This has been a hard week. Last Wednesday our dog Casey died. He had grown too ill; unable to stand up on his own much, uninterested in eating, unable, even, to rest or sleep. I brought him in to see the vet and she told me what I already knew: his quality of life had diminished significantly the past week and there was nothing more we could do for him. It was hard to put him to sleep without S, but what can you do.

I had been questioning whether or not to keep blogging for several days before Casey's death, wondering if this was worth doing, or if it mattered at all. I'd had a protracted email exchange with Elizabeth, the woman who wrote those words I quoted on the 28th, which had left me feeling angry and bitter and overcome by hopelessness. I had felt compelled to email her and challenge her which I guess shows I'm an optimist or perhaps just foolish. After several exchanges I began to feel that I might as well have been yelling at myself in the mirror. She ignored my questions pathologically; it was impossible to get her to address any of my points. It was as if I'd said nothing at all. Her discussions were dominated by an absolutist ideology, one that saw only two sides, "right" and "wrong," in the world and in politics. She seemed unable to see how it was possible to abhor an ideology based on self-sacrifice and murder, driven by fundamentalist religion, and also be troubled by how we've responded to it. Though they were well written, most of her arguments were as shallow and thoughtless as what we hear from pundits every day. They weren't even lightly peppered with original thought. But what struck me most, and what made me feel so hopeless, was her evasion of my questions and her insistence that facts were opinions, essentially obliterating any kind of "truth." Facts, she told me, were merely talking points of the "left." It was through this exchange that I came to a horrifying realization: Truth and facts no longer exist.

Today, everything is up to debate and therefore must be presented in a "balanced" fashion, preferably with two political pundits, even when there is nothing to debate because the issue is a fact. No WMDs were found in Iraq. This is not a political opinion, it's a fact. It is also a fact that Saddam Hussein was a secular tyrant. It is a fact, too, that nearly 1700 American soldiers and countless Iraqis have died since we invaded Iraq in 2003, and that hundreds of soldiers' deaths were caused by lack of proper equipment. Regardless of whether pundits insist that Ted Koppel reading the names on Memorial Day was a "political" act, those soldiers, who all loved and were loved, are dead. It is not a political opinion. It's the truth. If we never read their names out loud, if we never see their pictures in the newspaper, it will not change the fact that we have lost them.

This need for "balance" has become overwhelmingly destructive. Just last month C-SPAN was to present a lecture by a woman who'd written a book about the Holocaust. She backed out because C-SPAN, in the interest of "balance," was to present right after her a Holocaust-denier, a man who thinks the Holocaust never happened, and she didn't want to give his opinions (yes, opinions, not facts) a national stage. The Holocaust happened. That is fact, not opinion. There is nothing to "balance" out a fact. It is what it is. There are plenty of opinions out there to be debated, but the fact of the Holocaust is not an opinion at all. It doesn't take much to imagine a future where Hannity and Colmes debate whether grass is green, whether human beings require air to breathe, and whether gravity, as a "theory," is scientific gibberish. What are we to do when there are no longer facts and only political opinions? Where does that leave us? 2+2=5?

I'm reminded of Syme in Orwell's 1984, working diligently on the newspeak dictionary. He told Winston of his genius plan: to rid the dictionary of the language of dissent. Once the dictionary was cleaned of the language required for thoughtcrime, the thoughts would no longer exist, therefore making thoughtcrime impossible. Getting rid of anti-government thought was as simple as taking away the language of dissent. Our current obscuration of the truth, our refusal to admit facts, our insistence that everything is opinion and open to debate, is no different than Syme's work on the newspeak dictionary. We are making it impossible to dissent because there are no longer facts or truth. (It's frightening to me, too, that the insistence on hiding the images of war, even the faces and names of the dead, is so similar to Winston's job of minding the memory hole. If the images are destroyed, it is as if the events never happened and those who died never existed. Their very existence will have been obliterated because there will be no public record of their lives and deaths.)

Unfortunately, it's not just right-wing crazies like Elizabeth who do this. Major news organizations do too, including the "liberal" New York Times that purports to publish "all the news fit to print." The so-called Downing Street Memo contains evidence of impeachable crimes by the administration, yet the Times deemed it "old news" according to the new public editor and ran a cursory story about it on A9. In one of her emails, Elizabeth said that liberals like me were "aiding the enemy" and that any dissent was "weakening our resolve." Even if I look past the fact that these words could have been uttered by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, O'Reilly, Coulter, Limbaugh, etc., and take them at face value, I can't help but notice how this is part of the same evasion of truth, denial of facts, that led us into this mess in the first place. If we dismiss every criticism with a quip as foolish as "you're aiding the enemy," we will destroy ourselves from the inside out. We have to look at the Downing Street Memo and see how we ended up where we are if we have any hope of preventing another unnecessary war in the future, or even of finding our way out of the one we're currently waging. How can we possibly know what to do now if we don't see reality for what it is, if we continue to obscure the truth and deny facts, and stop all inquiries with ugly "patriotic" invectives?

