Ashland Daily Tidings :: Online Edition

Ashland Daily Tidings (Ashland, OR — Wayback)

2004-11-05

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 - Subscribe  - Contact Us  - Rate Card  - Place an Ad Valley&State      Backpage      O&E      Sports      Archives      Classifieds      Faith&Beliefs      Obituaries      Revels October 25, 2004 Sheehan predicts Kerry win during Ashland visit By John Darling Tidings Correspondent Noted activist lawyer Daniel Sheehan, chief counsel in the Karen Silkwood, Iran-Contra and Three Mile Island cases, brought a scary vision of world politics to Ashland Friday, but one tempered with hope that a "new human faculty," one explained by quantum physics, can break the age-old cycle of war, power elites and ravaging of the planet. John Kerry will win the presidency by a wide margin, said Sheehan, but only by continuing his move to the right, where, in picking up the conservative thread of the senior President Bush, he forges a transnational alliance based on Euro-American trade organizations (Nafta and Gatt), one with its own parliament that can veto actions of member states that interfere with profits of multi-national corporations. This would be a "Caucasian alliance," defended by NATO and set against China, heading for thermonuclear confrontation by 2020, he added. The saving grace of this shift would be a more conscious and visionary vice president, John Edwards, who, schooled by Bill Clinton, would succeed Kerry, with Hillary Clinton as his vice president, Sheehan told a well-attended Southern Oregon University gathering. The present chaos and polarity in the nation's political life grows out of the search for an organizing reality to replace anti-communism, which died a dozen years ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sheehan noted. Conservatives, guided by the "New American Century" visions of Paul Wolfowitz and Karl Rove reason that the U.S. won the Cold War and has the right to pick up where things were before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, asserting American power - economic, military, political - everywhere in the world as an expression of the colonialism and social Darwinism of that era. This would be an extension of the divine right of kings, which flowed for a thousand years from the Catholic Church to monarchs, was enlarged to take in nobility starting with the Magna Charta of 1215, expanded again to include the mercantile class with the Protestant Reformation, but failed to include the "great unwashed" who staged the French Revolution - because they lacked a religious basis for their claim to power. Liberals, since the end of the Cold War, have been struggling to establish a world view under the doctrine of Natural Law that pervaded the ancient world, a doctrine now evolved to address the disparity of wealth, runaway technology such as weaponry and genetic science and "destruction of the world's resources without constraint," Sheehan said. Pointing to the choices offered by major political groups, Sheehan asked, "Do we accept any of those as organizing principles? No. As soon as you know the issue, you know the answer. What's needed is a new, alternative way of life, a return to Natural Law, which has only been off the table for 200 years (since being crushed after the French Revolution)." Shifting to quantum physics, Sheehan said science has isolated a "God gene" as well as brain chemicals that "establish divine trust and a recognition of the communality among human beings. Once you know it, you realize you're authorized to reclaim the authority of human beings to step into our own power and end this long winter we've lived in." Scholars in Harvard's Intellectual History Department 35 years ago first identified a "new faculty" evolving in the human species, he said, one akin to vision or hearing, that allows people to "directly encounter the phenomenon that binds all quantum fields of matter in a harmonic whole" thus "destroying the materialistic world view." This new human faculty, he said, was the spiritual component missing from the French Revolution, but which now "authorizes us to articulate an alternate vision, a new paradigm." John Edwards, he said, is new to Washington, remains "uncontaminated by the Council of Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission" and will be aided in 2012 by 40 million new voters of the "millennial generation" born since 1975 - people who aren't going to sit by and "wring their hands and just watch global warming and nuclear war with China." The town of Ashland, he said in a later interview, is "totally cool" because the baby boomer generation has identified it as a place where they can constantly reinforce "boomer and '60s values" creating a "metaphysical, political and social vortex." DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams