Character defects

As everyone knows the economy looms large in the media these days. News reports are filled with statistics about jobless claims and talk shows host an endless stream of experts who, like the groundhog, forecast six more weeks of winter. “Things are getting better but we have a long way to go.”

I caught a fragment of one of these shows driving home from my daughters preschool this afternoon. The focus of the conversation was “education and the workplace” jobs in a nutshell and how to get better ones. The discussion began to contrast people of different socio-economic backgrounds and said people from household that have been below the poverty line for more than two generations have a harder time advancing in the workplace. “It’s easy to imagine the poor as lazy.” Said the guest “But the truth is the system is bent against them. They don’t have the same chances for education and training and end up falling far behind members of more affluent families.”

My mind hung on this thought. “It is easy to imagine the poor as lazy.” Mostly because my wife had had a similar conversation with a friend recently in which this very topic came up. My reaction was why would intelligent people think that? When I put this question to my wife, my beautiful bride pointed out that we, she and I, are often guilty of the same kind of thinking, not about the poor, per se, but that I frequently criticize the Republican spokespeople, conservative religious dogma and extremists of both the political left and the right as being “insane” or “crazy” and that this type of labeling is no different than that which assumes that the poor are lazy or stupid.

In my recent post “On Buttons” I shared that this kind of thinking is born of fear and misunderstanding and that ultimately the more powerless I feel towards these groups the greater my animosity towards them will be. But let’s call it what it is, folks. My condemnation of these groups is a character defect.

Who can say where character defects come from? I like to think that character defects are born of an honest desire to protect myself from some perceived fear or threat, but that, unchecked they became all consuming. Anger is a good example of one of my chief character defects. In my youth, certain individuals modeled anger as a way to deal with frustration. I spent many years shying away from angry people. But somehow in the end I became the very angry person that I had tried to avoid. It is easy. I will glare at my child and say “what do you mean by that” the way others had done for me, and as a child I would have backed away. But my children don’t back away. They don’t have the same low self-esteem I had. So they challenge me. So I try the same tactic again, this time more forcefully. You get the idea. This is how things escalate, and I keep doing it because, as much as I don’t want to. This is how I am wired.

At least, that is the way it feels. Because This is the story I tell myself, namely, "This is how to discipline." I see myself in that role and I act it out dutifully. The more I do this, the more I have become convinced that the stories we tell ourselves have a lot to do with who we are. We use these stories to define our selves. But they are not who we are.

In Buddhism The identity of the self, either objective or subjective, is the cause of delusion. The root of personality is to be sought in the “true self” which is manifest in the union of subject and object. We are all the same. You. Me. Everything. The hopes and dreams of the of an individual are centered on the affirmation of the individual, and thus separate us.

The other day my wife turned to me and said “I really like what the Pastor said in the sermon.” She went on explaining that what the pastor had said what that Jesus was an individual of absolute Love, and that really nothing else mattered. The Virgin Birth, the myths and stories that tell us about his life mean little if nothing and that what really matters is that Jesus was a person of, well, in Buddhist terms, a person of pure Spirit , into which all of his experience of love was poured. Just as I pour anger and shame into my “experience” in life, Jesus poured compassion.

I think this is what the Zen philosophers are talking about when they say that Zen is grasped in the simplest of realities and not in the esoteric or fantastic interpretation of human existence.

Another way of saying this is to recount a conversation I had with a friend last night who told me he had started teaching art to third graders at a charter school. “They are creative geniuses!” He exclaimed. “If anyone in this graduate program could create like them, it would be amazing.” Unfortunately, by the time we reach graduate school we have lost that spontaneous wonder that unselfconscious creative bliss, and thinking and rationalizing and doubting have edged their way in.

So that is it. It is the stories I tell myself about the conservative right that make me hate them, just as it is the story I have learned about discipline that I try to reenact that is one of the triggers of my character defect of anger.

And that is not it. Because knowing these things about myself doesn’t make me stop telling myself the same tales over and over again, if anything I just make me say them louder, doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.

No, if I want to change my character defects, and I do, then I need to hold them up. I need to shine a light on them. I need to share them with others and become accountable for these stories. Otherwise they just lie there and fester in the dark.

I want to change my relationship with my family, my friends and my community, and the only way I know is to start getting real honest about the way I see the world, and then maybe I can stop filling my experiences with angry tea.