People of Compassion and Peace

Those of us who think of themselves as “people of peace,” might variously define that notion as: treating all people respectfully and fairly, standing up for a wide variety of human rights, and doing everything possible to avoid war.  More interestingly, however, there seem to be two distinct flavors here:

• “Militant peacemakers,” which, though it sounds oxymoronic, means people (like me) who get seriously peeved when we see injustice, unfairness, stupidity, indifference to human suffering, support of violence, etc.—and do everything we can to fight it.

and

• True pacifists, meaning people who, like the Quakers, the Zen masters and practitioners of actual Christianity, love their enemies, and decline to let negative emotions into their lives.

Those in current-day America who resist Trump’s most horrific actions and statements (which means almost all of them), are a blend of the two.  The recent Women’s Marches were a great example of this.  Walking around the crowd, one saw thousands of expressions of both universal love and passionate anger.

Though I happen to be a member of the first group, I have infinite respect for members of the second.  To offer an example, my friend and wellness coach Terra Gold (pictured above but more tellingly below) is an extremely accomplished practitioner of Eastern medicine, yoga and nutrition, and she also acts as an instructor at local colleges in a variety of the healing arts.  The fact that she’s a friend of mine on Facebook means that she’s exposed to all my rants on the worst of what’s going on here in the U.S. right now, and I’m sure she cringes each time she reads that I’ve “gone off” once again on a wildly unqualified cabinet appointee, an illegal edict, an obvious example of racial hatred, or whatever else that might have infuriated the hell out of me that day.

It’s said that the world needs all kinds of people.  Certainly, it needs large numbers of members from both groups above.