Many
of the specific failures highlighted by Chris Hedges' recent article, Nader was Right about Obama, criticizing the performance of the Obama
Administration are legitimate points. But
the way Hedges's positions are stated, and the conclusions drawn from
them are not the path of spiritual progressives, in my view.There
was too much anger in his statement overshadowing our spiritual
progressive commitment to compassion and a spirit of generosity toward
others with whose politics we disagree. And not enough sympathy for the
problems anyone would face trying to get elected as President and to
repair the damage of the past 30 years.
I
have great respect for Chris Hedges, as one of the very few people who
was a respected journalist at the New York Times and subsequently left
the Times in protest of the way they ignored those of us in the
anti-war movement who were warning about the lies of the Bush
Administration and opposing the use of violence to achieve US ends in
the Middle East, and because I am grateful that he has written a
brilliant article in Tikkun on the Obama Brand and has accepted our
invite to speak at our conference in D.C.
Yet
in this communication I want to state places where I disagree with
Hedges article, although I do at first affirm some things that are
right about Hedges' position even while I don't affirm the tone and
style of his communication (which, to be fair to him, was written for a
different venue and not at all like the more nuanced pieces he has put
into Tikkun magazine). I hope you read this
through to the end, even while grumbling that it is too long (I know,
but here is a basic truth about communication: if you are referencing
ideas that are already popular in the culture, you can do so with a
short slogan; but if you are trying to introduce new ideas that do not
resonate with the "established wisdom" or "common sense" of the
culture, it often takes a nuanced discussion that is longer-and hence
the nuanced position may feel too long to people who have been
accustomed to the dumbing down of popular discourse by the media and
the politicians.)
Despite what Chris Hedges wrote, I
have met Obama personally and privately on several occasions and do not
believe he is a liar or a conscious manipulator. I do not agree with
the decisions he has made since he won the Democratic nomination for
President, and particularly after he became President, and I've gone
out of my way to communicate in a clear, firm way those criticisms, and
to do so in a positive language that showed exactly what he could do to change his approach.
I
believe that Obama's failure to carry forward on addressing the deep
yearning of tens of millions of Americans for a different world than
one dominated by the moneyed interests and the fearful who rely on
power and domination of others to achieve security has been a dreadful
mistake. Obama aroused in people a willingness to transcend the deep
cynicism engendered in many by 28 years of Reagan, Bush, Clinton and
Bush II, encouraged us to believe that he would stand for something
really different, and that he would above all fulfill his promise to
tell us the truth (which I and others understood to mean "the whole
truth" facing him and moving him to make decisions).
It
was this commitment by Obama which led many Americans to take what was
for them the huge risk of dropping their defenses and allowing
themselves to hope that the world that they wanted (but believed to be
impossible) would finally be on the agenda, and that someone in a
position of power and influence would provide leadership to achieve
that world (albeit against potentially insuperable odds). Few of them
expected change overnight, none of them expected change without
compromise, but all of them expected that Obama would unequivocally
speak the same language and the same critique of the corporate powerful
and the same critique of the Bush abandonment of human rights and civil
liberties, to the whole country that he had spoken to his supporters
when telling them that "you are the people we've been waiting for" and
that he would deliver "change you can believe in." Most of the
criticism of Obama is not about what he compromised for, but why he did
it without first struggling hard for the progressive positions he
articulated during his previous career as a US Senator and to crowds he
met with during the campaign-that is, without trying to educate the
country to the ideas he said he believed in, before making compromises
on those ideas.
Lest
you think that this is somehow a rarified critique coming from a few
intellectuals, please note the report in the New York Times Wednesday,
March 3, 2010, in which leaders of the labor movement
expressed strong critique of Obama's policies and indicated that it is
unlikely that Labor will be able to mobilize their local unions to work
for many Democrats in the 2010 elections. The story goes on to quote
one typical steelworker who worked for Obama in 2008 who says "People
aren't feeling so good about the president...people really believe that
he bailed out Wall Street and forgot about Main Street. I think it's
going to be a real challenge for organized labor to try to reenergize
its base" in 2010 and beyond. A firefighter in Michigan is quoted as
saying: "He's not what he purported to be, which was 'I'm going to
change things, Im going to fight for you, the average guy in the
street.' He's no;t fighting hard enough for what he believes. The ones
that voted for Obama, they're not as enthusiastic." So,
please understand that when we critique Obama, we predicted all this a
year ago, and now we are seeing what happened when Obama followed the
path he did-but we are not the ones who have created the mass defection
from Obama and his weak-kneed Democratic Congress. I'll go on to say
why I disagree with Chris Hedges' article in a few more paragraphs, but
please get that it is Obama, not his progressive critics, that have
caused the great disappointment that flowed from his prioritizing the
needs of corporations and banks and investment companies over the needs
of middle income people and the poor. No one expected a magic wand-but
they did expect him to fight for a progressive vision and to speak
openly about what he was encountering when he was engaged in such a
fight.
