Those People

When my Zen community had a sex scandal involving our teacher, I noticed a phenomenon. As the story went viral, Zen teachers around the country lined up to take shots at us. There was a certain hectoring, tendentious quality to their blog posts and Facebook missives and YouTube interviews. Their rhetoric soared. Their pronouncements were final. If you held your nose over their statements you detected not the faintest whiff of subtlety.

I called them the “Berkeley Buddhists,” though only in my head. I was fucking terrified of them.

One such teacher, a famous writer of books and composer of bad Zen-inspired folk songs, included me in a group phone call with the wonderful female Roshi who was facilitating a meeting in our broken community. He told her, “You are so brave to be crawling into the patriarchal lion’s den. Please be very careful around those people.”

Those people.

I was one of those people.

Alas, I had come full circle. I grew up being bullied by right-wing Midwestern Christian fanatics. Now here I was, an adult being belittled by left-wing Berkeley Buddhist ideologues.

The sad thing was, I had always deeply respected this Zen teacher and writer who had downgraded me to one of “those people.” Now I didn’t know how to feel about the guy.

I got into Zen because it promised a way of life and a path to wisdom beyond the easy moral distinctions that plagued the Catholicism I was weaned on and the “religious right” ascendant in the nineties. By the time I found my teacher I was done with judgmental religious hypocrites. When he told me “You must learn to hold good and bad, God and the Devil, in one hand,” I creamed my pants. He was right. Or, rather, this was the kind of right that I wanted to be around. The other kind, the kind where there are angels and demons, our kinds of people and “those people,” seemed to me to be an incomplete oversimplification of how life really works.

It still does.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean. In response to the women who had been harmed, the Zen oshos or priests penned a public apology for our role in the sexual misconduct in our community. I wrote or edited every word of it. I wanted us to open our hearts unreservedly to the “reporters of harm.” I would brook not one speck of equivocation, self-justification, or disingenuousness. This shit was going to be on point.

Mission accomplished? I’m told that there’s a Philosophy of Ethics class at a college in California that uses ours as a model for exactly how a public apology should address its victims.

Then I got a phone call from an elderly woman. She had studied with my teacher in the seventies. Her voice broke as she talked; she kept excusing herself and starting over. As a child she had been repeatedly raped by a family friend. “Our teacher helped me work through my trauma — by touching me. Are you saying that my experience with him was invalid? Are you saying that he didn’t help me, but that he assaulted me?”

I assured her this was not the case. She replied, “You can’t have it both ways. Your apology was very clear. You spoke to the concerns of the women who were harmed by our teacher, but what about the rest of us? There are many other women who feel as I do. We were betrayed by your letter.”

She closed the call by recommending that I go fuck myself.

“Hitler and Roosevelt exist within one universe,” my teacher told me. His sex scandal broke my heart and shook my faith in his teaching, but several years later I’m coming back around to his “no good no bad” philosophy. (Minus the sexual misconduct, of course.) Yes, you have to make choices, and you choose based on your values, and these values must arise from compassion, wisdom, insight, logic — but don’t ever think that your point of view is absolute, that you have the final word, because the moment you become most certain of yourself, I guarantee you this: someone will step in to tell you their side of a story that will end with, Go fuck yourself.

Which brings me to Donald Trump, and the Viennese friend who asked me “What kind of people vote for that man?”

I live in Europe and I follow American news religiously. The answer to my Viennese friend’s question, according to the press I read (New York Times, LA Times, Daily Beast, Slate, Salon, Jezebel, Vox, New Yorker, CNN, HuffPo, The New Republic, The Atlantic etc.) is bigots, sexists, white supremacists, deluded blacks and self-hating Mexicans, uneducated rural nose-pickers and the complicit Karens who love them.

You know, “those people.” But you know who else?

Jeff and Tammy.

