In my last post I cited the numbers we all know well about income equality, and asked: What’s stopping us from closing down the shop? Here’s another summarizing excerpt by Owen Jones, columnist for the British Guardian:
“The EU’s nearly 500 billionaires alone control €2.3 trillion in wealth. In the first six months of this year, their combined fortunes grew by more than €2bn a day. That the wealth created by millions of European workers is siphoned off into the assets and bank accounts of a tiny elite is not a law of nature; it is a political choice. But when it is treated as unavoidable, ordinary people understandably conclude that their survival depends on reducing competition for scarce resources – fuel for the far right’s rise….Either we end an economic model that condemns millions to insecurity and stagnation – or we risk losing democracy itself.”
Almost 30 years ago, when I was putting Bernie’s teachings on the Three Tenets into the book Bearing Witness, we wrote extensively about the peacemaking activities of certain teachers and activists. We also added a very exploratory chapter trying to reply to this question: What changes a system of embedded inequality (which was then nothing as off-kilter as the one now)?
Sensei Joshin Byrnes wrote this very recently: “We don’t know others outside of our tiny like-minded tribes. ‘Economic systems’ are faceless, joyless, and agony-less. We increasingly live in an emotionally flat machine world, duped into believing falsely that we still know and care about each other. We don’t. We’ve lost touch. The cries of the world (rich and poor alike) can’t be heard in the machine world or in faceless systems. The cure, I think, is getting out a lot more, hanging out a lot more, feeling drawn enough into each other’s lives to care about whether our neighbors are hungry, happy, hopeful, etc, etc., across the spectrums of money, beliefs, world views.”
Joshin leads Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Community, which has opened its doors to street people with food and coffee, showers and laundry facilities, and most important, friendship and conversation. Doing that, and their ensuing experience with an encampment that arose in their back yard, helped his students bear witness to how this connects with the activities of the local police and sanitation departments, availability of drugs and implications for former prison inmates on probation.
In other words, in supporting homeless people, they came in contact not just with homelessness but associated symptoms that are tentacled in their town and elsewhere: poverty, isolation, drug use, lack of housing, just to name a few. They bore witness not just to one symptom but to many, and saw how they’re all connected.
I can’t agree more with Joshin about the need to leave your comfort zone behind and live face to face with people, preferably those different from you—and not just your patients and clients. Look across economic strata, racial, ethnic, and religious barriers, and educational gaps—meet them in person, talk and listen.
And still there’s a niggling voice in my ear that asks: Is this enough? How does this change an entire system? How will this change the distribution that provides ever-shrinking slices of a pie to the big majority of us? Or will it do the opposite, which is what so many radicals have argued in the past? Will it make that system tolerable, with handouts instead of fair-sized slices, charity instead of equality?
Does my Buddhist practice respond adequately to this question? I’m not sure. Zen Buddhism, especially in the way it came to the West, has been very individual-centered. Meditation and retreats were its big mainstays, and even as some centers now provide opportunities for climate and social justice work, Buddhism’s monastic roots continue to be very strong. The Dalai Lama is known for saying that if you want to be happy, do something for others. I’ve found that advice to be 150% right. But again, is the emphasis once more on individual happiness?
We are very attuned to changing our individual behaviors, as if numerous small actions can aggregate into something exponential and huge. Engage in the banality of good, my friend Roshi Michel Dobbs suggested, and I took the advice to heart. Does that do more wonders for those practicing that advice than for those on the receiving end?
There’s the other voice, Bernie’s Zen voice, that had little patience for rumination and mulling things over. He was always the engineer, the practical man with little respect for abstraction. You want to see movement, or even a movement? Take one step after another after another, and change is inevitable, don’t worry about how much or whether it’s enough. Continue to engage, continue to serve.
But this is my blog, not his, and I can’t help wondering if small acts of kindness don’t contribute towards perpetuating something that at its base destroys too many people’s lives. It’s the end of the year and there are many photos I’ve looked at of common phenomena, all of which I never want to see again: Factory farming of animals, shelters sending entire families with little children out in the early hours of a freezing, dark winter because the rules say they can’t stay there past 6 am. Mothers in cotton sweaters with holes in the arms walking their children to the school bus in flipflops on the ice. I used to see the last two when living and working in Yonkers, NY.
Ask me what I want for the new year, and I’ll say to never have to see those things again. Not because they’re concealed from view, but because we the people came to our senses and said: Enough is enough.
Eve Marko is a Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order and head teacher at the Green River Zen Center in Massachusetts. She received Dharma Transmission and inka from Bernie Glassman. She is also a writer and editor of fiction and nonfiction.
Eve has trained spiritually-based social activists and peacemakers in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and has been a Spirit-Holder at retreats bearing witness to genocide at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Rwanda, and the Black Hills in South Dakota. Before that, she worked at the Greyston Mandala, which provides housing, child care, jobs, and AIDS-related medical services in Yonkers, New York.
Eve’s articles on social activists have appeared in the magazines Tricycle, Shambhala Sun, and Tikkun. Her collection of Zen koans for modern Zen practitioners in collaboration with Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao, The Book of Householder Koans: Waking Up In the Land of Attachments, came out in February 2020.
Hunt for the Lynx, the first in her fantasy trilogy, The Dogs of the Kiskadee Hills, was published in 2016.
“When I was a young girl my dream was to be a hermit, live alone, and write serious literature. That’s not how things turned out. I got involved with people. I got involved in the world. Two things matter to me right now: the creative spark and the aliveness of personal connection. In some way, they both come down to the same thing.”


