In 1917, they broke down his door, yanked him out of bed, chained him to the rear of a car and dragged him over Butte, Mont.'s cobble stones. Finally, they hanged Frank Little from a railroad trestle. His efforts to organize the oppressed had largely failed. "'Slain by capitalist interests for organizing and inspiring his fellow men,' says the headstone."
Heroes and villains were easier to spot back in the day.
ReplyDeleteI usually don't have a fixed habit standing up for workers' rights. Habitual or karmic conditioning are by nature evil in the Gautama's Buddha discipline, no matter how noble. As the front page of black moon zendo indicates v. v. clearly the first day I come by, "Better your own truth, however weak, than the truth of another, however noble."
ReplyDeleteHowever the Kalama Sutta allows ordinary, foolish, sick and dying Buddhists like me or non Buddhists like anybody else perhaps to keep a decent degree of faith in the Buddha as well as His teachings. Those teachings were quite poignant. The underlying desired outcome is also one form of benefit for oneself as well as another too. Let me give an example, perhaps. Since the Buddha was originally a monarch, when He became a renunciant He was literally poorer than a communist from a third world country, maybe Cuba, I won't know. He sat under the Bodhi tree and tried figuring out how does all the sitting lead one and another such as the world to freedom from suffering and the causes of it. Whether He figured out anything or otherwise I am still stupid and ignorant today, but eventually at around my age of 34 or 35 He said this was it, drank some decent nourishment and called Himself the Buddha that attained Nirvana.
Since I ain't a Buddha myself I ain't sure what on earth is a Buddha or a Nirvana, but if He says so, maybe He really did become one. Again, the Kalama approach doesn't forbid me from being poor, lousy, pathetic and wretched like the Gautama Buddha is it helps me and another.
There was something about moderation in Gautama's realisation, such as avoiding both extremes of communism or capitalism. There was also something about suffering in His discourses, such as whether one is a communist or a capitalist one is subjected to aging, sickness and eventually death.
Since there is breakfast this morning, I might worry about 1917 in 2017.
On this day a century ago, the Battle of Flers–Courcelette in France saw the British advancing the first with the tank in warfare, tanks then looked like a mammoth.