An Eagle Flies

An Eagle Flies a Distant Sky
Crystal eyes, aetheric nerves

From distant skies look down.

Robot claws release their grip.

Fires of hell begin their fall.

Beneath, an edenic plain.

Two children, sisters play

With a doll blue eyed and blonde


Passing between small dark hands.

 

Bright smiles, laughter break under


Dark eyes. Joy and leaping

Steps as a new game begins.

The doll's pulled two ways at once,

Breaks and its wound bring silence,

Small recriminations.

But huddl’d beneath the sun

They splint and bandage its arm.

 

Becoming nurse and doctor

Another game is born.

The shade of the courtyard wall

is now a hospital ward.  

Faster yet hell’s fire bores down

From wings they never see.

Bursting through the courtyard wall

A pyre engulfs brick and stone.

 

Smoke and dust carry the flame

That melts the broken doll
,

lighting the sisters afire,

Burning flesh to char the bones.

Dead splattered meat draws the flies.

Games, dreams, and hopes are gone

Still above the eagle soars,

Crystal eyes never weeping.

 

Aether hides the assassins.

It’s us they claim to serve.

But where lies the loyalty

To life, to joy and laughter?
Where lays the true loyalty?
Is it to human life?
Have we forgotten what once
we lov'd and held so dearly?

Life, liberty and freedom
are not divisible.
True liberty and freedom
can not be bought with murder.

 

For all the victims of assassination, the killed, the wounded and their families, friends and neighbours:

 

This nation once opposed assassination on principle. It is our to our enduring shame that fear and indifference permits those we elect to continue in this morally reprehensible calculus of murder. 

Executive Order 11905 signed in 1976, by Gerald R. Ford formally banned political assassination while "improving" oversight on American Intelligence agencies, stating No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.
This order was strengthened by Jimmy Carter's Executive Order 12036 in 1978 which states No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.
Executive order 12333 signed by Ronald Reagan reverted to a language closer to Ford's order; No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.

Today, assassinations have become a routine instrument of national policy. So long as the proposed target is named as a terrorist, the American president can, on his signature alone, authorise a drone strike anywhere in the world except American territory. The level of acceptable "collateral  damage," other people killed or injured in the strike is likewise set according to standards set by the president alone.

Recently border security forces have been authorised to use drones. Though it is claimed they are unarmed, they are reputedly of the same type used to carry weapons overseas.

Total civilians killed are estimated at between between 380 to 801.  The moral damage done to our nation and to democracy has been incalculably high. 57 drone strikes are known to have occurred under the authority of George W. Bush in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen alone.

During Obama’s two terms, 563 known drone strikes are know to have occurred in the same countries.
In Afghanistan during the Obama administration, more than a thousand strikes took place in 2016 alone. Those documented above do not include the far larger number of declared military drone strikes in that benighted nation, nor in Iraq, or Syria, the Sudan or Libya.
Constitutionally, the only way to effectively end this world wide campaign of terror is for the American Congress to ban political assassination in its entirety, and to provide for effective oversight armed drones, banning their use either entirely or at the minimum in declared wars. Armed drones, if they must exist, should be operated only by the military, not by so-called intelligence agencies, which have time and again proven unreliable when granted unsupervised power.
Here's the source for drone use data.

 

The Death of Buddha

Today, across Japan, The Americas and Europe many temples will ceremonially display large images like this one in memory of the death of sage of the Shakyas, Siddhārtha Gautama, the man most of us know by the title Buddha, which means "Awakened One."*  He was 80 years old when he died. If you click on the image to expand it, you'll see images of life - plants blooming out of season, animals bearing gifts of flowers, Buddhist monastics and saints bearing bowls filled with lotus blooms --symbols of eternity --and  look on with equanimity, while bodhisattva's, kings, queens, Japanese demigods, and even heaven itself with gods all are weeping.

15th Century Japanese painting on silk The Death of Buddha
(74 x 43 5/16 in.)  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

But in his death, Zen Buddhists celebrate and remember him not as a god, not as a being touched by some mysterious divinity or sainthood, but as a man who reached through the complexities of self -- memory, desire and fear -- to find a way forward out of the irreality we construct and construe as truth. This is actually how Buddhists traditionally call their practice: "The Way."

