Imagine no Imagination

You know those things you say about yourself, tag lines that silently cling to or loudly proclaim what you believe are core, unchangeable elements of who you really are? I’ve been working on my own blurbs casually for the last decade or so; not refining them so much as trying to eliminate them and the restrictions they put on how I live my life. What are they really good for, except crafting an identity that limits my own capacity and power from inside my skin, and attempting to script what others should think of me looking in, instead of making their own determinations based on what they observe.

A standard one of mine was originally phrased as “I’m not creative.” People would sometimes argue with me on this because I was an actor, but for me acting was an interpretive art, not a creative one. Yes, I write, but I don’t write fiction or poetry and I consider the writing I do, again, analytical. I chalked this flaw up to being raised by someone who could not see reality as it was, who believed in black magic and negative energies and that my singing Bad Moon Rising on a road trip is the reason he got pulled over for speeding. In reaction, I chose to be practical, believe what I could see, and take responsibility for everything that happened to me. (Also not a great way to live, and one I’ve moved away from as well.) At some point in the too-near past I came to accept that I possess a certain creativity in thinking and looking at the world, so I narrowed it down to, “I have no visual imagination.” It’s true that I have a hard time picturing sets when I read plays, no matter the detail of the description, or really putting a face together in my mind when articulated in a novel. But I think I’ve also been turned off by the word Imagination, and haven’t worked very hard to embrace it. Partly because of the anger of that parent whenever I didn’t conjure up his idea of what I should be imagining, partly a reaction to New Agey teachings and preachings and “if you can dream it, you can do it” thinking (which is, IMHO, bullshit), and partially because it just seemed … well, like a waste of time. I mean, I’m not a real artist.

But in the social justice engagement I’ve done over the last few years, imagination has come up again and again. And I see the limits of people’s imagination really, concretely get in the way of progress. There are so many well-intentioned (eyeroll) people who simply cannot imagine an America without capitalism, without a desperate struggle for meaningless subsistence work for the poor, without fossil fuels, without police, even with racial equity. And I’ve come to believe in a version of James Baldwin’s oft-used quote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” To wit: Not every transformation that is imagined can be accomplished, but no transformation can be accomplished without being imagined.

Maybe that’s right.

Which brings me to Lennon’s famous and infamous song. It’s not one of my favorites and never has been, but I have a different understanding of it these days, informed in part by hearing a bit of an interview with Lennon shortly before he was murdered, but perhaps more from my own widening perspective. I always thought of the song as an endpoint. That the imagining was the goal. But really it’s just a necessary step. We can all imagine worst-case scenarios: our government and law enforcement systems let those nightmares shape a lot of practice & policy, for better and worse. But most of us don’t spend much time imagining significant, creative change. Maybe that’s why we keep implementing small, makeshift changes instead of restructuring the systems that created the countless small problems. Instead of inventing an energy-intensive meat substitute, dismantle corporate farming; instead of reducing some criminal sentences, create alternatives to incarceration.

Hard to imagine? Exactly. It seems worth the glucose (a term for energy usage that Roshi Joan Halifax uses regularly, and which I am stealing) to try. How much glucose do we spend catastrophizing? I read an excellent article a few years back arguing that Black writers had wasted too much of their energy writing to a White audience, defending their humanity or what have you, when they could have been writing for each other, and Imagine what they could have accomplished if they had.

One more point on imagination, and a bit of credit to your writer. I think someone did my astrological chart when I was a child and even though (even then) I didn’t really believe in that stuff, I liked the interpretation that I was good at seeing a situation from all sides, so I clung to it. This is, of course, an act of imagination. It may be a kind of cognitive resonance, a logical imagining, but it’s still creative. I clearly passed judgment on different kinds of creative thinking and decided this one was okey dokey. Why? Perhaps because I wasn’t criticized for using this skill, whereas my other creative failings were not infrequently critiqued or diminished. It’s a skill I still prize, but one that I keep to myself more these days. Being able to understand someone else’s motivation or thinking leads some vocal parties to align you with “them:” the other, the criminal, insurrectionist, White supremacist, etc. so introducing any understanding, which is a form of compassion, is counter-revolutionary (or just plain old evil). A lot of people simply don’t want to imagine why others might think a certain way. Are they afraid they’ll be sucked into the dark side? afraid they’ll have to see the enemy as human? afraid to feel compassion for someone they have judged as “bad”? It’s a disturbing and frustrating blind spot, and an impractical strategy as well. If we don’t try to understand the other, we’ll never be able to genuinely reach out to them and make our case in a way they can hear. And I don’t believe we can succeed in resolving the enormous, wicked problems of our time without recruiting as many folks as possible.

I admit, I still feel my body tense up when someone asks me to take a moment and imagine something – when I’m on a Zoom about prison abolition or white supremacy, for example; but I try to just note that physical reaction and dive in for as long as I can stand the water. If nothing else, it can be a fun exercise. At least when I am able to silence that voice in my head telling me my ideas are uninteresting. What the fuck does she know, anyway?

How to Reify Half a Million People

500,000 dead.

The number itself is beyond my capacity for imagining. I assume others have the same problem. Reporters and folks in the public eye sometimes do a good job of contextualizing it- how many deaths per day, per second; what cities have comparable living populations; how COVID mortality compares to cancer, heart disease, car accidents; or, as the President did, how the number compares to war dead: more than American deaths in WWI, WWII, and Vietnam combined – in less than one year. He listed American war dead because that 1/2 million, remember, is just American deaths. The worldwide total is now nearly 5x that.

Compassion is a special interest of mine and how we avoid or draw out compassion/empathy is fascinating to me. I found Biden’s speech quite moving when he talked about the pain of loss, something we know he knows intimately.

For the loved ones left behind, I know all too well — I know what it’s like to not be there when it happens. I know what it’s like when you are there, holding their hands. There’s a look in your eye, and they slip away. That black hole in your chest, you feel like you’re being sucked into it. The survivor’s remorse. The anger. The questions of faith in your soul.
For some of you, it’s been a year, a month, a week, a day, even an hour. And I know that when you stare at that empty chair around the kitchen table, it brings it all back, no matter how long ago it happened, as if it just happened that moment you looked at that empty chair. The birthdays, the anniversaries, the holidays without them. And the everyday things — the small things, the tiny things — that you miss the most. That scent when you open the closet. That park you go by that you used to stroll in. That movie theater where you met. The morning coffee you shared together. The bend in his smile. The perfect pitch to her laugh.

Beautiful. Truly. What it did was artfully done, in the best sense of the word. Even those of us who haven’t had a loved one die could connect with the specificity of the images of love lost, and effortlessly intuit the pain of eternal loss, if just for a moment. Nonetheless, it connected us with the pain of the people left behind, not with the people themselves lost to COVID. “There is nothing ordinary about them” didn’t sit right with me. It may be more true that we all are ordinary, and perhaps thereby even more worthy of love and compassion. Poor, messy, fascinating, trudging little humans. I came out of that tribute with great feeling for those left behind, but only a generalized sorrow for the dead, nothing specific or tangible.

Of course, that wasn’t the goal of that address and of course, the answer to the question of how to humanize the dead is easy – listen to the people who loved them as the specific, ordinary humans they were. There’s no shortage of that if you’re willing to look for it. And there is something special about the series that NPR’s morning edition is doing. Songs of Remembrance gives one person a chance to choose a song that reminds them of their beloved and then talk about whatever they want – sometimes the song was what she always sang at karaoke, or what they danced to at their wedding, or what he taught to his choir students, or just a song that recalls that human for that particular individual.

I think the song idea is so brilliant and effective because it’s again connecting the specific to the universal, as Biden did for loss. You get funny or admirable or romantic details about the person themselves and what they meant to the speaker, but you also get to hear a song through their story. If it’s a song you know, you can see it from a different perspective or connect to the shared familiarity. Some of the songs I don’t know, but I know they are known and shared across countries and cultures and political beliefs. The contributors and their friends and family members all took the universal – a song, heard millions of times – and crafted it into something unique. We can accept the offer of that inimitable experience and make it universal again.

That is what compassion is, after all, right? That’s why Metta meditation starts with wishing yourself well, happy, safe, enlightened – starting with someone you know well, even when you pretend you don’t – and expanding out a bit more – a good friend, an antagonist; followed by someone you don’t know well, but interact with. From them you expand your good wishes out to your neighborhood, city, country, world, picking up animals and plants and such along the way. And the next time you sit, you start the same way. We don’t pretend that we can easily access a genuine concern for the great abstraction of “everyone’s” wellbeing. It takes time and work. Eventually my hope is that it will be easy, because the distinction between the specific and the general will fade away; the arbitrary, imaginary line between myself and the rest of life will blur and love for anything will be love for everything.

