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    “This confused war”

    ByElizabeth

    My dear friend from college, Dan Harper, just posted the following on his website.  I feel fortunate to have a friend who inspires me to me more learned and more concerned.

    Martin Luther King would have been 80 today. On February 25, 1967, not long before he was killed, he spoke about the Vietnam War and its effects on our country. The following excerpt from that speech could easily be delivered today, with just a few minor changes:

    “This confused war has played havoc with our domestic destinies.

    “Despite feeble protestations to the contrary, the promises of the Great Society [anti-poverty program] have been shot down on the battlefield of Viet Nam. The pursuit of this widened war has narrowed domestic welfare programs, making the poor, white and Negro, bear the heaviest burdens both at the front and at home.

    “While the anti-poverty program is cautiously initiated, zealously supervised and evaluated for immediate results, billions are liberally expended for this ill-considered war. The recently revealed mis-estimate of the war budget amounts to ten billions of dollars for a single year. This error alone is more than five times the amount committed to anti-poverty programs. The security we profess to seek in foreign adventures we will lose in our decaying cities. The bombs in Viet Nam explode at home: they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.

    “If we reversed investments and gave the armed forces the antipoverty budget, the generals could be forgiven if they walked off the battlefield in disgust.

    “Poverty, urban problems and social progress generally are ignored when the guns of war become a national obsession. When it is not our security that is at stake, but questionable and vague commitments to reactionary regimes, values disintegrate into foolish and adolescent slogans.”

    Full text of the speech on Stanford’s Web site. Crossposted on PaxPac.

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    A Conversation (and Maitri)

    ByElizabeth

    This morning, after my morning beach walk, as usual, one of the men at the storefront for an adventure business that’s on the corner before the house I’m staying at called out his usual “hey beautiful lady” thing. I responded to him in Spanish, and we ended up talking for a while.

    He asked about my Spanish, as most visitors here (even those who’ve bought condos) don’t seem to have much of the language. I said I’d started studying last year; I was spurred by the current political climate to become competent in Spanish to open opportunities for me to be of service.

    In response, he told me that he’d lived in California for over 25 years; his three children were born in the United States. They are still in the US, but he, last year, was sent back to Mexico pursuant to the present administration’s policies.

    Later in the day, when I was walking out with my yoga teacher and friends, he greeted us with friendliness, not just the typical marketing greeting.

    When I get more capable, I hope to find a way to be of greater service, but expanding the opportunities for friendliness seems a decent start.

    Below is a picture of what I’m pretty sure is a curlew (birding experts, please comment and advise) eating an immature crab that I watched in the morning.

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    Baksheesh and Brahman

    ByElizabeth

    I spent a few hours this weekend reading Joseph Campbell’s  Baksheesh and Brahman, which is Campbell’s journals from a year in India from 1954-55 (I’m now about a third of the way through).  Campbell writes that he went to India to find Brahman and instead found politics.  He approached his visit from the perspective of a mythologist.  In contrast to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, who went to India to find God, Joseph Campbell went to observe religious practices.  Although the journals evidence his own perspective and prejudices, he makes cogent observations on the difference between religiosity and spirituality (not all that dissimilar to the distinctions made in the Bhagavad Gita about the difference between rigidly practicing ritual and truly believing).  He also makes very interesting and still timely and cogent comparisons between the relationship of Hinduism and to the then rather new Indian nationalism and American Protestantism to democracy.

    Ultimately, though, it is evident that this year was important for Campbell’s life path and work, as it was for the Beats, and has been for many of my friends who have gone, though not for all.  I think about going to India.  It will be when I have several weeks and don’t have a venerable and ancient cat who cannot be left behind for a long stretch of time.  In the meantime, reading of such journeys can stimulate thought and can be applied to other aspects of my life, though reading and studying (especially in the yoga tradition), is never a substitute for experience.  Just reading of spiritual experiences, but not doing the practices to open the door to one’s own experience is like reading cooking or gardening books, but never going into the kitchen or the garden.


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