![]() The only thing worthy of you is compassion…” “Promise me… Even as they strike you down Yet, he demonstrated, spoke out anyway against the killing and destruction. During the war in Vietnam, Thich was seen as a traitor by both the North and South Vietnamese armies. There was an article by Kaira Jewel Lingo titled “How Equanimity Powers Love.” She quoted a poem by Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and activist Thich Nhat Hanh. This morning, I was reading the summer issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Guide. Yet, the BLM protests went on despite threats against them. DT tried to blame much of the violence we saw in 2020, and the beginning of 2021, on BLM, or on non-existent “anti-Fascist” groups, while he was the person most fueling violence. Peaceful protests were met by a President who fueled the flames, sent in armed forces and created even more chaos. There were also demonstrations calling for equity in education, for protecting the environment, protecting school children from guns or immigrant children from being separated from their parents, for protecting our humanity, voting rights, civil rights, the rule of law, etc. Black Lives Matter became the biggest protest movement in our history, mostly peaceful protests, calling for justice for George Floyd and other black people. The protests I attended were peaceful.Ģ020 was a year when the federal government itself had become the greatest threat to democracy itself, and we had the most protests in our history. Louis, Austin, Seattle, Portland, New York, Washington, D. In the US in 2020, following the murder by police of George Floyd, in Minneapolis where he was killed, in Louisville, St. The movement was being torn down, suppressed, demonstrators jailed, or worse. Yesterday, I was listening to an NPR podcast, This American Life, about the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. But how courageous would I be in advancing that reality, that quest for democracy for all? We say we celebrate the birth of democracy, or at least the quest for democracy in this place, in this time a quest for a home where we might have, as the founders later described it in the Declaration of Independence, the right for all to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Or in the pledge, we say “with liberty and justice for all.” In 1776, these grand statements were not even close to reality. We celebrate today our independence from monarchy and autocracy. It is July 4 th and I have these questions for myself: how courageous am I? What must I do, what must we do, to make this democracy work?
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