Zen Politics, part one

The thing about Japanese Zen is its minimalism. The whole business of Buddhism generally is to clear away the junk and gunk in our minds so that we can see more clearly what actually is. The effect of Zen is to reduce clutter and achieve focus. In the movie "The Last Samurai" is the observation of "too many minds" when the American was learning to use the sword. In other words, the mind was scattered being focused on too many things that had nothing do with being effective with the sword.

American government and governance has "too many minds." It is neither coherent nor focused on issues the average person cares about. The government's raison d'etre to serve the people has been subverted to serve very narrow and selfish interests all in hot pursuit of the almighty dollar. In this regard, the greedy are extremely well focused and have indeed achieved their end of creating a government that serves them.

Unfortunately, the current political system is, for all intents and purposes, not on the side of people. They spend all their time playing a shell game with the public pretending to listen and then going back to the business of catering to money.

I find the calls for non-partisanship rather disingenuous as if Democrats and Republicans really do have differing views on anything.

The real line for partisanship has nothing to do with political parties. Rather, is has to do with which side of the people/money equation they are on. In other words, does money serve people or do people serve money? At a tax forum with three state senators yesterday I got as much right-wing whitewash as I would get from any GOPer. There was no concern about the human cost of tax policy even though many in the audience tried to make that point.

More importantly, there was no effort by the senators to partner with the people in the audience to help drive policy in a better direction. We were told instead that Gov. Pawlenty holds all the cards and that the legislators have their hands tied because of an insufficient number of them to override a veto--along partisan lines--and gave a litany of apologetics for the GOPers in not voting against a GOP governor.

I find something fundamentally wrong with people who adhere so much to a label that they are willing to check their brain into the delusion world at the cost of real lives.

So, back to Zen politics and a redefinition of partisanship.

I think it is time to do away with the labels that allow wolves in sheep's clothing to fleece the American population. Third parties don't have much a chance, and they'd just be another label anyway. Still, we need something. What exactly it could or should be, I don't know.

There was at one time a Populist Party. There are still all manner of parties listed. The problem is developing enough of a critical mass of popular support to dislodge the ticks bloating themselves on the body politic who call themselves "representatives."

It could also be very possible that there is no way to change or reform what we have now. Those things will have to wait for the catastrophic failure of the entire system before anything new can arise from its ashes.

Our forefathers tried their best to create a system that could endure. But the culture and the prejudices they brought with them from England were too great to be overcome. The aristocracy and demagogues have done their best to ensure that the true American dream of equality, liberty, and consent of the governed would never be made real. Now, we face a coup d'etat where the sovereignty of the people is vested in a single person under a dictatorship as made explicit in NSPD-51.

I don't know how to teach people to be better judges of character. What I do know is that we need a LOT more neighbor to neighbor on-the-ground discussions about policy and who those policies will benefit.

For my part, and for as much as I have called myself a Democrat for most of my voting age years, it is clear that times we live in now are a lot less about which party a person identities with and a lot more about whether they are in fact feeling and thinking human beings.

We don't need an ownership society, we need a give a shit society.