Tag Archives: human-rights

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Inspiring conversation on racism

A recent post on Buddhist Peace Fellowship’s Turning Wheel media has inspired really interesting conversation about racism, white privilege, and what we all can do to further the cause of peace and justice is this beleaguered country.

Posted by Katie Loncke, the essay on “Direct Action Gets the Goods” addresses the controversy over the disruption of a speech by Bernie Sanders at a Social Security/Medicare rally.

The article and most of the comments are excellent and all worth reading, as they show something of the pervasive nature of racism in our society. A comment by Eko Joshua Goldberg contains this gem:

To me, the real power of this action and the earlier disruption at Netroots Nation was not that it made Bernie Sanders’ campaign get real and improve its position on white supremacy, racism, and anti-black violence (although that does seem to have happened). It was the exposure of the reality of the present moment, both in showing the deep love, strength, and courage of black movements and black women to speak truth to power in the face of tremendous violence and repression; and also nakedly exposing white supremacy and racism among many white “progressives”

Eko is answering some who seemed to take umbrage at the disruption. Yes, even in this context, the progressive members of a socially engaged Buddhist organization, there is division and misunderstanding of the nature of white privilege.

Eko also provides this very revealing list of things that we all could do to be part of the solution:

For my part I vow to:
* work diligently to stop forgetting the reality of white supremacy, i.e., to see more clearly
* be honest about my white privilege and use it to help build anti-racist movements
* challenge systemic racism, colonialism, and white supremacy
* challenge interpersonal violence, hatred, and bigotry rooted in racist, colonial, and white supremacist thinking
* talk with other white people about how white supremacy, white privilege, racism, and colonialism plays out in our lives and in our communities, talk about what we can do to change that, and then follow through with action
* celebrate, appreciate, and promote the survival and liberation work being done by Indigenous people and people of colour, and provide solidarity/support in ways that are requested
* listen when I get called out for my deluded thinking and mistaken behaviours, and learn from my mistakes
* invite advice, critique, and comment

I’m thinking of adding his list to my morning vows.

P.S.: Another deeply moving comment from one of the participants, Dr. Amie Harper:

So, just let me know when it’s ‘okay’ to ‘disrupt’ the system of racism and anti-black violence that could kill me, my dad, my mom, and my beautiful lovely 1, 4, and 6 year old children. Let me know when you ‘approve’ of how I do it. Let me just sit here and wait for the ‘okay’ and cross my fingers that my brother will be okay. That my 6 year old son, while playing at the playground, won’t become the next Tamir Rice. Perhaps as I move to the next new job I get, hundreds of miles away, I won’t become the next Sandra Bland. Let me just sit here patiently and wait for those who are ‘irritated’ to let me know the CORRECT way for me to make sure we don’t inconvenience you with our lack of ‘civility’ in doing through the ‘proper measures.’ Let’s spend more time debating that than you actually doing something more. And please, let’s save the, “Breeze, you just don’t understand. For change to happen, the best way for [Black women] to be taken seriously is to go through ‘proper’ procedure, like voting or engaging with the political system another way, or getting ‘real’ jobs (because activism isn’t a ‘real job’ for some.”

Dr. Harper was inspired by the discussion to post the article from which this quote is taken on her blog.

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Maia on Charleston…

My friend and Zen teacher Maia Duerr has written what may be the best analysis of the whole Charleston tragedy and the racist milieu that gave rise to it.

Using the context of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, Maia breaks it down in ways that offer deep insight into the social and individual aspects of this national problem. Though it is Buddhist to the heart, it transcends that, and so is easily understandable and meaningful for all, Buddhist or not. Maia includes some wonderful quotes from Dr. King and Wendell Berry, as well as the Buddha and others, that elucidate her message beautifully.

These understandings are what we as a society must embrace if we hope to come out of this misery of racist lostness.

Dreams of Freedom.

“I believe it is essential for us to call this for what it is. This was not simply the act of one very disturbed young man. It has its roots in racial violence and distortions and inequities that have been part of the fabric of our country since its inception.”

 

Dreams of Freedom: Responding to Charleston

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We are (also) terrorists

Who are the terrorists?

If you ask most people this question, it seems that the near-universal response is “Islamic jihadists” or some variation of this. This is wrong on so many levels that it’s hard to summarize it. But let me try.

