There are times we are just dumbfounded and lost our ability to process information and deal with life effectively by the overwhelming pressures all seems to come at the same time – the non-stop wars, the severe Earthquake everywhere, the derailed train spill intoxicant over in Ohio causing human and nature disasters. etc…. It is shocking so many horrified events happened one after another, and many leaders in religious group and government passed away this past three years.
The latest one being Master Xing Yun who left us two weeks ago after the Chinese lunar new year. I still remember his new year greetings broadcasting just a few days earlier: ” ….Let us begin anew, and tomorrow will be better. Let us think this way,: the last year is already the past, if I have fallen short, this year I shall remedy my flaws. If in the past year, anything was left unfinished, this year is a good time for me to seize the opportunity. In Humanistic Buddhism of ours, we are promoting Humanistic Buddhism. A human world where everyone is happy, everyone is at peace, everyone is joyful and wealthy. Wealthy does not mean only money, our health is wealth, our peace is wealth, our joy is wealth, having good affinities with others can be considered as our wealth. We have wisdom, compassion, and the Dharma, all of which are our wealth. So every Spring Festival, people wish each other prosperity. In fact, wealth is within our own mind, making aspirations is wealth. …… Let us encourage each other with mutual blessings. ……”
Yes life must go on, no matter what. Even though individually our brain can get short-circuit, but join the forces together, we can form group-will and face the issue (reality) together, by tackling it one by one, one step at a time, for the benefits of all – all human and non-human, however slowly the progress may be. 三个臭皮匠，赛过一个诸葛亮！ And when we are in one with the universe, that is, when we are operating under the divine principle, we should prevail.
We come to this Earth realm to take lessons. There are only two options, voluntarily or involuntarily: our soul either evolve or devolve. And in the spirit of promoting Humanistic Buddhism, I want to talk out loud on issues in whatever capacity I have, however immature and inadequate. By sharing and discussion, I hope together we may be able to come up with better understanding, and better solutions.
The past three years witness the spread of covid-19 virus that completely change our life in many ways. While the tragedy took away millions of life, causing numerous restrictions, gave rise to many drawbacks, we can not totally deny the lessons the virus teaches us. And that is the message the book The Viral Underclass – the Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide trying to convey. Author Steven Thrasher is an American journalist and academic, the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair of social justice in reporting at (NWU)Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism focusing on LGBTQ research. He is also a faculty member of NWU’s Institute for Sexual and Gender minority health and Wellbeing. The book combines broad and deep reporting and heartrending narrative storytelling, examines the ways HIV/AIDS and other viruses strike people and communities with deliberate intention. His book is essential reading for our understanding of epidemics. His analysis of the viral underclass ring the siren alarming us with transforming unequal access to health care in a world where a pandemic heightens the brutality of inequality. Author challenges us to abandon our fatal illusions of separateness in favor of an embrace of our place in a collective entanglement of bodies. The following is an excerpt from the Epilogue of the book:
…… “My body, my choice” is a bipartisan tenet in U.S. politics scripture considered by many to be as sacrosanct as the right to stand your ground and defend your property with a gun. In the 1970s, when liberals wanted to enshrine reproductive justice in U.S. law, they did not frame their arguments in terms of wanting free abortions as part of universal health care for the entire society. They rarely articulated it as a desire for abortion at all – nor have they named abortion access much in the decades since. Instead, they frame abortion in the context of privacy and choice, encouraging society to consider intimate health matters with the same neoliberal logic that was marketing so many areas of contemporary life.
If I own my body, such logic asserts, I should be able to do anything I want with it. With an ownership mentality, if one owns one’s body, one is also freed from all social obligations to and from others. So, if it’s “my body, my choice,” then anyone can think, Yes, I can have an abortion, which is a health necessity.
But this same logic can also lead to thinking, I don’t have to join a union; my destiny is mine, and mine alone. It can also lead one down the path of believing, I also don’t want to be taxed and forced to pay for schools for someone else’s kids. Or towards feeling that If I am buying bottled water – or if I am brave and I choose to drink tap water knowing its risks – why do I need to be forced to pay for treating the water in Flint, Michigan? And it can mean, if I don’t want to wear a mask or get a vaccine, that is my right, and the repercussions of this on those around me don’t concern me.”
Across the political spectrum, “my body, my choice” can be used to conjure America’s sense of how individual ownership should supersede all else. But this notion of individuality, despite being a core element of American society. It is a myth that we are each the master of our own distinct destiny. It is a myth that the risks inherent in experiencing child-rearing, pandemics, and climate change should never be experienced collectively. And it is a belief that results in behavior with regard to one’s health, and its consequences, being seen as entirely the choice and burden (financial and otherwise) of the lone person experiencing it.