Until then, I am grateful to read and listen to these tributes and cry for the beauty and loss of the achingly human connection to another human, and recognize in their words and music that the love doesn’t die when the body does, and hope that they hear it too.

How to Do Nothing – A Sort of Book Review

I have so much to say about this book that I haven’t been able to write anything at all (well, that and the cast (#2!) on my wrist have been complementary barriers).

I loved this book and needed it. In the same way that A Field Guide to Getting Lost found me when I had left all my friends, gotten divorced, moved to a new city, and was underemployed; How to Do Nothing was kind enough to come out in paperback after I signed up for a year-long Socially Engaged Buddhism course, and had kicked off an effort to reframe my life through a lens of conscious, compassionate behavior, rather than the political chaos, urgency, and lonely echo-chambering of 2020.

Jenny Odell’s work isn’t long, but it’s quite expansive – a feature that some readers have found wacky, incoherent, or exhausting (good old Goodreads), while also hitting many of 2020’s best of lists. I won’t malign its detractors, I understand where they’re coming from, but I would also posit that her wide-ranging topics are cohesive under the banners of anti-capitalism and mindfulness.

I’m sure many of you like Capitalism, or parts of it. I see some benefits, too, but Capitalism is built on competition, production, and growth, which are generally weakened by communal support, contentment, and “doing nothing”. Advertising appeals to jealousy, self-loathing, and unhappiness; social media appeals to all those plus loneliness and binary thinking. I feel those brief moments of satisfaction when I jump in to endorse a fiery political opinion on Facebook, quickly followed by a physical grossness, much the same spike and dip I feel when eating refined sugar, which I’m also minimizing these days. For me, it’s essentially an excess of reaction – my critical mind is overwhelmed with judgement of every post I scroll past. Right or wrong? Genuine or performative? Good person or bad? I could give you a long list of Buddhish explanations of why this is generally unhelpful to our and humanity’s development and happiness, but the clearest deterrent for me is the feeling in my gut. I don’t know if I’d be aware of it if I hadn’t been meditating for over a decade, and maybe that’s why so many of us remained hooked on not only social media, but self-righteousness, anger, and judgment. The addictive nature of those behaviors in turn make it difficult to step away from them, stop, and center ourselves in the world, so the spiral into anxiety, conformity, and misery continues unabated.

If I had to sum Jenny Odell’s book into two words (and since I’ve just set that standard, I now do), I’d go with Mindfulness and Curiosity, in that order, though it’s more simultaneous in practice. All conscious change starts with awareness – whether that’s of a habit we don’t like, or a goal we want to reach. The greater the awareness, the more likely the change will stick. This is why people put reminders of diet motivations on the fridge, or download apps that check in on them. Our brains will always revert to the easiest, more immediately satisfying, most habitual thing if we don’t pay attention to what we’re doing and why. It’s the simplest and hardest thing in the world, because we’re modern humans wired for a short, constantly life-threatening existence that simply doesn’t apply to the vast majority of us anymore, and the imbalance makes us miserable. I do like the idea of Attention over what many perceive as the more ethereal mindfulness. It implies something more active. Odell’s subtitle is Resisting the Attention Economy, but it’s more an act of engagement than resistance, and a real, volitional something instead of nothing. By choosing to direct our attention to things that are outside of the economy, that do not generate wealth or power, we engage in an act of revolution.

I honestly found the whole idea ridiculously exciting.

She doesn’t end with attention, though. Attention is also a starting point for a better world (my squishy words, not hers). If we paid attention, would we know our neighbors? Would we change our jobs? Would we check our email every ten minutes? Would we keep stumbling through our lives, zombie-like, if we recognized how many other options were out there? Odell has a background in visual art, which I definitively do not, and her examples of disruptive art in the world were excellent windows into something I’ve been thinking about a lot – the life-sucking power of habit and conformity. Two examples: in the Twin Cities a few years back, some entity placed giant picture frames in strategic locations in the State & National Parks. It was framed (ha) as a photo opportunity – a way to get Instagram-obsessed youngsters to notice the great outdoors, I suppose, but in a more general sense it was marking out these non-productive spaces as worthy of notice. The beauty of nature which a lot of us seek to create in our own home with giant posters or representative paintings are actually all around us for free whenever we direct our attention towards it, but we are such creatures of goal-oriented habit, that we don’t notice them unless we recreate the style of the recreation and bring the picture frame to the source of the picture. Humans are hilarious.

Example two: B & I stopped at a coffee shop in an outlet mall on our way out of town last year, and as I was walking back to the car, sun bright and delicious blended matcha in hand, I had an impulse to pirouette. I didn’t, and subjected Ben to a philosophical theory on conformity and oppression when I closed the door. I was focused on racism at the time (as I often am), and interpreted in part as the dominance of a repressed White European culture (particularly the Scandinavian influence here) that sees any act that might call attention to yourself or disrupt norms as morally questionable. I still believe that, and believe it manifests in a racist way, since many cultures would embrace physical outbursts of joy, etc. But Odell calls attention to another aspect of nonconforming behaviors: they wake people up. We can make an hour’s drive from work everyday and remember none of it, but if we narrowly avoid an accident, those moments are emblazoned on our memories, and our actions at the time are present and fully conscious. Trauma certainly wakes us up, but a simple act of nonconformity, of creativity, of whimsy can do the same. Acts of disruption become acts of love, an invitation to stop and be in the world at that moment. As much as we shun this behavior in others (even being the only person in the movie theatre laughing at the dark comedy can be isolating), we also crave it. I would also argue that we need it, that unless we shake up the quotidian we don’t even see the maze we’re trapped in, and without recognizing it, we’ll never break out. Let me call back to White Supremacy for a moment and point out that pretty much everything that is considered “normal” in the US is a White cultural norm, so allowing these standards to remain unchallenged is itself a racist act. Who knows what other options are out there? I can feel my muscles relax just thinking about it.

So, less of a book review than a mulling over mainstream society, but I have to credit Odell for helping me explore and articulate it. If you’re looking for a how to get off social media, this isn’t what you want. If you want some ideas on how to consciously craft a better life for yourself and your people, I think you’ll get a lot out of it.

Application Essay for Enlightenment

Okay, that’s a little misleading. I am starting a year-long training on Socially Engaged Buddhism next month and was asked to submit an essay on why I am participating and the social justice work I do. Here’s ’tis:

I think of myself as a philosophical and spiritual Buddhist. I’ve been meditating regularly for a decade. I don’t practice any religion, but I’ve read enough (mostly Western) Buddhism to feel I have a grasp on what it’s offering, and what I’ve understood resonates as true – that clinging and aversion create suffering, that putting shoes on your own feet makes more sense than trying to carpet the world, that emotions should be felt and acknowledged, but not sanctified or given a leadership position; that the vagaries of the world can’t hurt you much of you can get to a place where you recognize your own learned, egocentric, knee-jerk bullshit.

At the same time, I write and talk and facilitate discussions on & occasionally protest about race and racism and I know how important it is for Black people, in particular, to have space where they can express anger after hundreds of years of being forced to counter a false stereotype and actual threats to their lives for having genuine emotional reactions to abuse. And I think it is important to hold the country and individuals accountable for causing pain, even when it’s not intentional, or at least not consciously so. And in theory, at least, these seem to stand in opposition to my Buddhist beliefs.

As a pseudo-Buddhist (or Pseu-Bu) and a former door-to-door fundraiser, I believe in “assume good intent.” I know how the expectation of rejection creates negativity in a very real way. But I totally understand and have defended the reasons why that is not always possible, and perhaps not even best, when confronting White people’s harmful words and actions; that it may be important for White people to experience the pain that has grown out of their complicity in White Supremacy. Maybe it’s just fine that they feel discomfort when faced with the consequences of their actions, intentional or not. Maybe the best thing isn’t always the kindest thing. I get all that. I don’t even object to BIPOC folks acting out of anger, as long as it’s not violent.

But I only accept this behavior b/c it is a reasonable response in an unreasonable world & a racist, genocidal, cruel, unfair country. If those circumstances did not exist, these behaviors, while perhaps educational and cathartic and rightfully disruptive, would simply be creating more suffering.

I am not saying I need to reconcile these – one of the big hallmarks of White Supremacy is either/or thinking, and Eastern philosophy seems to allow space for apparent contradiction as well. But I want the support, I want better understanding of the foundations of my beliefs, and I would like to be able to understand, defend, and articulate them well (and from a place of love).

