Letter to the Editor

The feelings of puzzlement and disgust I felt as a result of reading Mr. Arens’ letter to the August 11 edition of the Glen Arbor Sun, are so similar to the feelings I have towards much that’s current in American “culture”, I have decided to answer it that I might personally find a way to more peacefully live in my own country. This is important and necessary spiritual work all of us might well undertake, for every authentic religious tradition posits the ascendancy of love and compassion over anger, and as a nation torn in two, each half angry at the other, we must find a path to more affection and concern for each other. This is also important for our inner health, as we all wish to be more peaceful and loving, and know from personal experience that inner states of anger and negativity are painful and always lead to agitation and unhappiness. In our civilization we may finally have come to an age in which there is an identity between finding this spiritual path and surviving as a species. What will happen to us if our nuclear and biological weapons, monolithic telecommunications systems which shape our thoughts and perceptions, and our attachment to a level of wealth unsupportable by the finite resources of our planetary home, are in the service of beings who are unable to alter their mental domination by attachment to wealth, and anger toward others?

In his letter, perhaps Mr. Arens was attempting to express the sentiment that if one felt something precious was lost when the Woodland Indians were slaughtered by invading Europeans, that it is necessary, for the sake of moral balance and emotional honesty, to equally lament the dispossession of wealthy landowners in Cuba when Fidel Castro put a long overdue end to Batista’s ruthless military regime in 1959. Unlikely this was his rational intention, for a brief review of twentieth century Cuban history would make any such assertion impossible to defend.
Batista rose to power in a military coup, which ended a liberal and broadly representative democratic government in 1933, replacing it with a brutal military dictatorship, lasting with brief interruptions for more than two decades before if fell to Castro’s populist revolution. During his first decade in power, Batista developed a significant long-term association with the American Mafia, whose influence helped corrupt the fabric of Cuba’s moral and economic life. Much of Batista’s economic base derived from the profits of Mafia operations in Cuba, whose power and violence in the US had its counterpart in Cuba, where Batista, essentially a mobster himself, had gunned down or simply disappeared thousands who spoke or acted against the brutality of his regime. This pattern of violence broadened and escalated over the last decade of his rule so that by the time he was forced into exile, it was directed against 80 percent of the Cuban people and cut across nearly all of its social classes. (J.A. Sierra, Fulgencio Batista: a Biography of Cuba’s US-friendly Dictator)
When the Castro government took control of Cuban affairs, economic policies turned sharply in favor of the poor, and some who had profited by the economic and political climate of Batista’s rule, whether they had directly participated in its creation or not, were dispossessed and later exiled. The poverty of the campesinos was particularly desperate, because their options had been institutionally curtailed in order to ensure the presence of their cheap labor on the plantations. Thus landowners were hard hit in the post Batista era, and Mr. Arens’ grandfather was apparently one so affected. While lingering resentment is understandable, reflection on the realities of the terrified and impoverished majority of Cubans under Batista, should nurture a more balanced understanding of the situation. Thus from the standpoint of historical facts it is impossible to equate the slaughter of the American Indian who was minding his own business in his own country, with the interruption of the wealth of a landowner in Cuba as a result of a revolution, which took place for reasons most of us can understand. Even the CIA, which had sided with Batista throughout much of this escalating repression, towards the end sympathized with Castro’s revolution. (Lyman B. Kirkpatrick Jr., The Real CIA, chapter 7, 1968).
Since whatever underlies Mr. Arens’ position cannot therefore lie in the realm of reason, we must search for its origin in the arena of emotions, which would include feelings of attachment, anger, and related emotions. Attachment would include the elements of ‘my land’, ‘my wealth’, ‘my family’, while the possibility of being deprived of things that are ‘mine’, gives rise to the related emotions of resentment, anger and hatred towards those who would harm or take away ‘my things’. It is critical to appreciate that the disturbing emotions naturally function to exaggerate and distort the perception of their objects, and impute to them qualities they lack from their side. Objects of attachment therefore, appear to us as if they really possessed the attractive qualities we perceive, while those we hate or are angry towards appear to us as really possessing the essential qualities of being terrible or hateful. No matter how true and compelling many of our viewpoints and opinions seem however, much that constitutes our inner world is incongruent with reality, and failure to appreciate this discrepancy between the way things appear to us and the way they really exist is our greatest source of error.
Therefore, when we act on these distorted perceptions, our behavior is necessarily always mistaken, and instead of the happiness we wish, we inevitably create only unhappiness for others and ourselves. If we could see those who threaten to harm us from another angle, in this case from the side of the revolutionaries, and 80 percent of the Cubans who suffered under Batista’s dictatorship, our enhanced understanding of their true nature would weaken our certainty they really possessed the qualities we had earlier attributed to them. If we are honest about this quest for inner truth it might even be possible for us to experience the emotions of understanding and compassion towards those we previously hated. If we can accomplish this admittedly difficult task, our mind would experience peace and happiness, rather than the destructive effects of anger and hatred and the unhappiness and restless agitation these feelings always create.
However, if we cannot or will not accomplish this transformation in our thinking, we will experience the mind’s ceaseless and futile agitation as it seeks to justify its attachment and anger, a frantic activity that leads us only deeper into more serious realms of error. I see in America today an increasing domination by attachment to wealth, grown beyond any reasonable proportion, while our anger and hatred of those whom we see as threatening our possessions, and our ‘group’ has prompted us into senseless violence and destructive activity. Our failure to undertake the difficult inner spiritual work necessary to understand the nature and function of our inner mind states, and the distortions in perceived reality they create, has lead us to accept a war now proven to be unnecessary by the falsehoods uneasy minds have concocted to justify it. That this mistaken violent activity cannot possibly create the peace we desire is made amply clear by the alienation of most of our friends in the world, by the multiplication, unification and increased strength of the enemies we seek to destroy, and rejection by those into whose affairs we have intruded.
Accumulating evidence illuminates the mistaken nature of our attitudes and actions, but rather than working to adopt more realistic attitudes and behaviors, in an ever more desperate freefall towards self- justification, our minds have now seized on the most potent force of all to resolve this problem. We have recruited God to our side, and in so reducing Him to the status of a national or household idol, have entered a realm of utmost peril to others and ourselves. We have married our nations flag, the symbol of one group, to phrases like ‘In God We Trust’, and ’God Bless America’, in a final attempt to justify our distorted mind states, and our violence in Iraq. A little thought will show us how completely out of balance such behavior has become. Look up into any clear Michigan night and you will see hundreds of millions of stars in the Milky Way, only a part of one galaxy. The Hubble telescope has revealed billions of such galaxies, whose final extent we have yet to glimpse. Must there not be countless beings on countless worlds around these countless stars, and all of this the creation of the God we worship? How small are we, and how miserably minute are our petty struggles against other beings on this tiny atom of a planet, that we would have the temerity to suppose that the power which has created this unbelievably vast, immense complexity could or should in the infinite mercy and love we attribute to him favor our faction over that of our enemy!
What is nearly as absurd on a planetary scale is our persistence in such behavior even though we see our enemy doing the same, believing the first thing he will see, after blowing himself up to destroy his enemies, is the face of Allah, the God he believes responsible for the creation of this selfsame immense universe, smiling on him with approval for the destruction wrought in his name, and for a flag. Is not this truly insane? How could such a loving God have anything but pity for a race of creatures stupid enough to think and act in such a manner, and how could there conceivably be a taking of sides? The danger inherent in assuming our group has exclusive rights to God’s love and power, and that He will use this power to defeat our enemies, from whom his loves has presumably been withdrawn, should be self-evident, but given the freewheeling manner in which this primitive idea has gained a foothold in our society, it apparently needs explanation. The danger is that it removes all restraint to our behavior, and makes it possible for use to commit any act with the assurance we are right in doing so. It is the ultimate lubricant by which the end smoothly and without friction justifies any means, and although Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction, with God on our side, there are now no barriers to using the ones we do possess.
Jesus must have exerted great effort to purify his mind of attachment and hatred, and to perfect great compassion, thus becoming capable of sacrificing his life for others, an act of overarching humanity that proves what the highest levels of the human soul is capable, and an example of what pursuit of a truly Christian life may require. Being a Christian is not going to church, professing faith with mouths only, slapping fellow church goers on the back in gestures of mutual assurance of their membership in God’s exclusive club, and later in the week waging war with a clear conscience. It is doing the hard inner work necessary to understand that the mind’s attachment to useless wealth, and hatred towards our fellow beings are the real enemies, and that the only way we will ever realize a happy and peaceful world is to seriously undertake the work of creating a quiet, happy, and compassionate mind in ourselves.
David Hendricks,
Empire