Deja Vu All Over Again

For a week now, I've been wondering what to write here, and every time I immediately evade the decision by clicking elsewhere to read the latest diagnoses of our body politic. I find the nonstop punditry of this primary season a fascinating lesson in the Buddha's first great revelation, the "wonder of wonders!" Shakyamuni had discovered how all of us see the world our own peculiar way, through the prism of our own individual experience and fear.

We all spin our own narrative to connect the dots of happenings and since everybody's making it up to suit their perspective, there's never an agreement on what's going on. Ever had someone tell you that blue gray sweater you're wearing is really purple? The traditional analogy is a group of blind people touching an elephant: one will describe it only as its tail, another as its trunk, another as its enormous foot. Nobody understands there's a bigger whole there, an elephant in the room.

The Buddha would also say we are like spiders spinning that narrative as a protective web around ourselves. The way a spider's web is there to kill prey that nourishes it, our web keeps out and mentally destroys what we don't like. That's the origin of what we call spin. Reality is as bespoke as a five thousand dollar Saville row suit. 

Naomi Klein says the real reason the right has to desperately deny climate change because their world view is stuck on the Bible page that says man has dominion over all the Earth. He can do whatever the hell he wants. Now unfortunately these folks have been confronted by Mother Nature exerting herself to challenge that dominion with enough is enough. In fact too much already. They won't accept that they are not masters of the universe with total control of it.
 
Another great Buddha insight is you cannot clearly--see the bigger picture, if you are self-referential, aka ego stricken, vested in yourself instead of others. That includes your God who is of course the best God and lives by Vince Lombardi's rule: "Winning is not everything; it's the only thing." Check out all that monotheistic violence in the MIddle East and ask yourself why cultures of many gods remain relatively calmer.

I've had maddening conversations with a man who believes others who don't behave or have the priorities of himself and his ethnic group aren't worthy of help or attention. He's so vested in himself as a Jew and supporter of fellow Jews in Israel, he actually threatened to walk out of my house if I made a lamb and chickpea dish whose origin was Palestinian. Oh my. Growing up is when babies discover a whole world beyond their fingers and toes, beyond Mother. What matters is whether that discovery threatens or delights. What matters is you can't give peace a chance if you don't give others a chance to exist too.

According to the Buddha, we humans can't see clearly and are self-referential because we are duo-fueled. Spin our narrative web, the web of samsara, we run on hope and fear. These two emotions are inseparable, like samsara and nirvana, meaning you cannot have one without the other. Fear is not getting what you hope for or getting what you hope you won't--getting what you want and not getting what you don't want. Since it is often fear of losing what you already have, it's attached to the hope you won't. Hope is getting what you want, and not getting what you don't. Unless you're on a diet, it's  about gaining or holding what you already have, so it's attached to the fear you won't. Since we live on a see-saw constantly flipping between them all the time, how can anyone be calm and clear-eyed?

All of these lessons have been easy to learn in political primary time. All the fear being whipped up by right wing demagogues, making all those people hope to be saved by them, all the fear manufactured by the Clinton machine to make Hillary the greater white hope, the profoundly realized fears of the American people evolving into intense hope for systemic change that is propelling Bernie Sanders. All that Super PAC establishment hope that threats to its hegemony can be bought out and swept away, the fear it won't showing in the mounting vitriol. Yes, even the Koch brothers have hope and fear. The hope for power, the fear of losing it...the quest for control, the fear of losing it. 

The same great wellspring of both hope and fear, of course, is change. Impermanence. Nothing lasts, nothing even stays the same very long. That's not just frustrating, it's scary; the unknown, uncertain, unpredictable. Change is going into darkness after the sunshine of seeming certainty and there's nothing like darkness to launch fears and hopes to make it through the night. That's why we have a lifetime of excuses for circumventing change, like "I'll get to it tomorrow", "Better safe than sorry", and  "The devil you have is better than the devil you can't see." The political term for this right now is "incremental." 

The political term for people who fear change is "conservative," for people who aren't afraid of it "progressive." People who live in fear hope for change; people who's hopes have been met fear change. Thus Bernie v Hillary, Trump v Bush, Black Lives Matter v Muslims go home. What the pundits say, what the editorial endorsements say and what Hillary Clinton promises are pretty transparent shows of and pandering to fear of change. The  establishment is terrified the status quo that's given them status will not be permanent. Up will come down. Elites will change. They will be, as we say, out of power. Obviously, they've never heard the Buddha's teaching that change is always underway and on the way. Nothing is established.

Academics have differing opinions about what's going on, but they seem to agree the establishment is too self-referential, vested and to terrified of change to see a pressure cooker is exploding. People under their thumb are mad as hell and hoping for change that is not incremental. Like Mother Nature, they are saying enough is enough, too much in fact. An interregnum perhaps, a revolution underway, the impermanence of impatience is erupting in volcanic bursts of molten anger and hope that's cracking the concrete underneath them... . 

