America, I Love You
My fellow citizens of the whole world,
I invite you to write your own poem
beginning with that title line!
America, I love you,
but you’ve gone way off the rails!
Your electorate is deeply asleep!
Something’s wrong within its moral fibre!
Ram Dass told my friend John,
“This is our fault, you know.
It’s because of the way we did
social action in the ‘60s and ‘70s.”
Even today, the demagogue who screams insults,
threats and lies from the White House
lost the popular vote by three million.
That’s something (not enough).
You should read Ezra Klein’s
Why We’re Polarized.
Everything is weighted toward the Right.
The red states: 70 percent of the land (which would = 70 Senators),
but 30 percent of the population, for starters.
America, the question is, what happens now?
Do we knuckle under to tyranny?
How do we begin to fix this?
Is it a blessing, America,
for us to be experiencing now
the kind of thing so many
“banana republics” have long lived through
while we enjoyed our relative freedoms:
the barrage of lies coming down from “the top”
until the only power left to exercise
is the furtive whispering of jokes about “the Leader”?
What are we, by our choices,
getting ourselves in for?
Don’t the very stones and land
already cry out?
Oh, America, you have an appointment
to lead the world spiritually!
What’s going to have to happen,
to get you ready to keep
that appointment someday?
America, I’d believed the day was already near!
I was with you, Leonard Cohen, in your chant:
Democracy is Coming to the USA!
Oh, America,
they told me not to worry
about the Dinosaurs of white male privilege,
that they’d die off. But they haven’t!
They’re still throwing their weight around,
and they’ve got a lot of weight!
Yes, time is on your side, America—
on the side of Inclusion, real Democracy, Justice!
But for those of us who live here,
or who live anywhere and care
about this great behemoth of wealth and power
that’s been such a boon and bane to the emerging New Age,
patience is now needed, along with great longing
and wise,
not precipitous
action.
A Small Blip on the Radar of Time
We’re somewhere in the middle of what in the East is known as a kalpa, which is something like 4.32 billion years long. Supposedly, there have been billions of kalpas in the history of the universe.
Only the tiniest portion of this kalpa has even had human life. The very earliest human history began a mere 200,000 years ago. Among ancient civilizations (about 2000 B.C. to 500 A.D.), the Roman one lasted about 1,000 years. In writings left from the Roman Empire and republic, historians say you can find many of the same kinds of archetypal political and social situations that are going on today.
There were, of course, many other ancient civilizations: Greek, Persian, Egyptian and so on. Then there were the Middle Ages, and after that, the Modern period, which began in around 1450 A.D. Scholars say Shakespeare’s “history plays,” set in the late Middle Ages, also dramatize archetypal situations similar to those of our own day.
What I’m trying to get at, obviously, is that we are a small blip on the radar of Time. I think it is only the fear of our own death that anchors us (via that fear) to our own time, and makes events here seem so all-important to us. That fear is perhaps what we should be working on, rather than (or at least besides) “what to do about” Trump, America, Brexit, etc.
Meditating on this pasara
If we don’t identify with our bodies, as a well-known Zen story illustrates, there’s no problem!
Here’s that story, in case you haven’t heard it: The King tells a hermit, “Do you know that I could run you through with my sword, without batting an eye?”
The hermit replies, “Do you know I could be run through with your sword, without batting an eye?”
To really meditate on all this pasara, a Hindi word that can be translated as a “spread” or “spread-out”—this little settlement of castles that arose on the sands of history, and will wash away in the ocean of Time, to be replaced by another and another and another—may go a ways towards solving the problem.
In the time of Hafiz, the great mystic poet whom many of us read, a warrior named Tamerlane erected towers of human skulls to celebrate his victories. Trump has not done that yet! And Hafiz became Enlightened anyway!
Life and the spiritual journey go on
What I’m saying, I guess, is that life and the spiritual journey go on. “In the middle of things” [“In media res” in Latin] is where scholars say that epic poems, and even mythic films such as Star Wars, begin: right where we are.
Here, I tell myself, I must do my best to live with love and humour in the midst of whatever is going on. This includes doing my bit as a citizen and recognizing my karmic obligations relating to this incarnation.
Of course, we must live in the Present. By doing so, we connect not only with our immediate surroundings, but with transcendental reality. It’s good to remember these words of Meher Baba: “There is one moment only—the ETERNAL NOW.”
I don’t think I’m just writing all of this to show off my thimble of erudition. I’m trying to crack the shell of the nut of Existence, because my situation (and in my opinion, the human condition itself) is desperate!
If you got this far, thank you for listening, and please contribute to my GoFundMe … no, just kidding about that one ?!
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image 1: Max Reif; image 2: Wikimedia Commons / Cropped from original); image 3: Wikimedia Commons / Cropped from original); image 4: Wikimedia Commons; image 5: © Meher Nazar Publications
