Presence

Sometimes you hear someone and you know after about three sentences you had really better pay attention because what they’re saying is so important and ruthlessly close to what real is for you and for everyone and for the world that it’s almost like being blown over by the simplicity of it and by a wind that heals and cleans and doesn’t say anything new in fact it’s as old as the wind itself but after all the hot air we have to listen to most of the time it practically cuts you in half.

I heard Shirin Ebadi’s talk at the Mondavi Center in Davis last night. Ebadi won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, the first Iranian ever to do so, for her work in human rights and especially the rights of women and children.

The Big Man

Postscript: I’ve edited this post to substitute “enlightened” and “unenlightened” for “evolved” and “unevolved” following some confusion about the terms…

1. Most men in the world are not Big Men.

2. Being a Big Man is something that is highly valued in many cultures, particularly in the United States. This is how you can end up with a bodybuilder turned Big Man actor as governor of California.

3. The Evolved Big Man is the Buddha. The Unevolved Big Man is Dick Cheney. Unevolved Big Men outnumber the Evolved ones by a factor of 1,000,000 to 1.

4. The prime motivating force of the Unevolved Big Man is power. Power over women, power over the future, and particularly power over other men who are not big whom they hold in cold contempt.

5. The Unevolved Big Man need not necessarily be a) large in physical stature, though this helps; b) male, though this helps even more. Margaret Thatcher is an example of an Unevolved, un-male, Big Man.

6. Many small men who are wannabe Big Men end up running countries or empires tyrannically. They include Franco, Hitler and Mussolini in the last century, Napoleon Bonaparte in the previous. A more vapid counterpart today is George W. Bush. But they all share an ability to get Unevolved Big Men to work for them and keep them in power, and since power is the prime motivator of the Unevolved Big Man, the Big Men get to rule just below the top. Goebbels comes to mind. (Examples of Unevolved Big Men who also ruled tyrannically include Slobodan Milosevic and Augusto Pinochet; Bill Clinton, on the other hand, is an untyrranical Unevolved Big Man.)

7. Unevolved Big Men hold a particular scorn for small men who are Big Men wannabes. This enfuriates the smBMws who then become the most dangerous of all men, violent, cruel, and sadistic. The Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church and the secret services of many cultures are filled with men like this. They often masquerade as innocuous small men. They are easy meat for the CIA and its counterparts and are prime fodder for terrorist organizations. They issued the orders at Abu Ghraib. They are the people who apply lit cigarettes to body parts belonging to persons that end up on Amnesty International lists. The less grandiose can become high school teachers, policemen, postmasters, and perpetrators of Road Rage. Or they beat their wives and children. Or all of the above.

8. It is a characteristic of the Unevolved Big Man to dismiss any criticism out of hand without offering explanations. Explanations are for everyone else to provide.

9. Big Men who are on their way to becoming Evolved are often mistaken by others, especially by women, as Unevolved Big Men, and are feared and shunned. This is especially perplexing for them because they’re trying hard to become unthreatening without becoming small. It’s the work of a lifetime, fraught with peril and disappointment; it’s also Really Important.

10. I have a particularly acute fear of Unevolved Big Men. I’m not sure why. I’m working on this.

11. I have recently discovered this fear is such that I will avoid any Big Men, evolved or not, just in case.

12. I realize this puts me at risk of never meeting some truly wonderful human beings.

Today is the second blogiversary of Feathers of Hope.

Requiem For This Land

So in one day that fine body of scalawags known as the U.S. Senate voted to a) allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and b) defund Amtrak. The only motivation to this is that Bush’s friends, cronies and sycophants will get even richer than they already are — you can only lose one’s soul once, I suppose. Oh, and gas will be 5 cents cheaper for about two years. The one marginally satisfying thing about the ANWR vote is that seven Republicans voted for the amendment to disallow drilling. Alas there were three Democrat turncoats — just see if I plan to go to Hawaii again!

We wrote compositions this evening in Spanish class, about vacations actual and dreamed-of. I do long for northern latitudes, and for the latter I thus mentioned Iceland. Here’s an amazing photograph from that northern land of fire.

Forty-fifth Out of 146

This is the ranking of the United States in the newly released 2005 Environmental Sustainability Index, a joint product of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, the Center for Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, and the World Economic Forum. The top five countries in this index are Finland, Norway, Uruguay, Sweden, and Iceland respectively.