First, the facts show that jihadists are responsible for a tiny percentage of terrorism in the world. In fact, most terrorism – somewhere in the range of 90%+ – is carried out by by ethnic separatists rather than religiously motivated folks of any stripe. Think Progress details some of the data on this here. I have read other accounts of this with the same clear message: we have been duped into thinking of terrorism as an Islamic extremist thing since 9-11.

Second, even the jihadists are likely motivated more by the economic and social conditions of their lives than by Islam, even in its extreme versions. Chris Hedges expresses the radical notion that terrorism is:

…a harbinger of an emerging dystopia where the wretched of the earth, deprived of resources to survive, devoid of hope, brutally controlled, belittled and mocked by the privileged who live in the splendor and indolence of the industrial West, lash out in nihilistic fury.

We have engineered the rage of the dispossessed. The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism. And rather than understand the roots of that rage and attempt to ameliorate it, we have built sophisticated mechanisms of security and surveillance, passed laws that permit the targeted assassinations and torture of the weak, and amassed modern armies and the machines of industrial warfare to dominate the world by force. This is not about justice. It is not about the war on terror. It is not about liberty or democracy. It is not about the freedom of expression. It is about the mad scramble by the privileged to survive at the expense of the poor. And the poor know it.

Third, nearly everything the US and other wealthy developed nations are doing is making terrorism worse: more desperate, thus more likely and more extreme in nature. This is complex, but essentially our imperialism and our media sensationalism work together to create the conditions in which terrorism thrives.

For a more detailed, and nuanced, discussion of this, read my friend Gareth’s insightful new post, We’re Fueling Terrorism. Gareth also makes the important point that Muslim leaders are speaking out against Islamic terrorism, and includes a great essay from Rabbi Josh Lesser illustrating that much-ignored truth.

In addition to these ways in which we are creating terrorism on the mundane level, it is also true at the deeper level – what might be thought of as the quantum spiritual level – that we are the terrorists.

As Buddhist teachers (especially Thich Nhat Hanh) have been saying for many years, we are one with all that exists. We are the victim, we are the perpetrator. It is only our ignorance – born of the dualistic conditioning to which we are all subjected – that leads us to see ourselves as separate from the other.

We are the victims, we are the bombers; we are the imperialists, we are the dispossessed. The deeper we are able to sink into that realization, the greater our understanding of reality.

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Economic Injustice and Buddhist Teachings

A recent article by my online friend Maia Duerr, writing on the Turning Wheel Media site, addresses issues that are central to my own concerns recently: how do the Buddha’s teachings, and our practice, relate to the social, environmental and political problems that threaten to sink our society and indeed humanity?

This article focuses on Economic Injustice. Maia points out that the Buddha clearly gave his teachings a social dynamic:

We so often ignore the most basic teaching of the Buddha, that interconnection is the truth of things as they are. We forget that when Shakyamuni Buddha had his own awakening, from the get-go he put it in this collective context: “I and all sentient beings on earth, together, attain enlightenment at the same time.”

She goes on to point out that these social problems all have roots in our individual and collective ignorance of this interdependence, and the cravings and aversions that arise out of that ignorance.

(I would add again, the three poisons – rendered in the article as greed, anger, and delusion – I think are easier to understand as ignorance, attachment, and aversion. But that’s another post.)

Identifying racism, classism and corporate control of resources as some of the social manifestations of the three poisons, she says we’ll only begin to address these problems when we understand those roots.

As Thich Nhat Hanh suggested, when our practice begins to mature, we find ourselves ready to get up off the cushion and address the problems in front of us.

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Collective delusion can unite us

Legacies of Collective Delusion

Delusion is one of the three poisons and according to Buddha’s teaching, is the root of  our suffering.

But as Funie Hsu elucidates in her amazing article on Turning Wheel, delusion can also bring us together. It is a wonderful article that deserves to be read in full. I will try to present highlights here in the interest of motivating you to read it.

Delusion in the Buddhist teachings is understood as the fundamental error of our mind, the dualism in our thinking, the idea that we are separate from others, from nature, from everything – as I have discussed here previously.

Hsu, a former teacher and now doctoral student at UC-Davis, relates our personal delusion to that embodied in the systemic oppression of people of color and other ghettoized segments of the population.

Drawing on the ideas of Wayne Yang about colonialism and post+colonialism, Hsu expands the notion of delusion to include our social order.

