“Global Boiling” Arrives
Centuries ago, the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gotama, is reputed to have said,“The world is burning”, a figurative expression referring to the countless varieties of suffering that arise for the world’s inhabitants.
He could not have foreseen that a time would come when “The world is burning” would count as a literal truth.
That time, of course, has come.
The average global temperature for July was the highest ever recorded. On one particular day, the ocean waters off the coast of Miami registered a record-breaking temperature above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the first time ever. Dangerously high heat domes settled over large swaths of the United States, Europe, and China, and remained in place for weeks on end. Fires burned out of control across Canada, devastated much of the Greek island of Corfu, and incinerated the entire Hawaiian city of Lahaina, where we witnessed the horrifying spectacle of residents running for their lives down to the beaches and plunging into the ocean just barely in time to escape the speeding spreading flames.
United Nations Antonio Guterres described the situation with this definitive declaration: “The era of global warming has ended. The era of global boiling has arrived.”
And still, despite the mounting evidence of unprecedented extreme weather events, and despite the increasingly urgent alarms being voiced by such well-informed global leaders as Guterres, the climate crisis continues to command much too small an amount of the world’s attention.
The reasons for this are manifold and complex. To be sure, in some parts of the world, there are other life-and-death issues that need to be dealt with. Ukraine must defend itself against Russia’s genocidal invasion, and Western European democracies must support its cause for their own security. Here in the United States, the political contest between democracy and autocracy is the defining theme of the 2024 presidential election, and is of epochal importance. There is little doubt that the outcome of this coming election will determine the fate of America’s democracy, and its ability to contribute to the global efforts needed to combat climate change, for many years to come.
So yes, the world’s attention is understandably preoccupied with these, and many other, critical matters. But still, even allowing for the necessity to address these issues, when we weigh them against the overwhelming scale and scope of climate change, it’s a challenge not to summon up a ghastly (even if totally fictitious) vision of a lunatic Nero fiddling away while Rome burned all around him centuries ago.
Just decades ago, at the height of the Vietnam War, a slogan emerged from the anti-war protest movement - “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.” While the vision it conjured up was so unlikely as to be impractical in the extreme, it did powerfully underscore the uncomfortable truth that war is a matter of choice not only for the politicians who declare it, but also for the individuals who wage it.
I wonder if we could imagine a similarly impractical yet powerful catch-phrase to underscore today’s uncomfortable truth that, while our world is literally burning, collectively we are figuratively choosing to “fiddle around” with issues which, even if we manage to resolve, will ultimately be consumed, along with all of us, in the fires that continue to rage unattended.
Covid Finally Catches Up with Me
Nearly three and a half years after the start of the Coronavirus pandemic, I finally came down with Covid three weeks ago. I had begun to think that perhaps I was just fortunate enough to have an immunological system that, aided by the various Covid vaccinations and booster shots I’d received over the years, had developed a natural resistance to the virus.
And then along came a Monday in July that started like most of my other Mondays, with a brief run on the local streets, a quick breakfast and shower, a bag of fresh litter in our cat’s litter box, a load of laundry into the washer, a scroll through the leading stories on the New York Times website, a scan through my unread emails, and a few shopping errands in town.
So far, so good.
But then, pausing for lunch, my sinuses start acting up, there’s pain in my head and around my eyes, I’m coughing and sneezing, and I’m exhausted from head to toe. I describe my symptoms to my wife, and in a moment she’s handing me an unopened Covid home test kit, and within another moment or two, we’re both looking at the dreaded red test line indicating that I was positive for Covid.
So, off I went, into the bedroom for five days of isolating and Paxlovid, eating my meals alone and speaking with my wife either on our cell phones or through a narrow opening in the doorway, with both of us wearing our masks. It was the same regimen we employed a year ago, when she came down with Covid. And it was equally effective on both occasions - I didn't catch Covid from her then, and she didn’t catch it from me now.
Being ill, I find, poses a particular set of challenges for the Buddhist practitioner, in that illness, like injury, necessarily narrows our focus onto our own self, our own body, our own pain. Under these circumstances of physical duress, there’s often very little room for awareness of others’ suffering, awareness of the nature of non-self, awareness of the interconnectedness of all beings. When we’re ill, it quickly becomes “all about me.”
I don’t think this can be helped. It’s simply our human nature to care for ourselves first and foremost - especially when we fall ill or become injured.
But there is, perhaps, a useful learning here as well. If it’s unavoidable that we close in upon ourselves when we’re in an unhealthy state, then perhaps it’s equally desirable that we open up to others when we’ve returned to a healthy state.
Put as simply as possible, our healthiest “self” might actually be the “non-self” who’s most aware of their connectedness with all other suffering beings.
Interesting reading from the past few weeks:
New Yorker staff writer Amanda Petrusich offered this moving remembrance of the recently deceased Irish singer Sinead O’Connor … “Throughout her career, the richness of O’Connor’s music was often surpassed by the vehemence and scorch of her politics. Perhaps most notably, she once ripped up an eight-by-ten photograph of Pope John Paul II on ‘Saturday Night Live’ while singing the word ‘evil’—an act of righteous dissent against the Catholic Church’s ghastly mishandling of sexual abuse by clergy. For years, O’Connor remained adamant that her performance on ‘S.N.L.’ did not ‘derail’ her career, as many critics claimed—she continued making the exact sort of music that she wanted to make, and if it did not reach the same commercial heights, so what? That had never been the goal. O’Connor had been thrashing against the dumb, stultifying demands of capitalism and pop stardom even before she was famous … [She gave] birth to four children—Jake, Roisin, Shane, and Yeshua, each by a different father—between 1987, when she was twenty, and 2006, when she was forty. She had written so vividly about the supposedly incompatible experience of being a single parent and an artist, and of finding deep satisfaction in both pursuits. She portrayed parenthood as noble and gratifying. ‘If I have no other purpose in this life other than to put these four children on the earth, well, that’s enough for me to feel like I did something useful in this world,’ she wrote.”