In the main report there is a figure (Figure 3) that illuminates the position of the United States well. This is a scatterplot and regression of the environmental sustainability index agains the per capita gross domestic product. Despite having the highest per capita GDP, the United States falls well below the regression line. In other words, the United States is performing poorly when you take into account its wealth level.

Instruments of Peace

So: how do we change a culture? How do we change the hearts—not the minds—of people who say “I voted for Bush because he’s a Christian and I think he’d provide a more moral response to our problems”? (Never mind that Kerry is a devout Catholic, or that Bush when governor of Texas presided over a huge number of executions for which he granted no pardons, not even for a woman who converted to Evangelical Christianity, similar to his—he mocked her—and has subsequently presided over the deaths of well over 100,000 Iraqis and well over 1,000 Americans? This seems not to register with a large number of folks who voted for Bush. Gandhi once said that the only people who don’t understand Christianity is a religion of nonviolence are the Christians).

Michael Nagler is worried that the majority of Americans will only wake up when they realize we are no longer a democracy, at which time it will be too late to do much about it without risking our lives. According to his schema, nonviolent response goes in three phases: the first, where you are in a position to try and interact with your opponent rationally; the second, where you are in a position to win over their hearts, since they won’t listen to your arguments (the example he gave was of a Gestapo agent finding two Jews in hiding and letting them go after their small son played with his buttons, he having a son of similar age); the third, where you’re prepared to die for what you believe in. And sometimes do, like the “Saint of Auschwitz” Kolbe who volunteered to die for someone else, yet thousands of people subsequently claim he saved their lives, because the only thing keeping you alive there was your will to live, or like the Hindu women in a village who hid their Muslim sisters under threat of a pogrom and who declared to the rabble at the door that they’d have to kill them first before they got inside—and everyone lived.

Nagler thinks that for us, the first phase is long past: when 12 million people worldwide march in protest of the Iraq war and it gets termed a “focus group,” it’s clear we have no way rationally to alter the mind of this president or his cronies. But we are still in a place where we can appeal to the hearts of those who profess Christianity and voted for Bush. Our march into the third phase will be bloody and difficult, which is why there is urgency now in the second.

Nagler’s spiritual teacher was Sri Eknath Easwaran whose meditation practice was termed, under pressure, “passage meditation.” The idea is to take a passage written by someone in a state of heightened consciousness and memorize it, absorbing the words into our being until they touch and merge with our person. It was an interesting morning, with the half hour devoted to this practice punctuated by the drums over at the Farmer’s Market across the street. (I tried, and failed, to bring to mind the complete prayer of St. Francis, so I fell back on the Lord’s Prayer, which I must have started about twenty-five times over the course of the half hour.) We emerged to find ourselves in front of the Labrador Rescue Society. Keep walking, I told Numenius…

Search For A Non-Violent Future

We just heard Michael Nagler, non-violence scholar and founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at UC Berkeley, speak and participate in a panel discussion at the Davis Community Church. The church hall was packed, though I was a bit disappointed there were relatively few young people there. He was a little hoarse; he says he has an allergy which came on starting November 2nd. A few quotes:

“If you lose, don’t lose the lesson” — the Dalai Lama

Nagler says that the lesson of the election is that we’re not going to solve the fix we’re in through the efforts of standard liberal and left-wing politics. Rather, we have to go much deeper than that, to the cultural and spiritual levels.

“Do not agitate the minds of ignorant people” — the Bhagavad-Gita

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world” — Gandhi

Nagler is naturally enough a Gandhian, as am I. But how does one, in the face of this tsunami of negativity we’re in a) keep hope up and b) avoid mirroring back our opponent’s hatreds?

Part 2 of Nagler’s visit is tomorrow morning, a closer look at spiritual practice and peace.

Seen on a Trip to the Coop

It’s rare to see political graffiti in the US, but maybe times are a-changing. We spotted this today on the side of a large shed the other side of the railroad tracks from the food coop in Davis. Is the ambiguity in the message intentional, or do they need an editor?

Gossamer

The spiders spin a strand, jump onto it, and drop into the breeze. They can travel for thousands of miles like this. We looked up into the sky today as we walked through the Arboretum and there were hundreds of them, floating softly like white wisps of dreams, waiting to make a good landfall. It’s a leap of random faith: unlike fledgling birds that make their first southward migration without really knowing where they’re going but that can at least rely on instinct, and the southward sun to aim for, and some kind of internal magnet, the spiders are completely at the mercy of the winds that carry them aloft.

