[Buddha-l] Re: buddha-l Digest, Vol 32, Issue 17

[Richard Hayes]

On Thursday 18 October 2007 15:32, curt wrote:

> "Always remember: Others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win,
> unless you hate them. And then, you destroy yourself."
> Richard Milhouse Nixon

The man was right. (As a Quaker, I am always mildly pleased to see another 
Quaker quoted, especially when the thought expressed accords with the 
Dhammapada.)

> "I call on you not to hate because hate does not leave space for a
> person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking."
> Saddam Hussein

Again, the man speaks wisely. It just goes to show how much wisdom we fail to 
attribute to a person when we choose to see only the person's villainy. What 
bothers me most about the way discourse has gone in America lately is that 
some profoundly important and insightful statements have been made in this 
country by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and by Hugo Chavez, but they have been 
completely ignored because these same people also said some offensive things. 
This is even more the case with Osama bin Laden. The man makes some very good 
criticisms of American policy, but because he has been seen as a villain, we 
collectively turn a deaf ear to him. We are become a nation built upon the 
fallacy of ad hominem arguments.

"And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to 
Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was 
how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not 
very many, and I think we got it right." 
Dick Cheney (1994)

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes