Coming back.

I’ve had some time to think things through and decompress with the events in my life, and I think I’m ready to start writing again. It really is amazing how life can change within a matter of minutes, how our fortunes can shift in the blink if an eye. We’re processing our loss the best we can, creating small rituals and symbols to deal with our grief.

Grieving is something that we’re never really taught how to do. It’s a subject we’d rather not face, and frankly I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to face our mortality in such a way. It’s really painful, there is sadness mixed with anger, an anger that has no outlet and no focal point. I can be angry at God but then I’ve recently realized that’s just wasting my time. I can ask why these things happened and I will never receive an answer. There is a hole in our hearts that will likely never be filled, only built around and buttressed.

The importance in grieving is allowing ourselves to be be sad, to be angry, to just sit in a catatonic stupor. We need an outlet for these emotions, and to keep them bottled inside in a vain attempt to “get over it” or “move on” is just building a pointless powder keg of damage in our souls. We’ve cried until our eyes became sore, we’ve shouted at the sun and moon, we’ve held each other without saying a word. Our beautiful family and friends have allowed us to grieve and have shared our pain with us, the ultimate act of compassion. Because of them we will be fine, and we are on the positive path to healing.

Lastly I want to give my heartfelt thanks to the hundreds of you on this blog who have sent me amazing messages of strength and support. It’s fair to say that we are strangers bound by digital threads, but for someone I don’t even know, who knows nothing of my predicament, for them to pour their heart out to me and support me in my grieving is the mark of exceptional character and humanity. You are incredible, and I don’t know how to repay you other than express my gratitude. Gratitude for not only your support and words, but for also restoring my faith in people and the kindness of strangers. I am blessed.

I’m going to get back on my business plan posts, so read up on the past posts and refresh your mind. My world and this blog may have stopped, but time never does, and life goes on. Let us embrace it and celebrate it.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Your humble director,
Sridhar.

We’re all going to die today…

…or was that last month? I keep losing track of our supposed Armageddon days. I suppose now is the time to give you a ‘live today / everyday like it’s your last’ speech but hey that’s kind of maudlin and fey. It’s been a tough week, what with kids getting shot, kids getting killed in Pakistan drone strikes, kids getting shot in Chicago’s South Side for the past umpteen years with no news coverage, kids getting maimed in the countless civil wars in Africa, kids getting sold as sex slaves in the Middle East, and just basically kids getting the blunt end of every adult dysfunction we can dream of.

It’s hard not to watch the news and think that this is a pretty shitty world we live in, in fact the news seems to make it a point to reinforce that idea by making things sound worse than they actually are. I know for every killing there’s tens of thousands of acts of kindness and compassion in this world, ranging from selfless service in Kolkata’s slums to the girl behind the register telling me to ‘have a nice day.’ But I have to admit, these instances seem to be diminishing over the years, as we seem to be buckling under the pressures applied by an adult, cynical world. We’re drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid, and the cracks are starting to show.

Maybe the Mayans were right in that it’s not so much the end of the world, but the end of civilization as we know it. They could’ve been off by a hundred years, but there’s a definite disintegration of all that was built before. I see people dying of cancer, mighty brick buildings being struck down and replaced with feeble, ready-to-break sheds, animals going extinct and no snow on the mighty mountains of Colorado.

If you don’t feel like blowing your brains out already (we can all-too-easily source an assault weapon from Wal-Mart to assist in that endeavor), hold on, hold on. Let’s think this through a bit.

Bad things happen. Every day. I can try to rationalize it as some kind of circle-of-life shit but it’s hard to do that in the face of injustice. A cute gazelle getting eaten by a cheetah is not injustice - there’s some basal purpose behind that act of killing. What happened last week and in Aurora, Columbine, Virginia Tech and basically all over the country was not done for survival or food, it was acts of deluded power, anxiety and illness.

The thing is that we can control and manage those things using the tools we have developed over thousands of years as a civilization. At this moment, more important than any one given law, legislation or gun purchase, the most important thing we have to embrace as a country is philosophy. We have to ask ourselves “why” and not so much “how” these things keep happening. And as cogent creatures we are fully capable of it.

