Category Archives: Ahimsa

The silent death of Little Girl

Reminding us again that the real sting of death is that eternal silence where a beloved life once was.

two young kittens 2018

Little Girl (foreground, her sister White Back behind her, as always), who greatly resembled her beautiful mother Mama Kitten, her constant companion and ally, left us as gracefully as she came into this short, precious life four years ago. 

Her absence hangs heavily over the turf she bravely defended and enjoyed the many roosts of, and where we touched base late almost every night.   She was an agile, athletic hunter who could grab a bird out of the air, a gold glover who could catch a tossed treat and pop it into her mouth. She always showed up in the driveway to shake us down every time we approached the door. She carried on the tradition her mother started. They were known as the Driveway Bitches, two natural beauties, demanding their due, and they always happily collected their toll.

An ordinary event, the natural death of a sometimes affectionate feral cat we loved, filling our mortal hearts with sorrow, threatening to burst them, until the sorrow overflows.

Reminding us again that what takes your breath away at death is that eternal silence where a soul we loved once was.

My strange belief in the power of understanding

I say strange belief because the world often appears to defy understanding. Look around, and tell me an understanding can be reached between people who hate each other. I believe it is possible for two enemies to become friends, once they learn how much they have in common, how many fundamental beliefs they actually share. It is rare, sure, but it has been known to happen.

The mother of a boy randomly killed by a new gang member tells the kid when he’s convicted that she will kill him. She visits him in prison, sends him books and money. When he’s released she lets him live in her murdered son’s room, which he does gratefully as he finishes his education. They become as close as mother and son. The young man asks one day if she still believes what she said at the end of his trail, that she’d see him dead. She tells him she does, and that his current life proves she did kill that monster he was becoming. He understands the truth of that. A beautiful true story I heard the woman herself narrate years ago on a program about the power of forgiveness. Rare, and wonderful, and also, proof that things that seem impossible can be done, if the heart is right and the actions taken are intelligent and consistent.

I enjoy talking with people, particularly when the conversation goes beyond normal pleasantries and daily observations and takes unexpected turns into new terrain and unknown commonalities are revealed.  There are difficult things we learn sometimes, important life lessons, and I particularly love those rare occasions where conversation takes this deeper turn and we compare the personal details of hard lessons we’ve learned about a particular vexation. 

In my home growing up, though the four of us were all reasonably good at talking, and liked to chat, our conversations often turned into angry arguments.   In that previous sentence we see, I suppose, the roots of my strange belief in the power of listening, speaking clearly, acknowledging — my belief in the importance of understanding.

You can argue adamantly, to prove you’re right, dominating the person you’re arguing with, yielding nothing, ever, or you can argue without stubbornness, open to another perspective and trying to illuminate a misunderstanding or unintended cruelty.  Dispassion is a word Buddhists and others use to describe thinking and communicating that is not the slave of passion, not in service to strong feelings that impede our ability to reason, to weigh things fairly, under a warm light.  If you speak and listen dispassionately you hear better and your responses are not as likely to add fuel to anger.  Dispassion is sometimes derided as unemotional, robotic, inhuman, but the real essence of it, I think, is keeping your thoughts slightly apart from your feelings, particularly strong feelings that will often stir you to assemble the troops to counterattack, and bearing in mind the larger, more humane purpose of the conversation.

In the grips of strong emotion we are often not at our best, emotionally, intellectually or morally.   In the last five years of my mother’s life, on the rare occasions I said something that made her explode in anger,  I became adept at quickly changing the subject to something pleasant.   It worked very well, she’d immediately release her mask of aggression and smile with great relief.  I came to see that the thing she was angry about was something I could immediately stop pressing and the thing I distracted her with showed that I understood her pain and we were now talking about something she liked instead.   I recognized that there were some things, like her painful relationship with her daughter and grandchildren, that she needed to vent about, and get my sympathy for.  She was unable to imagine anything better between them and her hurt and anger got inflamed whenever ideas about how to improve the hopeless situation were suggested by her know-it-all son.   Finally recognizing this inability of hers, an inability she shared with her daughter, sad to say (and which doomed every suggestion I might make),  I would desist in my doomed peacemaking efforts at the first sign of anger.

My father and I had a lifelong debate on whether people can change their fundamental natures.  There are good points on either side of the issue, but I was locked into proving that my belief that we can change much of what is painful to us was reasonable and based on evidence, and he was determined to prove that the idea that we have this kind of autonomy and power to change is a cruel illusion that does more harm than good.  I can see truths on both sides of the debate as I type these words.   Because of the acrimony between my father and me it was never possible to persuade my father of how much we can change our reactions to things that bother us or to move him off his fixed belief about the inevitability of pain, frustration and anger.   

“You admit you’re only changing your reaction, the superficial part, and that doesn’t touch the inborn, fundamental nature at all,” my father would say. “If you are born with a prickly disposition, no amount of navel gazing is going to make you able to resist provocation when it arises, provocation that would not even bother some one with an innately placid nature .   You might get a tiny bit better at not immediately snarling, but you are only changing your surface reactions, not your genetically programmed reflex. The fundamental things about ourselves are immutable and it’s pathetic to believe in something impossible.” 

“But changing your reaction, say not responding with reflexive anger, makes it possible to have a reasonable conversation with others, and that’s not a small thing,” I’d say.  In the end I pointed out that he himself had changed his angry reactions toward me, and that our relationship was better for it.  This proved a bad example to hand to a wartime prosecutor like my father, though he had, in fact, greatly moderated his angry reactions to me in recent years, after a difficult conversation I’d initiated with him one Yom Kippur.

“I only changed my superficial reactions,” he told me, “nothing fundamental changed in me.  I became a better actor, is all.  If I ever honestly told you what I really think of you it would do such irreparable harm to our relationship that we’d never be able to talk again.”   

He rested his decades-long case by saying the one thing that proved he was determined to be right, more than anything else in the world, and this neither he, nor I, nor any power in the universe could change — and here was the final proof.  All this talk of emotional plasticity and the value of a skilled therapist, of introspection, self-criticism and self-acceptance, so much bullshit for contempibly weak people to believe.  As for him, he was man enough to admit the difficult truth about humans — however we are, emotionally, at two years old, is how we are for the rest of our lives.

Therefore, following the logic, we cannot learn anything important, not really.  Superficial things, OK, we all learn to use toilet bowls, and language, academic subjects, but we can never learn how to hurt ourselves and others less.  Some people are born decent, reasonably happy, they get along in the world without friction or conflict.  Others are born riled up, unhappy, critical, ready to rumble, and these angry little ass kickers, who can never be wrong, are doomed to live in a world of hurt.

His tune changed on his deathbed, as apparently not infrequently happens.  Part of it, I believe, was seeing his lifelong adversary quiet, thoughtful and willing to do whatever he could to make his father’s death easier.  He lamented that he’d been unable to consider so many things, had been so limited in what he could imagine, had been so adamant, seen the world as so black and white.   He had painful regrets that he expressed for the first time, and I did my best to reassure him about each one that he’d done the best he could.

Now, it’s important to note how many times I have infuriated people close to me in recent years by my determination to remain peaceful and mild-mannered in the face of escalating bad feelings.   In the end the ugliness where there was once friendship and laughter, the absence where mutual good will used to be, becomes impossible to ignore. In their defense, there is nothing more maddening when you are angry than some fucking prig on the high road, managing to keep the anger off his tongue.

Expressing anger dramatically is a deadly game I’ve played countless times over the years, so, in the end, after enough angry invitations to tell a friend to go fuck himself, I yield to the surge of righteousness I’ve been trying not to express as contempt and tell the person, in detail, all of the irredeemable things about them I can no longer tolerate.   Friendship does not recover from this, because at the point where everything about another person is reduced to their worst and most shameful weaknesses, well, that’s irreparable harm.

