Waking Up: Poison as Medicine

When I was 11 years-old, my 6^th grade teacher, Miss Lewis, decided to teach our class about democracy. 
 

It was June, the end of the school year, a time when any teacher could have easily decided to coast on autopilot till the last day of school- especially during Social Studies.
 

But that year, Miss Lewis chose not to.
 

No, she decided to educate our class about democracy by bringing our attention to the most current event of that time: The Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 in which hundreds of student demonstrators and civilians were killed by the Chinese military.
 

For those of you who don’t know (or don’t remember), in the spring of 1989 there was a period of student-led protests in Beijing, China to call for greater democracy including freedom of speech and freedom of the press. 
 

At its peak, it is estimated up to a million young men and women gathered together in Tiananmen Square while thousands of others protested in 400 other cities nation-wide using non-violent techniques-- including hunger-strikes--to communicate their outrage.
 

I can’t tell you how much this one Social Studies lesson changed me.
 

And I mean that almost literally. 
 

As in, I don’t completely know or understand how this one single event got so deeply under my skin so as to rearrange the furniture of my mind- to borrow a phrase from Joanna Macy.  I just know that it did.
 

For some folks of my generation, the event they most remember is the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion that was largely viewed live on the television.
 

But not me.
 

Learning about The Tiananmen Square Massacre awoke something inside of me that felt like it was always there, and I began to make connections.
 

Fast forward five more years.

I am now 16 years-old, it is 1994, and I am on a school trip to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. The museum officially opened just one year before under President Clinton, and I have my first experience in the Shoe Room.

For those of you who have never been to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, there is an exhibit that displays 4000 shoes  in the museum that actually belonged to the murdered women, men and children of the Nazi concentration camps of World War II, and the experience of seeing piles of these extremely personal belongings is visceral (oh, yes! there is a smell!)  and overwhelming- as it should be.

Looking back, I remember silently walking through the room with all my senses alert and flooded with unfiltered human reality, while a lump sat hard in the back of  my throat. I remember thinking without remission: "I don't understand how this could happen...How could human beings do this to other human beings?...How could children be murdered?...This was just decades ago when my own father was already in this world?"
 

Fast forward 3 more years.

I am now 19 years-old, it is 1997, and I am sitting in an African American History class as an undergraduate.
 

My professor is an elderly Jewish man barely taller than I (I am only 5 feet) who has taught at the college for decades.  He matter-of-factly tells our class that by learning African American history, we are actually learning a more accurate, whole history of the United States; he said the historical view from the "bottom" is a fuller picture than the view from the "top."
 

It is.
 

I learn for the first time about the devastating 1896 United States Supreme Court decision called Plessy vs. Fergusen; a criminal legal decision that legitimized "separate but equal," or what became known as Jim Crow, for the next 70 years. 
 

I learn how 9 white male Supreme Court judges constitutionally disenfranchised African Americans politically, economically and socially.  I learn how this one court case was so powerful, it successfully un-did 3 decades of progressive post-Civil War, post-slavery reconstruction. 
 

I also begin to make connections between my own personal experiences and this court decision.

Like Charlotte weaving her spider web,  this eye-opening class was a catalyst for a whirlwind of insights and understandings of reality that had previously been blind to me regarding the historical context for the housing projects just miles from where I lived; for my mother's friends' families who were part of the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the southern states to the northern cities who were trying to escape lynching, the poverty and the terrorism of the KKK; for how the de facto segregated school systems of the north, that I was educated in, were created.

In other words, I began to see with much greater clarity how we were still marred by this single court decision over 100 years later.  You could argue: I was waking up.

And it continues to this day.

For me, President Trump’s recent executive order to stop all refugee programs from war-torn Syria and “temporarily” restrict all travel from 7 predominantly Muslim countries was another such "wake-up call" that was exacerbated (or maybe punctuated) by reporting by The New York Times on 1/30/17 that a January, 2017 Quinnipiac Poll found 48 percent of Americans support the new policy.

What?!I  thought. How could this be?!
 

It seems so strange to me that these events, like the alarming 1960's television images of the civilian war carnage in the Vietnam War and the police dogs and water hoses being used against protesting African Americans were for my parents' generation--arguably some of the darkest low-points in the last 100 years of our human history--were my "coming of age moments" in my journey of awakening.

I'm incredulous that it is the ugly of the ugly that wakes me up...

On the other hand, Buddhist thinkers and writers might say, Of course! That's how it works.

In Pema Chodron's1997 book When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times she wrote:

We can use difficult situations--poison--as fuel for waking up...Everything that occurs is not only usable and workable but is actually the path itself. We can use everything that happens to us as the means for waking up. We can use everything that occurs--whether it's our conflicting emotions and thoughts or our seemingly outer situation--to show us where we are asleep and how we can wake up completely, utterly, without reservations...Use poison as medicine to use difficult situations to awaken our genuine caring for other people who, just like us, often find themselves in pain.
 

Poison as medicine?

Suffering  and awareness of suffering as part of the path to enlightenment or what is more commonly called: wisdom?

I suppose this way of understanding the path of awakening is present from the very beginning of the legend of the Buddha when the young prince Siddhārtha Gautama, the man who would become known as the first Buddha, left his protected palace gates for the first time and witnessed the reality of human suffering in the form of an old person, a sick person and a dead body, and this experience became his first hard-core wake-up call.
Yet, I have to wonder, how many more "wake-up calls" will we need--like the indefinite ban on Syrian refugees--before our society as a whole can evolve into an enlightened future where we live the values of a spiritual democracy? 

In the meantime, it appears anyway, there will be plenty of opportunity (aka poison) for you and me to use for our own awakenings in the next four years.

May our practice benefit all others.