As an outsider of politics or ideology and a person grown up in Asia, in the last 5-6 years, I frankly never experienced so many discords and media arguments in my life. I feel like escaping someplace that can get away from all these squabbles. Granted, the country is having its Pluto return opposing its natal Mercury, a transit Neptune in opposition to its natal Natune in the last 10 years, and now a transit Chiron returning against its natal Saturn and natal Juno (which is an asteroid symbolized committed equal partnership). In addition, the baby boomers of this country, which represented at least 16 percent of the population (according to 2019 numbers) are also having their natal Pluto in Leo being opposed by the transit Saturn in Aquaria. Astrologically speaking, we are at the start of a very new cycle. So this is a huge inflection point, for the country and for each of us individually.
Colloquial English idiom speaks about change being constant. The Chinese slant says Fengshui take turns: thirty years river east and thirty years river west. Buddhism talked about Impermanence. Life is an ongoing journey for elevating our soul’s evolution. Let us face reality and go with the flow of transformation.
We humans all have a tendency to like being prosperous and dislike being poor, enjoy sunny days and dislike stormy weather, and delight in taking and aversion to giving. Appreciate the comfort and loathe suffering. But just as with so many things in life, there are ups so there are downs, there are left so there are right. there are roots so there is fruit, the duality of the nature of our world requires us to think more philosophically about the silver lining of the dark cloud, so speak. Suffer and loss serves their meaning. In the endless cycles of destruction and rebirth, we have all been there at some point in time. Before he became a Buddha, Shakyamuni had suffered a lot in many lives. He made a lot of mistakes, like all of us. He made himself suffer, and he made people around him suffer. Contrary to what most people think that there is nothing to gain from negativity ( here I mean unpleasant experience), the YinYang Symbol shows us that for every loss there is some gain on the other side, for every gain, there is some loss on the other side. Ultimately, nothing is really gained, and nothing is really lost if we see if your the perspective of energy.
On many levels, our country is experiencing unprecedented shock as we realize how our ideas and the social-political system had failed the test against reality. However, this is not the first time. We had this shock when John Kennedy was assassinated, we had this shock when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and We had this shock when Trappist monk and Theologian Thomas Merton, a groundbreaking leader who challenged the hypocrisies of our age and instead offered his meditations on the power of prayer, and We had this shock when President Nixon announced the end of the Bretton Woods International Monetary System and replace it with the Fiat U.S dollar. What we perceived as threatening/hostile circumstances are actually the echo of a series of choices we made decades earlier, and some much-needed adjustments we had rejected thus far.
2020 was a watershed. On top of all the chaos of the pandemic, we had an outdated medical system that failed to meet the challenge of our era, and we have an economy that advocates heavily on consumerism to boost GDP and a private central bank that lives on a rent-seeking system of fractional banking. As a result, the majority of the countrymen are wiped out by disaster Capitalism and suffer from high inflation caused by the energy shortage and supply chain reconfiguration. But our agony was actually rooted much further, basically, we were trapped in neoliberalism – a fundamentally biased worldview of destructive individualism, secularism that denies the higher purpose of life and rejects the cause-effect spiritual path, and an attitude of exceptionalism toward highly differentiated crony capitalism that dismissal responsibility and tradition. We have been so busy projecting our energy outside that we forget to look inside to ask for what we really need to lead a happy life. We had ambitiously asserted our ideology to the world, only to find decades later so many revolutions/coups/assassinations turned out to have unintended consequences and backfire on our higher purpose. We have lived in our own lying for so long that we are not able to distinguish between delusion and reality. It is not that our enemies did not had their share of problems, faults, and misjudgments, but for the purpose of our soul’s growth, we own to ourselves to do self-searching and introspection.