So maybe my pre-deathbed father was right all along.  If you are locked in a battle with an adamant rival, intent on winning at all costs, you will, in the end, revert to however you were born to be.   The angry will rage, the placid will cry. You can pursue dispassion, believe in the power of conversation to illuminate difficulties, remove hostility, the plasticity of the human soul, forgiveness and all the rest, but in the end, when a line is crossed that is impossible to get back to the other side of, you are only prolonging the terminal phase of something that is already dead. All your high ideals about the power of understanding are so much useless, smelly, self-righteous baggage. 

Maybe so. 

I continue to work on being clear, and listening carefully to others. It is not the work of a few days, that.  Do we get better at things we practice faithfully?  All signs say we do, however loud the hooting chorus of fatalistic naysayers gets.

Anger is a mask for feelings even more threatening

It hit me last night during a walk, after a day sadly considering the ongoing righteous anger of people I’ve known for years, that anger is a powerful emotion that often masks even more painful emotions.   It is unbearable to sit with the pain of feeling unloved, rejected, abandoned, ignored, powerless, harshly judged, vilified, unfairly punished.   Shame, of course, is a famous goad to violence, a cycle observed in every prison, in every slum, where people kill each other for the capital crime of disrespect. 

The easy fix for terribly painful feelings is a nice surge of anger at the perpetrators, or those you focus your anger on, which works just as well.  In the clean, harsh, black and white light of anger, all becomes clear.  These merciless fucking fucks deserve no less than the full force of my manly wrath!

Anger is an automatic reflex to being hurt. Easy as kicking when the doctor expertly hits your kneecap with that little rubber hammer. It also has the great advantage of closing off any conversation that might make you feel uncomfortable, possibly force you to confront whatever terrifying personal demons you are trying to hold at bay. Anger is far superior, and feels much more empowering, than crying in pain about something beyond your control or ability to heal from. It also has the inherent advantage of making you the victim of the person who made you mad. Being the victim is very important for a feeling of righteousness and personal integrity since it lets you off the hook for doing anything you’d be at fault for if you had not been the victim of the person you’re rightfully getting back at with your anger.

On a mass level, which is the aggregate of millions of individuals, anger works exactly the same way.  You have middle class citizens who work hard and play by the rules, losing ground every day in a world where your savings are constantly losing value and only the casino of the stock market offers the kind of interest banks used to pay depositors, although you can lose it all when you place your small nest egg on the Wall Street roulette wheel.   The job you work hasn’t seen a raise in decades, the union is gone, the plant is about to close so the corporation can make a bundle for the shareholders by moving production to a country with no regulations at all about anything.   You look around and more and more “minorities” are getting ahead, they’re on TV, in the movies, winning awards, championships, these rich, spoiled bastards complaining about being mistreated, the victims of systemic prejudice.   The so-called party of the working class is openly owned by billionaire corporate donors, just like the other party has always been, and has done little to protect what is being taken from you every day.  It’s a billionaire’s world now, and you don’t stand a fart’s chance in a hurricane of getting out of this in the comfort your parents enjoyed at the end. We all know who’s to blame. Time to get some payback!

Make America (insert any country’s name here) Great Again!   Like it was in the good days, when everybody was prosperous and before a bunch of activist commie dupes on the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the longstanding protections we all enjoyed during perfectly legal racial segregation.  Women knew their place in those days too, did their duty and gave birth to whatever was in their womb, as God intended.   And the so-called gays kept their perversions to themselves, on pain of a nice ass whupping, or worse.  We put Jesus Christ into the Pledge of Allegiance, for fuck sake, and still the godless communists keep coming, for our God, for our guns, for our children.

