Like so many others I am horrified by what I see happening. For the last few days I have been wanting to strike out in anger and horror at the abomination we all seeing taking place. Anger can fuel powerful activism, but anger can also make us shortsighted.
How many of us, really, can say we ever changed our position about anything when someone was pointing their finger and yelling at us telling us how awful we are? Sometimes it works better to gently lead people to see themselves more clearly. To that end I offer these few paragraphs below. Please feel free to copy and share them, without attribution, anywhere you think it might help people open their hearts and minds.
It is basic human nature to prefer comfort and avoid discomfort. In Buddhist terms this is called attraction to comfort and aversion to discomfort. Though it makes no difference what religion we are, what language we speak, or where we happen to live. It is basic human nature common to every human being. It doesn’t make us bad people, it simply makes us human. We need to be careful, however, that our need to avoid discomfort and displeasure doesn’t blind us to horrible things, which may not affect us personally, yet may be happening right in front of us.
It has been famously said that the nicest people made the best Nazis. In their interest in avoiding discomfort nice people turned away while their neighbors were being dragged away and placed in concentration camps. People frequently ask why didn’t someone do something to stop it? It is because nice people simply turned away; what they saw made them uncomfortable, in their effort to maintain their own comfort they turned away from atrocities happening right in front of them.
It is only natural human nature to want to disbelieve that horrible things are happening on our watch. It is only natural to want to think things can’t be as bad as some people are saying. But we need to be very, very careful that our desire to give people the benefit of the doubt, that our need to maintain our own sense of comfort doesn’t make us accomplices to monsters.
