Wisdom Quarterly: American Buddhist Journal: News of the Day; Statement of Purpose

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

News of the Day; Statement of Purpose

Ashley Wells, Dhr. Seven, CC Liu, Pat Macpherson, Bhante, Wisdom Quarterly (EDITORIAL)

Left vs. Right: peace activist offers flowers to establishment army (wallpapervortex.com).

Greenpeace continues to turn up the heat on its “Save The Arctic” campaign, this time with a melancholy video featuring the music of Radiohead (“Everything In Its Right Place”), a voiceover from Jude Law, and one very sad polar bear, lost on the streets of London. “As the Arctic sea ice melts, polar bears are being forced to go far beyond their normal habitat to find food and look after their young. This film is a powerful expression of how our fates are intertwined, because climate change is affecting all of us no matter where we live....” More

Statement of Purpose

2014 Wisdom Quarterly editors

My friends are a bunch of Bohemian left-leaning, vegetarian-ish, anti-establishment types, who think government “conspiracies” -- activities planned in advance rather than just events that happen for no particular reason -- are something to point out.

Try this at home, but make sure you film it so we can see the carnage.

The fringe-right has never been closer to agreeing: everyone sees that our government conceals the truth, deceives us, and tricks the public as if it were in their job description. The left is called names because we are not running a PR campaign. Everyone is looking for the truth. We hope.

The left pushes against the sexism and racism and socioeconomic inequality of our Western history; the right seems to want to do all it can to conserve or it get back to an imaginary “golden age” of 1850's/1950's sexist, racist, class-bound “prosperity,” and that means being pro-war. We oppose war and a war mentality (like waging “war” on drugs, the poor, disease, education).

Brave, beautiful Kajol Kahn, 8, loves deadly snakes (nagas).

The Buddha (B. Tan/flickr.com)

The “war on poverty” was a terrible name and notion for a wonderful program. The right hates it. We need a social safety net, which is the only thing that kept us from entering a new Great Depression. This Great Recession is due to who? Banking conspiracies -- planned events to impoverish the many to benefit the few. Thank you, The Fed, the private banking consortium that runs monetary policy. What will the government be doing about it? Everything it can to keep those private bankers going, apparently in the hopes of getting corporate jobs after their government careers.

Meet you on the golf course? - Git 'er done!

Even the right can't want that, but those bankers are part of the right, conservatives, class-warfare opponents of everyone else (the 99%). The moderate right wing -- namely, the Obama administration -- swings hard to the right. Although labelled “left” or “socialist,” things in Washington D.C. are actually, if we look at the facts and numbers, just a continuation of previous Bush administrations. Who is destroying the environment, making and expanding wars, aching to drill in Alaska, to frack everywhere, to drain public resources and destroy the last remnants of Native American lands? Bush-Obama.

Learning from the past. But wrong lesson.

Obama is not Bush. He might as well be. Under the surface, he just continues his policies. Whoever controlled the former controls the latter. The movers and shakers behind the scenes -- groups we call the “military-industrial complex” -- are the same. Isn't Obama worse for appearing so much nicer, speaking so much better, and uttering much nicer sounding lies? Bush and Cheney were odious. Even the right is ashamed of them now. Obama and Biden have been continuing the same policies, in some cases making more draconian choices, but we are all just glad it's not Bush.

Wolves can be a human's best friends with understanding.

Revolucion hasta la victoria siempre!

“Evil” is a terrible word, almost always misleading and pointless to accuse anyone of. Yet if it applies to Bush and Cheney, one has to conclude that it applies to Obama for continuing on the same disastrous course.

The right wastes no time accusing Obama of every problem we face, when they were so quiet about Bush doing the same things. That leaves the left sitting on its hands. We can't criticize a guy who speaks so nicely, who says all the right things (even if they aren't true), and we sure can't side with right wing wackos.

But if someone is correct, even if they are on the right, we have to give them credit. Maybe they are motivated by racism or party politics or fantasies of American exceptionalism, and wild dreams of being the “true” patriots, sovereign citizens, and blah blah blah. And maybe racist dictator Hitler created the Volkswagen (folk's wagon). We can't say a line of cars is wrong because a creator is wrong.

Living in harmony with local environment

Like Smiley and West, we have to call out Obama. Like Ed Snowden, Jeremy Scahill, J. Assange, Michelle Alexander, G. Greenwald, Amy Goodman, Chelsea Manning, and the next maverick -- all wonderful activists for freedom and justice -- we have to call out the actual guilty parties and policies wherever they come from, whatever sheep's clothing they put on. We have to save the world, or at least some part of it!

Save Afghanistan; US out!

The Buddha and Buddhism teach two things above all other things, wisdom and compassion. So many right wing people -- Tea Partiers, Republicans, Libertarians, Reactionaries, and Xenophobes -- talk about the Christ and Christianity. If everyone were true to his/her espoused ideal, wouldn't we all get along milk and water? Oh, Green Partiers, Democrats, Occupiers, Radicals, and Philanthropists, we have to rise above because the right is unlikely to extend a hand first.

If Chito could get along with a reptilian, we can all learn something.

News of the Day

US "War on Poverty" (KPFA, Jan. 8, 2014
This is the 50th anniversary of LBJ's "War on Poverty" address with Prof. Annelise Orleck, Dept. of History, Dartmouth College and Sharon Parrott, from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

The Pentagram, our U.S. Dept. of War

US Imperial War(s): The Pentagon "is very reluctant to label anything a ‘base’ because of the negative political connotations associated with it," said Alexander Cooley, a political scientist at Barnard College and Columbia University who studies overseas bases. "Some of these facilities, such as the Manas Transit Center in Kyrgyzstan, may not be officially counted as ‘bases,’ but it is the most important U.S. facility in central Asia..." More