In our country, we are tricked into believing there are only two choices for us, a left and a right. Because we think we have options, we rarely wake up to see we have none.

The weak-minded are always telling other people who and what they are, because they no longer believe anyone can think for themselves – liberal, conservative, left, right, red blue.

That way, they need not think or listen. I see it every day; people forget how to think—cows to slaughter.

Nothing makes the rich and the powerful happier than when people fight over their very few choices. It’s a powerful distraction.

Everday, one peckerhead or another, tells me what I am and who I must be. They never ask me,  that would scare them to death, they have no script for it. I am learning late in life, but better late than never, to be who I am.

I can’t always love me, and neither can lots of other people, but I am learning to accept me, and who I am. No one can steal that from me, ever.

We have lost the right to identify ourselves as if there are no more than two ways of looking at the world. In so doing, we are losing ourselves.

We can’t get enough of our labels. We’ve surrendered our most precious thing, our consciousness, and identity to others. They call that joining a cult.

If you preach compassion, you must be on the left. If you preach cruelty, you must be on the right. How sad we have so few ways of seeing ourselves, and of hearing others.

I like the idea of a new label, a third label, a new political party since our current choices have made a spectacular mess of things.

I would join this movement. I’d call it Citizens For A Kinder American.

Our platform would be compassion, as outlined by Henri Nouwen, the Dutch spiritualist, and philosopher:

“Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

-Henri J.M. Nouwen

(The photo above is of Maria’s left foot, she was walking barefoot through the wet grass and stepped up next to our “faith stone,” embedded in the concrete on the back porch.)

It’s a beautiful image to meditate over.)