Dance
Soon the thin window glass
Will try to keep out the desert heat
Now it stands between the morning chill
Either way the birds sing through
Lay down the mat and cushion
Sit not waiting for enlightenment
When the gong rings
It’s time to dance
©
I get the news I need on the weather report.
Paul Simon, The Only Living Boy in New York
I spent a week mostly without news. Some days I saw a brief topline summary, some days none. I didn’t read headlines, I didn’t click on headlines. I didn’t listen to talking heads telling me what happened, I didn’t listen to talking heads analyzing what the other talking heads said.
I lived to tell. And I feel good.
News that affects your life or the lives of those within your circle of care (which for some people encompasses the world) is worth knowing about. Much of the rest of the information may be interesting and stimulating, may be fodder for thought or conversation or tweets, but questions remain: How does it affect your life? How much, if anything, can you do to affect the things you hear about? Is simply seeking and hearing this news somehow making you or your life worse? Is there something—anything—else you could be doing, hearing, thinking that would be better than paying attention to the news?
The news is with us always. You don’t have to hide from it, you don’t have to seek it. Just try to keep it in its place.
When Trump took office, he assumed that everyone he appointed to an executive branch job was on his team—that they would support whatever he did and said, do whatever he wanted, no questions asked, no backtalk or criticism, public or private. If it ever came to a choice between Trump and “doing the right thing”, the team members would choose him, just as his staff had at the Trump Organization.
He quickly discovered it did not always work that way. And so among his other strategies, he saw that he would have to purge all those whose unconditional loyalty was beyond question, and replace them with those who, for whatever reasons (incompetence, ideology, need for job or job security, etc.), would toe the line.
These replacement players would be a compliant, sycophantic part of the wall—the wall Trump has almost completed around his executive branch. In the Justice Department, for example, Sessions and Comey are gone, as Rosenstein soon will be. The same has happened elsewhere, time and again.
This Trump wall, unlike the one at the southern border, will work, at least for a while. Built with the solid powers of the presidency, the wall won’t be easily gotten around or broken through. With all his glaring deficiencies, Trump knows one thing: how to protect himself. This wall around the executive branch will do just that.
Medicine Buddha of Lapis Lazuli Radiance
Love is Healing
healers are the healed
lovers are the loved
that feeling is not yours
it belongs to them
then returns
There are a variety of insurgencies—political, economic, social, cultural, spiritual.
There are also a variety of drivers for these. The same as for the insurgencies themselves, but not necessarily congruent. There are, for example, political insurgencies that are driven by economic forces.
It may be thought that spiritual traditions including practices such as meditation and beliefs in equanimity are quietistic and do not induce or allow insurgency. The same might be thought about other contemplative traditions. This is an incomplete understanding.
In the psychology realm, there are therapies that urge patients to “get in touch with their anger.” The point is not that the patient will never, ever be angry again. That might be as unrealistic and maladaptive as being angry all the time. Instead the thought is that once anger is seen in a different light, it can be experienced in a different way.
Just so, enlightened paths can lead to enlightened insurgencies. This is as tricky as it sounds. In the face of things going in the wrong direction, in the face of injustices, inequities or just plain thoughtless and destructive stupidity, it is easy to forget your principles and, as the cliché goes, become part of the problem and not part of the solution.
We’ve seen it in every movement for change and reform. We’ve seen it in the civil rights movement in America, where there was (and is) continuing disagreement about the vehemence of protest and resistance. Every prophet has faced this—the wrongs may be easy to see, but the rights are harder to formulate, even if God supposedly inspired you to action.
How much harder it is for those of us who are light years from being prophets. All we can do is keep our feet more or less on the path, watch ourselves and our indignation, and figure out, as best we can, how to make things better as quickly as possible without making them worse.
Sengai Gibon (1750-1837), The Universe
Triangle Square Circle (60-90-0)
Three angles
Four angles
All angles
Here and gone
©
Withholding
Of the ten thousand words
I could wield as weapons this moment
to attack an innocent
(all are as innocent as they are guilty)
I withhold:
the greater for all
the lesser for none
©
The founders of America had a dream, fueled by the Enlightenment and by what we might call Christian realism about how people really are.
It would be ideal to depend on the kindness of strangers, but experience has shown that strangers cannot always be relied on and are not always kind. Instead, as a national community, we are committed—by the Constitution those founders hammered out—to “promote the general welfare.”
With many ups and downs, and some real gaps, that has generally worked out during the first two centuries of that American dream. Those days may not be over, but the founding principle is under serious, if not existential, threat.
The Shutdown is just one example, but a glaring one. At best, Trump and his cohort believe that forcing federal workers to work without pay will be taken care of by the private sector. At worst and most likely, they just don’t care.
America has tried political philosophies that leaned to individual self-help and more limited government. But never before has the governing philosophy (if you can call it that) literally pushed Americans—Americans working for other Americans—into forced labor and economic hardship.
Welcome to Trump America, where it’s every man, woman and child for themselves.
William Barr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, as the Senate considers his nomination to be Trump’s Attorney General. The Democratic Senators asked some specific and incisive questions about his independence from Trump and about his willingness to allow the Mueller investigation and report to proceed unimpeded. The answers were often ambiguous and weasely. In any case, it does not practically matter. The hearing was pro forma, as his confirmation is assured.
It is a cliché to say that America is more divided than it has ever been in modern times. This is an inadequate understatement. However it has happened, America, including some leading figures in the legislative and judicial branches, has sorted itself into two diametric sides. Despite some feeble attempts to equivocate this as “good Americans on both sides,” the fact is that an unequally large number of Republicans have decided to abandon many of the virtues we have long assumed are basic not just to America but to good governance and American life in general.
Unlike the earlier Civil War, whole states won’t withdraw from the republic. But a minority of Americans will, or rather, they will support remaking core institutions and values until the republic—and the working world order—is more to their liking.
This Civil War won’t have a Fort Sumter, but it will have a series of moments. The current shutdown is one of those. The possible withdrawal from NATO is another. Then there will be the end of the Mueller investigation, including a report and additional indictments. There is now every reason to believe that the report will not be made public and that indictments in the works will be stopped, along with any collateral FBI investigations. Assume also that if House committees call administration officials to testify, those officials will refuse on the basis of executive privilege. Pardons, of course, will follow all this.
So it goes. What will happen next? How will it end?
In the 1850s, it looked increasingly possible that there would be some radical upshot to a deep divide on substantial moral and political questions. Yet a real civil war was still a shock, and ultimately a brutal solution. Now, rather than a divide based on momentous issues, some are merely fighting to protect the power of a corrupt and amoral American autocrat. It may be a petty platform they are standing on, but make no mistake that they will stand firm, and there will be injuries in this civil war—to people, to institutions, and to the republic itself.
Bob Schwartz 