Fairness and Life

Hola mi Gente,

It’s cold again today, but we really can’t complain, it’s been a mild winter here with very little, if any snow. Two-three months from now I’ll be whistling my way (hopefully) to my new job, watching the leaves make a comeback, my thoughts consumed with yet another promise of spring.

Now watch it set a record for snowstorms!  LOL

* * * 

Motifs in Indian temples often use interconnected shaped and knots symbolizing karma and the link between all lives. Above is an interconnected motif in a Jain temple.

Life Ain’t Always Fair

[Note: some of the details of the following have been changed in order to respect anonymity]

Just the other day, I received a telephone call from someone who I had the pleasure of working with. She always calls me at east two-three times a year to say hello and tell me about what she has done and her life. 

I first met her when I was a director for a reentry project several years ago and she had just been released after a ten-year prison sentence. Her crime? She beat her husband to within an inch of his life. Actually, as she put it, she thought he was dead and that’s the only reason she stopped beating on him. Her husband had systematically abused her for about fifteen years, almost from the time she had met him when she was a teenager. Throughout those years, she suffered broken bones, bruises, humiliation, and emotional and psychological abuse. In spite of the adversity, she managed to get a college degree and several good jobs in the financial sector (which she often had to leave because of her husband’s behavior).

Then one day she couldn’t take it anymore and she snapped. When she came to us, she was forty years of age, but she looked like she was twenty. She was very pretty, petite, soft-spoken, with intelligent eyes, and articulate. I often wondered how all that rage could have been contained in such a small form. She had been having a tough go at it, mostly because she could not find a job. This is the “collateral consequences” of incarceration: having to pay for your crime even after having served your sentence. Millions of people will never be able to vote, for example. That is also known as disenfranchisement.

She was crying one day in my office, trying to cope with the vicissitudes of life. She could not find suitable housing because she could not get a job. In a circular fashion, she could not find employment because she had a criminal record. Sometimes I simply sat with her and I often thought to myself that she was right. As far as I’m concerned, she should not have gone to prison in the first place.

People, mostly people ignorant of the term, like to use the word karma as if it means retribution. It does not. The historical Buddha called the workings of karma one of the “four unconjecturables.” We could drive ourselves crazy speculating on how it will play out, he said (Anguttara Nikaya 4.77). But I won’t get into karma today; I’ll leave that for some other day.

The fact remains that life is not always fair. Neither are people, ourselves included. Sometimes people take advantage of us. Sometimes we do all the right things and still wind up on the short end of the proverbial stick. Sometimes we are hurt though we may have acted cautiously. On the other hand, others may be generous to us and yet we take advantage of their kindness. Or we act with good intentions toward others and our efforts go unappreciated or misrepresented.

That life is unfair is perhaps a given. It is an aspect of life that challenges us to do the psychological work to grieve for the losses associated with unfairness. It also challenges us to do the spiritual work necessary so as not to become vindictive. Both of these together equal the unconditional acceptance to the unalterable fact that life, generally speaking, is not always fair: you win some, you lose some. And yes, I realize this all sounds mundane and banal… 

It’s easy to be “spiritual,” forgiving, and wise when things are going right or when we are dealing with easy-going, caring people. Anyone, even an asshole, can do that. The real challenge is to meet our losses with an open heart, with a commitment to act and think compassionately toward others, especially when they test our patience or willfully hurt us.

Some people, lacking a full appreciation of self-love, mistake what I am saying. Being open and cultivating compassion when faced with cruelty does not mean we allow ourselves to become victims of abuse. It simply means we  allow ourselves to be what we are when we are most loving -- vulnerable. 

Any relationship can have deeply painful moments in it. A mature person knows that closing off and building walls is dangerous to their sensitivity and that remaining too open is dangerous to their boundaries. A psycho-spiritual maturity allows us to walk the middle path where a willingness to be open is tempered by a healthy maintenance of boundaries. We can seek amends when others treat us unfairly, ask for redress, and if that doesn’t work, we let go and our hearts do not close. Ultimately, letting go has the effect of opening the heart.

It is also a given that human beings seem to live with the default setting of retaliation. It takes a conscious effort to override this seemingly hard-wired setting. We have to customize our factory settings. Our ego’s favorite sport is retaliation, but if I accept you as you are without protest or blame, I am then not driven to get back at you as your judge and executioner. 

My former client is one of the more powerful teachers of the reality of life’s unfairness. Though she has been abused by individuals, society, and its institutions, her heart remains open. At one point, working together we were able to take her out of a dangerous city shelter, and find a living arrangement with other women in a transitional home. And though she had no money, was unfairly stigmatized, and could not get a job, she would come to my office and accompany me to speaking engagements where she used her pain and suffering for the benefit of others and her life became infinitely richer because of it. Knowing what she had experienced, I don’t know if I would have had the spiritual dignity to act as she did, with an open heart.

I do know her example took away all my excuses and that was the power of the teaching she embodied. What about you? Have you built a fortress around your heart as a response to pain? Or do you remain open, knowing to live is to know pain? However, life can seem unfair and pain might be inevitable, but suffering is optional.

My Name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Where the Heart is...

¡Hola! Everybody…
I can write… really. I can sit down, and under the right conditions, I can write prolifically (if not well LOL). However, I am easily distracted. Any change in my writing ritual, any distraction -- a phone call, for example -- will sidetrack me for hours. So, the move has taken away from the everyday ritual -- the familiarity -- and the back pain (at its worst today), has resulted in zero writing. As I settle in to my new apartment, the ritual will come back, but the back pain (exacerbated by sitting) will definitely put a damper on my blogging…

* * *

(St. Michaels at 4th Ave.)

-=[ Home ]=-

A house is not a home…

My first morning here, a bright sunny Sunday morning, I was awakened by a hushed but insistent, not particularly good mariachi singing right outside my window. Annoyed, I got up to see who it was and to request they take their singing ass somewhere else. When I looked, I saw a short, older Latino, dressed in black, with black cowboy hat and boots. He wore dark wrap-around shades, and with the small accordion he held, he played the same three chords over and over again. He sang songs of heartbreak, of love lost and regained and lost again, in his hushed, not particularly good, but insistent voice.

Next to him, stood a large shopping cart full of roses for sale and young Latino/a families on their way from church occasionally stop and purchase a few. Eventually, I notice he is blind, his cane pressed up against his armpit. He comes here most mornings to sing of love lost in that same hushed, not particularly good, but insistent voice.

I have moved from the largely upscale, yuppie Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope to Sunset Park. It’s not that far away, and still somewhat upscale, but there is definitely more diversity. It's a neighborhood first colonized by a wave of Puerto Ricans in the 50s and 60s and later revived by an explosion of Latin American and Asian immigrants. One avenue block up, on 5^th Avenue, you can walk the main drag and see scores of businesses offering their goods and services to the many different Latino/as that live here. Young Salvadoran teen girls and Mexicans from Puebla pass by Dominican hair salons, Puerto Rican and Mexican restaurants, or buy treats from sidewalk vendors selling everything from aguacates to mangoes, caña, and piraguas.

I live in a very young neighborhood of families with both parents, something you rarely see outside of a Latino/a neighborhood. My building, a six-family building, has one family from India, the old patriarch a hilarious character. On the ground floor behind me, lives a Dominican, a single mother of an adolescent girl. Above me, lives a Salvadoran couple with their young son.

Sunset Park is also home to one of the largest Asian communities in the city. Some say it’s larger than the more famous Manhattan Chinatown. So, in addition to the Latino/a offerings, you can also shop for all things Asian. On 8^th avenue (the number eight signifying luck) you can find Chinese businesses, including grocery stores, restaurants, Buddhist temples, video stores, bakeries, and community organizations, and even a Hong Kong Supermarket. And again, there is that unmistakable youthful energy rubbing up against traditional family structures, as young immigrant families work hard for The Dream. On Sundays, you’re lucky if you’re able to find an empty seat at one of the many different restaurants as families -- mostly young Latino/as and Asians -- all congregate to observe the traditional Sunday repast. Some days you’ll see two or three generations seated together as impatient teens, annoyed at being saddled with tending to their infant siblings, break bread with their parents and grandparents.

I see all of this and I am reminded of the America I knew growing up in New York and I smile, knowing I have arrived home…

Someone recently wrote me privately, asking why I am so angry about what’s going on in Arizona. I feel the answer to that question is self-evident. There are certain values I believe in. There aren’t too many principles I can lay claim to, but the few I value, I hold dear. Two of those principles are fairness and justice. I am light-skinned with blue eyes and I can probably pass for white in Arizona. But for me, racial profiling is deeply offensive to the values of justice and fairness.

And make no mistake about it, Arizona using race to demand that people produce “papers” to prove who they are is a police-state tactic diametrically opposed, not just to my personal values, but that shouldn’t be unacceptable in America. If we don’t stop this law now, similar ones will spread across the nation. Already, lawmakers in at least 10 other states have promised to bring similar bills to their legislatures. The land I was born in, America, is my home. And in my home, racial profiling is wrong. It is un-American is the most essential way.

