I Just Wish NFL Players Could Find A Way To Protest Without Starting A National Dialogue

OMG, this is brilliant! The Onion absolutely nailed it.― Molly

Like so many Americans, I was shocked and disgusted when I first saw San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sitting down for the playing of our national anthem as a protest against social injustice. In the weeks since, it seems like every time I turn on my TV to watch football, there are more and more NFL players sitting, kneeling, or raising their fists during “The Star-Spangled Banner.” And while I certainly respect the right of these players to protest, I just wish they could find a different way to do so that doesn’t start any kind of national dialogue.

Before I go any further, I want to make one thing clear: I completely understand that as African Americans, these players are frustrated with what they perceive as targeted police brutality against minorities. I realize that they are directly affected by racially motivated discrimination, unfair treatment, and institutional oppression. Believe me, I get it. But the bottom line is that there are other forms of demonstration that can draw attention to these issues without sparking a substantive and meaningful discourse across the country. Would that really be so hard?

Part of what makes America so great is that our citizens have the freedom of speech. I’m all for these players—or anyone else, for that matter—expressing their opinions, but once they start shifting the nation’s focus to serious and pressing matters facing millions of people, that’s where I draw the line. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe in any so-called “protest” if it involves raising awareness of systemic problems within our society.

Nobody wants that. As a proud American, I know I don’t.

No, America is not perfect, and yes, there are challenges facing us as a nation that need to be addressed. But a big public spectacle that inspires collective self-reflection and a thoughtful examination of the country’s morals is not the solution. Nor, I might add, is using fame and notoriety to start a conversation that tries to widen the perspectives of people from all different walks of life.

Instead of going down on one knee or raising a fist during the anthem, can’t these players stand up for what they believe in without creating a platform for the free exchange of ideas and differing points of view? I mean, isn’t that—and not an environment of honesty and empathy—what we should be striving for?

Though I admire their intentions, I hope that going forward, these men choose a different forum for their actions, ideally one that is totally out of the public eye and garners no national media coverage whatsoever. A sporting event is, frankly, not the time or place for anyone—least of all a bunch of millionaire professional athletes—to be making political statements, especially if those statements cause people to engage in introspection or mindful discussion.

So to all the players around the NFL who have joined one another in protest, I would just say this: Do what you feel is right. But please try to remember that when you make your point in front of that red, white, and blue flag, you’re also forcing me—as well as so many of your fellow Americans—to think, consider the feelings of others, and act like a human being.

Maybe Colin Kaepernick should think about that before deciding to kneel at the 49ers’ next game.

Please go here for the original article: http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/i-just-wish-nfl-players-could-find-a-way-to-protes-53971

Pema Chödrön: Awakening a Tenderness For Life

  There is great wisdom here. ― Molly

Life Is a Good Teacher and a Good Friend 

The only reason we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else's eyes.

What we call obstacles are really the way the world and our entire experience teach us where we’re stuck.

What you do for yourself, any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself, will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.

People find it quite easy to have beliefs and to hold on to them and to let their whole world be a product of their belief system. They also find it quite easy to attack those who disagree. The harder, more courageous thing, which the hero and the heroine, the warrior, and the mystic do, is continually to look one’s beliefs straight in the face, honestly and clearly, and then step beyond them. That requires a lot of heart and kindness. It requires being able to touch and know completely, to the core, your own experience, without harshness, without making any judgment.

Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.

If you can live with the sadness of human life (what Rinpoche often called the tender heart or the genuine heart of sadness), if you can be willing to feel fully and acknowledge continually your own sadness and the sadness of life, but at the same time not be drowned in it, because you also remember the vision and power of the Great Eastern Sun, you experience balance and completeness, joining heaven and earth, joining vision and practicality.

An emotion like anger that's an automatic response lasts just ninety seconds from the moment it's triggered until it runs its course. One and a half minutes, that's all. When it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it's because we've chosen to rekindle it.

You want it your own way. You’d just like to have a little peace; you’d like to have a little happiness, you know, just “gimme a break!” But the more you think that way, the more you try to get life to come out so that it will always suit you, the more your fear of other people and what’s outside your room grows.

We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That's the essence of samsara - the cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places. 

Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum. We don't interrupt our patterns even slightly. With practice, however, we learn to stay with a broken heart, with a nameless fear, with the desire for revenge. Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears.

Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth. 

Maybe the most important teaching is to lighten up and relax. It’s such a huge help in working with our crazy mixed-up minds to remember that what we’re doing is unlocking a softness that is in us and letting it spread. We’re letting it blur the sharp corners of self-criticism and complaint.

One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are.

Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance. 

When we feel dread, when we feel discomfort of any kind, it can connect us at the heart with all the other people feeling dread and discomfort. We can pause and touch into dread. We can touch bitterness of rejection and the rawness of being slighted. Whether we are at home or in a public spot or caught in a traffic jam or walking into a movie, we can stop and look at the other people there and realize that in pain and in joy they are just like me. Just like me they don’t want to feel physical pain or insecurity or rejection. Just like me they want to feel respected and physically comfortable. 

When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast and limitless.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.  

Transformation occurs only when we remember, breath by breath, year after year, to move toward our emotional distress without condemning or justifying our experience.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. 

We can use our personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings. 

