Use the Oxygen Mask First

As a follow up to my previous post about non-hatred - about opposing Trump and Trumpism with everything we can, but not by being motivated by hatred and anger toward them - and in response to the many many people who are reacting to the election results with fear and a sense of helplessness, I would like to posit what I think is the very first thing we should do as we develop our strategies and commitments for the future.

And that very first thing, our very first response to Trump and the disastrous results of the elections is: work on your spirituality.  

Non-Hatred

In the current version of the “stump sermon” that I deliver in congregations, I begin my delineating Kansas Interfaith Action's four mission areas (racism, poverty, violence, climate disruption) and conclude by proposing four corresponding values that can guide our work as we try to bring the voice of faith and conscience into public policy advocacy.

This last piece has gone through numerous iterations since I first gave the sermon on MLK Sunday of this year. (Shout out to Rainbow Mennonite Church in KCK.) For one of these values in particular I've had trouble finding the words that capture precisely the tone and meaning I'm trying to set.

Election Postmortem

Before I move on to What Comes Next, I want to spend a little time on a postmortem on the election. First of all, I want to own that I was completely wrong in my predictions about this election. My crystal ball was really cloudy; my "realpolitik" analysis did not accommodate what was clearly a paradigm-shifting election. There were others, particularly supporters of Bernie Sanders, that were more aware of what was really at stake than I was. I was tepid about Bernie because I thought Hillary was more electable, and I was convinced as recently as 2 or 3 weeks ago that she was going to beat Trump like an orange, Many of Bernie's supporters are now saying, See, we told you so, if you had nominated Sanders you wouldn't have President-elect Trump right now. I have my doubts, as I always did about Bernie. But it's a counterfactual anyway.

I'm pretty hesitant to blame the results on Hillary Clinton's failings as a candidate. Over time she became much better than I thought she was capable of. She wiped the floor with Trump in each of the debates. Certainly in my bubble there was a lot of enthusiasm among people who wanted to see that glass ceiling broken, and toward the end (after voting began) there was an outpouring of emotion (#pantsuitnation) that could be compared favorably to Obamamania.

Hillary's Feminism

And now, a little radical theory for you all:

Hillary Clinton's imminent election serves as both the crowning achievement, and the last hurrah, of the kind of Second Wave feminism she represents.

Clinton's feminism is of the classic variety: a white-woman, glass-ceiling focused feminism that was the main force of the movement in the early 1970s, but which has since been superseded, and put into some amount of disrepute, by the intersectional feminisms that came later. (This analysis is complicated by the fact that she became prominent in large part because of the achievements of her husband; I'm going to put that to the side for now for the sake of clarity.) 

Clinton's form of feminism has the same flaws as integrationist racial and gay activism of recent decades: It focuses on the inclusion of women (affluent women mostly) into the economy and society as-it-already-exists, never asking it to change its priorities for having them. That is, women are now to be included at every level of boardroom, executive suite, etc., but completely on empire's terms - no change is demanded of capitalism's priorities or practices, save solely for the inclusion of the formerly marginalized population. 

It's interesting to see how having Trump as her opponent has served Clinton in this regard. Because he is so misogynistic, it puts her type of feminism into its best light. She is able to play the "champion of women" role to the hilt because he makes her form of feminism look both necessary and sufficient. Critiques of her approach are stifled because of this. 

More recent radical activists would not be satisfied with the kind of inclusiveness-as-sole-goal that Clinton represents. Even in capitalism's own terms, the fact that childcare, healthcare etc. are not taken as givens this long into the process shows the limits of the Second Wave approach. All the more so anything more radical, such as calling into question the demands of empire and capital themselves - which Clinton is not likely to do, as she has never done it before. 

Thus, Clinton's ascension is both the culmination of the Second Wave's goals, and their eclipse, as more radical feminists ask for more than the slice of the desiccated pie that Hillary's model offers. 

One thing Clinton has shown herself to be in this campaign, however, is open to pressure from the grassroots. Like Obama, she will do the right thing if she's forced to do so. It's up to us to do the forcing. 

