I’ve been looking through some old books lately. I imagine it has been 30 years or more since I’ve read The Road Less Traveled (1978). Author M. Scott Pecks starts with the main idea of Buddhism and all of the meditation reading and training I’ve done:

Life is difficult.

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no long matters.

I been coming across this idea for years, but I haven’t really accepted it yet. Finding it unexpectedly as the first sentence of Peck’s book made it seem fresh food for thought. But who can really accomplish this acceptance?

“We dodged bullets (and body bags) in Indiana last week,” wrote Brian Howey after a school schooter attacked in Noblesville, Indiana but didn't manage to kill anyone. Howey made some interesting comments about the sad state of school safety including this:

Hoosier parents are now demanding “hardened” schools, which will come at a big cost to taxpayers. Consider it a payment to protect unfettered gun rights in a nation awash in firearms. There are more guns in the United States than people. There have been 23 school shootings in the first 21 weeks of this year to date, resulting in at least 34 deaths. Dozens more have been wounded. Noblesville students described the scene on Friday as “sheer chaos.” A parent told WTHR-TV, “This is a war on our kids.”

I'm a little late posting this.

Tomorrow afternoon, May 29, Starbucks will close its shops to provide “racial bias training” for its employees. This was precipitated by an event in one of their Philadelphia stores earlier this year when a white employee called the police because two black men used the rest room and were sitting at a table without ordering. The men were accused of trespassing.

Nalani Cobb writes about this in the New Yorker and includes the list of reasons white people have recently called the police about black people. It's a list I've read before. I guess that's why the statement below seems particularly interesting.

The crucial aspect of the Starbucks story isn’t whether a company can, in a single training session, diminish bias among its employees. It’s the implied acknowledgment that such attitudes are so pervasive in America that a company has to shoulder the responsibility of mitigating them in its workforce.

As Cobbs says, there is always skepticism about such attempts. But that is no reason not to try. I look forward to the end of bias in public spaces.

I recently read a month-old issue of Time magazine and found a fascinating article, "6 Ways We Can Reduce Gun Violence in America." They are all sensible, and I think, helpful. I sent this link to all of my legislators, both national state. If hundreds of people did this, they might actually listen. Here's part of the intro:

No other developed country has such a high rate of gun violence. A March 2016 study in the American Journal of Medicine found that Americans are 25 times more likely to die from gun homicide than people in other wealthy countries. There are commonsense steps we can take to reduce that toll, but they require acknowledging certain truths. The right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution, and there are approximately 265 million privately owned guns in the U.S., according to researchers from Northeastern and Harvard universities. Any sensible discussion about America’s gun-violence problem must acknowledge that guns aren’t going away. “We have to admit to ourselves that in a country with so many guns, progress is going to be measured incrementally,” says Jeff Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine.

Finding Peace

In The Last 100 Days, David B. Woolner quotes Franklin D. Roosevelt: “...today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at peace.”

How, oh how?

Just Write

From Naomi Shihab Nye” “Very rarely do you hear anyone say they write things down and feel worse. It's an act that helps you, preserves you, energizes you in the very doing of it." (Interviewed on OnBeing)

Presidential Prerequisites

 

If I were running things, before a person could become president, he or she would need at least a minor in history. I believe the president—legislators too—should know and understand the past. However, I can't imagine this really becoming a law. I just wish voters would demand that their politicians be well-informed. The presidential primary debates could be part history test. How can we understand the present if we don't understand how we got here?

I written about the importance of studying history before, here and here.

The Problem?

From James Baldwin: “White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other. And when they have achieved this, which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never, the Negro problem will no longer exist or will no longer be needed.”

Understanding Anger

Recently two friends recommended the book The Heart of the Soul by Gary Zukav. I've just been jumping around the book, and the passages below remind me of interesting ideas I've read before. They ring true. And during this time when the daily news is filled with stories of anger, these reflections on anger seem relevant. (The bold print is by Zukav.)

Anger is an iceberg phenomenon. It is the apex of a larger structure, all of which is invisible except the very top....There is no such thing as anger without an immense emotional substructure. Anger is the peak protruding above the clouds. Beneath every experience of anger is a huge body of emotional experience.....

Anger lashes out at a target. That target is another person, group of people, or the Universe. Anger is righteous and self-important. Anger does not listen to, respect, or care about others....Anger wants what it wants, when it wants it...

Angry outbursts are painful experiences, but they are not emotional explorations. Each outburst of anger is a barrier to the exploration of emotions. It is a fortress from which an individual who has no power does his or her best to face a frightening world.

All hostility originates in fear. Fear is the birthplace of every impulse that is not loving. A loving individual is fearless. An angry, jealous, vengeful, depressed, or avaricious person is filled with fear....Love is fearless.

Between terror and anger lies another experience—pain. In other words, beneath anger lies pain, and beneath that pain lies fear. It is not possible to experience the fear without first experiencing the pain. The pain may appear to be caused by the loss of a job, the death of a child, or a diagnosis of a terminal illness. The pain of these things is intense, and the experience of it is very much like feeling a white-hot piece of metal. That is why it is easier to become angry than to touch the pain. This is what most people do, but the pain does not go away when you become angry. It gets buried. (129-133)

I have looked at some of my own emotions through these lenses of anger-pain-fear. It's amazing how nearly impenetrable unpleasant and painful emotions can be. But these ideas from Zukav help one travel through the fog.

Words Matter

In 2016, Krista Tippet gave a talk a to the Unitarian Universalist Association's General Assembly. I

read it at the time and liked it. I reread it recently and liked it again. It is frustrating that these ideas can so easily become forgotten. This passage makes me want to use better words, but I'm not sure I know how.

Words Matter:...The words we use shape how we understand ourselves, how we interpret the world, how we treat others. And the world right now needs the most vivid, transformative universe of words that you and I can draw on and give voice to.

We chose too small a word in the decade of my birth, the 1960s, to grapple with the onset of genuine diversity in this country. And it does bear remembering that it was only in the 1960s that America truly began to integrate racial, religious, ethnic, and social differences into its national sense of self. We did so by pursuing the reasonable order that would be achieved by a civic mandate of tolerance.

Tolerance has value as a civic tool. But as I say, it's not big enough in human, ethical, or spiritual terms. Tolerance connotes allowing   

Tolerance, the word itself, connotes allowing, enduring, and indulging. And in the medical context, it is about the limits of thriving an unfavorable environment. Tolerance is not a lived virtue. It is kind of a cerebral assent and too cerebral for animate guts and behavior when the going gets rough. Tolerance has not taught or asked us to engage, much less to care about the stranger. Tolerance doesn't even invite us to understand, to be curious, to be open, to be moved or surprised by each other.

"Tolerance is not a lived virtue." Very good Krista. You can listen to or read her talk here. If you listen, the talk starts around 34 minutes.

Taking the Knee

I haven't figured out why this is so offensive to some.

My background teaches me it is a respectful and humble posture.

It seems commendable in so many places.

To Write or not to Write?

For many years, on and off, I have written this blog. I have been ignoring it for some time now. Last night I came back to look and discovered I had not written at all this year and only eight entries in the last half of 2017. Yet, when I read the entries, I saw that I was writing about things that concerned and moved me, things that still move me. And surely I was not the only one interested in these issues. Yet, for some reason, I have not felt moved to share in these last months. Have I not been moved? Has the strange climate in this country left me mute? I think, for awhile, I would like to try sharing again. I'll see how it goes.