For MLK Day...

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr.

With a broken computer, and about to head out to take part in the Martin Luther King Day of Service, I'm not saying much, but thought I'd share a few images and words...

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Namaste, & all that...

Thoughts Swimmin' By Like Dolphins

...ever try to take pictures of dolphins from the beach? by the time ya hit the button, they’re gone...so, then, ya start pointing the camera in the general area where you saw them and start clicking, hoping one will appear, and maybe even jump, at just the right moment...which doesn’t usually work so well, either...but, at least you can end up with some nice shots of water...

...my car inspection’s due this week...and it’s gonna cost me a bundle...including the annual couple hundred bucks necessary to make the check engine light go off...only to come back on a week later, and stay on until I fork over another couple hundred dollars next year....I’m thinking about pointing out that I live in the eternal now...so the distinction between this year and last year doesn’t mean anything....somehow, though, I doubt ya can get an inspection sticker with now on it...

...a lotta people’ve been pissed off lately...and not just at town halls and the MTV Awards....I’m talkin’ about the mellow incense-scented environs of the yoga blogosphere, where fierce and sometimes hurtful arguments about corporate sponsorship, lascivious gurus, and the relative merits of divinity and solid abs seem to be poppin' up like poison ivy in a Zen garden....as an ongoing effort to be more compassionate and understanding, and hence less combative, is an essential part of my whole yoga practice thingy, I try to keep out of the fray...at least when the argument’s about yoga...though even that can sometimes be difficult as a one armed handstand...like, sometimes, people are so lacking in compassion and understanding I just feel like smackin’ ‘em upside the head...but I don’t...so that’s at least a start...

...I’ve been told there’s an equivalent to the Golden Rule in every major religious or ethical system...which attests to the fact that people in every society throughout history have needed to be reminded not to act like assholes...and, in the end, there’s really not much to do but keep trying...and try not to be to hard on yourself for not always acting like Gandhi...particularly since, as his biographers can attest, Gandhi didn’t always act like Gandhi, either...

Passing On...

Our capacity to make peace with another person and with the world depends very much on our capacity to make peace with ourselves.
Thich Nhat Hanh

I have only three enemies. My favorite enemy, the one most easily influenced for the better, is the British Empire. My second enemy, the Indian people, is far more difficult. But my most formidable opponent is a man named Mohandas K. Gandhi. With him I seem to have very little influence.
Gandhi

....this friend of mine told me about how, coming back from month-long yoga retreats she’s found herself unable to relate to her own name....I said I’m always like that....I don’t think this is a sign of my enlightenment, though, impending completed, or any which way...then, I don’t think either my name or who I really am means anything...or if it does it means something just this second and it’ll mean something else in the next....somebody, I think it might’ve been Thich Nhat Hanh, said we die with every outbreath and we’re born again with every inbreath...actually, maybe he didn’t say that...maybe it was somebody else...maybe it was me...

...anyway, I was thinking of that recently... the rebirth thing...not reincarnation in any literal sense but the sense that we can start again, at least in an internal sense...no, I don’t think I can shirk responsibility for ugly words and actions of the past...but maybe I can no longer be the person who needed to say and do them....there’s that song where Lou Reed talks about the possibility of becoming a father and says it might be fun to have a kid I could pass on to something more than rage pain anger and hurt...never mind the redundancy...I’m wondering what I’m passing on to myself...what I can pass on to myself...what I can not pass on to myself...

...I tend to be hung up on the past...my biggest regret about my adolescence is that I wasn’t more violent...really...seriously....if I had it to do over again, I’d break some bones...but endless violence inside myself can’t be my reality now...I don’t want it to be....I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen for maybe fifteen years over Indian food a month or so ago...she said she thought we were both a lot nicer than we used to be...I agreed...not as good looking but much nicer people...it’d be great to have an eighteen year old body but no way would I ever want to have an eighteen year old mind again...there’s only so much suffering a person can take....actually, that’s not true...one thing I learn working with recovering addicts is that people can suffer more than you can imagine...and yet keep trying to get well....I find that inspiring....somebody who’s been molested, beaten, abused in every way by criminals and law enforcement both and is still there has something to teach about the possibilities of rebirth...

