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

[JKirkpatrick]

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
_5159
> 04.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

Inmates: If people would vote to legalise maryjane, and if
necessary sell it with a tax (but not too high a tax as with
cigs, otherwise you get smuggling all over again), the prisons in
this country would lose at least half if not more of their
inmates. One of the reasons that the inmate ethnic proportion of
Latinos and African-Americans is so high is that smuggling and
selling drugs makes a lot of easy money under conditions where
they have few to no chances of making such a haul otherwise. 

I'd vote to legalise all drugs. The "war on drugs" is a farce and
by now everybody knows it. 
Meanwhile, let us not forget that various Buddhist organisations
have prison inmate meditation programs.

JK