I met Jeff at Confirmation class in high school. After we graduated he moved to Minnesota, married Tammy, whom he met on the night shift at McDonalds, and they adopted Tammy’s nephew. Dennis was born with a rare neurodegenerative disease that left him a quadriplegic. For a decade I followed Dennis’ physical decline on Jeff’s Facebook page. The boy grew thinner, shriveled up, lost his sight and mental functioning — the spark of life dimmed in him but would not die. With simple grace and Christian composure, with appeals to God for help and friends for money, Jeff and Tammy cared for this sick boy until he finally passed away last summer. And then the two of them went to the Cheesecake Factory for a quiet dinner to celebrate Dennis’ life.

And that’s when the protestors barged in. Waving signs, screaming, marching down the isles. They stood on the tables and began chanting. What they were chanting was true. The implication was that Jeff and Tammy and the other diners were complicit in the problem the protestors were protesting. Which is also true. We’re all complicit. Life is bloody, the world is flawed, people are hideous, and our institutions are corrupt. (It’s called the First Noble Truth in Buddhism.)

Jeff agrees with all this. “But what,” he asked in a stemwinder of a Facebook post, “does that have to do with Tammy and me, and what we just went through, and the reason for our night out together?” The police gathered outside, but they dared not come in, and the chanting only got louder. “We finally had to leave the restaurant,” Jeff wrote.

What breaks my heart is that they left their food on the table. Anyone who has ever been broke knows how much a night out at an expensive restaurant means. Not long after I had to unfollow Jeff on Facebook. All those MAGAlogues he’d begun posting were crushing me. . . .

So, America now waits in the balance to see who will win the presidential election. Will it be “our people” or “those people”? As for me, I can’t wait to hate a new president. When I thought the Orange Hairball Vomited Up from the Gagging Throat of the American Electorate was going to win Tuesday evening I added my saltwater to the mug on Ben Shapiro’s desk labeled “Liberal Tears.”

And yet. Sometimes, when I hear myself or a friend or a pundit belittling “those people” who voted for Trump, I think of my time under the lash of the Berkeley Buddhists, and I think of everything that Jeff and Tammy went through, and who they are as people, not merely as Trump supporters, and I become less sure of my emotions around this election.

Emotional uncertainty is really uncomfortable. Hate is so clear, so clean, so juicy and potent and final. Hate takes you for a ride. Woo-hoo, eat a dick motherfucker! Uncertainty roots you to one spot, holds you there, demands that you not lunge in any one direction. It makes you contemplate and question and go still inside.

I think of Buddha under the Bodhi tree, sitting in his “immovable spot,” tempted neither by the demons of war to run away, nor by the goddesses of lust to come hither. The dude stayed put. He got his head and heart clear, and went on to drop brilliant bits of wisdom like “Holding onto hate is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”

Good advice during times like these.

From my perch here abroad, it seems to me that the body politic is united but the American tongue is forked, split off in two directions, each half telling the other to go fuck itself. And while I understand the temptation to curse those other people, I think it’s best to resist.

A few years ago, I was at a calligraphy exhibit in Little Tokyo, LA. I looked up from the Zen master who was slashing black ink across a white canvass and locked eyes with the very Berkeley Buddhist who had decided I was one of “those people.” I had yet to make his acquaintance and seriously considered “Go fuck yourself” as my opening line.

I held his gaze. His face shifted from curiosity to recognition. And we met each other, right there, with two-dozen Japanophiles between us, without saying a word. In one fluid stroke, his brush dripping, the Zen master was inking an enso, a great black zero, and the entire room — silent yet electrified — was drawn together by this manifestation of mu, oneness, the void.

I guess the cat got my tongue because I never did introduce myself. Words seemed excessive, and the context wasn’t right for a confrontation. (Is it ever?) We both got our books signed by the Zen master, and on the way out I held the door for him. Mr. Berkeley Buddhist looked down at his sandals, and then up at Mr. Those People’s face, and we both raised our eyebrows and parted our lips a little, about to speak. He was kind of tubby, with a goatee, mustache, shaved head, and the soft bushy eyebrows of a congenial intellectual. His black robes swished as he went out the door.

I still don’t know how I feel about the guy. I hope I never do.