The logic of this myth works only if we pointedly ignore the hierarchies of power class, and American history. Pay no mind to the fact that the myth often comes from people who want to bust unions or who own bottled water companies. forget that an ownership mentality about individual bodies has been dangerous on the North American continent from before the birth of the United States. After all, if a body can be owned, ownership of that body can be transferred – by force of enslavement, for example.
But do consider how often we are encouraged to frame our internal thinking, in some form, along the lines of I should be able to do what I want, when I want, because its my body and my choice! Thinking I have a body is very different from thinking I am a body. This schism can make it difficult for us not only to feel in alignment with our full selves, but also to understand just how deeply we are connected to other humans – how inextricably all our fates are bound together.
Viruses challenge the concept that any one of us “has” one body. As they move freely between the lungs, bloodstream, and genitals of one of us to another, they show how we is a more relevant concept than you or me. How can any of us “own” a part of this body we all share? We can’t. And yet, so much of our thinking is wedded to this concept of my body, as if it existed discreetly.
I believe people who are pregnant should be able to end pregnancies. I also believe that if someone has an abortion, they should not have to deal with it or pay for it alone. It should be free and supported, as part of universal health care. And I believe that if someone has a child, it is not up to them alone to provide everything that child will need for the next couple of decades.
Similarly, I believe every transgender person should get the health care they need, including gender-affirming surgery. But the burden should not be on them alone; they exist in relationship with others, and it is up to the cisgender people around them to offer them gender-affirming care.
Letting go of this ownership framing wouldn’t necessarily mean letting go of agency for anyone to get what they desired. Still, it could mean letting go of the burden that everything must be shouldered alone. It certainly would require relinquishing the illusion that we are all floating specks bobbing through the universe without tie to one another. Unlike so many economic and political forces in the United States that pressure us to see ourselves as siloed and alienated, viruses offer us a deeper understanding of how to think ethically in relation to one another – and a sense of how much more power that gives us.
For any person to enjoy the benefits of lower community viral loads, breathable air, and the kind of equitable vaccination that leads to herd immunity, communal thinking is required. But true communal thinking is not nationalist thinking. By the middle of 2021, more vaccines were freely available in the United States than there were people who readily wanted them; by the end of the year, many Americans could even get a third booster shot, if they wanted. Yet even as thousands were dying in countries where people desperate for vaccines couldn’t even get one shot, many proud U.S. citizens loudly bragged about refusing to take any that were available to them. By 2022, the United States was behind dozens of other countries in its vaccination rate.
Most of us in the United States are socialized to think as consumers, not as citizens of a society with collective health responsibilities – even me. For instance, before COVID-19, I could get on planes easily and fly anywhere I could afford in the world, with little thought to how that choice affected the asthmatic Black and brown children living near the airports I departed from and arrived at, whose lungs inhaled exhaust from the jets ferrying me around. Or how the carbon footprint of my travel would affect wildfires in California or Greece.
Why did I need to think of their bodies when I thought about flying? I was free to do whatever I chose with my body, as long as I could afford the price of the ticket ? ….. because…… we asked you to go on a journey focusing on the viral underclass, so that their stories could help you rethink your most deeply held assumptions – the most deeply held assumptions, that most fundamental, largely unexamined premise we have in the United States is the belief that I am me and you are you and that each of us is the master of our own hero’s journey.
What if viruses teach us that there is no “me” and no “you” at all and that we all share one collective body? And that such individualistic thinking creates not only an underclass, but alienation across lines of class?
Think back to how viruses literally take a part of one person’s code and transfer it to another, which transforms that person individually and forever alters their offspring. As the poet and medical doctor Seema Yasmin puts it, “Eight percent of your genome/ is viral – we are literal cousines of ancient pathogens /wretched offspring of pandemics.” What if we all share just one body – a body that stretches across not just our egos and political philosophies and national borders, but even species?
When I asked disability activist Alice Wong about protests against wearing simple face coverings, she told me (through the BiPAP mask she’s worn twenty-four hours a day for years) that she just had to “wrap my head around why people don’t realize it’s no just for you. It’s for others. it just gets back to this very individualist culture” in the United States.
…… If we humans are going to survive pandemics from any virus – let alone if we are going to survive the existential climate crisis – we cannot do so while behaving as if each of our destinies were disconnected. It is not a bad thing to say we’re interdependent,” Alice continued, raising a concept foreign to many Americans. It requires courage and an acceptance of vulnerability to admit how SARS-CoV-2 has shown , as Alice put it, that “we are in the same soup. Exactly in the same soup and open to the same things. ” Our connection is not merely biophysical but cultural: This is about the invisible conditions that are swirling around us. In our air. In our atmosphere. Through our words.“
……in our minds as well.
to be continued ……