So
when Obama failed to do that, failed to do the one thing that was in
his power to do, namely, to tell the truth, to say honestly and openly
to us what was happening and why he was taking the moves that he took,
and to relate what he was doing to what he had said he would do, and
when abandoning what he had said, to explain why and to acknowledge the
pain and disappointment that any such abandonment would reasonably
cause among those who had supported him precisely because they believed
he would stick with his promises and would explain what he was doing
and why.
So
when Obama failed to stay honest and open with us about what he was
doing, he caused a tremendous disappointment and humiliation among many
who had opened themselves in this way, and they have reacted in part by
despairing of government at all (and yes, part of the resurgent
populist Tea Party movement comes from reactionaries, but part of it
also comes from people who, watching Obama use big government to fund
the very entrenched interests of the rich and powerful that they had
understood him to promise to challenge, feel rage and anger at this
betrayal, even if they didn't vote for him but secretly nurtured a
fantasy that maybe finally something different would happen in
government).
Another
group has turned to deep despair and an unwillingness to get involved
again in politics, and this may be a major factor in the triumph of
right-wing forces or even fascistic forces in the next decade or two,
because it's going to take a long time to get people to hope again. And
finally, another group, represented by Hedges, is just so angry at
having been disappointed once again, are coming to the conclusion that
they were consciously manipulated and want to express their anger. And
they too have a legitimate reason to be upset.
And,
no, I don't buy the argument that there was nothing that Obama could do
differently. Over and over again in the past six issues of Tikkun we've
described in detail what he could have done differently and still could. In Tikkun we printed Memos to Obama by some of the most creative
thinkers in America, and we were assured by people close to Obama that
he received these. We bought a full page ad in the Washington Post and
again in a very respectful manner proposed some specific steps he could
take to retain the energy and hopefulness of his campaign even within
the constraints of "inside-the-beltway" consciousness that was being
championed by writers like E.J. Dionne and other liberals in the first
months of his presidency.
The
key thing that is right about Hedges is that we all need to STAND UP
and become visible again now that Obama's wrong turn has made invisible
the tens of millions of people who supported him in the primaries and
our shared desire for a different kind of world--because to the extent
that we become invisible to others and to each other, the crushing
weight of the current global capitalist system--and all its violence,
injustice, and preaching of the values of selfishness, materialism, and
looking out for number one and assuming that everyone else only cares
about themselves and will seek to dominate us unless we dominate them
first--makes people despair about changing anything, and makes plausible
the rage of proto-fascist movements on the Right which give expression
to the frustrations about the contemporary world but do so in
destructive ways. Hedges is trying to say to the attempts to erase the
yearnings of tens of millions of people for a different world: No, We are here, Don't Lose our prophetic voice and value of articulating our messianic aspirations--and in this respect he is saying something
that deserves respect. This is what is good about Hedges article.
So then where do I disagree with Hedges? Let me count the ways:
1. Hedges'
analysis and particularly the harsh way he expresses it leads to
despair and to the "blame game" that has little usefulness in politics.
Our difference here is partly the difference between two styles of
prophetic leadership: one that rails against injustice, the other that
moves beyond the legitimate outrage and seeks to find a way to change
the reality. My own work as a social change activist and
psychotherapist for forty years has led me to believe that people's
ideas and perspective can be changed in fundamental ways, but that
requires a mixture of prophetic outrage with genuine compassion and a
spirit of generosity and respect for those with whom we disagree (even
respect for the humanity of people who are doing or saying things that
we feel to be outrageous-though that shouldn't stop us from strongly
critiquing those perspectives). In my books over the course of the past
twenty years I've shared with tens of thousands of people strategies
for how those changes can take place, and they are strategies that are
as much a challenge to the Left as to the Right, insisting, as I do, on
the importance of psychological and spiritual sensitivity (and
acknowledging that I sometimes fail to live up to my own values and
deserve criticism as well).
