Mental reservations

Commenting on the oath of office this morning, a friend wrote that "having' mental

reservations' would actually be a sign of wisdom." I don't claim wisdom, at least

not on behalf of the part of me that speaks in words, but I want to speak my own

mental reservations: I want to believe in Barack Obama. The significance and

power of a nation whose wealth was built through the enslavement of people

kidnapped from Africa electing the son of a Kenyan to be President is not lost

on me. Nor is the reality that the margin of difference between the policies

promised by the new administration and those enacted by the last is a margin that

represents life or death for millions. And who could not be moved by Rev. Joseph

Lowery speaking the benediction that evokes a god older and more loving and

more real than the God of bondage evoked by Rev. Rick Warren?



But there are truths that burn so hot that the veils that once covered them can never

be repaired. And they keep me from celebrating wholeheartedly.



Barack Obama intends to keep 50,000 -- 80,000 troops on the ground in Iraq

indefinitely. And he plans to escalate the war in Afghanistan.



Those wars and the dozen proxy wars our taxes will continue to fund are waged to

ensure the continuation of the mindless growth demanded by the system we live

under -- the growth that Edward Abbey called "the ideology of a cancer cell," the

growth that consumes forests and mountains and deserts and lives and whole

nations and whole species.I don't doubt that President Obama wants to reduce

the damage done, to render the system a little bit less brutal. And again, any

diminishment of brutality means less suffering .



But at the same time, the commitment to continuing that brutality means an

acceptanceof more "collateral damage." President Obama said "we will not

apologize for our wayof life or waver in its defense." But only when we do finally

apologize for the wayin which we have been living at the world's expense

(including apologizing to ourselves for the ways in which we have cut ourselves

off from the living Earth) can we "put aside childish things" and learn to live in a just

and sustainable way .In this country we tend to ignore the fact that systems have a

reality and mind of their own, and that they always operate to ensure their own

survival. In pledging himself to the idea of America, President Obama

surrendered a part of his own will to the systems of control that bind themselves

together under that name.



But a witch bows to no one. And I will not offer my own allegiance to that system.

I offer my love and support to a man named Barack Obama wrestling to hold

onto his humanity in a situation where great powers conspire to rob him of it.

But I have no loyalty to President Barack Obama as he undertakes the work

of attempting to guide and steer violent systems of control. My own allegiances

are to mysel(ves/f), the truth, and the living universe.Those loyalties may brand me

as an outsider -- but such has always been the way of the poet and the shaman .

Like Tomas the Rhymer I will kiss the lips of the Queen of F(a)eri(e) and be

transformed, given the gift of a tongue that will not lie that makes it impossible

to ever again be at home in a world woven from the enchantment of falsehoods

repeated so often that we no longer hear the din or imagine the possibility that the

imagination can stray outside the bounds set by that wall of noise. The tongue

that speaks the truth cuts a hole in that wall, revealing a road that leads into the

sweet, fierce ,loving wildness of the heart. I am setting out along that path.