Unbiased CompassionThe love and compassion of a buddha, they say, is like the sun: it shines impartially and unceasingly on all beings. There is no picking and choosing involved, no personal preferences, no hope or fear. A buddha doesn't shine the light of his compassion only on those beings he likes or who please him, and withhold it vengefully from those who fail to meet his standards. "The great Way is not difficult," said the Third Zen Patriarch, "for those who have no preferences."
Most people have no trouble extending love and compassion to the people they like, and to the people whose behavior pleases them. It's easy to love someone who's lovable. But what about someone whose behavior is unethical, or whose personality is offensive? How is it possible to extend love and compassion to someone who is, by any reasonable standard, acting like an idiot, or a poseur, or just a plain, old jerk?
I find this incredibly challenging. I can give lip service to compassion and loving-kindness, but when I'm faced with someone who's a thief and a liar, or someone who's delusional and in denial, or someone who's aggressive and abusive, it's not so easy to find the love and compassion within myself. Instead, everything in me wants to shut down and say "No!" to the offending person.
One thing that helps is to look within myself and remember that there have been times in my life when I, too, have acted selfishly -- when I was almost certainly perceived by others as a jerk (difficult as that may be for me to imagine). There have been times, too, when I was a poseur, trying to impress other people and gain social advantage. And there have been times when I acted like an idiot, when I was in denial, when I shot myself in the foot through my own stupidity.
With pretty much any quality I might find offensive in others, I can discover at least a trace of that same odious quality within myself if I look closely, and honestly. And I have first-hand experience of the fear and insecurity that drive people to behave in such ways. From there, it's not such a great leap to feel empathy for someone who has gotten so stuck in those familiar traps that they just live that way all the time.
Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell ThemIt seems that America, my home country, has grown into a nation divided against itself. The never-ending power struggle between progressives and convervatives, left and right, has reached a crescendo of bitterness and animosity that I've never seen before, and that has perhaps not been seen since the Civil War. Citizens of the same country are pitted against each other, determined to fight for their values and defining themselves in opposition to the enemy. It seems more difficult than ever for people on either side of the divide to be compassionate and respectful and tolerant towards those on the other side.
Politically speaking, I know which side of the divide I stand on, and it's not with the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin. But when I look at such people, and at the whole conservative backlash that's now taking place against Obama's rise to power, I can infer the fear and pain that they must be in to make them behave as they do. After all, I suffered the same kind of fear and pain and anguish throughout all eight years of the most recent Republican administration.
It is sad that the vitriolic, "Drill, baby, drill!" nonsense being passed off as public discourse by so many Republicans and Tea Partiers could actually garner so much national attention, and stir up so much animosity and ill-will in people on both sides of the political spectrum. And it is nauseating when individuals who are visibly bloated with prejudice and aggression and greed, masquerading cynically in the name of family values and patriotism -- "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," to borrow a phrase from Al Franken -- are placed in positions of power and influence.
The past week has brought us several outrageous examples (as if more proof were needed) of the widespread hypocrisy of conservatives. Now that BP's catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is threatening the U.S. coastline from Texas to Florida, suddenly we don't hear them chanting "Drill, baby, drill!" anymore. And yet another prominent Republican and anti-gay activist, the Baptist minister George Alan Rekers, has been caught and exposed with his hand in a male prostitute's cookie jar. How many of these right-wing homophobes have now been outed as closeted homosexuals? I hope someone is keeping a list of these guys -- I've lost count. Rekers cynically claims that he hired the RentBoy.com hooker, and took him on a European vacation, only in order to share the gospel of Jesus with him and save him from his sinner's lifestyle -- but the
prostitute affirms to the
Miami New Times that they shared a lot more than that.
Sympathy for the DevilEven as I oppose, on general principle, the entire conservative movement and most of the things for which it claims to stand, it is still possible (admittedly, with great effort) to feel compassion and kindness towards the human beings who comprise that movement. To borrow a phrase from their own playbook: "Love the sinner, hate the sin." The internalized homophobia and loneliness of people like George Alan Rekers is profoundly sad, and having experienced the pain of those feelings myself, I know that as a human being he is worthy of compassion, not mockery. The pain that drove Rush Limbaugh to become a pill-popping drug addict is also not completely foreign to me. To allow my moral outrage at such people's hypocritical actions and deeply misguided political views to make me hate them would be playing right into their hands. It would be stooping to their level. In spite of my outrage, somewhere inside I know exactly where these people are coming from. Their pain is my pain. But it's so easy to forget that.
This doesn't mean that we should agree with anything that Sarah Palin, for example, has said or might conceivably say, or that -- Heaven forbid -- we should ever allow her to be voted into a national office. But the similarities between us are greater than the differences. Not only are we citizens of the same struggling country, facing the same set of problems, but we are both human beings -- citizens of the same struggling planet. We both feel pain and fear; we both want to have happiness and want to avoid suffering. In the larger scheme of things, the distinctions between us are negligible, almost non-existent. Deep inside, beneath our differences, I
am Sarah Palin -- and so are you.
Last week, President Obama addressed the University of Michigan's graduating class and urged them to maintain "civility" in political discourse -- even as a shrill cabal of Republicans and Tea Partiers protested outside and accused him of being a "socialist." Obama's call for civility -- for simple human courtesy and reasonable, respectful dialogue in politics -- sounds almost quaint, a throwback to an earlier, more innocent time in American life when civility was a value that meant something to most people. Listen for five minutes to one of today's conservative shock-jock radio shows and you'll know that civility doesn't mean a damn thing anymore.
But the virtue of civility is precisely what is most needed today; it is the only thing that will de-escalate the bitter, bipartisan stalemate and hateful, internecine struggle that have become the hallmarks of American politics. Civility would be a step towards
real patriotism. We can all agree to disagree, and we can work towards solutions to our problems. But it would be a lot less painful for everyone if, in the process, we were to maintain some degree of respect and compassion towards one another. The unbiased compassion of a buddha shines impartially on all beings, even on hypocrites and liars and hate-mongers and shock-jocks and spin-doctors and greedy, thieving rogues.