I see this even in our discussion of the Iraqi insurgency. It's presented as one monolithic group like the Viet Cong or the Sandinistas. I heard a group of academics discussing insurgencies on NPR's Odyssey program a week ago. Not one of the speakers talked about how the Iraqi insurgency is made up of a hodge podge of groups who are not necessarily motivated by the same "cause" or even have the same goals. Fundamentalist Muslims, the jihadists, don't have the same goals as the former Baathists, right? Let alone ordinary Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds, locked in a sectarian fight, or foreigners who align themselves with one or the other who are fighting too. How can we possibly "win" against an insurgency we don't even properly define and identify? It's as if we're so afraid of reality we'd rather remake it to fit our desires. Combined with what seems to be a purposeful obscuration of truth and denial of facts, it's no wonder we've ended up waging war so thoughtlessly.

It was after Casey died that I decided to take a complete break from the news and internet for a few days. I'd started reading Pankaj Mishra's book, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, a few weeks ago but hadn't made it past the second chapter. Every time I started to read my mind would wander back to my worries of my husband (he's growing very bitter too) or those damn emails from Elizabeth. I couldn't settle my mind long enough to read a full paragraph; instead I read the same paragraph over and over again, not getting anything more out of it than the first time. Now, though, I decided to give myself a couple of days for concentrated reading, which as it turned out wasn't so hard to do. I was spent; it was as if my body had had enough of the stress and worry and just turned it all off. I read whenever I could for three days.

Mishra's book is one of the most brilliant books I've ever read, and I'm not just saying that because I've been a student of zen for a number of years. Part memoir, part history, part travelogue, part philosophical inquiry, it is more than just a retelling of the historical Buddha's life; it is also the history of western philosophy and the rise of democracy; a history of northern India and Mishra's own history, from his time in a small village with dreams of becoming a writer to where he is now, a professional writer living in London and India; and it's an exploration of the philosophies, the psychology, of the Buddha and what he taught, and how it relates to the works of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and a number of other European and American thinkers.

We learn in Mishra's book that Buddha came of age in a time not so different than ours, a time of large economic shifts, racial and ethnic strife, growing empire, and rife with people searching for some way to find peace in their changing world. Buddha offered a program, a prescription for "an end to suffering" through meditation (calming of the mind), self-reflection, and an honest look at reality, one that was free of delusions. He taught that this was personal and experiential, and that no one should have "faith" in his teachings but rather should come to the conclusions on their own through the practice of meditation. He wasn't a god to be worshipped, and wasn't comfortable with cults of personality. He insisted he was an ordinary man, no greater or superior than any other human being. Mishra tells us it was Europeans in the 19th century who came up with the term "Buddhist," a concept antithetical to the Buddha's teaching to "be your own refuge," though it's become common today perhaps because we require classification in so many aspects of our lives.

The heart of the Buddha's teachings is that there is no such thing as a "separate self," meaning we are all interconnected and interdependent. We cannot exist without air, water, sun, earth, etc., and neither can anything else, human or not, exist separately. We're all in this together. The Buddha insisted that we can see this if we calm our minds, and through that calming we'll finally be here in the present moment where all life actually exists. If we're in this moment, he taught, then we will be available to love and cherish our beloved ones, be able to take care of each other, and therefore help to ensure a better future even after we're gone. He also taught that all things are impermanent and in a constant state of change, and that it is our desire to have things permanent and unchanging that leads to our suffering. This is, to me, a basic recognition that we are driven by our fear of death and loss. This fear can transform into hatred, anger, and self-righteousness, and even to irrational nationalism and groupthink that can lead to large-scale suffering and destruction.

On assignment, Mishra travels to Afghanistan before and after 9-11, once for a conference of jihadists with over 200,000 attendees (including Pakistanis paid by the Taliban to increase the attendance numbers), and again to see the place where ancient stone buddhas had once stood before the Taliban blew them up in 2001. He sees the fervent religious hatred growing there just as he sees violence come from uncontrolled nationalism in Kashmir. He talks about Gandhi and how he tried to go beyond nationalism and identity, but ended up being murdered by a Hindu nationalist whose family is to this day proud of his actions.

The last chapter of the book is Mishra's description of the day he found out about 9-11. He was in northern India, staying at a cottage he'd rented on and off for a decade. A friend from Calcutta called and told him the news; soon after, he talked to friends in New York and listened to the radio, desperate to find out news of the attack. Later he saw that "the machinery of war had begun to grind," as the experts paraded across CNN using their "big words," presenting the large concepts of democracy, freedom, terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, etc. It is from this that Mishra has his epiphany: if we are able to calm our minds long enough to see that we are interconnected and that we are impermanent and in a constant state of flux, we will be led to "nothing less than a whole new way of looking at and experiencing the world." He discovered that Buddha was a "true contemporary", and that Mishra "now saw him in my own world, amid its great violence and confusion, holding out the possibility of knowledge as well as redemption -- the awareness, suddenly liberating" which led him to finally write a book about the Buddha.

