Today I am especially troubled that I am part of a human community that is so capable of cruelty. I try to take great refuge in my small community of companions who struggle to be a source of compassion and human kindness. I think of them often, turn to them for generous support, rely on them for guiding inspiration. I also think how this small group is in turn connected to a larger group of like-minded, open-hearted people. We have a life-link that nourishes us and penetrates the world around us.
But there are those others.
Today I am painfully aware that I have a similar life-link with those who would remove health care from 24 million of their neighbors. I am part of the community seriously planning to take food from hungry school children. Safe in Minneapolis, there is no ignoring that I am a beneficiary of my country’s ambition to increase its capacity for war and human destruction. I identify with and am recognized as part of a class that secures its position of privilege by wresting privilege from lower classes.
It is discouraging that I am also companion with many who, as Claudia Schmidt once said, are “foolish, incredibly foolish …….dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.”
I am part of an unknowing community that helps the wealthy amass even greater wealth, while blindly ignoring that this happens at their own expense. We selfishly support the hoarding of resources by the few, in the vain hope that we too might share in the hoarding.
Even worse, we teeter on the edge, and sometimes go over the edge of throwing one another under the bus so that we ourselves might prosper.
I take refuge in my community of humans who aspire to a life of compassion and human kindness, and shower me with the abundance of that intention. I can never repay them with the gratitude due to the generosity they show me. We meet somewhat quietly and hardly ever show up on the front page. I don’t especially like those people I meet on the front page, even though I recognize them as my own kind and still part of my community.