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Saturday, November 29, 2003
Saturday, November 29, 2003
Yesterday I wrote about how I thought it was pretty cool of President Bush to leave the comfort of his ranch to go visit the troops in Iraq. Granted, Air Force 1 is not exactly slumming it, but I still thought it was cool.
I was reminded last night that cool and visionary are two different things. What would have been visionary would have been to hold a town meeting with a couple of hundred Iraquis. That would have sent an entirely different message. Not one of a segregated caring, but one of universal caring. This is not to take back my compliment of the President. Not at all. But simply to make a distinction.
We are not very practiced at doing visionary things. But with every choice that confornts us, there is a bad option, a good option, a cool option, and a visionary option. With respect to the defense budget, for instance. A visionary option might be to make a surprise announcement to the world that the United States is going to cut its defense budget in half and use the extra $200 billion to find a cure for the global AIDS epidemic in the next five years. That would not just make the rest of the world think differently about America. That would make America think differently about America. That would make us proud of ourselves in a way we cannot even fathom. And it would light up the world. It would awaken something dormant in our world right now: love.
Some people might say, why is it always America's responsibility to do these things? It isn't. We don't have to do that. We are under no obligation to do that. All I am saying is that it would be visionary. And we might discover it to be a very gratifying thing to be the most powerful nation on earth because we are the most visionary nation on earth, instead of because we have the most military and economic might. America has a visionary legacy. The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were visionary in the 1700s. Radically so. What radical vision do we have today? What was radical three hundred years ago is commonplace today. We cannot continue to rest on the laurels of Jefferson. We must be Jefferson in the 21st century. I don't mean quote Jefferson. I mean stand for radical ideals the way that he did. And perhaps what is radical for a nation built on Jefferson's vision of freedom is a new vision of universal love and compassion.
I have alwas felt that just because we admire our heroes doesn't mean they admire us. Jefferson might much rather have us writing a declaration of universal compassion than building statues and monuments in his name. He might much rather have us being visionary than avoiding responsibility for it by applauding visionaries long gone.
There is always a visionary choice. Our task in this time and place must be to muster the courage to look for it, and to develop the character and the strength to choose it. This is the task of a patriot in the 21st century.
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Friday, November 28, 2003
Friday, November 28, 2003
Those of us who think of ourselves as peace activists are often prone to question whether President Bush has any true desire for or commitment to world peace. He's a very easy target. It's easy for me as a writer to use him as the polar opposite of Gandhi. It's easy for me to catch the wave of the liberal press - to write about sweetheart Haliburton deals and how the war in Iraq was all about oil. And maybe it was, but I don't really know that - not first-hand - not for sure. I wasn't in the rooms when the decisions were made.
The truth is I have never met the man, and if I gave creedence to everything that's written in the press about him - even the liberal press - then I'd be giving creedence to all of the unjust, inaccurate, and outright false things the media wrote about me over the years.
I have to say that that was a pretty cool thing he did yesterday, flying over to Iraq in a darkened Air Force One to spend time with the troops. I don't believe in the war or in the violence, but that's beside the point. AndI could buy into my own cynicism and say that the visit was all about PR, and that it didn't really come from authentic feelings for the troops, but that's not how I felt about it. For whatever reason, it moved me. That was an authentic feeling for me, and I try to trust that.
My sense is that George Bush feels he's on a mission, and that he feels he is carrying the mantle for world peace. I think that he thinks that he knows better than the peace activists. I think he probably feels he is protecting us from ourselves. We might think he's wrong, but hey, if he thinks he's protecting us from ouselves, he still thinks he's protecting us. I just think he believes that the only real way to world peace is through the threat of force and yes, violence.
Those of us who think of ourselves as peace activists think that there is a better way. I believe we are right. I feel we are right. But perhaps we don't need to be right at the expense of our kindness and compassion toward the President. Believing we are right doesn't mean that we have to close our minds to the possibility that he does heroic things sometimes, or that his heart might be in the right place, or that some of his ideas might have merit. Because if we close our minds to that - if we have a rule that nothing he does can be called good by us and that everything he does must be called evil, then we have no more an open mind toward him than we believe he does toward terrorists and the like.
