Wars of Occupation: A Brief History, with Scorecard

What does the future hold for America in Iraq? Well, no matter your preference regarding candidates, you would no doubt like to see a relatively peaceful outcome in as near a future as can be arranged, and in which there is the absolute minimum loss of innocent life (that includes American soldiers). I think that's a fair assessment of everyone's aspiration at this point, in spite of the fact that the Bush administration and its followers would like to tag those who speak out against the war as ignorant (at best) and treasonous (most frequently).

But this is a time for facing reality, and reality, as we all know from our personal lives, is not always comfortable or amenable even to our most ardent wishes and purest intentions. Santayana told us that those who choose to ignore history are condemned to repeat it, so perhaps we are well served to cast a glance at the history of wars of occupation. The perspective obtained might tell us more in a few moments than an entire evening of probing websites or channel-surfing the news shows. Here, then, is a sampling of wars of occupation from the history of mankind, with a brief recount of the final score.

War Combatants Outcome for Occupying Force

Trojan War Athens vs. Troy Not good: after at least ten years of war (maybe more) and innumerable losses of men and money; Athens prevailed, sacked the city of Troy, and went home, depleted and exhausted

Persian War Persia vs. Greece Not good: the Persians, who had the dominant empire of the time in size, economic strength, and military power, were routed at Marathon. As one historian points out: The final victory [for the Greeks] must have seemed a miracle. A handful of independent cities, who were not prepared at all, and who hastily formed an alliance with enormous aversion, had humiliated the mighty Persian empire. Persia would never again be even a modest power in the world--at least not until OPEC was formed.

Peloponnesian Wars Athens vs. Sparta (et al) Not good: decades of war, internal strife, and economic decline resulted from the Athenians' arrogant attempt at occupation and imperialism. Their attempt to spread their version of "democracy" throughout Greece ended in tragic defeat and humiliation (to witness how closely the past evokes the present, see the account of this war here: The Peloponessian Wars

The Roman Occupation Rome vs. Palestine Not good: the struggle for Jerusalem took the Romans 7 years and untold loss of life and resources. If that weren't bad enough what followed was one of the early blows in the fall of the Empire: the bloody and maddening fight for the fortress that has come to be known as Masada.

The Napoleonic Wars France vs. Europe Not good: the "scorched earth policy" of Napoleon naturally bred hatred from enemies (which comprised nearly every nation in the world at that time) and hypervigilance from the little demon himself (he has become a cultural symbol of paranoia). After Waterloo, France would never again be a power in the world, and would soon enough see itself forced under the yoke of others' tyranny and finally relegated to the status of "Old Europe."

WWI and WWII Germany vs. the World Not good (in fact, disastrous): the Kaiser and the Fuhrer, in their turns, each discovered the consequences of relying on power and dominion to further wealth and territorial possession. They were each forced into insupportable alliances, overstretched economies at home and ravaged supply lines abroad, until Germany met the final defeat that would push it into a mendicant's corner of "Old Europe."

The Cold War USSR vs. Eastern Europe and the U.S. Not good at all: The Russians, like other occupying forces before them, overextended themselves beyond the limits of their economic and military capacity, and finally were undone by the inertia of their own lumbering tyranny. The same lesson was repeated for them in Afghanistan.

Korean War U.S. vs. Korea Ambiguous, but ominous: the U.S. took on what it perceived to be the spread of Communism, less than ten years after the nation was still recovering from the losses and strain of WWII. The war was fought to a bitter, bloody stalemate, which persists to this day as the Koreans amass (for real, it would appear) WMDs.

Vietnam War U.S. vs. Vietnam Disastrous in the extreme: the U.S. again grappled with the spread of Communism, apparently somehow buoyed by their tie in Korea. The result is well known to most Americans alive today: 50,000 dead, hundreds of thousands wounded, traumatized, and impoverished--and that's just for the losers. "Never again" cried the politicians of every party affiliation and allegiance at the time. Never again, indeed.

Invasion of Kuwait Saddam vs. Kuwait About as ugly as it can get: Saddam had his eye on Kuwait and the UAE for a long time, and, supported by American military and financial might given to him some ten years before, he made his move, sure of his standing in the eyes of the CIA as a "benevolent dictator." He discovered that, as Cervantes said, "greed always bursts the bag," and that even the CIA will lose patience with a man who doesn't understand his limitations.

