Meet the Republicans...

I had a really disconcerting encounter today. I sat down to eat lunch with a few of my friends; business majors who enjoy discussing politics. The tv was set on election coverage, so we began discussing politics. I told them I was voting for Obama and I was essentially tired of spending billions of dollars in the desert to increase our capital under the Bush regime, and it doesn't even seem to be working. My buddies were telling me that the Democrats are going to be spending billions on social programs, which will have no capital return, wasting our money to inflate the government. Revoking our "freedom." We were off and running.

I don't believe our country is anywhere close to espousing equality. Capitalism inherently sets up class-based hierarchies. The one who owns the capital controls the one who doesn't and seeks to gain more capital, often at the expense of the workers. Our government has created a lot of checks on that process to ensure that people aren't entirely destroyed by the system, but the rich continue to get richer and the poor continue to get poorer. The system perpetuates itself. After a few generations, the rich are established in their wealth and the poor are established in their lack of wealth. It's a very difficult thing to break free of, which is why we have social programs to help those who have been chewed up and spit out onto the bottom rung of society.

"But," my friends said, "the poor people just need to change their attitudes! They're mooching of the system, content to be poor. If they'd just work harder and stop being lazy, they could pull themselves up by their own boot-straps! It's their fault!"

I cocked my head to the side and furrowed my brow. Do these guys really believe this stuff? Do they really believe that a single mom with a kid living in a trailer park is just lazy? Do they really believe that it's her fault and if she'd just work a little harder she'd be able to break out of poverty? That's ludicrous.

I then said something about how if we could really figure out how to achieve some harmonious type of socialism or even communism we'd all be much better off as far as equality is concerned.

At this point (and I was pretty hurt by this) they all literally sat there and laughed in my face.

"Don't you get it? That's limiting our freedom to make money! How stupid do you have to be to give up freedom?" And then I understood. We're not raised in this country to worry about each other or to actually want to create equality. We're raised to love material wealth. My friends and I weren't going to get anywhere. We have entirely different views on why we're alive.

I guess I already knew what they were telling me, or should have known it. I was raised in this culture. I could have put the pieces together myself, but I was really shocked when I realized that they really do believe what they're saying. They're buying into the whole thing, and it scares me. I don't use that term lightly. I'm genuinely scared for the future of the planet if people like that continue to propagate themselves. I'm scared.

Siddhartha...

Lindsey gave me a book this year which I just got around to reading. The book, by Herman Hesse, is called Siddhartha, and is about a Hindu Brahmin character. Essentially, Siddhartha is a very talented Brahmin who leaves his caste to travel with the Samanas, a group of ascetics geared at removing themselves from the attachment of the world.

After rejecting both the Brahmin path and the path of the Samana, Siddhartha decides to enjoy the material world and all that it has to offer. He becomes a very successful business man and a lover of a beautiful woman named Kamala. In the same way that Siddhartha tired of the Brahmin and Samana path, he grows very empty in the worldly path, leaving everything behind at a moments notice to reconnect with spirituality.

After he leaves, Siddhartha spends many years as a ferryman and becomes enlightened through perfection of the art of listening to the world. Forgetting himself in the river he navigates, Siddhartha realizes that the river is a metaphor for life. We float down the path thinking we're separate, but we're all intermingled in the water. We all evaporate and become vapor, condense and come back down as rain, and float down the river together again. This is a novel concept for me.

Everything is the same. The rock is the same as the man who holds it. I'm not positive I fully grasp this idea. Actually, I know I don't fully grasp the idea. I'm not enlightened. Either way, Siddhartha realizes his inner Atman and discovers complete equanamity with the world. Sadness and happiness are the same. Victory and defeat are the same. Love and hate, light and dark, heavy and light, all are illusions of opposites which are really no different from each other.

I suppose I'm so intrigued by this concept because it seems like it makes a lot of sense, yet I don't fully understand it. I think that perhaps the most fundamental concept in Hinduism and Buddhism is equanamity. All of the other concepts flow out of the concept of equanamity. We're all the same. Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, white, black, hispanic, rocks, trees, Atman, non-Atman, it's all the same. Much of our suffering comes from clinging to a concept that we think is correct. If we'd just let go of these concepts of difference, we'd find ourselves getting along with each other.

It almost seems too easy, and too apathetic, but it isn't apathetic at all in my mind. It takes work to see the world through the same lens, to love everything as if it were yourself. It also takes work to realize, actually fully grasp the reality of the idea, that we are all the same. It is one thing to know something in your head, but another to realize the truth of that knowledge in practice. Life is good.

Mother knows best...

My mother, in her infinite wisdom, said something the other day that I wanted to make sure I documented and remembered. I love learning from my elders, by the way. The more I try to learn from mistakes people have made, the less likely I am to make the same mistakes. The more advice I gather from people more experienced than I at life, the wiser I become. The best part is, it's free to just listen to what people have to tell you, and most people are dying to tell you something.

Anywho, Mom and I are riding in the car the other day talking about life and she says to me, "There are two things that took me years to learn, and if you can figure them out you'll be a much happier person. 1 - You don't always have to be right. It's okay to be wrong. And 2 - You don't always have to blame someone for everything that happens. Sometimes things just happen."

There is a lot of intelligence and wisdom in that statement backed by a lot of experience. Mom and I have very different philosophies on life in general, but because we're so different, she always gives me a different perspective on life that I hadn't thought about and can learn from.

Hopefully we can all learn from each other, all differences aside. Actually, no. Not differences aside. Differences at the forefront. They are what give us the many broad ideas and perspectives that we couldn't get if we were all alike. If we can only learn that differences don't inherently create hierarchies; if we can only pick up on the fact that differences just make us different, not better or worse, we'll be a much better world.

So here's to diversity. Here's to living another moment in this wonderful world full of people who think differently than i do.