I’m not so clueless as to suggest a complete ban on guns - sure I don’t like them but they have a role to play just as any other weapon does. War is a constant, we will have true evil forces in the future to dispatch, i.e. Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, etc.. You can’t just ask a Navy Seal to go into a compound and slit a tyrant’s throat (although I’m sure it can be done). But I recall a conversation I had with an old high school friend of mine who returned from two tours in Afghanistan. We were hanging out on the porch and I asked him what it was like over there. He said it’s pretty much what we think it is, but what was really bothering him was that he had shot someone in Afghanistan. A civilian who was suspect. There wasn’t any time to deduce who was friend or foe, action had to be taken, and he pulled the trigger. He told me that a part of him died when he puled that trigger, and that at that moment, his fear was what was propelling that bullet. I reassured him that he was fighting the good fight, but I also told him that as a civilian I could never relate to what he was feeling, only so much a sense of loss that accompanies a deep moral decision.

Fear is a powerful thing, and the end result of fear is ultimately loss. To live in fear is paralysis, and everything that is unknown becomes a threat, and what is known becomes suspect. The purpose of philosophy is to make the unknown a little more known, to give us a sense of context and meaning. Philosophy is not justifying something, it is merely contextualizing it. Where does a senseless act of violence fit into the greater whole of existence? What are the determining factors not for this guy to buy an assault weapon, but to want to kill in the first place? While I do think the access to an assault weapon and ammunition is a major problem, it is only one piece of it. Mental illness is a large problem, but it’s not exclusive to mass killings and homicides. There are plenty of people without mental illness who pull the trigger.

We must use philosophy to tackle anger, and to me, anger stems from one thing - resentment. When we harbor resentment - be it from loss or injustice - our anger festers and seeks release. The main way to deal with resentment is forgiveness, and to forgive someone is the absolute highest level of compassion that can diffuse any kind of powder keg of a situation. It lifts the burden of anger that can lead to irrational and immoral decisions. Forgiveness - even if the other side refuses to accept it - is the cure to violence.

To ask the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook killings to forgive the young man who killed their children is no small task. Even though he is dead. To ask them to forgive the people who sold him a high-powered assault rifle is just as hard. To show compassion and bring a universality to the death of their children, to place their tragedy alongside those of other families around the world, is to achieve transcendence and to help heal wounds of senseless violence everywhere. This is the essential starting point, and from there we can tackle guns and mental health. It would be impossible to do so with resentment and anger in our hearts.

The world might very well end today, tomorrow, next week or nine million years from now. But to die with bitterness and acid in our soul is to disrespect the gift of existence and consciousness. I don’t want to go out that way, mad at the world and doing nothing to make it better. I accept that I will die, and so will everything around me. Nothing is permanent except energy, a shimmering field of it that constitutes the collective dynamic of what we are. We can control where it goes and how it is used, a gift bestowed upon our species, a gift we readily take for granted. That, my friends, is the root of our change.

But if the Mayans were right and indeed we all die, just know that I love you all - even the folks who made Twilight. You’ve made this world amazing and I’m blessed to share it with you. And when we wake up tomorrow towards a new day, let us renew our commitment to making the world an even better place to live in for us, for future generations, and for every being in the universe. Be well.

Hot Topic: Celebrating Death.

Ever since I was a kid I used to get disturbed when in the movie theater, people would cheer when the villain was killed. Generally it was an action film, rooted in some pursuit of heroism, and the villain died a spectacular death whose complexity was directly proportional to the level of heinous infraction committed. I used to scratch my head as to why we were cheering the death of someone.

Fast forward to the present, and I strangely find myself cheering upon hearing the news of the death of Osama Bin Laden. I’m still conflicted, but I won’t deny that for some reason, the death of this tyrant has brought me tremendous relief and closure.

