The Truth Is Out There

St. Dominic De Guzman- The Truth is Out There
gouache on paper 4.5" x 5"

In her book "The Verbally Abusive Relationship" author Patricia Evans writes that abusive personal relationships are a microcosm of abusive societal relationships, drawing parallels between the control an oppressive regime struggles to exert over it's citizens and the control an oppressive partner struggles to exert over their significant other. She points out that in both cases fear is at the root of these evils- fear that people will recognize their own power, fear of abandonment, fear of inadequacy, fear of exposure. Does the root of all evil stem from fear?

I have been thinking about this for a long time. I have been considering it in the light of recent events, including Arizona law SB1070, the argument over the cultural center near Ground Zero, Dr. Laura's racist verbal crap explosion, and various and sundry things being said by Sarah Palin and members of the Tea Party, and local cases of child abuse, domestic violence, and homicide. To name only a few. The sadness of the harm done, the ugliness of the rhetoric, the wrongheadedness of the self righteous, the shocking disregard for our fellow human beings. Ten years into the new millennium, this is what we've got. It's a damn shame.

The common thread I see among all of these things is fear, but when I think where could that fear have come from, what I get is : ignorance. Some ignorance is very easy to identify—words or actions that reveal a deficiency in knowledge of a subject. Some ignorance is very willful ignorance, serving an agenda, a play for power, stoking the fear engendered by the ignorance of others. The most basic ignorance, though, is the ignorance of self. When we fear to look within, to address our hurts, to know ourselves and to heal ourselves, then we can't know peace. We act out- whether it is by violence towards our spouse or children or by getting up on a podium or a radio show and spouting really hateful, condemning words about people we don't even know, we are acting out. Fear, not love, is what motivates our actions when we are ignorant of our true selves. We live our lives in knee-jerk mode, and a lot of other people get hurt, maybe even in spite of our best intentions.

So, ignorance: the root of all evil. The solution? It would be really nice if human beings could just agree to acknowledge that by the time we are twenty some one or some thing has probably seriously fucked us up in some way—a trauma, a messed up set of beliefs about our selves and the world, some jerk messages our parents instilled in us—whatever. And it would be really nice if everyone accepted that before they got married, had children, went into a professional practice, spoke in public or held a public office, you would get some kind of therapy, get to know yourself, heal whatever your wounds are, and learn to be at peace. How else is anybody going to act with pure intentions? Because otherwise, there is a whole lot of fronting going on, a whole lot of the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, a whole lot of nastiness and needless suffering.

I will end with some quotes from the Dalai Lama:


"If there is love, there is hope to have real families, real brotherhood, real equanimity, real peace. If the love within your mind is lost, if you continue to see other beings as enemies, then no matter how much knowledge or education you have, no matter how much material progress is made, only suffering and confusion will ensue."


"I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of altruism, of love and compassion, and elimination of ignorance, selfishness, and greed."

And lastly:

"Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace."


Amen

What I Found Out

"St. Dorothy, Patron Saint of Gardeners, Buries Land Developers to Make Room For A Field"

7"x8" acrylic on paper

I don't believe in statistics. I just don't believe in them. I don't believe that the bad things people do to each other have to happen. I don't believe violence or dumping toxic waste in a river are probable based on sheer numbers. Pick any one of those numbers and you will see a whole chain of decisions that were made, perhaps even generations before the incident of child abuse or environmentally caused cancer occurred, you will see individuals making choices. Assuming these events are just the roll of the dice or somehow inevitable allows us to abandon our responsibility to each other and to our planet. There may be reasons why people do what they do, but they are not excuses. Excuses let us off the hook, but understanding the reasons allows us to effect positive change.

My rejection of our dependence on statistics is the result of 40 years of struggling to understand the nature of evil. I grew up in the very incubator of American bad behavior-the middle class suburb. I never felt comfortable here. I was very aware that I didn't "fit in": my weird last name, my hand me down clothes from a sister who was several years older, my autistic brother. More than that, though, was the awareness that others suffered and I did not. It was personal in the case of my brother: why was he autistic and apparently doomed to a terrible life, why not me? Couldn't it just as easily have been me? I felt guilty for getting off scot-free. As for the rest of the world, I had seen the plight of Cambodian refugees and terribly malnourished African children on the news, I had read enough books about children during war time. I somehow knew I was living in an illusory bubble in which people were focused on things like having designer labels on their clothes, and that somewhere else at that same moment other people were in grave danger. It was the unfairness of this arrangement that troubled me. I could not have expressed it in words, it was a feeling, a feeling that I was enjoying safety that I wasn't entitled to, that I didn't deserve, yet here I had it and other people didn't. Why? Why? It drove me nuts for years.

Fortunately, among the gifts afforded to me in adulthood is faith in a loving God, and the knowledge that I'm not any better or any worse than anyone else. What a relief. I know for a fact that every single person who shows up on this planet is loved by God, from the baby who barely gets to draw a breath because she was born in the midst of a famine in Ethiopia to the Emperor of Japan, we are all loved. We all deserve to live in safety- whether we get to or not is an accident of birth. And that still isn't fair: that Ethiopian baby didn't have to die, neither did the victims of Union Carbide in Bhopal India, or Karen Silkwood, or Reverend King, but it isn't God's doing, it's the direct result of humankind's shortcomings, the dire consequences of our hubris and our miserable failings. So the question for me next became: are we all so completely broken that this can't ever be fixed?

It occurred to me long ago--as I observed the "norms" of middle class America with bafflement--that just because something is "the norm" doesn't mean it's normal, or even a good idea to begin with. The very institutions we made that condition how we think and perceive ourselves in relation to the world, and that dictate our social and economic structure are directly causing much of the suffering in the world. But how to resist the seemingly inescapable pull of the social/political/economic moral black hole that is just "business as usual" in the United States: driving and polluting, working far too many hours so we can buy things that are produced at the cost of human life and health, eating food that is so far removed from nature it maybe shouldn't be called food, every dollar spent funneled into a large corporation that is murdering the poor and killing the environment? Why are we as a nation driven to be like gerbils on a wheel that never stops? Why are we so technologically advanced and yet so spiritually under developed?

Well, seek and ye shall find: last year I picked up a back issue of the excellent Orion Magazine and read an eye opening article titled "The Gospel of Consumption" by Jeffrey Kaplan. This illuminating history of the birth of American consumer culture answered some of the questions, born of helpless frustration, that have dogged me for years upon years. Kaplan writes:

In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”

Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work—more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”

By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

-Jeffrey Kaplan "The Gospel of Consumption"
Orion Magazine May/June 2008

Finding out that our soul-sucking, resource draining, money driven way of life is just a big trick perpetrated with malice of forethought by a bunch of rich industrialists was such a relief. It means that it doesn't have to be this way. Stop the gerbil wheel, I want to get off. And that equally culpable partner in crime, the United States government?

Well, this year I have been reading "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn. I had long been aware that what I was taught in school about the founding of the United States was a load of happy horseshit, but this book really reveals the the dirt, and dirty it is. From the murder of the Arawak people by Columbus to the deliberately constructed architecture of racial discrimination that allowed the depraved, barbaric treatment of kidnapped African men, women and children caught in the American system of slavery, to the classist economic privilege that existed from the time the first European set foot on this continent, this book is answering all of my questions, born of years of disappointment, mistrust, and disgust, about why our government is so broken and corrupt. Why are lobbies allowed to exist? Why are our elections privately funded, effectively shutting out everyone but the rich from running for office? Why are the interests of corporations set above the good of the people and the environment time and time again? Why is there such a disconnect between our ideals and what actually happens? It turns out that our "founding fathers" were all a bunch of rich guys who wanted to protect their wealth from the king of England. Our purported ideals were what they waved around to get everyone who wasn't rich to help them out with the revolution. It worked, and they structured their new government to first and foremost benefit their business endeavors and real estate schemes, and to protect their wealth and privilege. Oh.

And yet, a relief still, because it doesn't mean that Americans are too inept to run a healthy, fair system of governance, just too greedy and self-interested to actually create one in the first place. Ineptness may not be curable, but I'm enough of an optimist to believe that greed and self-interest are choices. Knowledge is power, and finding concrete answers to the questions that have plagued me has allowed me to examine my own role in our current system, think about solutions, and try my best to change what I don't like about my own behavior.

And if we don't decide to change? I don't know about you, but I can feel the wobbly, reckless, blinding speed of our downward trajectory. I've been expecting a crash for a long, long time.

Which is why I've just re-read Margaret Atwood's two most recent novels, "Oryx and Crake" and "The Year of the Flood". Set in the not too distant future, science and technology are still in the hands of large corporations and profit, as an ends, still justifies any means. More species are rapidly dying out as all of the world's resources are used up and global warming gains momentum unchecked, and the only government that exists is the creepy Stasi like CorpSeCorps, paid for by the corporations to maintain law and order so that their profits can continue to grow unimpeded by citizen protests, conscientious objectors, or anti-establishment free thinkers. This world is inhabited by bio-engineered super viruses that can dissolve people into puddles, new species of bio-engineered, gene spliced animals-including the horrific chickie knobs, a chicken that is all meat and no brain that grows in a lab- and cyborg bees developed by the CorpSeCorps for spying and surveillance. Margaret Atwood's genius is not only that she presents her warning about our probable future as an involving and masterfully written story, but that you can see the future she writes as the logical, natural consequence of, say, our current decision to buy a pair of sneakers even though we know they were made in a sweatshop, or any other of the seemingly innocuous moral lapses we citizens of the first world make a hundred times a day-decisions based in the blissful ignorance of safety and plenty, or by throwing up our hands in frustration and saying: I'm one person, I can't change anything, or by simply deciding to not care. We have that luxury now, but our time is running out. We are caught in the gears we have made out of material gain and creature comforts. The global economy in it's present incarnation is running every aspect of our lives-we serve it, and it only really serves the very few. It has sneakily fostered a self-indulgent way of living among the better off that directly causes much suffering to the poor and is destroying our planet. But-it doesn't have to be this way. Margaret Atwood's warning doesn't have to be our future. About this, I'm not terribly optimistic, but I remain hopeful. So far.

The very heart of all of this mess is, of course, that our abilities far exceed our wisdom. Any parent of a toddler-or a teen for that matter-knows what I mean. Human beings invented the wheel and a ton of really good and helpful things since, but we've also made nuclear weapons, various other killing machines including SUV's, and a billion of those cheap little plastic McDonald's Happy Meal toys that are toxic as hell and wind up in landfills. We've done terrible things with even good inventions, tainting them with unfair and unsafe labor practices and pollution. Not to mention we're still bashing each other on the head with rocks.

The Dalai Lama said, "Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive." I pray and pray that each individual person on our planet will gain in spiritual wisdom so that the choices we all make will be more responsible towards our fellow beings, healthier for our children and our planet, and motivated by kindness and compassion. That world is possible. I don't care if it isn't probable, because I don't believe in statistics.

It Is What It Is

St. Eugene de Mazenod

Patron Saint of Dysfunctional Families
mixed media shrine

Last year I told my husband that if we were rich we could leave the country during the holiday season and escape to some place where they've never heard of Christmas. Christmas has been kicking my ass for years. About ten years ago I decided that enough was enough, and every year since then I have been letting go more and more of all of the deadline induced anxiety and guilt induced panic. I've been examining all of the weird capitalist driven hype surrounding the (not even his actual) birthday of Jesus Christ, the most socialist, egalitarian, non-materialistic holy person to ever walk the earth. I've deconstructed the crazy messages foisted on us by our unrelenting capitalist economy, like that a sweater bought at the Gap for Christmas is somehow much better than that same sweater all of the other 364 days of the year, and that the actual Spirit, the Real Meaning of Christmas can in fact be purchased, wrapped, and imparted to the recipient in the form of that sweater from the Gap! They will actually experience a warm, happy glow and hear tinkling bells, and they will love you for it. Yeah, I've been actively deprogramming myself, and I've been trying to figure out how to celebrate Christmas in a way that is meaningful to me. I've been very frank with myself about being realistic with my time and resources. And that is all great. Year by year I've been letting go more and more. But there is something I struggle with every year, and that is not how I do Christmas, it is with whom I do Christmas. Which is what this blog is really about.

U R TOAST
detail of St. Eugene de Mazenod shrine

I suspect that the average person feels really, really bad at Christmas. Because the perception is that everyone else's family is having a Christmas card picture perfect jolly old heart warming time of it from November until January. Everyone except us, that is, with our alcoholics, weirdo recluses, co-dependents, martyrs, people prone to angry outbursts, the dead who we miss terribly, and those who choose to be estranged. Somehow it seems so important that on this one day everybody be who they are not, and this big Christmas expectation can condense and intensify our feelings of sadness, loss and disappointment about what is lacking in our family relationships into crisis proportions. I also suspect that the reason for all of the crazy doing, spending, and rushing around is that it serves as a huge distraction from how bad we feel. Because, let me tell you, the less crazy Christmas doing I do, the more painful feelings I have to get through about my family relationships.

