Smoke Gets In Our Eyes
Earlier this month, residents of New York and those of many of our neighboring states here in the northeast spent nearly a week under skies shrouded by smoke blowing south from the wildfires raging across Canada. The sun, when visible at all, glowed with an eerie Mars-like reddish tint. And the air, when we breathed it in, seared our throats with its ashy wooden taste.
Assured by the weather forecasts that the changing winds would disperse the smoke within a few days (unfortunately, by blowing it over into the skies of states to the south and west of us), we carried on with our daily routines, taking precautions against breathing in too much of the unhealthy particle-filled air. We took note of the ironic reversal in one particular safety protocol - while during the pandemic we masked indoors and dined outdoors, now for the duration of the smoke-induced air quality emergency we were masking outdoors and dining indoors!
Overshadowing the individual inconveniences each of us was coping with, however, was the more alarming collective realization that we were once again, with memories of the coronavirus still fresh, confronting another unexpected airborne threat that was disrupting our routines and threatening our health. As the legendary Yogi Berra supposedly once said, it was “deja vu, all over again.”
On deeper reflection, it’s probably somewhat thoughtless to characterize this latest crisis event as “unexpected”. While we could not know exactly which Canadian forests would go up in flames, and could not accurately forecast the direction the winds would carry the smoke, we certainly should be expecting that the worldwide phenomenon of record-breaking high temperatures due to climate change will result in more and more uncontrollable wildfires spewing out more and more smoke-clogged air.
It’s yet another manifestation of the increasingly undeniable truth of one of Buddhism’s core principles, that of the interconnectedness of all things. Every event gives rise to certain other events, creating an infinitely complex web of causes and conditions from which every future event emerges - each of them dependent upon events that have already occurred, and each of them creating the conditions that will give rise to events yet to occur.
Accordingly, climate change gives rise to extremely hot temperatures, which give rise to extremely dry forestland, which create the conditions for extremely widespread and uncontrollable fires, which then give off extremely excessive amounts of smoke, which the changing wind patterns caused by the changes in atmospheric conditions caused by those extremely hot temperatures (the ones that started this whole unhappy cycle) deliver all that smoke to cities and states far from the sites where those fires originated.
The same causes-and-conditions analysis could be applied to the escalation of Covid19 from a regional outbreak to a global pandemic; or, to the proliferation of worldwide inflation and increasing food insecurity in economically struggling countries stemming from Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine; or again, to the thousands upon thousands of refugees walking for months, often with hungry young frightened children in tow, through danger-filled deserted stretches of Mexico seeking asylum at the southern border of the United States from failed states and gang-ruled cities throughout Central and South America.
So much suffering, all of it arising from the complex causes and conditions of humanity’s ever-evolving endeavors to survive and to flourish, too often pitting the powerful against the powerless. We are none of us perfectly protected from this ongoing struggle. We all breathe each other’s smoke, we all catch each other’s viruses, we all bear the costs of one nation’s criminal aggression, we all receive the cries for help from those driven from their homelands through no fault of their own.
We’re all connected. We all depend on each other.
If only we could see that. If only there wasn’t so much figurative smoke getting in our eyes, clouding our vision with delusions of our independence from everyone else. Then perhaps the actual smoke getting in our eyes might help us to see our interconnectedness a little more clearly.
Interesting reading from the past few weeks:
New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens drew this cautious parallel between the recently re-elected Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan and autocratic-leaning Republican Party here in the United States … “The re-election this week of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey should serve as a warning about other places — including the Republican Party — where autocratic leaders, seemingly incompetent in many respects, are returning to power through democratic means. To wonder how Erdogan could possibly be re-elected after so thoroughly wrecking his country’s economy and its institutions is akin to wondering how Vladimir Putin appears to retain considerable domestic support in the wake of his Ukraine debacle. Maybe what some critical mass of ordinary Russians want, at least at some subconscious level, isn’t an easy victory. It’s a unifying ordeal. Which brings us to another would-be strongman in his palace in Palm Beach. How could any but his most slavish followers continue to support him after he had once again cost Republicans the Senate? Wouldn’t this latest proof of losing be the last straw for devotees who had been promised “so much winning”? [Perhaps because] the Trump movement isn’t built on the prospect of winning. It’s built on a sense of belonging: of being heard and seen; of being a thorn in the side to those you sense despise you and whom you despise in turn; of submission for the sake of representation. All the rest — victory or defeat, prosperity or misery — is details.”
New York Times contributing opinion writer Frank Bruni warned readers of his weekly newsletter about the havoc awaiting us should Donald Trump be returned to the White House … “There is profound discontent in this country, and for all Trump’s lawlessness and ludicrousness, he has a real and enduring knack for articulating, channeling and exploiting it. ‘I am your retribution,’ he told Republicans at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year. Those words were chilling not only for their bluntness but also for their keenness. Trump understands that in the MAGA milieu, a fist raised for him is a middle finger flipped at his critics. Trump’s basic political orientation and the broad strokes of his priorities and policies may lump him together with his Republican competitors, but those rivals aren’t equally unappealing or equally scary because they’re not equally depraved. He’s the one who speaks of Jan. 6, 2021, as a ‘beautiful day.’ He’s the one who ordered Georgia’s secretary of state to find him more votes. He’s the one who commanded Pence, then his vice president, to subvert the electoral process and then vilified him for refusing to do so and was reportedly pleased or at least untroubled when a mob called for Pence’s execution. He’s the one who expends hour upon hour and rant after rant on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him — a fiction that’s a wrecking ball aimed at the very foundations of our democracy. His challengers tiptoe around all of that with shameful timidity. He’s the one who wallows happily and flamboyantly in this civic muck.”
Thanks for reading this issue of TLBR. Look for the next one in four weeks, posting on Tuesday, July 18th.
Please note that we are transitioning to our summer publication schedule. Until September, TLBR will post every four weeks, instead of the usual interval of three weeks. Enjoy the upcoming months of warm weather … and (hopefully) smoke-free skies!
Yes Tom. You didn't spell it out but hatred, greed and delusion are also part of the causes of global suffering.