Some Thoughts On Transforming the Normalization of Hatred and Lies

Yesterday morning I heard the news that Rush Limbaugh had died. I don't need to speak to my immediate reaction and first thoughts. I don't want to be a mirror for the dehumanization that was Limbaugh's tragic trademark.

What does come to me to speak to is the grief I feel, not for this lost soul, but for the normalization of hatred that he poisonously perpetuated, something that surfaced and spread throughout our nation much like the cancer that grew within him and ultimately killed this man. It is this cancer that I grieve, the one that has infected the hearts and minds of millions of us as Americans and which has also rippled out beyond our borders.

I weep as I look at the face of Walter Cronkite and think of how far we have fallen. Not that there wasn't the great need for systemic changes then when the airwaves were graced with the voices of truth, facts, and integrity like Cronkite and others. We humans indeed faced so many challenges during that era, too. The poisons that have long fueled hatred, fear, and greed run deep. 

That said, my grandfather would have passionately said that being "conservative" did not mean that it was okay to hate, to lie and threaten and commit acts of violence, to mercilessly judge and condemn those who are different. I keep thinking of my conservative grandfather. He would be horrified, completely and totally horrified by anyone like Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump referring to themselves as "conservative." And he would have vehemently insisted that this is not what conservatism is about.

Part of my grief is also very personal. My own mother, when she was imprisoned in her narcissistic illness, listened to FOX and Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and others. And she absorbed the poison into her very cells. At one point, my mother even wrote her grandsons — who were her only grandchildren — that she had to know if they weren't 100% backing George W. Bush and weren't republican. My mother then went on to write to my three sons that she believed that all democrats deserved to burn in hell. 

How many human hearts have had their capacity for love and kindness destroyed by the immersion in this poisonous propaganda? This is what I grieve.

Not that there hasn't always been a dark underbelly to our country. Indeed, the roots of the shadow side of our nation have always existed. That said, whatever steps forward that humankind has made are now challenged by what Limbaugh and others have brought to the surface and given pervasive and unrelenting voice to. Hatred is no longer lurking in the shadows. Instead it has become normal and justified and patriotic and religiously justified to hate. This normalization has meant that the cancer has metastasized and grown even more deeply dangerous. Once again.

Racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, political polarization, unfathomable poverty and suffering, deadly disinformation in the midst of a pandemic, and other poisons have seeped into the veins of our country in such a way today that it can no longer be denied. Everyday there are new assaults and right there on the surface for all to see. At times this toxicity has risen to the surface with overwhelming venom and violence and delusion, making possible and inevitable the horrors of January 6th. 

At other times the heartlessness and violence shows up in the lies propagated by Limbaugh and others on what passes for "news" today, in epidemics of addictions and pervasive poverty, in the funding for endless wars and worldwide militarism, in the vastly immoral redistribution of wealth upwards, in the denial of systemic racism and the demonetization of Black Lives Matter, in the justification of for-profit healthcare rather than Medicare For All and even in the midst of a pandemic, in tent cities that blanket our country and millions who are threatened with hunger and homelessness and no or inadequate healthcare, in the doubts and denials about the climate crisis fed us by climate change deniers funded by the fossil fuel industry, in the continued endorsements of a predatory capitalist system that is killing thousands of people everyday and destroying the planet, and on and on. 

There are many faces to the pervasive violence which is normalized in America. Our individual and collective tolerance for this violence must be lowered before any authentic and systemic change can occur. We truly and urgently need a caring revolution.

Limbaugh may be dead, but, as with Trump, he was a symptom of a disease which remains. It has now been decades in which the corporate funded media resources consumed by the vast majority of Americans have, to one degree or another, become infected with something other than the truth or other than the in-depth investigative journalism that is required if we are to be an informed citizenry. Trump and Limbaugh and the rise of right-wing domestic terrorists, the catastrophic climate crisis and COVID crisis, and all the multiple severe crises that we face would not be the reality of today if this were not true.

 

Tragically, Noam Chomsky's words are accurate: Americans are a massively propagandized people. And, no, it's not just those Others who identify with a different political party who have been fooled into abandoning an awareness of deeper truths and the consciousness of, and motivation to work towards, a higher good for us all that has been for so very long urgently needed. 

