Thursday, November 28, 2013

War & Peace













How do you view competition in business, politics, and our personal lives?

… We have to consider our idea of happiness. Even if you are successful in making more money as you do, but you still suffer. Maybe your competition doesn’t make as much money as you do, but they are happier. So you choose to be happy or have or have the other kind of success?
Thich Nhat Hanh;
You Have the Buddha in You,
Interview with Andrea Miller:
Shambala Sun Magazine: Jan 2014
&

I have Buddhist sentiments but my heart doesn’t resonate with every interpretation of the Buddha’s teachings. I’m thinking that my mind will change with the practice of mindfulness, but there are things going on in the world that are not conducive to reason. Thich Nhat Hanh was one of the monks in Vietnam who protested that war using peaceful means: I agree with that. However, I’m not convinced that peaceful protest works universally in the here and now. The Mullahs that would condemn a woman to being stoned are difficult to convince peacefully.
There are those who are born warriors. War is a delicate tool to use against the kind of ignorance that would fly an airliner filled with innocent passengers into a tall building occupied with equally innocent workers. That kind of political fanaticism needs to be dealt with forcefully, with the immediacy of the here and now, and that is what warriors were born to do.
War is a horrible thing, it should not be left to amateurs or shouldn’t always be the first response. There are innocents involved and force is best used surgically; taking out those who wouldn’t be responsive to reason. But military force alone solves nothing without being accompanied with compassion and diplomacy for the sake of those defeated. Victory parades should resemble funeral marches. Reconstruction ought to follow the destruction of war with as much commitment in effort and money to that as the nation’s commitment to war.
Peaceful protest raises our consciousness and therefore serves a purpose for the future’s sake. Buddhist monks burned themselves in public during the Vietnam War to no apparent and immediate effect. The lives of those monks seemed wasted as the War ground on. And the results of victory by the Viet Cong were as disastrous as the American intervention to civilians and soldiers alike. Because the War had no real strategy to win, there was confusion and doubt on the home front. Lives were wasted irresponsibly to no end in sight because Americans never took war as seriously as the Viet Cong did. Peaceful protest played a role but would not have had any real impact had the war been conducted as war and not as a political opportunity for charletins.
We live in a hazardous world where we can, with a flick of a switch annihilate all traces of civilization. Total war is inconceivable to most but, to the Mullahs who strive against the West, it is a means to an end and that end is The End. I am perplexed because no apparent solution reveals itself to me. These are times the require balance and focus relying on the guidance of a Power greater than myself before I jump on any bandwagon.

geo 5,543

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Peace in Our Time

Steeped in military history and strategy, he changed his interest to psychology and listened closely to the loomings of war… the ranting of Germany’s Furher broadcast over the BBC. He had a good sense of where the world was headed in the very near future when he heard Neville Chamberlain’s infamous speech, with Hitler behind him, after the Munich Conference:

“My good friends, this is the second time there has come back from Germany to Downing Street ‘peace with honor’. I believe it is peace in our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Now I recommend you go home, and sleep quietly in your beds.”

After he heard that speech, he wasn’t about to go quietly to sleep anywhere but where the action was. 

from Adriane;
a work in progress...
11/26/2013

Saturday, November 2, 2013

A Doomsday Busride

I rode home on a bus full of commerce.
The ride was a good one
I noted that all the Questions
were sitting in the back
of the bus and that It
was an apartheid of ideas riding

in the back of the bus.
I realized, after missing my stop,
I missed my stop, and that this bus
wasn’t going to stop
… anywhere.
I shouted out to the Questions
at the back of the bus.
I desperately tried to warn them;
“Hey, Questions, the Questions belong…
you belong…
in the front of the bus and
that as long as the bus was
segregated as such it wasn’t
going to stop.”

I yelled till my throat was sore
and more Questions soared to the back of the bus
like bats flitting from a cave of angst
from behind my eyes and between my ears.
towards the back of the bus,
“Don’t you know a bus stops
that is what buses do…
buses stop at bus stops…
bus stops are lined up in such a way
that Questions get off
the bus first and Answers
follow.
It doesn’t work the other way
around… if Answers
get off at the stops first then
the bus goes nowhere
and that it isn’t a bus after all.
This bus is a roller-coaster
ride that you can’t get-off
of until the ride comes
to the end
of the line
and that you can’t get-off
it before it takes-off
on another rondo in the rodeo
of circular thinking… round and round of
Answers… Answers… answers
to Questions never asked.”

Oh no, how did I get on this bus
that isn’t a bus at all?


It is a dooms-day machine.