As the world burns

I sit at my desk in my home office, tapping away at the keys in the dark of late night/early morning. This is a remarkable luxury given the circumstances of this world at present. Thousands of my fellow citizens here in the US suffer and die from the preventable disease of hubris in the face an an indifferent and unrelenting reality. Such is the way of life in America. Even when we arrive on the other side of covid-19, the hubris we so vigorously defend and uphold will continue in its variegated forms, from climate catastrophe, to state-sanctioned violence, to relentless capitalistic consumerism/individualism. I imagine new forms will crop up from now until then. What drew me to Buddhism was the freedom gained from seeing clearly in the moment, not being so compelled to try and push away the immovable object, and not being bowled over by the irresistible force. Buddhism taught me that when the wave is bearing down on you, it is useless to run. Better to turn around and dive in, as Stephen Batchelor implores in his luminous work, Buddhism Without Beliefs. (I'm not doing his prose justice, but you get the idea.)

I am unsure of the path forward out of this grand mess in which this country currently finds itself. We don't seem to be in a place to actually sit with each other, and for good reason. Our current field has been built on and around legacies of hatred, resentment, violence, and oppression. This oppression, racism, and resentment has never been adequately discussed, redressed, and eliminated, and is actively being questioned, silenced, and/or invalidated outright. There is a straight line to be drawn from our current carceral means of doling out what we unironically and uncritically call "justice," and the perversion of humanity that was chattel slavery. Among the many myths that permeate this country's psyche is the one that Buddhism answers rather elegantly. While the noble and flawed experiment known as the US would kill itself vaingloriously on the hill of rugged individualism, Buddhism encourages one to see not only is the nature of our reality ephemeral and dynamic, but that no piece stands alone in the interdependent mesh of being.

The Buddhist-leaning among us will sit with the reality that there is no such thing as this notion of personal independence. Or permanence, for that matter. They are concepts with no true referent in nature. As John Muir, a noted naturalist and racist wrote, ""When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." Everything that exists does so in relation to everything it isn't. As much as I loathe the current politics and discourse (and I am guilty of coarsening the language around some of our leaders on some of our platforms) of our country, I can only hope to continue working to see clearly, and somehow rouse the compassion necessary to wield the sword of insight, cutting through the mass delusion that cripples this great idea we call America.