State Politics

If what you've always wanted is my take on Kansas politics, well, this is your lucky day.

Context for those who don't live here: The Republican Party here is split in two: moderates in the traditional businessman mode (whom I'll call Mod Rs), and right-wing conservatives of the tea party variety (whom I will call UltraCons). They have always cohabited uneasily, usually with the Mods in charge, until the election of Sam Brownback in 2010. He took it as his business to purge the legislature of Mod Rs so that he could get the votes for his "experiment", and most of the Mod leadership, especially on the Senate side, was purged in 2012. This year, in the aftermath of the dismal failure of the Brownback experiment, many of the leading UltraCons were defeated in their primaries, leaving the fall campaign in those races as the Mod versus Democrat.

Being primarily an issue advocate and not very active on the electoral side, once the Cons were defeated in the primary I didn't much care what happened in those races. To me the difference between a Mod R and a Dem is pretty nominal. Both are likely to vote in favor of the positions that my allies and I would take. So I turned the limited attention I have to devote to electoral politics to races where the remaining UltraCons were facing Dems, figuring that the rest would take care of itself.

However, what has happened in these cases is that the Dem, who expected to run against a Con, has to differentiate themselves from the Mod that they are in fact facing - a task that, as I say, isn't always easy to do. Therefore, things tend to get a little personal. One of the favored approaches is to criticize the Mod as being "from the party of Trump and Brownback," which is true as far as it goes, but depends on the voter not knowing that the Mod actually opposed and defeated Brownback's candidate.

A lot of this is played out on social media. There was a fundraiser that some of the Mods attended with Congressional Representative Kevin Yoder, some pictures of which went around Facebook and Twitter with comments along the line of "You see! They are Republicans!" As election day gets closer the level of venom gets higher, which to some extent is par for the course, but is also unfortunate, for the following reasons:

First of all, it's only in the fevered imaginations of Democratic partisans that the label "Republican" is, in and of itself, disqualifying. Most Kansans who are registered to a party are Republicans, and I would venture to guess that there are very few districts in which the Democrat could win without at least unaffiliated voters, who are, almost by definition, not going to care that much about party affiliation. Also, as I say, the Mods who remain defeated UltraCons, and anybody who pays the least attention to politics will know that, so the Dem claiming the Mod is a Brownback lackey will mostly serve to make the Dem look manipulative and dishonest.

Then there is the matter of incumbents. Advocates have a category called "friendly incumbents," which means people who have supported our issues in the past. We all have lists of them, and for the most part we support them, against any opponent, no matter what the opponent's position on our issues. When the friendly incumbent is a Mod R, it tends to drive partisan Dems a little crazy, as they say, Why would you support a Republican when a Democrat would be a more reliable vote? Well, there's three reasons, the first two being that that's not always the case (I have issues I work on where some of the Mod Rs have been more reliable supporters than some of the Dems), and second, you always need Mod Rs to win any vote in the legislature.

But the third reason is that you have to understand the context these people have been working in. The leadership of their party made it clear that they weren't welcome. They got terrible committee assignments, and every one of them was working under the expectation that in any cycle they would get primaried by an UltraCon and that every reasonable vote they ever took would end up on a inflammatory postcard. Yet they continued to stand for what they believed in. They're a gotdam profile in courage, if you ask me.

I happen to live in a district where, in both the rep and the Senate race, a Dem is running against a Brownback stooge, so my choices are easy. If I lived in a district where that wasn't the case, I would probably make my decision based on who I thought was more qualified, based on their experience. In some races that would be the Dem, and in some it would be the Mod R. Whether they got their picture taken with Kevin Yoder would be a fairly insignificant data point. (Full disclosure: I have had my picture taken with Kevin Yoder.)

Ultimately, I'm concerned not so much with what happens in November as what happens in January, and throughout the 2017 session. Mod Rs and Dems are going to have to work together in some form or fashion to start to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and all's-fair-in-politics aside, the more that happens between now and election day that makes that harder to arrange, the less I'm going to like it.

The Spirituality of Sadness

The Spirituality of Sadness

Unitarian Church of Lawrence

August 14, 2016

Today is a significant day on the Jewish calendar. It is called Tisha B'av, the Ninth of Av, and it is a remembrance of basically every tragedy that ever occurred to the Jewish people. Originally it was designated as a day of mourning for the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem, and since then many other tragedies have also been ascribed to that day, such as the beginning of the first Crusade in 1095, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, and the beginning of deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942.

The traditional practice for this commemoration is a 25-hour fast and the reading of the Book of Lamentations and selections of mourning psalms called Kinot. Here are the first 3 verses of a new translation of Eikhah by Rabbi David Seidenberg

1 Eikhah! How can it be – that she sat alone, the city so great / so swelled with people? She was like a widow. The one great among the nations, ministering among the states, became a slave caste. 2 Crying, she will cry in the night, her tear upon her cheek There is none for her, no comforter, from all her lovers. All her companions played traitor with her. They became for her enemies. 3 She, Judah, was exiled, by poverty, and by (so) much hard labor She sat among the nations, not finding any rest; All her pursuers caught up with her between the confined places.

So the mood is one of sadness, of mourning, even of despair.

And it led me to think about how we deal with feelings of sadness in our own lives. I think it's pretty safe to say that we Americans, preternaturally cheerful creatures that we are, don't like to feel sad. I guess nobody likes to feel sad, but we tend to think there's something wrong with it, or with us for feeling it, so we do whatever we can to avoid it. We distract ourselves. We medicate ourselves. We anesthetize ourselves with drinking or shopping or television or Facebook.

Well my friends, I'm here to tell you that sadness is part of the human condition, and we cause ourselves a great deal of suffering by trying to avoid it. Perhaps that's obvious, but sometimes the obvious still needs to be said.

In the Buddhist tradition, the second of the three causes of dukkha/suffering is aversion, or trying to get rid of our avoid negative mind-states. So the problem isn't the negative mind-states themselves, it's in trying to avoid them, or suppress them, or distract or distance ourselves from them. Guaranteed, when we suppress or repress our negative mind-states, they will reappear somewhere else, often in ways that are uncontrolled or destructive. Carl Jung said, “What you resist, persists.”

So the first, best thing we can do is feel the feelings. Not to try to figure out the reasons, or to replay the story, or to figure out what to do about it, but just to feel it – in our bodies, in our souls. A quote from Jay Michaelson:

Equanimity is not the banishment of sadness. [Neither does it mean being blissed out, feeling our feelings less intensely.] It is the acceptance of sadness for what it is, and the letting go of the desire for it to end.

So let's do a little practice with this. I invite you, if you're comfortable, to close your eyes, and let's focus on our breath for a few moments. Now I invite you to call up an incident from your from your personal, emotional life that brings up feelings of grief or sorrow. (pause) Take a few moments to sense or visualize that situation, tuning into where you feel it in your body. (pause) Does your face feel flush, does it feel there a rock in the pit of your stomach? Now drop the story and just notice the feeling of sadness. Focus on your breath, and on your feeling. If images arise, let them, and then let them fall away.

Stay with that for a moment. It's okay. Now put your hand on your heart. Say to yourself, it's okay. Your feelings are okay, sadness is okay, grief is okay. Say to yourself, I love you, I'm here. Now open your eyes. Look at a person near you. Smile at them with your eyes. Say to them, it's okay. Say to them, I love you.

Feel your heart open a bit. You know that feeling when you look into your neighbor's eyes and you see what they're feeling - what that's called? It's called compassion. We'll return to that in a moment.

So the first thing is to feel the feelings. To be okay with feeling this way – not to be afraid of it, or averse to it, but to recognize it, even to welcome it, as part of our humanity. Then and only then can we start thinking about what to do about it, if indeed anything at all needs to be done.