The way to dissolve our resistance to life is to meet it face-to-face.

If you stay in bed all day with the covers over your head, if you overeat for the millionth time in your life, if you get drunk, if you get stoned, if it’s just this habitual thing that you think is going to make you feel better, you know that’s going to depress you and make you more discouraged. 

The essence of this practice is that when we encounter pain in our life we breathe into our heart with the recognition that others also feel this. It’s a way of acknowledging when we are closing down and of training to open up. When we encounter any pleasure or tenderness in our life, we cherish that and rejoice.

We awaken this bodhichitta, this tenderness for life, when we can no longer shield ourselves from the vulnerability of our condition, from the basic fragility of existence. In the words of the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, “You take it all in. You let the pain of the world touch your heart and you turn it into compassion.” It is said that in difficult times, it is only bodhichitta that heals. 

Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs. To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.

It helps to remember that our spiritual practice is not about accomplishing anything—not about winning or losing—but about ceasing to struggle and relaxing as it is. 

We can learn to rejoice in even the smallest blessings our life holds. It is easy to miss our own good fortune; often happiness comes in ways we don’t even notice.

Finally, never give up on yourself. Then you will never give up on others. 

 ― Pema Chödrön

Excerpts from: When Things Fall Apart,

The Pocket Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You,

Taking the Leap, Comfortable With Uncertainty,

and The Wisdom of No Escape 

 

Pema Chödrön: A Wholehearted Journey of Gentle Honesty

For me, this is indeed a lifelong journey, this humbling and blessed journey of waking up from the illusions I mistook for reality and that we all get swept up in as part of being human. And this is also, I believe, the Great Awakening that is growing on Earth today.― Molly

The ground of not causing harm is mindfulness, a sense of clear seeing with respect and compassion for what it is we see. This is what basic practice shows us. But mindfulness doesn’t stop with formal meditation. It helps us relate with all the details of our lives. It helps us see and hear and smell, without closing our eyes or our ears or our noses. It’s a lifetime’s journey to relate honestly to the immediacy of our experience and to respect ourselves enough not to judge it. As we become more wholehearted in this journey of gentle honesty, it comes as quite a shock to realize how much we’ve blinded ourselves to some of the ways in which we cause harm. Our style is so ingrained that we can’t hear when people try to tell us, either kindly or rudely, that maybe we’re causing some harm by the way we are or the way we relate with others. We’ve become so used to the way we do things that somehow we think that others are used to it too. It’s painful to face how we harm others, and it takes a while.

 ― Pema Chödrön,  

From When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice 

for Difficult Times

 

Albert Einstein: Our Task Must Be To Free Ourselves

A human being is a part of the whole called by us “the universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. 

— Albert Einstein 

Chalmers Johnson: Blowback Is Simply Another Way of Saying That a Nation Reaps What It Sows

Ron and I have been watching the 10 part documentary on Vietnam. Often I am left weeping at the end of each series. And I am struck again and again by what I already know, and yet what remains shocking, and that is how the horrific tragedies of history repeat themselves today and throughout history. I hear the same pervasive propaganda, see the same dehumanization and violence and atrocities, and experience the same dark pull of a toxic nationalism and the Big Money backing of the American Military Industrial Complex that glorifies sending our children off to kill other children in far away lands. What will the documentary look like in 50 years about these times? Can we humans please learn the lessons of war and truly engage in waging peace instead? I have two of Chalmers Johnson's books and have learned so much about the true history and present day policies of our nation from Mr. Johnson and from other amazing resources that embody a courageous and profound commitment to truth. We all need to learn these facts. Only then will we refuse the powers that seek to divide and polarize us and choose a different path individually and collectively. Peace is possible. May we all choose to be this peace our world hungers for. - Molly

As a form of government, imperialism does not seek or require the consent of the governed. It is a pure form of tyranny. The American attempt to combine domestic democracy with such tyrannical control over foreigners is hopelessly contradictory and hypocritical. A country can be democratic or it can be imperialistic, but it cannot be both.

The term blowback, which officials of the Central Intelligent Agency first invented for their own internal use, . . . refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign act of terrorists or drug lords or rogue states or illegal arms merchants often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.

Imperial politics represents the conquest of domestic politics and the latter's conversion into a crucial element of inverted totalitarianism. It makes no sense to ask how the democratic citizen could 'participate' substantively in imperial politics; hence it is not surprising that the subject of empire is taboo in electoral debates. No major politician or party has so much as publicly remarked on the existence of an American empire.

Although most Americans may be largely ignorant of what was, and still is, being done in their names, all are likely to pay a steep price - individually and collectively - for their nation's continued efforts to dominate the global scene.

A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.

Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens.

Blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows.

- Chalmers Johnson

Chalmers Johnson (August 6, 1931 – November 20, 2010) was an American author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He served in the Korean War, was a consultant for the CIA from 1967 to 1973, and chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley from 1967 to 1972. He was also president and co-founder with Steven Clemons of the Japan Policy Research Institute (now based at the University of San Francisco), an organization promoting public education about Japan and Asia. He wrote numerous books including, most recently, three examinations of the consequences of American Empire: Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.

Please go here for more information:
http://americanempireproject.com/authors/chalmers-johnson/
https://www.thenation.com/authors/chalmers-johnson/