Growing into The Spirit of The Sixties

Stefan Schindler with John Lennon collage

by Stefan Schindler

In my early childhood – born just north of San Francisco, and fresh from two years in England – I spent four years in Texas, then one in Alabama, unconsciously absorbing from both states a culture of racism and American superiority.

Then the family moved to Japan, where I spent three years absorbing a new culture, and, subconsciously, an alternative worldview. It changed my life, and I shall be forever grateful. When the family moved from Japan to Pennsylvania, I was shocked to discover fellow students who had never been out of their home state. I was like a visitor from the moon.

My formal education continued to be mostly ignoration, but the year was 1960, just in time for me to grow into The Spirit of The Sixties. As I  watched The Beatles evolve into Peacemakers, coinciding with my college years, I began to realize just how brainwashed I had been.

My father, a bomber pilot in World War Two, was a career officer in the U.S. Air Force, rising through the ranks to become a Lieutenant Colonel. Hence our family’s many moves around the country and the world. Hence also my military upbringing.

When I entered Dickinson College in 1966, I joined ROTC (and its elite “Pershing Rifles” group). I quit after six weeks, having been ordered to do this and that my entire life, and now, in college, finally free from my father’s commanding influence, and joyfully participating more and more in the anti-establishment counter-culture revolution.

By my senior year at Dickinson, 1970, while President Nixon continued The Vietnam War, I was a member of S.D.S – Students for a Democratic Society – and with fellow peacemakers disrupting ROTC drill performances on the football field, and, more importantly, marching in peace demonstrations outside the gates of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, just a few blocks from Dickinson.

After graduate school, post-1975,  I embarked upon a self-education program, leading to my further political awakening, a new appreciation for Mark Twain and William James as members of The Anti-Imperialism League, and the writing of my book, America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War.

Now, just about a year from 2020, I see The United States of Amnesia failing to learn the lessons of history, and increasingly becoming a high-tech version of Plato’s cave, governed by plutocracy, divided more and more by economic apartheid, and careening toward ecological apocalypse, nuclear war, and another Great Depression. John Lennon was right – “We are led by lunatics.”

Fortunately, the spirit of Emerson, James, and Twain lives on in the activism, writings and wisdom of people like H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, I. F. Stone, Martin Luther King, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, John Pilger, John Prados, Dan Ellsberg, the Berrigan brothers, Molly Ivins, Howard Zinn, Bertrand Russell, Amy Goodman, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Victor Wallis, Naomi Klein, Lewis Lapham, Thich Nhat Hann, Sulak Sivaraksa, the Dalai Lama, Vandana Shiva, and so many others.

Like Maya Angelou, I know “Why The Caged Bird Sings.” I know that the meaning of life is learning and service. And I give thanks for friends like Toni Snow and Lewis Randa, who help me keep the faith and keep on truckin’, as a Compassionate Peacemaker and global citizen, committed to Universal Brother-Sisterhood.

Note from Kathie MM: Please share with people on your email lists Stefan’s inspiring story of his journey to peace activism-and send us your own story for publication on engaging peace. Many families, many communities, include peace activists who go about the business of making the world a safer more just and human place. Share the stories. 

 

Buddhist Social Democracy, Part 1

by Stefan Schindler

   All things pass; life is brief; seek freedom; be kind.  Siddhartha Gautama, Gangamala Jataka

 “A Buddha arises for the welfare of the multitude.”

This is a common refrain in Buddhist sutras. On Buddha’s Eightfold Path to the common good, a spoke in the Dharmachakra – Siddhartha’s “Teaching Wheel” – is “right vocation.” Right vocation is ethical employment guided by the medical maxim, “Do no harm.”

Buddha’s politics aim for moral-egalitarian economics, informed by the main Buddhist issue: suffering and freedom from suffering (the first and third of Siddhartha’s Four Noble Truths).

A just society is peaceloving and peaceful. Violence opposes that.   Violence and poverty go together. But if poverty is the breeding ground of crime, so too is wealth. Indeed, the primary cause of poverty is wealth itself. Excess wealth among the few creates insecurity, fear, desperation and despair among the many. This is a crime against humanity.

Buddhist social democracy offers economic balance, making space for personal and communal creative evolution. Heart-centered pedagogy is its path, where all the institutions of society support lifelong educational opportunity. Giving peace a chance through voluntary simplicity and the joy of learning.

A psychiatrist for the criminally insane once noted that her clients’ crimes were mere drops of blood in the sea of pain inflicted by the captains of industry and their political, military and media puppets.

Locally and globally, economic apartheid is capitalism run amok; a collective Faustian bargain. The delicate balance of freedom and authority tilts toward fascism.

Benito Mussolini said: “Fascism ought rightly to be called Corporatism, since it embodies the fusion of state and corporate power.”

American Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis declared: “We can have democracy, or we can have vast wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.” Howard Zinn observed: “While the jails are full of petty thieves, the grand thieves are running the country.”

Thirsting for distraction after long hours of competitive work, citizens become historically and politically illiterate; ignorant of their actual past, present and trajectory. Trapped by “chains of illusion,” in a high-tech version of Plato’s cave. Worldview warped by a blizzard of epistemological confetti. Unable to cope with the power elite’s weapons of mass dysfunction. This is important.

An informed citizenry is the prerequisite for a functioning democracy, gifted with the leisure, skills and desire to comprehend, critique and oppose plutocratic ruptures in domestic and global harmony. George Santayana elaborates: “Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

The more a government serves capital profiteering instead of the welfare of the multitude, the more fractured a society becomes.

Martin Luther King offers a diagnosis: “Wealth, poverty, racism and war always go together; and we cannot solve one without solving the others.”

H. G. Wells warned: “History is now a race between education and catastrophe.” Accordingly, a just society does not empower a news media which critiques peacemakers in the name of patriotism.

Nagarjuna says to a sophist: “When you cast your faults onto me, you are like a man riding a horse who has forgotten where his horse is.”

Mark Twain says, with an exasperated sigh: “The lie is half-way around the world before truth has its boots on.”

Chogyam Trungpa – twentieth century Tibetan Buddhist in the West – shows Buddha’s teachings to be therapeutic: “Buddhism is all about returning to the sanity we were born with.”