This Week In The Dream Antilles

A week of horrors, death and killing. The death of Troy Davis. The evaporation of the illusion that justice would somehow be served in his case. The negation of hope for mercy and compassion and life for Troy Davis. A killing in our names we were unable to stop. We could not, did not spare Troy Davis. We killed him. And we killed a part of ourselves.

We have lost our way. And we have broken ourselves apart. We believe in the illusion that we are all separate, that we are fragmented. We don’t see ourselves as every bit of the entire phenomenon. But we are all of it. Every single bit of it. We are all of it: we are the failed rescuers, we are the victims (Officer McPhail and Troy Davis and their families and friends the homeless man who was shot), and most importantly we are the executioners (wearing a black hood or shooting Officer McPhail or denying the stay). Inside each of us is all of them. Inside us is the person who killed Officer McPhail. And Officer McPhail. And Troy Davis. And those who killed him. And those who judged him. And those who advocated for him. And all of the families of all of these people. All of them is inside us. A huge loud, bloody cacophony. We truly are Troy Davis. And we also are Officer McPhail. And Justice Scalia. And every single person touched this week by this killing, especially those we most blame for this execution.

But we deny it. We cannot accept it. We cannot allow it to recognized inside us, in our hearts, our minds, our souls (if we have them). It is unacceptable to be all of this. It is denied. We consign all of this ugliness to our Shadow. To the unseen. To the denied. To the disowned. To the unacceptable. We can’t see it in us, but everybody else can.

We are oh so dangerous like this. We are blinded like this. We cannot love anything or anyone like this. In our panic to deny and disown all of this and our dread of our own painful, complicated human ugliness, we are filled with fear. We deny it. And we lash out. And we kill. We kill it outside of us, because we cannot countenance its existence inside each and every one of us. We kill outside because we cannot love what is inside.

This has to stop. We are dreaded Angulimala, with his chain of fingers around his neck, whom the Buddha himself told to stop. But we are also the Buddha. We need to abolish the death penalty, and we need to accept, in fact love the parts of us that are so invisible, so unacceptable, so horrible. These parts and our efforts to ignore them are driving us crazy. And they are making us kill. We need to stop ourselves.

In Troy Davis’s memory, we need to commit once and for all to ending State Killing. For everyone. And part of that commitment, if we are to succeed, has to be to healing this enormous fissure inside us.




This Week In The Dream Antilles is usually a weekly digest. Sometimes, like now, it is not actually a digest of essays posted in the past week at The Dream Antilles. For that you have to visit The Dream Antilles. Please leave a comment so that your Bloguero will know that you stopped by. Or click the “Encouragement Jar” if there is one. Your Bloguero likes to know you've visited.