The Common Enemy

Everyone has to make a 9/11 homage post.  A lot of children were created that night all over the world.  A lot of children lost their parents. 

In America, we were so focused on our personal enemies previous to an attack on our home soil.  After 9/11, the enemies remained the same. When you have children, the question of enemies becomes so much more palpable.  We teach our children about compassion and pain and fear. But how do we put into words our common enemies?   When I taught yoga classes in September of 2001, I felt like all of the teachings were being questioned.  I wasn't sure if talking about the war in the Bhagavad Gita was even useful to those who were feeling the direct effects of the war against people they knew.  I kept asking myself the same question. 

Who is the enemy?

In Buddhism, we are taught that life is suffering.  Suffering leads people to do all sorts of grotesque stuff.  There are heinous acts of violence every day in so many countries. 

Who is the common enemy?  Mother Nature? The hurricanes and monsoons and tsunamis?  Al Quaida?  Robert Mugabi? The child sex trade?   Food that is heated over 110 degrees and no longer alive?  Mosquitoes? The Patriot Act?  Politicians?  Fundamentalist religions?  Self-deprecation? Cancer? Alcoholism? When we would ask our meditation teacher what to do about this seemingly out of control world, he would say, "Do your inner work".

 A friend of mine adopted a young girl from an orphanage in Cambodia.  

this little girl had seen so many awful things in the first two years of her life.  She has been living in the US with her new parents for three years now and has turned the focus of her suffering to her own life.  She is now obsessed, as many five year-old girls,  with the right shoes and pants that she wants to wear every day.  What can her parents teach her from the ashes that she arose from?  Do your inner work.  They cannot force upon her the memories  of her life and suffering.  Her suffering is immediate and as superficial as it may seem, it is real.  It is not only a function of the society she lives in, but of the inner human struggle.  

When I was traveling in college I changed my major from art to education, because I wanted to directly affect the lives of others.  When I threw myself into saving abused children and their families, I learned this;  I can't save anyone,  I can only show them the tools and how to use them.   They have to take the steps out of their own suffering.  It is possible that art could have been just as effective as education. 

There is a way out of suffering. 

Our biggest enemy is our inability to move out of our own suffering and see the real power that we have to elicit change in the world.