…K. Wayne Yang (La Paperson) cautions that viewing segregation as a cause of inequality situates the problem in the ghetto and further stigmatizes it. “More fundamentally,” he notes, “this view assumes the zone ‘outside of the ghetto’ to be the place of universal rights.” The solution, then, cannot be to simply get rid of the ghetto (whether by redevelopment, gentrification or other means) because racial/economic segregation is not the core cause. Rather, Yang argues, it’s colonialism.

Yang says colonialism is ongoing, and that ghettos are actually colonies, or dislocated territories whose existence in critical to the continued existence of the so-called ‘normal’ parts of our society.

They are [colonies] because of their alienation from the other parts of the city, which cannot distinguish themselves without their ghetto counterparts. These colonies are “dislocated” territories with residents who have been involuntarily dislocated from mainstream society. The violence that youth of color, especially black and Latino youth, endure in these colonial neighborhoods are a product of both racial and economic displacement stemming from the ongoing process of American imperial domination.

Then Hsu makes the leap: “We can also begin to see the inherent reality of our systemic and human interconnectedness. Even our systems of oppression are reliant upon interdependent relations to create privilege.”

In other words, in spite of our delusion of separateness, our society relies on the essential interconnectedness among humans to create the class divisions that oppress us.

Indeed, our delusion [blinding us] to systems of oppression is a learned way of thinking, taught to us through many ‘benign’ lessons that illustrate seemingly benevolent relations. They distract us from understanding that individual lives are interconnected to broader (violent) systems and that individuals are connected to each other within these systems. In doing so, violence can be rendered an anomalous act, committed by one person against another, instead of being the effect of systemic oppression. When looking at our own communities, “the focus on ‘crime’ naturalizes violence to pathologized places, as something that ‘happens’ in the ghetto, rather then something that is ‘done’ to the people there…black on black violence is highlighted and institutional violence fades into the background.”

She ends with an amazing paragraph that presents this beautiful thought: “despite the widespread feelings of aloneness we all feel at different points in our lives, alienation—from the modes of production, from each other, from our hearts, from our environment—is a commonality that connects us to each other in our suffering and struggle. Though we try to delude ourselves by assuming an inherent duality from self and other, our interconnectedness remains a constant.”

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The illusion of separation

[The Signal Blanket: Danger! By Paul Goble, The Coming of the Iron Horse]

How can we live authentically, fully human, fully divine, following a path of right living, in this world of seemingly insurmountable problems – violence, hatred, degradation, destruction?

The problems in our world today all begin with our mistaken idea that we humans are special, and special in a very special way, special because we are separate from the rest of the natural world, separate from each other. We even divide mind from body within ourselves.

This notion of the discrete, separate, independently existing self is deeply embedded in our culture, including our language, and thus embedded in all our ways of thinking – so much so that it’s difficult to talk about it clearly. It’s even more difficult to get people to think about it clearly.

Just the words “nature” and “environment” seem to imply that this separation is normal, that this is “just the way it is”. We don’t see that these words encode a dualistic world-view, a basic assumption that has grown stronger and stronger as our societies took step after step away from the connections with our intimate nature, beginning with language and symbolic culture and expanding with quantification, agriculture, science, and industry.

I have addressed the issue of separation and connection in an earlier blog post, but this is such a difficult issue to discuss that I think it’s worth a second, mostly new, approach.

Why is the idea of separation important and how is it related to our discussion of living authentically?

First, because we believe ourselves to be discrete, separate, independently existing entities, we see “nature” – all other beings and processes – as “resources” – things for our human use, to be controlled and subjugated for our purposes, and having no essential worth or meaning otherwise. Thus, as this idea has grown in strength and influence over human culture, our impact on the earth has been more and more harmful. Today we callously and arrogantly threaten the very biosphere that supports our life.

Second, because of this idea of separate-ness, we think we can behave in pretty much any way we like towards other humans and not really suffer any consequences. Competition – the whole “every man for himself” ethos – arose out this notion, as did the ideas of possession and property. Which leads pretty quickly to murder, war, torture, genocide, and all the other forms of violence that are endemic today. (Only because we are threatened by some outside power if we don’t do “right” is there reason to do otherwise, so when that belief in an outside power wanes, all kinds of horrors arise.)