Now let's turn our attention to another kind of sadness - sadness outside of ourselves, in the outer world, in the public square. We live in a very trying time politically. We have a man running for president who would be a figure of fun if he weren't so dangerous. We have a government in our own home state that thinks kicking children off of food stamps is an anti-poverty program, and that having guns anywhere and everywhere is security. We probably don't really understand what's happening with Brexit, or in Yemen, but we know can't be good. We live with the growing threat of climate change, which is an aversion we as a society definitely try to avoid. We have black citizens being killed by police at a rate of one per day. There's a lot to be sad about.

So as before, let's take a moment to follow our breath – and now call up one image of something that is bothering us in the world today. Feel what that brings up in your body, in your heart. Now drop the story and focus on the feeling, and on your breath. If thoughts arise, let them go, and stay in the feeling. Now send out feelings of lovingkindness to the people in your story. May you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace.

I am often asked when I speak about how we can be sure that whatever activism we take part in will have a positive effect? I wouldn't say this in that setting, but the answer is – we don't.

We feel sad because there's what to feel sad about. Let's take a moment, before we try to solve our dilemma, to realize that we will never really solve our dilemma. If we were to miraculously fix one problem, we would immediately be overcome by all the other problems. The kind of eschatological, endtime thinking that represents in Judaism as the coming of the Messiah, in Buddhism as “enlightenment” and in communism as the Revolution, is a myth, and not in my opinion a helpful one. There's no magic bullet. Social change, like personal spirituality, is hard, slow, spade-work. What we have, all that we have, and all that we will ever have, is this moment, to feel fully and to do with what we will.

All too readily our disappointment and sadness becomes anger and hatred. Anger at Republicans, anger at Israelis or Palestinians – depending on your point of view - anger at the “terrorists”, anger at the corporations, anger at Sam Brownback. Anger. Outer-directed, focused on the guilty other, the problem, the cause. I put it to you that this anger, as natural as it is, as normal as it is, in unhelpful in three ways – it is in fact a distraction from our real feelings – of sadness, of loss, of fear – in other words, it's just another drug to take us away from our aversions; it doesn't give us the strength we need to work on problems that seem overwhelming; and it doesn't produce the ends we want. It doesn't enable or promote effective action or produce the kind of world we're trying to reach. It's okay, obviously, to feel the feelings, because we're not to be afraid to face any of our feelings, as long as we don't act on the anger but can get beneath it to the sense of loss that produces it.

The Zen monk and peace activist Thich Naht Hahn is an amazing example of working with sadness on both the personal/spiritual and public/temporal levels. He came of age during the Vietnam War, during which, as a young monk, he started a social service organization called School of Youth for Social Service. He carefully and purposefully didn't take sides during the war, for which he, and his organization, was harassed by both sides. At the beginning of the war, members of his Buddhist order immolated themselves to protest what was going on; in the middle of the war, members of his organization were kidnapped and killed by the Viet Cong; and at the end of the war he was sent into exile by the new government. So, a lot of political unhappiness, a lot of personal unhappiness. And what does he do with it? For the rest of his life he builds sanghas – Buddhist communities – and travels the world teaching mindfulness and peace.

A quote from Thich Naht Hanh:

We must be aware of the real problems of the world. Then, with mindfulness, we will know what to do and what not to do to be of help. If we maintain awareness of our breathing and continue to practice smiling, even in difficult situations, many people, animals and plants will benefit from our way of doing things.

He felt his feelings deeply, and was able to find there the strength to walk peacefully but with purpose through the world.

What comes out of working with this sadness? What was the feeling when you looked into your neighbor's eyes earlier? Compassion. Now I'm going to offer you four things you can do with these feelings I'm forcing you to pay attention to. And the first tool is compassion. When you look around this room you realize that everyone is feeling the same feelings you are. And when you look out in the world, you realize that way people feel is the way you would feel if you were facing similar circumstances. Another aversion technique we seem to have perfected is judgmentalism. If this person is suffering, it's because of their stupid behaviors or beliefs. But we know, as the Buddha taught, that it's the conditions of peoples lives that lead them to their particular beliefs and behaviors, and that if we were in their situation we might do likewise. And when we realize that, when we really feel it – in our bodies, in our bones – then we feel, not hatred of them, not judgment of them, but compassion for them, and even love.