Oliver Burkeman, author of the book “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” (a copy of which is currently sitting atop the “to-read” stack on my bookshelf), shared his thoughts on the value of focusing on just one thing at a time … “Identify the small tricks you use to avoid being fully present with whatever you’re doing, and put them aside for a week or two. You may discover, as I did, that you were unwittingly addicted to not doing one thing at a time. You might even come to agree with me that restoring our capacity to live sequentially — that is, focusing on one thing after another, in turn, and enduring the confrontation with our human limitations that this inherently entails — may be among the most crucial skills for thriving in the uncertain, crisis-prone future we all face. … The attraction of multitasking [is that] it offers the false promise that we might somehow slip the bonds of our finitude. We tell ourselves that with sufficient self-discipline, plus the right time-management tricks, we might finally ‘get on top of everything’ and feel good about ourselves at last. This utopia never arrives, of course, though it often feels as if it might be just around the corner. The uncomfortable truth is that the only way to find sanity in an overwhelming world — and to have any concrete effect on that world — is to surrender such efforts to escape the human condition, and drop back down into the reality of our limitations. Distracting yourself from challenging tasks by, say, listening to podcasts doesn’t actually make them more bearable over the long term; instead, it makes them less enjoyable, by reinforcing your belief that they’re the sort of activities you can tolerate only by distracting yourself — while at the same time all but ensuring that you’ll neither accomplish the task in question nor digest the contents of the podcast as well as you otherwise might.”
David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, examined the latest indictment of Trump in regard to his role in the January 6th insurrection, and warned of the “reckoning ahead” awaiting the American electorate … “The country is headed for a great reckoning—in the courts and at the ballot box. Will the American electorate show itself capable of overlooking a conspiracy to undermine democratic rule and return the chief conspirator to power? The indictment is a powerful summation of much that we have learned before, but who, in fact, will read it? What minds will it alter? What difference will it make? The former President continues to attract millions of supporters who have such antipathy for Biden, for the Democrats, for the ‘corporate media,’ for academia, for all the institutions they see as woke and hostile to their interests, that they interpret Trump’s deviance as defiance, his lies as truthtelling, his fury as their fury. Trump is their leader and, if need be, in the end, their martyr. As Nate Cohn put it in his analysis of the Times’ poll, ‘The MAGA base doesn’t support Mr. Trump in spite of his flaws. It supports him because it doesn’t seem to believe he has flaws.’ So far, tens of millions of Americans are willing to overlook not only the multiple criminal indictments of Donald Trump but also his lethal mismanagement of covid-19; his inhumane handling of children at the border; his myriad statements of bigotry and misogyny; his assaults on the free press and the rule of law; his indifference to national security and the climate emergency; his affection for autocrats around the world; his impeachments; his many schemes to enrich his family. According to [the most recent] Times poll, Biden and Trump are tied in a hypothetical rematch at forty-three per cent. Sooner or later, a great reckoning is coming.”
Tom Nichols, staff writer for The Atlantic and lead contributor for its daily newsletter, insisted that it’s now up to the American electorate to preserve our democracy’s future in the aftermath of the “J6 indictment” just handed down against Trump … “The former president—once our chief executive, the commander in chief, the leader we entrusted with the keys to nuclear hell—is accused of knowing that he lost a free and fair election, and, rather than transferring power to a duly elected successor, engaging in criminal plots against our democracy, all while firing up a mob that would later storm the Capitol. Long before now, however, Americans should have reached the conclusion, with or without a trial, that Trump is a menace to the United States and poisonous to our society. The GOP base, controlled by Trump’s cult of personality, will likely never admit its mistake: Trump’s record of lawlessness and depravity means nothing to [them]. The rest of us, as a nation but also as individuals, can no longer indulge the pretense that Trump is just another Republican candidate, that supporting Donald Trump is just another political choice, and that agreeing with Trump’s attacks on our democracy is just a difference of opinion. The indictment handed down today challenges every American to put a shoulder to the wheel and defend our republic in every peaceful, legal, and civilized way they can. We can no longer merely roll our eyes when an annoying uncle rhapsodizes about stolen elections. We should not gently ask our parents if perhaps we might change the channel from Fox during dinner. We are not obligated to gingerly change the subject when an old friend goes on about ‘Demonrats’ or the dire national-security implications around Hunter Biden’s genitalia. Enough of all this; we can love our friends and our family and our neighbors without accepting their terms of debate. To support Trump is to support sedition and violence, and we must be willing to speak this truth not only to power but to our fellow citizens.”
Thanks for reading this issue of TLBR. We continue to be on our summer schedule of extended intervals between issues, so please look for the next one in four weeks, posting on Thursday, September 14th.
Took me a while to sit with your writing but not surprisingly it provided a host of thoughtful insights
that enrich my day! Hope covid has moved on and your health restored.
Impactful