Anywhere but here and now

I just finished listening to the Pensees or Thoughts on Religion by the French thinker and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). Among other things, he designed a calculating machine, arguably a distant forerunner of the computer. 

He also apparently had a mystical experience of which he wrote 

"From about half-past ten in the evening until about half-past twelve … FIRE … God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not of the philosophers and savants. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace."

For those of us out of the math world, he's best known for nuggets from the Pensees, such as "the heart has reasons which reason knows nothing of."

This time around, I found his insights on the human condition to be brilliant and his theological musings a bit dogmatic, which is probably what he was going for.

He was a devout Catholic, although one accused of being a Jansenist heretic, (Jansenism was an almost Calvinistic tendency in the Church), but sometimes he sounds downright Buddhist. Example: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

Here's a great passage from the Pensees about our chronic tendency to be anywhere but where and when we are that could have come out of an old school dharma talk:

“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

Ouch. That hit close to home. 

 

Fixing the farm bill

Disclaimer: Well here goes nothing, I submit my first entry as a guest blogger on The Goat Rope, with El Cabrero making big cloven hoof prints for 谢岚 to follow.   Most humbly, 谢岚

(rough translation from Chinese: gratitude for mist from the mountains.  Pinyin pronunciation: Xie Lan).  

An oft-reported subject on The Goat Rope is Hunger Games, a really bad movie that never ends.  With Congress returning from recess today (groan), the most recent plot point involves the House Farm Bill which contains major threats to SNAP such as expanding harsh work requirements to include parents.  If you want, today is the last day you can submit comments to the USDA about these mean changes to SNAP.  谢岚 comments are below. 

If you need help “freeing the pen” as 谢岚 often does, check out Lojong for Writers.  Today 谢岚 received this pithy instruction: Don’t Make Things Painful—don’t beat yourself up when your writing doesn’t turn out as you hoped.  Good advice, thanks Atisha!

Dear Ms. Gersten-Paal:

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on USDA's Advanced Notice on requirements and services for Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents (ABAWDs).

American Friends Service Committee's WV Economic Justice Program pays very close attention to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) because SNAP plays a critical role in addressing hunger and food insecurity for 357,000 West Virginia residents. West Virginia is a state that especially must rely on SNAP for the following reasons, to only name a few:

•More and more jobs in WV pay low wages and have little or no benefits.
•West Virginia has traditionally been a state with high levels of poverty and un- and underemployment.
•West Virginia's traditional industries have declined.
•West Virginia hasn't fully recovered from the Great Recession in terms of either jobs or income.

One population that SNAP helps in particular are the thousands of formerly incarcerated individuals reentering society and others with criminal histories, with SNAP providing basic food assistance and supplementing inadequate income as these individuals seek employment. The time limit can be particularly harmful for people who have been incarcerated. They typically face steep barriers to employment such as stigma, low educational attainment level, and occupational licensing bans prohibiting them from many entry level jobs, all of which result in the need for more than three months to find a job.

Before entering prison, this population was more likely than the general population to have experienced poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and poor health. And these struggles often continue after release. Further, many may have competing parole requirements -- such as meetings with parole officers, curfews and required substance use disorder programs -- that can hinder opportunities to meet the 20-hour requirement.

While this request for comment appears to be open to suggestions on how to make the time limit less harsh via administrative action, we are concerned that the Administration seeks only to make the rule more draconian: to expand the scope of the cutoff and to eliminate the little flexibility states have to limit the damage of the rule. The Department's stance on the time limit is not one that our organization shares. We strongly oppose any administrative action by USDA that would expose more people to this cutoff policy. In West Virginia we have an underfunded workforce system and SNAP employment and training program which have proven ineffective at helping people meet the job training requirements under this rule. Put simply, there is no justification for weakening current waiver rules and exposing more vulnerable people to this SNAP eligibility cutoff.

The only action we encourage USDA to take with respect to this time limit rule that impacts Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents is to propose its elimination. Restoring SNAP's ability to provide food assistance to impoverished unemployed people would be a powerful policy improvement that would reduce food insecurity among those seeking work.

Two ironies and a novelty

It occurs to me lately that the world is increasingly divided into two kinds of places: those in which it is difficult or impossible to stay and those to which it is difficult or impossible to go. And the difference between the two is shrinking.

AND HERE'S ANOTHER IRONY. Former Massey CEO Don Blankenship has achieved total political victory even while he faces criminal charges from the Upper Big Branch disaster.

NOW FOR THE NOVELTY: would you believe Buddhist campus sororities and fraternities?

Support for a path

Not that the majority in the US House of Representatives cares or anything, but a recent poll shows that a sizable majority of Americans favors a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

THESE GUYS WON'T LIKE THAT. Here's a disturbing look at white rage in rural America.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, but the roll out of the Affordable Care Act is really going well in some states.

URGENT ANCIENT BUDDHIST ARCHAEOLOGY UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

On wanting to quit

El Cabrero has been a terribly inconsistent blogger lately. I think I've been running around too much.

Speaking of running around, today was a case in point. I've had a 15K run planned for some months, although I can't say I was looking forward to it. The race in question is the Poca River Run, which touts itself as West Virginia's oldest road running race.

It is a pretty 9.3 mile course along the river, which today was swollen from recent rain storms, including a fresh one that soaked me on the last few miles. I've gone farther on harder courses. For some reason though, running this one brings out the wimp in me. This year as last I wanted to quit just about as soon as I started. Everything seemed to hurt and go wrong for the first mile or two. It didn't get a whole lot better after that.

My back hurt. My lungs hurt. I had a bad pain in one heel from what turned out to be a hole in my sock. It's the kind of thing you can put up with for a good while but it would have really caused problems on a longer run. There were other aches and pains. But misery morphed into plain old discomfort as the miles ticked away.

I think one of the great gifts of endurance sports is just that. You learn to endure. You learn to watch pain and discomfort the way Buddhists do in vipassana or mindfulness meditation. Like everything else, pain is an impermanent thing. If you watch it, it doesn't usually stay the same. Sometimes it gets worse, sometimes better and sometimes it just migrates somewhere else.

You also learn not to obsess about the whole thing but rather take it one mile at a time. There seems to be some evidence for that thesis anyhow.

That reminds me of the statistics classes I took in graduate school, another endurance feat that I only managed to survive by making my teacher laugh and go off on lengthy tangents. On every test, one question persisted and it gave good advice for working through problems:

Q. How do you eat an elephant?
A. One bite at a time.

JUST ONE MORE LINK. It's about former Massey CEO Don Blankenship's long delayed rendezvous with justice.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The doors of the temple stand open

The theme here these day is the life and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the focus at the moment is on his 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, which stirred up so much controversy that he wasn't invited back for 30 years.

It would be one thing to tick off a bunch of foaming fundamentalists with a little free ranging thought, but Ralph even managed to alienate relatively laid back Unitarians, who were more closely aligned with traditional Christianity then than now.

One thing that got him in trouble was his characteristic assertion that truth is not something once received and thereafter believed but rather something each soul must directly intuit. He believed that the same sources that inspired Jesus and other prophets and seers can inspire us today if we only let it.

If it sounds like he'd been hanging around with and reading about Quakers, he was. He was also learning or intuiting as much as he could about the religious traditions of Asia--so much so that the sounds Buddhist and even Zenlike in his insistence that every person must directly experience insight rather than merely accept some religious tradition:

...the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

That's kind of how a 19th century American might express the Buddha's advice to "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." It also is reminiscent of the teachings often attributed to the Zen patriarch Bodhidharma, who was believed to have spoken of

A special transmission outside the scriptures;
No dependence on words and letters;
Direct pointing to the mind of man;
Seeing into one's nature and attaining Buddhahood.

Such ideas are pretty commonplace now. You can find some reference to them in almost any bookstore and in popular culture. But they were a bit over the top back then. They'd still upset quite a few people today.

SPEAKING OF PEOPLE WHO WOULDN'T LIKE EMERSON, here's an article about the fortunes of fundamentalism in the US and around the world.

WHAT WOULD FREUD SAY? WV legislators have gone gun crazy lately. Would Sigmund say it was castration anxiety or are they just trying to compensate for something?

CAN I HAVE ONE? This NRP story about an Indonesian zoo breeding Komodo dragons has me all excited.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A man is made Providence to himself

The theme at Goat Rope these days, aside from occasional rants when things get on my last nerve, is the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. At this point, I'm on his Harvard Divinity School Address, which managed to tick off even Unitarians.

As I've mentioned before, Emerson and Thoreau were both forerunners of American Buddhism. In this essay, Emerson expounds a subtle idea of karma whereby people become more like what they invest themselves in. Compassionate people get better at compassion. Greedy people get better at greed. He sees this as working like a law of nature:

See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs, correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the senses, is, at last, as sure as in the soul. By it, a man is made the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie--for example, the taint of vanity, the least attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance--will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own violition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell.

To which I can only say, with Hamlet's friend Horatio, so have I heard and do in part believe it. Or I'd like to  anyway.

COAL COUNTIES AND DEATH RATES seem to go hand in hand.

PLEASE CHECK OUT THIS WEBSITE to learn more about Medicaid expansion, whether you can qualify for coverage, and how you can take steps to make sure it happens here.

I CAN HANDLE BATS EATING SPIDERS, but the thought of spiders eating bats kind of grosses me out. Maybe it's a mammalian solidarity thing.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Karma, New England style

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a huge influence in 19th century life and letters in America and beyond. I mean, even Nietzsche liked him.

At the moment, I'm taking a look at his 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, which was so controversial at the time that he wasn't invited back to that institution for 30 years. In a day or so, posts here will take a look at some of the things he wrote that got him into hot water with even relatively laid back New England Unitarians.

Today, though, the first passage that hit my eye is one that echoes classical Buddhist teachings about karma. Contrary to popular belief, Buddhist views on the subject are pretty subtle. It's not like if you do a good deed you get a Lexis. It's more like if you act nastily, you'll get better and better and being nasty, with all that that entails. And vice versa.  (Emerson, by the way, was an admirer of Indian philosophy and was moved by the limited amount he could read about at the time of Hindu and Buddhist ideas).

Anyhow, here's the passage. I must admit that while Ralph drives me crazy sometimes, I like this one:

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. The laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus; in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step so downward, is a step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

Everybody got that?

Note: this post was meant to come out early this morning but there have been internet problem on the farm.

THE DOWNSIDE OF PRIVATIZATION is discussed here.

THE LONG HAUL. Here's a profile of a friend of mine from the Gazette.

THE FUTURE OF UNIONS. Here's a look at the challenges the labor movement is facing and possible ways to deal with it. Suggestion: take a look at the I.W.W.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

By their fruits

A few weeks back, I scored a major find at a local library. It was, and, yes, this does show what a geek I am, a 24 part lecture series on Transcendentalism and I was totally jazzed. I was all over it and regretted when it came to an end.

I'm not sure still what to make of Transcendentalism, that name for a diverse and fractious movement of writers, poets, dreamers, cranks and crazies that came spinning out of New England in the mid 1800s. And what a mixed lot they were, ranging from brilliant to batty.

But still, for all the amorphous verbosity, this was a movement or a trend in American thought that spread far beyond this continent and it had a largely beneficial influence, as its ripples were felt in the anti-slavery movement, support for the Union cause and abolition in the Civil War, the early women's movement, environmentalism, the utopian community movement,spiritual egalitarianism and other social reforms.

You could make a good case that one of these guys (Thoreau) accidentally laid the foundations for the theory of nonviolent action, which did great things during the Civil Rights movement and in many other circumstances..

People like Emerson and Thoreau were also among the earliest cultural bridges, promoting respect for other religions. No history of Buddhism's migration to the West or of the dawning appreciation in this country of such Indian classics as the Bhagavad Gita would be complete without a nod to this movement.

Jesus said "by their fruits shall you know them" and I try to make it a point to avoid sharp disagreements with him. By that standard, as loopy as some of the Transcendentalists were, they did pretty good.

Much more on Ralphie to come.

LATEST RANT. Here's my call for WV Governor Tomblin to expand Medicaid coverage to working West Virginians.

HUMAN EVOLUTION. Game on.

IT HAS BEEN WAY TOO LONG since I ran something about zombies.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Hammer time

There is an old saying that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We tend to get pretty attached to our hammers and use them whether they make sense or not.

(The problem with thinking everything can be fixed with a hammer, as any West Virginian can tell you, is that it leaves duct tape out of the equation altogether. But I digress.)

This is yet another thing I find useful in Buddhist thought, especially for people interested in social justice. Activists can get stuck in ruts--or sometimes time warps--doing the same things over and over. I love rituals--but not ritualism.

The Buddha taught that "attachment to form is a hindrance," which means that having fixed ideas about how things are or what to do can get in the way of getting anything done. Every day, every situation, every conflict is unique and demands a unique response, which may or may not look like anything that went before it.

CLIMATE CAPITALISM? Maybe so, maybe not. Read more here.

OKAY. Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship reports having "a totally clear conscience" about the Upper Big Branch mine disaster.

IN CASE YOU PLAN ON LIVING A LONG TIME, here's some advice.

OR, IF NOT, here's something on near death experiences.

ON THE SUBJECT OF DEATH, sitting a lot could make it happen quicker.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Not two

Off and on over the years, I've tried to read the writings of the late French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Don't ask me why. It's probably a self punishment thing or an effort to purify evil karma.

I never got very far. I think the only book of his I made it through was a little one about the Oedipus myth (Freud's take was way more fun to read).

However, I do think I agree with one of his main ideas, assuming I've got it right. He seemed to think that people are hard-wired to use binary classification systems like raw/cooked, civilized/savage, good/evil, us/them, etc. That kind of thing can be useful a lot of the time and probably worked best in the relatively simple environment in which early humans evolved. But it can also get us in big trouble.

One other useful idea from the Buddhist tradition is that of non-duality, which kind of grows out of the idea that all things are anatta or without self. Non-duality emphasizes the connectedness and relatedness of all things. As some Buddhists put it, we "inter-are."

Non-duality has shaped the way I look at working for social justice and made me a bit uncomfortable with some of the words you hear a lot in that context: organizing, education, leadership and service. Words like these seem to assume that humans can and should be divided into the organizers and the organized, those who educate and those who are educated, those who lead and those who are led, and those who serve and those who are served...which is kind of creepy to me.

I don't think things work too well that way most of the time. Non duality for me means that there should always be mutuality, fluidity, interaction and give and take.

ASTROTURF AND TEA. Here's another look at the Tea Party and its billionaire funders.

SPEAKING OF ELECTIONS, Holly Sklar points out here that Wall Street has already voted.

FEAR TACTICS. Deficit hawks are keeping fear alive.

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER. Rumors of a sale of Massey Energy continue to swirl on Wall Street. If it happens, a certain CEO would get a golden parachute, of course.

FAREWELL, SWEET PRINCE. An octopus that predicted the outcome of World Cup soccer games has died, apparently of natural causes. May he be reborn in the Pure Land of Amida Buddha.

SORRY, BEN FRANKLIN, but crows are tool using animals too. And they teach their young to do the same.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Paying attention doesn't cost anything

Several years ago, a friend and I spent a day and night at a Theravada Buddhist monastery in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. It was old school (which is kind of what "Theravada" means) as in no food after the noon meal, hour-long meditation sessions, chanting in Pali and English.

The main item on the bill of fare was mindfulness meditation. We were supposed to be mindful of every step, every breath, every bite of food. The scripture that we chanted was the Mahasatipatthana Sutta or Great Discourse on Mindfulness.

During the sitting sessions, we were supposed to focus on the breath. When the mind wandered, as it inevitably did, we were to note the thought or feeling without reacting to it and return the mind to the breath. Over and over again. The idea was to develop one-pointed concentration and ultimately the ability to apply awareness to all activities.

The closest I came to one-pointed awareness that day was thinking about how bad my knees were hurting. As I've said before, seated meditation isn't my strong suit; the moving kind works best for me. But one of the main points of either kind is simply paying attention. We are on automatic pilot most of the time, but with practice we can learn to bring conscious awareness to all kinds of things.

That would be another practical Buddhist insight for people interested in social justice. There is and never will be any substitute for paying attention to what is going on. Noticing things is the first step to changing things.

CLASS WAR? More like a one-sided class beatdown.

FROM THE UBER-BLOGGER OF ALL THINGS COAL. Ken Ward of Coal Tattoo had two interesting posts yesterday. The first is about changes in a possible severance package for Don Blankenship if Massey Energy is sold, as some rumors hold. The second is the warm and tender relationship between that company and former WV supreme court justice and current congressional candidate Spike Maynard.

IT'S ALMOST DRESS-UP-YOUR-DOG-DAY. Whether they like it or not.

URGENT COBRA UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Relentless empiricism

I recently finished reading (really, listening to) Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The book was a bit grim but eye opening about the plight of women in many parts of the developing world.

One phrase that stuck in my mind from the book was "relentless empiricism." In context, the authors believed that people interested in development should be driven by reality rather than ideology or rhetoric. That phrase also reminded me of another useful aspect of Buddhist thought.

The Buddha may have been the original relentless empiricist, for he counseled his followers to accept nothing on the basis of faith, tradition or scriptures but rather to test all in the light of their own experience. This saying is attributed to him:

Believe nothing on the faith of traditions,
even though they have been held in honor
for many generations and in diverse places.
Do not believe a thing because many people speak of it.
Do not believe on the faith of the sages of the past.
Do not believe what you yourself have imagined,
persuading yourself that a God inspires you.
Believe nothing on the sole authority of your masters and priests.
After examination, believe what you yourself have tested
and found to be reasonable, and conform your conduct thereto.

He even encouraged non-attachment to his own teachings, comparing them merely to a raft to get from the bad side of a river to the good side. Once across, he taught, there is no need to carry the raft around.

FALLING. Here are some musings by Paul Krugman on the economy, the elections, and missed opportunities.

ASTROTURF. This item looks at the big money behind a "grassroots" movement.

MORE ALONG THAT LINE here.

A MORE IDEALISTIC TIME. A first generation member of the Peace Corps (and a friend of mine) looks back on his tour of duty here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

This and that

There are a number of Buddhist ideas that I think are useful for people interested in social justice. Earlier this week, I wrote about the big three, also known as the three signs of being: suffering, impermanence and insubstantiality (dukkha, anicca and anatta).

Another one is related to all three but especially the latter. It's the basic idea of dependent origination, also sometimes called dependent co-arising. This basically means that nothing really exists in itself or is as solid as it seems. Rather, all things are dependent on a long series of causes and conditions and come into being and pass away according to those conditions.

As the Buddha put it,

When this exists, that comes to be. With the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be. With the cessation of this, that ceases.

The take home message I get from that is that the conditions that shape our world and social institutions constantly change. If we pay attention and act skillfully in accordance with conditions (or refrain from acting when conditions are inappropriate) then there is a better chance at attaining a positive outcome. Acting unskillfully or disregarding conditions is like someone trying to cross a busy street without looking at the traffic.

LIVE LONG AND PROSPER? Here's a snapshot about the effects of income on lifespan.

SIGN ON. The National Unemployment Law Project has set up a website to petition Congress to extend unemployment benefits, which are set to run out at the end of November.

SUPERMARKET SURPRISES here.

LOCKED UP SYNDROME. This Gazette editorial looks at the American tendency to warehouse way more people than most other countries.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A flickering lamp

One of the three signs of being according to the Buddha was something called anatta, which is one of those great words that don't translate directly into English. It literally means something like "without self" but insubstantial might be closer to it. (The other two signs of being are suffering and impermanence, the subjects of the last two day's posts.)

Basically, it means that nothing is as solid as it appears and that all things are composed of other elements that rise and fall based upon changing conditions. He even took it so far as to mean that we don't have a lasting self but are rather a changing bundle of sensations, perceptions, form, consciousness, and mental reactions.

One of my favorite expressions of this idea from Buddhist scriptures has appeared here before. It's from the Diamond Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism and is incidentally the world's oldest printed book. Toward the end, the Buddha says,

Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

Believe it or not, that's another very practical Buddhist idea for those interested in social justice. It often seems like we are up against incredibly powerful opponents, be they institutions, corporations, regimes or whatever. But as political theorists of non-violence such as Gene Sharp, Robert Helvey and others have argued, social and political power is not monolithic; it comes from many sources and requires the cooperation of many disparate elements.

Powerful entities, in other words, are not as powerful as they may seem; they are themselves insubstantial and impermanent and require many sources of support. They come into being and pass away according to changing conditions. Change the conditions or remove the "pillars of support" on which they rest and things can change.

FUN, GAMES AND MAYHEM. This probably won't surprise many people, but research suggests that graphic and violent video games can desensitize players and encourage aggressive behavior at least among some people.

RUNNING THE NUMBERS on bullying.

THE LONG WAY HOME. Homelessness is a growing problem for returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

WHITE TEA. A new report finds that some racist groups are seeking affiliation with the Tea Party, although party leaders have publicly repudiated racism.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

That was then, this is now

The first social justice fight that I got really immersed in was the Pittston coal strike of 1989-90 in support of the United Mine Workers. The union worked without a contract for something like 14 months before walking out in April 1989. The main issues in the strike were health care and retirement benefits.

It was pretty hairy and lasted for almost a year. People worked really hard on that one and eventually the miners got a contract they could live with. It was a victory.

A few years later, however, and Pittston got rid of most of its holdings. People were either laid off or went to work for different, often non-union companies.

I'd do it all again. In a heartbeat. But it illustrates another of the Buddha's ideas that I think is relevant to working on social justice issues, to wit that everything is impermanent. We work very hard for things that just aren't going to last forever. We won't either, for that matter. That's just the way it is, although that's no reason not to do all we can.

I've worked hard on policy issues only to gain ground and then lose it again. On the positive side, impermanence is also a characteristic of the things we don't like too, which is always worth keeping in mind. I kept telling myself that several years ago when the misguided policies of the Bush administration seemed to be riding high.

The teaching of impermanence also reminds me that everything changes from moment to moment. In a world of flux, getting stuck in ruts or repetitive actions is a recipe for failure. What worked in the past may not work now. I've seen some activists who seem to be stuck in a time warp trying to recreate some past struggle and I've felt the urge as well, but life unrolls moment to moment.

The only way that I know to stay fresh in a world of impermanence is to pay attention and act in accordance with the demands of the moment. That doesn't mean forgetting the past or its useful lessons or not planning for the future. But you can only do either in the moment.

HELLO, PLUTOCRACY. The growing wealth gap and democracy for sale threatens America, according to Robert Reich.

MORE THAN ONE WAY. A Kansas group has made progress on energy conservation even amid climate change skepticism.

INTERESTING RUMORS are floating around about the possible sale of Massey Energy.

THE STONE AGE DIET PLAN included more than just meat.

IT'S NOT JUST US. Honey bees' memory fades as they age too.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Too optimistic to be happy

According to Buddhist tradition, being born as a human is a rare privilege. Other states of being may be more or less pleasant but the human state is said to be the only one in which one can attain enlightenment. It is even rarer and more fortunate to be a human and be exposed however briefly to the Buddha and his teaching.

By those standards, I guess I'm pretty lucky. Due to a traveling grandfather who died before I was born, I don't remember a time when I didn't know about Buddha or at least recognize his image, thanks to a statue and a prayer wheel he brought back from China in the 1920s. Learning about Buddhist teachings came later, partially through my study of martial arts.

For the record, I'm not a card-carrying Buddhist but more like a Buddhist sympathizer. Seated meditation drives me nuts and I'm way too fond of wine to sign on to the Fifth Precept. But I've been struck over and over again by the practicality of some Buddhist teachings to working for social justice--and not going crazy in the process.

Here's one to start with: life is suffering. Some people seem to have this magical idea that if only this or that could be made to happen or stopped from happening then everything would be just peachy. If the desired state does not come about, they can make themselves pretty miserable. Paradoxically, they are too optimistic--in the sense of thinking everything can be fixed--to be happy.

Buddhism isn't pessimistic but it is realistic. Things aren't all bad all the time but living and suffering are intertwined. Such a view is entirely compatible with happiness, strange as that may seem. We can do things to increase or decrease the amount of suffering in the world but not eliminate it. That insight makes me grateful for little victories and for all the things that aren't terrible at any given moment.

Here's a suggestion: try to make it a practice to notice it when you don't have a toothache.

DEJA VU. This New Yorker piece by Sean Wilentz traces Glenn Beck's outlook to old, hard right groups like the John Birch Society.

JUST SAY NO to more foreclosures. Dean Baker calls for a moratorium here.

YOU CAN READ THIS LATER. It's another New Yorker item about procrastination.

DROP EVERYTHING and watch this video clip from Stephen Colbert about how goats are stealing American jobs.

SPEAKING OF SUFFERING, elite athletes train to push past pain and other people can learn to do this too.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The poisoned arrow

Sometimes people, including myself, get hung up on speculative questions that don't really help much in the here and now. This reminds me of one of the Buddha's parables. According to the story (full text here), the Buddha is approached by someone interested in abstract questions about the cosmos, life after death and everything.

The Buddha responded that such questions aren't really much help in the goal of liberation from suffering. To paraphrase, he said it was as if someone who was shot with a poisoned arrow refused all medical treatment until he found out who shot the arrow, what they looked like, what his day job was, what kind of wood the arrow was made of, what kinds of feathers it had, and what the bow looked like. If that were to happen, "The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him."

IS THAT ALL? The Economic Policy Institute calculates that the US economy is short 11.5 million jobs.

SOMETHING ELSE TO DENY ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE: major parts of the world are drying up.

SPECIAL TREAT FOR LINGUISTICS DORKS here.

MEAN GIRL BLUES. Here's an interesting article on girl bullying.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The mountains go dark

The wind has settled, the blossoms have fallen;
Birds sing, the mountains grow dark --
This is the wondrous power of Buddhism.--Ryokan 1758-1831

Only that day dawns

Goat Rope has been spending a bit of time with Henry David Thoreau lately. His writings are full of great nuggets. If you are a fan, click on last week's posts.

Old Henry had a Buddhist soul, although his direct knowledge of the Buddha or Buddhist teachings was very limited. Not a lot was known about Buddhist teachings in the early and mid 19th century America. If memory serves, he may have read a little of a translation of the Lotus Sutra, a Mahayana text which contains little if any information about the "historical Buddha."

Some may want to chalk that up to karmic affinity...

He professed his fondness for Buddha and Christ in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, where amidst musings on various religions he wrote

I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too.

Although he didn't have the chance to learn Buddhist meditation techniques, he seemed to have got there on his own, as this passage in Walden indicates:

Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than the work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works.

He also picked right up on the grand Dharma theme of wakefulness, as is shown in quotes like

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

And

I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

Sorry, Kerouac, but I think he might have been America's first Dharma bum.

MISSING MATCH. Many states are going to have to make painful cuts unless Congress extends the matching Medicaid funding which is part of the Recovery Act.

WHISTLEBLOWING. The folks at Massey Energy don't take too kindly to it, according to this NPR report.

GETTING REGULATION RIGHT. Here's an interesting take from the financial page of the New Yorker.

THE BATTLE OF BLAIR MOUNTAIN, a major historic site of WV's mine wars, continues.

ZOMBIE CHIC. What's up with the popularity of zombies in pop culture?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED