Humanity's spiritual maturation into living in global peace and harmony

My Sunday movie was The Quiet Girl, an Irish film. Cáit is nine years old. She has three older sisters, a toddler brother, and another sibling on the way. She’s the middle child and can get overlooked in the crowd. She’s also good at hiding. Her family is a bit dysfunctional and is poor. To give Mam a break leading up to the baby’s birth, her parents take her to live with her mother’s cousins, a couple with no children. Of course, Cáit is not consulted. Over the summer her guardians don’t do anything special, just include her in their daily tasks of keeping a farm and treat her with love. It’s a tender film. I can’t really say she blossoms under their care – she sheds only a bit of her passivity. Once with her summer guardians the woman says there are no secrets. “If there are secrets in a house, there is shame in that house.” But there is a secret in that family’s past, though it doesn’t have much consequence in the story. This came out last year and was Ireland’s submission for this year’s Oscar for Best International Feature Film. It was the first Irish language film to be shortlisted for that award. I enjoyed it. Aldous Pennyfarthing of the Daily Kos community reported on the latest efforts of the Wisconsin Republicans to protect their gerrymandered maps. Yes, they’re gerrymandered – in a state that is evenly split for the parties (the nasty guy edged out Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden squeaked by in 2020) Republicans hold 64 of 99 seats in the Assembly and 21-11in the Senate. There will be a case challenging the gerrymandered maps before the state Supremes, as an Associated Press article posted on Kos reports. The big question is what happens when it gets there. Back to Pennyfarthing’s post. The Wisconsin Supremes recently switched from a conservative to progressive majority when Janet Protasiewicz was elected by a wide margin and took her seat. She ran on abortion and gerrymandering. And now Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said that if Protasiewicz doesn’t recuse herself for this case he will begin impeachment proceedings on the grounds that she “prejudged” the case. Since that was one of her campaign issues Vos says she cant be an impartial observer. Michael Li pointed out that once Protasiewicz is impeached she cannot participate in any case until she is acquitted. So if the Assembly impeaches and the Senate stalls on the trial she is sidelined and the Court is balanced between conservatives and progressives. There are several voices that are saying that not prejudging the case would be difficult – it is obvious that the districts are gerrymandered. And Protasiewicz would have to be “dense, corrupt, or a Republican” to not see it.

“That type of reaction shows how threatened the Republican majority is by a challenge to their rigged maps,” Rep. Evan Goyke, a Milwaukee Democrat, told The Journal Sentinel. “It's really good evidence that the state is gerrymandered, that they'd be willing to go to such an unprecedented maneuver.”

The Daily Kos Elections team warns the Wisconsin Republicans using the lesson of Ohio – Issue 1 to increase the amendment approval threshold lost by a big margin because so many voters were upset with Republican overreach. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet by David Pepper that linked to and quoted an article from the Ohio Capital Journal:

There’s a tendency by political professionals to think that voters can be inherently and consistently manipulated.

In the roundup’s comments Denise Oliver Velez included a cartoon by Jesse Duquette. It is titled “Conservatives throughout history” and shows Jesus giving sight to a blind man. In the background is a guy in a red hat who says, “It’s not fair! I can see perfectly fine and this guy gets his blindness forgiven just like that?” Duquette added the caption, “Woke Commie Jesus Trades Student Loans for Loaves and Fishes Because Bootstraps Haven’t Been Invented Yet.” Last week Hunter of Kos reported that Republicans have been calling for a special counsel into whatever Hunter Biden’s been doing that’s illegal. And now that Attorney General Merrick Garland has done what they asked they’re outraged. Hunter has a few examples of their outrage. The core of the Republican anger is that the guy named as special counsel – David Weiss, who has been on the case since the nasty guy appointed him – is the guy who hasn’t found anything worthwhile so far, in spite of years of trying. So from the Republican perspective he’s part of the cover up. Pennyfarthing wrote about the crop of Republicans running to be President. He noted:

[Chris Christie is] the only Republican who’s actually running for president in 2024. Or running to do the job, anyway. Trump is running, but mostly because he wants to stay out of jail and likes the way his Diet Coke button looks on the Resolute Desk. Sure, some of Trump’s other opponents are taking little swipes at him here and there, but Christie is the only one talking about Trump the way he needs to be talked about.

In another pundit roundup Chitown Kev quoted Paul Waldman of the Washington Post. Waldman discussed that Republicans have been using ballot initiatives to impose their will on a state. See the efforts to ban same-sex marriage in 11 states in 2004.

But lately, liberals have had more and more success — even in conservative states — making policy gains at the ballot box that they can’t achieve in state legislatures.

An example is Michigan. Yeah that 2004 effort banned same-sex marriage here too. But we passed a citizens redistricting commission in 2018 and last year passed abortion rights and voter rights. And a few more I can’t think of at the moment. Meteor Blades of Kos posted another Earth Matters article with a few things to mention. There is the new national monument around the Grand Canyon (I won’t attempt the Native name). A good thing about it is the Native tribes in the area will be an integral part of managing it. Blades talked about the climate news out of Antarctica, and it isn’t good. Sea ice around the continent, a vital part of keeping the ice sheet from melting, is about 20% of what it should be at this time in their winter. Blades included an excerpt from an article by Jason Bordoff in the New York Times. In spite of goals to cut fossil fuel use the amount used is still rising. And it is rising fast enough that oil companies are dropping plans to slow down production and diverting money that had been designated to develop clean energy. Yes, there is increasing investment in clean fuels, but it’s still well short of what’s needed. Rachel Martin of NPR, as part of her Enlighten Me series, spoke to Rainn Wilson. He played Dwight on The Office (I never watched) and even though it seems opposite of that role he wrote a book about spirituality titled Soul Boom. Wilson, who grew up in the Baháʼí faith, had a few interesting things to say.

You see, the backstory to Star Trek that a lot of people don't know is that there has been a horrific World War III. And coming out of the ashes of that war, humanity has essentially solved racism, solved sexism, has solved income inequality, and is then able, in its maturity, to go out into space and explore and spread the word. ... I would always look at things through a spiritual lens. So for me, when I look at Star Trek, I talk about this in terms of a spiritual path. We all have an individual path that we walk on a daily basis. I'm trying to be a better person and I've got this stress at work and I'm feeling anxious and this person is mean to me and I'm struggling with this and that. And that's our personal spiritual path. When people talk about spirituality, they're often focused on that aspect of a personal spiritual journey and we're not focused so much on the broader one, which is humanity's spiritual maturation into living in global peace and harmony. I am old enough to remember the '70s, when people would actually talk about world peace. ... And we believed that we could have peace, especially with the end of the Cold War. And nowadays, you bring up world peace and you just get that big, collective eye roll like, oh, you're the most naive idiot to walk the face of the earth to even consider world peace. ... There's another [mythology of humanity] where humans lived at peace with nature, where humans were cooperative or kind to each other or worked together, shared knowledge and enlightenment and moved forward and into progress.

I like his thinking and want us to move in that direction. I also know how difficult that is.