TIBETSPACE

WELCOME TO TIBETSPACE

Welcome to TIBETSPACE, a blog in the process of changing. Begun as a site for all things Tibetan, all things Tibetan has dramatically expanded as His Holiness has created conversations that continually transcend traditional cultural boundaries.  So I will try to chart some of those conversations here, always keeping His Holiness's views in mind, but also trying to show how long those views are.

TIBETAN INDEPENDENCE DAY: FOUR OBSERVATIONS

Marking the 51st anniversary of the Tibetan uprising in Lhasa, Tibet activists around the world today are waving flags, posting their support, making mo-mo's, and otherwise showing their support for His Holiness and the Tibetan people. Significantly, the mayor of Saint Paul, Chris Coleman opposed Chinese pressure and issued a proclamation in support of the Tibetan people.  Good for Mayor Coleman and good for the people of St. Paul.  Americans are generally sympathetic to the Tibetan cause when they are in full possession of the facts.

Four things to keep in mind as we mark this momentous day in Tibetan history:

1. Regardless of the rhetoric indicating otherwise, the Dalai Lama is enormously important to Tibet's future.  Tibet's government-in-exile has never been officially recognized, and as a result, it lacks many of the diplomatic advantages that such recognition would bestow on it. The Dalai Lama, one of the most effective and persuasive politicians of the twentieth century, has stepped into the breach and carried the Tibetan cause around the globe.  Most of us who support Tibet do so because of his His Holiness's boundless energy and charisma.  His advocacy cannot be over-estimated; neither can his eventual absence from the Tibetan stage.  The Chinese, of course, know this.
2. Americans!  Listen up!  Democracy and self-determination are not the same thing!  Americans, particularly, should realize that we have an opportunity now to remedy certain aspects of our past bungled foreign policy, attempting to "install democracies" where democracies were unwarranted or, even worse, unwanted.  It isn't up to Americans to foster democracy among the Tibetan people in exile or in Tibet.  If we wish to foster anything among the Tibetans, we need to foster the Tibetan people's journey toward self-determination.  Democracy and self-determination . . . they are, believe it or not, two different things.  And as Americans, we wouldn't tolerate a similar confusion directed toward our own national aspirations.  We need to extend the same consideration to the Tibetans.
3. Guess what!  Not all Tibetans are monks or nuns!  The Tibetans will be electing a new Prime Minister in 2011, and as Samdhong Rimpoche steps down from his post, the opportunity arises for Tibetans to elect someone from outside of the monastic community.  This could have an enormous impact on the Tibetan diaspora and the Tibetans currently living in Tibet--it is certainly worth watching, and certainly worth attempting to understand.
4. Very few Tibetans live in exile:  in fact, approximately .025 % of them are living outside of Tibet.  And most of us know very little about the 6 million who are carrying on under horrendous conditions within Tibet. Understandably, His Holiness and the Tibetans who are living in exile have continually maintained that the 6 million living in Tibet continue to be their main focus.  Americans, on the other hand, have shaped their impressions of Tibet through their contact with the Tibetan diaspora, a very small percentage of the Tibetan people indeed.  Our support of Tibet should frankly recognize this phenomenon.  It is perhaps unique in modern foreign relations.

BILL MCKIBBEN: UPDATING THE ENVIRONMENT

Bill McKibben, whose ground-breaking work, The End of Nature, foretold global warming and a host of other problems that now plague our earth, provides a timely and sane update on the environment.  I post it here simply because environmental issues have now become inextricably tied to human rights issues, and the discussion of the environment now impinges directly on the discussion of human viability on the planet, all concerns very  much on His Holiness's mind.

FREE TIBET BURNOUT

 So we learned today that the Chinese have launched yet another "Strike Hard" campaign in Lhasa, anticipating March 10 when the Tibetans generally celebrate their uprising, which occurred 51 years ago. The more things change, the more things stay the same.  