Siddhārtha Gautama was born a son of the ruling class of the Shakyas, a people living in the North East of the Indian Subcontinent in the 5th century B.C.E.. After a pampered and protected early life, he confronted the sorrows of his world at age 29. He then gave up his princely title to pursue wisdom rather than power. After a six year trek through the competing mystical and ascetic practices of the Vedic world, which then as today saw many spiritual teachers rise and fall, he found an alternative, what Buddhist's call "the middle way," that neither rejects life and experience, nor indulges transient pleasures and fears in an attempt to flee from suffering. This way is called the Eightfold Path:

1. Right seeing  - viewing as things are rather than as we wish them to be.
   
   
2. Right thought - understanding freed of the passions, desires and possessiveness that influences everyday thinking,
   
   
3. Right speech- communication freed from self-deception (passion, aggression, and stupidity)
   
   
4. Right activity - action freed from self deception (passion, aggression, and stupidity) which mean not only not killing, avoiding self indulgence, and sexual misconduct, but the just relations with the world around us: action as compassion and generosity.
   
   
5. Right livelihood - ways of living in the world that are not founded on increased distortions of reality, deception and theft of either goods or life.
   
   
6. Right effort - When we perceive clearly, think completely, talk, act and live in a way that recognises the world (and ourselves) for what it is, rather than what we desire or fear it to be, we are ready to make a leap, not of faith as Kierkegaard, the Christian theologian taught, but of our own effort and will to stay with the real, rather than within the piteous graspings born of desire or fear.
   
   
7. Right mindfulness - making the leap, having the will to stay in the world as it is, rather than the falsity of our own passion, needs, wants, and foolishness is to sense the world and our selves as it is - and having grasped this this, to remain there is right mindfulness, the way of awakening to real freedom.
   
   
8. Right practice - the methods, that strand of Buddhist teaching called Zen says are the surest path to genuine freedom from our passions, aggression, and foolishness or stupidity is through the practice of zazen and a cluster of related disciplines like koan study, and that these are not just tools to get to some other place or understanding, but are themselves liberation. 

Awakening or enlightenment doesn't remove us from the world. Like Siddhārtha Gautama, when we experience awakening we will continue to live, and will someday die. But in life and death alike we know the world and our lives with a beautiful and terrible clarity, that brings with it genuine benevolence, care, and love.

There are Zen monasteries, communities and sitting groups across North America, and I'd encourage all my readers to find and join one. There are, regrettably, a number of "fake" teachers, especially on the internet. If you're looking for a group or teacher and are unsure of how to distinguish the real from the fake, feel free to email or comment here, and I'll try to be of help.

You can find a series of brief lectures on the Eightfold Path here, given by Anzan Hoshin Roshi of the White Wind Zen Community in Canada.
___________

* Japan, whose Zen practice laid the groundwork for much of the growth of Buddhism in North America and Europe adopted the Western calendar in the late 19th Century, fixing religious and secular remembrances to dates in a 365 day calendar. Much of the rest of Buddhism ties these dates to a lunar calendar, so the date seems to wander in the eyes of the West.

Jefferson and America's Lost Liberties

Portrait of Jefferson by  

Charles Wilson Peale, 1791

I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

- Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison,  30 January 1787

For all his failings, not least his slave holding and his views of the First Nations peoples whose lands he coveted for the American Republic, Thomas Jefferson was nonetheless the architect of America's now lost conception of liberty. Deeply formed by both the philosophers of an earlier generation called Humanists, and even more by his European philosophical contemporaries, the early advocates of the Enlightenment, Jefferson taught without hesitation that the rights of humankind to liberty, to strive for happiness, to speak freely without fear of reprisal, to believe or not believe in divinity, and to equal justice before the law are all apparent as the natural product of reason. He taught that the moral obligation of a fearless conscience is the defence of these rights. The famous quote that appears above is part of a larger argument, that it is the nature of government to seek power, to gather power and to exert power at the expense of natural human liberty. 

Rebellions, said Jefferson, are the people’s way of putting governments in their place as servants to the people, not their masters. In the generations since the Second World War we have seen rebellions in America: both the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement were precisely the kinds of correctives Jefferson envisioned. But at the same time and since, aided by changes in technology and communications, as well as a spirit of fear fostered by our government -- first the 1950’s Red Scares, secondly the fear of annihilation that pervaded the Cold War with the USSR, and today, the government’s drumbeat of fear and economic loss that blend the image of terror with the faces of ethnic and religious difference.