So, what have we learned? It seems as if wars of occupation do bring some short-term benefit for the aggressor--as they did for the Romans, Napoleon, and even Hitler. But war creates a dynamic of diminishing returns, and history proves this: war tends to quickly deplete the society whose government makes it the cornerstone of its foreign policy.

So, does occupation, for whatever professedly noble, altruistic, or even religious reason, ever work? Has it ever worked before? You be the judge: if this history makes sense to you, and supports the continuance of the current war of occupation, then god bless you and your Halliburton stock options. But if history tells you a different story, then let that inform the kind of ballot you cast on November 2.

The Declaration of Independence, Reaffirmed

We live amidst the dominant political paradigm of a two party system: every November, no matter who happens to be running for what--dogcatcher or world leader--we must go to the polls and choose between a Democrat and a Republican. In our recent history, a few notable figures--John Anderson, Ross Perot, and now Ralph Nader--have attempted to restore the Independent party in the esteem of the American public. Yet they have failed, even where (in Perot's case) there was an abundance of financial wealth supporting them and their message. Why?

Perhaps the reason is that independence is not, and cannot be, a party. It is a state of being that is aligned to no group, no particular agenda, no fixed ideology, no concretized, immovable position. Independence is an innately personal and fluid attitude--you might say a quantum mode of being human. It is unceasing motion with no defined position; yet it possesses a pervading stability of orientation. Independence is not, of course, a complete absence of dependence, but only of group-defined, societal dependence. Independence is self-dependence, the awareness of one's unique individuality and its connection to an encompassing, formative, and nurturing Universal--to Nature. Nature has rhythms and harmonic patterns of theme-and-variation, but it has no rigid Laws except for those that are projected onto it by human consciousness. How can we apply this understanding to our own lives, and particularly (at this moment in history) to the decisions which we are called to make about our leadership?

As we approach the moment in which we will have to cast a vote to help determine how we will be governed over the next four years, it is perhaps time to ask ourselves the most fundamental questions--questions that seem to have nothing at all to do with politics, with the economy or the international situation. Try this one, and see where it leads you: over the coming days, ask yourself, "What am I living for?" Then review the possibilities and the alternatives.

Am I living to survive, to keep my house, my job, my standard of living, intact? Am I living toward a hoped-for point of "retirement" when I will be able to finish out my life in peace, contentment, and material abundance? Am I living solely for my children--that they may grow into the same or greater wealth or possessions than I have been able to accumulate? Am I living so that they will come of age in a safer, more prosperous world than I knew? Am I living for some combination of these goals (including many that will only occur to you)--or for something even more than any of these, something that embraces them all?

Let each answer that arises prompt you to a new question (this is always a sign that you're making progress with such an exercise, when questions lead not to definitive answers but to more clearly stated, pointed questions). The first thing you'll probably discover is that your needs are not confined to one area or another of life or the future, but that they encompass an ever-broadening range of possibility and aspiration. As more questions arise, as they become more focused in their direction and wider in perspective, answers may form and coalesce--fluidly, lightly, like wind or light on the surface of a lake. The perspective you thus achieve is what you must bring to the next set of questions--those that you ask of the people who would serve your interests in government.

We have a candidate who assures us that, if re-elected, he will make us safe. Look beneath the appearance of this claim and ask more questions of it: does "being made safe" mean having one's son or daughter drafted into a military and sent to suffer and die in a foreign desert? Does it mean accepting economic hardship and unemployment on behalf of a greater good that only a man in Washington with a golden telephone connected to the office of an external God can determine for us? Does it mean giving up your Social Security earnings to corporate interests, so that the stock market will be robust while millions of people wallow in the "retirement" known as poverty? If this is your idea of independence, then you are doubtlessly already free of such concerns--you are in that exclusive domain of the top 1 per cent of wage-earners that President Clinton talked about in his speech at the DNC. But be careful: you can buy your place in the collective, you can purchase a false sense of security and position, and you can insure your belongings and your life. But you cannot insure your soul.

But if this does not answer your questions, if it does not accord with your burgeoning, personal vision of independence, then continue asking questions. And if you feel the slightest twinge of guilt or remorse at asking such questions, remind yourself that you are fulfilling the mission expressed by the founders of this nation, with every question that you ask. The people who wrote the document upon which our nation was formed did not call it the "Declaration of the Republic" or the "Declaration of the Democratic". They called it what they did because they understood that "we the people" is comprised and energized by the "I the person": it is the individuality of each human being in the community, the nation, the world, that together and synergistically creates the whole, the Union. So, do not be afraid of listening to and following your deep, individual voice in discovering the truth that harmonizes with your being and your moment: this is what our founding fathers wished for us.