Lets
acknowledge that the Democratic Party has been overwhelmingly catering
to the interests of America's ruling elites. It has also been a major
force for legitimating some of the program of liberals and
progressives, particularly in regard to the struggles against some of
the more egregious forms of racism, sexism and homopobia in our
society, it has fought for the rights of immigrants, it has weakly but
nevertheless consistently opposed giving priority to defense spending
over social programs. I know that this has not been anything close to
what I've wanted. But the party remains a mechanism by which liberal
and progressive ideas can be communicated to ordinary Americans, and,
if we could get enough of those Americans to actually vote in primary
elections, we could get candidates at every level of government who
shared a progressive agenda. Yes, we are up against huge odds, because
the wealthy will step in to fund the most conservative and
corporate-friendly and rich-friendly candidates. But in the final
analysis, if enough of us reach out to other people in our own
communities and convince them of the need for a spiritual progressive
politics, it is we who could win in the primaries and even in the
general elections. I know that this is a very difficult route, but
primarily difficult because it takes a lot of effort on our part to
make it happen. But the Democratic Party could be taken over by people
who share the analysis of the spiritual progressives.
I
salute liberals who are trying to do this very thing, but I don't
believe that they will succeed unless they adopt a language that is
more loving, compassionate, and generous than that reflected in the
piece that Hedges wrote and which we at Tikkun sent out (albeit
explaining that we often send out pieces with which we disagree because
the views are ones that don't get a hearing in the mainstream media and
deserve to be heard even if we think they are in some important
respects mistaken or "off").
Please
don't misunderstand what I'm saying here: I am not advocating that
people follow the strategy of transforming the Democratic Party-I'm
only saying that it remains a possibility that could be tried, that
groups like the Progressive Democrats of America are trying precisely
that and with excellent leadership from the Progressive Caucus of the
House of Representatives, and that had Nader type people with more
emotional nuance and psychological sophistication and genuine empathy
for the American public run in the primaries for the Presidency and the
US Congress, and had those people been able to articulate their
critique in a language that emphasized the spiritual and ethical
dimension and the need for love, generosity, caring for others and
provided the kind of alternatives that we have articulated in our
Spiritual Covenant with America, including the Generosity Strategy as
represented in our Global Marshall Plan (see all this at www.spiritualprogressives.org)
those people might have become the Senators and Congresspeople from the
states where we now have Rahm-Emanuel-chosen Blue Dog Democrats. And
one such person might have been the presidential candidate in 2008.
Moreover,
it remains the case that the majority of those who vote in communities
of color, poverty, or low income still identify with the Democratic
Party, and running in that party is a powerful way to communicate to
people with whom we cannot ordinarily communicate through the
corporate-controlled media that didn't even bother to cover our
Strategy Conference in SF two weeks ago, though it was larger and at
least as significant as the smaller sized Tea Party gatherings over
which the media makes such a fuss.
To
leave these people behind and turn one's back on them without having a
serious strategy to reach them outside the Democratic Party is not a
satisfactory political strategy, no matter how righteous and good it
feels to those who have finally said no to the Democrats only to
embrace a party of excessive political correctness but also excessive
self-involvement and little serious outreach beyond their own fringe.
2. Hedges
is wrong to characterize all liberals as lacking in emotion or leaving
legitimate rage only to the proto-fascists. Here, as in Hedges'
critique of the Democratic Party, there is a failure to recognize the
efforts of so many very decent and ethically powerful people who have
not been fully represented by their leaders. Who does he think turned
out in the millions to demonstrate against the War in Iraq--all Greens?
No, it was many of these Democrats. It's true that leadership like
Nancy Pelosi failed to forcefully represent them, and that Obama is to
some extent repeating that failure now and failing to articulate a
clear worldview that could rally people and make them understand the
alternative to "capitalism is the only option and domination is the
only path to security" that underlies the "common wisdom"
inside-the-beltway and throughout much of our society, but it is not
fair to dismiss the vast majority of Democrats in this way. Doing so
will not help us build a powerful anti-war movement again to counter
the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and head off wars with Iran or
Yemen. Just read the platform of the Democratic Party of California to
see that there are voices within the Democratic Party that reflect much
of what the secular progressives outside that party are calling for
(though definitely not the New Bottom Line that spiritual progressives
champion).
