A while back some Bay Area acquaintances invited me to a meditation circle to send "positive energy" to President Bush. A single question got me uninvited: "Why not send some energy to his opponents?"

I have noticed an eerie incapacity among certain spiritually inclined people for telling the difference between discernment and judgmentmentalism. As a result, they decline both, often with rather comical results.  In another group a frustrated participant sputttered her ire at the "negative" talk about corrupt politicians and greedy CEOs by branding it "judgmental." I wrote "ire," but I also mean "anxious." My impression was that her inner judge had caught her by the throat. 

If all the "positive thinking" proponents got their way, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky would have to disappear: far too gloomy, angry, sad, and real. Mark Twain would depart in their wake: the master of satire who, posing as the devil, thanked one of the Rockefellers for a paltry contribution to charity. One collection of Twain's writings bears the menacing title A Pen Warmed Up In Hell. Camus, Hesse, Baudelaire, Goethe, Baldwin, Haley, Steinbeck, Hemingway: all would be found wanting in uplifting moods and intellectual pleasantries.

Come to think of it, so would Buddha, Muhammad, the unknown writers of the Vedas and Upanishads, and of course Jesus, who compared the respectably corrupt of his day to fashionable coffins filled with dead men's bones. 

As an alternative to personal and cultural self-mutilation, I suggest getting clearer on the difference between discernment, which sees things as they are even when unpleasant, and judgmentmentalism, which condemns out of hand. To fail to see a scoundrel as a scoundrel, a tyrant as a tyrant, or a psychopath as a psychopath enables these antisocial characters by cloaking their misdeeds in euphemism and ignorance. Soon the worst of us end up in charge while the rest of us scratch our heads wondering why.

This ostrich policy often originates as a childhood defense in abusive families: "Don't you talk about Dad that way! He wouldn't have hit you if you weren't so negative!" Too often the family cheerleader and enabler grows up to cheerlead and enable destructive agendas that multiply surreptitiously. No destroyer succeeds without a horde of self-blinders pretending things are fine and telling the rest of us to cheer up.

And none sits on the throne for long among those unafraid to suggest that the emperor get a new tailor.