I also don’t think everyone has to agree or have the same role in social justice movements. Folks can have myriad approaches to activism. While I believe hate is the wrong path, that acting in anger is only the right move by accident, that sucker punching a White Supremacist during an on-camera interview or screaming Fuck the Cops is ultimately counter-productive, that doesn’t mean those things are wrong in every context or that there may not be a place for them. Some people oppose violence in any circumstance, whereas I believe in self-defense and protecting others when necessary, especially for women, people with disabilities, & BIPOC folk. I respect complete non-violence, but for me it isn’t always the right path. One of the things I love about the Buddhism I have studied is that there are no absolute rules. I love the story of the (as I remember it) Buddhist monk on the ship who kills the murdering pirate who tries to take over, not only to prevent the inevitable loss of life, but to save the pirate himself from further self-torture.

In part, I’m looking for spiritual and philosophical reinforcement. And to better trust myself to make the right decisions for me. And to have patience and love for my fellow White liberals when they typescream “if you’re not outraged youre not paying attention!” and “if this doesn’t make you cry you don’t have a heart!” The policing of and sublimation of emotions is such a quick, easy, cold, infantilizing approach to dismissing our fellow humans.

I know that the best practice is meditation practice, and if I could take a bullet train to enlightenment and drop that ego, I probably wouldn’t even need this. Short of that, I am hoping a better, intellectual understanding and community and education will help me speak and perform my own truth – not without a willingness to change, but without shame or fear of confrontation and challenges from groups I feel compelled to defer to.

I live in Minneapolis, less than 2 miles from where George Floyd was killed. I attended the first protest and several cleanups and more protests and volunteered at the memorial and food shelves and attended online discussions about race with folks who were just setting foot on the path I’ve been traveling for decades and wrote and facilitated and taught about inequity and White Supremacy, and while this all sounds frantic & thoughtless, it was & it wasn’t. I knew this real, yet manufactured urgency was temporary. I knew I would “git my Buddha on” and transition to thoughtful, spiritually integrated action in the near future. I was relieved beyond expression when I stumbled across and attended a Love Serve Remember weekend months ago which gave me the spiritual strength to get me through the election, another path where I had given in to just doing masses of whatever until I crossed that finish line, and planning to re-center myself afterwards.

So I stopped attending unhelpful (to me) conversations on whiteness and race, sent my 100 postcards to Georgia, and allowed myself a breather at the end of the year. And one day this training showed up in my gmail. My only hesitation was the expense, but even that didn’t last long. It looks like exactly what I’m looking for – a grounding in reality and connection and a shift away from white guilt and white supremacist behaviors like urgency and perfectionism doing over being.

This very piece is practice in moving away from perfectionism, which for me blares most loudly in my writing and editing. A dog walking injury of a broken wrist makes it difficult and a bit painful to type, so I won’t be editing this to my usual standards. I am trying to let go of the idea that you (without even knowing who you are) will therefore like me less at the get-go (insert nervously smiling emoji here).

Have I answered your questions? Perhaps not entirely. Racial justice is obviously my main focus, and writing and facilitating are the main ways I focus, but I also work on food justice, and occasionally climate change, disability rights, and other issues, and am open to doing more work as I feel I can.

And with a deep breath, I dive in.

Thanks for reading,

You Are What You Love

I have a friend in the Twin Cities, a guy I performed with years ago, who is one of the loveliest people I’ve ever met. It is always a joy to see him and it is not possible for me to wish anything but the best for him. At one point he made a comment about what a kind person I am, and rather than disillusion him with the reality of my day to day reactiveness to the vicissitudes of life, I realized, yes. Yes, of course he would think that I’m a kind, friendly, loving person because I am incapable of being otherwise with him. It’s as inconceivable as punching an affectionate puppy. And I reasoned that someone like him must have a far more positive view of humanity, because they are not getting the typical blowback that most of us experience on a regular basis in our grumpy or even neutral interactions in society. And how much, in turn, that must reinforce his naturally (whatever that means) loving behavior.

Some people simply bring out the best in us. I don’t think many would argue against that, but I do think a lot of us fail to fully embrace what that means: they bring out something that is already there. My friend doesn’t make me a better person, he creates a mini-culture around him in which that is the easiest and most acceptable way to be. He brings out my goodness; he doesn’t create it. He simply welcomes, embraces, and rewards it. I am lucky to have stumbled into several gracious, generous, joyful people like this in my life.

I attended a virtual retreat with Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember foundation back in August and this idea came up several times – how friends loved and missed Ram Dass, but that the love he evoked in them was as present as ever. Krishna Das talked about how utterly devastated he was when Neem Karoli Baba (his and Ram Dass’ teacher) died, how difficult it was and how long it took for him to recognize that the love he found in Maharaj ji came exclusively from inside of KD, that the holy man didn’t manufacture anything in him that he didn’t already possess; that the absolute, unconditional love that all of the Maharaj ji’s followers say washed over them as soon as they met was never other than what they were always capable of, indeed what they inherently, effortlessly are.

Another excellent explanation of this is in Duncan Tressell’s gorgeous “Mouse of Silver” episode of The Midnight Gospel (on Netflix), in which his dying mother assures him that the love she has for him could not possibly leave with her; that it is eternally present in the world and there for him whenever he needs it. It made me feel like we have the potential to keep generating more love in the world, filling up empty and negative space with this endlessly rejuvenating and infinite resource, restricted only by our capacity to liberate it.

There’s a moment in one of my favorite films, Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, when the depressed of the Nicholas Cage twins brings up the time when they were teens and a girl pretended to be interested in the happier twin as a joke. But the latter didn’t take offense, and remembered his time with her fondly. He tells his brother, You are what you love, not what loves you. I always thought there was something profound about that statement, but honestly couldn’t get much of a handle on it. So an asshole obsessed with a good Samaritan gets credit for the benevolence of the one desired? But I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s the same idea as the stuff I’m talking about above. The act of love – not desire for dominance or ownership, but actual love – is what defines us. Our ability to love, to manifest love and draw out love and act out of love in the world is the best measure of what we are, what we have contributed to the world in our brief time in it.

It’s been a rough year for love. For me, anyway. I feel like I’ve been fighting against hate with almost every supposedly good thing I’ve done. So much of activism and politics is fueled by hatred and anger. I tried not to get wrapped up in it, but didn’t always succeed, and allowed what I thought was “important work” to take priority over the how of it all. With the election (almost) over and some more knowledge and experience under my belt, my 2021 will prioritize the motivation over the act, the being over the doing, to the extent that I can and as long as I continue to believe this is the path the follow.

I’ve lived long enough to know that change is the only thing I can count on, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get excited about the prospect of a stronger spiritual focus in the coming year. A joyful new year to all of you.

Bros Before Everything

I had a bit of a freakout last week. Maybe that’s not the right word. Crisis? That seems to involve decision-making. Breakdown? Nah, I could still function. Normal reaction to the world in all its horror? Yes, that’s it.

I had finally read an article I had set aside for months – about femicide in Mexico. I was too devastated and revolted to sleep after reading the details of the gang rape, mutilation, and murder of a preteen girl when I last picked it up, a few months back. But this was broad daylight, and it seemed important. I topped that off with a piece about the Police unions in Vanity Fair’s Breonna Taylor issue. I can’t even remember the other unmentionables of that day, but let’s throw in a few additions from the last week – another gang rape of a young Dalit woman in India, ICE officers taking children from their fathers in the Immigration Nation documentary, Muslims beaten to death and scapegoated in India, every Trump rally, even college fraternities flagrantly flouting social distancing rules.

It’s all about the Bros.

Groups of guys – especially groups of young, rich White guys – have often scared and disgusted me. I was the the obnoxious, goth freshman girl screaming Fuck the Greeks! on Fraternity Row every alcohol-induced chance I got. I’ve always been ready to stereotype, but despite my aversion, I have underestimated the power and danger of the Bro group. It’s more than toxic masculinity: it’s blind obedience that is the threat. Toxic masculinity may guide the group ethos, but without Bro loyalty, it would have no following.

Fraternities are an obvious example, but they’re just a play-acting version of military brotherhood, which is perhaps an attempt to imitate the group cohesion actually necessary when fighting predators and hunting for food back in the “back when” times. I am utterly ignorant in the ways of military life, so Hedges’ book War is a Force that Gives us Meaning was enlightening not only on the individual addiction to the life-threatening energy of war, but for his widely accepted assertion that soldiers overwhelmingly fight not out of a sense of mission, or nationalism, or ideology, or even fear; but out of love for their brothers in arms, friendships formed out of abuse and stress and isolation and absolute interdependence. One could argue that without that brotherhood, and the psychological tactics that create and enforce it, there would be little war at all. These guys (and women) don’t have time to evaluate the justness of the battle; they’re worried about protecting their buddies. It’s admirable and terrifying. What wouldn’t they do to protect their fellow soldiers? Protection doesn’t stop when the bullets stop: the brain doesn’t work that way. If you are loyal to your bunkmate in battle, you’re also loyal when he drunkenly beats up a civilian in a bar, or rapes someone, unless your attachment to the people or standard under threat is stronger than your attachment to your bro. Bro group masterminds work hard to ensure that doesn’t happen.

