Having had a long career articulating universal spiritual principles in my
\nwriting and lecturing, I have seen the transformational power of knowing
\nthat no matter what happens, love will always get the final say. From
\nIsraelites arriving at the Promised Land to the resurrection of Jesus,
\nreligious traditions carry the common theme that after the deepest darkest
\nnight there is always the dawning of a new day.<\/p>\n
Running for President, I have been challenged to find a way to express that
\nsame idea in secular terms. I\u2019m from a religious minority myself, after
\nall. I know how important it is to keep our political conversations
\nsecular, in order to respect the plurality of faiths – and non-faith – that
\nmake up the American electorate.<\/p>\n
Religion and spirituality are two different things, however. In the words
\nof President John F. Kennedy, \u201cWe cannot afford to be materially rich but
\nspiritually poor.\u201d I have wanted to inspire faith that better times are
\npossible, but isn\u2019t invoked with the cheap and easy cliche so often uttered
\nby politicians: that \u201cour best days are still ahead of us.\u201d In truth, maybe
\nthey are, and maybe they aren\u2019t. I want to inspire hope born not of
\nplatitudes but of possibility – a feeling that something deep inside us, at
\nthe very core of things, is always bending in the direction of the good.<\/p>\n
That sentiment, spoken in a secular but profoundly spiritual way, lies in
\nthis well known quote from French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus: *\u201cIn
\nthe midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
\nAnd that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world
\npushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger \u2013 something
\nbetter, pushing right back.\u201d*<\/p>\n
How beautifully that quote expresses the idea that there is, within all of
\nus, the capacity for regeneration and repair. How desperately we need to
\ncollectively believe that now. Even among the happiest people, I find a
\nsadness about America today. In the words of a woman I was talking to last
\nweek, \u201cOur country has gone awry.\u201d She is a State Representative, and told
\nme she spends most of her time trying to push back against genuinely
\nantidemocratic efforts in her Statehouse. Rather than being able to spend
\nher time making people\u2019s lives better, she\u2019s constantly having to push back
\nagainst people who are actually trying to make things worse for them.
\nPeople who are actually elected representatives of the people\u2026. are trying
\nto limit the rights of the people.<\/p>\n
Such are the times in which we live.<\/p>\n
But as I say so often, we have had tough times before. We cannot allow
\nourselves to forget that, nor the fact that historically our ancestors have
\nresponded to tough times in glorious ways. From abolition to Women\u2019s
\nSuffrage, from organized labor to the Civil Rights movement, as a nation we
\nhave never failed to ultimately push back against oppressive forces in our
\nmidst.<\/p>\n
It is simply our turn now.<\/p>\n
I am running for president to provide a different option than the ones
\npresented by a sclerotic, covertly corrupt status quo. I reject the notion
\nthat only those who have spent years working within a system that drove us
\ninto a ditch, should be considered qualified to lead us out of it. Such
\npeople\u2019s qualification is that they know how to perpetuate that system; the
\nmost important qualification for our next president is that she know how to
\ndisrupt it.<\/p>\n
How? By doing what I am doing now. By saying the quiet parts out loud, by
\npointing to the elephant we all know is sitting in the middle of the living
\nroom, by speaking common sense to a vast gaslit nation. No, the \u201cpractical
\nissues\u201d of politics are not what matter most today. Our problem is not that
\nwe don\u2019t have enough political car mechanics; our problem is that we\u2019re on
\nthe wrong road. We don\u2019t lack technicians; we lack vision.<\/p>\n
I read an article about myself years ago in which someone said something
\nthat made me laugh but that I felt was true: \u201cMarianne Williamson isn\u2019t
\nsaying anything everybody else isn\u2019t saying – she\u2019s just saying it when the
\nmic is on.\u201d I feel that\u2019s as true of my career today. It\u2019s not like I\u2019m
\nsaying anything that people don\u2019t already know. But that\u2019s the point! *The
\ncontinuance of our current political system depends on our consistently
\ndenying what we know.* It wants us to pretend that what we know in our
\nhearts isn\u2019t true, or isn\u2019t important. And thus we lose faith that we know
\nmuch of anything at all.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Having had a long career articulating universal spiritual principles in my writing and lecturing, I have seen the transformational power of knowing that no matter what happens, love will always get the final say. From Israelites arriving at the Promised Land to the resurrection of Jesus, religious traditions carry the common theme that after the […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":8148,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-substack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}