Tag: precepts

Safety pin note

Been so much dismal storm around safety pins, their moral meaning and weight, that wearing one, which was meant to mean

I’m with you and will help you out if you need me to if I can—

is at risk of meaning instead

I have taken a position in the debate over safety pins!

Goddamn. If anyone decides to kill off all the liberals, it won’t take a pogrom, it’ll only take putting us all in a room, and an invitation: “Talk to each other.”

That said. I’m wearing one and it’s sharpening my attention. Same as the precepts I took should (that’s another post). And I’m bothered by a small encounter and want to think and feel it through here.

I’m at Elizabeth Station, nice beer store / watering hole. Got an IPA I’m ready to buy, standing in line, and right beside me is a tasting going on – beers from my favourite brewery in the world. Unibroue, out of rural Quebec, they do the awesomest Belgians. (And you know, I’m tired to the bone of being American, suddenly keen to get my Canadian on. Quebecois, moi – vraiment? )

And K so, I’m not the best at breaking into ongoing conversations – I’m pretty damn bloody socially awkward, it’s been given me to know, on this point and others. That known, truth be told, I’m not at this point too aware of the guy presently tasting. He’s sipping from his taster glass, he’s not presently talking to dress shirt Unibroue dude. I step up

—Oh, are you doing a tasting?

And the spiel begins. Aged in cognac barrels, whatever. Pretty quick I can feel that the guy to my right, previous taster, is a bit put out. I’m not sure what it is exactly – strained smile? awkward stance? – but you’d sense it, too. Here’s where I take a few more visible facts of him in. Latino, thin well-trimmed beard, short, stocky, muscular. A smile that looks like it’s used to being friendly but just went to being thin and pained.

Okay. I’m in the middle of a micro-aggression I done. Even sweeter? I’m wearing the GD safety pin.

I want out. And am quadruply trapped: In the checkout line. At the tasting table. Wearing the GD the safety pin. Took the effing Buddhist precepts.

Quadruply stuck in a triangle of mutual misapprehension. I come up with

—Wasn’t Unibroue bought by Heineken or something?

—Sleeman’s. And they were bought by Sapporo. And they let Unibroue pretty much do their own thing. The Japanese can’t even pronounce the names of our beers.

That, from me, got a head tilt. A small thing, but the safety pin sent it to me, and I meant it as apology to the friend I didn’t make beside me, and I could see it got the message across the other spar of the triangle. The invitation to collaborate in an us-and-them, I’d turned down. Unibroue dude stumbled over his words a bit for a minute or two, till I bid him adieu.

Don’t wish him ill. He wanted to make connection in the how he knew to. Should be said, he sorely mangled the names of the beers he was pouring, Fin du monde, Trois pistoles.

Wanted, as I left, to find the friend I didn’t make, make eye contact, anything, but couldn’t. Liberal friends, conservative friends if I have any, we live in dukkha. Just gotta suck it up.

Did I break into an ongoing conversation cluelessly? I can do that. And that does happen all the time, esp. where beer is drunk. More to the point, did I feel licensed to because the man in the thin well kept beard wasn’t white?

I’m pretty self-aware, when I have time to reflect and introspect, and when I look in, I don’t find any sign of that. That a blind spot? Can’t, by definition, know.

If I’m honest about all the grubby factors that go on in male dominance calculi, our height difference was more likely a factor. But even that – not so much. He seems to me in memory grounded, muscular, sound in his frame, also open, friendly. The gorilla dog in me felt not threatening not threatened.

I can’t find a dominance intention in me. But maybe some cluelessness as to his sitch. Really the question here is, did he feel shoved aside, because I was white, and Unibroue dude was white, and he was not?

And here we are, that awful term and awfuller thing, white privilege. I don’t want it, don’t feel I have it, feel continually inadequate, but appear to be given it. At least that’s what I take from the body language and pained smile of the friend I didn’t make – something was not right for him and I was involved in it.

Tried, after I’d bought my beer, to catch his eye, make a connection – something to atone for what felt wrong and unfinished to me – and could not.

Atonement, that’s another post.

Last thought, a thread left stray above. One of the things we’re in here, with the election of Sad Trump, is a change in the chess game of the gestalt of masculinity. (Chess comes to me as trope because you can look to be losing badly – as I’ve felt we, who want to be voices of enlightenment and kindness, are – only to turn it round, wow, whew.)

I hope we’re seeing an old sense of manhood in its vital death throes. Not, please no, a victorious fascistic resurgence. (Fascist surges have never been victorious, long run; there’s comfort there.) But masculinity will not itself be extinguished. It needs to metamorphose. So I’m going to here if I need to be in my small way (10,000 hits in 2+ years is hardly more than a smudge) open, even at risk of being heterodox, about what that metamorphosis might ask. Of men, of all. Love to you friends.

