It's not fair

It was not strong enough to be called a craving - my decision this morning to go to my computer and automatically renew a prescription. Should take five minutes at most. Then I wanted to finish carrying trash out of the kitchen, get dressed, meditate, blog before I left for lunch.

I will not try to trace the labyrinthine depths in which I got lost as the prescription site refused to boot up, would not tell me how to put this scrip on auto renew, refused to print an order form, and so on. It is not fair, it's not right! As I saw how the hands of the clock had crept on - I hate time - I realized my spacious morning had been lost to this idiocy. I told Tom I felt like flying a plane into my computer.

Of course Wun is preoccupied with the fantastical narrative of Andrew Stack, who did commit suicide by flying a plane into an IRS agency yesterday. It happened on two channels before my eyes in real time (real time, there's a thought) as I worked away on the Nustep in my health club, making up for the sedentary affluent life to which I am not entitled.

From what I read, Stack had a righteous grievance against an unjust tax law that has prevented many computer engineers like himself from making a living self-employed. If you read his entire 3000 word statement, this is inextricable from money, money. And from some belief that the regulations of a huge bureaucracy ought to be comprehensible, and kind, that one man ought to be able to change things.

I learned about unfairness and being kept ruthlessly under the heal of Authority when I was eight years old, and my mother gave my chocolate pudding to my brother, to stop his tantrum. I recall how frustrated both she and I felt as he lay kicking and screaming on the floor, then holding his breath and turning from red to a bluish-white? I said it, "It isn't fair!" Children have a keen sense of fairness.

I was not tempted to violence in return. I suppose I moped, a kind of kid depression called pouting, which you're not allowed to do. Is violence not what girls do by nature, having little testoserone, or is it conditioning? Both, I think.

The world I grew up in was affluent and safe from overt violence, but heavily unfair. Loaded against women. Run by the Bernie Madoffs. Once in a while the system cracks and some lava of justice pours through, and a Madoff gets put in jail. I find it tremendously amusing that one of his investors has written a book about how she now fears "being a bag lady."

Andrew Stack took money very seriously. And his ability to fan his own belief that the world should be fair, and his anger that it wasn't, were so developed that he set fire to his house before he took off. His wife had taken herself and daughter away the night before, afraid of his gathering rage. I suppose he wanted to leave her nothing. A real man, acting like men are supposed to in America.

Oh, Buddhism, speak to me. Doesn't the Buddha's story tell us with breathtaking clarity that the road to enlightenment is not entitlement, but includes giving up everything you were taught could be yours, your kingdom? In some lineages, monks still make patchwork robes of used materials - recently I read an interview in which the Dalai Lama talked about that. He said, This way we have nothing to lose.

Nothing to grasp. No desires. No well-developed dreams, fantasies of what you need in life to be happy. No hatreds, abandon even them. Imagine that.

No opinion

I just posted the following on facebook -

I'd like to write a Facebook quiz in which all the choices are No Opinion. Like
(a) no opinion because I don't care
(b) no opinion because I don't really know enough about it
(c) This is not important enough to have an opinion about
(d) I have embarrassed myself expressing opinions in the past.
(e) I think opinions are inherently divisive.
Then I could collate the results and announce that the respondents were in universal agreement.

Where was I coming from with this? Ah, yes. Experience. There was immediate experience, reports on facebook about a teenage boy in Georgia who insists on dressing in drag in school. Who did I side with, facebook asked me? Actually, with the poor Principal and guidance counselor, who I pictured holding their heads in their hands. As I got into the story, quick before it goes away, I learned that Jonathan would not settle for being the only student in school allowed to use the administrator's restroom; he insisted on going into the girl's. On the other hand, there he is in lipstick and heels, do you want him going into the boy's? These are the weird dilemmas of a country where individual freedom is valued.

On the more serious side, there was my experience the other day at what was called A Listening Session at church. This was a carefully designed opportunity to express our uh-oh opinions about what we want in an associate minister (yes, this is a Unitarian church). Despite expert leadership, it veered quite naturally into more and larger opinions, a chance to state our own backed-up ideas and grievances. I found myself running out of time expressing my conviction that the church needs to address the needs of the variously handicapped (such as me, with hearing impairment) in a serious way.

It's not that my opinions are wrong. This one was right, everyone seemed to see it. There wasn't any conflict on the subject. What got me was my sudden realization that I was really wound up. Boy, did I have opinions, and the more I said them, the harder I believed them, and the more energy I had. My frustration had been hiding down there, left over from a Memorial Service at which I couldn't hear, because the earphones were not charged. So it was good for me to address the problem.

Sometimes people talk about justice being fueled by anger, that this is a good use of our anger. Thus I have attached a picture of Manjushri, the Buddhist icon who represents wisdom. He is usually shone wielding a sword. But it isn't supposed to lead to bloodshed, but to be the sword of clear wisdom, cutting through the nonsense to the heart of the issue, and leading to skillful action.