Tags
21st century, Donald Trump, early writings, George W. Bush, Martha Nussbaum, Prabhupada, Śāntideva, Treya Killam Wilber, United States
I will be taking a break from blogging as I travel in the next couple weeks. In the meantime I would like to leave you with this.
The results of the 2016 American election came as a surprise, and for many of us it was a horrifying shock. (One survey indicates “shocked” was the most common word Democratic supporters used to describe their reaction.) For me, though, this was not an unfamiliar shock. For the 2004 election had shocked me in a very similar way. In 2000 I had comforted myself with the idea that Bush didn’t legitimately win, and I was confident the people of the United States would reject him after horrors like Abu Ghraib. I was wrong. They did not. He even won the popular vote. Those results shook me to the core, filling my every moment with rage and frustration.
I had to learn ways of dealing with a world that so plainly rejected my values. A year or so after the fact, Goenka’s karmic redirection helped me a lot. But in the immediate aftermath of 2004, what helped was writing in my personal journals, thinking through ways to come to terms with the terrible situation. Just as reading can be a spiritual practice, so can writing.
What follows is the journal entry that, I think, helped me most to deal with the situation at the time. Continue reading