"Something's happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?" Black Power to Black Lives Matter, Joe McCarthy to Gene McCarthy and Ted Cruz to Bernie Sanders, Paul Simon's old lyric: "I don't know a soul who's not been battered, don't have a friend who feels at ease, I don't know a dream that's not been shattered...." I don't want to be too self-referential or overtly political, but it does seem, at least on the Democratic primary side, we are witnessing the last battle of the original culture war: that violent clash between the consciousness raisers and the corporate fund raisers. The 60s was a clash of world views as Eastern thought entered Western minds. It's now embedded in many of them. Bernie Sanders looks like the last gasp of the 60s, one final attempt to upend me into we, and pass a torch that ignites younger generations to keep on keeping that amended vision.

Rethinking how the 60s brought us Zen and Dharma, yoga and Hare Krishna got me thinking the generation whose protests made it a crucible has never been acknowledged. Perhaps that's because corporate marketeers name generations as sales niches. What they call “the greatest generation” bought all their Harvest Gold appliances, Chevrolets and tract houses to make corporations great. Their kids, the Boomers, were so easily seduced by shiny shopping malls, dazzling stadium shows and Technicolor screens, so contentedly all-consuming corporate profits boomed. Now we’ve got complicated Gen X not sure if they want to shop til they drop so we quickly got Millennials who drop everything to shop for apps.

I am among the missing, the generation cropped out. As lost and culturally critical as the one born before World War I, my generation was born between 1928 and 1945—during the Great Depression and greater world war. Our cohort gave you Ben and Jerry, Gloria Steinem, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Martin Luther King Jr., George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Joan Ganz Cooney, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Brian Wilson and his Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix, Hunter S. Thompson, Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, Pema Chodron, John Kabat-Zinn, Andrew Weil, Lanford Wilson, Larry Kramer, Erica Jong, Alice Walker, Alice Waters, Marian Nestle, Jerry Brown, the murdered trio of James Earl Chaney and Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, Jann Wenner, Adam Hochschild, Lorne Michaels, Bob Woodward, Daniel Ellsberg, John Kerry, Bill Bradley and Bernie Sanders.

Looking at those names, I see iconoclasts whose efforts continue to resonate through every aspect of American society. These are cultural game-changers who raised consciousness and rewrote the nation’s vocabulary: gonzo, organic, hippie, yuppie, feminist, dropout, sold-out, civil rights, folk music, spirituality, environment, holistic, sit-in, cop-out, wilderness, tofu, yoga, equality, Zen. They brought organic food, protest marches, Rolling Stone and Mother Jones, Sesame Street, Saturday Night Live, long hair for men, free clinics, community gardens, tie-dye, the perils of nuclear power, the existence of native people, women in the workplace, meditation, midwives, vegetarianism, Earth Day, ecology, clean water, cleaner air, skepticism of spin, alternative medicine, Watergate, Question Authority. Om

This was the last generation to be drafted to die for this country, the first to fight for women in the workplace and womb, the first to take up Thoreau and Gandhi on their idea of nonviolent war.  This was the first group to declare a generation gap—for which a Boomer clothing franchise was named, the first and last until now to be mad as hell, the first to come up with Plan B for America. If you want to know more about it, listen to Bernie’s stump speech.

It is not surprising corporate America feels so burned. The first generation to get mass access to higher education became the first to loudly question, even challenge established wisdom, institutions, and advertising claims. We actually heard Eisenhower warn against the military/industrial complex and saw General Westmoreland hiding body bags in Vietnam to pretend victory for the nightly news. We saw live the assassination of JFK and saw it left dead in the water unsolved, followed by two more assassinations, a profiteer’s war in Vietnam and the cover-up of Republican criminality. Some blew whistles of dire warning about all the bells and whistles.

My generation linked the spiritual idea of NOW to the political idea of later generations because we figured out human life and Earth had limits. We fought to make others understand that. Well-exercised power also had limits: just because you could didn’t mean you should. It was the first time that Bible page dominion declaration was questioned. It is not surprising its loud questioning and protest made subsequent governments reduce the commitment to higher education and critical thinking. As silent Calvin Coolidge said when he did speak up: “The business of America is business.” That was the core of the protest then, and seems to be its core again now.

So I see Bernie Sanders campaign as the 60s last stand. It has reignited the original culture war between the sales forces of “Buy now, pay later”, ”progress is our most important product”, “better living through chemistry” and the tie-dyed brigades of “Say what you mean and mean what you say”, “no additives or preservatives” “give peace a chance”, and “we shall overcome.” His rhetoric echoes that revolution's motto: If you aren’t the solution, you are the problem, his popularity Neil Young's words: "I'm looking for a heart of gold", his message: we shall overcome.

As I also said earlier, l am human so I connect dots based on experience and fear.  I can't pretend to be his spokesperson, so I have no idea if Buddha would ever feel the Bern. But I do. This final attempt to fight for my generation before we flame out reminds me of  the key line of Lanford Wilson's poignant play about us, The Fifth of July: "Just because we didn't succeed doesn't mean we didn't try to make a better world for you."

Of course, a good Buddhists knows "better" is in the eyes of the beholder. And that is in fact what this election is all about.



~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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