Pirates! and: What?

This report from the AP is extremely confusing. A shipment of tanks(!) and other arms has been hijacked by pirates (what century is this?) off the coast of Somalia. In a stunning confluence of the world's worst situations this ship is being held for a 20 million dollar ransom (down from 35 million!). The US Navy's fifth fleet has it surrounded to contain it while the Ukranian shipping company that owns the ship negotiates with the pirates.

As if that were not wild enough, the shipment was intended for Sudan, which is under a US embargo restricting arms shipments to the country. The embargo is a half-hearted attempt to squash the well-known genocide in Darfur, a genocide that nobody wants to do anything about.

Not terrible enough? The pirates who have the ship are thought to have been on their way to delivering the arms to Al-Quaeda training camps in Somalia.

Holy Cow! What parallel universe is this happening in? None. This is happening in the world we live in. How does this kind of thing happen? An arms shipment going to a genocidal region is then hijacked to go towards Al-Quaeda. When was this boat and its goal a good idea?

This is one of those news stories that highlights just how far we have to go towards a peaceful world. Why is international trade in arms even still legal or tolerable? Who thinks it's a good idea to sell tanks to anyone?

Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and Voltaire would love this story. I hope you do, too.

Empathy

This post is in response to K's questions about the Willful Ignorance post over there on my--hopefully--more academic blog.

K's question was: Can empathy be trained or learned?

There is no doubt in my mind that this is so. I should define empathy first, I suppose. It is an odd word that is often used when someone actually means sympathy. Sympathy--and an etymologist out there will do a better job than I--means to feel with another person. Empathy means to feel into another person. There is a subtle difference between them. The difference is that with sympathy, one creates or imagines another persons feelings. With empathy, one actually feels another's feelings.

Gasp...

Is this possible? I think so. I cannot say that I have empirical evidence. I am unsure that there are instruments of empiricism that can know such an experience. Perhaps one day. However, in my experience, empathy is possible--if often incomplete.

How we might evidence empathy is beyond the scope of this discussion. In this kind of situation, I refer to the words of those who know and do more than I. My yoga teacher, for example, says that there is all sorts of emotion flowing about in the world. With six billion people--all of them emotional beings of some kind or another--emoting all over the globe, there is a veritable ocean of feeling coursing hither and thither. Whether we notice this or not, we tap into it, swim in it, live in it, breathe it. Much of our own feeling--primarily suffering--blossoms from an unwitting empathic appropriation of the emotions of those around us and, perhaps, those far away from us.

Training empathy is a matter of recognizing that this is happening constantly based initially on the suggestion of someone you trust and then ultimately based on your own experience. Once this seems obvious--what we might call faith--then one can do other things with the understanding and the wild world of emotion out there.

Listening is a good start.

I think I will pause here and let whatever conversation happen without holding forth too much.

Thanks for asking, K.

Rocky Run: Spring in Pause

I made my first ever bird watching excursion today. With reluctantly talented Ultimate-playing friend of mine--his was the inspiration to wander a bit of Columbia county--I ranged a small DNR property in search of birds. Ostensibly, that is. Really we were there to witness Spring in pause.

It was an uncertain moment when the buds of the trees, skunk cabbage, and flowers were poking briefly through the plane that divides this world from the one whence they come. There was not that explosive feeling that we will have in southern Wisconsin in a few days or so. Instead, it was an extended pause right before that burst of technicolored florescence that we celebrate so dearly every year. There was little movement. Not much wind, not much scampering, not even much flitting or buzzing.

There was pause. It was almost as if the place was stunned by the sudden relief from winter. The tentative land reflected what I have seen in many faces around these parts: the trauma of extended, deep winter. I was not here for this year's freeze, but it is seems to be legendary already.

The walk was good. The birds were scarce. Though, I think my first outing yielded a rare spotting. According to Sibley, the black vulture is rare 'round here and I believe we saw one circling a world about to be born. Odd that a death eater would mark what looks to be Spring.

