This is not a time to deny our gut. It's time to honor it, because it's a trail that leads somewhere important. In a Quaker exercise during my lectures, we sit silently, with eyes closed, and seek our virtue, as Abraham Lincoln called it. We ask the small still voice within to reveal to us a higher vision for this country. And, the power of that exercise, the enthusiasm and emotion with which people have participated proves to me how much we long to be part of a great creative work to restore this country and this earth to its innocence and grace.
Democracy is a very spiritually based concept.
It places great trust in something which lies inside each individual. It rests on the power and authority of the individual's wisdom, intelligence and virtue. That is profoundly different than a system of government where power resides in someone's money or other external circumstances. The fact that we have drifted away from governance as a reflection of the average person's intelligence, virtue and wisdom, has as much to do with the fact that we have not expressed that virtue in the public domain, as that there are certainly those who would wrestle it from us. In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln said that there is no evil that government can perpetrate in this country as long as people retain their virtue and their vigilance.