Tired, tired, tired of jingoism....

Jingoism (defintion): Extreme nationalism characterized especially by a belligerent foreign policy; chauvinistic patriotism.

John McCain and his flag-waving Republican war-mongers are a case in point. Aren’t you tired of this constant repetition of self-congratulatory nationalism? Here’s a story that’s a corrective.

From Otto Scharmer’s book Theory U: He tells the story of Rusty Schweickart who was on the Apollo mission that preceded the first moon landing, where they tested the lunar lander in orbit. 10 years later, Rusty figured out how to talk about what had happened. He figured out that the only way to describe it was in the second person, e.g. “now you see this; now you see that.” As Rusty put it: “I was there…..I could see something with my eyes, but it wasn’t just me seeing. It was humankind seeing.”

He goes on: “Now you’re near the end of the mission, and you’re very fortunate because the mission has gone very well technically. And so you have free time that you really had no right to expect. So these last days you actually spend much of the time just looking out the window. And as you look out the window, you realize that your identity has shifted—that for the first several days, whenever you had the chance to look out the window, you looked for the west coast of California, or you looked for Texas, or you looked for the Florida peninsula. You looked for the things that were familiar to you. And then you suddenly realize that you’re now looking forward to the west coast of Africa. And you’re looking forward to the Sinai. And you’re looking forward to the Indian subcontinent. You realized that your identity has shifted, and you are now identifying with all of it.”

“And now you’re well into the last day. And you find yourself just looking. And you’re drifting over that very familiar piece of geography that we call the Middle East. And you’re looking down at this, and suddenly it hits you that there are no boundaries. Every time you’ve seen this before, from the time you were a little child, there were always lines. And you realize that there are no lines. The lines do not exist. Lines only exist because we hold them in our mind as existing. They you realize, at that instant, that people are busy killing each other over those imaginary lines.”

Some days later, someone else asked Rusty “what was it like up there?” Rusty stood there a long time. Then he said, “It was like seeing a baby about to be born.”

Rusty could, finally, see—through a lens of possibility—the sacred totality of the Earth, an Earth without lines.

Is there a politician alive who could say the same?