Much easier to feel rage toward all these hyped up perceived enemies than to realize you’ve been suckered, divided, conquered, force fed a gallon of stinking bullshit, down the old gullet with a funnel and hose.  The problem was never a vast cabal of powerful pedophiles, no such cabal exists (except in fevered fascist propaganda, it’s a favorite charge of Putin) these destructive creatures are universally hated (even when protected and hidden in hierarchies, or by their great wealth and political connections) and don’t last ten minutes in prison.  The problem was never most of what you are constantly told it is.  Believe it or not, it’s not even a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, and I would know. if it was

The problem in the US and elsewhere is that the super-wealthy 0.01% have finally taken over the political system. Here they’ve orchestrated the appointment of a hand-picked Christian corporatist majority on the Supreme Court, installed by them, that decides what’s constitutional and what must be struck down as contrary to our democratic values. These super wealthy include the eternal vampire psychopaths, created by our courts, known as corporations.   Endowed by federal judges with feelings and rights, and even personhood, equivalent to an innocent embryo, these artificial persons are entitled to do whatever they feel necessary, legally spend unlimited amounts of secret money to make the laws, and have the government, that protect themselves, and their profits, the best.

The thought that anger is just a mask, much of the time, for more threatening emotions, struck me as a good starting point to think about a lot of things related to non-harm and kindness.   The easiest thing, and it is part of basic survival, is to simply get mad when you feel mistreated.   Fuck the fucking consequences, I don’t have to take this kind of treatment from an actual piece of shit!   I will rage, and feel righteous, and the unbearable pain and life-sapping fear that lurks inside when I start to consider the harms that were inflicted on me personally will be replaced by a surge of being 100% in the right to smash your fucking face, asshole.

This mechanism, I realize now, was the emotional engine that drove my father, from his shameful childhood to his deathbed regrets.  A man, particularly in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, could not give in to the need to have a good cry about the painful betrayal he experienced in his earliest life.  Feeling humiliation is unbecoming, unhealthy, crippling, weak.  Fuck that, a man takes action! 

Sometimes, sadly, that action needs to be righteously bellowing at your children.  It’s your right, you feed the ungrateful little provocative bastards, and clothe them, house them, bust your ass working two jobs to give them a life a hundred times better than the horror show you experienced.  I understand the anger itself, I saw it regularly, daily, for almost the entire time I knew my father.  It was only once, not long before he breathed his last breath, that he had his first inkling that maybe there was a better way to be a human being than raging at his children, keeping his wife on a short leash.

Lack of imagination is a crippling handicap, and a very common one.   Without it, you cannot imagine better options than variations on the old standard you inherited from your own fucked up parents. It’s like the corporate insistence that it’s either unregulated worldwide capitalism (freedom) or totalitarian communism. Limited in your seeming choices, you are bound to justify everything you do as the only real choice. Real choice, of course, being limited by what you can imagine your choices to be.

If you do something, and feel totally justified doing it, it must be universal, otherwise, shit… it could be abnormal. The thought of not being normal was one of the most terrifying things my father, who never forgave any hurt, was ever confronted by. When I told him once that he was weird, his brain almost short circuited. The odd expressions that played on his face as he repeated the word “weird” with incredulous inflections made a big impression on teen-aged me. Luckily, for him, everyone in the family knew how fucked up and abnormal I was.

Sitting with corrosive emotions

This has got to be one of the hardest things humans have to do.   A feeling that causes pain, and is left unaddressed by the people involved in causing it, leads to anger or depression (anger turned against the self, in an apt description I read), after an increasing bitterness that becomes impossible to ignore.  The reflex in most will be to turn anger on the person causing the pain, simply blame them, or to quietly take the pain on yourself as confirmation that you deserve no better, somehow.  Hard to sit with corrosive emotions, though sit with them you must, sometimes.   

There are a few reasons a loved one will not hear you when you ask them to, few of them are very promising for the relationship.  Particularly if they, understandably, demand to be heard at once when they are in pain and then tell you just to wait a few more months to talk about what’s bothering you.   

