I’d like to begin this week’s Random Wednesday with a personal note. Many of you know about my mother’s medical crisis and near-miraculous recovery over the past few months. Now my father is in the same ICU she was in not long ago. He was hospitalized with pneumonia and a lung infection. That is resolving well but over the past week he has become mentally disoriented and we can’t figure out why. If you are so inclined, keeping Mark Swiss in your thoughts and prayers would be greatly appreciated.
Messed Up Lives
But we all have messed-up stuff going on in our lives, even the great spiritual teachers. At Lion’s Roar, Colin Beavan writes about asking his Zen teacher what to do about his messed up life — the financial worries, the relationship issues, the job stress — and commiserating over how they both suffer these everyday problems:
I like this. To be reminded that one of my Zen teachers can’t quite get his life together. He has had his fair share of money and romantic problems, I happen to know.
Actually, after years of trying to find someone whose life wasn’t a little messy, here is what I’ve discovered: Nowhere have I been able to find anyone who has transcended her own humanity. Gandhi had a terrible temper and could be mean to his wife. Martin Luther King Jr. had affairs. And so on.
This is no longer bad news for me. It means maybe there isn’t something I’m doing wrong. Maybe this is just being human.
The point, Beavan says, is not to try to deny or transcend the messiness of our lives. Rather, in accepting the nature of our lives we can find equanimity and put our energy to its best use:
Even though I feel hurt and anger sometimes, maybe I don’t have to fight those feelings. Maybe I can instead accept some discomfort and leave myself free to invest my energy into things I really care about.
Taking Credit
In a piece at Democracy, Jack Meserve points out two fundamental political errors being make by today’s Democrats:
This point has been made before on Obamacare, but the tendency behind it, the tendency to muddle and mask benefits, has become endemic to center-left politics. Either Democrats complicate their initiatives enough to be inscrutable to anyone who doesn’t love reading hours of explainers on public policy, or else they don’t take credit for the few simple policies they do enact.
He points out the simplicity of Social Security and the UK’s National Health Service, in contrast with the complexities of Obamacare. And that’s not just a failure in marketing:
[T]he amount of immense mental energy and social capital required to keep track of, comprehend the eligibility requirements of, and then successfully apply for these benefits is a de facto regressive tax on people whose lives are too materially difficult to deal with arcane bureaucratic bullshit. That is, those people that need the help the most.
He also contrasts how Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus (the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act”) left few markers behind, while you can still find Works Progress Administration plaques eighty years later.
When we realized the importance of literacy, Meserve says, we didn’t create a complex system of tax credits for books, we created public libraries. We didn’t set up a system of subsidies for private fire services, we build firehouses. His prescription is simple and profound: “Help people and take credit.”
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