Hearing the strong feelings on many sides from todays debates. Breathing. Reconnecting. The murder of writers is of course deplorable and unacceptable. Grief is of course natural and understandable. But it would be too easy, as a Buddhist peace organization, to ignore the thorny political questions arising from this awful event. I believe that Buddhists can do better, can hold space for the emotional, the spiritual, and the political, and see how they are interconnected. Whose lives are mourned in mainstream media, and why? When are threats to free speech denounced, and when are they normalized? Wishing everyone well tonight. May we keep loving and breathing in the face of what can feel so overwhelming. May we find refuge in unshakeable love, be it manifest in Allah, in Christ, in the earth, in struggles for justice, or in Buddha, dharma, and sangha. ~katie Rather than posit that the Paris attacks are the moment of crisis in free speech—as so many commentators have done—it is necessary to understand that free speech and other expressions of liberté are already in crisis in Western societies; the crisis was not precipitated by three deranged gunmen. The U.S., for example, has consolidated its traditional monopoly on extreme violence, and, in the era of big data, has also hoarded information about its deployment of that violence. There are harsh consequences for those who interrogate this monopoly. The only person in prison for the C.I.A.’s abominable torture regime is John Kiriakou, the whistle-blower. Edward Snowden is a hunted man for divulging information about mass surveillance. Chelsea Manning is serving a thirty-five-year sentence for her role in WikiLeaks. They, too, are blasphemers, but they have not been universally valorized, as have the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 03:32:26 +0000