Nor
is Hedges being fair or accurate when he says: "The timidity of the
left exposes its cowardice, lack of a moral compass and mounting
political impotence. The left stands for nothing. The damage Obama and
the Democrats have done is immense. But the damage liberals do the
longer they beg Obama and the Democrats for a few scraps is worse."
This is unfair both because it ignores the genuine desire of people on
the Left to heal and transform American society, and because it ignores
the real dilemma facing those who vote for "the lesser evil"-namely
their legitimate concern about the well-being of those who they
perceive will be better off under a Democratic President than under a
Republican President-particularly the poorest elements in our society.
Their conclusion, with which I do not agree but which I believe
deserves a complex and respectful response and not the dismissive and
disrespectful tone that Hedges shows toward them, is that the suffering
of those people will be somewhat less under a Democratic administration
than under a Republican Administration, and that things like family
leave, lifting the restrictions on providing birth control information
in federally funded birth control centers, banning torture like
waterboarding in our military bases, and other such steps, small they
may be, make a big difference to those who are impacted by them and
hence are worth compromising to achieve.
I'm
not going to go into my arguments against that position and why I
believe that taking the risks of creating an alternative party might be
worth it under some circumstances, though in my view such a party would
have to be very different from the Greens, and would have to have a
commitment to the kind of political strategy I outline in my book The Left Hand of God,
and would have to emerge from a movement to transform the Democratic
party which, having obtained massive support, would then leave that
party to form a spiritual progressive party, but what I will say is
that the argument of those who wish to stay in the Democratic Party and
make small but significant changes in the life of the most powerless is
an argument that deserves respect and a more careful consideration than
Hedges gives in recent piece.
Let
me give just one example of what still feels compelling to me about the
argument made by those who wish to transform the Democrats rather than
abandon them. It's the story of the guy who sees a young child on the
beach throwing back into the water some of the thousands of fish who
have been swept up onto the beach after a huge tsunami. The many
approaches the child and says, "What's the point of throwing those fish
back in the water. Unless there is a massive movement of people down on
this beach, or unless the government sends a bunch of equipment to
quickly push these fish back into the sea, most of them will die. Don't
you see that what you are doing can't make any difference?" To which
the child responds, "To these fish I'm throwing back, it makes a
difference." It is in my view hard to deny that the Democrats in power
are doing more to help the poor and the oppressed, or to take steps to
preserve the environment, or to take steps to protect workers' rights,
than would the Republicans were they in power and than they did when
they were in power. Those who argue that "there is no difference" like
Nader did in 2000 really do us a disservice. It's one thing to argue
that the differences are not significant enough, quite another to
pretend that these two parties deliver exactly the same thing in power.
It just isn't true.
I'm
not convinced by that argument, because I believe that we could in fact
make much important changes in this society if even twenty million
people were willing to join an alternative party. But they are not
convinced now, and to get them to be convinced, we need a strategy that
starts with respect for those who disagree with a "leave the Democratic
Party" strategy. I didn't feel enough of that respect in this
particular writing of Chris Hedges. And what's ironic about that to me
is that I know Chris Hedges, and know him to be a person of humility as
well as passionate intensity, and so I don't dismiss him but embrace
him even as I critique this particular piece. And I sent it out
precisely to engender this kind of discussion. What troubles me with
some of the responses that I got was that they seemed to think it wrong
for us to send out articles with which we disagree. But that has always
been Tikkun's policy-including printing in the magazine articles with
which we disagree. It's part of our belief that the deepest truth
emerges from a marketplace of ideas within which respectful debate and
struggling with alternative positions can emerge (credit due to John
Stuart Mill). We respect our readers enough to believe that they can
hear positions with which we and they may disagree, and struggle with
those positions. In fact, I've found that when people don't have that
opportunity, be it on the Left, Right or the Center of politics, they
end up really not fully understanding their own positions and unable to
defend them when critiqued. So for that reason we've always warned our
readers: if you want to know OUR position, read our editorials in the
magazine, but don't assume that we agree with everything we print or
send out.
