Meditation 27: What To Do

Things are looking bad.  What does one do about it?  How ought one to respond to the horror, mayhem and rampant injustice in the world?  Should one be angry? Sad? Depressed? Full of hate? Of Love? Of Indifference? What is the right attitude to have about all this?  Should the lucky ones be happy while the world goes its evil way, with men oppressing men, children and women in large areas of the earth?  Just considering the injustices perpetuated against women, we see horrific spectacles of rape, machine-gunning, bodily mutilation, and now self-immolation of teenage girls in Afghanistan.  Even where women have the vote, civil rights, and opportunities to advance, there are still systematic inequalities in the treatment of women.  These systemic inequalities are not gone from the countries that are most progressive in advancing the cause of women's equality, and are very striking in countries where the question of the equality of women, as we understand it, does not even arise.  Similar things can be said of the oppression of men by an economic power system that exploits their labor, or the oppression of children in sweat shops and forced prostitution.

The passions at work in our world today are very negative.  Prominent among them are anger, hate, the desire for revenge, and the desire to kill one's enemies.  We have seen this many times in the course of human history, but after the horrors of the last century, their return in forms undreamt of then, fills us with dismay.  Does mankind have no memory?  Are the delights of power so overwhelming as to put all future planning out the window?  Is greed so wonderful?  Is money all that we should ever think about in the end?  Obviously, it is not, but what then?

Should we be angry at what we see going on in the world that is unfair and oppressive to the human spirit and what it could be, if loosened from the ties that bind it to a brutal power system?  Again, the answer is "yes."  How could one not be angry about genocide, the unequal manner in which women are treated by many men, the way profits become ends-in-themselves?  One conclusion, then, is that it is right to feel angry about injustices.  Now the question is what to do with this anger?  Should it be allowed to turn into hate and the desire for revenge?  Not if we want our miseries to end in anything other than death.  It cannot be right to return a wrong for a wrong, no matter how understandable the feelings are that lead to the desire to do it. We have to be smarter than fall back on the old standby of the scapegoat and the "enemy" in a black and white world.  It is too complicated for that, now. We must be creative and find a way to work from where we are to a world in which we would all want to live and have something to live for.