I know a lot of people who are disgusted, angry, upset about the Trump incitement of an insurrection. Actually, from my study of this “incitement” is the wrong word. Planned, ops, even in contact with members of the Congress who participated, and more important, likely direct contact and links with some ultra right participants in the invasion of the capitol.
Sure, we could get into it…. where were the police, if these were BLM protestors, how did this happen, what went wrong, should we blame Trump or the many levels of enablers, what about Russia, this is white supremacy, etc. Reasonable questions and reasonable topics for discussion. But let’s cut to the chase, how to practice with the insurrection on January 6?
As a priest and teacher, right now, I feel yesterday is a exemplary of authoritarian populism and white supremacy. To me, yesterday demonstrates the limits of “let’s try to talk across the partisanship” or “we need a national conversation about race.” Stahp. Sure… we do that…. read the books, study together, and self-examine our histories.
But what can I do? How can I contribute to change? In general, the rhetoric of metta, healing and understanding is limited. Is it relevant? Perhaps metta but not as a response…. any more than any other day of my life. Please, there must be more. For me, that more is understanding the history of now.
The wisdom of seeing the world as it is might means to see our blindness of the past 4 years stretching back to the 1790 constitutional convention. The more recent past, is Russian ops and racism since 2015 or 2016 for the purpose of dismantling trust in American institutions, creating chaos here, and opportunity for strongman states—and securing dark money economies founded on drugs, human trafficking, and the illegal sale of weapons, technology, and information.
If one can invoke and chant the metta sutta, one should also be seeing the wisdom … the world as it is of Trump (and thousands of enablers, dark money) and now, the return of the confederacy.