Numenius and I looked up at the gossamer and we talked about hatred.

There’s a lot of it about. Liberals don’t like to use the word about themselves, it’s somehow dirty, it’s what THEY—the others—do and have and spread. Not us. But over the last few days many people I know—most of them in the blogosphere—have admitted to feeling hatred. (In addition to anger, rage, grief, perplexity, dumfoundedness, fear nay terror, numbness, isolation, like running away, like getting a long-lapsed antidepressant prescription refilled, and so on.)

Butuki over at Laughing~Knees is asking some pretty tough ones, questioning our assumptions about who we are—as Americans, as voters, as members of the world community. Chris Clarke is expressing in particularly searing form contempt for certain other liberal assumptions. Elck at The Vernacular Body suggests a most intriguing exercise: try to find five things you LIKE about Bush. Rana at Frogs and Ravens is being brutally honest about her emotional roller coaster this week. And over at Velveteen Rabbi, something extraordinary is going on: people are writing, respectfully, really wanting to understand, from somewhat opposite ends of the political spectrum. They are doing what I’ve come to understand as almost impossible: they are really trying to talk.

Here’s what I think we can learn, we liberals who are still reeling from these few days of heartache and disappointment. We have just had a full-on dose of what it feels like to be marginalized. We feel isolated. We see something the victorious don’t see, and they don’t care that we see it. Our truths are irrelevant to them. We feel like we don’t matter. We feel judged because of who we voted for, assumptions are made about us. We read about and hear people writing us off, and it hurts. (Some of the things said are, well, hateful.)

Well, guess what. A significant fraction of Americans feels like this ALL THE TIME. Whether marginalized by the color of their skin or the way they speak or the work they do or the trailer they live in. Welcome to their world. And, since this fraction is one we’d like to have on our side, maybe we can use the experience to LISTEN to them for once instead of assuming we know what’s good for them and telling them to vote for us or with us.

That, and explore this hatred thing a bit more. Look inside a bit. And leap out and jump into the sky on a strand of gossamer, trusting to the universe to provide…

While We Fulminate…

The young take action.

The most encouraging news I came across today was that about 85 students in Boulder High School in Colorado staged a protest in the school library, saying they were concerned about the future of the country and refusing to leave until Republican politicians came and met with them. No Republican came to speak with them—a spokesman for Governor Owen told them the best way for them to practice democracy was to go back to their classroom—but their Democratic congressman, Mark Udall, came over and spoke with them for about an hour.

The students consider their action a success.

Learning Difference

This evening I led a discussion following a showing of the film of Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight at one of the undergraduate housing complexes here at UC Davis.

My co-leader bailed; she had a calculus test. (I’d rather be almost anywhere than in a calculus test, so I let her go happily.) But I don’t interact with undergrads very often and was a little nervous. The group ended up being about 35, about 30 more than I was expecting.

After the film it emerged that two of the students had been living in LA at the time of the Rodney King riots; the father of one of them was a policeman. She was a little shaken by the portrayal of the cops in the film (well, it’s true they don’t come off so well). It was good for the other students (and me) to hear her perspective; her father spent over two weeks with almost no sleep.

We then did an exercise where each person wrote down a time they had felt out of place—followed by something they might say to the people that made them feel this way. The cards were shuffled and everyone read out a different person’s card.

Here are three at random:

“When I moved to a new school, I felt out of place. I would have told the other students to give me a chance to show what kind of person I was, rather than judging me.”

“I felt out of place around my boyfriend’s hispanic and black friends. I grew up in a wealth white/asian community, while my boyfriend grew up in a poorer diverse community. Although I never felt any classism or racism toward his friends, I never felt totally accepted as a person. I was always seen as a “rich white girl.”

“After the elections, I was in a study group with some of my long-time study friends. They all happened to be Republican and chided me about my Democratic beliefs and my opinion of the outcome of the election. Though at the time I felt uneasy and out of place, I know that if the elections had turned out the opposite way, our feelings toward each other would have been reversed.”

I learned a lot this evening. These students have much to teach me. We need to keep talking to each other, all of us…