Third, this conception of self causes us to misinterpret most of what has come down to us in the spiritual realm. We set ‘God’ outside of matter, outside the very universe, in some realm of ‘other’; earlier humans clearly saw God as in matter, in everything. We misunderstand the idea of animism as meaning that things have a spirit when it really means everything is spirit. We think, or believe, that we have a soul, and this soul is what’s important so we disregard the body. Or else we don’t believe that we have a soul, and thus we live only for the body. Either way, we’re equally lost, because we don’t understand that we are soul, we are spirit. This separation of the sacred from the everyday world again leads us to feel free to exploit that world of matter, that world of “other” to our own ends without regard for our impact; it allows us to set up one version of morality in the spiritual realm and another one for the material.

Fourth, we are unable to have true compassion for others within this dualistic conception of self/other. What passes for compassion in most of our religious or secular conceptions today is a weak notion of what we “should” do – either out of fear of punishment or desire for rewards – in this life or the next – or out of a wish to elevate ourselves in our own eyes and the eyes of our brothers and sisters.

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All of these various ideas blend and intertwine in our ways of thinking and in our actions individually and collectively, creating a human culture that wreaks untold havoc on itself, on all the other living beings on the planet, and on the very underpinnings of life itself, ruining and despoiling not only the world but each other and ultimately ourselves.

To live authentically in this world, in this human culture, we must find a way to transcend its influence, to slough off the conditioning that tells us we must claw our way to the top of the pile, gathering more and more of the world unto ourselves, insulating ourselves from others and from the world out there with yet more and more comfort, security, pleasure and excess.

The first, essential, step is to see through the illusion.

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Authentic living: Does it matter?

If there were a madman standing somewhere – perhaps on some hidden island in the middle of some unknown ocean (thinking of Dr. No…) – with his finger on the Destruct button, sending live video out to all the world saying that everyone must accede to a set of demands else he will push the button, what would we do? What would be authentic life in that moment?

What if this fictional madman had a series of buttons, each labeled with one of the world’s major cities, and began pressing them one at a time, with subsequent video of the total destruction of each city following upon his press of each button, laying out for the world a timetable of sure destruction and a list of demands including such things as ‘no more plastic’, or ‘eschewing all non-renewable energy,’ or ‘destroying all weapons of war’ … you get the idea.

What would be the reasonable and prudent course of action in such a scenario?

The world we live in is in fact in just such a predicament, though the madman is not a Dr. No on some remote island, the madman is us.

The timetable is yet to be agreed on, and the means of our destruction is still a bit up in the air, but make no mistake, unless we make some drastic changes at some very deep levels, it will come.

“Sustainability” is a cruel hoax.

Even if we make all the changes currently on the table and considered “reasonable” by those in high positions, we will not be able to sustain anything close to how we are now living for more than a few decades… perhaps, if some technological breakthrough materializes, we might sustain our way of life for a century. Which would allow my grandchildren to have children, yes – but how long would those children survive?

What is usually presented as sustainability is more like “stretch-ability”.

A description of the kind of life that is truly sustainable indefinitely on this earth would be so radically different from our present lifestyle as to be unacceptable to most, perhaps even unrecognizable. Somewhere between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic, we left a truly sustainable paradigm behind. By the time agriculture made “civilization” possible, we were firmly set on the course to the economic polarization, authoritarian regimes, and environmental consumption of today’s world.

So yes, we face sure destruction, yet we temporize and hem and haw and argue about the prudent course, and we stroll about on the deck smoking Cuban cigars and enjoying the evening breeze even as the iceberg looms.

So yes, I am asking, what constitutes an authentic life when faced with the mass destruction, maybe even the extinction, of our progeny, perhaps even of life on earth.

Perhaps I am too audacious. Perhaps I am arrogant as well, to think I have anything to say about authentic living. But I persist.

I offer these words in a spirit of humility and gratitude, realizing that I could be very off the mark with all or any of it, and acknowledging my great debt to the thousands of teachers, writers, thinkers, friends, enemies, and lovers who have helped me along the path to this point.

I also offer these words out of serious, ongoing love and concern for the well-being of the people and all the life-forms on this imperiled planet.

This concern is the real motivation for writing, for sharing, for perhaps at times sounding insistent. The situation is dire everywhere you look. Things are ‘going to hell in an egg basket’ as the old folks I grew up with said. The economic, social and environmental crises threaten to collapse the world our children and grandchildren depend on for their very lives. Is this not sufficient motivation for speaking out, for risking a strident tone?

