More Is Being Asked of Us Now Than Possibly Ever Before in Our Lives: We Strive, Not Yet Knowing How, Not Yet Knowing If We’ll Succeed. All We Know is the Need to Act

How do we read the signs that the world and our own hearts and minds are giving us? The universe doesn’t just text us one, clearly typed message, explaining all we’re facing. Would we even welcome such a message? Maybe we do get such messages sometimes and aren’t sure if we’re hallucinating it?

 

I’ve been reading Being-Time: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji, by Shinshu Roberts, and just started to alternate it with Seaglass: A Jungian Analyst’s Exploration of Suffering and Individuation, by Gilda Frantz. Dogen is a 13th Century Zen teacher and founder of one of the main schools of Japanese Buddhism. I usually read only 2-4 pages at a time, because each paragraph is like a puzzle requiring considerable reflection. But the beauty that can be discovered in doing so is immense. Frantz’s book was recommended by 2 Facebook friends. It’s been a remarkable find, of essays, personal stories, and interviews about facing the difficult in life and revealing the myths and motivations that drive us.

 

And yesterday, after reading a little in both books, a deep realization, frightening in its scope, grabbed my mind and challenged my emotions. Both books synchronistically seemed to be sending one message, a message of something being asked, no, demanded of me. Something more than I’ve already given, to the world, to myself. It was less a regret for something left undone than a glimpse into an opportunity⎼ if I could take it. Frightening in the risks involved, both in the doing or undoing.

 

There’s a sense of inevitability posed by life in these times, hidden between news reports and the sounds of rain. Between bare tree branches, deep gray clouds, and the feel of tension in my hands and shoulders. Between the ordinary, the known, and the extraordinary and unknown. And a question⎼ We know we must act. But how?

 

More is being asked of all of us than probably ever before in our lives. No matter how much I might want this not to be so, that is the reality. We must let go of so much of what’s normal to our lives so we can do what the times require of us. What our inner selves demand of us.

 

How do  we change our lives internally so we can respond skillfully to the fear DT incites and manipulates in us? To the assault on our values and humanity? How do we respond to his blatant assaults on our security as a people and a nation? To our health care? To our incomes? To threats of deporting immigrants of color, from Latin America? Threats to LGBTQ+? To anyone who opposes him? To the rule of law? How do we respond to the expanding climate and ecological crises?

 

How do I feel less the me isolated from the rest of us, and more of the rest of us in me? Doing so might not only reveal how to help others, and maybe help others realize what they, too, can do, but inspire or expose unseen depths in myself. I want to meditate even more than I do. To learn more than I know. To do more.

 

To help me do this, I plan to read poets and writers from Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, and the US, about how to face the horrors caused by one group of humans against others. Or read writers from the distant past, in ancient China when the social order had collapsed, or even in Ukraine or Eastern Europe, in the villages where my own family might have once lived⎼ so we can feel any horrors of life can be faced, and the strength in ourselves to act can be found….

 

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

Does Catastrophe Lead To Positive Social Action?

So many people have, maybe forever, been trying to figure out how to improve the political, social, environmental, educational and other conditions in our world. I have been reading two books lately that have helped me and might be of help to others in thinking about social action. I will write about one this week, and the second next week.

 

It is tempting to think that almost anything that can be done should be done in order to stop a wrong from being committed. If the world is on its way to destruction, shouldn’t any act be deemed acceptable to stop it? Last weekend, I heard Sasha Lilley, writer, political analyst, host of Pacifica Radio’s Against The Grain, talk in Buffalo Street Bookstore about Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth. She is one of four authors, along with David McNally, Eddie Yuen and James Davis. “Catastrophism presumes that society is headed for a collapse… a great cleansing out of which a new society will be born.” Catastrophists tend to believe “disaster will waken the masses from their long slumber” and act for a utopian revival.

 

We might think Rosa Parks, for example, just sat down on the bus one day and created the bus boycott and civil rights legislation, and ignore all the actions she did before and after that. We might think the Arab spring was one day’s or one season’s awakening. We might think “increase the repression and people will wake up and act.” We might think we should create a fear of the possible end of the world and people will spontaneously rise up to prevent that catastrophe.  Increasing the fear, pain, discomfort of the masses doesn’t necessarily promote social change—it just promotes fear and pain.

 

Such thinking has catapulted the right-wing into the headlines. Back in 2007, in the book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein made clear how a crisis mentality is being manipulated by those in economic and political power to shock people into accepting the unacceptable. After the shock of Katrina, public housing, schools, hospitals in New Orleans were taken over by private interests. After 9/11, the “War on Terror” was turned into a “for-profit venture” benefitting large corporations. The analysis also applies to education, where the right wing controlled media tell us our public schools are in a crisis of poor grades and the solution is privatization. The examples go on and on. Fear does not promote clear thinking; it inhibits it.

 

According to Sasha’s research, Catastrophism is deeply reactionary. It supports the right-wing politics of fear and repression, austerity and gated communities. The power of the right-wing increases in a crisis and capitalism tends to renew itself, not burn out. Social action decreases. When people don’t have a job, they usually don’t organize and rarely demonstrate for better working conditions or a more equal distribution of wealth. They want an income. I think the term is disciplining labor. When there’s no hope, there’s little positive action.

 

Sasha also pointed out that a public space is needed where big groups of progressive people can come together to openly examine headlines, discuss social conditions, and events. Where organizing can be planned and a movement can be born. The corporate media is not that space. Political parties have not been that space. The internet so far (despite blogs such as this one) has not been that space. How can that common space be created? How can a movement be created?

 

I highly recommend Catastrophism. It would make great reading for a social studies class of teenagers or anyone else caught up in a crisis mentality.