The problem is that all of us who are concerned about Tibet, and all of us who tend to privilege Tibet in those concerns, ultimately reach an impasse.  If we're not in positions of international power, or if we don't speak Tibetan or Chinese, or if we've made no progress in getting Rosetta Stone to do an edition on Tibetan (why they refuse to do so is one of the great mysteries of the universe . . . not),  or if we don't find ourselves on the verge of Enlightenment, how long can we remain engaged?  Particularly when the level of engagement that we have mustered seems to have had very little impact on the Tibetan situation.

As one of my friends asked me the other day, "Do you suffer at times from TAB Syndrome, Tibetan Activist Burnout?"

Of course I do.  Even Gandhi tired of the Indian campaign at times, and at the end of Rick Ray's wonderful film, "10 Questions for the Dalai Lama," His Holiness himself says that he dreams one day of escaping to a remote spot, like "a wounded animal," where he might undertake a modest spiritual practice.  A "wounded animal?"  His Holiness?

Wow.

Online access to world events keeps us constantly informed of the world's problems, but it doesn't supply us with the ways and means to solve or even minimally address those problems, and therein lies the Burnout Gap.

We can't maintain the proper enthusiasm for reform when we are continually confronted with unsolvable problems, like the latest installment of the "Strike Hard" campaign.  So what to do?  More to the point, what did Gandhi do, or His Holiness, whenever this gap between problem and solution yawns?

Every day Gandhi spun his thread, and every day His Holiness rises early to do his prostrations, say his prayers, and engage his meditation.  No muss, no fuss, no international  implications, no convened panels, no lists of talking points, no multi-national directives.  Every day, action is first directed toward the readily achievable:  I can do a prostration; I can sit in silent meditation for 10 minutes; I can hoe a row, or spin a thread.  These things I can do.  

If, by the by, Tibet becomes free, well, then, that's fine too.

But if we undertake these readily achievable actions with a degree of intelligence, choosing them wisely with what the Buddhists call skillful means, or upaya, we can then begin to make a difference.  The American Trappist monk, Thomas Merton wrote:

The 'fabric' of society is not finished.  It is always in 'becoming.'  It is on the loom, and it is made up of constantly changing relationships. . . .

And because each of us lives on that loom, each of us is 'constantly changing relationships' by the lives we choose to live.  And because those lives are characterized largely by our actions, we change the fabric of society by undertaking the right actions. And right actions can't possibly, in the beginning, be conceived of as "freeing Tibet." But they can be conceived of as completing ten prostrations and knowing all the while that a completed prostration does as much or more to the loom than simply harboring a dream of a free Tibet.

It turns out, though, that you can't really achieve the achievable without some sense of a distant goal, a free Tibet, for example.  But the distant goal often takes our gaze away from the near-to-hand.

Still, that's a problem that's easily solved.  Just do what you can do.  And be glad that you did.  And if done with the proper motivation, these actions will have a profound effect on the loom where all of us live.

 

THE CHARTER FOR COMPASSION

In a previous posting, I alerted our readers to The Charter for Compassion, an attempt to encourage all of us, in a self-aware kind of way, to examine and practice the fundamental ethics of compassion.  It's a good-hearted, well organized attempt to raise awareness in all of us, and it attempts to do it in a non-religious fashion. . . And I hope that it's been successful.

At any rate, the Charter itself has now been published, and you can read it, and if you so choose, sign it below.  (I was contacted by one of the members of the organization and asked if I might include it on TIBETSPACE.)

A NEW YEAR MESSAGE FROM TIBETSPACE

New Year’s Day, 2010.  Very cold.  My daughter, who just arrived at the tail end of 2009, is sleeping in her rocking chair at my side.  Many years ago, the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats, also received the gift of a daughter in winter as he was full-stride into his life, and he wrote an extraordinary poem about her.  It is called “A Prayer for My Daughter;” here are the first two stanzas, two of the most gorgeous in the English language:

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid

Under this cradle-hood and coverlid

My child sleeps on.  There is no obstacle

But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill

Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,

Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;

And for an hour I have walked and prayed

Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

 

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour

And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,

And under the arches of the bridge, and scream

In the elms above the flooded stream;

Imagining in excited reverie

That the future years had come,

Dancing to a frenzied drum,

Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

 I have often thought of this poem at critical periods in my life, in my friends’ lives, in my country’s careening life.  It speaks directly to the fact of change and the fear that often accompanies such change—“imagining . . . that the future years had come” is how Yeats phrases it, and in one sense, the purpose of these two stanzas is to announce this coming change and to plea for the courage and fortitude to accept, endure, and finally thrive and grow within this change.

 But, in all of us, change brings out the fear of loss, and the fear of loss generates an accompanying will to protect and defend those things we feel are most threatened by this envisioned loss.  And so we struggle to make good decisions about what we can afford to lose, about what price we will pay if we decide to defend those things we feel we cannot live without . . . those things that we have, at times in our history, called “sacred,” or “unalienable,” or “natural,” or “just,” or even “American.”

 The past year has seen many such defenses undertaken for many such causes:  in Tibet, in China, throughout Africa, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan.  All of us who were listening have, to use Yeats’ phrasing, “heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower.” 

 But if we are listening from America—and America has announced its intention to listen on a global scale, and having listened, to intervene and act where we deem it appropriate to intervene and act—we might pause for a moment and have a look at the national compass as we begin the New Year.

Americans will have blood on their hands again—trying vainly, it seems at times, to winddown the war in Iraq as we kick-start the one in Afghanistan, we will see the death toll begin to rise.  These numbers—and bodies—will be largely hidden from public view—nothing new in that—but the families, communities, and loved ones who are affected by our continuous war will be spared nothing in the way of grief and deprivation. 

 I do not envy those who find that they must argue for a just war; I would only wish for them clarity as they come to terms with the implications of their decision.

 Americans will be denied the full public health care they deserve because of simple greed at the corporate and political level.  It is not complicated.  As our politicians struggle to decide how many multi-million dollar homes are appropriate for our health-care executives, my wife’s nurse, Diana, is meeting her at the wound clinic on holidays, evenings, whenever it is appropriate and necessary, to dress the re-opened C-section that is now part of her recovery process.  The doctors, of course, are uncomfortable talking about the problem.

I hope that Diana, and all those like her, someday receive their just rewards.  It is difficult to take our politicians seriously when confronted with the likes of Diana.  And she is not a rarity in this country.  By the time a Senator votes for an important piece of legislation, particularly social legislation, a sizable proportion of the electorate is already practicing it far away from the antiquated and gridlocked spectacle on the Hill.  We shouldn’t have to wait for our politicians to endorse an evolving reality.  And thank God we don’t; thank God Diana didn’t. Harry Reid has nothing to do with available health care; Diana does.

Human rights, partly because of the Internet, has become a larger part of our daily reality.  While Obama’s Nobel speech was disappointing, it was the only speech he could have given, and the Prize made it more difficult for Americans to ignore the fact that much of the world looks to us now to play a prominent role in this struggle.  The decision to give Obama the Peace Prize amounted to a plea for America’s assistance in bringing human rights to all who are living without them.

 My hope is that we will respond with intelligence and compassion to the human rights issue, but one thing is clear:  our elected officials cannot do it.  The story goes that when FDR was discussing the formation of The New Deal and Social Security, he said to one of the program’s most ardent advocates, who was questioning FDR’s commitment, “Of course, I agree with you and the proposed programs.  Now go out and make me support it.”

 I occasionally get the feeling that Obama is genuinely sympathetic to human rights.  If only someone would make him take action on his sympathies.  This would require an organized lobby to bring diplomacy into alliance with a non-violent practice, and that’s a tall order, taller, at least, than any Senator or Representative currently roaming D.C.

 When we think of the marquis human rights activists over the last century—Gandhi, Tutu, King, the Dalai Lama—we see that they were not elected officials, and that they gained clear advantages from not having to satisfy an electorate’s whims, demands, and wishes. 

 But this much seems clear.  From where I stand, I see a world that is simultaneously violent and compassionate, and with a wide and ever-changing spectrum between them.  Slide the mixing tab along the spectrum, like one of the color scales on your computer, and you change the proportions of compassion and violence.  Happily or sadly, again, from where I stand, I also don’t see the tab being pushed to one extreme or the other.  I suspect that we will never entirely rid ourselves of violence, nor will we ever entirely lapse into the kind of bestiality we associate with genocide.

 But I do see some pushing going on, and I do see the pressures levied by that pushing as driving the evolution of human consciousness.  So when America commits troops to Afghanistan, and the tab slides a little more toward the violent pole, and when we listen to the reasons explaining why such a commitment had to made, it is time then to push back, and if nothing else envision the alternatives, write about those alternatives, sing about those alternatives, Hell, even bore your friends stiff about those alternatives, and ever so slightly our consciousness is modified, and the tab inches back, just a hair, toward compassion.

 Gandhi, King, Tutu, His Holiness—these are the big tab-pushers, and it’s sometimes easy for us to feel that our efforts, when compared to the work of these extraordinary figures, is at best insignificant. 

But that’s not so.  If we look back over the last several million years of human evolution, it’s clear that while smaller brains have been turned in for larger ones, and four feet for two feet, human consciousness is also undergoing fundamental changes as well.  I’m not qualified to discuss this in any detail, but I am qualified to suggest that human consciousness is more easily and beneficially modified by each of us than is the current size of our brain or the existence of our wisdom teeth.  I’d footnote here the last 2500 year of Indian philosophy.

 You can, in fact, adjust your awareness of the world around you, make substantial changes in how you react to it, and in so doing become a bit of a tab-pusher yourself.

 So start there.  2010 will be glad you did.  And so will my daughter.

AND SO THE SPEECH IS DONE . . .

Thank God, it’s over. 

   I’d dreaded Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech because I figured it couldn’t go well.  And it didn’t.  The essential ingredients here didn’t promise much:  a talented young man who’d been given an award that he and legions of others said he didn’t deserve; a commander-in-chief on the brink of continuing America’s policy of waging perpetual war for an illusive peace by committing 30,000 troops to Afghanistan with no real way of determining when and how we might declare an old-fashioned military victory in the new-fangled post-9/11 world and so bring the troops home; the ghost of MLK, Jr., peering down, who’d publicly and dramatically refused to support war which, as Obama was about to announce, he felt compelled to support; an adoring and slightly condescending European public that our President had recently angered by turning down the traditional invitations extended Nobel Laureates—put all of these together, and you’ve got a recipe for bad prose, empty abstractions, and heart-felt posturing. 

Obama's assignment in Oslo amounted to a rhetorical exercise that the most fiendish instructor of basic composition couldn’t devise:  send your country to war, defend that decision, and do this while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

 So I don’t blame Obama for his speech; I believe that Obama is a decent, honest, and intelligent man. (Who else would've spent much of the past two months repeatedly reminding us that he didn’t really deserve to stand with most of the previous winners?)  But even a President as studious as Obama certainly is couldn’t bring in high marks for this one.

 Oddly, I wanted to blame someone for Obama’s speech, so I blamed the Nobel Committee for putting Obama in this untenable position--asking him to write an essay that no human being could write.  I think they did this because Obama has been—to appropriate Edward Said’s term—‘orientalized’ by the Europeans.  It turns out, as he showed the committee in Oslo, that his passport doesn’t say ‘Shangri-La.’  He’s a talented and able politician who is also black. Another problem:  Obama fell into the category of what William Jelani Cobb and others have called “Negro Firsts:” 

In the cavalcade of heroes that we trot out each Black History Month, there is a special VIP section reserved for Negro Firsts.  The belief is that each one is a barometer charting the falling pressures of racism in America . . . The job is not enviable:  the First is generally required to perform a high-wire act in hurricane winds (Cobb, “The Tragedy of Colin Powell”).

 

And so the hurricane winds in Oslo were set in motion by the likes of Mandela, King, the Dalai Lama, Aung Sang Suu Kyi, and a host of other humanitarians who’d given their careers to fighting human oppression and war, and many of whom had suffered greatly during their struggle.  Obama wilted under that comparison, as all of us would, and it’s not his fault.  The Nobel Peace Arena is simply not his arena.  Not yet.  He doesn’t have the chops to thrive and represent himself credibly among that kind of company.

