State of Emergency We are living in an ongoing crisis, a long-term state of emergency. We are at war all over the world (U.S. government officials tell us that Al-Qaeda operates in or from 60 countries). We have partial martial law within our country, most obviously in airports. Escalation has taken over. Killing has escalated. Fear has escalated. This gives diversity consciousness a new resonance, a new bottom line. It gives people a renewed purpose. Diversity is the key to survival. So the logic is clear: diversity must be escalated. "They don't think like we do," said a U.S. terrorism expert. "I could never imagine myself diving a plane into a building and killing people." The response of some people shows their cognitive/imaginative threshold. Some people were conceptually blocked. "I can't imagine how they could do that," said many people after Sept. 11. When we define some people as deviant, we can't approach them in our usual way, it puts them beyond our reach, or else we would have to admit that their deviance is within our repertoire as well. The more different from our norm someone is, the more we are challenged to bridge the distance. When we live with great overlap and similarity, we don't practice making contact with "the farther reaches of human nature" (the title of a book by Abraham Maslow), our own or someone else's. We talked about outsiders and outcasts in connection with the School shootings of the past few years. When I was teaching "Lord of the Flies" to a high school English class, students were quick to dismiss a character as nuts. They accepted only a narrow band of normal. We write off, avoid, demonize, pathologize, those who seem different. We homogenize our mental/emotional/political environment. We reinforce our norms and convince ourselves we are the most normal AND the most special people in existence. Feminists are terrorists to a male-dominant world order. Someone who is considered deviant is by definition not accessible in the usual mode and is seen as a threat to one's stability and security. "A physician has to enter the consciousness and subjectivity of the patient or he's not a good physician," says Dr. Oliver Sacks. Dr. Jerrold Post, George Washington University psychiatrist, has been giving interviews in which he says the terrorists are not psychotic. They have their own coherent rationality, which many of us do not understand or accept. We see confrontations between people with the American flag and People with peace armbands, between the American flag and the UN flag, between the American flag and the Earth flag. But isn't America for peace, for coexistence in the larger world, for life on the planet? "Divided we stand" may be a more democratic principle than "united we stand." Some people have been living "under cover" most of their lives. It's hard to "come out" into a hostile environment, a cognitively, aesthetically, emotionally, politically and morally hostile environment. Robert Frost: "I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world." A good American has a lover's quarrel with his country. This is what HUAC didn't understand fifty years ago. To be eternally vigilant as Jefferson declared means to be observant, to see things that are not good for liberty as well as things that are, and, being American, to talk about them, to work to change them. We need cognitive diversity, people who can grasp different worldviews, mentalities, modes of thinking, feeling and perceiving, different ways of processing information, different thought processes. That's what artists, healers, and spiritual seekers do. We need to understand people who feel marginalized, ignored, rejected, displaced. That's what peacemakers do. We need to be able to hear and empathize with dissidents, who are not mainstream or conventional. That's what valuing diversity is about. We need people who see the light and people who see the shadow. A poet has empathy for a rock, sees a commonality between herself and other beings or nonbeings or states of being. Artists live in their own shadow enough to know one when they see it. We need to increase our diversity quotient as a source of ideas, emotional intelligence, and sustainable strength. Sept. 11 was a watershed in the life of this country. It gives us an opportunity to learn about ourselves, all our disparate, complex, selves. (October 29, 2001)  BACK