 

And I certainly share this with the humility of someone who's been in a long process of recovery, healing, and transformation from all the ways in which I've been ignorant, indoctrinated, and impacted by illusions I believed in. The journey continues...

 

The trajectory that has taken us from Walter Cronkite to Rush Limbaugh illuminates the utter seriousness and gravity of the cost of turning away from that which is in our highest good to that of what feeds fear and hatred, projections and propaganda, dehumanization and delusions, disinformation and denial, greed and lies, and the spiritual death that  occurs when we disconnect from our hearts and the hearts of others. 

The voices of truth, integrity, wisdom, generosity, and love need to be sought. These are the sources we need to turn to, to cultivate, to be inspired and informed by. This is among the greatly needed antidotes to the poisons which have infected our nation and planet. We absolutely need a new normal, one in which love is its root.

This is a list of some of the teachers and wise council that I have cultivated over time:

Pema Chödrön, Riane Eisler, Joanna Macy, Jane Goodall, Naomi Klein, Amy Goodman, Arundhati Roy, Vandana Shiva, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz, Angeles Arrien, the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, Rachel Carson, Dorothy Day, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Michelle Alexander, Jane Mayer, Frances Moore Lappé, Terry Tempest Williams, Margaret Mead, Christiana Figueres, Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, Sir David Attenborough, Howard Zinn, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Cornel West, Bernie Sanders, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Henry Giroux, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Jeremy Scahill, David Sirota, Daniel Ellsberg, Father Daniel Berrigan, Michael Parenti, Paulo Freire, Chalmers Johnson, Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley, Bill Moyers, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, James Hansen, Bill McKibben, Michael E. Mann, Dahr Jamail, David Korten, Bryan Stevenson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Michael Meade, Carl Jung, Frank Ostaseski, Francis Weller, Fred Rogers, Jeff Brown, Thích Nhất Hạnh, the Dalai Lama, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Judith Duerk, Rachel Naomi Remen, Brené Brown, Tara Brach, Charlotte Kasl, Mary Oliver, John O'Donohue, Rumi, Hafiz, William Stafford, Wendell Berry, Joy Harjo, Amanda Gorman, Jack Kornfield, Matthew Fox, Robert Beatty, Doug Pullin, my three sons, my loving husband Ron Matela, many beloved and wise friends, our Earth Mother, and the list goes on and on... 

 

I recognize and respect that many of us have a diversity of those who inspire and inform us. Who do you turn to? What are your antidotes to the poisons in our midst? What is it that strengthens your heart and mind and your capacity to increasingly stand in truth and act out of love?

 

It is my belief that it remains of deep importance for more and more of us to embrace — in an ongoing and evolving way — a profound commitment to truth, and no matter where the threads of truth lead us. And it is our principles which must always come before personalities.

 

This commitment to truth is certainly one of the essential ways that we can develop an immunity to those who would pull us under into the depths of dangerous deceptions and delusions — those like Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump, the oligarchy and promoters of a toxic status quo, QAnon and other cults, and other lost souls who promote and spread the fundamentalism, dehumanization, and heartlessness which justifies all the many faces of violence that we can be vulnerable to absorbing within ourselves and projecting onto others.

 

An important part of this is also to cultivate mindfulness of when we notice ourselves slipping into becoming mirrors of that which we disdain. I easily could have said good fucking riddance to Rush Limbaugh. But I caught myself and know that that would not be helpful. Returning hate, demonetization, and other forms of violence with more of the same only feeds that which is destroying rather than unifying us. May we instead consciously choose to channel our outrage and heartbreak into that which nourishes, heals, transforms, awakens.

 

Love is ultimately what takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. 

 

As the snow melts outside my home in Vancouver Washington, I pray for the onging disolution and melting away of that which obstructs our great human capacity to stand strongly in courage and truth, conscious awareness and wisdom, compassion and kindness, generosity and love, forgiveness and grace, and a fierce and unrelenting quest for a more peaceful and just world. 

 

This begins within the hearts of each and every one of us.

Bless us all, no exceptions.

💗

Molly

 

"Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word 'love' here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth." — James Baldwin