faces that we can invite mutual respect for the audacity of Win-Win non-violent healing. It is when we walk this double-binding extra walk with those who disrespect integrity and hope and faith and multiculturing love, that we are more likely to discover our own lack of strength to remain vulnerable to shared evils of ego-centrism and anthro-supremacism lurking within our own hearts and minds And bad faith harboring mendacity and apathy about past violent colonization, where empathy and creolizing curiosity and respect could have invited interdependent hope. My audacity of hope lies in faith we always have a political and personal option that is a Win both for our ego's economic future and for our Earth's ecological nonrupture. That this is true for healthcare giving and receiving accessible to all Earth's residents and constituents, whether voters or not even enfranchised, whether we could even bear to hear their votes for respect and not for disrespect, or not ego-perpetuating dissonance. Restoring Win-Win life options always optimizes peace outcomes, audacious hope for long-term justice outcomes, mutual respect for our inductive interdependence first, and our deductive differences secondarily, and contingently compromising suboptimal democratic intent settling for short-term Win-Lose outcomes, leaving less room for love of complex internal multicultural rights than hate for external monoculturing chaotic wrongs. Infectious Disease Clinics are good places for more Audacious Hope and democratic multiculturing Love. But so would any classroom, so would the Parent rack of any bookstore-- required reading for any healthcare legislator, any ecopolitical policy maker, any person wanting to grow hope as respect first for our living interdependence, second for loyal and gratefully shared differences feeding further curiosity and deeper empathy and stretching faith in respect across extending nature-spirit families sharing this one global sacred Habitat. Concelebrating many liturgically evolving flags all blowing in our singly shared audacious winds of hope.