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Friday, November 14, 2003
Saturday, November 15th, 2003
There have been 158 U.S. service members killed in Iraq since this past May, when President Bush declared the end of "major combat" in the country. Today President Bush said that we will not leave Iraq until there is peace. Using the year 2000 U.S. murder rate, we can estimate that approximately 6,000 Americans have been murdered since this past May. They have not been murdered by Arab terrorists. They have been murdered by other Americans. What business do we have trying to bring peace to Iraq when we cannot achieve peace within our own borders? Since the end of the Vietnam War, approximately half a million Americans have been murdered by other Americans. Ten times the number of soldiers killed in Viet Nam.
So who is the real enemy? Every three months Americans kill more Americans than Osama Bin Laden did. The enemy is in our midst. And this is true around the world. Rarely do people travel across international borders to kill their enemies. We kill our neighbors. We kill the people closest to us. We murder our husbands, our wives, our children, our next door neighbors, our teachers, our co-workers. Angelinos kill Angelinos. Chicagoans kill Chicagoans. Israelis kill Palestinians and vice versa - the people that live closest to them. The closer we get to people the more we see the parts of ourselves that we have rejected that are just like them. And instead of taking responsibility for that part of ourselves, we project it onto others and reject the object of the projection.
It is so difficult to take a good hard look at our enemies and face up to the fact that what we hate in them is what we hate in ourselves. It is sickening to think that what I hate in another is a rejected aspect of myself, because then I have to confront that I am just like them. My ego does not want to accept that. But the people that we hate the most are the ones that give us the greatest opportunity for self examination and insight and, ultimately, self-love. The part of them that is broken and that we detest is the same part that is broken in ourselves. We think we are the opposite of our enemy, when in fact, we are exactly the same, and that sickens us to the point where we don't even want to imagine it. But the embrace of that person is where all possibility for our freedom lies. And the rejection of that person is where all suffering lies.
It is the pain of loving ourselves that we do not want to confront. So we have constructed an elaborate illusion. We want it all backwards so we have it all backwards. We are out hunting down foreign terrorist and foreigh terrorists are out plotting against us when we should all sit down, shut up, stay put in our own backyards and start to confront the hatred we have for our neighbor, our sibling, our co-worker. This will reveal to us the hatred we have for ourselves. This is the root of all violence.
We are always asking God for signs. The U.S. murder rate is God sending us data. It is God telling us that we hate ourselves. It is us telling us that we hate ourselves. The answer to world peace is not a mystery. It is just an answer we don't want to hear.
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Thursday, November 13, 2003
Friday, November 14th, 2003
Well, I started to write something about the protestors in South Korea, and I wanted to use a few words from Martin Luther King about the need, not fight your enemy, but to win your enemy's heart. Then I came across this writing of his and well, that was it - the beauty of it just breaks my heart. No way I'm writing anything better than this tonight. We need to take on this guy's mantle. We need a new and noble purpose - one as beautiful and daring as he and the people of his time embraced. That is where we will find joy. It's a bit long, but if you want some inspiration, check this out:
"A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men [sic] do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on.
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls "enemy", for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." A nation that continues year and year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities over the pursuit of war.
This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, clan, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. We can no longer afford to worship the God of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursed this self-defeating path of hate.
We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who posses power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves in the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
May our country, on the brink of war, take to heart the final refrain of 'America, the Beautiful': "America! America! God mend thine ev'ry flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law."
The words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered at Riverside Church, New York City, April 4th, 1967
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Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Thursday, November 13, 2003
"And after they had explored all the stars in the universe and all of the planets around each sun they realized they were alone, and they were glad, because they now knew they would have to become all of the things they had hoped to find." - Lanford Wilson
I love that thought. And while at first it might seem otherwise, it does not at all deny the existence of God. It affirms it. It simply says that God is here within each of us and all of us, waiting to be expressed fully by us. It says that God needs us as much as we need God.
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Wednesday, November 12, 2003
I was thinking about all of the women and men who have died in the wars of the world over the centuries. The barbaric bloodshed and horrific suffering in the ages of barbarism and in the modern age, where barbarism has a hundred euphemisms.
At some level, those people thought they were fighting for better world for themselves and their children. Whether it was the sailors in the Royal Navy dying of scurvy and being cut in half by swords, or the Spanish Armada, or the soldiers on the battlefields of Gettysburg and Vietnam, they all had a hand, for better or for worse, in delivering humanity to this place and to this moment.
Did they die only that we might kill one another in a nuclear war? Did they die only that our barbarism might be more technically sophisticated? Did they die only that women and men might continue to hate one another and compete with one another? Will the legacy of all their death and all their bloodshed and all that they gave be only more death and more bloodshed?
On this Veteran's Day, it seems to me that the only true honor we can pay to these people and their sacrifice is to create the world of peace that somewhere, in the depths of their being, they thought might one day be possible. For if all we are fighting for is that women and men might continue to fight - if we want more bloodshed even now only that our children might have more bloodshed tomorrow - if all we can see is a repetition of the past into eternity - if that is the limit of our vision - then all those women and men have died in vain. Is that what they would have wanted? At some point violence has to stop being the answer to violence. How long an experiment do we need? How long must we test the effectiveness of violence? We have had thousands of years of human history throughout which we have tested violence as an answer, and yet it has only gotten us more violence. We have the results of our experiment, and they show us emphatically that this way does not work.