The point is, I think George Bush has a heart. He is a human being made by God like the rest of us. How could he not have a heart? He has a wife who loves him and whom he loves. He has two kids that he loves. He is loved by his parents and he loves them back. He has struggled with alcoholism and his own pain. And we could definitely argue that he risked his life yesterday. I may not believe his methods are enlightened, but I take my hat off to what he did yesterday. I salute him. Not as the Commander-in-Chief, but as a human being. It is not my place to regard him as anything less.
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Thursday, November 27, 2003
Thursday, November 27, 2003
Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I hope you have a beautiful day. I went to see "Love Actually," last night. I highly recommend it. It is a great reminder of all the love that exists in the world alongside all of the hatred and violence - the love that shows up at the airports on a day like today when family members re-connect, when grandparents embrace their grandchildren, and when people gather with the ones they love the most and who bring them a sense of comfort and belonging. It is a reminder of how simple love is and how readily available it is to us at any moment, if we will just relax our defenses enough to let it in and let it out.
I remember the power of love I felt when I did the est training back in 1979. I remember the power of the reconcilliations that were going on in the room - like a grown man who hadn't spoken to his father in ten years getting on the phone with him and telling him he was sorry and that he loved him. Watching the tears pour out of his face and watching the burden of ten years of rigidity and hatred fall off his shoulders, and his face lighting up like a 5 year-old. There were dozens upon dozens of things like that that hapened in that room. The simple power of love breaking free of the shackles of the ego and the mind.
I remember when my sister and I were 4 and 5 and we would get in these horrendous fights with Bobby and Diane - our two little best friends who lived next door. "Our father's smarter than your father," we would say. "Our father could beat up your father," they would rebut. And for an hour we hated each other. But back then we had the power to make up. Our hatred would evaporate more easily. We'd walk over to their yard or they'd walk over to ours and we'd say, "you wanna be friends again?" And I remember how much I used to love saying "you wanna be friends again?," and the good feeling I got shaking Bobby's hand, and the instant reconcilliation that followed, and how everything that preceded it was forgotten on the spot, and knowing that this feeling of warmth and friendship was my true, natural feeling for him. And we'd all run off and bake Easy-Bake Oven cookies or build a go-kart together or whatever, and it was all so easy compared to trying to hold up and hold onto the position that our father was better than theirs.
Love is not some spineless new age alternative to the military industrial complex. Love is what we all used to feel almost all the time when we were with our five year-old friends. We used to be able to cycle from hate to love with ease, the way summer cycles to autumn. But as adults we seem to lose that ability. We get stuck in hate and our own righteousness, and stay there for years upon years, depriving ourselves of that wonderful feeling of reconcilliation - depriving others of the gift of that simple little question - "you wanna be friends again?" Today I'm grateful that God gave us love and my prayer is that S/He will show me how to get back to the facility I had with it when I was five.
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Here's a new little feature I might try out from time to time. Just click on the icon below. Happy Thanksgiving...
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Wednesday, November 26, 2003
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
The new global AIDS statistics were recently released. An estimated 3 million people died of AIDS worldwide in 2003. That amounts to 8,219 people every day, or 342 people every hour, or close to six people every minute.
About 5 million new people were infected with HIV in 2003. This amounts to 13,698 people every day, or 570 every hour, or 10 people every minute.
Most of this suffering is occurring in the developing countries of the world, and mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Two days ago Congress approved a new U.S. defense budget of $401 billion. The Los Angeles Times reports this morning that the money spent fighting HIV and AIDS in developing countries "has grown by 50% from last year, to $4.7 billion in 2003." This is about 1% of the new U.S. defense budget.
Three million people dying of AIDS is such a huge number that it becomes an abstraction. On the other hand, a $401 billion defense budget is an abstraction too, but that doesn't keep human beings from manifesting it. Can you imagine the resources we would put up if there were a brutal dictator who was killing 3 million people a year, every year, year after year? Why is the brutality of AIDS any less a priority? The real question is, why is it 100 times less a priority?
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Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
The thought manifests as the word;
The word manifests as the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character;
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings...
As the shadow follows the body,
as we think, so we become.
