Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

“Can we all just get along?” –American Rodney King, in light of 1992 Los Angles riots following the non-guilty verdict in the assault trial of Los Angeles police officers accused of beating him nearly to death, despite a graphic video aired world-wide.

I was thinking earlier today, in an arroyo because my friend KB and I chose Hike over Frisbee (with a few tosses of Frisbee literally thrown in at the end to keep the spiritual momentum going as we returned to our respective “regular” days), that considering this man Rodney King, not highly educated nor media groomed, nor ever expecting any kind of fame, had a camera thrust in his face at a time of extreme emotion, I could think of a worse choice of words by someone given One Shot At A Worldwide Soundbite.

In fact, I can hardly think of a better one. So succinct, so concisely expressing what so many saints of various faiths have spent their entire lives and sometimes rather horrifying deaths trying to get across. I think Rodney might be a saint. The forces of evil (poor, angry storm troopers, working for others) nearly killed him, and his response when his neighbors got upset about that, was, “Can we all just get along?”

Thankfully, since I prefer spending a long career trying to explain it, I might have abdicated the opportunity to make such a single statement that sums up the primary message I’d like to add to the Cosmic Slop. (Plus, if given such a planetary microphone, I might be tempted to simply say something surreal or of meaning only to my family, like, “I can’t believe it’s not butter” or “That’s Chief Inspector Clouseau to you, Mr. Putin.”) So I live in constant little moments. I hope they all add up to something like “Can We All Get Along?” We all act from our experience. I’ve seen war. I’ve been to Rwanda, Tajikistan, Guatemala and Burma. But were a Los Angeles Accu-News camera thrust in front of my face this spring day, with G. Love and Special Sauce on the box as I write and the first cactus wrens of the season echoing across the canyon outside, I would say, “Try to arrange life so at least once a week you get to choose between some version of Hike or Frisbee (with maybe a little bit of both).”

Because if you have time to get outside and experience the Planet, you have a better chance of seeing your life in relation to it. And that, if you’re anything like me, gives you a better chance of hoping we can “all just get along.”

I was cogitating about the general theme of “everyone getting along” this day for too may reasons to list here, ranging from the neighborly (maybe the hardest when it comes to getting along) to the American political (OK, maybe that’s the hardest) to the Global to the Cosmic. What started me on this track was that in a documentary about the original American Apollo moon exploration program I watched care of Netflix last night, astronaut John Young said that the primary lingering effect of being one of 26 humans to see the Earth from somewhere else for him was realizing that “we ought to be lookin’ out for our kids and for our grandkids, and what are we worried about? The price of a gallon of gasoline.”

This is not a politically progressive man. This is a career military and NASA officer hailed for decades as a national hero. So with that staggering (if obvious) comment still bouncing around in my head, I was wondering on the trail today, could a guy like Young “get along” with, on the other extreme, a left wing hate radio propagandist-masquerading-as-journalist like Amy Goodman, who has been bugging me with slanted news now for a couple of years? (I’m grateful for this pseudo-reporter, since her biased program Democracy Now! saved me from unquestioning “progressive” sheep follower status thanks to its blind and cruelly one-sided anti-Israeli “reporting.” Luckily, I’ve studied enough about the history of the Middle East to know that the region is immeasurably complicated, and that the end of a tragic era of war can only come about by everyone, yes, somehow getting along.)

But this is clearly not the goal of a broadcaster like Goodman. Her goal, like those of shepherds of any platform, appears from frequent observation to be to create an easily grasped good guy and an easily grasped bad guy (usually the opposite of whatever the right wing of American spectrum’s blind sheep followers believe on any issue). No solutions suggested, no balance presented, just one-sided invective in the name of opposition. Like Rush Limbaugh on the right, she does this with a journalistically unforgivable closed eye to history and a manipulation of facts based on current hotspot events.

The fact that I might agree with the editorial slant on Democracy Now! on upwards of 75% of issues makes it all the more important that I recognize the terrible and dangerous distortions when I disagree. It’d be one thing if the show admitted to being one big editorial. But even that wouldn’t satisfy me, just as the arguments of friends don’t when they say, “We have to live with the fake news bias on the right from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, doesn’t a little bias on the left balance it out?” After all, they contend, isn’t a clueless Fox victim unaware that it was the Bush Administration that brought him the Patriot Act and threatened his guns and other freedoms more dangerous than a few urban liberal effetes listening to what they already believe; namely that anything any post-Lincoln Republican has done, ever, is wrong?

“No way,” I strongly argue. Bad reporting is bad reporting, as far as I’m concerned, and it’s not “less” bad because I might agree with some of the slant. Most people are too busy to gather news on-site themselves, of course, so they “consume” news that others produce. Folks tend to believe what they see, hear and read, when it’s packaged as “news.” So it’s important to make an effort to give them the truth, not your personal truth masquerading as “news.” Lies and slant do not move us toward “all getting along.”

That, I determined on this day so gorgeous even breathing feels like dancing, would serve well as my definition of a fundamentalist (of any faith): someone whose short-term core vision doesn’t include the hope of everyone trying to live in peaceful, respectful coexistence. Look, people have different beliefs, long histories and personal issues. What’s the point of carrying on the war into another generation? That’s Hatfield/McCoy thinking. Let’s heal over time, but let’s at least start with the intent, the goal, of peaceful coexistence. I mean, something’s driving you. Is it healthy, loving and sustainable, or is it some other formula?

Take the Middle East. Let’s get Arab, Jewish and Persian leaders together just to sign that: a document saying, “More strife is horrible. Immediate peace will be difficult since so many severe wounds on all sides are so recent. But we in our hearts and as representatives of our people hereby openly state that our eventual hope, our ultimate dream, no matter how long it takes, is to all get along. To coexist in peace.”

If your leader won’t say that (hello, Iran), I believe you need a new leader. Why would it endanger a people politically or militarily to simply admit to yearning for peace? To not yearning for murder and hate? Folks are doing this in Rwanda at the moment, by the way, where one in six people were killed in the course of a year in 1994.

By progressing on own personal journeys toward self-knowledge, I firmly believe, we humans can take huge steps toward ending eons-old struggles in a single lifetime. With some inner peace established, all we have to do is desire wider-world peace and avoid fundamentalists. Fundamentalists are just people, too, who haven’t progressed very far in their personal journeys. They are still angry about something that happened to them earlier on in their lives. And yet someone gave them a microphone or a government.

Rodney King said it more concisely than I have in this Dispatch. I personally know several editors who would love him. And he did it under pressure, on the third day of chaos in his city that had left 37 people dead all because he was too drunk to sit quietly and obey some out-of-control cops. My revelations these days tend to come to me on hikes, playing Frisbee, that kind of thing. So that’s why I try to make every moment as kind, inspirational and amusing as it can be. Whatever works, as far as I’m concerned. As long as your goal is peace. I’m not one to give advice, but I often get asked these days if my Funky Butte Ranch lifestyle leaves me as happy as it seems to.

It does. So when asked for tips, I usually say, “what works for me is to start with the personal (my own self-knowledge and peace), and work toward the Cosmic.” Then, when you get there, help me explain to my neighbor in a gentle way why the removal of a trailer in my viewshed would move humanity toward getting along. No, no, I’m dialing in the inner-peace-and-self-knowledge-while-yearning-for-planetary-peace dynamic (I did, after all, have both a hike and a meditation with the goats today). I find after more than three and a half decades on this Planet that when I’m radiating from this effort at my core, I not only feel best at the surface where I interact with the rest of the Cosmos, but that’s when I seem to make those around me feel better, too. Goats, certainly. And sometimes people, too.

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