Clean up

Poisons in the soil, air or water: chemicals like arsenic or methanol, heavy metals like cadmium or lead, radioactive substances like uranium or radon; infestations like red algae or worms, causing death, disability, stunted growth and birth defects: these poisons can have baleful effects generation after generation.

This line of thought began after hearing an MIT professor speak of the First World War as poisoning the twentieth century, producing the Russian Revolution and Fascism and other doleful consequences. Other events and former institutions have also had long term poisonous efffect. Slavery also still exerts its negative influence, as does the Great Depression and 9-11...so many other instances.

It's not just that certain good consequences have been foreclosed, or that negative ones have been made possible--that and its opposite true at any moment of history--but that the very social fabric is like a brown field, riddled with toxic attitudes and responses which affect all decisions and plans, weighing them down with distrust, rancor, and fear.

Antidote treatments, chelation therapies, sequestrations and so on are strategies for dealing with environmental poisons, and they  have their limits of effectiveness. But what about social poisons?  I can deal with my own thoughts and try to clean up my immediate social surroundings, but what about the society in general? Negative attitudes and influences remain all around, reinfecting or invisibly influencing us, our actions, our policies, our institutions.

At the heart of any social detoxification must be the regular practice of sincere apology and forgiveness, based on a willingness to be vulnerable, to recognize our need and ask for the companionship and cooperation and consolation of others. Vulnerability lays us open to rejection, censure, exploitation, scorn, but it is the risk that must be taken if these chunks and crumbs of rage, resentment, self-justification, often not based on personal experience but absorbed unthinkingly from around us, concentrated, replicated and expelled to affect another generation, if these poisons are to be denatured, rendered harmless, recovered from.

What has happened cannot be changed but it is worthwhile wondering at each point what poisons are being, have been, could be generated and disseminated by our actions, and how to deal with them as soon as possible. With regard to our legacy of poisoned relationships, the slow, arduous, courageous work of owning up and letting go until the water of interaction comes up clean and pure, safely drinkable, sweet.

This is good but interminable work of a lasting significance justifying its risks, I believe, given that mutual vulnerability is the basic premise of the relationship of God-in-love and the Beloved.