FEELING BLUE

To disconnect, or stay connected? That is the question. It's a familiar, perennial one. As usual, my Buddhist wisdom tells me, I am too attached to outcomes for my own peace of mind...

Last night I made the mistake of watching the debate between Democratic candidates in Las Vegas and was appalled by the disharmony, the rabid hostility, the focus on issues that really matter little, in my view, in the context of blatant, rampant, unbridled and now surely undeniable corruption at the highest levels of our government.

This morning I saw a felon strutting unrepentantly from the courthouse, where he had just been sentenced for political offenses. He wore a big grin on his face, as though secure in the knowledge that he would shortly be reprieved by his patron, the president of the United States--who now appears confident, for good reason, in the knowledge that he can indulge in any corrupt or vile behavior with impunity.

Beyond this seemingly endless national tragedy, I look out at a world in disarray, with whole populations on the move, desperate to find refuge from war, oppression, from hunger and insecurity, all caused by an over-populated and inexorably heating planet. I see populist and nationalist autocrats seizing power, enabled by supporters driven by fear.

When I look about me it becomes harder by the day to place my trust in the resilience, even the self-interest of my fellow human beings. We seem bent on self-destruction. We have become so fixated on the protection of our own personal well-being that we neglect that of others, forgetting that the health of a whole body is dependent on the health of even the remotest of its parts.

"All is for the best," asserts Candide's fatuous itinerant teacher Pangloss repeatedly, in Voltaire's biting parody of Leibnitzian philosophy, "in this best of all possible worlds." All very well, responds his no longer quite so gullible student in the book's closing line, "but we must cultivate our garden."

Wise words today for those who, like myself, are otherwise confronted by despair. But conscious disconnection from reality exacts its own cost, too--a sense of abdication of responsibility for a situation that affects my life, the life of those around me, and, more seriously, the lives of those younger than myself who will live with the consequences of my inaction, if I fail to make my voice heard when it is required of me.