Why is it that it’s always Israel that has to implement a cease-fire? At what point should the Israelis be able to just flat-out counterattack their enemies who keep sending suicide bombers? Why can’t Israel defend itself against those who keep launching unguided rockets into civilian areas, attempting to kill anyone and everyone they hit?

Why can’t people see that there is a moral difference between Israel accidentally killing 50 or 60 people in a guided munitions airstrike intentionally aimed at enemy armed forces, and the Hezbollah forces launching their Katyusha rockets- 1,500 of them in the past few weeks- towards Israeli cities?

I wish we didn’t have to have this war. I would prefer peace. Buddhists are generally considered pacifist for good reason; given a choice, we’re almost always going to try negotiations, reasonable accomodations, finding common ground.

But what common ground can be found with someone who doesn’t even accept your humanity, your right to live?

The Israelis have proven over and over that they’re perfectly willing to make peace and be reasonable with their neighbors, given even a tiny chance.

All these nations- particularly the Europeans- should quit saying that Israel is the bad guy here. They should say “as soon as the Palestinians and Hezbollah and Syria and Iran and anyone/everyone else seriously accepts Israel as a fact of life, and admits that Israel has a right to exist, THEN we can start talking peace”.

Buddhism teaches us that we’re all interconnected. The problem in the Middle East is that there is a strong contingent of people, radical Muslims, who do not believe that; they believe that you are either with them, or you’re against them, period. And if you’re against them, you will either bend to their will, or you will die.

(You’ll notice that this is the same rhetoric that our President uses, by the way. He’s almost as war-crazy as the Muslim nutjob fringe.)

My big question is… why can’t more people see that? Why are we so blinded by fear of the terrorists? Why can’t we just be practical?

This all came to mind last night when I was watching an episode of the TV show “The West Wing”. This is normally a favorite show of mine that I missed out on when it originally aired, so I’ve been watching re-runs on the Bravo network.

There’s a story arc where the US discovers that the “Qumari” (a made-up nation in the Middle East) Defense Minister is a massive financier and planner of terrorist attacks- kind of an Osama Bin Laden, if you will, only he’s got an official title.

The show depicted the problems with trying to decide what to do about the guy. Most of the evidence against him was illegally obtained, and there were other diplomatic considerations, so they couldn’t simply arrest him and try him.

Thus, the main choice was to kill him. The problem is that then you get into the whole notion of political assassinations, and whether they’re okay or not.

I don’t see a moral problem. The show frustrated me a bit. It seemed pretty clear to me; the guy represents a clear and present danger to the safety and security of American citizens and military forces; he’s attacked in the past and will attack again in the future; if and when you can, you kill him.

I wish it weren’t like that, but that’s how it is in the real world.

Then again, I come back to my relatively new-found faith, which does a pretty good job of expressing my beliefs. Every year, SGI President Daisaku Ikeda releases a peace proposal. In the spirit of founding President Makiguchi and President Toda, “Ikeda Sensei” (as our Japanese members refer to him) genuinely wants the world to get along with one another and live in harmony and happiness.

On the one hand, we desire peace. On the other hand, it really seems as though the enemies have no respect for one of our basic premises that peace will be based on…

There are, I believe, three crucial aspects to the practice and norms of a humanism that is rooted in Buddhism: (1) A gradualist approach; (2) An emphasis on dialogue; and (3) A focus on personal character or integrity as a pivotal value. This is something I have stressed for years and which I addressed in a January 1993 speech at Claremont McKenna College in the United States. These are also themes running through Montaigne’s philosophy.

-from President Ikeda’s 2006 Peace Proposal

At the same time, President Ikeda captured the dillema that I’m talking about when he described the 9/11 terrorists thusly:

Necessary and inexcusable… This expresses an acute sensitivity to life, an awareness of its preciousness. It demonstrates a willingness to confront those contradictions and dilemmas that are an inevitable aspect of the attempt to live in a fully human manner. For the terrorists in Camus’ essay, this sensibility brought some degree of restraint–keeping them, for example, from bombing a despot’s carriage because two innocent children were riding in it with him.

It is hard to imagine that those who planned and executed the September 11 attacks possessed any such awareness of the value of life. They appear to have been motivated by purely narcissistic self-absorption, with no evidence of reflection.

-from President Ikeda’s 2002 Peace Proposal

President Ikeda, in 2002, went on to lay out what he thought we needed to do:

…Rather, I think, we need to ask ourselves deeper questions: What is the true danger? What are the real enemies?

The real enemies are, I believe, poverty, hatred and, most formidable of all, the dehumanization that exerts a demonic dominion over contemporary society.

Carl Jung (1875-1961) voiced his concern over this disease of the psyche as follows:

A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations…. (275)

The fight against poverty, hatred and dehumanization may seem a circuitous route to the eradication of terrorism, requiring that much more time and effort. But I am deeply concerned that if we lose sight of these ultimate challenges, means will be confused for ends, and we will fall under the illusion that all that is required is to destroy the terrorist networks.