Indeed, it is the message that every independent teacher of personal wisdom and social progress has expressed. When the Buddha lay on his deathbed and was asked urgently by his students for a final, summary teaching that they could take forward, he said to them, "You are the Light itself. Rely on yourself. Do not rely on others." He had achieved the same understanding that the authors of the Declaration of Independence later discovered: that when we rely on our own light, as individuals, we are spontaneously affirming and completing "a more perfect Union". Another teacher, from about the same time as the Buddha lived, also arrived at this perspective. His name was Lao Tzu, and he lived an entire professional career as a government official. Upon his retirement (or perhaps exile), he wrote a document that stands as one of the treasures of both personal and political philosophy, to this very day. In Chapter 54 of this document, called the Tao Te Ching, he condenses the message of the Buddha, of Jefferson and Washington, and of every other teacher who deeply perceived the inherent harmony of humankind and Nature, of work and home, of individual truth and social organization. It is a message that each of us can learn from, both autonomously and universally, as we open the curtain and face the names before us in the voting booth this November:

With a firm inner foundation,
You cannot be toppled.
An embrace is all the grasp you need
To be safe within.

An offering of simple honor,
From the children of the past
To the children of the present
Supports the children of the future.

Why do you cultivate your image
When your natural being is already full?
Why aggrandize your family pride
When the perfection of family is complete?
Why meddle with your community
When its natural form is imperishable?
Why do you fight to enrich your nation
When its simple order is abundance?
Why divide and oppose earth and heaven
When the purity of their union is unalterable?

Therefore, examine yourself
To become your Self.
Examine your home
To become a family.
Examine your village
To become a community.
Examine the state
To become a nation.
Examine the world
To become one with Being.

How do I know
That this is the way of Nature?
Because I asked It,
From within my deepest self.

Valueshock Explained

Why the term "valueshock"? Well, it is meant to indicate a time in which transformative potential rises, like the synergy between the ground of the earth and the dynamic thermal currents of the sky, which forms the cleansing and cathartic energy known as lightning. It is a natural force that has been wondered at by humans since the dawn of recorded history: consider the poem from Hexagram 51 of the I Ching, written somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago:

51 Shock
Shock brings success.
Shock comes--oh, oh!
Laughing words--ha, ha!
The shock terrifies for a hundred miles,
And he does not let fall
The sacrificial spoon and chalice.
(from the Richard Wilhelm / Carey Baynes translation, 1923 / 1950)

The structure of the hexagram is said to represent the dynamic force described above: the rumble of thunder doubled in its force as it roars through the vault of heaven. It is a metaphor on times such as those we live in, where the dread notes of fear resound throughout the world, joined by the sound of transformative potential that is latent in the most terrifying moments of history. The commentary written to this hexagram by Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog may help us to perceive this synergy between the rumble of conflict and the possibility of liberation:

A person may receive this hexagram when he has experienced an unsettling event, which has shaken his confidence in the ordinary ways he has been relating to his life. The shock is to make him aware that these ordinary ways, which he has been taking for granted as correct, have failed to help him in the given situation. It also shows him that the values he has been following are questionable, and that his path has now led him to a dead-end.
(from I Ching: The Oracle of the Cosmic Way, ichingbooks / Anthony Publishing Co., 2000; p. 547)

The "unsettling event" referred to is the cycle of violence and destruction that began with the attacks of September 11, 2001, and which continued with the war of occupation currently being waged in Iraq. We have also seen the re-emergence of the cult of genocide around the world over the past 20 years--in Bosnia, in Rwanda, and now in Chad. Meanwhile, the seemingly endless round of attack and counter-attack between the Israelis and Palestinians goes on to this very moment; while mushroom clouds of nuclear capacity appear in Korea and Iran. Finally, there is no longer any question (even in the President's mind, during his rare moments of lucidity) whether the "war on terror" can ever be won--but only as to how bad it might get.

These are the shocks of our time. In our world of today, the shock indeed "terrifies for a hundred miles"--and for a hundred thousand. But how can "shock bring success"? What did these people of ancient times know that we seem to have missed, consumed as we are by our fear and horror? Perhaps they perceived that the way through shock is to remain open to what it has to teach us. These people were guided by the natural world and their place within it, which was not one of lordship and dominion, but rather of an active and humble participation in the natural rhythms and movements of the Earth and its creatures. They saw that, as terrifying as a thunderstorm could be--as threatening to life and property--it nevertheless brought nourishing rain to the fields, while its ionic force cleansed the air, relieved the humidity, and balanced the pressure of the atmosphere. The clarity and stillness that follow a storm are palpably regenerative--thus the movement in the poem from alarm (oh oh!) to relief (ha ha!).

