In 1973, I had a difficult experience with two teachers. I was outraged at accusations they made against me. I felt angry. I felt hatred. I was nauseated for a week. Note that these are my memories from a long time ago, so the exact details are fuzzy. But I realized that the hatred was making me sick. I renounced hatred then and there. I can still dislike, take actions against things I don’t like. But hatred is not beneficial in any way that I have ever been able to determine. Not that I have gone out of my way to try to find benefits of hatred. Although one book on critical thinking I read some years ago suggested that if you have to hate, hating ignorance and hatreds, for example, could be an intermediate step to moving beyond hate.
It is very depressing these days to be part of the American public. Having lived overseas in the 1970’s and 1980’s for a total of a little more than two years, I found out what people from other countries thought about American leaders. We interfered in many countries beyond the ones that were in the news due to the Vietnam war, and we took other actions to protect our comforts, even when they went against our stated values of democracy and freedom.
Recently, every day, the events happening in our country seem worse and worse. It’s hard to imagine how much worse it can get. The arrest of the extensively vetted green card holder, former UK Government employee, who just finished his masters degree at Columbia University, by all fact based accounts, someone who worked for peace and justice, is a much bigger problem than any of the news sources are saying. This goes far beyond free speech issues.
My neighbor, during the presidential campaign, insisted that “nobody is taking anybody away.” Well, he hadn’t read about Project 2025.
Read for yourself at the link below. My response: The members of any legitimate universal religion who promote sectarianism are betraying the higher teachings of their culture. The ADL used to promote tolerance, knowing that hatred is viral, and the targets never remain isolated. Now, they seem to have lost that most basic foundation of working for justice for all. The rise of far right Jewish groups goes to demonstrate what my wise friend Reverend Dan told me years ago. We do, in general, as we were done to, not as we would like to have done to ourselves. The competition among religious groups to out reproduce each other is a factor underlying the rise of the right, and the take-over by the intolerant, of national governments around the world. All of this getting us to focus on hating each other, instead of getting us to focus on what the powerful are doing to end humanity as a flowering of unique individuals, each of us doing our own thing to enrich the experience that humanity as a whole “uploads” to The Universal Consciousness, is a problem. Since the previous sentence is long winded, who knows who will try to understand it? Bottom line: Mahmoud Khalil is not a terrorist. His whole life speaks to his efforts at building a just peace. Why isn’t the UK speaking up louder about this?
We are now doing even worse things than what we’ve been doing to the Afghans who helped us during out twenty year military effort in their homeland.
As a person who tends toward gloomy outlooks, I have found, over the years, that taking a longterm view of the world helps me to stay centered and balanced. There was actually research done that demonstrated that while many people do better by staying in the NOW, depressed blood chemistry people often do better focusing on the past, present and future. That is how, after years of studying wisdom traditions from around the world, including science fiction, the Mythology of the Future, I am less gloomy than I was, despite the global turmoil being created by multiple organizations claiming to represent me, or “people like me”. Hint: I am unique and there is nobody else like me. Even my mother used to say that God broke the mold.