It is hard for a person like me to fathom a method to the madness of gang rapes and mutilations in Mexico. I can see some twisted logic in physically demonstrating the price of noncompliance to the enemy, but the gruesomeness of it is still beyond me. A journalist intimate with these monstrosities said in the Harper’s article that bonds are formed through complicity, and criminal groups create complicity through crime. “When it’s a femicide, when corpses are mutilated, it doesn’t have so much to do with her. It’s a message between them, within the band. It’s something symbolic, done to the body of a woman.” The brutality is the point, and the less human, the less sympathetic the “other,” whatever that other is, the easier it is to remain loyal to the group. Toxic masculinity objectifies the women, but again that is just a small part of it. The groups are bonded through their collective horrific acts; they are all complicit and they all share in each other’s blame and unspoken shame. No one is turning on or turning in anyone else.

Unfortunately policing, a career with the stated intent of serving the public, often follows the same rules of soldiers under fire, street gangs, and mafias. Reports from cops released from, or on the margins of, the Blue brotherhood describe a community in which everyone who is not on the team is characterized as an enemy often a deadly enemy, and Backing the Blue takes precedence over everything else, including laws and morality. If that isn’t enough to ensure allegiance, forced participation in illegal activities has sometimes been used to coerce silence as well. This kind of cult mentality is what compels 57 police officers in Buffalo, NY to resign from the emergency response team when 2 members are suspended from policing duties after actively causing a brain injury in an unarmed 75-year-old peace activist. Why exactly they resigned is debatable, but the sequence of events is clear. Brotherhood that blindly swears allegiance to the belief that cops can do no wrong creates a police force that terrorizes cities, particularly poor people and people of color in cities. Again, the racism is just a part of it (given, a seminal part of it). The culture of us against them, and the refusal to point the finger at another brother (who may be a sister, who may be Black) is essential to creating an unjust system.

This brings up another aspect of the Bro cult philosophy: it usually involves victimhood. The idea that you are under threat (true in war; true if you’ve picked a fight with a rival gang) is a weird part of this macho, aggressive psychology. There’s far more incentive to defend your compadres if you are all being attacked. So fraternities say their first amendment rights are threatened if they’re penalized for throwing parties during a quarantine. And police feel the need to proclaim Blue Lives Matter, even though police and related law enforcement jobs are, with fire fighters, the only professions in which the killing of a member automatically generates a capital felony charge. Blue lives clearly matter in our legal system. I’m not opposed to that. But qualified immunity means the lives of those killed by police routinely don’t matter. Bro groups use their power to make themselves appear victimized, thus strengthening group loyalty and empowering themselves further.

The protectorate of Bros exists to provide a united front against anything that questions their power, so that they can do what they want without concern for the consequences. If Bros have power, if they have enough power, the only thing that can take them down is the defection of a Bro.

How do you keep a Bro from defecting? By crafting intimate bonds that are far stronger than any discomfort with any bro’s objectionable action; by making the group esoteric, hard to get into, ultimately fully accepting of each member in all his eccentricities, and an essential part of his life. Even better, by involving him in something so criminal or shameful that he puts himself at risk if he chooses conscience over loyalty and betrays the Bros. Some Bro groups, like cults, encourage or insist upon the detachment of their members from outside friends or family, even sacrificing all their worldly possessions, so that they lose everything if they lose the group. Standing up can be dangerous. There are usually punishments. You may be mocked, you may be called stupid, a traitor, a deserter, a rat. You may even put your life or freedom at risk. Look at Serpico. You will probably be gaslighted; you will be told that what you think is true is actually false; that what you think it moral is actually evil. The people who say this may even believe it, which makes it harder to challenge them. I don’t have an easy answer for avoiding groupthink, but inasmuch as I have succeeded, I can attribute it to independent study, meditation, an obsession with logic, and compassion. We’d probably do well to pay more attention to whistleblowers.

The fact is, we all become Bros at one time or another. We don’t even have to be forced into it. We excuse members of our own political parties for doing things that we would find unforgivable on the other side. We say our friend is just joking when she says something that we would call out as racist in our enemies. The fact is our brains (yes, all brains) work really, really fucking hard and are always looking for ways to make life easier for us. Thinking hard, thinking slow, burns calories. We are wired to conserve energy. If we can ally ourselves with a group that always knows what’s right and what’s wrong, that makes living more efficient and convenient. Your brotherhood may even be right some of the time, or most of the time. It may be an activist organization with the best intentions, but any group can be swept away by its own passions or power. Good groups need their members to keep them current and flexible and compassionate and transparent. Allegiance should never be blind – to our country, our party, our religion, our friends, not even our actual brothers. Trust is nice, but vigilance is essential to democracy.

The one thing Trump rewards is loyalty. For me, that’s reason enough to question its value.

Despair

Well, so much for that last post. The past two days have hit me with an overwhelming weight of something close to hopelessness. And this was before Ruth Bader Ginsburg left us. Good for her; she could use some rest.

This is not hopelessness for the future, though I can’t say I hold myself above that either. I am hopeless for the present. It isn’t any one thing; I’ve just been overwhelmed by the cruelty, lies, ignorance, and lack of compassion here there and everywhere, in every way you could imagine, again and again and again.

I have gone through all my default consolations, the logic I pull out when love and spirituality aren’t enough. Nothing is working. I can knock down every one.

There is good in the world every day; what I hear and see suggests a world of constant horror, but that is not the case. Every moment, people are helping people, putting themselves at risk, loving despite real, deep danger.

It’s not enough. The pain experienced around the world is overwhelming. You know, that stuff is nice and all, but it’s not enough. Not by a fucking longshot.

Things go in cycles. Perhaps this a bleak time, but we’re not on a downward trajectory. The cycles of humanity are like the cycles of nature: birth and death, pain and pleasure, day and night.

Yeah, really fucking hard to think of this as a cycle when simultaneous fire tornadoes (firenadoes?) and hurricanes are battering our country. Not to mention the locusts in East Africa, the encroachment into non-human space that created the coronavirus, the 121degree record temperature in the LA suburb of Woodland Hills, blahdeblahdeborg. Climate change is not a cycle. Maybe it is, but not for humans. For us, it’s a trajectory towards massive death, disease, and destruction of the countless creatures that live on this fucking gorgeous planet, this planet that often keeps me from descending into the bog of fuckit.

None of this is real. This is all an illusion. We should experience life while we’re watching a movie, not like we’re in it.

Yeah, fuck that shit, too. Yes, thank you Ram Dass and Baba Neem Karoli. I know you understand that it’s more complicated than that. I kind of believe it, but the problem is that for the people drowning in the Mediterranean, or being sterilized in detention camps or grieving the killing of their Black brothers, sons, and fathers in the US, or watching their children starve to death in Yemen, enlightenment is not available or practical. It doesn’t matter if it’s “real” or not. It is real to them. That is all, and it is agonizing.

This is the darkest timeline.

Is this really comforting? Maybe, because it’s kind of a joke, and ties into the Game theory of the world, kind of like #3. There is something comforting, I suppose, about believing this is just a roll of the dice, or that alternate selves are living a better timeline elsewhere. But again, people are still in agony, many living things on earth are still in jeopardy.

I had a thought last night that maybe the darkest element of our timeline is not the unconscionable things that are happening, but our habitual living of our lives. How can we continue like this? How can I put my time and energy into earning a paycheck in a job that only minimally, indirectly, sort of helps some people, when children are being held in prison because they are brown and were born South of the border? How are we all not committing our every waking moment to chaining ourselves to whichever of the hundreds of inhumane institutions we prefer and screaming our throats raw, getting thrown in jail, getting killed to wake other people the fuck up and maybe change something? At least people like me, with no kids and no health problems and very little holding me back. How can I live with myself?

We are subject to the control of our evolutionary patterns.

This doesn’t ever give me comfort, but at least it explains things. Explanations aren’t enough anymore. When an expert informs us that men rape, torture, dismember, and display the dead bodies of young women in Mexico because they are forming bonds, because collusion build community, I don’t feel better. I just wind up at

Humans are awful.

Honestly, this is the only thing that has given me comfort the last few days. That we are designed by evolution to be horrible, selfish, violent, territorial, frightened, parochial beasts. If I see the world that way, I can find some joy in the times when we don’t meet expectations, when we are kind and generous and thoughtful.

But it doesn’t last. Because I don’t believe it. My parents, all parents (I’ve been told) fucked up a lot. And yet I give a shit about people. Most of my friends also care, also wouldn’t kill someone for profit, also feel compassion for people outside of their tribe. So what the fuck is wrong with the people who aren’t like that? Why are people so cruel?

Flipping again, maybe my cohort isn’t that great. How much are we really doing to help? How much of our own comfort are we really willing to give up for the sake of a keystone species? How much effort are we willing to put into ending a genocide? And even when we do make the effort, why are we doing it? Out of self-righteousness? To be seen as good? Are we really any better than anyone else?

What’s left?

What comfort does the world have to offer me? I suppose I shouldn’t seek any. I should sit with this until I can get to a place I can live with again. I’m fairly confident that will happen. But not entirely confident. Does knowing the worst that might happen keep it from happening? Can we stop ourselves from walking into the fire?

The young man who wrote this poem died in the Mediterranean Sea, trying to cross to a livable life:

You’ll die at sea.
Your head rocked by the roaring waves,
your body swaying in the water,
like a perforated boat.
In the prime of youth you’ll go,
shy of your 30th birthday.
Departing early is not a bad idea;
but it surely is if you die alone,
with no woman calling you to her embrace:
“Let me hold you to my breast,
I have plenty of room.
Let me wash the dirt of misery off your soul.
Abdel Wahab Yousif

He was a poet from the Sudan, and his nightmare was stark reality, unlike the unfounded fears of so many here: child-eating democrats; COVID slavery; Black people. Are my fears of what is to come for this country likewise ridiculous? Or will I be referencing this blog post when I am arresting or maimed for practicing my first amendment rights against the government?

I stumbled across a kind of soulmate while reading myself to sleep last night. Robinson Jeffers also had no love for humanity. He felt that the further we removed ourselves from nature, the more insufferable we became. He did not perceive humane to be a word of ethical or compassionate behavior. Perhaps the climate crisis and the monstrous president and the wars and for fuck’s sake Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s untimely death are not independent atrocities, perhaps our decision to set ourselves apart from the world and our inextricably tied family on the earth is why we are saddled with this unbearable loss and sadness and, for me anyway, today anyway, true despair.

I don’t know. Here’s a picture of the beautiful man who wrote that poem. Beauty creating beauty. There’s that, at least. Maybe that’s all there is.

post-Post post:

There is always the possibility that this is the fire we need, to burn things down and start over. Perhaps not the most optimistic option, but it’s something.

The Darkness of the Womb

I’ve been slowly attending a virtual retreat offered by Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember organization and it has done me an ineffable amount of good.

I can still eff it a bit, though.

Today’s speakers included a relatively young Sikh racial justice activist who did some important shaking up of the primarily septuagenarian group. Valerie Kaur challenged the ideas both of accepting things as they are and turning inward for the sake of turning inward, fraught concepts among activist meditators, and the main reason I sought out this retreat. Her greatest gift to me, however, was an image that totally flipped my idea of where we are right now and where we might be headed.

She suggested that we might not currently be in the darkness of death and decay, but the darkness of the womb. What if we are about to be born? And if we, as the United States for example, have not yet been born, what does that mean for our potential?

The seed was planted by the guys who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, right? That all men are created equal; that they have inalienable rights; that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are among those, that it is the duty of a people to “throw off” a despotic government – these were truly revolutionary ideas. As any fair-minded student of US History knows, they had all been denied, prevented, and/or deliberately perverted even before they were penned by the men who penned them, and the betrayal has continued every day since.

Our “founding fathers” ejected the seed, and then, like many men, they walked away – into slavery, capitalism, sexism, concentration camps, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, voter suppression. What if all of this was part of the germination? You’ve heard of the century plant? What if this is the four-century plant and we are about to bloom?

What if the ideals of the country haven’t been a failure since birth, but have all been shoots navigating through choppy ground, now ready to finally spring forth into the waiting sunlight? What if it’s not that America has never been Great, but that America has never been? That this is all, if not a delusion, then a nascent idea, one that depicted itself as fully formed, but never was? What if what we needed all along, for America to finally be, was the liberation of Black and Indigenous (and disabled, and trans, and all other) people? What if the horrors and revelations of the last few years are the magic ingredient, the secret, obscure symbol, the dance, that, when the moon is full, gives birth to a nation of liberty and justice for all?

What if America is not a mess of a country that Others its own and uses that Othering as a weapon to centralize power for people who look like the hypocrites who wrote down these good ideas, but one that, once it comes to fruition, would horrify people who grasp onto White Male Fear and Supremacy, like Roy Cohn is horrified by the heaven of flowering weeds and beautiful trash and destruction and voting booths and “big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion” that Belize describes in Angels in America?¹

What if we have been waiting for the right time to be born? A time when we are recognizing our enslaving, genocidal history and our present-day racism and sexism? A time when we have witnessed the failings of capitalism in the deaths of 200,000 people, the unemployment of millions, the lines of masked neighbors lined up for food and diapers? A time when the revolution will be tweeted and Zoomed?

My favorite metaphor comes from the chrysalis.² When you cut open a chrysalis, you don’t see a half-butterfly. You see a rotting caterpillar. What if we’ve been the hideous chrysalis all along? We’re still a young country; it’s not that absurd an idea. Change is painful and ugly and we have been pained and rotten.

What if the “rough beast/ its hour come round at last”³ is approaching its birth, but the second coming is not one of fire and brimstone, but of justice and compassion and equity and those things that Jesus appears to advocate for in the New Testament, the ideals that every religion seems to hold at its core, the ideals that our country has been waiting to realize for hundreds of years?

Look, all I’m saying is we don’t know. As much as it seems to many of us like the end of all we hold dear, we cannot help but notice all the love generosity and compassionate action that surrounds us. We do not know what will happen. This is a mysterious place.

Today I’m indulging in possibility. Happy Labor Day.

Angels in America Part Two: Perestroika; Act 3, scene 4
Rebecca Solnit introduced me to this image in A Field Guide to Getting Lost
William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming, of course
the image is Georgia O’Keefe’s Flower of Life II

On Wasps and Wild Theories

In early August I was stung on the back of my left thigh while I was biking. I don’t know whether it was the type of wasp or the fast-pumping blood as I quickly pedaled the remaining 40 minutes home to sign on for a work meeting, but my whole upper leg swelled a hot, angry, itchy red that tightened my muscles for days and just fully receded earlier this week.

Yesterday, as we were walking down the middle of the street in a residential section of sleepy Alexandria, I got stung again. On the back of my left thigh, inches from the last stabbing. And I was, again, MINDING MY OWN FUCKING BUSINESS, WASP!

Pain can send you to weird places. The first place I went was Angryland, but the first place most unpleasant experiences take me is Angryland. It’s my home away from home, but it’s abusive, and years of meditation have helped me to pack up and get the hell out of there quickly under most circumstances. I felt like I was clear of the place within a minute of the searing pain kicking in, but really I was still kicking rocks out on the grounds, quickly transitioned from pure anger to angry fear. Why was this happening to me? I joked to my partner that the first stinger had planted a homing device in my thigh that was beckoning nearby wasps. He asked if I had recently bought a 5G phone. But I really was thinking similar thoughts, and the joke was an attempt to hide what I knew was irrational. Self-pity pumped through me with the next wave of sharp pain. Why me? What had I done to deserve this? Nothing, I knew. That was ridiculous. (I refuse to buy into that privileged Buddhist line of thinking.) But I still found myself looking for a reason, a rationale.

I caught myself before I’d gone too far down that path, because I recognized something I’ve long criticized in others: the imposition of a simple, but false logic on a series of random events. It’s that kind of thinking that both leads individuals to believe that their god chose them because they happened to survive a catastrophic event or two, or that the US is teeming with “reverse racism” because a BIPOC person was chosen over a White guy for a job or two. It is the kind of thinking that leads QAnon followers to find meaning in everything from the Trump’s lies to Trump’s ties. They’re scared, they feel vulnerable, and they want to believe there is order to the universe, even to the point of inventing more chaos (Democrats eating children?) upon which order will be imposed.

I am susceptible to this kind of thinking. Beyond the universal human predilection for pattern-seeking as a way to simplify life and save energy, I spent years dissecting works of literature for themes, metaphors, patterns. I am an analyst as much as I am anything. But I have to accept the likely fallacy of any of my assumptions, and the impact of that failure is far more consequential in life than in the study of 20th century American literature. I have to ground myself in the facts as I can reasonably verify them and find some sources I can trust to deliver those facts to me. Otherwise, it’s too easy to dissolve into despair and cynicism. Whether that’s justified or not, it’s not the way I want to live, because it leaves me isolated, helpless, or both.

So. I was stung by two waspy things in more or less the same spot within 3 weeks of each other. It’s weird, but it isn’t supernatural or unprecedented. It’s just hot and itchy and sucky. Like some other things, and not like many different things.

Can’t Find My Way Home

blind faith Lucky happenstance brought me to Can’t Find My Way Home, a onetime alltime favorite song of mine.

Onetime? Only because I fell in love with it at first listen, but knocked it down an unmeasured number of positions once I decided that the lyrics didn’t contain the depth of analytical, tortured meaning that my reaction to the music required.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

I mean, seriously. What did I want? Why I can’t find my way home? Who the you is? What the throne represents? Where I am now? I’ve said that I want to get into opera someday, to have that experience of connecting with the power of the music itself, without any understanding of the foreign and exaggerated words; to have a potentially lifechanging experience. Y’know, like Cher in Moonstruck. But I’ve been surrounded by music my whole life. I have been moved by music my whole life. There are countless songs that make me cry if I try to sing along with them – and I always sing along, and find new heartbreakers All the Time. Most of those have lyrical meaning for me, but certainly not all of them. There are definitely a handful of tear-wrenching songs that I do not understand at all. I have no control over or justification for my reaction.

And yet I have still clung to this idea that the words in a song have to have explicit, profound meaning if the song is to be considered a complete success. What more could I possibly ask of Blind Faith than what they gave to us? What more could I possibly ask than Stevie Winwood’s haunting vocals, Ginger Baker’s percussion, Eric Clapton’s guitar (and the other guy – I’m not going to pretend I know who he is). What more could I even ask from the lyrics? The impression and the transmission of loss and longing is inescapable, and the sound of the words is the perfect . Even the content of the lines is perfect. It’s just enough to support the soft whirl of the quartet without forcing a narrative. The song as a piece is the story, and it isn’t a story you read, but one you experience.

I chalk this stupidity of my ways to White Supremacy.

Some White people have a hard time identifying ways in which whiteness hurts their lives. They may have a great understanding of how it fucks over Black people, but other than segregating everyone and hurting our fellow humans, they struggle to pinpoint how whiteness hurts them.

It reduces the joy I get from art.

Among other things, whiteness is about (what it perceives as) logic and critique and rankings and the actual literal (literally). It encourages the rules of religion, but not the surprise of spirituality. Whiteness is materialist, and does not suffer experiences left to their own devices, untranslated into words. I’m good at logic, which is one reason I veer into that whiteness. Another reason is a continuously negative mediated experience of the spiritual growing up.

To be fair, I also connect to lyrics because I don’t play an instrument, so it’s my most intimate bond with the song. I’ll always be a lyrics junkie, but I really have no excuse here. Please, welcome home to one of the greatest rock songs ever. And leave your body and mind alone. Haven’t we had enough of them, already?

Selflessness and Outreach

particle head Some of you may know that I struggle with deeply seeded self-loathing, despite actually liking myself quite a bit. I tried DIY brainwashing, which didn’t work. (Maybe I need a guru? Ritual? Drugs and a sex cult?) I’ve also tried changing my inner monologue – rejecting negative commentary, not allowing my dog to critique me in a voice that sounds a lot like mine. It’s really hard, y’all. Maybe if I put “be nice to Zoe!” signs in every room of my house. And on the inside of my glasses. And in little notes in all my books. And in post-its on every screen I view. It takes a ridiculous amount of attention.

Here’s the new plan:

I can’t hate myself if I don’t have a Self! You Buddhists and pseu-Bus out there know what I’m talking about. I believe that if I just stop identifying with the idea of the self, it will be the answer to all my problems and thus open up my capacity to engage & contribute to the world.

Easy enough. No more self =

no more self-loathing
no more self-doubt
no more self-judgment
no more selfishness

I was scrolling through Ted Talks last night while putting together a cheap compost bin, and was excited to find one on Not Taking Things Personally. Wasn’t crazy about the guy’s style, but the first half of his presentation was good. When people have a problem with you, it’s not about you. It’s about those people themselves. People react to you based on their own problems, preconceptions, and present state. Sure. No one sees what’s really in front of them, and there is no such thing as objectivity.

But then he addresses those (no doubt extremely rare) situations when it actually is your fault, and his solution is: compassion. Be nice to yourself. This pretty much puts me right back where I started: I am bad at being nice to myself, dude.

However, if I am just a collection of genetics, experiences, and particles, there is nothing to forgive, nothing to improve, nothing to loathe, nothing to regret. There is just this slice of life held together by a structure, some skin, and a more or less recognizable countenance. There is no master conductor that makes bad decisions and thinks bad thoughts and therefore no one to take anything personally when confronted by the perceived critiques or abuse of others. There is only the ability to incorporate that input into the particle stew and see how it changes the flavor.

Of course, the meal is incomplete without recognizing everyone else as their own particle hot dish, pozole, sega wat. (Thank you to the kishka of particles named Brian Greene for the particle idea of the self.) No one is really choosing the way they behave or the way they think. Everyone is a product of their environment or, as Buddha put it, (per Sharon Salzberg), “nothing exists independently of the causes and conditions that bring it about.” Judging, critiquing, excluding, ostracizing people for being the particulate arrangement that they are is pointlessly cruel and self-destructive. If instead, I can poke at that arrangement and try to reshape it in a way that I believe is more generous, more compassionate, more curious, if I don’t hate those particles for what they have been led to become at this moment, then I don’t tribalize and build walls and thereby prevent myself from using the most effective approach to try to recruit them to my antiracist, antisexist, humanist team. That is, I find the ways that our particles connect, find the shaping forces that we have in common, and recognize that neither of us had any say in being who we are.

But we do have a say now, at least in the sense that we have been brought together in this hypothetical moment and can listen to and learn from each other, to send our particles in a different direction going forward. Change is inevitable. How we change is contingent upon our environment, including everyone who reaches out to smack us down or lend a hand up.

Defunding Police & Seeing Clearly

IMG_20200606_152227604 Two hours ago, the Minneapolis City Council voted, in a veto-proof majority, to Defund the Minneapolis Police Department. This will be a hasty post, but I’m just sooo excited, friends!

I have never been so proud to be a Minneapolitan. Today, I add this label with pride to my geographic identities of Chicagoan and Angeleno/a. There is no city I would rather live in right now. Real change is resting in our hands; not just in policing, but in community resilience and care and connections and in our way of thinking.

As a pseu-Bu* meditator, this week has been an inspiration. Sure, some of the folks who I marched with yesterday may have been anti-police across the board, or anarchists, or willing to swallow whatever the most radical voices were saying, for better and worse, but some of us have spent decades living in cities, witnessing corruption and brutality and racist policing, and yet have not imagined, until recently, that there was any other way for us to be. Getting rid of the police sounded as crazy as getting rid of capitalism, or personal car ownership, or one of the many other exciting ideas on the horizon that now seem possible.

BECAUSE IT IS ALL POSSIBLE.

One of my favorite things about Buddhism is the commitment to see what is really in front of you, without preconceptions or embedded beliefs; letting go of ideology and history to see what is really there. And we old (over 30) folks who were willing to look at the problem differently, to consider the evidence and recommendations that had been put before us by younger, less White, more revolutionary people, really did do something significant.

We changed our minds.

If you’ve studied the way the brain works, this is really not easy to do. And while we are not by any stretch the heroes of the Defund movement – that label goes to Reclaim the Block and MPD150 and many other brilliant and tireless activists, it will take those of us who are plugging along, doing our best, wanting to help, all the clearsightedness we can muster to support the changes that are coming. How do we reimagine policing? What can we actually do to help? How do we think of crime? And punishment? How can we build a beloved community where people help each other instead of anonymously calling an outside, armed force to intervene when we have problems? How can we see these as our problems? Loosening our grip on the way things have always been, our beliefs, our fears, will all be necessary in the new world to come.

I am so excited, I can hardly stand it. I just want to throw my arms around everyone. Love and peace and resilience to all.

*pseudo-Buddhist

Fionamism

bolt cutters It’s been years since Fiona Apple’s last album, as it usually is. She’s a hermit who hates giving interviews and rarely leaves the house, a protegee who released her first album at 19, back when that was unusual, and proceeded to make an award acceptance speech that marked her as a freak for as long as people decided that lasted. And she does seem to be a bit of a freak, as so many of us are. What does Fiona have to contribute to the latest, most conscious wave of feminism?

A strange kind of love.