But note the absence in the verse of any intervening human destruction to counter the shock received. Instead, it tells of one who remains so inwardly quiet and steady that he can continue with the ritual of nourishment, so that "he does not let fall the sacrificial spoon and chalice."

Well, that's fine for sitting out a thunderstorm, but what about when people start flying airplanes into the buildings of your most important and populous city? Let us remember that the folks who wrote these quaint-sounding poems lived in a time of warfare and strife such as would make life in modern Baghdad seem a bargain by comparison. I'm not kidding, and a glance at the historical records of the time proves it: this was a time, spanning several centuries, in which a hundred Osama bin Ladens wrought terror, death, and destruction over a part of the world roughly in scale to today's Middle East. Tyrants and their armies fought, conquered, looted, and burned in an unceasing whirl of mayhem and murder. Life was very cheap, and never assured from one day to the next, no matter where in China you happened to live. It was known as "the warring states period." And they meant it.

So the insight that these people offer us into shock is worth paying some attention, because it was insight earned through lived experience. There were no "think tanks" or "wonkers" in that era (plenty of bureaucrats, though)--these would arise in the Confucian era, soon to follow this. In the warring states period, there were just people desperately trying to survive and still live decent human lives.

The answer they arrived at, which they expressed in the philosophy of Taoism and its formative documents--the I Ching, the Chuang Tzu, and the Tao Te Ching--involved teaching a personal sense of humility: the ability to learn from shock, to grow from it, rather than react impulsively or violently to its appearance. To do this, they turned the shock inward, upon themselves, and let its rumble be felt within, where it could shake loose the crust and corruption of ideological acculturation. In other words, they allowed the shock inside themselves, where it could clear away the clutter of conditioned values. Thus, the expression in the address bar to this site: valueshock.

What we are able to accomplish as individuals will contribute, more than any group belief system or mass movement, to the enrichment and growth of the whole, of our nation. To the extent that each of us can feel the shock of our times and turn it inward in a calm but rigorous process of self-examination ("he does not let fall the sacrificial spoon and chalice")--to this extent, I say, we will all benefit. In order to fully accomplish this transformation of society out of the deep cleansing of received belief within each individual, certain seeming sacrifices must be made. We will have to rely on our own natural discernment, and not on the dictates and insinuations of a mass media that is no longer in touch with reality (is there anything more unnatural, more unreal, than "reality TV"?). Therefore, we will have to follow Barack Obama's advice from his keynote address at the DNC, and turn off the television, and ignore the shrill print-noise of those mindlessly addictive newspapers which are appropriately termed "tabloids" (or "dogma-pills", as I call them). There is a surfeit of information to be had in this culture: you will not lack. But wherever you feel you're being hawked to or sold an inner bill of goods or a system of belief, turn away and turn within.

The times are indeed desperate--perhaps more so than in any period of this nation's history since our Civil War. For those of us with young children, there is an almost implosive density to this moment in history, as if their future and the quality of the lives they will grow into will depend on how we meet the current crisis. But it is more than a crisis of conflict or of leadership--any candidate who tells you that he or she will instantly restore order and peace to life and resolve humanity's most pressing problems must be rejected (and to be fair to Senator Kerry, I have not heard him once make such a claim). For what we need now are leaders capable of facing reality; we do not need Bible-beating fantasy-dwellers preaching security to us at the point of a gun (or worse still, a draft notice). Our leaders cannot work in a vacuum, nor should they be allowed to pretend that they can. We must demand of them that they, like us, deeply question the values that the shocks of our time have exposed and shaken from their brittle pedestals of authority and sanctity.

Shock brings success--or at least it can, if we can listen to it within ourselves. This is a time when we can be sucked further into the vortex of fear, denial, and despair--never to emerge, nor our children to know what it is to live freely or in peace with mankind and Nature. It is also a moment of wondrous transformative potential, when the shock and horror that has eclipsed our world at the dawn of a new millennium can lead us to a point of balance and mutually supportive harmony that will effect such changes as have not been seen in living memory. The choice is up to us, each of us, in this very moment.

Like Sports? Well, Use What You've Learned From Them Now!

