Morning refuge

mole:

Until enlightenment I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and in the supreme assembly of the Sangha, I mutter, but I don’t really: I take refuge in the car starting and in scrambled eggs and in coffee fatted with cream. I think of all the cancers growing in my friends, and in strangers, possibly in myself: the race between cells that know restraint and cells that don’t is not a hard one to call. The worst are full of passionate intensity, and single-mindedly, bloodily intent on replication. The faces in the Republican Convention hall didn’t even look human to me: they looked like masks.

2 Replies to “Morning refuge”

  1. This is stunning Dave. I relate, even to the coffee with cream. Who knew that a party, which although not my party, still had some human standards back in my Paleolithic days, could now be legitimately compared to a malevolent cancer. Let us hope that the best don’t lack all conviction, or I’m feeling kind of doomed. I keep flashing on another of my other favorite quotes. “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency…?”

    1. Yes, it’s a little scary how far the party is willing to go these days to pander to the hateful and ignorant. At the convention, we saw one group of delegates drown out a speech from a Puerto Rican politician by chanting “USA,” and another group throw peanuts at an African American camerawoman and call her an animal. Add to that all the creative ways the party is trying to keep poor people from voting, plus the tendency of opinion-shapers like Sarah Palin to label only certain groups as “real Americans,” and I think it’s fair to conclude that the GOP is not merely trying to shrink the government — they’re trying to shrink the country until it’s as small and narrow as their own minds.

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