What I’m Reading Today, June 23
Radical Dharma/ angel Kyodo williams
For too long we’ve been beholden to a set of surface feelings, organizing around ideas and beliefs about what it means to be a good person or create good society. These efforts at good behavior and pursuit of good policies have proven to be no match for the deep embedded ness of what is the foundation of, and has been intricately woven throughout, every facet, institution, and relationship of the United States and the psyche of its inhabitants: the radicalization of people and its underlying presupposition–the superiority of white-skinned peoples.
“empathy” = more powerful, better people bestow fairness upon the other, lesser ones
Much of what is being taught is the acceptance of a “kinder, gentler suffering” that does not question the unwholesome roots of systemic suffering and the structures that hold it in police. What is required is a new Dharma, a radical Dharma that deconstructs rather than amplifies the system of suffering, that starves rather than fertilizes the soil of the conditions that the deep roots of societal suffering grow in (xxiii).