A misappropriated quote of Martin Luther King has been making the rounds on Facebook, a quote that essentially paraphrases the famous line by Gandhi, which is that “an eye for an eye makes the world go blind.”

I believe in those words, and I am vehemently against capital punishment. But again - upon hearing the news of Bin Laden’s death, I find myself at peace with his passing. I have to think that some of this comes from the idea that he can no longer do any harm, that he can no longer spread his poisonous ideologies. Our special forces accomplished one of the key directives of fighting a terrorist organization, which is to cut the head off the snake. I can rationalize Bin Laden as an evil on the level of a Hitler, a pure embodiment of hatred and a sociopath.

That’s me trying to justify his death to my own mind. But in the end, he’s dead, and not by natural causes. We killed him. In the name of justice, yes, but we killed him. I might have been happier if we had apprehended him alive and brought him to a tribunal, or would I?

We can argue that Bin Laden showed no mercy when he pulled the trigger to kill innocent people in the myriad of Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks, and therefore he does not deserve the dignity that he denied his victims. But just like his victims, does any human being deserve to die?

It’s a prickly issue. The family of a victim will likely seek closure knowing that the murderer of their loved ones can no longer partake in the world that their kin were prematurely robbed of. But can we not argue that the same effect is achieved when that murderer is locked away from society for the remainder of their lives? Is not the concept of hell to live in a state of constant torture? Then is not solitary confinement an embodiment of a living hell, and is therefore a higher level of punishment than the release of death?

I’ll play the devil’s advocate with this. Had we not killed Bin Laden and instead imprisoned him in solitary confinement, would he even feel remorse? Would he feel the pain of isolation, would the notion of being a living dead man even affect him? His beliefs are so strong that he would view everything as an act of martyrdom, as a sacrifice to his greater cause. As long as he would be acknowledged alive, his followers would draw strength from his martyrdom. As an objective in the fight against agencies of death and chaos, keeping Bin Laden alive would do little to extinguish the flames of extremism. It might even fuel it more.

In Sri Lanka, the killing of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the head of the LTTE (aka the Tamil Tigers) destabilized the terror organization and, at least for now, ended one of the largest human catastrophes in modern history. The sentiments and struggles of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka remain (a sentiment that is valid, but not justifying of terror and the use of child suicide bombers), but the violent figurehead that was Prabhakaran is no longer there to fuel violent retribution or organized terrorist attacks. With the head gone, the organization of the LTTE (which before 9/11 was the FBI’s most dangerous terrorist organization, ahead of the IRA, the PLO, and Al-Qaeda) has corroded under power struggles and a lack of faith amongst supporters that the organization can survive. Prabhakaran, like any man, did not deserve death, but conversely his death has saved thousands of lives and has paved a path for potential peace.

But all said and done, Bin Laden achieved exactly what he wanted - he brought the most powerful nation in the world to it’s knees, paralyzed her with fear and ideological division, turned a brutally critical eye upon the United States’ relationship with Israel and its policy towards the Palestinian people, and made a lot of his friends in oil producing regions very, very rich. He is the definitive modern agent of chaos, a sociopath with a definitive ideology. His death doesn’t mean victory, but it does knock out the knot that held a complex web of extremism together. Without guidance, the extremists will consume each other with power plays and conflicting ideals.

And I have to believe that none of this can happen if Bin Laden were still alive, either in exile or in captivity. Killing him is not a fix to the world’s problems, but it’s a small assurance that he can’t make things any worse. And now it’s up to us, the citizens of the world, to make sure that his ideology of hate is delegitimized, dismissed and destroyed from the annals of human existence.

So in hindsight, I don’t celebrate his death, rather I celebrate the justice his death creates.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

Please recommend Lilith!

As per every Tuesday, I humbly ask for your support by nominating ‘Lilith.’ Your support is largely what keeps me going on this blog, so my sincerest appreciation and thanks.

Also, today is the birthday of one of my favorite film icons, James Dean. He would have been 80 years old today, and one can only wonder what his body of work would have been had he not left us so tragically young. Here’s to limitless potential.