So what should we do? Let our enemies walk all over us? Kill us? Perhaps the answer lies not in what to do with our enemies, but what to do with a psychology that creates enemies. For as long as there is an enemy there will be violence. If we could find a way to see others as something other than the enemy, we might find a path to peace.
The Zen masters talk about a state of pathology and fear where "all appearances arise as the enemy." We have reached that point. The enemy is everywhere now. Britain and Canada have just issued nationwide mandatory ID cards to guard against terrorists in their midst. The enemy might live next door. The enemy might be going through the metal detector ahead of us at the airport. Check everyone's shoes.
We create what we focus on. We manifest what we fear. We fear the enemy, and it is manifesting everywhere. And we see physical evidence of the enemy. The World Trade Center towers are gone. That is real. Soldiers are dying in Iraq. That is real. The enemy is not in our minds, we say. The enemy is real.
We don't need more weapons. We need to better understand our psychology, the projections of our minds, and the power of fear to create self-fulfilling prophecies. This must be the next evolution of humanity. Because the veterans did not all die just that there might be smarter ways of killing people in the future. They died that there might be smarter ways, period. They died to keep people from killing people in the future.
Should they have given their lives for anything less? And if we continue to kill one another, did they give their lives for nothing? Or worse, perhaps they give them for something worse than nothing.
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Tuesday, November 11, 2003
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Monday, November 10, 2003
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
I saw a story tonight on Lou Dobbs - one of the few guys in TV news that seems to talk in a calm voice and may actually tell the truth - about the "Race to the Bottom," as it's called. It's about how American companies search the globe for the cheapest labor. A lot of our t-shirts and sneakers and jeans and things get made in China or Bangladesh or other poor conutries by people working for as low as 3 cents an hour. The American lower middle class and the American poor, making $5 or $6 an hour, are pitted against the poorest people in the world in a competition for work.
As children many of us had a dream of a marvelous world where peace reigned and everyone had enough food and everyone was kind to one another. It would be one thing to say that we are reaching for that world and we have a ways to go. But the truth seems to be that we have abandoned that world and are headed in the direction of its opposite. We should be creating a world where everyone helps everyone else get to the top. The very idea of a race to the bottom requires an exceptionally dark imagination. No child would ever have come up with it on his worst day.
What good is it for us to be able to afford more t-shirts if we live in a world where people suffer in poverty and malnutrition to make it possible? What good is it to have seven pairs of jeans instead of two if children are enslaved as seamstresses in order to make it happen?
I remember when I was about twenty I did the est 6-day seminar. There was a 1- or 2-mile run each morning for the whole group. The goal was to see if we could decrease the average time it took the whole group to run the distance each morning. This of course meant that the fast runners would hang back and cheer on the slower runners. Little by little, each day, we improved the time of the whole group. That made us all so much happier than a new pair of jeans had ever come close to making any one of us.
That world is not so difficult to create. With tremendous stress, effort, and struggle, we have managed to create a world of death and obsession and conmpetition. How ironic that it would have been so much easier to create a world of life and happiness and cooperation.
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Sunday, November 09, 2003
Monday, November 10, 2003
We see so many homeless people on the streets. The cycnical voice in my head from time to time says to me, "this person doesn't really look homeless - I'll bet this guy's just acting and trying to con people." Or sometimes I'll see one of them holding a sign that says, "former veteran - please help," or "have two kids that need food - please help," and the cyncial voice says - "how do I know he's a former vet?," or "how do I now she has two kids?"
When I think my cynicism through, I inevitably end up with the thought, "whether the sign is true or not - whether the guy is homeless or not - the truth is he's definitely out here begging for money - there's no denying that." If he's a con artist, maybe I can make him a little less cyncial himself by saying "hello" and asking his name and giving him a little something. I know I wouldn't want to be so down on myslef that the only way I thought I could make a living was by conning people into thinking I was homeless. For sure, this can't be the dream this guy had for himself as a kid. And if he had no dream for himself as a kid, if he was just a real slacker with no ambition, and that's how he ended up here, all the more reason to show him a little love and dignity.
The way I figure it, nine times out of ten I'm not getting conned, and the one time I am, so what? Last time I heard they don't keep you out of heaven for being a little gullible. But if my chief objective in life becomes being so smart that no one ever pulls one over on me, then it seems to me I pulled one over on myself. Those are the kind of people that end up with the really angry looking faces - the permanent scowls cemented into their wrinkles when they're eighty-five. I'd rather have a smile cemented into my wrinkles when I'm eighty-five. I'd rather be the kind of person that gets laughed at every once in a while. Maybe if we were all a little less afraid of getting conned and a little more afraid of getting rigid the world would be a more beautiful place.
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Sunday, November 9, 2003
"Each of us, from the wealthy to the children I have seen across this country, their bellies bloated by starvation, we all share one precious thing, and that is the name 'American.' It is not easy to know what that means, but in part to be an American means to have been an outcast and a stranger - to have come to the exile's country - and to know that he who denies the outcast and the stranger still among us, he also denies America." Robert F. Kennedy
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