Parents, for example, may feel supremely challenged by a very smart child.  The kid will have to learn to navigate around the insecurity of the parents, find his or her own way forward, without the help of the parents.  Sometimes just a difficult question about something that perplexes the kid will set the parents off.   How do we explain something that gives us so much pain to think about?  Nobody knows the answer to human evil!   Why do you ask such goddamned questions all the time!?   Jesus, can’t you just be quiet?!  The kid derives various lessons from this consistent feedback, adjusts the best they can.

Some people cannot be wrong.  If you point out something they did thoughtlessly, or unfairly, you are pointing to something intolerable, something inhuman, unthinkable to them.   “You don’t seem to understand, I cannot be wrong.  It’s not that I don’t like being wrong, I can’t be wrong.   How do you not know this about me after all these years?  I will not be wrong, I will not be challenged to defend my actions, you have the problem, not me!  I am loved by everyone, you’re the only one with a problem, look at your own life!” 

My dear old dad had this feature, an inability to admit fault for anything.  It endured through almost fifty years of constant war with his children, two provocative little shit snots who constantly challenged him, and lasted until the last night of his life, when he realized how much of a horse’s ass (his phrase, only time I ever heard him use it) he’d been to see the world as black and white.   He wistfully imagined the world he could have been living in instead, full of nuance and color, rather than the bleak high contrast warscape he inhabited and imposed on his young children.  He apologized for forcing my sister and me to grow up in the grim shadow of his irrationally limited emotional worldview.  I appreciated the apology.  He died a few hours later.

Once, two years before he died (two years of the meaningless fake small talk he demanded at the end) he told me I had to respect his right not to respond to concerns I raised. For once I was there with a reply I couldn’t later improve on. I told him I understood that he was choosing not to talk about a difficult subject but that I certainly did not have to respect that choice. He then demanded we keep our conversations politely superficial, talk only about sports, health, politics, and so we did, until that last night of his life, when he admitted he’d felt me reaching out to make peace with him many, many times over the years. He regretted, that last night, that he hadn’t been mature enough to reach back, even once. He’d been too afraid, he told me. And so, to avoid pain he could not bear, we’d had to pretend to be a loving father and son, on his strict, limiting terms, until I was there to support him as he died.

Sometimes, I have to say, I am the last one to understand the full scope of a situation.  Sometimes it feels like I’m the last to realize that something I’ve long cherished is already dead.  My efforts to not react with anger, to fully process what needs to be said so I can speak without the anger, must make me some kind of aggravating holier-than-thou freak to loved ones who get anger off their chest and move on, without the need to understand anything about what set off their anger (since, after all, they know who to blame).    By the time I put my thoughts together, particularly after a couple of follow-up challenges (threats like “I’ve dropped people from my life for doing less to me than what you did”) the subject is ancient history, being dredged up needlessly by a troubled person, and nobody in their right mind cares about that stuff.

My best advice is to somehow make peace with the bitterness that churns up when your needs are dismissed.  That bitterness is to be expected when you are stonewalled in your need to be heard.  Forgive yourself for being unable to stop feeling it. I find that setting things out clearly on a page provides some temporary relief.

You will have to leave the embittering situation in the end, if you can’t find a way to make it better, it is Survival 101 for anyone but the hardcore masochist. Remember that making peace requires goodwill and openness on both sides, you can’t do it alone. In the meantime, finding the patience you will need is a great challenge, a mind-fucking challenge some days, as is maintaining a posture of peace, when the sides seem to have been drawn in black and white, the final irrefutable victim story irrevocably arrived at, all details agreed to, and the terms of any possible peace treaty have already been carved in stone.

Picturing the familiar festive table without you is a little foretaste of death, the place we all must go in the end.  If you’d been hit by a truck, or died suddenly of a heart attack, the effect would be the same.  A chair you used to sit in, occupied by someone else, as life goes on, as it must.