From the Sayings of the Buddha
(As printed in "Awakening the Buddha Within," by Lama Surya Das)
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Sunday, November 23, 2003
Monday, November 24, 2003
There is an ad out for the new Sony plasma TV. It has choir voices or high strings or some kind of angelic instrumentation playing while a group of people run on the beach. They arrive at this supernatural kind of wall, much larger than the ocean. They stop, tilt their heads, drop their jaws, and look up in awe and bewilderment at it, as if it were divine or something. They step back slowly from it, humbled, afraid. They have never seen anything like it. It is revealed to us that on the other side is a guy - a normal 203 consumer - that they can't see watching them on his new Sony plasma TV in his living room, as they step back away, and the ad says something like, "so close to reality, you won't be able to tell the difference. Then there's another ad out for a BMW SUV, where these little animated cherubs swoop down from heaven and line up in formation along the sides of the vehicle, flying at its side, guiding it along the road - sort of the way guardian angels used to guard God.
If we had any doubt that our culture idolizes material things these kinds of ads set us straight. The more you observe it, the more you see how products are being marketed to us as divine. They are presented to us in such a way as to make us feel incomplete if we don't have them - the way we used to feel incomplete without God. You don't belong if you don't have these things. You are not loveable. It is the slow but steady replacement of God with electronics and cars and jewelry. And the replacement of God's love with messages of inadequacy.
There is nothing wrong with these things. Cars are really fun and plasma TVs are really cool and I couldn't write these blogs without my laptop. But we must be vigilant now that the balance does not tip over, with all priority given to these things and none given to God. It should be the other way around. We are going in the wrong direction and gathering momentum as we go. We are idolizing ourselves and the material things we can create and consume. We have to slow down the cars and turn off the plasma televisions so we can spend time with God and spend time with our friends and spend time with ourselves.
God must feel awfully lonely these days. We must feel awfully lonely. And no car or plasma TV is going to take that feeling away. Only love will do that. And only God can give it to us.
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November 23, 2003
So many man-made catastrophes and institutions have turned us off to the idea of God. All of the wars fought over the centuries in the name of God. All of the words that the telvision evangelists put in God's mouth. All of the Biblical edits made by men over the centuries to turn their ideas into the ideas of God and to control those around them. All of the vitriol of our modern religous institutions in God's name. All of the talk of love in the pulpits and all of the absence of love in the actions.
None of this is God's fault.
If we allow the fanatics and the Pharisees to rob us of God then on what shall we rely? On ourselves? On our own intellect and cleverness? On our own ideas about how the world should work? That does not seem to have worked, does it? If we deny the existence of God simply because we have been turned off to the idea of God by those who have twisted God's love, then where shall we find love? If we cannot know that we are loved by something greater than us then where can we find a greater love with which to love others?
The answers to all these problems that face us cannot be solved by human beings alone without some connection to a will more loving and creative than our own. President Kennedy said, "Our problems are man-made, therefore they can be solved by man." (Excuse the male references). This is true and this is not true. We have created our own problems, out of our selfishness, out of our hatred, out of our violence, out of our stupidity. We have created these problems out of fear that we are not loved, and that if we don't take care of number one then no one else will. We can solve these problems, yes. We can solve them together. But in order to work together to solve them we will need to recognize that God's gift to us is one another, and we will need to ask God to give us the grace to see one another as gifts to each other, for without that grace from God we will contnue to fight one another and to see one another as the enemy. It is not enough to say to myself, "I should love my enemy" if I feel no capacity to love my enemy. I must ask God to help give me the capacity to love my enemy. This is the gift God has for us that we are missing on our own. This means we must ask God for help. This means we must ask for this grace. This means we must humble ourselves instead of elevate ourselves. That is what it means to sk for help. This means we must have patience instead of driving forward with our own answers. This mean we must stand in doubt instead of in our own intellectual confidence.
God's greatest gift to us is God. To deny the existence of the true God because of the false God that has been created by men (and women) gives creedence to that false God. Their denial of the real God becomes our denial of the real God. In either case, God is missing, and we live in a Godless world.
Let us make it our task to open the doors of our hearts to God. To welcome God into the place where we have shut God out. God is innocent in the matter of the damage that men have done with their false gods. Let us not shut the real God out of our lives for a crime God did not commit. Let us not regard it as cool to be ambiguus on the matter of our belief in God. Let us not regard it as a sign of our inteligence that we don't need a God to rely on, but rather as a matter of our foolishness. Let us not be forced into a foolish belief by people who have created a foolish god. I believe that God is infinitely loving and infinitely humble. I believe that God is waiting to shower upon us the grace we need to solve our problems together as one common humanity.
God is just waiting to be asked.
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