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Saturday, November 22, 2003
Saturday, November 22, 2003
There was an ad on television for the Lincoln Navigator an hour ago or so. It said, "this holiday season, get everything on your wish list," and then it listed all the features the Navigator comes loaded with. The sad thing about the ad is that our materialistic society has reduced our wish lists to things like a DVD and heated leather seats. Those have become the only kinds of wishes we think can actually come true. So we settle for them. Our horizons have been cut off at our pocket books. Small personal pleasures occupy the outer reahes of our imaginations. They define a successful life. "He who dies with the most toys wins." We actually think that sick bumper sticker is true. Or at least we function as if it were.
We are meant for so much more. Our birthright gave us a diferent wishlist. Peace in our world. Joy in our realtionships with our mothers and fathers, our sisters and brothers, our children. Reconciliation of differences with our enemies. The end of world hunger. The travel of human beings to Jupiter and Mars and to other galaxies. The reforestation of the Rain Forests. The possibility of kindness as the organizing principle for society. Imagine if it were the wish and the dream and the commitment of Los Angeles to end hunger within its borders in the next ten years. Imagine if it were the wish and the commitment of the Bush administration to find a cure for AIDS in the next five years, no matter what the cost or how difficult the effort. Imagine if we had real dreams instead of fiberglass ones.
God wants so much more for us than a Lincoln Navigator. Isn't it ironic that we do not dare to imagine the world that God has imagined for us. Isn't it ironic that the holiday season celebrates the existence of a love and intelligence infinitely greater than us yet we think we know better than It does.
The philosopher Nietchze once wrote, "I have always envisioned a God that dances." I believe that God dances. It is our great task to free ourselves from the limits of our materialistic society and break free into the miraculous world that God intended for us - a world of love, beauty, compassion and joy - free of weapons and violence and animosity - a world where we can dance with God, and have reason to. A world where dancing erupts out of the spontaneous joy of living and not the artificial stimulation of Special K and Ecstacy. We actually have a drug called Ecstacy, because we don't seem to be able to create real ecstacy without one. This is the real price of the Lincoln Navigator. Don't let the sticker fool you.
We need new wishes and new wish lists. How pale a Lincoln Navigator would appear to the vivid and vital world we could create together. We must lift up our eyes. We must set them on a greater horizon. How much greater it would be to walk hand in hand wih our eyes wide open through the world of our dreams than to drive in a new Lincoln Navigator with the windows rolled up through the world of our limitations.
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Thursday, November 20, 2003
Friday, November 21, 2003
The media has been running stories all week on the John F. Kennedy assassination 40 years ago. "The Men Who Killed Kennedy," "The Kennedy Conspiracy," and literally nine or ten other half hour or hour long specials on the event. You cannot turn on the TV without either seeing one of the shows or seeing an ad for one of them.
Then today CNN runs an ad for yet another show - "Why America is Fascinated with the Kennedy Assassination." America isn't nearly as fascinated with it as the media is. Just because the media puts ten shows on the air that fill the time slots with Kennedy assassination hoopla doesn't mean that we are fascinated with it.
The media forces an agenda down our throats and then makes us believe that it is our agenda. Makes us believe that the things they are covering are the things we want them to cover, so it's no longer their fault that superficiality rules the airwaves, because we, they claim, are the ones clamoring for it.
The media has us all focused on Michael Jackson's mug shot and John Kennedy's 40 year-old autopsy photos while the pictures of the real problems in our world go unpublished. We need to take this power away from the media and begin setting the agenda ourselves. We need to be tracking the real news - the progress we are making or not making toward ending hunger, toward improving education, toward ending violence, toward eradicating disease, and the other important things. We need to raise the bar back up to the level of our intelligence, up from the low level idiocy that is the upper limit of how the media treats our intelligence.
The world we really live in is not the one we think we live in. The world we think we live in is the one the media gives us. The assassination of reality is what is really fascinating about what's on television these days.
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Wednesday, November 19, 2003
Thursday, November 20, 2003
I wanted to write some more about this question of violence. Is it apropriate to use violence against a violent regime? Is it possible that violence in that context could actually lead to world peace? These are questions I raised yesterday. To distill it down even further, the question is, is it possible that we are slowly eliminating all of the brutal dictators and despots from the world, and that once we do - once the world is rid of these bad apples - can the world finally have peace? If that is true, isn't it OK to use violence as a last resort to deal with these people - people like Hussein who brutalizes and tortures his own people - people like Hitler who killed millions of innocent people? If not, what is the alternative? To simply let these madmen kill people?
