i love our country and i love what our country can be. i’m grateful for our country and for living here, but i am grieved by its past sins and our lacking ability to come together in moral unity to recognize our past and resolve to make change.

this country was built for freedom, but was built on the lives of those who didn’t receive freedom or rights and weren’t recognized as equal in their humanity. for so many descendants and many BIPOC those rights and freedoms are still illusive in cultural, structural, systemic ways.

we have a long way to go in forming a more perfect union. we won’t get further without awareness and recognition of the past aligned with a vow to make the changes and sacrifices necessary to ensure that ALL people are recognized as equal in their embodiment of life and that the socio-economic, governmental structures and systems in place reflect that value.

we are in a challenging time in this country. we have so many who have awakened to this need for change and progress, but we also have many who feel their privilege being threatened and are desperately clinging to an illusion of a “great” past where/when not everyone was/is included, being led by a man who stokes the fire of division and separation, racism and violence in his words and policies.

how ironic that on Independence Day, I should say that our emphasis on our independence is our downfall, but I do and it is. our worship and celebration of individualism is not a truthful reflection of how life is or how life works and this causes harm. we are not independent, we are interdependent. our lives, our words and actions, are intertwined. our welfare, our future as a species on this planet is in jeopardy precisely because we are not aware or do not recognize this. this harmful ignorance is alive in a phrase such as “America First”, it is alive in our clinging to celebratory monuments to a past that was oppressive and harmful, it is alive in our unwillingness to wear a mask or responsibly socially distance for the welfare of others during a rising pandemic.

we aren’t guaranteed a future, friends. but in the life we embody, in the short time we embody it, we have such a great and sacred opportunity to be beneficial, to offer our lives to a movement of love, one that embraces the beauty inherent in our diversity and the necessity for equality and justice, so we can indeed form that more perfect union, not just in these United States, but a union of all humanity and all life.

~j

07.04.2020

#July4th #InterdependenceDay #SitDownRiseUp #NoJusticeNoPeace #BlackLivesMatter #EqualityForAll #EngagedBuddhism #JMWart #JinpaLhaga