More and less acceptable ways to express hurt and anger

On a scale, from most obviously harmful to most subtle, we have violent murder to quiet, implacable disapproval.  In between we have, in random order, punching, kicking, slapping, shoving, handling roughly, verbally abusing, threatening, glaring at, mocking, humiliating, ignoring, demeaning, belittling, emotionally and physically withdrawing and many other techniques.  Sarcasm and silence can both be deployed effectively to express displeasure, as can an uncompromising refusal to engage with the other person’s feelings, including the ever popular dead fish expression in response to the other person’s attempts to be funny. Silence might be the king of all of them, with its wonderful feature of complete deniability (as compared to, say, bashing somebody in the face in public no matter how much they may have seemed to deserve it).

My father, in most ways a wonderful human being, had been repeatedly physically abused and emotionally brutalized as a young child, by his own mother.   He was a master at showing anger, employing numerous techniques from the in-your-face to the demonically subtle. As he was dying, literally on the last night of his life, he lamented, for the first time (after a lifetime of denying that childhood has anything to do with your adult life) that his life was effectively “over” by the time he was two years old.   The next seventy-eight years was a determined exercise never again to experience the trauma of being humiliated, powerless, viciously treated.   In his case a tiny, violent, ill-tempered religious fanatic mother had convinced herself, somehow, that whipping her first born in the face from the time he could stand was what God wanted.  We all know that the Old Testament God is a vengeful diety, He told us so Himself, but fuck…

Anything that awakens a childhood trauma hurts well beyond the event that activated it.  It is unsettling to find yourself, as an adult of many years’ experience, suddenly as vulnerable as a baby about to be mistreated again by an insane caretaker.  It makes us feel coldly abandoned, particularly if done to us by somebody we love and trust.   There is no end to the cycle of hurt and anger this provokes in us, unless we constantly strive to do the goddamned difficult work not to become enraged, intransigent, capable of doing things to others that we ourselves would suffer terribly if done to us.

On the other hand, of course, much easier to simply join an angry mob, under incoherent banners, to scream, pump your fist in unison, and let the fucking chips fucking fall where they may.

Easier is not always better, though. 

When the world crushes you

Some days the world will try to crush you, you may wake up with the weight of it solidly on your chest.  It’s nothing personal, the world does it to everyone sometimes.  Stay busy enough, I suppose, and you can often outrun thoughts that will otherwise stop you in your tracks: the senseless war over slowing or speeding up climate catastrophe, finally addressing racism head on, the war over public education, a propaganda machine effectively substituting grievance-stoked rage for discussion.   If you stay busy enough you may never think, “Jesus, all the evidence is out there in public, has been for years, why are these dangerous, powerful criminals not being indicted?”  Then, after a day of great exertion you collapse into bed, exhausted, ready for needed seep, but there is a small crew with jackhammers outside your bedroom window, waiting to energetically make sure you will make do with short sleep.  

The world will crush you sometimes, it always does.  What to do on those days?  Do something you love, even if only for a short time.  Remember, the world is a crushing machine on certain days and you are not wrong to feel squeezed by it.   Moods change, the people and things you most love remain.  Reminders of all the rest of this miraculous life can help lift the weight of the fucking world off of you. It won’t lift at once, or permanently, but, shoot, I’ll take less of an anvil on my heart any day.  It may be tough to dance with a million tons on your shoulders, but it’s easy enough to listen to the music that makes you want to dance.  

The first thing is to breathe.   Breathing is the best thing to do, the first, most essential and naturally calming thing you can do.  Remember to breathe, slowly, deeply, appreciating with each inhale and each exhale how much more beautiful this life giving process is than the inevitable alternative which always comes in its time.   If you wake up feeling crushed, focus on breathing, first.  My two cents.

