LOSING SLEEP

I have been losing sleep. The country is descending into chaos. First there was the coronavirus crisis, followed shortly by the crisis in the economy; and now the crisis of social unrest. 

We were hopelessly unprepared for the virus. The current administration catastrophically undermined preparations for a pandemic and worked assiduously to deprive further people of basic health care insurance; and the last five decades of misguided financial policy created the ground for the economic crisis, assuring the deep disparities in the distribution of wealth and disempowering government by depriving it of the revenue to operate efficiently and meet the needs of those who depend upon it. 

What we are witnessing in America today is the apotheosis of greed, and Tr*mp is its avatar. He is a huge, lumbering, all-devouring monster who indiscriminatingly consumes everything that comes his way. He poisons minds before scarfing down the people who used to own them. He feasts on whole government agencies, gobbles up masses of assembled idolators, snatches up those who oppose him and thrusts them down his insatiable maw. He burps up unintelligible rants of ignorance and hate, and farts out venomous edicts that threaten to destroy the world. He will stop at nothing to gratify his inexhaustible, obsessive needs and accepts no boundaries to his personal entitlement. 

But I have been losing sleep over the crisis of social unrest, whose roots precede the current president by centuries. We can no longer pretend to be surprised or shocked by the unequal administration of the law, which patently favors one skin color over others. To cast blame on the black community for the damage and disorder is to justify decades of injustice and unequal treatment under the law. It is to shirk responsibility for a system that benefits some at the expense of many; a system that disproportionately arrests, indicts and incarcerates black Americans for crimes that are excused or ignored when perpetrated by their white fellow Americans. 

The anger and resentment on our city streets erupts after each outrage, and after each we manage to lay the blame on a few "bad apples" who do the damage. Will the anger at this latest outrage, compounded with the long-simmering anger against a system that has benefited so few Americans at the expense of so many, prove to be the catalyst for the change we so clearly need? Or will we sink back into the same old ways and await the next one, as we have done so often in the past? 

For myself, I ask as always: what can I do? The Buddhist answer lies in the practice of goodwill and compassion. I thought of this last night as I lay awake with worry and distress, and the idea came to me to schedule a special session of my neighborhood sitting group this afternoon for a collective exercise in the practice of goodwill. I put out the invitation this morning. I hope that there are others who will join me.