The answer seems obvious. Logic seems to dictate that violence in this context could lead to world peace. History seems to support the idea that slowly but surely we are ridding the world of opressive dictatorships - that the world is on a march toward democracy - and that in that environment these evil people will not be able to survive much longer. We got rid of Hitler. We got rid of Noriega. We got rid of Molosovitch. We got rid of Hussein. We seem to be getting closer to a world where all of these evil people are gone and we can all live in peace. I have to admit to being swayed by the idea myself.
But there are problems with this logic. First, one of the major problems is the assumption that the enemy will approach from the outside. Abraham Lincoln warned about this. He said that the enemy will come from the inside. Our peace-keeping U.S. military (and I do not mean that sarcasticaly - under the logic above, it is our military that will create this peace for us) trained Timothy McVeigh. Fueled his violence. Taught him about bombs. Look at what Timothy McVeigh did. He acted out of his own anger and violence and killed 200 Americans.
Second, the logic is also based on the assumption that the threat is from evil, unpredictable dictators with weapons of mass destruction. But the damage that a nuclear bomb could do coming from North Korea is nothing conpared to the damage that a computer virus could do to the information infrastructure of the world. Look at what happened just a few months ago with the worm virus. Presumably this was created by someone with tremendous anger toward Bill Gates and someone with a tremendous sense of violence in their heart.
Third, the logic is based on saving the world from some kind of singular apocolyptic event or series of events. The logic is based on preventing wars among nations. But violent crime is a threat to peace every bit as much as a nuclear bomb. It does not much matter to me if we have world peace and then my son is murdered in a convenience store hold-up two blocks from my home. In that case, there is no world peace in my world. It is the logic of deterrence that gives us a society that has guns and guns are at least part of why people get murdered in convenience store hold-ups.
What is at the root of it all is violence. Violence inside Timothy McVeigh. Violence inside computer hackers. Violence inside convenience store robbers. The desire to protect ourselves from the violence of others that has us manufacturing weapons for self-defense.
I think we are kidding ourselves if we believe that the elimination of Saddam Hussein is putting us on a path toward peace. The sheer existence of guns and militia contribute to the culture of violence. It contributes to a "tough-guy" culture. That contributes to a "tough-guy" attitude in high school. That contribute to things like what happened at Columbine. Who knows what anger and violence festers in the hearts of people that are in our very midst? Who knows what they are capable of?
I want to try to continue to articulate this. This is an awkward attempt at a beginning. My basic sense is that a culture that does not deal with violence in the soul can never have peace. "He that lives by the sword shall die by the sword." We must look at what creates the Husseins and the McVeighs and the Hitlers. How do they get to be this way? What hatred did they endure as children turned them into the monsters they became? And what hatred is being inflicted n children right now that will make them the convenience store thieves and computer hackers and Husseins of tomorrow? And what about our society is causing that?
We spend $300 billion on the military while children starve around the world and while our own children in America lack an adequate education. That lack of opportunity will funnel these kids into crime and violence. These kinds of priorities teach the children that this is a cold hard world. And so the conditioning begins right there. What a paradox that the money we spend to prevent violence by violence is contributing to the violence of the future.
I keep coming back to this inescapable sense that if love is not the first priority then nothing will be able to save us. It is a crisis of love that confronts us. Picking off evil dictators one at a time, while hatred festers in the hearts and minds of millions of people around the world, is a backward approach. It is the easy answer. It is not the real answer. And if we find ourselves one day stumbing through the rubble of Armageddon, we will wish that we had undertaken the difficult task of coming up with the real answer.
We know how to build a military. But how do we build love? This is an important question.
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Wednesday, November 19, 2003
President Bush gave a major foreign policy address this morning in Great Britain. His doctrine basicaly distills down to this: we must confont violent dictators with violence if diplomacy does not work. We must not, for the sake of convenience and stability, allow brutal regimes to fester. This speech is valuable in that it states the problem well. What are we to do with those who would brutalize others? Are we to turn the other cheek? Are we to allow them to create chaos out of our world? Are they the only way that chaos could come about? Is violence apropriate? Is violence an answer? Is violence, paradoxicaly, a way to peace?