He is us

President Obama, may blessings rain down on him, slipped this one in quiet.

Anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end.

Quiet like a stiletto.

Don’t remember if it was before or after he got me crying by describing a schoolgirl’s drawing of a purple and green owl hanging in his office. She was shot at Newtown. He made his point there pretty good, too.

But the other point. Trump’s a threat of the same sort as Hitler, Stalin, ISIS – don’t be fooled by my rosy vision of American multiplicity, which I do believe, and it is under threat. But if I shout threat! too straitly, I’m doing what he does.

Luckily, he commands not only nuclear codes, but subtext, i.e. complexity.

He’s a great man. If he has been a good, not a great, president, it may be conditions to blame, not him. So it seems to unhistorical me. He stepped into crises not quite acute enough to make his enemies allies, but enough to consume most or all of his care. And his election excited racial and cultural enmities that are to be worked through on a scale not to be measured in election cycles.

Worked through at all? Sometimes I despair of it. The hate on parade at the RNC had me in tears. It had me thinking, there’s too much hate here. I believe a multiracial multipolar acentric amiable comity is possible; I like to call it Canada. But I sometimes despair of whether it’s possible here.

Tonight though, moved by him – even with all the Hollywoodery I am moved by him – I do believe it.

In the days after the RNC, which I could not help but watch at least bits of, I felt helpless. I said to me, just check your inner Trump, that you can do. The easy thing’s to demonize, make him other, nothing-to-do-with-me, but that itself’s a Trump move, and then you’ve already lost.

So I made it a practice, and it wasn’t hard to, after all that hate I wanted to be peaceable. Whatever in me reminded me of Trump, I tried to say “be at peace” to. Little e.g., I was in a bad mood that morning, because my body hurt, and got irritated that someone in the grocery store cut me off with her cart. Could have darted a mean glance. Instead, checked inside, and found I’d rather let it go, and come to rest.

But it’s important to me to say, there’s plenty in me that reminds me of him. Selfishness. Grandiosity. Impatience. Insatiable need for praise. I keep them in check, he doesn’t, that’s an important difference, of course. But still.

The Republicans have become the party of projection and rejection. And now they’ve nominated someone so extreme, so ludicrous, in both those respects, it’s easy for us to reject him and project upon him in our turn. 

If we don’t acknowledge there’s some of us in him, some of him in us – we doom ourselves to being governed by him, at least inly.

Or am I wrong? Is that only me? I don’t know. I feel like I’m barely escaping a grave error, while living in a nation barely escaping, maybe, a grave error.

The image up top is a bumper sticker on a pickup truck seen in the Home Depot parking lot the morning after Trump’s speech at the RNC.

You can read it, right? Take a second to consider how you can read it – how you can so easily get from four abstract shapes to a word.

It’s because you do complexity.

Spider-chastening

I want to affirm for reasons I maybe only partly understand something President Obama said today to graduating students at Rutgers.

Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science – these are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy… In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.

Affirm it because I may want soon here to try to understand the draw of Drumpf. He poses a grave danger and the danger’s got to be understood. And I think for me, understanding it, how he draws so many in, means going to what’s irrational and tribal and hungry for authority in me. What feels worn down by liberal piety and wants to be told its first thought’s okay after all.

I’m a poet and believe in a beauty outside the precincts of the rational. That’s a bound on Obama’s statement, one I think he’d assent to. Irrational, arational, supra-rational.

I’m also a Buddhist, and that’s meant finding the whole range of human goodness and depravity in my own breast. I don’t get to say the bad shit’s out there. To understand Drumpf I need to look at some ugly right in here.

I want us to be governed by compassionate reasonable people. We deserve to be. After all we’ve been through, some of us more than, we all deserve to be.

Don’t take any thoughtplay to come to mean otherwise.

Just want to bring light into dark corners. Mine own. Spider-chasing.

Syrians to Canada (II)

Some friends on Salt Spring Island are raising money so they can invite two, maybe three Syrian families to come live there with them there. Maybe they will make new lives, new starts, there. Maybe they will go from faces in the news to friends you run into in the grocery store. How nice is that?

It strikes me as the most, a sliver of the only, important thing.

If you want to send them a few bucks you can here.

It’s hard to feel loss even when it’s right in your face. My dad, he’s in decline, I don’t want to see it. Three hours after we’d had lunch together he was asking if I’d had lunch with them. He’s going. Next time I see him he’ll be a little more gone. Don’t want to see or feel any of it. And yet I don’t want not to more.

And when it’s not your family, and not your people, and not your problem …

And yet it is, and it is, and it is – and you know it, yo?