[Buddha-l] As Swami goes, so goes the nation?

[Richard Hayes]

On Apr 19, 2010, at 9:10 PM, Weng-Fai Wong wrote:

> This swami was in town recently...
> 
> http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_515904.html

She comes to Albuquerque every year. I see her every time I get a chance. She says things about America that I agree with. (But Dan Lusthaus will quickly remind you that Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Osama bin Ladin also say things about America that I agree with. He might claim my standards are low. It would be another example of his tendency to get most things wrong.) 

What Amma has going for her that the other truth-tellers lack is that she uses her influence to do a lot of very positive things. She comes pretty close to being what we Buddhists call a bodhisattva.

A couple of years ago I got involved with the project that Amma's organization runs of writing to prisoners. It has been a positive experience for me, and the prisoners seem to appreciate having someone to write to. These days the American prison system has been extraordinarily dysfunctional, because of overcrowding, which in turn is happening because sentences are absurdly long (especially for blacks and Latinos). Genocide has gotten a bad name in recent decades, so America does not openly indulge in that sport as much as in previous centuries. But the slow cultural slaughter of Mexican-Americans, African-Americans and American-Americans continues in somewhat more subtle but no less cruel ways. The prison system is part of that operation.

Amma's inmate-project organizers are always looking for people willing to correspond with inmates around the world; if anyone would like to take on that practice, send me an e-mail, and I'll tell you how to contact them.

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
MSC03 2140
1 University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes
rhayes at unm.edu