Flakes of Wrath

Contrary to what your more irritatingly blissed out yoga practitioners in their designer label “Live Simply and Let Others Simply Live” t-shirts say in between expensive spa treatments, there’s a lot to be pissed off about.

Sure, forgiveness is a good thing, one might even say divine. And, apparently, it’s good for one’s mental health:
Forgiveness is an act of letting go. It is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves....We do not release them from accountability by forgiving; we free ourselves from the burden of bitterness. Gordon Livingston, M.D.
Things get more complicated when you away from the personal, though. A long time ago, when I was an angry self-righteous young political activist, my Dad gave me a book by Eric Hoffer called The True Believer. Hoffer said that people who want to change the world are simply trying to avoid changing themselves. I thought: if King, Gandhi, and Mandela did what they did to avoid working on themselves, we should all be grateful for that.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark as human gods aim for their mark to make everything from toy guns that spark to flesh colored Christs that glow in the dark; it’s easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred.
Bob Dylan

Here’s what’s pissing me off at the moment (as opposed to ten minutes from now, or ten minutes ago): Republicans. Cindy McCain said “In Arizona the only way to get around the state is by small private plane.” Phil Gramm says people should stop whining about the economy, since, presumably, nobody he knows is so strapped that the private plane is on the block. Karl Rove says Obama is just like that snooty guy “everybody” knows from the country club that, presumably, “everybody” is a member of. And yet, find a picture of a Democratic candidate wind surfing or admitting that he reads a book now and then, and an Andover graduate son of a president who used family connections to keep out of Vietnam only needs to clear some brush in front of a Fox News camera and mispronounce big words to be a man of the people. Of course, these are also the people who’ve taken on the mantle of “morality” to the point that when the word “values” appears in the mainstream media, we can assume it means “right wing fundamentalist Republican values” even as they’ve fucked the world with their ideology of avarice, bigotry, paranoia, and unbelievable greed (though, admittedly, what pisses me off almost as much is that democrats/progressives/liberals let them do it...since, y’know, we’re too postmodern to use that kind of terminology).

Keep you doped with religion, and sex and TV, and you think you’re so clever and classless and free, but you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.
John Lennon, “Working Class Hero”

On the other hand, King et al didn’t, as far as I know, spend a lot of time sitting around stewing in their own rage. I have friends who can barely sit still over a beer thanks to their visceral hatred of George W. Bush. I’ve also met incredibly privileged people who spend hours every day gritting their teeth with rage as Rush Limbaugh rants about the possibility that a few of their tax dollars might go to healthcare for people with nothing. I spend a ludicrous amount of time and energy coming up with angry political rants (see above), ending up emotionally drained and, thus, actually less likely to take any significant action about anything.

There’s a scene in the movie Gandhi, where Gandhi’s on a hunger strike to get the Hindus and Muslims to stop killing each other. A distraught man enters the room, throwing a hunk of food onto his blanket. “I’m already going to Hell,” he says (all dialogue is from memory), “I won’t have your death on my conscience, too.” When Gandhi asks why he’s going to Hell, the man recounts that, after the Muslims killed his family, he bashed a Muslim child’s head in. Gandhi says “there is a way that you can escape from hell. Find a child who’s lost his parents in the fighting. Take him with you and raise him as your own.” Then, after a pause: “One more thing: he must be a Muslim, and you must raise him as one.” The point of this is not that the guy needs to make some bizarre and, most likely, impossible penance to keep from going to Hell after death; it’s that he’s already in Hell because of his hatred for the Muslims for what they did and for himself for what he did because of that hatred. The only way out is to break the cycle.

