Life without Hope

This morning, I was watching clips from a 1936 Russian film called "The Girlfriends" (Podrugi) with a score by Shostakovich. The film, a typical propaganda piece, features three young girls and a boy who get caught up in the chaos of World War I and the revolution. At the beginning, however, they are working at an American-owned rubber factory, when the oppressed workers call a strike. The children, desperate for any income at all, make an unsuccessful attempt to sing at a beer hall frequented by the workers and are booted out, but later, aided by a quirky old guy who befriends them, work their way back in, where they sing a beautiful and touching revolutionary anthem called "Tormented by a Lack of Freedom," when they are joined by all the men at the tavern. I looked up a translation to the lyrics to this anthem, which are filled with hope and defiance as they sing of a martyred leader:

"Like you, we may simply become

The soil for the new people,

Or a terrifying prophecy of the new,

Imminent and heroic days..."

Later, Shostakovich ironically incorporates this anthem, as a kind of dirge, in his Eighth Quartet, where it is both surrounded and interrupted by a terrifying, percussive three-chord sequence that immediately would recall, for the audience, the feared "knock on the door" during the Stalinist Terror.

Watching this clip, and thinking about these children in that dark time, and the hope and defiance they manifested for a better future, coupled with Shostakovich's later, bitterly ironic reflection on this early hope in the Eighth Quartet, I was also reminded of a comment made by one of my students at Hampton University several years ago, who remarked, about her enslaved ancestors, that "We are living our ancestors' dreams today."

And so we are--most of us in the middle classes and in the affluent North, anyway--who live in a globally interconnected world where we take computers, the Internet, cellphones, fast food, mobility, freedom, security, and general affluence for granted in ways that none of our ancestors could have dreamed.

And yet...we are also teetering on the brink of an incremental global apocalypse that will eclipse all previous catastrophes by a large margin--one where there is no escape at all--driven by three huge, interrelated terminal crises:

• our collapsing, debt-ridden global market economy, which is only the most visible symptom of...
• the inexorable peak and decline of the fossil-fuel based net energy upon which that global market economy is entirely dependent.
• a simultaneous global ecological collapse, driven above all by irreversible climate change from global heating, coupled with overpopulation, pollution, collapsing fisheries worldwide, depleted groundwater, the collapse of bee populations for pollination, deforestation, desertification, etc.

Anyone who takes a hard look at these current realities has little reason to harbor any hope for the future at all. Especially since our political systems, both here and throughout the world, have been hopelessly hijacked and corrupted--bought and sold--by large multinational corporations and their front groups like the Koch Brothers-funded "Tea Party" movement in the US, who, through the strident, hate-filled demagogues they sponsor on Fox News and Clear Channel radio, have stirred the TV-addled lumpen-proletariat into a frenzy of hatred and "patriotic" paranoia, thereby electing a fanatical congress who will destroy our government altogether before they allow it to raise the taxes of the super-rich or enact legislation protecting the environment or serving the public interest. The only branch of government they will leave untouched is, of course, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Military-Industrial complex, who will go about their business as usual, committing mass murder, torturing suspects in secret prisons, and sending drones out to terrorize Afghan villages that refuse to bow to the Karzai puppet-regime they have set up.

Where is all this headed? Nowhere, fast: a corporate-dominated mass media that maintains the illusion of democracy, by creating bread-and-circus elections and creating a consensual "reality" that bears little relation to anything real; meanwhile, well below the artificially generated, corporate-sponsored radar screen of public awareness, a corporate feeding frenzy on resources worldwide will wipe out any and all environmental protection. The Arctic ocean, Atlantic and Pacific will be open to offshore drilling, while oil shale fields, commercial fishing, hydrofracking for natural gas, mountaintop removal mining, and deforestation proceed without constraint; meanwhile, unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness, and general desperation will proliferate, along with crime, drugs, and random violence, while the middle and upper classes barricade themselves within gated communities--all prey, however, to rapidly rising fuel and food prices, layoffs, and more foreclosures...and anyone who attempts to mobilize the poor and destitute against the rich and well-protected will be ferreted out by internet surveillance and cellphone tapping, and be quietly spirited away and eliminated by paramilitary goon squads. Finally, we will face, worldwide, the grim specter of shrinking islands of fiercely defended affluence in the midst of a turbulent sea of random violence, despair, madness, starvation, disease, and chaos, while the climate gets steadily hotter, drier, and more turbulent, going into a self-accelerating feedback loop.

This is a future I would not wish on my worst enemy, yet it is the future we have created for our own children and grandchildren. And while I used to harbor a residual optimism that somehow a rapidly proliferating Gaia movement could somehow turn all this around before it is too late, that optimism has now vanished, particularly in light of this toxic, corporate-funded, neofascist "Tea Party" phenomenon, that is bringing out the worst in everyone: greed, willful ignorance, hatred, denial, and despair.

All of which, as always, begs the question: while our planet is going to hell, what is a Gaian Buddhist to do? My short answer is the same as it ever was:

Breathe, Observe, Let Go.

Be well, Do good work, Keep in touch.

Learn, Teach, Heal, and Create.

The slightly longer answer is this:

"Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness is no other than form. The same goes for feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness..."

Breathing in, I take on my own, and everyone else's vast suffering, both now and in the future (and the past as well.)

Breathing out, I send forth friendliness, compassion, joy, and equanimity to myself and to all other living beings: my family, friends, students, total strangers, those who annoy me, those I despise, and every living, breathing being on the planet and throughout the universe.

(Repeat as often as necessary)

And let us remember--the Present is all there is--ever. The future is a mental formation only, and everything, including our body, our society, and our planet, is impermanent. The important thing, always, is to cultivate wisdom and compassion in the present moment, and then to take care of everyone and everything, and abandon no one and nothing...

As the English poet and Anglican divine George Herbert, a true Bodhisattva, once put it:

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

The bridal of the earth and sky;

The dew shall weep thy fall to-night,

For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave

Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye;

Thy root is ever in its grave,

And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,

A box where sweets compacted lie;

My music shows ye have your closes,

And all must die.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,

Like season'd timber, never gives;

But though the whole world turn to coal,

Then chiefly lives.