Seeking Justice vs Letting Go: Profound Thoughts. Profound, Useless Thoughts.

I wake up each day torn between the desire to enjoy the world or change the world. This makes it difficult to plan the day.

--E.B. White

Let's get this out of the way: You aren't E. B. White, and neither am I, so let's cut the shit. You don't get to whine about how Buddhism promotes some sort of cud-chewing bovine complacency, through encouraging people to deal with suffering internally instead of addressing its external source.

I mean, what were you doing to Change The World anyway? Sorry, dude, but surfing the blogosphere and nodding in agreement when Glenn Greenwald whines about something Howard Kurtz said doesn't count.

"Oh, but wait!" you're saying. "Also, I drive a Prius!" Well, gee, sorry, I wasn't aware. Everyone else, stop reading. Let's let Sir/Madam "I drive a Prius and occasionally give a handful of bucks to The Human Fund" go pleasure themselves while thinking about proud they are that they TiVo Whale Wars and use address labels from the Sierra Club.

Done? Then let's continue.

My general non-activist nature aside, the tension between the Buddhist approach of letting go, versus getting pissed off and trying to change things, bothers me. And the Buddhist defense of it seems like a bit of a cop-out as well.

The defense is something like "Buddhism advocates compassion for one's fellow beings, and can inspire people to help others, but from a basis of non-anger, non-aversion, non-blabbity-blahblahblah." In other words, you can better help people if you first remove the Anger Blinders from your eyes.

To which I say,

Seriously, that's not the way human brains work, and it's certainly not how one inspires other human brains to action. Let's face it, most people aren't all enlightened and zen.

They're suspicious,

angry,

sad,

and constipated. 

As Barbara points out in one of her essays about getting breast cancer,

What sustained me through the "treatments" is a purifying rage, a resolve, framed in the sleepless nights of chemotherapy, to see the last polluter, along with, say, the last smug health insurance operative, strangled with the last pink ribbon. Cancer or no cancer, I will not live that long of course. But I know this much right now for sure: I will not go into that last good night with a teddy bear tucked under my arm.

I think that for every Dalai Lama, there are a hundred Barbaras; my gut tells me that the Barbaras are affecting more lives, if you control for the fact that they don't have the benefit of being chosen by a bunch of monks  as the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. (He did pick the right toys, though. I guess that's big. I'm imagining a set of Buddhist action figures.) 

So, I think in the search for justice, a little righteous anger is good, even if it leads to suffering. There is more to life than happiness, after all.

But really, this is academic. For every instance that an enlightened and peaceful acceptance of suffering leads to an uncorrected injustice, there are literally a thousand, perhaps ten thousand instances in which the suffering alleviated far outweighs the satisfaction of getting even. So: good job, Mike. My hat is off to you. Not sure I could have done it.

Enough mental masturbation on the subject for now. It's time to get back to more pressing concerns.

Release date: September 21st. I'd better work through this fucking "attachment" stuff in a hurry.