 But Obama did what he could, while continually—painfully, at times—reminding us that there wasn’t much he could do, credibly, in this company.  He was humble in the face of those who had gone before him, and he tried honestly to claim that his job description as Commander-in-Chief of the United States held him to a different standard than those articulated by King and Gandhi (who never won the award—does Obama know this?) and the followers of non-violence.  This much is clear:  American Presidents are going to be intimately involved with war and violence on many fronts, and that would seem to hamper their efforts to win the Prize.  Obama might realistically have won it when he brokered a deal to end the war he starts—that’s an American’s best shot at winning it nowadays in our role of Big Stick Carrier.  (I know what you’re thinking:  but to imply that Americans didn’t play a role in creating the problems that Jimmy Carter helped to solve is naïve.)

 So Obama talked about the notion of the just war, which in some ways, has become, philosophically, the last refuge of war-makers.  And if you believe it’s a bit incongruous that a Nobel Peace Laureate would find himself in his acceptance speech defending war, you’d be right.  It hadn’t happened before, and it must have been difficult to do it.  Ever since Constantine took Christianity, an essentially non-violent religion, and made it the state religion of the Roman empire, Christian apologists—Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas most famously among them—have been struggling to justify the wholesale slaughter of our fellow human beings.  It’s probably best to keep religion out of war, and see it for what I’ve always thought war was:  the business end of politics.

 But Obama couldn’t do that because he was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, and that’s not the place for political expediency, and so he wound up with idealistic phrases like, “cultural leveling of modernity,” and “the continued expansion of our moral imagination,” and Bushisms like “evil does exist in the world,” and fifty-cent phrases that wouldn’t survive a freshman essay like, “the intractability of depravation.”  And several split infinitives, which his political career will survive.  And an uncharacteristically hazy notion of the subject he was addressing—just war—and an even more uncharacteristic inability to focus on his theme.  His speech wandered from abstraction to abstraction, and never developed an argument that would seem appropriate to the occasion.

 He was given a homework assignment that no one could complete.

 Note to Obama and his writers:  “just war” has been heavily scrutinized since 9/11, particularly that part about how you know you’ve won because you’re not fighting conventional forces who think of defeat in conventional terms.  The kind of forces that await our troops in Afghanistan are always “down” in those same traditional terms, but they’re never “out.”  Which has profound implications for how we decide when it’s time for us to get out.  Obama never mentioned this complexity because this wasn’t an address to the Joint Chiefs; this was a Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech. 

 Again, his difficulty here was rhetorical. 

 I don’t know who Obama’s speech writers are, but this one seemed to have been the labor of a long night flight to Oslo.

 And when he finally turned to give his advice for achieving a “just and lasting peace,” he had three things on his mind:  1) developing alternatives to violence; 2) achieving a peace based on “the inherent rights and dignity of every individual;” 3) insuring that such a peace secures economic rights for all.

 But all I could think of, all I could hear, as the plan unfolded was Obama’s commitment to send 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.  Which makes his peace rhetoric a bit more rhetorical than it ought to have been.

 The speech was interrupted by applause only once, and the audience seemed to grow increasingly uncomfortable with what was unfolding before them.  Maybe they were beginning to understand that an American president is commander-in-chief of an aggressive nation traditionally and perennially committed to war, and that even though many things have changed in this country to elect such a man as Barack Obama, the essential international mission of our country—that we must police the world—has not changed, and that the spirit of this singular and talented man would be unable to represent the spirit of the Nobel Peace Prize in any speech that aimed for honesty.

 So Obama did what he had to do.  No one can envy him his task here.  He separated himself from the marquee peace-makers that came before him—the Dalai Lama’s absence from his remarks was glaring, but Obama was in a difficult position again, having earlier bowed to China’s demands to postpone meeting His Holiness when he traveled to Washington in the Fall—and reminded his audience that he is, in fact, a war-maker, like practically every President before him. 

 It was a sobering message, I am sure, for the Nobel people to hear, but someone had to tell them.

 

 

CHRYSLER & HUMAN RIGHTS? WE'RE KIDDING, SURELY?