As we went through all the crises, we became more aware of the nature of interdependence (not co-dependence) in this world. I was recently watching a documentary about Iran, In one of the episodes it said, “Iran’s greatest enemy is the United States”; which naturally lead me to think, “who is United States’ greatest enemy?” and the question reminded me of the long list, although I almost forgot about it the last 3-4 years with all the talking about the trade war with China. And now with the Russia Ukraine war, the American media, and perhaps the media in the Western world all claimed that Russia invade Ukraine, but Professor Jeffery Sache, in an interview, said, cold war thinking remains very strong even today. I do not quite agree with his point of view on climate-change, but his analysis of Ukraine’s Russian war is good for sharing with the countrymen.
In the 1990s when Soviet Union Gorbachev said we are going to have massive political reform; Sache advised giving Russia more help, “Help them? Are you kidding?” That was the kind of attitude the U.S government had towards the USSR. Professor Jefferey Sache said he regards that as the underline deep source of our problem since then.The USA just wants to be in control, that is the kind of mentality that goes way back, it is American exceptionalism; It is the deep belief of many Americans, also at the top of the system, that the world is only safe if only American runs the show; Sache doesn’t share the view, he thinks other people don’t want to be run by outsiders; they want to run their own affairs, in a cooperative way, therein lies the tension, Everyday to now with this war we still hear: the US, leader of the free world, US, leader of the west; the US, leader of Nato, much American think, of course, that is the way, but what he said fell on deaf ears.
What we hear from the rhetoric from mainstream media in the USA, is that Putin is a Hitler, he has to stop, and we have to defeat him. The man is crazy, living a dream world of Russian Imperialism. There is no stopping him, any agreement is to rip up a piece of paper. Professor Sche said he lived through this kind of characterization, what we hear is not real, it is propaganda, and we should be negotiating. Every decade there is a new Hitler we can not deal with. Whether it was Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao or Nicaragua, Iraq, or Syria, we are really good at this game of rhetoric. Since Professor Sache is all over the world, virtually all the time speaking with world leaders, Professor Sache said what we hear is propaganda, not real. We should be negotiating, actually, Biden refused to negotiate with Putin in 2021 because Putin raised a very specific set of points. One was the enlarged Nato, and there was a chorus here in the USA saying that was herring, that was a phony issue. But that was not fake, Sache said he had been in this issue since 1990 when the West promised Gorbachev that no nato enlargement. We are liars. The USA cheated and continued to do so, and Biden Adm refused to negotiate. That is straightforward, except that was not the story that was told. Then there is the question of Ukraine itself which is an ethnically divided country because there is a significant Russian minority. Those are real issues by the way, although war is the answer to them in any sense. But there was a very complicated, very difficult conflict where the USA was stirring the pot also, back in a decade ago and especially around 2014-2015, there were actually agreements reached for the area where the fighting is raging right now – the Don-bass region.
Agreements were called the Minsk-I and Minsk-II. They were signed by the Ukraine government. Then Ukraine’s government said we don’t want to do those, and when Putin says well what about the Minsk agreements? He was shouted down or ignored. Oh, they don’t exist, they were unfair, they were this, they were that. But there were actually agreements. Professor Sache said when he said this, he can only tell you how many emails he is going to get from Ukrainian Canadians, Ukrainian-American: Sache, are you crazy, what are you saying? But the truth is, diplomacy is crucial if you’re going to avoid wars. Signing agreements matters. You can’t just walk away from them. That is true of Russia, and it is true of Ukraine, it is true of the United States also. We actually should be sitting down and negotiating. All our media don’t discuss the substance of what this war is really about. Or what its roots are or even what its claims of Putin are. Just say repeatedly he is Hitler, he is a madman. He is out of control, there is nothing to do but defeat him. that is our mantra, that kind of the mantra that can get us all killed if we do down this route. Because it is false, and it’s extraordinarily dangerous. Because like it or not, Russia had 1600 active nuclear warheads. And we don’t even want to sit down to talk and shame our government for not having diplomacy with Russia. At least sit, talk, discuss and explain. We don’t do that, we just say victory victory victory on the battlefield. Sache said he is not in for that because this is a very dangerous and unwise approach.