3. It
is wrong to describe Israel as an apartheid society. I abhor Israel's
treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and we at Tikkun
were the leading voice against the Occupation for 22 years until J
Street, a much better financed enterprise, took our
place in Washington D.C. (and is doing a terrific job of getting the
message heard which we and others in similar movements pioneered in the
US-though they omit from their message our prophetic Biblically-based
insistence not only on the "rights" of Palestinians but also on their
fundamental humanity and why a spiritual or religious person must care
equally for their wellbeing as the wellbeing of Americans, Jews,
Israelis and everyone else on the planet.)
But
Apartheid describes the situation that existed in South Africa, not the
one that exists inside the pre-67 borders of Israel. In South Africa
Blacks did not vote in the election of the prime minister or of the
parties who ran the country; in Israel its Palestinian residents in the
pre-67 borders do vote and have ten percent of the Knesset populated by
Arab representatives (and would have more if the Arabs didn't vote for
Labor or other parties). In South Africa Blacks were prohibited from
going to the same schools or universities a Blacks, from attending the
same movie theatres or swimming on the same beaches; in Israel Arabs go
to the same beaches, attend the same university classes, and in most
other respects have the same political rights as Israeli Jews. True,
they face the same kind of discrimination that Blacks still face in
many parts of the US-it's not right and its discriminatory, and its
deplorable, but it's not apartheid. Why use a term that can so easily
be shot down by the Right-wingers, when what Israel is doing is not
that, though arguably worse than apartheid in some important respects?
The answer, I suspect, is that many activists are so frustrated at
their failure to have won a majority of Westerners to our critical
perspective about the Occupation that they think that if they label
Israel with some well known disparaging term, that that will make it
easier for Westerners to understand. But that is not a legitimate
approach-you can't jump over the difficult task of explaining what is
wrong with what Israel is doing by using incendiary language that
actually can be refuted. Moreover, you can't really win over Westerners
with a simplistic account-because many in the West remember that Israel
was created in the wake of eighteen hundred years of global
anti-Semitism and a twentieth century genocided that murdered one out
of three Jews alive. We at Tikkun do not believe that that suffering is
reason to excuse Israeli treatment of Palestinians, but we do believe
it is a reason why the world had a right to return those Jews who
wished to return to their ancient homeland from which they had been
expelled by force, violence and repression, in an instance of global
affirmative action which, unfortunately, displaced (in our view,
unjustly) hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. This story too is too
complicated to try to summarize here, but it must be told with
compassion for both sides, recognizing that both sides have a
legitimate story to tell, and both sides have been cruel and violent
toward the other side (as for example when Jews were climbing out of
the crematoria and gas chambers of Europe and Palestinian leadership
refused to allow them to enter Palestine because they were Jews, while
allowing non-Jews to come to Palestine). Every part of this story has
two sides at least, and it doesn't help to label one side the "evil
other" and the other "the righteous victim," but to develop a sense of
compassion for both sides-if the goal is to seek peace and
reconciliation, rather than simply to achieve some rhetorical advance.
As one who sometimes falls into this mistake, I understand the
frustration felt by all who are outraged at Israeli behavior-and I
believe that outrage is legitimate-but I think that the prophetic
condemnation is only one part of the story, and we also need to act
strategically and with generosity of spirit if we want to change the
situation and alleviate the current suffering of both Israelis and
Palestinians.
Inside
the West Bank and Gaza there's a totally different story, and there the
conditions do resemble apartheid. Jews who settle on the West Bank have
a totally different set of laws, roads, water, and much else. But
again, that discrimination is not based on being Arabs so much as being
part of a society that has tolerated violent attacks on Israeli
civilians. I do not think that that argument is sufficient to justify
Israeli behavior, but neither do I think that the Israeli behavior
stems from racism as much as from fear.