And if you think you’re safe, or rationalize that this is an intelligent solution to the largely fabricated crisis of immigration, you should think again. And if you’re a person of color and think they won’t profile your black or brown ass, think again. And if you’re a light-skinned Latino/a with blue-eyes internally ashamed of your own kind and in your neurotic eagerness to assimilate, support Arizona’s apartheid-like strategy, think again. For if you allow it to be done to those you fear and loathe, what makes you think it won’t be done to you?

And if you can bring yourself to hate and dehumanize another human being, regardless of their citizenship status, perhaps what you really hate is a part of yourself.

Love,

Eddie

Crime Pays!

¡Hola! Everybody... I grew up poor -- I come from humble origins -- and I am grateful for that. I am not ashamed. My family taught me how to smile in the midst of trouble, laugh during adversity, and pawtay even during rough times. Sure, the conservatives see that and call it irresponsibility or evidence of a “culture of poverty,” but I know it’s living even when authorities do their damndest to put their boots on your neck.

These are tough times, but perhaps my ancestors have something to teach all of us today -- to smile in the face of adversity, to celebrate life even when it seems as if “life sucks” (and saying that is just narcissistic bullshit!). My people -- we party hard because life is hard, but they also knew life was precious. Hope you can find it within yourself to at least fake the funk this holiday season.

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-=[ Victoria's Secret ]=-

“This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you will, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.”

-- Al Capone

Too many of my friends are being kicked to the curb these days. Quite a few of my friends who work in the financial sector are being let go right before the holidays. It’s for economic reasons -- health insurance will change in the New Year, and it’s best to give severance packages before the end of the year. Two of my fiends who work at Citibank will be clearing their desks this Monday. Two others, who work on Wall St. have already been let go. There are many more living in fear for their jobs. These are good people, hard-working people with families and homes, who have always played “by the book” and believed in the merit myth that if you played by the rules, worked hard, that you could achieve the American Dream.

Yesterday, I had lunch with a very close friend -- a woman who had to scratch and fight for everything she got working in the financial sector. She was let go. I tried to spin it positively for her, but she’s in her 40s and she’s afraid that she won’t be able to get a job.

This is what we have voted for people. We believe in using people as disposable assets. We believe in the “free” market to set our social policies. We believe that predatory lending is cool. We want corporations to be our masters.

Welcome to the world we have chosen. A world where people die in emergency rooms and talented people, good, honest people, are thrown to the curb even while our tax dollars pay for CEO Golden Parachutes. Welcome to a world where, in the richest nation in the history of the world, children die needlessly of hunger and treatable disease.

Welcome to the world you have created. A world where imprisonment is the answer to poverty and lack of education. Welcome to a world where we would rather spend $50,000 a year to incarcerate a black youth rather than a fraction of that to educate him. A world in which we incarcerate more people than any other nation. Welcome, it’s our world -- yours and mine.

I spoke at a prison yesterday. I’m asked to speak at these things because I am considered an expert in helping people not return to prison. Administrators and politicians are interested in this not because it’s morally correct, but because there’s no money left to run the prisons.

I get in trouble all the time because I don’t filter my analysis with kind language. I’m not here to convince anyone, nor persuade anyone. I’m here to speak the truth.

Period.

This world of ours didn’t come about by accident. Our criminal justice system is racist. It always has been. They ask me to expound on this phenomenon and I tell them -- it’s racism, you stupid ma’fuccas! No one else mentions it. someone has to...

Put together long mandatory sentences for minor drug offenses, a strong racial bias, prisons run by corporations for profit, the sale of convict labor to corporations, and a charge from room and board and you have a modern system of bonded labor -- a social condition otherwise known as slavery.

People don’t like to hear this, but it’s the truth with a big “T.”

JC Penny, Victoria’s Secret, IBM, Toys R Us, and TWA are among the US corporations that have profited by employing incarcerated men and women. If you think this is inconsequential, think again because prisoners have no rights and the jobs they are taking (working for literally slave wages) are the jobs that you are losing. How would you like to compete for a job where you competition comes from third world nations and prisoners? You don’t stand a chance. Sure, keep bad mouthing unions, you idiot.

Not only do corporations profit from the prison system they profit tremendously from committing corporate crime. Corporate crimes kill far more people and costs taxpayers far more money than street crime. Include illness, physical injury, and death from dangerous, defective, and mislabeled products, dangerous working conditions, and the release of toxic pollutants, and the human and financial costs or organized corporate crime becomes truly staggering.

Yet, unlike the harsh mandatory sentences imposed on street criminals (mostly young men of color), mostly for petty crimes, the persons responsible for corporate crime rarely suffer personal fines of imprisonment.

