Hate and Nonviolence

Listening to NPR's special on MLK, the thought occurred to me:  The people who Hated back then sound just like the people who Hate today --purveyors of popular wisdom that they claim to be, never hating or hateful.

Shortly after that, I'm listening to a follow-up show covering Gandhi and his grandson.  I am chagrined to simultaneously realize my reaction adds to the circle of violence, and believe the assessment essentially true.  Firmly ensnared in samsara.

I look back at the past century and see King & Gandhi, and their pop cultural echoes that rode, for a time, and helped change the world.  I look at the present day, and wonder: who and what do we have now?  Dissent, in America, is dead... unless you Hate all the right people.

Witness the Dixie Chicks (hardly the John & Yoko of our time), blacklisted both literally and popularly due to a single comment by their lead singer during the W. Bush Presidency.  She dared to say she felt embarrassed the President was from Texas.  Fast forward to more recent times, when the same people who cried foul of these three pop singers now become birther, tea party, & associated movements accusing the current President of everything from not being American, to being socialist.  They've popularized images of the man decked out as Hitler or as a monkey.

Discourse among people of opposing views is now: 'my goal for the next two years is to remove him from office.'  No longer do we have, at base, the idea that we are all people, we all want to do better for ourselves and our fellow man.  Now we are all enemies to each other.  Or this is romanticism on my part, and we were always enemies.

Who profits from this state of affairs?  Profit is probably an accurate word.  While we hate and hate and hate, radio pundits go on spewing popular, divisive propaganda, the political machine gets more mired in its own act of self-evisceration... and we are left with a world where a person's labor is all he can hope to offer against the wages of sin (as it were) and in a globe of almost seven billion such persons that means we're all worth somewhere south of an American buck per hour's labor.

It is certainly enough to make one feel lost.  Enough that we can fix in our estimation the identity of the enemy.  If we choose that path.

Nonviolence.  I guess it is a sort of faith that great people once asked of us.  Maybe it is not faith, but action. And... Maybe it wasn't something asked of us.  Maybe: expected of us.

Because the alternative... the alternative is the alternative.

Talk with your family and friends, and talk about taking a pledge of nonviolence.  What is passive violence and how often does it occur in our day to day?  How often to we grow angry?  Gandhi had his grandson keep an anger journal, documenting every time that anger occurred.  But always with the end goal in mind: to find a solution to the problem of anger.

B