“ORIGINAL POLITICS: Making America Sacred Again”

ORIGINAL POLITICS: Making America Sacred Again—the second book from educator, ecopsychologist, and political philosopher Glenn Aparicio Parry—aims to facilitate a seemingly impossible task: unifying a socially and politically fractured United States. However, Parry, founder and past president of the SEED Institute and director of the grassroots think tank Circle for Original Thinking, remains optimistic about the future, noting that looking to our past can help us chart a course forward.
“To create a whole and sacred America,” according to Parry, “it is necessary to piece together the forgotten fragments of history that currently keep us divided. The most significant forgotten piece is the profound effect Native America had on the founding values of the nation.” Among these values were an egalitarian sense of community and justice—and a strong and sustained practice of equal participation in the political process among people of all genders and backgrounds. ORIGINAL POLITICS draws powerful and often startling insights from our nation’s past and present and urges a commitment to opening minds and inspiring a movement towards national healing and inclusion.
Bitter political partisanship. Heated clashes over immigration. The climate crisis. Income inequality. Sexism. Racism. Gun violence. Our country was plagued with problems long before COVID-19 hit. Is the United States headed for a second Civil War? Is our democracy facing the threat of extinction?
What if our current state of turmoil wasn’t a harbinger of doom and devastation but a sign of our potential for renewal? In ORIGINAL POLITICS: Making America Sacred Again (Select Books; June 2020), author and visionary Glenn Aparicio Parry sheds light on the cyclical nature of political change. Interweaving hard-hitting facts of US history with Native American philosophy and other perennial wisdom, Parry foresees a political evolution that ultimately returns America to wholeness through our true sacred purpose: unity in diversity. He assures readers that we will fulfill our sacred destiny even amid our current retreat into partisanship, fragmentation, and fear; for it is in periods of devolution that the shadow side of America is revealed, containing the seeds of renewal.
Glenn Aparicio Parry is eager to engage your audience in a discussion about:
• How racism in America traces its roots to the very birth of our government—as Parry notes, our founding fathers spoke in high-minded terms about liberty and equality while cherry picking who would benefit: only White male property owners—and how shameful issues that were long pushed into the national shadow reemerged with a vengeance with the two-term election of an African American president, Barack Obama.
• Why the women’s suffrage, feminist, and #MeToo movements owe a debt to the example of Native American women—who were recognized as equal partners, valuable contributors, and leaders in their tribes, not, like White female pioneers, merely the property of men—and how the crushing 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton motivated more women to run for public office, coming full circle with the election of two Native American Congresswomen.
Why the startling victory of Donald Trump—the first US president without an iota of political, government, or military experience—was a symptom, not a cause, of how far our democratic system has fallen. Parry characterizes Trump as a classic, if unwitting “trickster figure” — not evil (like Hitler), but a bombastic narcissist (like Mussolini) who foments White supremacy, sexism, and xenophobia. Parry tells us that, in Native America, a trickster figure “acts in a contrarian manner opposite of normal for the conscious purpose of awakening people to new ways of looking at reality.” Trump is not a conscious trickster, but nonetheless, “The election of Trump set in motion forces that will forever change the United States and the world order,” Parry asserts. “Things may never return to normal, whatever that is, but they can be transformed—into something far worse, or perhaps into something much better.”
Speaking to our terrifying times, ORIGINAL POLITICS affirms the looming apocalypse—but in the sense of the word’s original meaning: an unveiling, a revelation. Informed by American history, Nature American beliefs, and nature, Parry encourages all of us to join together in preventing the worst-case scenario from happening and, instead, see the truth of America “with one eye toward the unhealed wounds of our past and toward the open field of our potential future.”
Among his practical suggestions:
• Avoid reliance upon biased media sources that present only one side of the narrative, and instead look at liberal and conservative positions as two aspects of one whole.
• Reflect on why a politician from the opposing party or perspective irritates or infuriates you. Is the reason really political, or is it personal? Can you find anything positive in his or her POV?
• Make a conscious effort to see all kinds of others—men and women; native and immigrant; Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow—as individuals and fellow humans. If people have a different political opinion, therein lies the opportunity for learning.
• Learn to realign our political actions with the larger and more powerful cycles of Nature.
• Adopt a worldview of the entire planet as a living organism that continually evolves and regenerates. Avoid careless actions that inflict damage on other species and the natural world. Commit to treating everyone and everything with love and gratitude.