"Old Great-Grandad Booze"

detail of St. Eugene de Mazenod shrine

That being said, a step back and a look at the big picture is in order. I believe that each person was purposely put upon the earth for one, or some, or all of these reasons: to teach, to learn, and to witness. I believe that I could not possibly be the person I am without my family: all that is good, all that is bad, and everything else has made me grow. I am discovering that when I stay rooted in what is I am not derailed by sadness over what is not. It has been a hard lesson to learn—forty years in the making—that I have been spending the holidays with the idea of who I want my family to be as opposed to who they are. I love them and accept them in sickness and in health, in absence and in presence, in grumpiness and in shame inducing nagging all of the other 364 days of the year in varying degrees of compassion (on a 0-10 scale). Yet on Christmas I expect some facsimile family. They don't exist. And they always disappoint me. Not like my real family, from whom I know exactly what to expect and who are consistently themselves, December 25th or no. And so I must own, that they were not screwing up my Christmases, I was. Thank God I am finally getting a handle on why Christmas kicks my ass. And so my plan this year for serenity, sanity, and hopefully enjoyment is as follows:

1. I will practice this wisdom from the Dalai Lama: " I am open to the guidance of synchronicity, and do not let expectations hinder my path."

2. I will remember these wise words from St. Milarepa, himself the child of a dysfunctional family: "I have understood this body of mine to be the product of ignorance, composed of flesh and blood and lit up by the perceptive power of consciousness. To those fortunate ones who long for emancipation it may be the great vessel by which they may procure Freedom. But to the unfortunates who only sin, it may be the guide to lower and miserable states of existence. This our life is the boundary mark whence one may take an upward or downward path. Our present time is a most precious time, wherein each of us must decide, in one way or other, for lasting good or lasting ill." (emphasis mine)

3. I will pray. A lot. Especially to St. Eugene de Mazenod, the patron saint of dysfunctional families. I will ask him to look over us and to help me detach with love.

4. I will talk my husband's ear off, and the ears of my other trusted friends, so that I can stay centered, see the big picture, and not be ruled by my feelings.

St. Milarepa
mixed media shrine

I think I can reasonably expect to survive.

The Saint of Compassion

This shrine of His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, was a collaboration between myself and my beloved husband, Marcus. He painted the figure, and I really love how he captured the Dalai Lama's beautiful smile. I lined this simple shrine with a nubbly woven pink silk and painted the halo with the Buddhist symbol for world peace, lotus flowers, and my favorite quote from my favorite living saint - "My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness."

Marcus and I have been talking about compassion in relation to the debate over President Obama's health care reform proposals. I am struck especially by two arguments that seem particularly wrong headed and, if followed to their logical conclusion, inhuman.

The first is: "it costs too much." Now I ask you, what should we be spending our collective monies on? What is more valuable, more priceless, than good health? Ask any person who has had their life curtailed by a chronic condition or any parent who helplessly watches their child suffer. Ask a terminally ill person with goals, dreams, and people they want to stick around for. Ask them what good health is worth. Good health is the basis for living the lives we want to live and we should be putting our money into ensuring that everyone's health needs are met. As a matter of fact, along with good food and shelter for everyone I can't think of a more important thing to spend our tax dollars on. I hear "my children will be paying for this!" Yeah? So will mine. And I'm glad they will be paying for something so worthwhile. I find this argument especially ironic in the face of the two wars the United States is currently involved in, needless wars that cost billions of dollars and the lives and health of countless people. We will be paying for that mess for a generations. And yet people argue that good health care for everyone is too expensive? Even worse, that good health care for everyone isn't worth the expense?

The second argument I have been hearing is the worry that "illegal" immigrants will benefit from public option health care. I say, I wish they would. Because a person in need is a person in need, regardless of, well, of anything. A person in need of medical care being denied for any reason at all is a cruel and terrible thing. It goes against the basic tenant of all major religions, and of anyone who is a decent human being: compassion. And compassion in practice is the care of the sick, the poor, and anyone unable to help themselves.

I leave you with these quotes on the subject of compassion from the Dalai Lama himself:

"Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, it is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability, it is essential for human survival."

"I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of altruism, of love and compassion, and elimination of ignorance, selfishness, and greed."

"As human beings we all want to be happy and free from misery… we have learned that the key to happiness is inner peace. The greatest obstacles to inner peace are disturbing emotions such as anger, attachment, fear and suspicion, while love and compassion and a sense of universal responsibility are the sources of peace and happiness."

If the Dalai Lama's wisdom were to enter the United States Senate we would have a completely reformed health care system and a public option in a heart beat.

Amen