Dharma Bum

Civic Duty!

This morning I was notified that I was being recommended for appointment to the City of Huntington Beach's Human Relations Task Force by Council Members Joe Shaw and Mathew Harper. The appointment will be made at the 1/17/12 HB City Council meeting. The Human Relations Task Force promotes and celebrates diversity in our community through education and understanding. It also works closely with the Police Department to strictly enforce and monitor all incidents that could be classified as hate crimes. I'm really looking forward to this new role and the opportunity to bring together and make more visible all the rich cultural diversity that is located in our community. Plus, there might be some art stuff involved.

Link Dump - God & The Art of Listening

For a nation of talkers and self-confessors, we are terrible when it comes to talking about God. The discourse has been co-opted by the True Believers, on one hand, and Angry Atheists on the other. What about the rest of us? - Eric Weiner

Wanted to point DB readers to a couple of opinion pieces in the NY Times I found interesting today. Earlier this week I was having lunch with my Australian friend Ellie and she shared an interesting perspective about how we in America have mixed politics and religion in a way that wasn't recognizable to her or her experience of her home country. In the article Americans: Undecided About God? Eric Weiner points to this link as one of the reasons many americans are opting out of both religion and politics. The solution? He thinks someone needs to invent a new way of being religious, a sort of entrepreneurial answer that would provide space for doubt, encourage experimentation, and allow some of us an opportunity to talk about God without embarrassment. It's worth a look HERE.

Next up we go to Africa again to learn The Art of Listening. Henning Mankell looks to Africa to re-learn the art of listening and describes how many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. Take a look HERE.

image: Esther Pearl Watson

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The class struggle still exists; it exists more intensely. - Michel Foucault

These days there's nothing more common than money. -- Yet sometimes it seems that the very ubiquity of money robs economics of any intrinsic interest as a topic for cultural discussion: there's more and there's less, what else is there to say? -- I think the main reason that most people, most humanities academics especially, don't want to talk about economics is not because it's a political hot potato, because it's so controversial, but precisely because of this commonality or banality. The very all encompassing presence of money seems to solicit just as predictable modes of response: celebration, denunciation, or some hand-wringing combination of the two. - Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault

London

Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985.

Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of not seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news.

Laurie Penny’s eloquent take on why the riots in London happened. On Al Jazeera

Dispatch

Paris: Conversation is important here. Passed by several cafe's. Lovers, friends, ideas, not a "smart" phone in sight.

I left my phone in the room today. It wasn't missed.

Guest Post - Angry Asian Buddhist

In response to Asian Pacific American Heritage month one of the writers I follow, Angry Asian Buddhist challenged other bloggers to celebrate this month by publishing an interview with or a guest blog by an Asian American Buddhist. I invited Arun to guest post here on DB:

Thank you, Chris, for inviting me to write a post on your blog.

For most of the time I was aware of it, Asian Pacific American Heritage Month has not been a big deal. It seemed everyone has a special “month” or “day” to celebrate their unique heritage, and then we go back to our lives as usual—if we were even paying attention. But this year was different.

At the beginning of this month, my father started emailing me popular articles about Asian Americans. First was Wesley Yang's New York Post article “Paper Tigers”—a piece accompanied by the provocative subtitle, “What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?” Then my father sent me a link from the San Francisco Chronicle, “The league of extraordinary stereotypes” by Jeff Yang, a discussion of the pop-culture stereotypes of Asians you’ll find if you sift through half a century of comic books. My father didn’t write much in his emails, but when I talked with him on the phone, he continued to bring up the articles to see if I’d read them. He even resent me the link to Wesley Yang’s piece—just in case I couldn’t find it—and then he just sent it to me as a PDF attachment.

To give you a picture, my father is an old retiree who considers gardening his daily exercise. American-born and raised, he comes from the generation that brought us the Asian American movement. They helped craft the notion of Asian American identity at a time when doing groundbreaking Asian American research meant going to temple and just asking people about their life history. My father would read me bedtime stories about Chinese American laundries, Japanese American internment and Korean American athletes. Any PBS documentary about the Asian American experience was a “must-watch” event. That was how things were for the first fifteen years.

After I began high school, the focus on our Asian American heritage dwindled. Academic involvement and university ambitions became the main topic of dinner conversation. Once in college, it was all about challenging classes, independent research and my honors thesis. When I went back to the rural homeland to search out our roots, my father saw it as an excessive vacation. As someone who himself never had a college degree, he saw my proper focus to be on work, study and then finding even better work. By the time I had blazed my own career path, even after I started the Angry Asian Buddhist blog, we hardly ever talked about Asian American issues. It all seemed so last century.

A week passed before I finally read the pieces and called my father back. He told me, “They write about things that I had to deal with when I was working. I never talked about this.” For the first time, we talked about the kind discrimination he faced through his (extremely successful) career. I realized that for all the Asian American identity and pride my father had raised me with, he had never felt comfortable sharing this part of his struggles with me. In fact, it took these articles written by younger Asian Americans closer to my age for my father to find the words and expression that captured the sense of alienation, frustration, ridicule and determination that pervaded his working career. These articles came together because this month is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. The simple existence of this stupid holiday set in motion a chain of events that allowed my father to find the perfect words penned by someone else to tell me about his suffering.

That realization is what compelled me to write my invitation for other bloggers to include the voices of Asian American Buddhists—emphasis on “voices.” It’s important that we speak for ourselves, not just have someone else write about us. All too often our experiences are presented through the filter of White writers’ perspectives, glossing over our thoughts, our emotions and our personal struggles. When the voices of Asian Americans are continuously denied, then I start getting the sense that our voices have no worth, that our perspectives have no value and that our stories have no place. It’s the sort of connection with these Asian American writers that brought my father closer to me in a way that completely surprised me. It’s that sort of connection that, I hope, will touch other readers in the Buddhist community—and ultimately bring our community even closer together.

Thank you so much again, Chris, for giving me the opportunity to share these thoughts on your blog.