Tag: Muslims

Perhaps Someday We Will Learn How to Live

Every morning I awaken to a country bristling with hate, intolerance, and violence. 

Trump bullied his way to the presidency, exploiting public anxieties, e. g., steel belt resentment of jobs sent abroad, latent fears of a changing demographic replacing White homogeneity, evangelical rancor against abortion, and Islamaphobia, which sees every Muslim as a potential terrorist.

Trump pledged he’d limit Muslim immigration and reduce refugee numbers.   Shortly into his tenure, he attempted a 90-day immigration ban on seven Muslim nations, fortunately curtailed by the courts, though the recent SCOTUS decision suggests he may now have the upper hand.

One of his gallery of appointed rogues includes top advisor Stephen Bannon, known for his misogynist views on women and feminism that plague our nation.

Early on, Trump appointed the now disgraced retired general Mike Flynn as national security advisor, who’d previously depicted Islam as a “malignant cancer.”

Since his election, hate crimes have risen sharply.   Think Progress has mapped their occurrence from the election through February, 2017, recording 261 hate crimes, 41% of which have been linked to Trump’s rhetoric.

But I want to be fair. Much as I dislike Trump, hate in our country has many sources and targets.

Violence comes from the Left as well as the Right. 13% of the 261 incidents included attacks on Trump supporters.

Now comes the June 14 shooting of four Republican congressmen, one of them critically, while practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity in Alexandria, VA by a disgruntled Bernie supporter.

There’s also Black violence, targeting Whites, often police, the abused becoming the abuser, the most notorious being the Dallas sniper ambush of twelve policemen, five of them killed (June 8, 2016).

Even liberals can become intolerant, as one of my favorites, simply because he’s so even-handed, Fareed Zakaria, reminds us: “American universities these days seem to be committed to every kind of diversity except intellectual diversity. Conservative voices and views, already a besieged minority, are being silenced entirely….Freedom of speech is not just for warm, fuzzy ideas that we find comfortable. It’s for ideas that we find offensive.”

Alarmingly, the number of hate groups in The USA has proliferated, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, increasing from 892 in 2015 to 917 last year. This number doesn’t track, however, widespread cyperspace hate raconteurs, whose venom sometimes seeps into social violence such as Dylan Roof’s heinous murder of nine Black church members:

ACTIVE HATE GROUPS 2016

KU KLUX KLAN ……………….130                  

NEO-NAZI…………… ………… 99

WHITE NATIONALISTS……..100

RACIST SKINHEAD. …………..79             

CHRISTIAN IDENTITY……… ..21

NEO-CONFEDERATE…………..43

BLACK SEPARATIST…………..193

ANTI-LGBT……………………….52

ANTI-MUSLIM………………….101

GENERAL HATE………………..101

Total:   917 Active Hate Groups (“The Year in Hate and Extremism,” Intelligence Report, SPLC, Spring 2017, Issue 162.)

Top five states for hate groups?   This may surprise you!

1.  California……….79
2.  Florida…………..63
3.  Texas…………….55
4.  New York……….47
5.  Pennsylvania…..40

It’s not any better abroad.  Britain’s decision to exit the European Community, which requires open borders of its members, parallels the upset victory of Donald Trump, many of the pro-exit voters older, working class Whites. France has its Le Pen; the Netherlands, its Geert Wilder; Germany its AFD (Alternative for Germany).

All of this comes down to the age old problem of the Other. Unfortunately, for all our supposed sophistication in today’s world of technological prowess, we’re still engulfed in the tribalism of our ancient progenitors, hostile to the outsider. And it’s not likely to get better, given the increasing anachronism of national borders that same technology makes possible.

Still, I am not without hope that the good side of humanity will ultimately prevail.  Or as   gifted Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye puts it,

My father’s hopes travel with me
years after he died.  Someday
we will learn how to live. All of us
surviving without violence
never stop dreaming how to cure it.

–rj

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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What Being Centered Really Means

True peace is achieved
By centering
And blending with life (Tao 22).

You hear a lot about being centered, but just what is it?

The ancient Greeks advocated “the golden mean,” or middle way.

Roman writer Vergil based his Aeneid on Pietas, or something akin to self-control.

Perhaps drawing on his Hellenic education, St. Paul advised moderation in all things.

Excess is always dangerous in any pursuit, for it forecloses on alternatives that may prove more tempered and thus wiser than those fostered by our passions.

Unfortunately, indulgence, or excess, defines history with its repeated accounts of obsession gone astray for power and possession.  History is narcissism writ large.

At the everyday level, we hear continually of people who have ruined their lives and hurt others simply because they were unable to rule themselves.

Because self-interest especially dominates in politics and religion, I generally am suspicious of them both.  As I write, there’s the rancor in Congress over raising the debt ceiling so government can pay its bills.  Currently, however, a persistent few are willing to shut down government unless they have their way.  As I’ve written  in an earlier blog, political parties lead to narrow partisanship, as President Washington so wisely observed in his Farewell Address.

In religion, we needn’t dial back to the Crusades or Inquisition to access the violence of fanatical fundamentalism.  If you look at a worldwide map, you’ll find religious mayhem abundantly distributed, whether in the Middle East, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Burma, the Philippines, and Indonesia.  As for Africa, there’s last week’s heinous massacre at Nairobi’s West Gate Mall in Kenya by Somali militants, who selectively shot non-Muslims.  Nigeria has its own ongoing debacle with Islamic extremists. These things happen because without centeredness we lack balance and thus forfeit stability and often our humanity, too.

On the other hand, fraudulent centeredness can possess its own rigidity if focused merely on ourselves.  True centeredness serves as a reference point that proffers balance, always its marker, between extremes. Think acoustics. Think harmony.

Centeredness promotes equilibrium, a check on ego, a capacity to not confuse the parts with the whole, enabling us to respond more patiently and thus more wisely.  A state of being, it isn’t found in having.

Centered people aren’t dismayed by the fallout of time or chance.  They see the evolving pattern and not the ephemeral circumstance.  They’re grounded in the Eternal, not the transitory.  Thus change and loss and disappointment don’t throw them off balance.  In touch with themselves, they live in harmony with nature’s artifice. .

Writing from a jail cell and facing imminent execution, St. Paul could cogently advise his friends that they pursue “all that is noble, all that is just and pure, all that is lovable and gracious, whatever is excellent and admirable–fill all your thoughts with these things.”

This is centeredness.  This is harmony.  This is the fabric of Eternity.

–rj

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