By Wednesday, 17 September 2025, 12:48 Pm Opinion: Martin Lefevre – Meditations

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In America and beyond, there has been widespread
celebration of the life of a racist, homophobe and Christian
nationalist extremist on the right. A more muted celebration
of his death by some on the left has been met with people
being canceled and fired for “hate

That’s painfully ironic since the martyr
for the extreme right (they’ve literally adopted an
Islamic fundamentalist mentality using that word) was
vicious in his attacks on gays, trans, liberals and others.
More to the point, President Trump is constantly spewing
hate against the media, Democrats, or anyone that criticizes
his heartless, destructive policies.

On the spiritual
level, there is a moral equivalence between people who
celebrate the life of a man who said that there should be
public executions in the United States and that children
should be compelled to watch, and people who said the
assassination wasn’t the one they hoped for, but were
happy to hear about it nonetheless.

Though the circle
of hate meets at the bottom however, the extreme right holds
power, and America is plunging more deeply into
authoritarianism every week. Can it be stopped, or is it
already too late?

Political analysts offer nothing of
more substance than James Carville’s tired bromide,
“It’s the economy stupid.” They intone: “Despite all
the serious threats to democracy itself in the US, for now
the first rule of democratic politics still applies: just
win the next election.”

There is an implicit denial
in such a prescription. It’s worse than a placebo, since
it presumes that there’s enough life left in the American
body politic to meet the crisis through the old, worn-out
strategies.

One commentator from the UK, who spent
nearly two months in the US observing the rapidity of
America’s decline, had a few accurate
observations.

For example, he said, “No European
society can compare to the US for the ubiquity of violence.
Hardly a day passed this summer without the evening news
reporting at least one violent crime, including yet another
horrific school shooting.”

He also wrote that he
“was shaken every day by the speed and executive brutality
of President Trump’s assault on what had seemed settled
norms of US democracy and by the desperate weakness of
resistance to that assault. And the way a would-be
authoritarian can exploit the intense capitalist competition
that permeates every area of US life.”

But he failed
to mention how Britain is following America into the Stygian
darkness. As a British writer said after the massive racist
march against immigrants in London a few days ago: “There
is something dark bubbling up in British society.” Yes,
and it has the same rotten root in human consciousness as
the American malignancy.

feeding the materialistic/consumeristic maw by “focusing
relentlessly on kitchen-table issues” before the midterms
election is an absurdly superficial response. It willfully
fails to see that America’s precipitous decline is not
because half of its citizens have been left out, but because
the American people as a whole have been hollowed out by
utter inward neglect.

A robust democracy
and civic life depend upon and flow from the character of a
people. And whatever character Americans once had was
dangerously eroded decades before the current political
manifestation.

But the point about “intense
capitalist competition permeating every area of US life”
is well taken. We Americans have contracted out to the
private sector for maximum profit our open and hidden wars,
our debilitating health care system, our obscenely
overcrowded prisons (and lately, hellish pens for “illegal
aliens”), and increasingly, our schools and the education
of our children.

However, unable or unwilling to delve
any deeper than the political level, even our former friends
in Europe are feeding the dwindling number of thoughtful and
engaged Americans the usual blather: “Democrats need to
show that they do actually care about the ordinary working
and middle-class Americans whose support they have lost over
the last 30 years.”

If there’s one thing that I
tell friends at home and abroad that they need to keep
front-of-mind about Americans, it’s that we are
world-class projectors of the darkness within us. The Trump
Administration is laughably transparent about it, but the
continued refrain from Democrats that “this isn’t who we
are” makes them project it onto Republicans, when darkness
permeates this land.

Progressives have no way to
address the crisis of evil in America and the world because
they deny its very existence, often putting the word in
quotes, as if it was some kind of made up thing on the part
of those who project their own darkness onto

So can anything be done to halt and reverse
the momentum of this runaway train of

Inwardly, we urgently need to ask questions
with those willing to question their beliefs and worldviews.
Questions such as: Is what ails America and the world a
political problem, or is it first and last a
psycho-spiritual issue?

Why have things gone so wrong
in this country? Is it basically because too few Americans
attend to their hearts and minds, and have tried to fill the
emptiness with consumerism?

In terms of our inner
lives, whatever our backgrounds and traditions, what insight
can we inject into the political dimension that will help
end the division and hate so rampant in society?

have so many people, especially young people, become
nihilistic, believing that nothing matters, life has no
meaning, and there is no higher power beyond the mind of

Is the worldwide spiritual and political crisis
just another cycle of history, or is it unprecedented, and
humankind is being compelled, like never before, to
radically change?

What is human nature, and why
hasn’t it changed? Is it so flexible as to be indefinable,
as many progressives believe, or is it immutable, as
conservatives believe?

On the political level,
California has formed an alliance with Oregon and Washington
to protect the minimal health care programs Americans have.
If we can expand the remit, and include British Columbia,
there is the basis for a non-separatist confederation within
two nations.

The United States has led the so-called
free world into darkness the last decade (President
Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza made him
part of the abdication of American leadership). Can the west
coast states of the United States and Canada’s westernmost
province lead humanity into the light?

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