And the second tool we have is gratitude. Because we realize that for everything that we have gone through – and all of us have gone through a lot – we have a lot of advantages. We live in the wealthiest country in the world, we had decent educations, most of us have white skin, which in this country accounts for a lot. We have the ability to feed and clothe ourselves, we have friends and loved ones, you guys have an awesome fellowship, we have antibiotics, and farmers markets and recordings of like 3,000 Grateful Dead shows. That's a lot, right? Making a gratitude list is one of the most powerful spiritual techniques available to us.

And the third tool is connection. Connection to ourselves through this feeling of our feelings, connection to each other through spiritual community, connections to others working on issues that we're concerned about, connection to the earth. As EM Forster famously said, “Only connect.” I haven't spent much time talking about it today, but I believe that one of the key reasons for the the increase of depression and alienation in our society is our alienation from nature. Whenever someone asks me about increasing their spiritual connection (often framed as “connection to God”), I recommend spending time in nature. It is there we can often feel more connection with creation, and, if we are so inclined, to a creator, than in any other setting.

And the fourth tool to positively utilize our connection with our sadness, with our compassion is in service or action. Getting out of ourselves and helping another. Whether this be – on the service side - serving at LINK, or being a Big Brother/Big Sister, or mentoring a younger person in our profession, or – on the action side – organizing or just showing up at a Black Lives Matter event, or testifying at a City Commissioners meeting or in the state legislature, or – perhaps – getting involved with a great group like Kansas Interfaith Action, when we put our values and our feelings into action, when we get out of ourselves and help someone else, it helps to turn our difficult feelings into something that can change the world for the better.

A brief poem, by Gregory Orr:

Some say you're lucky
If nothing shatters it.

But then you wouldn't
Understand poems or songs

You'd never know

Beauty comes from loss.

It's deep inside every person:

A tear tinier than a pearl or a thorn.

It's one of those places

Where the beloved is born.

I started by talking about Tisha B'av, the date that commemorates the destruction of the Temples. It is said that the messiah, the harbinger of a redeemed world, is to be born in the afternoon of Tisha B'av. It is thus that – to use a Thich Naht Hahn image and thereby mix spiritual metaphors - the lotus of redemption itself forms in the mud of destruction. I've already told you I'm not really into messianic imagery. But by accepting our sadness, by tending to it – not wallowing in it, but caring for it – we can use the tools it gives us – the tools of compassion, gratitude, connection and action – and turn thereby turn our sorrow into a force that can bring a little bit of redemption to the world. 

Is Violence Inevitable?

This post was written as an assignment in the Certificate of Nonviolence Studies program I am enrolled in at the Metta Center. It was supposed to be written as a conversation, but I did it as a blog post, so I thought I would also post it here. It's a very important area of thought and study so if you have any comments please feel free to share them. MR. 

Our questioner asks, as it has often been asked, that while nonviolence is a good idea, is it not, (alas!) in contradiction with hard-wired human behavior – the predilection toward solving problems with violence? The reason there has always been war, this argument goes, is that “mankind” is warlike; that we manipulate others to protect and advance ourselves and, at best, a small group of our closest relatives; or, to put a Lockeian spin on it, that human civilization is a battle of all against all.

I want to counter this argument by moving through, as it were, the range of science, from the so-called harder sciences, to the softer.

First, the “hard” science of human biology. In the popular understanding, Darwin's theory of evolution supported the Lockeian version of individualism sampled above: that the goal of life is to win, to survive and reproduce, and that because cooperation doesn't advance these goals it is against human hard-wiring – that is, evolution.

This understanding has been put to political purposes virtually since it was promulgated, to support a “social Darwinism” that, conveniently, jibed very well with the prevailing paradigm of private property and income inequality.

Yet it leaves a key question unanswered: how does altruism – which undoubtedly exists in human relationships – arise and continue to exist in a system that rewards only selfishness? In the absence of a moral reasoning, why should evolution work this way? This has been a great question of sociobiology.