Many a wag has observed that sports has replaced Christianity as the dominant religion in America today. Whatever the truth may be about that, we do need to learn to listen to our interests as individuals, and apply them to other arenas of life. We weren't designed by Nature to break our lives into a few big boxes or pigeonhole coops carrying such labels as "work", "home", "hobbies", "family", or "relationships". First of all, it takes too much energy to keep the divisions in places, because the walls tend to collapse whenever we're not paying attention. Second, it's not natural, and therefore not very practical: we short-change ourselves through compartmentalizing things. On the other hand, you'll find that whenever you allow one area of your life--what you've learned in it and the talent or insight that you bring to it--to inform and enrich another area, everything benefits and there's a lot less conflict in general. Just try it and see where your experience leads you.

So, what does this have to do about sports? Well, let's say you're a sports fan to some extent or another: what have you learned or observed from watching American team sports--baseball, football, basketball, that sort of thing? Have you noticed, perhaps, that the successful teams are not always the ones with the most money, the most talented individual players, or the coach with the "genius" label attached to him? Maybe you've also wondered why power and violence don't seem to ensure victory for professional teams: even in football (where you'd think that violence and domination would be the recipe for success), the Raiders lose every year while teams with more speed, grace, and smarts win. Have you ever asked yourself what kind of synergy or chemistry goes into the formula for victory? It does seem that, in sports, there is more to success than mere appearance--the team that seems dominant "on paper" rarely manages to win the day on the field.

Now let your mind wander from the playing field over to the political landscape--it's right there, just outside the stadium (indeed, sometimes the politicians themselves step into the playing field for a little TV time). Is the current political contest a boxing match--a battle of two isolated individuals with competing agendas and contrasting backgrounds--or is it a matchup of two teams? Ask either major candidate, and he will tell you that it's more the latter, and that his team is more rounded, more experienced, more capable than his opponent's. As much as we are conditioned by experience to question any politician's blustering claim, this one's worth exploring further.

President Bush has a team, comprised of expert businessmen who are very good at entering a situation with a well-defined profit motive and executing a plan designed to maximize their profits. Their resourcefulness, ambition, and energy in this kind of endeavor are truly impressive: Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the corporate entities that support and benefit from their efforts are extraordinarily effective at generating insular financial wealth and power in the most unlikely and seemingly adverse circumstances. However, the profit goes to themselves and their supporters rather than to the government or the people; and it's kind of one dimensional, like having a baseball team with a lineup that averages five or six runs a game but a pitching staff that gives up seven. None of these leaders has any military experience that would qualify him for directing a war--let alone a war of occupation with its concomitant dangers and inevitable reversals (a glance at Roman history or the Napoleonic era would be enough to convince anyone as to these realities). And so, lots of people die--horribly and needlessly, and the American economy is stretched to the breaking point while the leaders of this enterprise build gargantuan nest eggs for themselves and their funding supporters.

Perhaps it is necessary to allow a team with somewhat more internal diversity and chemistry a chance at managing this situation. Of course, we don't know who will be filling John Kerry's cabinet, if he is elected. Perhaps it is time for Kerry to give us an idea of how he would put his team together, and what kind of players he will be calling upon to start a late-inning rally come January for the American nation. If he truly believes in the team concept of government, then he will see the advantage in publicly announcing his intentions regarding key members of his would-be cabinet. Would Wes Clarke, an experienced military leader, make a more effective Secretary of Defense than Don Rumsfeld, who has proven his business skills in abundance but shown us nothing but a tragic inconsistency in military knowledge and leadership? Might not anyone offer more stability and vision than John "Let The Eagle Soar" Ashcroft as Atty. General (the contenders at this point would be Joe Liebermann, Jamie Gorelick, and Eric Holder)? And how about a real physician for Health and Human Services (Howard Dean)? Or an acknowledged diplomatic leader in building consensus with foreign nations, such as George Mitchell (who helped to foster a peace agreement in Northern Ireland) for State, rather than another four years of the ineffectual Colin Powell?

The details are, of course, open to debate and speculation, but the general point is stimulating: if successful politics is about team-building, then Kerry has got to start showing us the major elements of his team soon, while the American public still has time to weigh the options. If we begin to see that there are some attractive alternatives to the monotonic administrative treadmill that we've been walking for the last four years, then perhaps we will become more open to the possibilities of change. In any event, such a broadening of perspective would help to take the public debate out of the realm of what two individuals were doing or not doing in their military service over 30 years ago, and bring us back toward a consideration of current and future issues affecting our nation's likely course in world and domestic affairs. It would also show us that Kerry believes in leadership by cooperation and consensus. That may draw more Americans toward a position of openness toward his potential as the manager of a new team in Washington. After all, many of us are, to some degree, sports fans.