I saw fear in my friend’s face yesterday. Fear in the face of a Latina who has fought all her life to make her place in a world dominated by mostly white privileged males and my anger seethes because they’re taking our money and using it to downsize good, honest, hardworking people.

Welcome to out world, people. The world you wanted.

Eddie

Life and Fairness

¡Hola! Everybody,
I’m heading out hopefully to move the bulk of my stuff today. My driver flaked out on me at the last minute yesterday because he had to work, so I’m counting on someone I don’t know that well. Wish me luck…

It’s cold again today, but we really can’t complain, it’s been a mild winter here with very little, if any snow. Two-three weeks and I’ll be whistling my way to work, watching the leaves make a comeback, my dick getting hard at yet another promise of spring.

Now watch us get a record snowstorm two weeks from now! LOL

* * *

-=[ Life Ain’t Always Fair ]=-

I’m working with a young woman who just got out of a ten-year prison sentence. Her crime? She beat her husband to within an inch of his life. Actually, she thought he was dead and that’s the only reason she stopped beating on him. Her husband had systematically abused her for about fifteen years, almost from the time she had known him. Throughout those years, she suffered broken bones, bruises, humiliation, and emotional and psychological abuse. Through it all, she managed to get a college degree and several good jobs in the financial sector.

Then one day she couldn’t take it anymore and she snapped. She’s thirty years of age, but she looks like she’s fourteen. She’s very pretty, petite, soft-spoken, articulate. I wonder how all that rage could’ve been contained in such a small form. She’s been having a tough go at it, because she can’t find a job. We call it the “collateral consequences” of incarceration: having to pay for your crime even after having served your sentence. Millions of people will never be able to vote, for example. We call that disenfranchisement.

She was crying the other day in my office, telling me that life isn’t fair. She can’t get a job because she has a criminal record. Sometimes I sit with her and I think to myself that she’s right. As far as I’m concerned, she shouldn’t have gone to jail in the first place.

People, mostly people ignorant of the term, like to use the word karma as if it meant retribution. It doesn’t. The Buddha called the workings of karma one of the “four unconjecturables.” We could drive ourselves crazy speculating on how it will play out, he said (Anguttara Nikaya 4.77). But I won’t get into karma today; I’ll leave that for tomorrow.

The fact remains that life is not always fair. Neither are people, ourselves included. Sometimes we are taken advantage of. Sometimes we do all the right things and still wind up on the short end of the proverbial stick. Sometimes we’re hurt though we may have acted cautiously. Others may be generous to us and yet we take advantage of their kindness. Or we act with good intentions toward others and our efforts go unappreciated or misrepresented.

That life is unfair is a given. It’s a fact of life that challenges us to do the psychological work to grieve for the losses associated with unfairness. It also challenges us to do the spiritual work necessary so as not to become vindictive. Both of these together equal the unconditional acceptance to the unalterable fact that things aren’t always fair: you win some, you lose some.

It’s easy to be “spiritual” and forgiving, wise when things are going right or when you’re dealing with easy-going, caring people. Anyone, even an asshole, can do that. The real challenge is to meet our losses with an open heart, with a commitment to act and think compassionately toward others, especially when they test our patience or willfully hurt us. Some people, lacking self-love mistake what I’m saying. Being open and cultivating compassion when faced with cruelty does not mean we allow ourselves to become victims of abuse. It means we simply allow ourselves to be what we are when we are most loving – vulnerable. Any relationship can have deeply painful moments in it. A mature person knows that closing off and building false walls is dangerous to their sensitivity and that remaining too open is dangerous to their boundaries. A psycho-spiritual maturity allows us to walk the middle path where a willingness to be open is tempered by a healthy maintenance of boundaries. We can seek amends when others treat us unfairly, ask for redress, and if that doesn’t work, we let go and our hearts do not close. Letting go has the effect of opening the heart.

It is also a given that human beings live on the default setting of retaliation. It takes a conscious effort to override this default setting. We have to customize our factory settings. Our ego’s favorite sport is retaliation, but if I accept you as you are without protest or blame, I am then not driven to get back at you as your judge and executioner. My client is one of the more powerful teachers of this given of life’s unfairness. Though she has been abused by individuals and society, her heart remains open. Just recently, I have been able to take her out of a dangerous city shelter, living with other women in a transitional home. And though she has no money, is faced with stigma and can’t get a job, she comes to my office and accompanies me when I go to speaking engagements. She uses her pain and suffering for the benefit of others and her life is infinitely richer because of it. Knowing what she’s gone through, I don’t know if I would have the spiritual dignity to act as she does, with an open heart.

I do know her example takes away all my excuses and that’s the power of the teaching she embodies. What about you? What’s your excuse?

Love,

Eddie