She (the narrator – no presumptions) aggressively rejects the competition, shaming, and other sexist behavior encouraged in women against women, particularly women bonded by their relationships with men. Decades after being bullied and bored in grammar school, she is sustained through hard times by the words of classmate Shameika, when she said she “had potential.” There is no resentment around her lack of kindness or the fact they weren’t friends, just an appreciation of someone who reached out for no reason except to help her out. I wasn’t going to read any reviews for this, but the quote I just stumbled across is too perfect:

My middle-school experience is still so important to me. Mainly because that’s where my relationship to women started getting fucked up.

And that- the fuckedupedness of women’s relationships, is a dominant theme in the album, expressed with humor and raw honesty and emotion and vulnerability.

Newspaper mourns her inability to befriend a woman getting fucked over by the same guy who fucked her. Where they should be bonding over his abuse and gathering strength and recognition from their shared experience, the new victim has “made me a ghost to you” while the singer can only observe the repeated pattern. “I watch him let go of your hand, I wanna stand between you” makes me think of a kid putting herself between an abusive man and mother, no thought for herself in the attempt to protect the person she cares about.

In Ladies, composed like a kind of Jazz standard, with a chorus sung like a Vegas showman, she strives to get through to “good women like you” to share and love and conspire together and accept themselves as irreplaceable, instead of different failed versions of whatever it is that any random man has made up in his head. I’m just goo-ing over this verse – typing it without the music attached is an insult, but it’s just so great, I had to share:

When he leaves me, please be my guest
To whatever I might’ve left in his kitchen cupboards
In the back of his bathroom cabinets

And oh yes, oh yes, oh yes
There’s a dress in the closet
Don’t get rid of it, you’d look good in it
I didn’t fit in it, it was never mine
It belonged to the ex-wife of another ex of mine
She left it behind with a note, one line, it said
“I don’t know if I’m coming across, but I’m really trying”
She was very kind

This simple offering is almost heartbreakingly beautiful, handing down a dress like the man they shared: I didn’t fit in it, it was never mine, try it out, maybe it’ll work for you. And feel free to build on whatever useful things I contributed to him or his life. It’s hard enough getting through any relationship, any life; making enemies of the people who could gift you the benefit of their experience is a horrible way to try and move forward.

But women have been doing this to themselves forever. You think it’s an accident? You think women just naturally hate other women? They are taught to see each other as nothing more than competition from childhood, and it’s the curse that keeps on giving. Who do you think created those messages? Who could possibly benefit by women going it alone without acknowledging, appreciating, or learning from each other’s pain?

The #metoo era of feminism ripped open the Pandora’s box of a lot of bullshit I had buried away for as long as I can remember. But one of the most disturbing things to come out of it was the realization that I had bought into the sexism of the dominant culture, all the while thinking I was fighting against it. I’ve shunned or minimized the importance of bonding with women my whole life, and while the romantic competition aspect hasn’t been a big one with me, plenty of other antagonisms have. Turning this competition into a shared force cannot be anything but powerful.

So, yeah, this is a FEMINIST album.

It’s also just fucking rock your sox innovative and raw and fun and brutal and both plaguey and plagueworthy. Do it.

Fucking the Poor: Health Care Edition

The whole country is in emergency response mode now. But there were plenty of people in emergency response mode before coronavirus reared is crowned head. So many great ideas are being thrown around – tuition forgiveness, free health care, rent forgiveness, money simply sent to people who need it – all of this because people are in economic distress “through no fault of their own.”

When is the fault their own?

When they are mentally ill and can’t maintain a job? When they didn’t have access to enough education to secure a job that pays their expenses? When their spouse dies and they can’t afford childcare during work? When their employer won’t give them enough hours to support themselves? When they were forced to flee their country to avoid rape or murder or starvation?

We (in the US, and many other places) act as though care is a zero-sum negotiation, that if we give to others, that mean less for us. While this may seem reasonable when we’re talking cold, hard cash, the logic breaks down pretty quickly. Money isn’t real. It’s a symbol to be exchanged for things we need and want – ostensibly, if we have enough, for things that make us happy. Even some of the richest folks in this country are starting to support a redistribution of wealth, because fucking the poor ultimately fucks everyone.

We could exemplify this with education or housing too, but given the PANDEMIC, let’s start with healthcare.

What happens when we deny people health care?

they don’t go to doctors, which means
- they don’t get preventative care, which can have long-term effects that lead to exponentially more expensive care in the future
- they are less productive
- if mentally ill, they can negatively impact the people around them with their depression, anxiety, anger, etc.
- when they are infected with viruses, they infect others
- they go to emergency rooms, either because they don’t have doctors or because their illness is so severe they can’t wait anymore, which crowds ERs, increasing the wait for people with non-preventable medical emergencies

they do go to doctors, which means
- they have to sacrifice something else to afford it, perhaps
  - nutritious food, increasing their chance of illness
  - rent, perhaps leading to eviction, increasing their health risk, stress, and potential burden to the system
  - child care, forcing them to stay home and lose income or their jobs entirely
- they are given a prescription which they may not be able to afford, leading to
  - not filling the prescription, and remaining ill
  - rationing of pills, maybe taking half the antibiotics they were prescribed, contributing to antibiotic resistance which truly could kill us all

and so on. Factor in our lack of paid sick leave and the risk is magnified.

If we hadn’t made testing and treatment for the coronavirus free, these people might simply die a horrible death. It’s still possible, even likely, that undocumented immigrants are too afraid of ICE and deportation to seek treatment.

How does this help us?

I’m no big advocate for selfish decision making, but when empathy fails, it’s a good backup. Helping others helps us all. We are all interconnected, whether we like it or not (we like it, whether we know it or not: no one reading this wants to produce all their own food and create all their own entertainment, even. Good god, if I was my only source of entertainment, I would snap like a twig.). Contagion is just one, obvious example of that. If everyone is healthy-ish, people are happier, more productive, more creative, more compassionate, smarter, better people. How do we not all benefit from that?

We can embrace our mutualism, or we can destroy ourselves in an attempt to destroy the other, while the thieves in power feed off our corpses.

Sorry, got a little apocalyptic there. I’m losing my patience, and it seems a lot of our human and non-human friends are, too.

The Danger of American Exceptionalism: Covid 19 Edition!

Oh, so many mini-strokes listening to Trump try to calm the country after failing to respond quickly and appropriately to a pandemic, but one particular phrase is a pet barfpoint of mine.

American Exceptionalism is a lie. I’m not sure exactly sure what it’s supposed to mean, but I know it’s a lie. Are we physically superior, with our impressive rates of obesity and diabetes? Have we endured so much more than dozens or hundreds of other countries who have suffered through numerous wars or famine or environmental destruction on a national scale? Is it because our corporations have the chutzpah to exploit people and natural resources around the world for fun and profit? The United States is clearly exceptional in its tremendous wealth, made possible by slavery, genocide, class warfare, greed, and, yes, some hard work and creativity, but I’m not sure how that helps us fight a pandemic.

When the President says that Americans are the strongest and most resilient people on earth in the context of fighting a pandemic, it’s not just a lie; it’s dangerous. We are not stronger or more resilient than anyone else. We are vulnerable – more or less depending on our age, health luck, profession, and government response – but we are just as human as everyone else on this planet and AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM IS NOT AN INOCULATION!

Sorry, lost my cool there. You all know this, I’m sure. I am just reminded, day in and day out, especially as I dig more deeply into our history of brutality and bigotry and lies, that words matter. Pride won’t immunize us, but humility will help. We are human, we are interconnected, we rely on each other for everything. I will be safe, I will socially isolate, I will look out for myself, but I will remember that my world is only worth protecting because of the ways in which it plays with everyone else’s worlds, and how we all get dirtied up in the sandbox of our collective lives.

Good news: dogs can’t get Covid-19! Mine is available to supplement social contact. I can even send her out into the yard for you, so you don’t have to deal with me.

Be well, my loves.

Does Anti-Racism Work Make You Sexy?

Followup question: Do I have a future in clickbait?

sexy I had a lovely day today. Nothing special. I had planned to spend most of the day writing and reading, but instead wiled away the hours interacting with folks and art. My journey began at a too-popular bread n breakfast place. Tables freed up one at a time as I anxiously waited for a place to plant my incipient biscuit sandwich. A 4-top opened up when I reached the front of the line, and I took it a little guiltily, checking to see if a nearby twosome was getting up anytime soon so I could swap out my spot. Continue reading “Does Anti-Racism Work Make You Sexy?” →

The Failings of Retributive Justice

justice I’ve been thinking a lot about justice lately. (Pick your reason.) I’m particularly interested in our default definition of justice and how the tight circumscription of that definition keeps us from exploring ideas and actual practices that might benefit victims, society, and (heavens!) the perpetrators themselves. Continue reading “The Failings of Retributive Justice” →

The Magical Pause: Email Edition

email image I haven’t put together any real resolutions for this year, though they always tempt me. My fantasies of symbolic slate clearing (post-rain, new years, moving) is at odds with my aversion to goal setting, so here I sit, wobbling on as usual. I suppose this behavior is more Buddhist, even if I got there by defeat instead of acceptance.