The Urgency of Optimism

Tonight, I went to cast a ballot in the local primary. There was perhaps less objective justification for doing this than in any election year in recent memory: the only race worth the name is the 11th district's runoff between a veteran congressman named Major Owens and two female Democratic challengers--whoever wins this primary will most likely win the seat, given that our district is about 70% Democratic. Otherwise, there were not even any city council seats up for grabs here.

Still, I went over to the local high school and parted the curtains of the ballot chamber. The gymnasium where the voting was being done was virtually deserted: I was the only voter there at about 8:00 PM. A dozen or so officials and organizers sat at tables, and a cop sat near the voting booths, apparently struggling to remain awake. The question might have occurred to me, "what am I doing here?" If it had, the answer was ready for me in the most fleeting act of reflection.

I do not think it an exaggeration to point out that these are desperate times. We are living under the yoke of an administration in Washington that has alienated our nation in the eyes of the world, even as it arrogantly claims the support of a marginal "coalition of the willing" (note the language--it's not a "coalition of the equal" or of "the eager"; but just, rather ambivalently, of "the willing"). This same administration is incurring and accumulating a deficit of such massive proportions as will handicap the people of our nation unto the next generation; it is the first administration since Hoover's to govern over negative job growth--a trend that shows no sign of reversing. It is an administration that is relentlessly destroying and endangering the Earth, and depleting its resources; it is a government guided by fear, hypervigilance, paranoia, and violence. And unlike the Reagan and Bush-1 White Houses, there is no calming, moderate influence in its cabinet or its supporting voices on Capitol Hill to restrain the careening juggernaut of oppression, occupation, suspicion, and profiteering.

I have a child, a 10-year old daughter, who will soon be old enough to suffer from the effects of another four years of this depredation in our leadership. She may someday turn and ask me, "did you not vote back then, when these threats to our national principles were so clearly manifest? and did you not speak out and act to let others know what was happening to us--to our nation, our human civilization, our planet?"

I do not want to have to tell her that I didn't think it was important, or (worse still) that I thought that anything I said or did wouldn't make a difference. I want to be able to tell her, no matter how these elections turn out, that I spoke and acted on behalf of her and her generation; that I tried with what ability and influence I had at the time to help people to see the transformative potential in a moment such as this; to teach them that no matter how horrible the world and its people may seem, no matter how ridden with failure and strife we may be in the moment where we find ourselves--there is always opportunity. In fact, the deeper the seeming distress, the greater the potential for a transformative movement.

Failure is not the result of futile effort guided by an open awareness; failure is the denial of our errors. Wherever we are freely conscious of our error, and ready to learn from it, then there can be no failure. It has, indeed, been my experience that we are more truly led forward by our errors than by our successes. Therefore, I continue to talk to others, to write, and yes, to vote--not because I have anything to say or teach, or because I possess any influence that others cannot say, impart, or bring to bear. No: it is because I know that what we give each other are the gifts that are common and universal to us all, which no one person holds in isolation or exclusion from others. These are lessons that I think President Bush and his supporters in Washington have yet to fully learn--that it is in those moments where we are most imperiously tempted to act from power, to dominate, and to shout down or otherwise oppress dissent--this is when we are the most urgently called upon to open ourselves to the teaching potential of our own error. This is to enter onto the path of Modesty. It is not to efface, demean, or debase oneself, but instead to find one's own individual uniqueness in the transformative moment of human unity.

Voting is a uniquely democratic act, perhaps the defining democratic act, because it reinforces within each of us the natural stirring of humility, which is the very breath of Democracy. As the men who are commonly referred to as our founding fathers recognized, America can only be safe and prosperous when it is accepted and welcomed in the community of the world and its nations. Yet now we are governed by other men, men who believe that America can only be made safe and prosperous when it holds the rest of the world at the point of a gun. This consciousness must be dismissed and reversed; we must return to what the formative leaders of our nation taught us, to what we have learned from all who came after them--from Lincoln to Thoreau to Mark Twain to Susan Anthony to Martin Luther King--that a nation born of the public act of dissent on the part of a free people can only be secure and whole to the extent that it protects the individual's right to say No to power. This is what I'd like my daughter to recall, years from now, about what we did here, in this moment of our nation's history.

This is why I voted tonight, in an empty schoolroom on a cool evening in September.