Who do we look to for answers? Do we look to Jesus and Gandhi and Buddha? Do we look to Churchill and Truman? Do we look at the example of Hitler and the Second World War? Do we look at the example of Reagan and the fall of the Soviet Unon?
And what is our objective? Is our objective to preserve our way of life, as the President stated? What is that way of life? What is it that we are preserving? Is our objective our own survival in this lifetime? Is our objective democracy around the world? Is it possible that even a vision as large as democracy around the world is too limited a vision? Could it be that our objective is love, and we don't really know it? And is it too early for love? Jesus did not feel it was to early for love. Gandhi did not. Were they right? Must we pass through a continuing period of violence in our evolution - to a place where we frst establish democracy, before universal love can be achieved?
These are the questions that confront us.
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Monday, November 17, 2003
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
I was just writing a long letter to a friend about politics and God and things and I realized the more I wrote how many more questions I have than answers. I feel more authentic and real with questions than I do with answers, because the truth is, I don't have many answers. Sub-consciously, I think that I'm supposed to have answers, and all too often, against my better judgment, I express them. I feel least real giving out answers. I feel more real when I ask questions. And I feel most real when I just shut up.
There is a famous Zen saying: "Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know." But it was always a paradox to me. Still is. Because whoever was the one telling it, by their own admission, didn't know.
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Sunday, November 16, 2003
Monday, November 17, 2003
There is a billboard out right now for Nextel that says, "I do, therefore I am." It is next to another one that says, "If you want a fashion accessory, get a poodle," meaning, your cell phone should not be a fashion accessory, it should be a productivity device. And there is a third one next to that which says, "Action accessory." The new Nextel slogan cuts right to the chase. It is, simply, "Done." "Nextel. Done." Nextel takes themselves quite seriously, and the authoritarian voice of their advertisements lets you know that you should take all of this quite seriously too, that is, the culture of doing and action and getting things done, at any cost. There are no longer ten commandments. There is only one: get things done. And their billboards are everywhere right now.
Nextel's message couldn't be more dangerous. My vision for myself is not to be a human doing. It is to be a human being. Being silent. Being understanding. Being at peace. Being in communion with God. Being helpful. Being real. Being. This culture of doing that is forced upon us does violence to our nature. This idea that we will find our happiness in doing has no basis in reality. The idea that we will find our happiness in having more things as a result of doing more things is even farther off base.
In silence all of the doing comes into perspective. In silence the awesome mystery of life begins to make its presence known to us. In simply being - being patient - being faithful - miracles reveal themselves. Life becomes less difficult. Ease - ier. In silence there is less dis - ease. In being we are able to see how the inconceivable God guides us and assists us along a path - not, perhaps the path we want to be guided down - not, perhaps a path where we will get more material things, but along a path where we will get to be more real and more serene and less unhappy.
Where Nextel is most off base is in their new slogan. "Done." We want to get everything done. We want to cross some final finsih line. But our work is never done, at least so long as we are here, and perhaps even thereafter. That is why now is all that matters. Because this point in the future, where we have everything on our to-do list checked off - where everything is done - never comes. So we can forget about that. We can forget about trying to get it all done. This means that we can actually stop. Rest. Breathe. Be. Because no one is going anywhere. No one is ever going to get it all done. So there is no need to keep up with everyone who operates under the illusion that they will. We can relax. Laugh at ourselves. We can be. We can en - joy one another. En - joy the trees and the sky and the night and the color of our own eyes and the sun and the people we love. We can be free of the need always to do. We can be alive.
This is the most interesting thing - that there is a kind of death in doing - a kind of absence of life - an oblivion to real living - an automaticity that blinds us to the awesome mystery of life in the obsession with action. Life actually reveals itself when we are at rest enough to regain consciousness. That is not to say that we cannot be while we are doing. It is to say that we must be first. Only then can we do things in a way that brings fulfillment to us. Our culture has it backwards. Nextel and the others tell us that if we do enough, one day we will be happy. The truth is if we will give ourselves permission to be happy first, then there is no limit to the miraculous things we can do.
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Sunday, November 16, 2003
In the words of John Gatto, New York City Teacher of the Year, from Jack Kornfield's "The Art of Forgiveness and Peace:"
"Think of the things that are killing us as a nation: drugs, brainless competition, recreational sex, the pornography of violence, gambling, alcohol, and the worst pornography of all - lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a religion."
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