I think it is instructive that Mishra ends his book with a remembrance of 9-11. I remember that day as if it were yesterday. S was working at an archaeological dig on the south side of Chicago; I was the executive director of a small non-profit. S left early for work, before 7 usually, so he didn't hear about the attack until the end of his work day, on the radio during his long ride home. I heard about the first plane crashing into the tower on the radio while I was getting ready for work. I remember rushing to the television and seeing the second plane hit live on CNN. Hours later, I took a break from the television and walked our carefree dog around the block, letting him sniff every bush, scurry around trees in search of squirrels. What a cruel day it was; the sky was clear and blue, the temperature perfectly tepid. It felt unbelievably wrong. I remember being gripped by sadness for days, a nearly unbearable ache centered in my chest and down into my belly. The thought of all of those people killed in the name of horrendous ideology was too tragic. It was heartbreaking.

Within days nearly every house on our block had an American flag waving from a flagpole or hung in a window. Cars and trucks were suddenly littered with "God Bless America" stickers and large magnetic flags. Down the street on the corner of Ashland and Clark men sold tee shirts from the trunks of their cars, beefy, masculine tees declaring "FDNY" in yellow on blue, "United We Stand" above bright flags, and images of Osama bin Laden covered in blood red bull's-eyes. The flags seemed like talismans to me, our feeble attempts to feel "safe" in the face of such horror, a hope to ward off the evil that threatened from everywhere. The fear was palpable for days, weeks. When pundits declared "irony is dead," we believed them. It seemed as if the world really had changed forever. We were now "united" by our undying fear of terror and death.

I wonder now when that fear transformed into hatred and anger and an overwhelming desire for revenge. The men who flew the planes into the World Trade Center died with the nearly three thousand people they killed that day, which leads to the question: How do you take revenge on the dead? How can there be "closure" when the criminals are nothing more than dust? It seemed logical and natural that we would go after bin Laden, the monster who proudly took responsibility for the attack, so it made sense that we would bomb Afghanistan even if it was already a shell of country caught in the 13th century from decades of war. It made sense, too, that we would attempt to rid it of its ruthless leadership and remake it into a place that no longer "bred terrorists." It's scary, though, to think that we're still in Afghanistan four years later, that my husband is in the hills around Jalalabad right now walking among fields of poppies, past houses with painted images of two planes hitting two towers while Osama bin Laden is still at-large, only found in the memory of those tees for sale on Ashland Avenue four years ago.

Sometime after that horrible day our fear and hatred of bin Laden and our desire for revenge became so great that we decided to take revenge on people who had nothing to do with 9-11, and who had already suffered under a tyrannical dictator for decades. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead, so many we don't even count them, even though they had nothing at all to do with the tragedy that came down on us that day. How can this be? It sickens me, too, to think that nearly 1700 Americans have died and yet we're no closer to catching bin Laden and we've done nothing at all to lessen the threat of terrorism, at least according to experts like Richard Clarke. Soldiers are in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, forced into unending service away from their families and loved ones, so that we can feel a little "safer," an abstract idea, while remaining in reality no less "safe." We are forcing them to live with the nightmares that war brings, all of that unbearable death and destruction, and for what? It breaks my heart to think of all of the suffering we have caused because of our own fear and irrational desire for revenge.

Last night I watched Rashomon, that Akira Kurosawa classic about the nature of memory and truth, then sat down and wrote for three hours. When I was putting in a link in the last sentence I inadvertently lost the entire post. Today I've tried to recreate it here, but I've found it has changed considerably. The gentleness is gone; I'm reading an anthology of poetry of witness right now and I think all the poems by poets killed during war have made me too desperate to write as softly as I'd like. But I'd like to include this from last night anyway.

At the end of Rashomon, the woodcutter takes an abandoned child from the hands of a monk to raise the child with his other five children. The monk, whose faith in humanity had been shaken by the testimonies he'd heard that day about the murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife, has his faith renewed and affirmed by the woodcutter's offer to raise the child. He tells the woodcutter, "Thanks to you, I think I can keep my faith in man." I had a similar affirmation yesterday from Sgt. Zach of A Soldier's Thoughts, a wonderful writer and blogger. Here's the comment he left me:


This comment brought tears to my eyes. Sgt. Zach is right. We have to make waves, and not "settle for ripples." Is there any other choice, really? If I see reality for what it is, if I look at the present moment without delusion like the Buddha says we're capable of, I have no choice but to do what I can, even if it feels like I'm yelling at myself in the mirror sometimes. It's actually the least I can do. In that spirit, I've signed up with the Big Brass Alliance, a consortium of liberal-minded blogs that will attempt to bring attention to the facts and get the media to finally cover them. I'll keep you all posted about Big Brass's activities and how you can join our efforts. I don't know what will come of it, if anything at all, but I'll give it my best.

Thank you, Sgt. Zach. I can't tell you how much your comment has meant to me.