There is something wonderful about knowing one’s location, the people we see day in and out, at the grocery, on the street. You know who to turn to when there is a need and they can depend on you. That’s wonderful. It is a joy to feel part of place, though we may not always recognize it at the time. These often-casual relationships do take cultivating. Being accepted requires being accepting.
At the same time there is a benefit of travelling outside one’s home country. Spending extended periods beyond the familiar, until the unfamiliar becomes familiar is that a person sees their own country in a way they cannot while residing at home. A conservative American provost of a college I taught at while living in Japan commented to me once while sharing a drink after a day teaching, that he never fully understood America’s provincialism until living in Japan. It had totally changed his political perspective.
Recently while travelling to Budapest, Hungary to undergo a dental procedure, I was at JFK in New York City awaiting my flight in an airline lounge. I overheard a conversation between a New York City businessman who was travelling with his wife to visit her relatives in the nation of Georgia and members of a Turkish American family visiting their relatives in Türkiye.
The New Yorker was enthusiastically supporting the policies of the Trump administration regarding immigration and the methods employed by ICE, tariffs, dismantling the Department of Education, the wholesale firing of government employees, tax restructuring, on and on. According to him everything is now on the correct course in America and the nation is improving dramatically as a result of the current administration.
It was relatively easy to tell from their body language and non-committal responses that the Turkish couple was uncomfortable with the conversation. I sympathized with them. The irony of the situation, especially regarding immigration, was completely lost on the native New Yorker.It was the height of tourist season in Budapest while I was there. Budapest is a cosmopolitan city, and I stayed in a popular part of the city. English is the common language among people from different lands and languages today. It was easy to understand overheard conversations between friends and strangers coming together from different lands.
Many conversations centered upon the volatile nature of President Trump’s policies and the effects those policies have on the countries from which the people were coming. They were uniformly disparaging comments. Many people were comparing Trump to Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President of Türkiye, Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, etc. The common theme was the rise of authoritarian governments around the world. What I was hearing did not surprise me, what was interesting was the urgency of the conversations.
Even those conversations not politically directed had political roots. Having dinner on the sidewalk at a small restaurant off the beaten path in Budapest I happened to sit near two middle aged Japanese sisters. They were grateful that they could take their trip to Eastern Europe as a birthday present for one of the sisters because the effect of American economic policies on Japan were going to make such a trip impossible for them in the near future.
I had an opportunity to speak with the sisters further when I took a picture of them together with their cell phone. It is fun to be able to exchange views with people when in a neutral county. I wish to point out that in my travels no one treated me with disrespect or anything but courtesy and civility. Though I did intentionally keep a low profile and was seldom identified as an American.
These various, seemly random, interactions affirm my perspective that while authoritarianism is gaining more and more power around the world, primarily due to greed, there is a counterbalancing of those extolling humanity that stands ready to push back, to resist, to provide the light of kindness and civility to shine.
We associate authoritarianism with the leaders, as mentioned previously. There are the powerful, such as the oligarchs who use their wealth and influence, as well as the people of societies who ultimately elect them.
From a Buddhist perspective, there is nothing purely evil nor virtuous. The qualities that we identify as benevolent and wicked each have the seed of the other embedded. There is always a shift this way or that. It is the distribution of good and bad not the presence or lack thereof that we perceive. That is the way of being.
In America starting about 80 years ago, there was a general movement toward progressing a more human agenda. Even relatively conservative executives, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, sponsored, non-discriminatory education, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Environmental Protection Act, opening relations with China, and the Equality Act.
Now the pendulum has swung back the other way. Not immediately, over the last 40 years, gaining momentum until it has begun to reach its right most, reactionary, apogee. Jim Crow 2.0 is upon us. An immigration reform bill was never brought to the floor of the House of Representatives by a Republican Speaker so that could become an issue in a presidential election. Thus, a well-intended moderate solution to the immigration conundrum was rejected in favor of extremist politics. The dominant political party marginalizes people who are not White, Straight, and Christian Nationalist as a political strategy of fear and grievance. The rule of law is being extinguished. Science is canceled and defunded because the findings released by scientists regarding the environment, medicine, etc. are inconvenient and restrict the greed of corporate capitalists and their political collaborators.
In the world as a whole there are those people who only seek what which benefits them directly. There are those people who work tirelessly to benefit others. There are those people who view themselves as superior and those who are victims. The vast majority of people wish to live a good decent life; ‘the people we see day in and out, at the grocery, on the street. You know who to turn to when there is a need and they can depend on you.’
Remember the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. He said that justice may take time, but progress is ultimately made through persistent effort and ethical action. Further he emphasized the importance of striving for justice rather than waiting for it to happen on its own.
As a sangha we are guided by the Bodhisattva Vows (to work for the benefit of all sentient beings) and śīla, (precepts, morality and ethics). We may be distressed by the pendulum swinging away from virtue. We must be guided by the spirit of Kanon Bosatsu (Avalokitaśvara Bodhisattva) who looks upon the suffering around her and vows to liberate all sentient beings. Know that as a community we can make a difference, one person at a time. With the assistance of other like-minded people of faith and civic communities we will swing the pendulum back in the direction of decency and humanity. It is the way of the buddhas, through the dharma and sangha.
Gassho with love . . . Monshin