Of Monks and Oligarchs
One of the things I have learned in my more than seven decades of life is that everything has its opposite. For instance, you wouldn’t know up if there was not also a down. You wouldn’t know warmth without cold. Darkness reveals the light. For every peak there is a corresponding valley. In the same way, good and evil reveal one another.
Not long ago, a group of Buddhist monks and a dog named Aloka completed a peace walk of more than two thousand miles from Texas to Washington, DC, in the dead of winter. Their long walk was a continuation of a trek that began in India.
Coming from India, the monks were not acclimated to North American winters. They were not ideally clothed for the journey, and they carried very little with them. Deep cold and snow had set in over most of the route. Without complaint, they endured pain and suffering. Illness befell some of them that required medical intervention. But the monks were focused on two things: mindfulness and peace. Nothing could dissuade them from completing the task they had set for themselves.
I had heard about the event, but I did not immediately give it the attention it deserved. I occasionally checked on the monk’s progress. But as the weeks passed, I began to pay closer attention to the crowds of people that had gathered to bear witness, often in severe weather.
People from all walks of life, young and old alike, came out to witness the spectacle, to offer words of encouragement, and to provide clothing, food and drink, lip balm, flowers and medicine and moral support to the monks. Some kind soul even supplied boots for Aloka. It seemed that with each town the monks passed, the crowds grew, and there was an obvious spiritual bond between them. The monks brought out the best in people.
On the final stages of the peace walk, I witnessed events that are not commonplace on this continent. The monks were humble, respectful and reverent. Their demeanor, their grace, their dignity, so rare these days in the midst of hatred, war, drug abuse, alcoholism, hubris and violence was not something I have witnessed here before on that scale. It felt surreal.
An aura of spirituality enveloped the participants. The mutual respect and reverence, the spiritual connection between the peace walkers and their supporters was palpable. You could feel the sanctity, the reverence for life and the love that radiated outward from the monks and was reciprocated in kind by the observers.
You could feel the authenticity in every gesture of compassion and empathy that passed between the monks and the onlookers. As they approached the nation’s capital, the monks and their supporters were melding into a single, integrated entity for peace, a literal peace movement.
I saw an elderly ex-marine break down in tears in the presence of the monks. I saw young children with flowers in hand and a wondrous glow of innocence in their eyes, give each passing monk a flower, a gesture of compassion and love, and I also saw the monks give flowers to the children and elderly men and women who braved the elements to share the mystical experience unfolding before them. No money changed hands but many profited. A wealth of experience accumulated like snowflakes in a winter storm.
The event and all who participated in it showed that another world is possible. It demonstrated that human beings could choose to walk humbly in a sacred manner, rather than take up arms against their brothers and sisters on other continents. We can consciously choose a path of enlightenment and spirituality over the coerced march to death and destruction that our so-called leaders are foisting upon us. The choice is ours to make.
The monks and Aloka didn’t tell us anything. Rather, they showed us the path to enlightenment through their long walk and their willingness to endure suffering. Every footstep was a prayer for peace and justice writ large in the language of motion, the act of being and doing. To walk in a sacred manner is not a symbolic gesture. It demonstrated that harmony is possible, but it requires intentionality, mindfulness, compassion and empathy for all life.
When existential stress is removed from our lives, calmness and peace of mind fills the vacuum, and peace can come to full flower. Ruthless competition yields to mutual aid and cooperation, shared prosperity, and the recognition that all is one. We have but one earth and we need to share it with every living thing. The very presence of the monks evoked peace; it awakened the slumbering hope that once animated our lives and gave us purpose. It reminded us that we can and must do better.
In contrast to the Buddhist monks, a few weeks prior, I heard Scott Bessent, the Secretary of Treasury, his pride-swollen chest puffed out, gleefully boasting about deliberately imposing suffering and misery and death on the Iranian people, including women and children, through sanctions and tariffs, frozen assets and blockades of critical resources. But this is nothing new. Our bread crumb trail of sins lead us far into the past and to inescapable conclusions about who we are and what we truly believe as individuals and as a nation.
We are not at peace with ourselves or the world. We are a people divided by socioeconomic class. We measure worth by income and social status and by material possessions and dominance. The almighty dollar owns us. We think that we can buy happiness and rule the world. Our imaginary visions of grandeur are in reality a dystopian nightmare that devours hope and human decency and leaves a trail of corpses in its wake.
Bessent’s economic statecraft is being imposed on Iran, Cuba and Venezuela and other nations, especially in the global south, that pose no threat to us. As a matter of policy, people are starving to death and being denied access to medicine and a decent life. These are the wretched of the earth, and they are our brothers and sisters. They are us. That is not statecraft. It is sadism, a crime against humanity.
Iran poses no material threat whatsoever to the US, and neither does Cuba or Venezuela, but the US seeks to humiliate them and destroy their sovereignty. It plans to turn Cuba and Gaza into another fantasy island for the Epstein class.
In a similar vein, Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, recently gave a sickening speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he proposed rededication to US imperialism, by using its economic and military might to steal the resources of other nations and to enslave their populations to corporate interests and to sow chaos and misery and other forms of debauchery.
To Rubio, that is how strong people treat the weak and powerless; they dominate them and plunder their sovereign nations without regard for their people’s needs. That is the mentality of a plantation owner and a Christian fascist.
Rubio’s intentions are clear: to impose US global dominance, to reassert its powers and to turn back the hands of time to the good ole days of slavery, child labor, colonial occupation, and the subjugation of non-whites. In a shameful display of sycophancy, the European capitalists gave Rubio a standing ovation.
As if turning a knife in the back of the resistance, Rubio also skewered “godless communists” for getting in the way of US imperialism around the planet. But if communism is godless, as Rubio asserts, it would therefore infer that capitalism is a religion of godliness, and it would also accord Rubio himself the status of one of its high priests. Although I am not a Christian or a member of any organized religion, I am quite certain that the prosperity gospel does not appear anywhere in the King James version of the Holy Bible.
What Rubio and his minions propose reeks of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism. It is a violent and oppressive ideology that fosters the assumed superiority of global oligarchs over working people. It treats the rest of the world as subjects to be ruled and punished by the rich and powerful, as if being poor were a sin punishable by death.
By now it should be abundantly clear to anyone with a conscience and an ethical code of conduct that the Buddhist monks peace walk was spiritually enlightened and life-affirming, whereas Marco Rubio’s speech on behalf of empire was death-affirming and dark. We Homo sapiens are enigmatic creatures. We often have difficulty connecting the dots and seeing the clear picture resolving before our eyes. Good and evil make a well-defined contrast to one another, as does the enlightenment and darkness of the human soul.
The effect those monks had on the people they met on their peace walk will stay with me for the rest of my life.
On the other hand, I hope that I can soon forget the vitriolic garbage spewed forth by the likes of Scott Bessent, Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio. The thought of them and their psychologically deformed ideology literally makes me ill. We can and must do better. We needn’t pursue another trail of tears or create more reservations and American colonies. There are too many of them already.