4th of July, Wissahickon Park (Scalia)

We have it in our power to begin the world over again
Thomas Paine, 1776

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Reality has a liberal bias
Stephen Colbert

On the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I've been totally in agreement and support of President Bush
John McCain

Lesley Stahl interviewing everybody’s favorite Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia on 60 Minutes:
STAHL: If someone’s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized, by a law enforcement person — if you listen to the expression “cruel and unusual punishment,” doesn’t that apply?
SCALIA: No. To the contrary. You think — Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.
STAHL: Well I think if you’re in custody, and you have a policeman who’s taken you into custody–
SCALIA: And you say he’s punishing you? What’s he punishing you for? … When he’s hurting you in order to get information from you, you wouldn’t say he’s punishing you. What is he punishing you for?

Freedom’s just another word for...nothin’
Paraphrase of Justice Scalia’s comments, with apologies to Kris Kristofferson and Janis Joplin

Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither security nor liberty
Benjamin Franklin

Happy hour is now enforced by law
Jello Biafra

The first time I got arrested isn’t worth talking about, much. I was outside of a Dead show in San Francisco—in a state of mind that certainly made it seem significant at the time, though it might’ve been anyway, except that it wasn’t. We got set up by this older guy who handed us something and promptly disappeared, mere seconds before somebody else grabbed me, saying “guess who.” I answered “I dunno,” then saw the little blue earphone. A quick search showed we weren’t worth their trouble, but the story was enough to get me rejected for a jury twenty years later. More interesting was the second time, maybe a year later—standing or crouching along the fence, joking, probably, enjoying the desert sun and each other’s company—me, Hilary, Don, Jeff P., Mel, maybe Elyse and Tom—until we heard the sound of the drum—some hippie kid who’d been picked the night before around the campfire to give us the signal—and, as somebody started raising the strand of barbed wire, I thought ‘shit we’re actually doing this,’ and climbed through. Then we were walking across the desert, trespassing on government property, hand in hand, spotting the biggest jackrabbit I’d ever seen. Up somewhere way ahead, where we certainly didn’t expect to get, was Mercury—name of a planet, in honor of a Roman trickster god—where scientists toiled, building devices and testing them underground to make sure they worked—and that was exactly the problem—they worked way too well, and there were way too many of them, and yet more were being built and tested, and here we were, crawling through barbed wire and trudging across the desert, trying in our feeble all-too-theatrical way to say no...please...stop. That was all we could do, perhaps, but it was something. There has to be some value in simply saying no, even if no one listens. After a while, tired and simultaneously hot and cold as hot desert sun wrestled with icy winds, we saw the Wackenhut up ahead—back then, in the mid-to late 80’s these armies for hire were already a growth industry, if nothing like what they are today. We decided to at least make a token effort to walk away, but didn’t cause him too much trouble. Casually approaching, he let us know we were under arrest, herded us together with a group of others, and politely asked us all to stick out our wrists for plastic handcuffs—they were easy to slip out of, though one poor guy learned not to do so too blatantly in front of them. From there it was a three hour bus ride north, to Tonopah, where they put us in an auditorium, told exactly what statute we’d violated, then said we were free to go but would have to find our own way back. Good one, State of Nevada. And so we packed every bar and restaurant in that little town until enough cars made it there to drive us back down to camp, some to be arrested again the next day, some, like me, to drive up in support. One of my releasees was kind enough to treat everyone in the car to a dip at a hot spring on the way back down. The day after that, a bunch of us headed to the bay area for another Dead show, where this time I managed to stay out of police custody.

Well, boys, I reckon this is it — nuclear combat toe to toe with the Rooskies. Now look, boys, I ain't much of a hand at makin' speeches, but I got a pretty fair idea that something doggone important is goin' on back there. And I got a fair idea the kinda personal emotions that some of you fellas may be thinkin.' Heck, I reckon you wouldn't even be human bein's if you didn't have some pretty strong personal feelin's about nuclear combat. I want you to remember one thing, the folks back home is a-countin' on you and by golly, we ain't about to let 'em down. I tell you something else, if this thing turns out to be half as important as I figure it just might be, I'd say that you're all in line for some important promotions and personal citations....
Slim Pickens as Major T.J. Kong, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

freedom won through non-violence will mean the inauguration of a new order in the world. There is no hope for mankind in any other way
Mohandas K. Gandhi