Insight vs. a punch in the face

Gaining insight is hard, delivering a punch in the face, when provoked, is pretty straightforward.   Not to say you might not pay a price for the punch, you can break your thumb, bruise your knuckles, have the shit beat out of you, even get shot or stabbed, but the reflex to lash out when angry is pretty basic.  It’s simple, primitive, sometimes effective in dealing with a real or imagined threat.   Those who train to deliver a punch effectively learn to harden their hands, protect their fingers from damage, turn the fist just so right before impact for maximum effect. Everybody else is free to let fly, with real or metaphorical fists, like a hurtful series of words you can never take back.

Insight, on the other hand, is hard to come by, often painful.   You need to learn to see things from a perspective not your own, feel things that may never have happened to you directly, learn to study the broken pieces calmly, detached from your ingrained reactions.  Insight allows you to make connections on a more thoughtful level than our world consistently operates on.   

The level our world operates on is a well-deserved punch in the face.   More specifically, a punch in the smug, fucking face.  Insight allows you to understand the operation of life on a less reflexive level.  Gain enough insight and almost everybody may want to punch you in the face, if you’re not insightful enough to be cool about your path toward insight.

I give the example of my own attempts to not replicate what I experienced from my parents in my youth.  That is, I try to follow Hillel’s formulation of the Golden Rule.  I try not to do things to others that I hate being done to me.   All we can do is try, but trying is a step in the right direction, every time.  I hated being unfairly accused of things I hadn’t done, painted in an ugly light, I still do, as does everybody else, of course.  In my parents’ house I was constantly confronted, always portrayed as coming home from the hospital two days old angry and ready to fight, usually blamed for the anger that was always exploding all around me, and always required to fight.   I fought, and got pretty good at it, even as I understood how tragically ridiculous the nonsensical war I was drafted into was.

I have made it a long project to make myself less susceptible to my anger, less ready to react with rage.  Reading about Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha (not in detail, mind you) I began trying to practice ahimsa, non-harm, as a first principle.  A difficult stance, in our violent world, particularly without a religious framework and a community of fellow non-harmers, but I have found the goal very worthwhile. Trying to keep the principle of non-harm in mind has made my life better, even if I am far from serene.

If you come from a mindset of not harming others, of being straight in expressing what you need, being direct and patient, it seems to me your life will improve, particularly if you were raised in a senseless war where everybody had to fight all the time for no real reason. 

It turns out even a straightforward insight like this is very shaky in the real world.  Certain old friends will insist that you’re deluding yourself, that you may have become a tiny bit better at DELAYING the arrival of your famous fucking anger, but you are actually just kidding yourself, propped on a flimsy moral pedestal that with only a few hours of determined kicking I can topple, proving that your rage is very real and present, you fucking superior fucking asshole.  In the end, I will make you want to punch me in the face, Ahimsa-boy, proving that I and the brutal real world are right and your ahimsa pose is just gas, self-righteous fumes, no matter how much you may think you’ve improved in overcoming your reflex to respond with anger.

To me, resisting the impulse to react with anger is a net good, no matter how incremental the improvement. If in the past you would have been angry a minute into an aggravating situation, you now find you are able to go for an hour before the anger starts sapping your will to remain peaceful.   In one sense it is a huge step forward, you will find yourself doing better in many situations that would have turned to shit instantly in the past.   It is a useful skill in our world, to refrain from striking others with words or fists. 

On the other hand, to someone intent on proving that you, like them, are a piece of shit beyond redemption, beyond the possibility of meaningful change of any kind, well, in the end they will be able to grind you down.   You are not a bodhisattva, you are just trying to do better, and in the end you will reach your limit and get that look on your face that will prove their triumphant point.

Been there, done that, showing great patience with people who demonstrated that insight was not for them, that a punch in the fucking face was much more to their taste (even if beyond the limits of their physical courage), and that I, actually, rather than being less angry and provocative with my so-called insight and ahimsa was even more of a piece of shit for trying to be better than them.  Of course, and I say this just between us, I was already better than them, in terms of treating people the way I would like to be treated myself, but my goal was to be better than myself, not anybody else.  I’m not in competition, in any field you can name, except to make myself better.

