i want to remember this
Jul. 26th, 2006 16:39![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
piranhano, not the pictures of israeli children happily signing artillery shells (i guess hezballah isn't alone in thinking it's good parenting to involve your children early and often in the violence), but these excerpts from a comment calling the lot of them on their crap, copied from the comment section of the huffington post, on an essay as to whether psychosis is contagious. (yes, it is, IMO.)
At some point today when you read the news you will see the daily photo of the Weeping Woman, head thrown back to the heavens, wailing over the Body du Jour. She is this week either Israeli or Lebanese. Or Afghani or Iraqi.
Does it matter? Does loss really sound any different in Hebrew than it does in Arabic?
Flip on the news and there you have it. Generic war. With the mute button on, can you tell the difference between the flattened building in Beirut and the rubble in Haifa? Or Baghdad or Kandahar. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
This, you see, is Holy War. The ultimate oxymoron being finessed by the ultimate bunch of morons. Hezbollah, which gave the world the first photos of toddlers wearing toy suicide belts, calls itself the Party of God. Israel, where the persecuted deliberately chose to become the persecutors because they have a biblical imperative to grow grapefruit in the Negev, considers itself the rightful home of God's Chosen People.
Iran is run by clerics that are busily manipulating the oil market and constructing nuclear bombs. There's a whole chapter on how to do that in the Koran.
Let me remind you that the one thing that all these groups would completely agree upon is that they would immediately die a horrible death and go directly to eternal damnation if they ate a pork chop. Because, as everyone knows, it's pigs that are unclean.
Then there is the ex-Nazi Youth Pope, whose very first two very vocal press coups were lots of publicity about denouncing the globally insidious evil of the peril that is Harry Potter and condemning people who are born preferring same sex intimacy to the fires of Hell. Or you could just have a ham sandwich on the wrong Friday and get there anyway.
Protestants everywhere are getting rabid in their understatedly WASP way over the turgid issue of whether women and gay men can genuinely be considered to be Vicars of Christ. Notions provably every bit as silly as presuming to leave the crusts on tea sandwiches.
Non-denominational George Bush, who invaded Iraq because Jesus told him to -it's right there in print in Cheney's Halliburton Edition Bible, has been less overtly obtuse than usual this past week. He's learned better than to be frank in his assessments when he's near anything with an on button or, God forbid, reach out and touch someone. Start messin' with the wrong Meissen and it just makes things tense. Even if they weren't before.
So let me give you the same advice that I've been taking myself. If your spiritual needs are of the slightly more fastidious sort, you might want to spend a little time reading up on Buddhism.
I used to wonder why the Dalai Lama was always smiling. Now I've learned that when you are centered on compassion, you get to see what happens when you are mired in its alternative.
Buddhists tend to be very bottom-line practical people. My guess is that if you asked the Dalai Lama, he'd point out that the one single question to ask about all this is---- how will it end?
After all that's broken and bleeding, a group of very expensively indulged diplomats will sit down in some grandly polished surroundings and hammer out a peace of some sort. Just like always.
So why not do it now?
You could try having a Buddhist kind of peace and create a Loss Registry. Every Israeli who is in mourning spends one hour a day in a room talking to one Palestinian equally grief-stricken. Every maimed, orphaned Sunni does likewise to some Shiite across town. The way you get them to agree to do that is to tell them that if they do it daily for six months they then have the alternative to kill each other face to face, at arm's length. But absolutely only if they have spent every single minute of that time listening to what the other has said.
We'd probably save a lot on bullets. And journalists could go back to the things that matter like the latest Natalee theory or how to tell apart Jessica from Brittney.
And there would be a lot less, in Tony Snow's immortally chilly words, collateral things like dead people to be crying over.
gandolina@hotmail.com
the idea of a loss registry is brilliant; i never heard of the concept, and a google search doesn't find the term in connection with buddhism. so now i have to hunt for the idea otherwise; if there are any practicing buddhists reading, i'd appreciate pointers.
At some point today when you read the news you will see the daily photo of the Weeping Woman, head thrown back to the heavens, wailing over the Body du Jour. She is this week either Israeli or Lebanese. Or Afghani or Iraqi.
Does it matter? Does loss really sound any different in Hebrew than it does in Arabic?