How
could they fear when they are so much more powerful than the Arabs they
dominate? Well, if you were part of a people who had been traumatized
by 1800 years of discrimination, oppression, murder and rape, and then
had 1 out of every three of you murdered in the twentieth century, you
too might have a difficulty in seeing things straight and recognizing
yourself as the powerful one. If the US can have a majority of its
citizens think that the outrageous and immoral attack on the Twin
Towers provides evidence that the US itself is in danger of being
destroyed by terrorists, when the US is the most powerful military
force in the world, how can you doubt that the Jews could be so
traumatized by our history to be acting out of
Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder rather than out of racism and a desire
to dominate others for the sake of domination and lust for power? My
point is that it doesn't help move things toward peace to be demeaning
the Jewish people, or the State of Israel, though it is perfectly
legitimate to oppose its policies and do what we can to change them
(including using the full power of the US to do so). We at Tikkun fully
support the call by the Goldstone report for an international inquiry
into Israeli and Hamas war crimes if each party does not itself engage
in such an inquiry in an objective and credible way. And we believe it
fully appropriate for the peoples of the world to do what they can to
end the Occupation of the West Bank, as long as they also use similar
methods to end the occupation of Tibet by China, the end of repression
in Iran, the end of the occupation of Chechnya by Russia, the end of
the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan by the US, the end of the
genocide in Darfur, and other such moral outrages. For a fuller
discussion of this issue, please read my book Healing Israel/Palestine.
4. It
is not a mistake for people to be demanding of Obama that he BE the
Obama they voted for. But what would be a mistake is to think that such
a demand is going to be given credence until we form a powerful
movement of our own that is ready to take action and bring people into
the streets and into nonviolent civil disobedience against the policies
of the Obama Administration that are most abhorrent (e.g. the
escalation of war or the funding of the banks and investment companies
or its willingness to allow foreclosures on homes to continue or the
give-aways to pharmaceuticals and health insurance profiteers). The
huge mistake is to have treated Obama as a messiah and then expected
him to deliver for us. Obama never named or targeted corporate power,
and we need to do so, not just by saying what we are against, but by
fighting for what we are FOR-e.g. the Global Marshall Plan and the
Environmental and Ethical Amendments to the Constitution about which
you can read at www.spiritualprogressives.org.
We need to be more self-critical about not having built such a
movement, and not as much at Obama who, facing the corporate power
structure without the help of such a movement, could have been
predicted to have caved as he did.
5. It
is a mistake to allow Obama to face the wild charges of the
right-wingers and Republican opportunists (who will oppose everything
Obama calls for because they believe that his failure will bring them
electoral victory in 2010) without the support and defense from people
in the liberal and progressive world. Chris Hedges is correct in saying
that the intensity of that assault has been aided by the failure of
Obama and Congressional Democrats to passionately advocate for a
different ethical vision, but instead to seem to be in bed with the
corporate interests. But we should also acknowledge that at least some
part of the anger against Obama stems from the same racism that has led
many Americans to hate Obama with passionate intensity far out of
proportion to anything he has done or failed to do. I do not minimize
the impact of the humiliation that many faced who hoped for a different
set of possibilities and Obama's betrayal of that hope, but I also do
not believe that that accounts for all or even a majority of those who
ruthlessly and unceasingly and irrationally attack everything he does.
None
of this is to challenge the importance of this discussion, a discussion
that will also take place at our conference in DC June 11-14 (details
at www.spiritualprogressives.org)--though we
will also focus on the creation of a Constitutional Amendment to
overturn the Supreme Court's decision empowering corporations, and on
an Amendment that requires corporate environmental and ethical
responsibility (please see various versions we are considering-at the
Current Thinking section of www.spiritualprogressives.org. Nor will it prevent us from demonstrating at the White House on June 13th with the call to Obama: BE the Obama We Voted For,
not the inside-the-beltway pragmatist/realist whose compromises have
lost support for liberal and progressive causes and aided the upsurge
of Tea Party conservatives.
And
by the way, we don't mean to be disrespectful to all Tea Party people
either-some of them have a righteous anger at the way government has
served the interests of the powerful, and they are responding to a
right wing populism because they have not encountered enough of a
progressive populism, and certainly not a progressive populism that has
let go of the relgio-phobia that often cripples progressive movements
from being heard by masses of Americans who might otherwise agree with
them.
So
I hope Chris will still come to our conference, and that others who
agree or disagree with him but understand the importance of discussing
this in a comradely and caring way among those of us committed to
peace, social justice, ecological sanity, love, generosity, and caring
for others do also sign up for the conference before it fills up and
closes registration as did our San Francisco conference two weeks
ago. Sign up now at www.spiritualprogressives.org.