Resiliance

    It was tempting to title this "compassionate anger," the term used by the Dalai Lama in his recent book title Be Angry.   Nothing unusual there in the title, especially if news outlets and election tampering threats  are to be markers of our moods.  But seeing that the author of Be Angry was His Holiness, the Dalai Lama?  It was enough to cause the publisher to open with these words: It seems antithetical to use "angry" and "Dalai Lama" in the same sentence, much less the same book. After all, the Dalai Lama's lifelong teaching is about the cultivation of love and compassion.  But however much the Dalai Lama has to say about avoiding anger, he also recognizes that it is an inevitable part of the human condition.  The Dalai Lama has observed: "Generally speaking, if a human being never shows anger, then I think something's wrong.  He's not right in the brain.

   Said the Dalai Lama in his book: Society is formed through its educational system, but the educational system does not transmit the deeper human values of compassion and kindness.  Then all of society lives with this false view that leads to superficial life in which we live like machines that don't need affection.  We become part of that.  We become like machines.  That is because today's society is based on money.  A society that's based on money is aggressive, and those with power can bully and behave cruelly to others.  This situation produces social unrest.  A society that depends on money has problems that reflect its beliefs...In reality, affection and compassion have no direct link with money.  They cannot create money.   Therefore, in a society where money is the priority, people don't take these values seriously anymore.  In this kind of society, people who value affection and compassion are treated like fools, while those whose priority is making money become more and more arrogant.  To be angry on behalf of those who are treated unjustly means that we have compassionate anger.  This type of anger leads to right action and leads to social change.  To be angry toward the people in power does not create change.  It creates more anger, more resentment, more fighting.

   Now those words sounded more like what one would expect from a person such as the Dalai Lama, words that are refreshingly human and a breath of fresh air, one that contrasts with the dire words from supposed "leaders," words which seem to envelope us like smog these days, vaporous and choking and now becoming so repetitious that we begin to seemingly ignore all of it and to accept it with a sigh of "that's just how it is."  After all, there does seem to be a lot to be angry about in today's world.  Take these little tidbits that emerged from Fortune about a disappearing class in the U.S., a class of people who are not poor but not rich but are still slowly watching their status of being considered middle class fade away: For years, the company CareerBuilder has conducted, via the Harris poll, a large survey of U.S. workers across the business landscape.  In 2017, a striking 40% of the nearly 3,500 respondents said they either always or usually live “paycheck to paycheck”—a level that was up four percentage points from the company’s 2013 poll...This past September, aggregate household debt balances jumped for the 17th straight quarter, with the debt now more than $800 billion higher than it was at its previous peak in 2008...In December, the personal finance site NerdWallet reported that average revolving credit card balances for households with debt --the “You Owe This Amount” figure that carries over from one billing statement to the next-- totaled $6,929...More than a quarter of adults did without needed medical care in 2017 because they couldn’t afford it, says the Fed.  The article goes on to tell of the "other" people working in Silicon Valley, the ones doing the everyday jobs such as cleaning hotel rooms and working two jobs and having to live in 200 square-foot trailers that charge $1400 a month in rent because that is considered "affordable housing" in that area; and yet on the other side of the nation came this from the article: Bill De Blasio, the mayor of New York City, campaigned as a fighter against income inequality back in 2013.  But once in office, he gave himself a 15% raise, to $258,750.  The ostensibly liberal City Council followed suit with their own 32% raise, to $148,500.  The council’s $36,000 raise alone is more than the average individual income citywide.  Fast-forward to last year, when the enriched mayor and council courted Amazon (owned by Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world) with $3 billion in subsidies.  Said Matthew Kaufman in the article, a teacher struggling to just stay afloat financially, "As long as we measure a person or out nation by the stock market, we will always be poorer than we realize."   

    So jumping back to the Dalai Lama, think of the side that tugs at you more when you read such news.  Does it cause you to become a bit more angry, say because the courts just approved another lessening of the Affordable Care Act, separating coverage for those with pre-existing conditions?  Or does reading such news pull you more to the compassionate side, feeling for those trapped in a cycle as terrifying as that of a bug lured into a one-way trap?  Even The Atlantic had on a recent cover it's titled story,  Why Are We So Angry?  Said part of the piece: The American dream is, in a sense, an optimistic reframing of the discontent felt by people unwilling to accept the circumstances life has handed them.  Recently, however, the tenor of our anger has shifted.  It has become less episodic and more persistent, a constant drumbeat in our lives.  It is directed less often at people we know and more often at distant groups that are easy to demonize. These far-off targets may or may not have earned our ire; either way, they’re apt to be less invested in resolving our differences...Without the release of catharsis, our anger has built within us, exerting an unwanted pressure that can have a dark consequence: the desire not merely to be heard, but to hurt those we believe have wronged us.

