Moscow Mitch..
A Buddhist monk I know has on his screen saver the names and photographs of people to whom he is grateful: Gandhi, Malala, Greta Thunberg, Vaclav Havel, Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the lower right hand corner is a picture of Senator Mitch McConnell. When I registered shock and unmasked disgust the monk said, “Each day he teaches me to have compassion for everyone.”
Trolling a flea market somewhere in the States, I saw a little sticker which read “Be careful who you hate. It might be someone you love.”
In a church in Birmingham, Alabama during the civil rights movement, preparing for the arrests of hundreds of schoolchildren, outside members of the Ku Klux Klan began picketing, carrying menacing signs, shouting their slogans. Dr. King took the podium and said, “If we can’t love the Ku Klux Klan, we don’t have a movement.”
Gandhi said, about the movement to nonviolently take India back from the British, we want to free the Indians from being in front of the guns and free the British from being behind them.
Yesterday, friend of mine was standing in a line at Safeway, only half registering that the woman in front of him was putting food back into the cart because she had run out of money. The man behind him jumped forward and paid the extra amount, so the woman would not go hungry. My friend was astonished at his own slow reaction to have done the same. He turned to the other man and said, “Thank you. You just changed my life.”
I saw the Italian people singing from their flowered balconies as the victims of Covid-19 piled up in heaps, and quarantined relatives mourned from a distance.
And while the health care workers were sacrificing themselves to do God’s work, I felt there was hope for the human race.
Keeping these images in the forefront of my mind helps dissipate the tiresome rage and frustration which consume me each time I witness another lie, another patronizing wisecrack about women, another degrading accusation of journalists, another racist slogan, coming out of the President and all the President’s men. And women.
Today their lying has leapt ever more rapidly from misinformation to irresponsibility to flagrant disregard for human life to what must be called for what it is: murder.
Will I put a picture of Mitch McConnell on my screen saver? I may not have evolved as far as my monk friend. I’ll probably just keep the photograph of my granddaughter standing on her head in the field. But it’s clear to me that I too need to keep my eyes on the path to kindness and mercy, empathy and compassion, courage and humor, and all the related things that we will need to reveal, confront, combat, and overcome tyranny.
Joan Baez
A norvég, svéd, holland és az egykori német hadügyminiszter.
