Swinging for the Fences: Please Join Me in this Bold New Effort
Hello again. It has been nearly a year and a half since I mothballed our NoneSoBlind to concentrate on my campaign for Congress. Now I’ve brought NoneSoBlind back onto the web, complete with all its archives.
And I’m happy to return to you now to enlist your help as my mission enters a new phase.
In the first two phases — the NoneSoBlind blogging community and my campaign for Congress — I addressed the immediate crisis in America stemming from the pathology that has arisen in the American political system. The emphasis now will be on our long-term efforts to create a better world.
To acknowledge this project’s ambitiousness, I’m calling it “Swinging for the Fences.” And what is its ambitious goal? To provide an integrated and fairly comprehensive framework for understanding how the human world works. And more specifically, understanding the forces over which we need to gain control if we –Americans, humankind—are to be able to create a desirable future.
It is troubling that whenever our artists depict the future of our civilization, in films or fiction, those imagined futures are bleak, or chaotic, or soulless. It can say nothing good about where we are as a nation, as a civilization, as a species that the kinds of future we seem able to imagine are so unappealing.
It is a sign, I believe, of our sense that we are not in control of our destiny. I see a way to address this dimness of vision.
Troubling, too, is how many Americans have been slow to see, or have failed to see at all, what’s been before our eyes in recent years as the most destructive and dishonest force ever to reach center stage of American politics has risen on the political right and degraded our nation.
It is a sign, I believe, that too many Americans lack a mental map that contains a space for spiritually dark forces. I see a way to provide that deeper conceptual space with a deeper spiritual resonance.
This project fits squarely with what I’ve done over the past more-than-forty years. My whole life, I’ve felt continually drawn to look at the big picture and discern the forces, unleashed by the dynamics of our systems, that shape our destiny often in harmful and destructive ways, and to try to devise ways to allow wise human choice to prevail.
I’m ready to put it all together in a vision that I hope will combine intellectual clarity with spiritual aliveness and moral passion.
Ideas can move history. The American Revolution and its resultant constitutional government were the fruit of ideas that took generations, and much hard-lived historical experience. Today’s world seems sorely in need of a vision, or ideology, that can inspire and empower people to fortify the power of goodness in its contest with the kind of destructive forces that have become so disturbingly visible in our country.
I’m swinging to hit the ball over that fence. Getting the home run is a long shot. But I’m confident we can at least get on base with a clean single or stand-up double. And who knows? Sometimes the long shot comes in!
I’m already beginning to construct –in public– this ambitious edifice of ideas and vision. On my campaign Facebook page (www.facebook.com/AndySchmookler), I’m starting to post small pieces of this Big Picture and to begin to put them together. As time goes on, these will be refined and ordered into finished works designed to have an impact on the world.
I need your help. With so ambitious an undertaking, and with me no longer a spring chicken, I need all the help I can get. Will you swing for the fences with me?
Here are some of the ways you can help?
• Monitor what I’m posting there under the rubric of “Swinging for the Fences.”
• Bolster the effort there by commenting with your ideas, your questions, your challenges, your advice, your encouragements—whatever you feel able to add that will fortify the project and makie it more of what it should be.
• Spread the word to others about what we’re up to. Think about the people you know who would value an integrated vision of how the human world works, and who care about whether the good, the true, and the beautiful triumph over the evil, the false, and the ugly.
• Contribute funds, if you’re willing, to help defray the at least several thousands of dollars of costs I envision for the project during this year. (I’m still working for nothing, as I have since 2005 with NoneSoBlind and my campaign.)
Your help and support and encouragement will be very much appreciated.
With thanks,
ANDY
January 22nd, 2013 at 9:46 am
I will try to help. I saw a Republican response to the call by our President Barack Hussein Obama to address Global Warming. It was typical of those who which to resist change. He said the US couldn’t do it alone so why bother. This from the party which harbors those who fear international cooperation. If you fear international cooperation then it is an impossible to address issue, but if you can get past the fear of international cooperation then it is assailable. I also saw radio report from a Republican official in Iowa, I believe who bemoans the “fact” that we just elected a President for which we have not seen a valid birth certificate. We need to find a way to get past the fear, in one sense, and past the use of false testiment in the other. This fear and inability to see the truth is the product of a false worldview. The only way to correct this is to substitute a worldview for them that fits the world better. So let’s construct that worldview for them! Once that is done, we will need to figure out how to get them to adopt it.
January 22nd, 2013 at 2:17 pm
Let me say publicly, how much I valued your run for Congress. The people of your district cannot say they have not seen a good man, a humane man and a courageious man tell them the truth. To those who voted for you, they did the right thing.
I was looking for your address over the weekend to send you a card in private: ut seens appropriate to do so in public as you beging again to make AMericans aware of the pathology of the new right. I hope to contribute as I may in the future.
Seeing you back here Andy, is like hitting a homer, with the bases loaded!
Richard H. RAndall
Major, USA, (ret.)
January 22nd, 2013 at 3:22 pm
Thank you both, Richard and Robin.
Let me say in response to your mention, Robin, of that Republican continuing to spew the birther nonsense: my focus now will not be on trying to penetrate the trance state that constructs the uncracked nut of the deluded right. I’ve got another, longer-term goal in mind now.
My goal will be, rather, to empower the like-minded with a framework of understanding, grounded in the deep source of the power of the spirit, to work effectively in the world over the long haul.
Had our side of the cultural divide been more fully alive to the truth, we’d have worked sooner and harder to prevent that nut from forming. I will try to explain how things like a world-view based on lies and delusions get formed, and how America became vulnerable to it.
Some of this will be familiar to long time readers of NSB. But the difference now will be this: I’m going to work to put all the pieces together into a coherent picture.
Many of those pieces will be harvested from the NSB archives. But the new work will not be just a series of entries but will include the construction of a framework that shows where those pieces fit into a Whole. Some of the ideas are already articulated, and now need to be woven together. Also, the construction of that Whole will involve the articulation of some new ideas.
It’s Big Picture time. I’m very excited about it.
January 23rd, 2013 at 12:18 pm
Good Show and good luck to the Bard: it might be trite and a bit dated but, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
January 23rd, 2013 at 2:51 pm
I agree that being fully alive to the truth is important. Here is one aspect of the truth that needs to be realized. It isn’t enough to only come alive in Presidential election years but also in what are called off election years as this lack of coming out in those years allow those with a faulty worldview to cling to power longer than they should to the detriment of our country and our world through Gerrymandering and changes to the way the electoral college votes will be distributed. Witness what happened in VA just these last few days and what is transpiring in Pennsylvania even as I post this missive. The empowerment must lead to motiviation even when there is no inspirational speaker out there motivating the good. I believe this fits within your plan although it is not the primary motivating idea by any means.
January 24th, 2013 at 3:43 am
Count me in.
January 25th, 2013 at 4:18 pm
As a parent I want a humane, peaceful, just world for my son. I think partisan bickering distracts us and am happy to see the president selling his ideas to all of us and want to join in the creation of resources to enable busy concerned citizens to contribute.