If I did have resolutions for 2020, PAUSE MORE would be at the top of the list. Lots of folks talk about The Pause, but it caught my attention in Tara Brach’s book Radical Acceptance. She calls it The Sacred Pause; I prefer The Magical Pause, because sacred is just so … weighty. Continue reading “The Magical Pause: Email Edition” →

Personal Non-Violence

punch (There may be a related “political non-violence” piece in the works, but that will have to go on the race blog. By the way: upcoming Race Blog!)

Since Trump’s electoral college win, we seem to have embraced more violence as a country. Not just the lunatic fringe of proud racists and anti-Semites, but also the liberal Left. Let’s call this the “punch a Nazi” philosophy, as it shone most blindingly after a video went viral of Richard Spencer being socked in the face during an on-the-street interview.

Many Facebook Friends loved this. Facebook Friends who didn’t were called racist or stupid or ignorant by fellow White Liberals. I didn’t get involved, because I’m allergic to commentdebate, but I watched reasonable people get taken down and shut down en masse.

I am not pro-violence. I think it’s bad for the perpetrator and the victim, and almost always creates more pain and suffering than it prevents. But not always. I am not a pacifist. I admire pacifism, but I am not a pacifist. At least, I don’t think so. One can only know one’s true stance when forced to defend it. Maybe I could look with compassion and kindness and forgiveness on someone who hurt me, but at this moment, I doubt it.

I believe in defending myself. I admire those who make a conscious decision not to – Jesus and his ilk – but I am a woman who has been physically assaulted and I believe in fighting back. Not just to avoid pain, but to show the attacker that women are not walking targets and hopefully discourage him (yeah, I think I can assume Him) from hurting another woman. If I were a man, particularly a physically imposing man, I could see how turning the other cheek might be illuminating as well.

I also believe in defending others. I would hope that if I saw someone being attacked, or knew an attack was imminent, that I would try to prevent it. It seems more likely that this would manifest as getting between than taking on, but I’m not opposed to physical action in this situation, either.

And I think that’s it. So if Richard Spencer (heretofore referred to as Fuckwad) were an actual Nazi: killing, deporting, and enslaving Jews, homosexuals, etc, I could justify personally taking up violence against him. But only – and this is the crucial element of my philosophy – if it did some good. You might say that Fuckwad promotes racism and anti-Semitism and slavery (which the fuckwad does), and that therefore he is a justifiable target, but does targeting him do any good?

Here’s where the pro Punch a Nazi contingent loses its rational footing. I get that you want to see Fuckwad punched; I get that you might want to punch him yourself, but punching him accomplishes nothing. I know many anti-Fuckwad folks laughed and cheered when they saw the video, but it did not accomplish any of the following things:

embarrass him: he recovered calmly and smoothly, in a civilized manner, saying he’d taken a hit before, and continued with the interview
hurt him: see above
prevent him from spewing his calm vitriol: see above
turn any of his followers in another direction: Fuckwad presented either as an innocent victim or as the masculine “man” they love to – platonically! – love. Plus, the attacker may appear irrational, violent, and animalistic, playing into the lie Fuckwad and team have crafted.
move any anti-Fuckwads to worthwhile action: posting about how much you love violence against people you don’t love is not worthwhile action, not if you want to make the world a better place, as you purport to do

I cannot think of one positive thing the sucker punch accomplished, other than, perhaps, making me more wary of liberals. I guess that could be a good thing. If you can think of a positive impact, please let me know. Maybe there’s something I’m not seeing.

Pseu-Bus (soo-boos)* like myself probably shouldn’t say this, but one could better justify killing Fuckwad than punching him. I don’t condone that, either, but it would have shut him up. There’s a tiny, tiny chance that might have done some good in the world, though it’s really unlikely. If he were The Creator of these ideas, or the only public figure still promoting them, then yeah, removing him might dramatically weaken the support for those ideas; but he is far from the first and far from the last, and disabling him would more likely bring about a martyrdom than a dissolution of support. Again, let me be clear: I’m not endorsing this, I’m just saying it holds more water than the punching defense. No one wants to go back in time to “clock Hitler a good one.”

I am not a pacifist because we don’t live in a perfect world and I do think there is a place for violence. If we let go of our egos and reactive anger, that place would be really, really remote.

Beyond that, violence is not my role in the world. There may be a place for violence in the activism that is necessary to save an environment or society worth living in. But every movement has numerous roles – speakers, writers, artists, event planners, even bodies. Don’t look to me to be the muscle. I am an overly compassionate wuss. It breaks my heart to see footage of the losing bench in a finals game, even if it’s the Patriots. It breaks my heart to think of a dog waiting for its dead owner to come home, even if the owner is Fuckwad. I have never felt good after saying something mean to even a vicious, loathed person. Not if they seemed hurt by it, and if they didn’t, then what was the point? I lose either way. Right Speech and Right Action in Buddhism aren’t just about protecting the world, they’re about protecting yourself.

I guess what I’m saying, dear reader, is I am not the resource for all your Nazi-punching needs. I can’t take on that role until it’s the only role left.

*Pseu-Bu: pseudo-Buddhist; in my case, someone who has put together some semblance of a Buddhist philosophy based almost exclusively on contemporary Western interpretations of Buddhism.

Fast-tracking Enlightenment?

enlightenment A lot of people come to meditation through drugs. Usually in one of two very different ways. Either they find meditation as a respite and palliative from alcohol and drug addiction and toxic patterns of behavior, or, like the recently deceased Ram Dass, they touch another, entirely different world through drugs – psychedelic drugs – and seek a spiritual life as a way to hold onto, or expand upon, or share that world.

Why psychedelics? I’m certainly no expert, but in reading Ram Dass, and Michael Pollan’s latest, and watching countless YouTube videos (both biographical and scientific), psychedelics offer your brain a method of functioning that stretches above and beyond our typical patterns – in fact, it can help break patterns that bury people in rumination and anxiety, as well as offering a view of reality that is entirely different from what we’ve come to accept as acceptable. Psychedelics have helped dying people lose their fear of death. They have broken depressive cycles for some people for years on end. For some lucky few, these experiences may be enough to change the way they live, completely, for years. But most of us need help.

While a psilocybin or ayahuasca trip can show someone a different view of the world, it doesn’t show them how to live in that world. Everyday living takes practice, and unlearning the way you’ve learned to live through a lifetime in a competitive society is even harder. So now that you have seen that love is all that matters (for example), how do you bring that to work, to a traffic jam, to your abusive parent? There is a huge gap between knowing and doing, as anyone with any philosophical leanings will surely recognize.

It seems to me that the role of meditation is more or less the same whether you’ve experienced a transcendent moment or not: it’s practice for better living in the world. You practice, second by second, guiding the mind instead of letting it take you for a ride; you practice not automatically scratching that itch, not adjusting your body to relieve that pain, not clinging to that feeling of joy that just came out of nowhere. You practice being in the moment so that you can love without expectation or fantasies; you practice nonattachment so you can give when someone needs help and can accept generosity without pride. Enlightenment is a glimpse of something better than what we currently live in, but it doesn’t change our living. I imagine it’s great to know that there is a real, true universal love underneath it all, but we live on the surface. And letting go of the ego? Sign me up, but I still (have to) live in this person, in this place, with these abilities and failings as best I can, and good god that takes a lot of practice. In the words of Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.

The idea that drugs are cheating (as some meditators have proposed) is pretty ridiculous, and pretty Protestant-Work-Ethicky. If it were a shortcut to nirvana, wouldn’t we all benefit from more enlightened people in the world? More realistically, if shrooms or LSD or ayahuasca can motivate people to live more lovingly, with less fear and less ego, if it can motivate them to find meaning in compassion and connection, who cares how they get there?

And if you’re wondering why the government has been so resistant to exploring the benefits of these drugs, imagine what a monumental increase in compassion and egolessness and acceptance, and reduction in competitiveness and ambition and greed would do to the economy. It’s not just the “dropouts,” those few who choose to detach themselves entirely from the mundane, who can disrupt the enforced order. There are so many ways to live, and many of them do not revolve around money, careers, or the nuclear family; some of them don’t even see the self as the most essential unit, or self-preservation as the highest goal. Imagine that.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Sigh.

clawing my way to enlightenment

Author: Zee Bee