Flip on the news and there you have it. Generic war. With the mute button on, can you tell the difference between the flattened building in Beirut and the rubble in Haifa? Or Baghdad or Kandahar. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
This, you see, is Holy War. The ultimate oxymoron being finessed by the ultimate bunch of morons. Hezbollah, which gave the world the first photos of toddlers wearing toy suicide belts, calls itself the Party of God. Israel, where the persecuted deliberately chose to become the persecutors because they have a biblical imperative to grow grapefruit in the Negev, considers itself the rightful home of God's Chosen People.
Iran is run by clerics that are busily manipulating the oil market and constructing nuclear bombs. There's a whole chapter on how to do that in the Koran.
Let me remind you that the one thing that all these groups would completely agree upon is that they would immediately die a horrible death and go directly to eternal damnation if they ate a pork chop. Because, as everyone knows, it's pigs that are unclean.
Then there is the ex-Nazi Youth Pope, whose very first two very vocal press coups were lots of publicity about denouncing the globally insidious evil of the peril that is Harry Potter and condemning people who are born preferring same sex intimacy to the fires of Hell. Or you could just have a ham sandwich on the wrong Friday and get there anyway.
Protestants everywhere are getting rabid in their understatedly WASP way over the turgid issue of whether women and gay men can genuinely be considered to be Vicars of Christ. Notions provably every bit as silly as presuming to leave the crusts on tea sandwiches.
Non-denominational George Bush, who invaded Iraq because Jesus told him to -it's right there in print in Cheney's Halliburton Edition Bible, has been less overtly obtuse than usual this past week. He's learned better than to be frank in his assessments when he's near anything with an on button or, God forbid, reach out and touch someone. Start messin' with the wrong Meissen and it just makes things tense. Even if they weren't before.
So let me give you the same advice that I've been taking myself. If your spiritual needs are of the slightly more fastidious sort, you might want to spend a little time reading up on Buddhism.
I used to wonder why the Dalai Lama was always smiling. Now I've learned that when you are centered on compassion, you get to see what happens when you are mired in its alternative.
Buddhists tend to be very bottom-line practical people. My guess is that if you asked the Dalai Lama, he'd point out that the one single question to ask about all this is---- how will it end?
After all that's broken and bleeding, a group of very expensively indulged diplomats will sit down in some grandly polished surroundings and hammer out a peace of some sort. Just like always.
So why not do it now?
You could try having a Buddhist kind of peace and create a Loss Registry. Every Israeli who is in mourning spends one hour a day in a room talking to one Palestinian equally grief-stricken. Every maimed, orphaned Sunni does likewise to some Shiite across town. The way you get them to agree to do that is to tell them that if they do it daily for six months they then have the alternative to kill each other face to face, at arm's length. But absolutely only if they have spent every single minute of that time listening to what the other has said.
We'd probably save a lot on bullets. And journalists could go back to the things that matter like the latest Natalee theory or how to tell apart Jessica from Brittney.
And there would be a lot less, in Tony Snow's immortally chilly words, collateral things like dead people to be crying over.
gandolina@hotmail.com
the idea of a loss registry is brilliant; i never heard of the concept, and a google search doesn't find the term in connection with buddhism. so now i have to hunt for the idea otherwise; if there are any practicing buddhists reading, i'd appreciate pointers.
no subject
on 2006-07-27 00:40 (UTC)Have you seen the story behind the picture yet (http://ontheface.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/7/20/2142505.html)? (I got there from The Guardian's website; oddly enough I'd just read it when I thought "time to check LJ" and your post was third from the top on my Friends page!)
Anyway, about "a Buddhist kind of peace"... eh. I have friends who are practicing Buddhists from Buddhist-majority countries. Buddhism in its natural habitat is kind of different from the Buddhism practiced in the West by a few gentle counter-culture souls. Just like any other religion, it has its wonderful holy men, its good people on the path to salvation/enlightenment, and its zealous louts.
Remember Aum Shinri Kyo, the Japanese Buddhist sect that dropped nerve gas into the Tokyo subway system? OK, those are crazies, but an organized terrorist group that we hardly ever hear of in the west is the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army in Myanmar. In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers (a Hindu terrorist group) fight viciously with the ruling Buddhist majority, with atrocities claimed by both sides. And of course Buddhism hardly kept Laos, Cambodia, or Viet Nam peaceful.
no subject
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on 2006-07-31 01:16 (UTC)