If you knot for me
You agin
Me
Oh my
They would halve US
Believe
In a New York minute
Weather 60 second ads
Or master debating in public
For ours
To won party
Or buy partisan ship
That teeming lode
When in realty
Wee are left harboring
To a T
Our weariness
In the wake
Of the dearth of trust
And in the daze
Long after
The election
Has Petered out
There are know
More mock promises
And crock tears
Until hour rejects
Sow board their ship
And bring about
See change

This poem is about partisanship and weather we should take any partisanship from anyone.  The is nothing like — nothing like — a presidential election campaign to stir up partisan emotions and partisan posturing.  As someone who is chronically politically active, and someone who has frequently experienced the short end of long partisan sticks, I have become increasingly aware of my deep distaste for partisanship.  In America, the conventional wisdom would have you believe that political activity and partisanship are the same thing.  This is not true, and the seemingly inescapable enmeshment of politics and partisanship is distinctly dysfunctional for humanity.  In my view, both the spiritual and political project of life is to ever expand our consciousness and participation in our collective life.  Our spiritual enlightenment is necessarily communal, and political freedom is only authentic when our participation in our collective life is shared equitably.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. so aptly observed, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”  Partisan in-groups, that parcel out power based on membership in anything other than our shared humanity, is a barrier to our spiritual and political evolution.  This mine-blowing realty is the ground for radical politics as necessarily counter-cultural and, as a rule, marginalized by the status quo and powers that be.  Nobody likes to be marginalized, which is precisely the shared basis for such a radical politics!  A paradoxical corollary to this is that marginalization, by happenstance or design, is the engine for radical politics.  It is no accident that marginalized people are typically the leaders of radical political activity, just as it is no accident that inasmuch as anyone stands in solidarity with marginalized people, they too will be marginalized.  Working through our own marginalization is synchronous with working through all of humanity’s marginalization.  The consciousness of intersectionality, that all areas of marginalization and injustice are inescapably linked, forms the antithesis and antidote to partisanship.

There are many overlapping in-groups and out-groups jockeying for power.  This is interest-based politics, and often identity politics.  For better or worse, each of us is marginalized in one way or another.  Hopefully, this can serve as leverage to increasing consciousness to the marginalization of others, especially those currently in an out-group.  The tricky part is that empathizing with out-group members is decidedly more dangerous than making any variety of internal criticisms intended to make an in-group a better in-group.  Making better in-groups is the lifeblood of partisan politics, though the seemingly easier job of undercutting out-groups, often scapegoating or even demonizing them, is what truly makes politics a bloodsport.  Haters hating haters is cause for plenty of bloodshed.  Nevertheless, to add insult to injury, and injury to non-violence, love of enemy prompts much bloodshed as well, though it is the lovers who are crucified, their own blood spilled.  Transcending narrow self-interests and in-group privileges is a costly endeavor exceeded only by the pricelessness of justice for all.

Beyond Democratic and Republican partisanship, is a unifying in-groupism, that corrosive beast called nationalism.  That ever-popular divide between Team America and Team Non-America (or Un-American).  As a nation, we are blind to the hubris-ridden assertion that what’s good for America is good for the world.  On occasion we may see clearly, yet we are at least as likely to fall for similar hubris-ridden assertions that are in fact against even our narrow national interests, such as “what is good for General Motors is good for America.”  Such endemic blindness is what Jesus was referring to when he spoke of the blind leading the blind, caught in a bind of our lack of awareness or consciousness.  Only higher consciousness of our shared humanity can overcome such lower ordered thinking and partisan warring, which is doomed to eternal, unsolvable conflict between “competing” interests.

Partisans inevitably think that anyone not for them is against them.  This is not the secret of the spirit of unity.  Interestingly, welcoming as, with, and for the least (those marginalized) is the greatest — “For whoever is the least among all of you, he is the greatest.” and “for whoever is not against you is for you.” [Luke 9:48,50]

May we be willing to pay the price for unity among all of God’s children, which is breaking free of being beholden to in-group power and privileges, and fervently welcoming all good things for the least among us.