We Have Met the Enemy - and the Friend

It was Pogo, a cartoon character created by Walt Kelly, who said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." This particular slogan now appears a lot in the environmental movement. It isn't somebody else who's polluting the rivers - it's us. The cause of confusion and bewilderment and pollution isn't really someone else's problem: it's something we can come to know in ourselves. But in order to do that we have to understand that we have met the friend and he is me. The more we make friends with ourselves, the more we can see that our ways of shutting down and closing off are rooted in the mistaken thinking that the way to get happy is to blame somebody else.

It's a little uncertain who is "us" and who is "them." Bernard Glassman Roshi, who does a lot of work with the homeless in New York, said that he doesn't work with the homeless because he's such a great guy but because going into the areas of society that he has rejected is the only way to make friends with the parts of himself that he has rejected. It's all interrelated. We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves. That's a very important point.

- Pema Chödrön, Start Where You Are