 I saw the commercial the other day, but having just returned home from the hospital with a newborn, I was blind with exhaustion, and didn't pay it much mind.  A bunch of big, black Chryslers carrying Nobel Laureates to a recent meeting in Berlin.  And then a white one pulls up, it's empty, and the narrator, with real gravitas, informs us that "this film is dedicated to Aung San Suu Kyi, still prisoner in Burma."  And the parting shot: "Chrysler:  For a World Without Walls."  

Really?  Chrysler?  A world without walls?  Why now this stream of visual rhetoric about human rights coming from a greedily managed American multi-national corporation?

You can, of course, slap the Marxist template on this little film and have a blast.  As long as Chrysler had a solvent, money-making operation that thrived on extracting maximum profit from the buying public while, for years, delivering a product vastly inferior, for example, to its Asian counterparts in the auto industry, then the only "rights" that concerned Chrysler were the ones that the unions forced them to acknowledge.  Human rights, on the other hand, is based on altruism, on the understanding that no one's rights are less important than your own, whether you are defining those rights as individual, communal, or corporate.  

Altruism, then, is the first outward sign of an inward and invisible commitment to human rights.  

And altruism has very little to do with the core principles of capitalism.  So altruism has very little to do with Chrysler.  You can say this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm content simply to call it, for now, a thing.  It is what it is.

But let's look at it another way.  While I don't for a minute believe that Chrysler's ad people are driven by a consuming passion for "a world without walls," I do feel that they are trying to save their company by advertising; because a successful ad campaign attempts to uncover a popular cultural practice or a deeply held and not quite articulated opinion and align it with a product, it might be logical to assume that the advertising people at Chrysler recently had one of those light-bulb moments.  

I can hear it now.

"It's come to our attention," one exec begins, "that this human rights thing is hot.  Not only that, but over there in Burma, they've got this woman, like, imprisoned, and she's getting tons of attention in Europe and Asia, and so we can play the HR card and the gender card at the same time.  And don't forget two more things:  we supplied the cars for those Laureates recently in Berlin, and Obama himself, we hope, will soon be stepping out of one of our cars, 'cause he's a Laureate, and you know how big he is in Europe.  So this is a no-brainer.  Let's get on the HR bandwagon and put more people in our cars."

So human rights has shown up on Chrysler's radar.  Let's call this a good thing, not because we suspect that Chrysler is about to become a massive non-profit for human rights, but because human rights workers have infiltrated a way of thinking that, while still fundamentally opposed to the founding principles of altruism, has been forced to acknowledge, in the only way it can, that those who fight for a world without walls are worth paying attention to just now.

That the Chrysler people are endorsing a way of life that, if fully realized, would dismantle their operation either hasn't occurred to them yet or would seem to them to present little threat to their confidence in human greed and materialism.

JON STEWART AND THE DALAI LAMA

Maybe, just maybe, there's one other person on the planet, aside from myself, who missed Stewart's take on Obama deciding not to meet with His Holiness.  

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Hell No, Dalai
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

ROBERT THURMAN, ONCE AGAIN, ON TIBET, CHINA, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The indefatigable Robert Thurman on Tibet, China, and the simple question, 'Why the Dalai Lama matters.'  And atheism, and the political right, and anything else that crosses his mind and fall within the wide arena of Tibet and His Holiness.

CHARTER FOR COMPASSION

The Charter for Compassion is one of the organizations that is trying to respond productively to the widespread human suffering that has become part of the daily experience of the citizens of developed countries.  Never before has the middle class, normally insulated from such suffering, had access to the fundamental images of deprivation, torture, homelessness, starvation, and environmental catastrophe that our online capabilities serve up nowadays on a continual basis.  The point is that when exposed to atrocity, most people want to do something about it.  And with such massive exposure now in play, Charter for Compassion is trying to provide people with ways of facilitatingthat response.  So have a look at the video below, visit the website, and figure out your own response.  There are lots of implications to projects like this one, and I'll be looking at some of them in the future.

CHARTER FOR COMPASSION TRAILER from TED Prize on Vimeo.