American government has become a tyranny all but unrestrained by the freedoms Jefferson saw as unalienable rights, our rights to free speech, to unfettered communication and thought, to travel where and how we please, to champion the causes that appeal to our hearts, and to command equal protection under the law, all have been scoured away by technologies of surveillance, by legal acts that deprive of an unfettered right to habeas corpus, that permit secret courts, secret warrants and secret trials, even secret detention and torture, all in the name of “Homeland Security.” 

Never has tyranny had a better friend than the tiny minorities of religious fanatics, both Muslim and Christian that have engaged in acts of terror, save one, those who have taken advantage of terror to establish their own power by trampling ours. Today we suffer under an administration that trades on fear, that asks us to hate that we might fear all the more. What should our response to such tyrants be? I know the answer Jefferson offered. I’m not sure that Americans have the stomach for liberty today. I know what Jefferson the revolutionary taught, but it’s so much easier to live behind walls of hate, to trade the depth of conscience liberty demands for these superficial protections from our fears. 

DHH

Here is the complete text of Jefferson’s letter, written 232 years ago:

Dear Sir,

My last to you was of the 16th of December; since which, I have received yours of November 25 and December 4, which afforded me, as your letters always do, a treat on matters public, individual, and economical. I am impatient to learn your sentiments on the late troubles in the Eastern states. So far as I have yet seen, they do not appear to threaten serious consequences. Those states have suffered by the stoppage of the channels of their commerce, which have not yet found other issues. This must render money scarce and make the people uneasy. This uneasiness has produced acts absolutely unjustifiable; but I hope they will provoke no severities from their governments. A consciousness of those in power that their administration of the public affairs has been honest may, perhaps, produce too great a degree of indignation; and those characters, wherein fear predominates over hope, may apprehend too much from these instances of irregularity. They may conclude too hastily that nature has formed man insusceptible of any other government than that of force, a conclusion not founded in truth or experience. Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable: (1) without government, as among our Indians; (2) under governments, wherein the will of everyone has a just influence, as is the case in England, in a slight degree, and in our states, in a great one; (3) under governments of force, as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the other republics.

To have an idea of the curse of existence under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is a problem, not clear in my mind, that the first condition is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population. The second state has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness. It has its evils, too, the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing.  [loosely Better the evils of liberty than the quiescence of servitude -- Jefferson is quoting from Rousseau's Social Contract of 1762 - ed.]. Even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs. I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. If these transactions give me no uneasiness, I feel very differently at another piece of intelligence, to wit, the possibility that the navigation of the Mississippi may be abandoned to Spain. I never had any interest westward of the Allegheny; and I will never have any. But I have had great opportunities of knowing the character of the people who inhabit that country; and I will venture to say that the act which abandons the navigation of the Mississippi is an act of separation between the Eastern and Western country. It is a relinquishment of five parts out of eight of the territory of the United States; an abandonment of the fairest subject for the payment of our public debts, and the chaining those debts on our own necks, in perpetuum. I have the utmost confidence in the honest intentions of those who concur in this measure; but I lament their want of acquaintance with the character and physical advantages of the people, who, right or wrong, will suppose their interests sacrificed on this occasion to the contrary interests of that part of the confederacy in possession of present power. If they declare themselves a separate people, we are incapable of a single effort to retain them. Our citizens can never be induced, either as militia or as soldiers, to go there to cut the throats of their own brothers and sons, or rather, to be themselves the subjects instead of the perpetrators of the parricide. Nor would that country quit the cost of being retained against the will of its inhabitants, could it be done. But it cannot be done. They are able already to rescue the navigation of the Mississippi out of the hands of Spain, and to add New Orleans to their own territory. They will be joined by the inhabitants of Louisiana. This will bring on a war between them and Spain; and that will produce the question with us, whether it will not be worth our while to become parties with them in the war in order to reunite them with us and thus correct our error. And were I to permit my forebodings to go one step further, I should predict that the inhabitants of the United States would force their rulers to take the affirmative of that question. I wish I may be mistaken in all these opinions.

Yours affectionately, Th. Jefferson