Careening Towards an Election
The internet made me do it.
Today, the UAW is on strike; the “Freedom Caucus”, that band of merry GOP hooligans, is threatening to shut down the government; the Ukrainians have penetrated Russia’s defensive line; the Indian government denies being involved in an assassination plot against a Sikh leader who was assassinated on Canadian soil, and also happens to be a Canadian citizen; the Chinese government has kidnapped 1 million Tibetan children; thousands of people are crossing the border illegally; Uganda just declared homosexuality punishable by death; etc.
Some good news? The Lahaina Banyan survived the fire.
This year we are careening towards an election in which one candidate is facing 91 indictments and the other candidate, while fit for office, faces a major opponent, his own age and an incorrect public perception of his competence.
So what’s a Buddhist to do in the face of all this chaos and uncertainty? Well, first, everything is impermanent, including chaos and strife.
Second, compassion. Guess what, it is quite consistent with Buddhism to be compassionate and dislike someone or something immensely at the same time. Compassion does not mean being a floor mat for people to walk over. Compassion, in Buddhism, is simply the wish that beings be free of suffering. That’s it, and nothing more. I want everyone to be free of suffering. That doesn’t mean I like them. But if they are free of suffering, it is likely they will be easier to deal with on a day to day basis.
Third, patience. Patience is actually harder than compassion. Patience, or forbearance, arises from the knowledge that all of the stupid shit we see everyone do every day arises from their wish to be happy. It also arises from the knowledge that all the stupid shit we do every day arises from our own wish to be happy. The problem is that we all do stupid shit all the time because we are ignorant of causes and conditions, and do not understand our effect on the world. Patience arises from understanding we are not better than anyone else.
This leads me to the next issue: climate change, the internet, and authoritarianism. These three phenomena are intimately linked. Prior to the rise of internet, almost no one questioned human-caused climate change other than a few outliers, mainly right-wing journalists, who sadly did not and do not understand how science works (it’s the evidence, stupid!).
Since the mitigation of climate change has many ramifications for the life style of the 1% and corporate behavior, right-wing groups began to use the internet to push back against the scientific community and the environmental movement, turning a scientific problem into a political problem. With the advent of the wide availability of the internet in the mid-90’s, heralded as a game-changing experiment in cultural and civic freedom, people had more access to information than ever before, and much of it was bad information. That bad information fueled the opinions of the poorly informed.
With the rise of social media, beginning with AOL, and so on, people began to form tribes on the internet. They began to reinforce their biases in echo chambers. At the same time, cable news came to dominate the news media. Readership of traditional newspapers and books began to plummet.
With the rise of Twitter and Facebook, internet tribes went to war with each other. The result of this war was the election of a president of the United States through the electoral college for the second time in 15 years. Qanon, the first major internet cult movement, began to rise. And this president, an authoritarian with delusions of grandeur, refused to leave office after losing an election, largely due to his incompetent handling of the Covid pandemic.
At the same time this president was elected, everyone began to notice an alarming trend: democracy around the world was being discarded in favor of authoritarianism by illiberal leaders who were elected into office. The support of these authoritarians was largely a result of coordination through the internet.
We find ourselves now careening into 2024 election, which has consequences for the whole world. The US Government, unfortunately, is riven by far-right extremists in the GOP and in the US population, who wish to install, by any means possible, a person who is unfit to lead . We are here, as near as I can tell, because of climate change, the internet, and the authoritarian response to the economic and cultural challenges posed by climate change.
In these circumstances, all this Buddhist can do is count on impermanence, have compassion, and exercise patience…and vote.
Revisiting this post today holds significant value.