The Big Answer

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In a flourish of metaphorical incisiveness, Marianne Williamson tells us that since the late 60s, “we haven’t cleaned up our room so much as added a room to put all of the dirty things in.” Other insights: “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. . . . Everyone in America has opinions today, but too few of us are doing our very best thinking.” Her book looks for constructive ways to deal with what is wrong with America. She attempts to engage the reader in being part of the solution, once she uncovers the causes underlying our pain and the type of healing that needs to be applied.

Too few of us are doing our very best thinking

She sees community as a good part of that solution, and she favors neither the left not the right to lead the needed renaissance; and neither party has the context for a discussion that will really involve the core issues. Community is the new-paradigm, systems part of the solution. Without it we eventually lose democracy itself. Dropping the overemphasis on materialism is another part, dealing with getting our priorities straight. She is also steering us away from placing any hope in political salvationism.

She says, as all the wisest of our people are saying, that “real change occurs not from the top down but from the bottom up. . . . What America needs, neither big government nor small government can address at the deepest level. . . . The problem with the current political dialogue is that it seeks to undo the damages we have suffered by means of the same dialectic that created them. To heal the havoc wreaked by a left-brain, paternalistic, authoritarian bias, we must be willing to question the bias itself.” This is a good statement of the need for adoption of the ecological-holistic paradigm to replace or at least balance the old, mechanistic-reductionistic paradigm.

The problem with the current political dialogue is that it is not a dialog at all—it's a clown show

The problem with the current political dialogue is that it is not a dialog at all. It's a clown show. For what purpose? To distract the public from the Corporatocracy robbing us blind. The oligarchy—which has not been a democracy for years—puts on meaningless elections, knowing full well that it matters not who we vote for: the Corporatocracy's theivery continues apace in the background, while in the foreground the candidates lob Culture War grenades at one another calculated not to clarify issues but to push our emotional buttons so the caterwauling successfully distracts us from the crookery going on in the background which they do not wish us to notice. Sort of like how pickpocket teams use a distracting person and a stealing person. Regardless of who gets elected or which party is in power, nothing changes except the faces of the prevaricating, pretentious phonies elected to specific offices. (See The US is an oligarchy, study concludes.)

The pushmi-pullyu—the perfect metaphor for the hopeless stalemate our two-party system has been in for many years

“To bring peace to America, we must first find peace within ourselves. Hysterical, greedy, frantic, insecure, cowering, unclear, inebriated, obsessed minds will not bring forth an American renaissance.” (Win-lose, angry, insecure casualties of steep-gradient nurturance and the isolated, disconnected American family experiment are not about to find the inner peace to support such a movement.) She says that “the purpose of our lives is to bring forth on earth as perfect an expression as we are capable of achieving of the goodness of the human spirit. For us to mine that spirit in our children, and exalt it in their nurturance; to devote our undertakings to the flowing forth of that spirit in . . . all people, making everything else secondary to the achievement of that goal—this is the call that will renew America . . .” And finally, “the past teaches us, most importantly, that the movement of history in the direction of good can never, ever be taken for granted.”

“Only one thing now can recreate the world, and that is unconditional love.” At its core that’s what her compassionate, aware book is all about.