   At the height of much of this, former President Bill Clinton gave a speech (captured in a podcast) just before the U.S. celebrated its Independence Day; it was a speech that brought a history of our country and its presidents into sharp focus, both with praise and with criticisms.  More importantly, it brought out his later workings with his once-rival, George W. Bush, and how they continue even now to bring together young member of their respective parties together each year and have them work together as a team.  Without fail, he notes, at the end of the session each group will go to the opposite side and express surprise and thankfulness at discovering that the two former Presidents had helped them dissolve long-held beliefs that prejudice and its believed anger proved little more than folk tales that had been passed down, which was similar to the conclusion reached by some hard core Israeli conservatives as noted at the end of the piece in The Atlantic.  So by now you may be wondering, just where does this notion of resilience enters the picture?

   Oxford dictionary defines resilience as: the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.  And PsychCentral added this:...resilience is how well a person can adapt to the events in their life.  A person with good resilience has the ability to bounce back more quickly and with less stress than someone whose resilience is less developed.  Everybody has resilience.  The publisher Capper Press has produced six volumes of letters and recollections from people writing home or writing in to magazines about their experiences, a series titled My Folks, books which range from times spent in a covered wagon to time fighting the Civil War..  In one of their books titled My Folks and World War II, this was how Brenda East, a 2-year old child in England at the time, described her experience of that war: Four months after the start of the war in Britain, food was rationed.  The weekly ration allowed each person one ounce of cheese, two ounces of margarine, four ounces of bacon, one egg, and 10-pence worth of meat...Mum tried to explain that there had not always been war and that it would end someday.  I was too young to understand a way of life in which I had no recollection, so I thought she was wrong.  I believed that people had to be killed in war or they would get too old.  War was how people died.  In a different piece in the London Review of Books, Patrick Tripp tells of a 71-year old patient coming in to treat his lung cancer: ‘I was 19 years old,’ he said, ‘in training in Panama.  They blindfolded me and took me in a helicopter to the middle of the jungle.  When they let me out, they gave me a compass, a knife and a chocolate bar.  You had to find your way back.’ ...‘When they dropped you off in Panama,’ I said, ‘after they took off the blindfold, how long did it take you to get back?’  ‘Two and a half weeks,’ he said.  Costco's magazine tells the story of Colin O'Brady, burned over 25% of his body in a freak accident and never expected to walk again: but O'Brady explains in a TEDx Talk about how he went on to become the first person to solo cross Antarctica without any food drops, sails, dogs or other assistance.   And in a final story, there's the rather famous classical flautist, Jean-Pierre Rampal, who loved jazz but told composer Claude Bolling 43 years ago: I love jazz without knowing how to play it, but I dream of working with jazz musicians.  Write something that stays in the classical field for my flute and in the jazz idiom for you.  Crossover music such as this had never been done before, but the result was an album that stayed at #1 on the Billboard charts for 2 years and remained on the charts for a total of 536 weeks.

   It is early here as I visit my brother, now living 4 times zones away from me.  I awaken each morning around 4 am, which is a late wake-up in my time zone, so actually I feel as if I am sleeping in.  But it makes me think that our perspectives can be skewed that easily because both my brother and I are equally comfortable and equally right in our definition of morning and night as the days go by.  But I adjust and spend my time enjoying the birds just sleepily awakening an hour or so after me, their songs growing more and more joyous as the day lightens, perhaps me realizing that this happens day after day around the world, people right in their own ways and choosing what to see or hear or believe.  I can be angry if I so decide, and so can my brother.  But more than likely and at the risk of appearing foolish, we would both choose to be more on the understanding and compassionate side.  Our choices, our decisions, and no matter what we may think we know that the world will move on, as resilient as ever...

P.S. Just as a note of what the world might actually "think," the World Economic Forum asked major business leaders what they felt was on the minds of people.  What issues now scare people the most, they were asked, and how would they rank those concerns?  At the bottom of the list?  Biodiversity loss and the threat of a terrorist attack.  Just above that but still of very little concern: migration, unemployment, greenhouse gases, water crises, and income disparity or data fraud.  And what topped the list, as it has done for the past 10 years?  Extreme weather events...Mother Nature, it would seem, is finally beginning to get our attention...