Chenrezig, Bodhissatva of Compassion

Chenrezig, Bodhissatva of Compassion

Nineteen Hundred Sixty Nine was the American Vesuvius of years, hurling so much ash in the air that the subsequent 40 years could be called the Pompeii Era. It was 1969 that put the real boom in the babies. We were then buried by the debris of yesterday’s fire.

Maybe it was moon dust kicked back to earth by the lunar astronauts. Sure, there was Neil Armstrong, but there was also Richard Nixon, Altamont, Abbey Road, the trial of the Chicago 8, Charles Manson, the My Lai massacre revelations, Hurricane Camille, Woodstock, Johnny Cash’s "A Boy Named Sue," and the last Looney Tunes cartoon, Injun Trouble.

It was also the year of Michael Jackson’s (with the Jackson Five) first hit song, "I Want You Back." The song isn’t a bad pop anthem for post-’69 America, an America appealing to gods of democracy and justice it knew were angry as hell:

Oh baby all I need is one more chance
(show you that I love you)
Won’t you please let me
(back to your heart)
Oh darlin’ I was blind to let you go
(let you go baby)

I’m not saying history was suspended during the 70s, ‘80s, 90s, and the first eight years of the new millennium. We had presidents and everything. The Cold War thawed, different teams won world series, genocide became commonplace, the Berlin Wall came down, a poet became president of the Czech Republic. South African apartheid ended. Great Britain took the Falklands. America took Grenada. The Muppets took Manhattan.There was Shaft, The Godfather, MASH, Jaws, Gravity’s Rainbow, Beloved, Songs in the Key of Life, Chico and the Man, Madonna,  Thriller, Seinfeld…we could go on and on.

I am suggesting, though, that in many ways these last 40 years were years of retreat and retrenchment, years of ash and tears. They were, generally, years of reaction. Now, these years happen to mark, more or less, my years in adulthood. I don’t feel I’ve retreated, and I’m sure many feel the same. There has been love, fulfillment, tragedy, hope, happiness, success, and failure all along the way.

One of the things that annoys me most about the media’s marginalizing of the ‘60s (with a lot of help from right-wing ideologues and historical revisionists) is that private life is so often overlooked. We weren’t all at Woodstock. But many of us took seriously the renewed focus on openness, responsibility, love, loyalty, compassion, justice, opportunity, and egalitarianism. Many have since lived their lives in that spirit: nurses, teachers, spiritual leaders, artists, writers, musicians. Many did, but most didn’t.

Also, years (and decades) are really just a kind of historical Dewey Decimal System. People don’t actually live in the former, and books aren’t written for the latter. Anyone with a New Years Day hangover knows that life bleeds across artificial boundaries of calendar and hour.

There was, however, something wicked about 1969.  It wasn’t so much that the illusions of youth were shattered. That’s just convenient moralizing from conservatives. Instead, 1969 was the year the soldiers of American Exceptionalism discovered a world of hearts and minds as exceptional as their own. The earth, seen from the moon, had no exceptional continents. There was no privileged flesh in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

America’s power-players denied it, of course. But there’s a reason Nixon ordered that the bombing of Cambodia be kept secret. Everyone, including the guy who ordered the bombing, knew it was a murderous, inhuman, un-American thing to do. Americans built a public monument to the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima. Now we were skulking about like the dead at night.

The rage caused by the realization of limits to American power mixed dangerously with (mostly) white male resentment over civil rights and feminism. It created a monster cultural volcano full of violent, scapegoating hatred and self-doubt. Over the next few years we were further demoralized by Watergate, the first Arab oil embargo, and our own suddenly obvious lack of nerve. Covered in ash, we slouched on. And called it Disco.

So what’s different in 2009? Well, there’s the fact that America’s first African-American president was inaugurated. But that’s an effect, not a cause. I think the real answer lies in part with younger Americans. As a generation, they seem blessed with America’s true progressive values – the values we celebrated in the ‘60s – without the baggage of American Exceptionalism. They didn’t grow up thinking that the road goes on forever and the party never ends. They were born into a smaller world, so small they see neighbors where their elders saw only foreigners.

Post-WW II economic expansion fooled the parents of the Baby Boomers. For a brief moment, the Boomers themselves saw it as an illusion. Then came Vesuvius, and too many spent the next decades groveling in the ash and mud for a lost something they thought their parents had given them.

What was lost by some, though, were lives of joy and freedom. In other words, we could find what we really lost only if we stopped digging around looking for something – endless material gratification? – we didn’t lose because we never had it.

The picture I chose to illustrate this essay is of the Chenrezig, or Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. Compassion, born of empathy, is the human quality most needed in the post-Pompeii Era. A kind of madness is disappearing with the soot. I hope. But the devastation of these past decades is all too real, and it will take mighty big hearts and extraordinary political will to heal it.

Meanwhile, the forces of darkness return to the playbooks of ’69-’72. The video of the shooting death of Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran is eerily familiar. After only a moment, I thought of the killing of Jeffrey Miller and three others by the U.S. National Guard at Kent State in 1970. John Filo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a young girl crying over Miller’s body was just as powerful as the video of Neda’s last moments.

And that’s another difference we may be marking in 2009. Too few in the world remember Jeffrey Miller’s name. Very few, I think, will forget Neda as the world struggles to emerge from the ashes of the past in the years to come.

Remembering feels possible again.