We wandered down to the creek and took a short dip in the flood run-off that was rushing by slightly chilled but balmy compared to Himalayan glacial melt. It was good.

The nagas seemed to be happy.

Going back to Cali

Here I am in Glen Park on the south side of San Francisco wondering exactly what just happened to me. Yesterday I was in Nepal, easting breakfast with fantastic people, holding back the fruit of separation from them. Now, I am in a coffee shop bardo across the street from the BART station wondering why this corner looks so much like Madison.

The journey back has exacerbated a small, friendly alienation I feel as a "'Merican." I had several interactions with people in those flawless transnational realms of Suvarnabhumi, Narita, and SFO. Folks seemed to be unable to guess that I was from the United States. Either that or they were humoring me.

Being from the states has a wealth of privileges, but I am unsure just how valuable those are. Materially, sure, but I cannot escape the feeling that there is something very wrong with those privileges.

Who am I kidding. I know there is something wrong with them. We have them because others do not.

Revolution

I do not advocate violence. That should be clear up front before you read the rest of this, because it may seem as if I do from what follows.

Things in Nepal these days are wild. Not in that special Kenyan way, but still: there is a lot of tension, cynicism, anger, and frustration brewing below that lovely Nepali smile that shines through the spring dust.

On April 10, things will be very different in Nepal one way or another, I reckon. Either the Constituent Assembly election is going to go well and there will suddenly be a clear path to a federal republic, national conciliation, and love among all; OR things will go to the dissatisfaction of many and there will be war again. [This is oversimplified and there is a lot in between, but you get the idea.]

Specifically, if the Maoists do not do well, there is going to be fighting again. This is bad.

In speaking with friends and random folks at the tea stand for the last couple of months I have noticed a distinct cynicism and deep doubt about the possibility for things to get better here in Nepal. This breaks my heart every time and each time I get up on my American high horse and give a potted lecture about how nothing will change in Nepal if each person does not make it change. There is no functioning government. There is nobody to do anything of make anything happen right. No disrespect to the various international and Nepali organizations trying to make the CA Poll happen: they are working hard, I hope to see that it does.

Then the conversation continues on a while and my interlocutor usually complains that there is an established elite based on caste, wealth, and religion that will prevent things from changing much in Nepal. They also often complain that the corruption that pervades the elite also reaches down into every local political and economic organization. As a very insightful student of Nepal put it today: the Ranas (former prime ministerial family who operated Nepal as their private fiefdom for generations) set an example for every Nepali to follow through the present.

At this point I bring up the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Most seem to know what the first is but I wonder about the second. I spend a minute in amazement of the dual execution of Nepali education: mostly crap, but they teach the French Revolution. It being French and all, there is a good deal of respect for this revolution. After the pause, I explain the Reign of Terror as a time where French folks pulled the aristocrats and nobility out into the streets and killed them.

My conversation partner usually reflects on this for a minute. I imagine him/her thinking about what it would look like in Nepal if Nepalis pulled the aristocrats, elite, and inhibitors-general-of-progress out into the pot-holed streets of Kathmandu and killed them.

The Maoists were kind of on this path, but decided--thankfully--to join the government and pursue a political process with less violence to achieve their aims.

The thing is that the French revolution worked, or so mine and my partner's conception goes. And it worked in part because French peasants and bourgeoisie pulled the nobility into the streets and killed them.

Is that what it takes for real change? Is there another way to move past the seemingly intractable problem of profound corruption and general political malaise in Nepal? Do we really face a different situation in the United States?

Lost and Now Found.

Back in the house, containers boundless recovered from the depths of blog limbo. I have to put a shout out in the airwaves to google for responding to my request for help-i-lost-my-blog help.

So, things in Tibet are wild these days. The world up there is falling apart with protest in the run up to the olympics. Word on the street today is that 80 dead so far.

So, in case you have forgotten, this blog is a personal blog where i am gonna write about spirit, morality, outrage, and stuff like that in a fairly informal way. If you want to follow my research and academic stuff, check out Upwords.

See you next time.

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