On compassion: day after election

My immediate reaction to the election result is devastation.

This once optimistically hopeful country (Obama) feels suddenly completely foreign again — a land I only recently was “blessed” with a membership card.

So I tried to seek familiarity in intellectualization — 90% of my academic training is studying causality after all.

Why? Why? Why?

Is it the failed Biden presidency? Undemocratic democrat party with no primary? Captured so much by establishments, so blind? And so hypocritical, directly participating in genocide.

Is it that the system is rotten to the core, this deep desire for change has nowhere else to place?

Is this xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, chauvinism? And why do men hate so much?

Except there is no comfort to be found, only more fear of the future, more frustration with this whacked system, and worst of all, more sense of powerlessness.

How does one still have faith, when your whole being is filled with despair?

I keep thinking about Thay’s teaching on compassion. That compassion is not empathy alone, it is also not contrived positivity, not performative self love words or self care spa, it is not tender, not pleasant, not joyful, it is in fact, so painful, so difficult, to the extreme of self destruction.

Compassion is to be brutally honest, to not only see Mara (fear, hatred, violence), but invite Mara to have tea with — can you imagine? Inviting a white supremist Trumper to have tea with?

To examine them, to deepen your understanding from all angels. To see they are within you and outside of you, they are within them and outside of them.

Only then, hope finally emerges, like this sun breakout the clouds above Hudson river.