In 1980, sociobiologist Robert Axelrod developed a game that would test how people would do if they cooperated, or if they acted selfishly. The full explanation can be found here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation but the upshot is that those pursuing the “nice” strategy – working cooperatively and rather trustfully – did better than those who attempted to take advantage. To be brief in the extreme, at the end of the process Axelrod delineated the following strategy for maximum success in the game:

• Be nice: cooperate, never be the first to defect.
• Be provocable: return defection for defection, cooperation for cooperation.
• Don't be envious: focus on maximizing your own 'score', as opposed to ensuring your score is higher than your 'partner's'.
• Don't try to be tricky.

This sounds a lot like Gandhi's strategy! He may not have known anything about evolutionary biology, but apparently he was onto something.

The question of “provocability” leads us into the question of “mirror neurons.” V.S. Ramachandran, a distinguished professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, conducted early research on mirror neurons, and calls them “the basis of civilization.”

Briefly, there are motor command neurons that fire when I take a particular action, such as waving my hand or picking up something. Apparently, when you watch me doing such an action, a certain subset (about 10-20%) of the neurons in you that it would take to perform the same action, called mirror neurons, also fire in you. When you see me in pain, these motor neurons fire in you and you feel a certain amount of my pain. This, Ramachandran and others hypothesize, forms the biological foundation of empathy.

So here we have the biological basis of empathy and cooperation – that is, nonviolent means of achieving what Darwinism claimed could only be achieved by manipulation and selfishness.

On the “softer” scientific, sociological level, we turn to the research of Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan. In their groundbreaking work, Why Civil Resistance Works, they charted the success and failure of over 300 nonviolent and violent campaigns between 1900 and 2006. They found that nonviolent campaigns proved twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as those that resorted to armed insurgency. This was the case regardless of the nature of the regime and its readiness to resort to repression. (http://peacenews.info/node/6874/erica-chenoweth-maria-j-stephan-why-civil-resistance-works-strategic-logic-nonviolent-conf) As time has gone on, and the sophistication of nonviolent organiation has improved, the rates of success of nonviolent strategies have continued to improve, while the rates of success of armed insurgency have declined. The main varying factor seems to be mass participation, which is higher in nonviolent struggles and has significant subsequent advantages, including strategic flexibility and diverse and resilient leadership.

Significantly, this disproves the popular adage, attributed to Chairman Mao, that “all political power comes from the barrel of a gun.” This truism is of a piece with the “people are violent, only violence works” theory we are discussing here.

The question will inevitably arise as to whether nonviolent strategies could work against a indiscriminate user of violence, such as ISIS. Leaving aside the fact that it was violence – that is, the invasion of Iraq – that led to the rise of ISIS in the first place, we have seen in places like Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan that continued application of violent methods have not come close to solving the issues in those countries. The question then becomes, do we continue to apply the same failed methods, or do we try to apply methods of nonviolent action that have proven effective in domestic situations? Eventually – perhaps when all other options have been thoroughly exhausted – we will try this.

And the third form of “science” I want to bring into the discussion is the humanities – the human moral voice. Despite the fact that much of the violence in the world today comes from people identifying with one or another religious teaching, in fact both the teachings of the various religions, and their practices, lead to the pursuit of peace as both the means and the end of human existence.

In terms of teachings, virtually every spiritual tradition in the world has a version of the teaching to “love your neighbor as yourself.” In my own Jewish tradition, this is based on the idea that each human being, whatever their “race”, nation, or creed, is created btzelem elohim – in the image of God – and that their life and freedom, and justice itself, are based on this basic, not similarity, but sameness, between us.

It is the application of the moral voice to the scientific method that gave both power and his strategic acumen to the greatest nonviolent strategists, from Gandhi and King through Soo Chi and the Serbian activists of Otpor!. While their opponents were convinced, as our questioner is, that only violence can work in human struggles, they were utilizing the “force more powerful” - nonviolence – and it is the secret to their success – and, potentially, to our own.