TRUMPeting The Call To Love In Politics
Sheila Thomas is a Religious Science spiritual counselor (practitioner) and an attorney who has worked on civil rights and equal justice cases for more than 25 years.
BY SHEILA THOMAS
“The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated.” Desmond Tutu
People sometimes ask me what I think about the popularity of Donald Trump this primary season. Often my answer starts out with describing a conversation I had years ago in which someone asked me whether I was going to a seminar Donald Trump was giving which as I recall was about ways to make money. My response was that I did not share Mr. Trump’s values about wealth and abundance, and therefore, his presentation would not be of interest to me. It was my feeling at the time and it still is now that there is a fundamental difference between what some, such as Donald Trump, see as wealth and what is truly a consciousness of wealth based on love, sharing and generosity.
For this reason, Donald Trump the candidate is not a surprise to me. The seeming wealth (and I use “seeming” intentionally) Mr. Trump so willingly trumpets in conjunction with much of our society’s love of celebrity and reality television is the perfect recipe for what we now see unfolding right before our eyes. He uses his wealth, celebrity and his reality TV persona to act out on the political stage. It is as if we are watching a movie in which the audience is watching and thinking: this could never happen in real life. But, it is actually happening.
There is information for us to gather about who we are as a society as we watch the primary season and, specifically, the Trump candidacy unfold. Every imaginable shadow quality including anger, prejudice, xenophobia, greed and dishonesty are being revealed in his campaign. These qualities are not exclusive to Mr. Trump and many of those who support him. We see other candidates as well as their supporters engaging in some of the same conduct as the primary season continues. It is a mindset of name calling and mean spiritedness that serves to separate and destroy rather than unify and build. Over and over, we see the belief played out that the only way to win is to tear down and destroy.
My question is what do we do with this information? Are those of us who desire a different country where all are included and treated with dignity and respect ready to do the inner and outer work to create something different? A candidate Trump is a call to action to put wealth and celebrity in their proper places rather than allowing them to dictate who and what we are as a society. We must make a decision about what are our priorities. It is also a call for us to remember that in a country where so much emphasis is put on religion that the tenets of all major religions is to love our neighbor and that anything short of this violates the love principle. Desmond Tutu reminds us that we are to be and do those things that support the truth that we are one.
Each of us must take time to ask ourselves, what is mine to do? Then we must listen and do that which we are led to do. It is not enough to simply observe. We also must free ourselves from the collective idea that money, celebrity and fame are the measure of an individual’s value and worth in our society. Then, we as a country will see through the illusion that is Donald Trump and see him for what he is: a wake up call to let love, compassion and understanding be our guides.
I am in agreement with the concepts and values of this column . . .
AND,
I think it is more complex than this. For example, what about the benefits of having candidates like Mr. Trump and Senator Sanders call so many practices of an embedded, sclerotic, and often corrupt system – Mr. Trump on the right and Senator Sanders largely from the left? Mr. Trump has done us the larger service of bringing much unhealed energy to the surface, mostly in the form of failing white middle and working classes who have largely been out of the political discussion for several decades. He has led the way, if you will, to the revealing part of a necessary healing in that regard. He has, perhaps without intending to, supplied a step in Desmond Tutu’s call for us to make everyone known so that we can work toward an awareness of oneness.
He has not been civil, nor kind, nor admirable in his methods – that is certain. I seriously doubt that a Trump presidency would do much to address the issues that he has revealed. But without him, that unhealed wound would likely have stayed hidden. There is, of course, no guarantee that healing will occur now, but it is certain that it would not have occurred without Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Perhaps what is ours to do is to value the exposure of this large segment of our society and to add them to the others who have been left behind and whose grievances have not been responded to by our nations leaders over that past half century or more.
This is not a situation of absolutes, it is one of many many gray areas. Let us be open to larger ideas that may come to us via unattractive messengers. Let us do our work to heal our nation – entirely and completely as best we can. I believe that my recent 5 part series on New Thought and US Politics speaks to this as well.
https://newthoughtevolutionary.wordpress.com/?s=American+Politics
Love and Light,
Jim
I agree that Mr. Trump is bringing up issues to be healed. Those issues have existed for sometime and were hidden from some for a variety of reasons.
Anyone who thinks Trump is “dishonest” but doesn’t think Clinton is not just a crook but a psychopath should be stripped of the right to vote. The fact that Trump scares this author so much she has to “study” him shows that “New Thought” is just a label for “Democrat Stooge.”
Rev. Jim,
If you think Donald Trump is “on the right”, then you and I fundamentally disagree about that. He strikes me as a left-of-center, Big Government populist.
Donald Trump has contributed to the anti-healing. We’d be more cohesive and healed without his angry, self-absorbed personality, his attacks and insults, his terrible demeanor.
Trump or Clinton would be disastrous for America.
Part of the problem with Trump is that he’s a sore loser and an ungracious winner.
I wonder if ever in our nation’s history we have been faced with such a “None of the Above” choice for the voting booth.
Interesting that people will not stay away out of boredom. If they vote it will be from fear of the alternative and be sickened at their surrender of conscience.
True the dialogue has raised the need for great change, but those who might have been motivated and equipped to do anything about it were wiped off the board of the billionaire shuffle in both parties.
I pray for the world. No leadership is coming from this nation this year.