Indeed, I believe we all need to begin to speak up on behalf of life on the earth, to speak up and to step out of our comfort zones, to change our ways of thinking and living, and to demand – as non-stridently as possible perhaps – that others take note of the impending disasters we face and to behave appropriately.

The changes we can make in our own lifestyles, while significant in many ways, are not enough. Even if all the “environmentally conscious” people of the world made all the changes they could “reasonably” be expected to make in their lifestyles – indeed, even if we, this tiny minority, really radically simplified our lives and reduced our consumption and all those things, it would not be enough to avert the environmental crises. Even if all of the progressives really got active in the political and social systems and took to the streets with the Occupy movements (Which I love!) around the world, it wouldn’t be enough.

There are just not enough of us.

So the strategy must be broader and stronger and more radical if we hope to make a difference in how things proceed.

The most important thing for us to do is to help others – our families, our friends and neighbors, our enemies in the culture wars, the great unwashed, the roiling masses, everyone! – come to see the true nature of the situation. This won’t be easy, because everything else is stacked against that seeing. Intense creativity will be required if we are to reach enough people.

So how do we help others to see this critical truth? Yes, speaking out and being strong examples is important. But again, it’s not enough. People generally change deeply set beliefs and ways of life only after powerful emotional experiences, not from being convinced by rational arguments, persuasive Power Points notwithstanding. It’s difficult to construct powerful emotional experiences for others, but the closest we can come to it is through the power of Story.

We must all begin to dig deep within ourselves to find the most powerful stories we can create, stories that will communicate at a real, undeniable emotional level the truths that we are coming to know. Truths that will help others to access the new understandings that power our lives, the new visions that give us hope, the new freedom from conventional living and thinking that offer the possibility for a new world, a beautiful world where humans recover the true ways of life that once were as natural as breathing.

The first step in the process is to see where we went wrong: separation.

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Beyond the pale

During college, as my awareness of the world of events and the world of ideas grew, my drift away from the faith of our fathers became a waterfall, and an intro philosophy course pushed me over it. I suppose much of my original skepticism was fueled by objection to the moralistic code that came along with church, but by this time I had cleared that hurdle and found an even stronger basis for morality in rational humanism.

I began to study history and to read widely, and realized at some point that I no longer had any doubts about my ideas concerning the existence of God. It just seemed clear to me that it was a pretty foolish notion. It wasn’t so much that it couldn’t be proved, it was just that it didn’t seem to fit the case of existence as I had experienced it.

This created something of a break with my family, though they didn’t stop loving me or accepting me, they just were very unhappy with me. It was just something that my parents and all their contemporaries found incomprehensible. They had never expected a child of theirs to go beyond the pale. I was the first among the cousins, as far as I know, to openly flout the whole Judeo-Christian tradition in this way, and they were just shocked and disappointed.

But I managed to graduate despite my moral decay, and found myself in a moral quandary. Having graduated and passed my Army physical, and with no exemptions left, I was prime draft bait for the Vietnam War, as it was called. I considered myself a pacifist, but without a religious community to support me I had no basis to claim exemption due to opposition to war.

Not that being a Baptist would have helped a whole lot. It was pretty much “Quakers only” in the pacifist exemption department. (I had never heard of the Koinonia Community in Georgia at that point.) I considered Canada for some time, but I just couldn’t go that far. It wasn’t the geographical distance that stopped me, but the personal and emotional distance that step would have put between my family and me. Especially my father. Daddy was a WWII veteran, a navigator in the Army Air Corps, and spent 15 months in a German POW camp.

Leaving the Baptist Church was one thing, leaving the country to avoid the war was another. Maybe it was the cumulative effect. Maybe it was all those years of war stories. I just couldn’t do it.

I began to look into the Air Force – Daddy’s preference – and though I was drafted by the Army, was able to enlist in the Air Force and eventually get a slot in OTS, as a pilot. I foolishly thought, oh cool, become an Air Force pilot, then I won’t have to go to the war. Not.

It was 1969 when I entered, and they were going through pilots like popcorn in a movie theater. Well before my year of pilot training was over, I knew I was headed for Vietnam. I was just praying they wouldn’t ask me to drop any bombs or shoot at anyone.