A Few Thoughts

I read something today that I wanted to share. It is an excerpt from a book by Ram Dass and Mirabi Bush entitled “Compassion in Action.” As I have thought about this today, certain aspects of my life and the world around me have crystallized and become clearer as has a deep desire to see my little girls grow up and live in a world that is much different than the one we are creating for them today. This feeling was strengthened tonight after watching (by chance) an excellent PBS documentary on Joan Baez and her amazing career as an activist for peace and musician and singer. Here is the excerpt:

A leading antinuclear activist was speaking. I felt the caring in her heart as she spoke of her children and the desire that they grow up in a world free from deadly radiation. In her voice was melded the cry of the mother, the anger of the outraged feminist who was furious with the men who had gotten us into this predicament, the urgency of the pediatrician-scientist who saw probabilities with an apprehensive eye. Her message was clear: "Fear! Urgency! Act!" I could feel her charisma and the immediacy and relevance of her message drawing the crowd into agreement.

Hearing her words from my meditation cushion, I sensed her mind pulling me into a definition of reality that seemed constricted, tight. I felt that she was engaging the audience through their insecurities. Noble as her intent might have been, she was manipulating her audience as "them." What she was doing appeared old-fashioned to me. I knew that it is possible to engage an audience as "us" quietly seeing together how things are, leaving to each person the responsibility for subsequent individual actions.
I became sad. Maybe getting people politically activated requires fanning the flames of fear and urgency, of moral outrage and the need to do something. Perhaps you and I just opening to how it is in the universe, then doing whatever we see fit about it, trusting one another to act in accordance with our deepest truth, is not enough. But I don't believe that. If we must give up our respect for one another's inner wisdom and coerce and manipulate one another for the greater good, then it seems a rather hollow victory.

There was another thing that made me sad as I listened to the speeches. I felt sad that we were still polarizing the world into the good guys and the bad guys, then getting our adrenaline rush from feelings of righteous indignation. Weren't we ready to acknowledge that reality is a conspiracy in which we all play our part? Didn't the planes and cars that we used to get to this rally use the very fossil fuel that feeds the fear-and-greed-driven economic political policies that dominate the mind connected to the hand that could push the button that would create the nuclear conflagration?

In the many times since Rocky Flats that I have spoken at peace rallies or participated in demonstrations, I have remembered Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., who opposed injustice, irrationality, and lack of caring with firmness and confrontation. Yet they did so with open hearts, with a compassion that embraced all us poor, misguided mortals, friend and foe alike. Gandhi said, "The British must be forced to leave India, but I want them to leave as friends." And King said, "Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend."

Looking at our world and my life after reading this and watching the story of the incredibly brave people in the civil rights and peace movements in the documentary, I was struck by just how pervasive violence, and the language of violence is in our culture. We have a War in Iraq, a War in Afghanistan, threats of War with Iran, a War on Drugs, a War on Terrorism, a War on Poverty, War on Cancer etc….and nothing ever changes and even less gets solved. Millions of kids starve to death every year in a world with the means and technology to feed them. There are precious little girls just like mine with parents that love them every bit as much as I love mine that are dying of hunger or being bombed by my government’s bombs. The only difference: my princesses were lucky to be born to a taxpayer in the bombing country and their princesses were not. I am thankful that my girls have enough to eat and are safe yet their sisters do not and are not.

Will it end? How will it end? Tonight I watched the story of peace loving people with incredible bravery stand up and protest, get thrown in jail, get attacked by dogs, beaten by police, get spat upon, get bottles thrown at them, and much worse… Their reaction: love, non-resistance and compassion for their afflicters. Real change occurred. Civil Rights laws got passed, a War was ended. Ram Dass’s commentary is spot on. Watch political debate in this country. On both “sides” of the fence, the language lacks understanding and compassion and is filled with the rhetoric of violence…of “us” vs. “them.” And so it goes. This is not designed to solve problems, just continue them and escalate them if needed to push an agenda. But whose agenda? Not yours, not mine...not OURS.

How will it end? We have to Be the Change and face the each other and the world (and our perceived “enemies”) with acceptance and compassion, wiith open arms and an acknowledgement that we are not separate nations, but one people. No nation state is more important than people.

I am as responsible as anyone. Just today I had a chance to see the violence in my own heart as I felt anger towards someone that I work with; felt violence in my heart as my family pushed my buttons; felt anger as I read a news blurb about the escalation of the War in Afghanistan. I perpetuate the problem with this hate and anger. To dwell there is a choice….sure it is conditioned, but it is still a choice…and I can see it and choose differently.

I connect with what Ram Dass wrote and what people like Gandhi and MLK lived for every day. That is a legacy that I want my princesses to inherit. And it is one that will change the world one kind word, one kind act at a time.