Insight is the only way out of pain, outside of the usual painkillers.  It is not a magic door you can walk through, of course, it is a path you take, a goal you aspire to.  Much easier than pausing to gather yourself and trying to develop understanding is staying on the treadmill, running until your heart gives out.  Hard to blame people who recoil from introspection.  People don’t like things that cause them pain, unless they are masochists. 

Think of it this way, though — you can repeat the same tragedy over and over in your life, with minor variations, or you can learn from the way you play your part in the tragedy and do it a little bit less tragically next time.  Or, you know, you can just punch me in the fucking face, it’ll probably feel better, at least until the adrenaline and cortisol rush wears off.

Rage farming?

When I read this headline yesterday in the Washington Post:

I immediately pictured the in-your-face, proudly ignorant, provocatively opinionated, unvaccinated, infectious former running mate of maverick John McCain smugly saying to the world, and NYC in particular, “here’s your fucking honor system, assholes.” It was enough to piss me off, the thought of that provocateur giving the finger to the honor system, like everyone else in her slavishly authoritarian party.

I felt a flash of anger. I thought of Tich Nhat Hanh’s good advice.

Here is Sarah Lazarus’s wry version of the Palin story:

Sarah Palin dined out at multiple New York City restaurants after testing positive for COVID, but in her defense, she’s had a lot of time to fill since her libel trial got delayed because she tested positive for COVID

The New York Times had their usual judiciously worded headline today:

A few hours after I saw the Washington Post headline I went back and took a look at the Washington Post article.

https://wapo.st/3G1f7RO

It turns out Sarah Palin ate outdoors, which is apparently fine in New York City if you are unvaccinated, whether tested or untested (covid positive could be a deal breaker there, it is an honor system). The article states that, according to someone, she went back to the restaurant to apologize for the ruckus she’d caused a few days earlier, which may be true. The article also noted that it has not been disclosed when Palin tested positive for covid-19, meaning the five day isolation period the CDC recommends could theoretically have passed. All unlikely, perhaps, but possibly true.

So is the attention grabbing headline really fair? Sarah Palin is in NYC to testify in her federal lawsuit against the New York Times, she claims a 2017 editorial libeled her. She’s waiting for a negative covid test so the trial can get started. By dining outdoors, it seems she had not actually flouted the letter of New York City’s pandemic regulations, assuming she wasn’t lying about her infectious status. She surely also enjoyed the attention she got for making the radical left covid-haters mad, you betcha.

She is an ignorant asshole, and a sassy symbol for millions more, standing on the right to infect whoever they want with a potentially deadly disease, in the name of performing rabid partisan politics and “owning”, if not also killing, political enemies. She is an aggravating pustule on the eyelid of American democracy, the wet dream of cynical fucks who pictured someone exactly like Trump as the president one day. But is the provocative, click bait headline fair in announcing that she deliberately flouted New York city’s covid rules when the article under the bold headline makes a something of a case that she may not have? Just asking.

Everybody wants to be treated fairly, you could even say we all deserve it. Fairness is another word for justice, after all. Even a provocative piece of shit is entitled to make the case that she’s being treated unfairly, as Ms. Palin is about to do in federal court in this anarchist jurisdiction.

t’s Be slow to anger, quick to seek better understanding. Breathing is much better than holding your breath til your face turns blue. Trust me on that one.

Not succumbing to anger is very, very hard to do, I know, particularly when provoked, even moreso when constant provocation is part of a deliberate plan to keep everyone enraged, to increase “engagement” on “social media” and bring about long planned American fascism, a privatized corporate state with unlimited wealth for a few and a hearty fuck you to everyone else.

It is best, for yourself and for all of us, to practice being slower to anger, quick to seek better understanding. Breathing, and letting ourselves calm, not immediately reacting to each provocation, is much better than holding your breath til your face turns blue. Trust me on that one.

And, yeah, calmly, and with love, fuck Sarah Palin.