As the military campaign in Afghanistan wound down at the end of last year, an editorial in the Christian Science Monitor maintained, “To just capture bin Laden misses the point. It’s not the man, but the ideas he practices that must be captured, and buried in the deepest cave” (“VA Day?”).

I fully agree. If we lose that perspective, we are likely to find military responses escalating without cease, provoking, in the worst case, a full-scale clash of civilizations. The problem of terrorism is not so simple that it can be eliminated merely through the “hard power” methods of military force. Ultimately, it is rooted in a wide range of social, economic and political issues that demand a concerted response from the international community. This response must embrace the elements of “soft power”–diplomacy, language and moral suasion.

Later, he goes on to share a story about Shakyamuni Buddha, the guy most of us think of when we talk about “Buddha”…

I would like to share an intriguing episode from the life of Shakyamuni Buddha. Someone once asked him, “We are told that life is precious. And yet all people live by killing and eating other living beings. Which living beings may we kill, and which living beings must we not kill?” To this question, which invites the kind of labyrinthine speculation one might associate with medieval Scholasticism, Shakyamuni replied, “It is enough to kill the will to kill” (qtd. in “Soft Power” 210).

Shakyamuni’s response is neither evasion nor deception. No other answer could be as accurate or correct in addressing this question. The realities of violence and killing are immensely difficult and complex. It is impossible to draw a simple and uniform line between the permissible and impermissible taking of life. It is for this reason that self-mastery–the “conquest” of the inner realm in order to uproot hatred and kill the will to kill–is ultimately of greater value than the attempt to establish inflexible definitions of right and wrong. As long as the determination to master oneself remains firm and unswerving, we will be able to transcend confusion and hesitation, to face and make those difficult choices and decisions that will produce the greatest good. This, I believe, was the true intent of Shakyamuni.

Shakyamuni’s point (and Ikeda’s) is that to defeat the enemy, we must recognize the true enemy- and that is the negative thought processes which lead us to dehumanize those people who’re opposed to us. Our true enemy is our own negative thinking, and our own desire to harm those “others”. If we can master that, then we will eventually win out.

In other words, we can’t want to kill them. We can kill them, if necessary; Shakyamuni’s point was that we all survive by eating other living things (even the vegans are eating living plant beings) but we shouldn’t WANT to kill and eat them.

Ikeda’s solution, then, for the problem of radical extremists seems to be that as a last resort, and only if necessary, we may kill them… but we must not allow ourselves to fall into the negative worlds of hate and anger. Instead, we must continue working on losing our “will to kill”, meaning we shouldn’t want to kill them; we only do it if we must.

This sounds very pie-in-the-sky, I know. But once we do that, and if we keep in mind that it is important for us to not dehumanize the enemy (which, not coincidentally, is the very first thing that armies do in training their troops- set up a cartoonish, evil caricature of the “enemy”, a dehumanized creature that only wants to kill you, rape your mom and sister, and take your stuff).

Instead, while we must continue to carry out police actions against them, try to bring them to justice for their crimes, and kill them if we must- we should also be working on building bridges to the next generation of people. We must attack the root causes of their violence. We must work on the anger and hatred and hunger and aimlessness their people have.

Anyway, just some random ramblings. Please forgive me… I do rant onwards at times.

My point is that all of this stuff swirls in my head at times. I see the Israelis and I think “they’re totally justified, I hope they go to town there”, and part of me really believes that.

At the same time, I think that if they are merely carrying out revenge killing, they’re not doing anything that will ultimately lead to breaking the cycle of violence they’re experiencing…

Being Buddhist is turning out a lot harder than I thought.

Here is everything you need to know about Craigslist versus old-school newspaper classified ads:

Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines)
Total: 11 different pages-url
Pages Percent Hits Percent
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/rfs/183371972.html 47 18.7 % 47 18.7 %
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/rfs/181063476.html 46 18.3 % 46 18.3 %
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/rfs/185142701.html 35 13.9 % 35 13.9 %
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/rfs/184614253.html 31 12.3 % 31 12.3 %
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/rfs/182216951.html 30 11.9 % 30 11.9 %
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/rfs/184256704.html 27 10.7 % 27 10.7 %
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/rfs/182529686.html 26 10.3 % 26 10.3 %
http://realestate.nwsource.com/sales/Listing.asp 4 1.5 % 4 1.5 %
http://us.f511.mail.yahoo.com/ym/ShowLetter 3 1.1 % 3 1.1 %
http://marketplace.nwsource.com/real/search.cfm 1 0.3 % 1 0.3 %
http://us.f356.mail.yahoo.com/ym/ShowLetter 1 0.3 % 1 0.3 %

I was helping a friend sell her house. To advertise and inform, I built a web page (www.tambark.com for anyone interested) and we put that web address onto the flyers we made. We also advertised the house on seattle.craigslist.com. Later, we ran an ad in the Seattle Times and Seattle P-I’s classifieds, which also comes with a longer version (pictures included) on their web site.

