Democracy - it's scarier than you think...

06/22/09 • -1 min

Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining

How responsible are we for our country’s actions? The US government has deliberately done the following: Spied on its citizens, jailed them without benefit of council, flouted the rule of Habeas Corpus, a fundamental human right which dates all the way back to the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, bombed and massacred civilians, overthrown peaceful, democratically-elected governments and mined the harbors of nations with which it was not at war, tortured prisoners, beaten people demonstrating peacefully, and often legally, for all manner of things, stolen land, exterminated indigenous peoples, polluted and irradiated its citizens, tested pathogens and nerve agents on prisoners, and too many other things to mention.
Currently, we are at war. Every week brings news that tens, even hundreds of civilians have died from our raids, firefights, drone attacks, bombings. The fact that the enemy often uses an essentially captive local population as human shields is often cited as the ‘reason’ such carnage has been visited upon them, as if that justifies the deaths of completely innocent men, women and children.
Yet we do nothing. By and large we did nothing while men and women were beaten in Selma, while the Bush administration kidnapped and tortured hundreds of people in black sites around the world.
And there are more tacit, implicit crimes we fail to object to with our bodies, our fortunes, our sacred honor:
The US Government spends my tax dollars on nuclear weapons that I am morally opposed to, and I go along with it, because the alternative, going to prison, is too unpalatable for me. It squanders my hard earned pay on over 1000 military installations around the world, many of which are a plague upon local peoples. From the birth defects and miscarriages in the Philippines caused by widespread pollution at Clark air force base to the theft of land, irradiation and impoverishment that our bases have visited upon hundreds of communities in places like Micronesia, America has stained other peoples with our profligate waste and heavy hand.
We are told over and over that America stands for peace, freedom, democracy. People the world over can tell you that our actions starkly contradict our words. We do not even remotely walk our talk.
Here is our government’s idea of freedom: America ostensibly wanted the Palestinians to be free and Democratic, until they freely and democratically voted in a regime that the US Government reviled. The fact that I revile Hamas too is unimportant; the people spoke. Along with Israel, America responded to Hamas’ win with an almost complete embargo, one that crippled the local economy and amounted to nothing less than collective punishment, which is prohibited under the Geneva Convention.
Being a democracy doesn’t ensure that we will be a force for good in the world. Hitler was voted in democratically. True, the Nazi’s themselves may have set the Reichstag fire, which catapulted the Nazi Party from a plurality to a majority, but subsequent elections ratified this state of affairs. The people, whether duped or not, willingly ushered in one of the darkest regimes in history. We the people can be stupid, easily manipulated, bigoted, violent, greedy.
Am I arguing against democracy? Not at all. As Winston Churchill said, it’s the worst of all political systems, except for all of the other ones.
But, we should realize that democracy, like almost any other human social construct, can and is used for both good and evil. Not only should we not feel smug about being the world’s oldest democracy, we should be alarmed at how dangerous and destructive ours is, and actively protest against the evil things it does in our name.
And sometimes that means breaking the law, through civil disobedience, just as those brave souls did in Selma so long ago.
When is that line crossable? When do we really stand up for freedom, true freedom, not some empty Neocon slogan that is an Orwellian synonym for control? When is it morally acceptable to revolt against the tyranny of the majority?
For me it boils down again to human rights. Are people’s rights being abridged? If so, we have the moral right to call people’s actions, government’s actions, into question.
In fact, we have the moral duty.
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Dalai Lama - Fundamentalist

The Dalai Lama – revered by many as a highly-enlightened being, a paragon of virtue, someone for us all to emulate.
But is he really so enlightened, or is his vision of humankind prejudiced? In his ironically-entitled book "Beyond Dogma," he wrote that "homosexuality, whether it is between men or between women, is not improper in itself. What is improper is the use of organs already defined as inappropriate for sexual contact." His form of Tibetan Buddhism, though not all forms of Buddhism, prohibits oral, anal and manual sex for heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. It has decided which of our body parts are acceptable for giving and receiving pleasure, and which aren’t. According to its... dogma, there will be a karmic debt to pay if we disobey.
The fact that I can find no reference that the Buddha himself ever addressed the issues of homosexuality, anal or oral sex is apparently immaterial; In yet another example of the supreme arrogance that only religion and politics can engender, some Tibetan ancient decided to define what the Buddha really meant by what he’d termed 'sexual misconduct'.
The Dalai Lama is a fundamentalist, not some new-age modernist, and fundamentalists are consummate dogmatists. Fundamentalist Christians are just as illogical: as far as I can see, the bible never states that lesbianism is a sin, yet they call it one, vociferously.
I believe that if there is a god he, she, it, or they created our bodies to be magnificently sensitive to pleasure. In my book, and I don’t think I’m alone here; sex is too joyous and profound to be reserved for procreation alone. Sex can be dangerous, of course. I am acutely aware of this as my own brother died of AIDS. But so can almost any human endeavor, from rock climbing to the consumption of ice cream sundaes.
William Butler Yeats said that love has pitched his tent in the place of excrement – meaning that humanity’s deranged hang-ups about sex arise from the fact that our primary sexual organs are also organs of elimination. This long-standing neurosis is quite evident in most religions – Eastern and Western alike..
The Dalai Lama is revered by new-agey folks the world over as enlightened and tolerant, yet he continues to parrot the backward, medieval prejudices of a religion that is in dire need of a Reformation. His books and photos adorn seemingly everyone’s home, but we pick and choose from his message, indulging in the parts that make us feel good, and delicately averting our gaze from the parts that make us uncomfortable.
Unlike Paganism and Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism are manifestly human-centric religions. All of their cosmologies involve the earth being just about the first thing to arise from the cosmos after the cosmos itself. Yet we now know from astronomy that our young planet is two thirds of the way out on the spiral arm of an ordinary galaxy that is one of at least 100 billion. We aren’t the center of anything.
Though these religions are obviously wrong in their most basic assumptions about the origin of the universe and the primacy of humanity, billions still follow their other, equally outmoded notions – except when it proves inconvenient – witness the millions of Catholics who practice birth control and get divorced. .
And if the religion in question represents some new and exotic import, we merely partake of its sweet, feel-good exterior, and politely ignore the integral parts that require disciplined work or make us uneasy. We are cultural dilettantes, essentially strip-mining every philosophy for its easy ore of ‘spirituality’.
The West is so thirsty for spirituality that we often assume that the ancients were wise and compassionate. I beg to differ. I believe that most religious texts, from the Bible and Quran to the Bhagavad Gita enshrine some aspects of the bloodthirsty, cruel, or bigoted failings of humankind. I do love parts of these books – as lyrically-written allegory. But I don’t rely on them to tell me right from wrong, or how to use my own body.
Nor do I rely on the Dalai Lama, who may be a decent, peace-loving man, but whose consciousness, from what I can see, is still somewhat limited by ancient prejudices.
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