Professor Sache said, a peace agreement was on the table actually back at the end of March and then Ukraine walked away because the U.S told them to walk away. We’re providing the weapons and the U.S, and even more, the U.K which is a more experienced empire than the U.S, which has a mindset even though it is long gone but still has an imperial mindset that is even more imperial than our mindset. They said to Ukrainians: don’t negotiate, you don’t have to, just beat them, beat them on the field, so what was on the table at end of March was basically neutrality for Ukraine so that Nato and Russia wouldn’t be right up against the border with each other. When you have two forces right up against each other, you are in a tripwire of nuclear war, we should have a zone where we’re apart, where there is some time to talk. Some time to work out problems for deconfliction, but no, we wanted to be right up against the border. But what Brzezinski said back at the end of March was neutrality, neutrality with guarantees. Okay, what is a very valid one. Point two was something on the Donruss. Even though there were Minsk-I and Minsk-II, you can’t just walk away, you have to do something about them.
The third point is everybody on the inside acknowledges there is no answer is Crimea. Because Crimea is a weird story of Russia’s seaport on the Black Sea – its naval base in Sverdlovsk, is so crucial for Russian security. But Khrushchev in 1954 of what was then a completely symbolic gesture. When Russia was administrative lines that were within an overall state. he said, okay, we gift Crimea from Russia to Ukraine, it didn’t mean anything when there was a soviet army and soviet naval base and all the rest. but after 1991, it certainly meant something, and what happened in 2014 was the pro-Russian President was overthrown. Russia views that as the U.S instigated a coup. There is something to that, and that is one of those things that the western media simply will not discuss and it’s so deeply hidden in classified documents, that may be in 50 years, someone will write a good book about Ukraine 2014 if we get to 50 years from now.
In 2014, the Russian President Yanukovych was overthrown, at that moment, Putin seized Crimea and there was a referendum, hard to know much about it. But Crimea became part of Russia. Just say there are three things on the table: neutrality, the Donbas, and Crimea. Crimea, the basic answer was Okay, we continue to negotiate, it is a frozen conflict. the Donbas something like the Minsk agreements, and then the government of Ukraine walked away from this. Even after reports that were close to an agreement, then we have our defense secretary and our state department which used to be diplomats, but now it’s warriors, saying we’re gonna defeat Russia, and so everything went away about the negotiations. That is the long-winded answer to your question. We weren’t so far from actually having a negotiated outcome. And then Ukraine walked away under the instigation of the United States.
Maybe we should ask, why U.S government had so many enemies? Without the propaganda and rhetoric of untruth from our government and media controlled by interest groups, we the people will not be this confused. Along the line of thought, how does it benefit the People of the United States and world peace with the murder of Soleimani, the Iran general? And how does it benefits the People of the United States and world peace when the government claims Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel? How does it benefit the People of United States to had a historical lowest tax rate for the super rich when the wealthy 10 percent of population owns 89 percent of stock in USA? Federal Reserve data indicates that as of Q4 2021, the top 1% of households in the United States held 32.3% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50% held 2.6%. In recent decades, wealth inequality has substantially increased in the United States. From 1989 to 2019, wealth became increasingly concentrated in the top 1% and top 10% due in large part to corporate stock ownership concentration in those segments of the population; the bottom 50% own little if any corporate stock. From an international perspective, the difference in US median and mean wealth per adult is over 600.
Without those self-serving irresponsible policies from our government for the super riches, the United States may be able to have better usage of resources to provide better living conditions to its constituents? A better medical system, a better education system, a better economy? A narrowed gap of wealth? A more just and inclusive society? A better system to assist the immigrants from the Global south. And to align better our speech and actions with God’s will? To foster our spiritual growth and accumulate more good karma? Iran is a good example, and so does Turkey.