The numbers above show the results. I ran a total of 7 ads on Craigslist. It was basically the same ad; I just refreshed it a number of times, which is why it’s got 7 different URLs. The listing shows what pages people were looking at and clicked on a link to come to the website; there were 4 people who were apparently reading an email (probably someone emailed the web site’s URL), there were 5 people who came from the Times/PI’s online presence (that’s “nwsource.com”), and there were 242 who came from the various Craigslist ads.

Oh, and the CL stuff was free, while the Times/PI ad cost over a hundred bucks (which, to be fair, included a classified in 500,000+ copies of printed newspapers).

The return for your dollar, since CL is free, is impossible to calculate; you can’t divide by zero, you know.

The main point is that CL totally blows the Times/PI classifieds away, at least in terms of driving traffic to the web site. In real life, the Times/PI ad did bring a couple of people to the open house, but FAR more people came from the CL ad and the signs/flyers that we posted on the house and in the neighborhood.

My conclusion? If you’re going to sell something FSBO (For Sale By Owner) don’t fool around with the traditional print classifieds, at least not in the Seattle area. Go with Craigslist.

True nickname story- a guy at work, John, shared a ride to Pullman last fall. He was going to visit his kid, then come back home with the kid for holidays or something. He found the rideshare via Craigslist.

The guy who picks him up introduces himself in person as “Nick”, which is also how he called himself on the phone. But the Caller ID had a different name.

John, to make conversation somewhere outside of North Bend, asks him what the deal is with “Nick”. “Is that short for something?” he asks the guy.

“Yeah, nickname” the guy says.

John says “That’s what I’m asking, what is it short for?”

The guy says “It’s short for ‘nickname’!” And John realizes what the guy is saying- his nickname is Nick, which is short for “nickname”.

And the guy was 100% serious.

The guy also happened to believe his rig was most fuel-efficient at 95 mph. But hey, he was a nice guy- offered John some of his weed and, at one point, says “pharmaceuticals?” offering a baggie full of random pills.

Anyway, that’s my nickname story. I wish it were MY story, instead of me passing along John’s story, but it’s still a damn funny story, so I thought I’d share it with you as a little funny at the beginning of the week.

What to do now?

I understand and sympathize with same-sex couples wanting to be included in the marriage statute. And I think it’s a matter of basic fairness, and that they should be able to get it immediately, without waiting.

But it isn’t going to happen, at least not through the judicial branch of government making it happen, not in this state (and this is one of the more liberal states in the nation).

So. What do we do now?

In The Art of War, Sun-tzu said that the army values victory, not protracted fight. The ancient Chinese text, used and taught by armies around the world for thousands of years, stresses getting into battles that you can win- in fact, the suggestion throughout the text is that the vast majority of battles are won before they’re ever fought. I believe that we (those of us who think that same-sex marriage is, at present, unattainable) must recognize this and retract, regroup, and re-engage in a battle that we can win.

The issue of basic fairness being our strongest issue, we must build upon this. We must recognize that as long as we’re stuck on the word “marriage”, we’re going to lose… therefore, we must ask ourselves: What do we really want?

While the word “marriage” sums up what we want, we can also look at the concept in its component parts. For example, we want the surviving member of a same-sex couple to, after the partner’s death, to be able to inherit the property that the couple jointly acquired. We want people to treat the partners with courtesy and respect. We want someone to be considered “family” or “next of kin” in situations where someone is incapacitated in the hospital. We want people to recognize and value the relationship that exists.

Some of these things are dictated by society through government, and can be changed by changing the law. Some of them are dictated by people’s attitudes, and can only be changed by changing people’s minds and hearts.

My belief is that we are slowly but surely changing people’s minds and hearts. Surveys show that the younger someone is, the more likely they are to view homosexuals in a neutral or favorable manner; the more likely they are to support, or at least not oppose, same-sex marriage; the more likely they are to have gay friends, and so forth.

But this is an evolutionary change, and thus will continue to take time.

The things that are dictated by society through government, though, we can probably make gains on. The answer, I believe, is “civil unions”. Shakespeare said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet; well, so will marriage.

We must start making small, incremental, winnable changes in the law. We must be contrite and say “okay, we aren’t going to get same-sex marriage, but how about civil unions?” We should stay away from the notion of children; as much as I know that hurts, we must win where we can, retrench and rebuild and not fight where we can’t win… yet.

So. What do we do now? We pull back a bit, we regroup, and then we come back out with a battle plan that gets us some victories. We have laid some groundwork; the battle we just fought (and lost) isn’t wasted, but we still need to find one we can win.

We need to focus not on same-sex marriage, but on civil unions that provide the same types of things (legally) that we want in the “marriage” concept. We can call it “marriage” all we want among ourselves; we know what it means. Anyone who knows any homosexual couples that’ve had their own “marriage”, or commitment ceremony, or whatever you want to call it, knows perfectly well that homosexuals are just as capable of that long-term, dedicated, loving relationship as straight people are.

So that’s what I think we need to do- focus on getting what we actually want, even if we don’t wind up calling it “marriage”.