Elizabeth Kucinich: Peace - Compassion - Mindfulness (Quote by Ani DiFranco)

[Flabbergasted]

There's a brutal imperial power that my passport says I represent but it'll never represent where my heart lies only vaguely where it went. When you grow up surrounded by willful ignorance you have to believe that mercy has its own country and that it's round and borderless.

--Ani DiFranco

As experience and Buddha teaches, life is suffering. Instead of being pessimistic, suggesting that everything is likely to lead to a bad outcome, the Buddha taught that there is a way to end suffering. In the teachings of the four noble truths, the Buddha outlined that life is suffering; suffering is caused by craving and aversion; suffering can be overcome and happiness can be attained, and that the Noble eight-fold path will lead to an end to suffering.

The eight-fold path is a focusing of the mind on being fully aware of our thoughts and actions, developing wisdom by understanding the Four Noble Truths and by having compassion for others. It is this compassion, this mindfulness, being conscious of consciousness that we dearly need to channel into our lives and into our world.

Our taxes, our nation’s creativity and our name stands by decisions to destroy from afar, to maneuver injustice and to cause great suffering through a disconnection from our humanity, the light of our spirit.

I met a family of women in a town in South Lebanon. Precious little now stood in what was once a thriving community. The matriarch of the family recounted how two generations of her family were killed before her eyes. Her grown up daughter had been shot 6 times at close range from their occupied home. A surviving daughter watched in horror as her six year old daughter was shot dead. The remaining family and children were in a desperate emotional state. Family and friends dead. Their town in ruins. Their home littered with bullet holes. An unexploded bomb in the bathroom. Their kitchen sporting a window screen punctured with the six bullet holes made when their daughter/sister/aunt was shot.

In village after village we saw shop keepers sitting on salvaged chairs on the street outside the front of what was once their shop, but was now a pile of rubble; nothing to sell and no one to sell to.

I spoke with doctors who tended to the wounded. I stepped over many unexploded cluster bombs while walking through ruined streets and saw children playing next to exposed land mines. It was not until I visited this conflict zone that I truly acknowledged the dark side of the human spirit, the energy, resources and political maneuvering that enables the creation, development, public financing and use of such a vast array of heinous weapons.

The bellman’s story is the one that I would like to share with you. He came to our room to collect our bags. He had watched the television coverage of Dennis’ and my tour in Lebanon and felt he knew the spirit of our hearts from the articles he had read in the newspapers, to which he responded by opening his heart to us. Unlike many we had met, he had not been directly affected by the bombing raids on Beirut, his home was intact, his family unharmed and his job secure; but this man, this strong father of three stood in the doorway and broke down into tears.

During the bombing of the southern suburbs of Beirut, bombing that completely flattened block after block of 8 storey apartment buildings, our friend the bellman was sheltering in his home several miles away from the affected area with his family. He described how utterly helpless he felt, the force of the bombs shaking his home, the noise too loud to bear.

He described with the shame of a father who was unable to protect his family, his youngest son’s reaction. Overcome with terror, he told his father that his heart felt it was about to burst out of his chest and that he thought he was going to die. This little boy was only one of thousands of people who were affected that day by severe emotional trauma.

The bellman described how he had lived through Israeli occupation and the civil war, how the region was just beginning to show signs of great recovery, its people had overcome their previous years of grief and their country had restored itself. Finally Lebanon was enjoying peace, a peace that the nation had craved. Then came this wave of terror, suffered on both sides of the border. Bombs made in the US, many paid for by US foreign military aid were being used to take Lebanon’s economy back 20 years and wipe whole areas off the map, opening the scars of previous decades.

Why? was the bellman’s question. "We want to live in peace with our neighbors." He expressed deep compassion and forgiveness, deep understanding for the pain that families in Northern Israel, too, were feeling. All victims of a political inability to talk and failed policies of retaliation.

It was as I listened to this man’s story that my realization of the interconnectedness of the human experience was truly grasped.

Lots more here:

http://kucinich.us/node/577

[Forkboy]

1. K&R