The World Is Yours!
Issue #4
The Spirituality Issue
December 1996

Where You Goin'?, Where We Goin'?

It's dark and raining outside and, frankly, I'm pretty glad. Glad because the rain means more green will be popping out of the dim earthen cracks that are left in this gray concrete jungle. Glad because for maybe just a few days the air will be cleaner, freed from the daily drudgery of the rust-colored mire that hangs over the city. Glad because sometimes I just want the weather to reflect my mood and the times; something that often eludes us here in California, where the weather is always sunny and the people are always living in La-La Land.

It's been a month since the elections passed like a plague over California and the nation. Even as we speak, the machinery of Proposition 209, the California Civil Wrongs Initiative, slowly ticks forward in the push to take away Affirmative Action, despite the court injunction that the lawyers have launched to block the initiative. At the University of California collegiate level, for instance, the regents were dead set to immediately implement 209 after the elections, and it was only recently that the courts were able to hold that up as well. Yet even as the courts hold up the decision, the citizenry of California have started taking matters in their own hands and have implemented 209 through daily actions on the streets of California. Thus it was that hate crimes have continued to rise, with the recent attack on a Mexican man in Huntington Beach by nazi skins, with the recent use of cyberspace to send hate mail messages to Asian students at the University of California, Irvine, and through thousands of daily actions taken by people who feel more emboldened to act on their racist ideologies.

Yet the thing that tears me up, is that not more than a few days after the elections, I'm sitting with some Asian high school students who were asking me about college. I couldn't even look at them, I was so down. After all, how can I sit there and tell them about college, knowing that their chances to get in have become just that much slimmer with the passage of 209?

Maybe I'm just too emotional or something, but I couldn't help seeing these kids without seeing myself, and sometimes it boggles my mind, cause it seems that a lot of people don't see their connectedness to other people or see the need to help others in order to help themselves. Everyone seems too hung up working for their own success, their own salvation, to figure out what it is that we're all here for. That's the strange thing to me, that people seem to have lost that sense of real spiritual inter-connectedness that seems to me to be so basic to most Asian cultures that I have come in contact with.

I remember a roommate I had in my first year of college. He was Vietnamese, and quite a bit older than I. One day, we ended up talking about the practice of giving roses to girlfriends, and he had an interesting take on the custom. He said that if he had a girlfriend and wanted to give her a gift, he would plant and grow a rose in the earth, bring his girlfriend to see it, and tell her that this rose had been planted for her, to express his love for her. It was interesting, you know, cause for him, it was a waste to kill a rose just to give to his girlfriend, especially since the rose would die and wither. He didn't want to do such an injustice to nature, you see, cause of his respect for nature and for all living beings, whether they were people or plants or whatevers. Not only did he have this respect for nature, but he carried it through into his contacts with other people, and really respected and validated the nature of all people that he met. This was how he practiced compassion.

Here, in America, this practice of compassion seems missing right now. It is seen when kids can't even get school lunches anymore, because the government is too busy spending money to get us on Mars or the moon. (Yeh, so we can colonize and fuck up other planets too. That's just great.) This lack of compassion is practiced daily when farmers burn their excess crops in order to keep prices down, even as people all over the world are starving. This lack of compassion is seen when we stick people in jail, refuse to give them any skills or training, and throw them out on the streets with even more anger and greater issues than before. And this lack of compassion is even further seen here when tons of food are thrown out of supermarkets everyday (I know cause I used to work in one), partly because they were rotten, but primarily cause they weren't sold and the supermarkets weren't willing to just give the food away. All of this, even as our streets get more crowded with homeless people, and as we continue to fail in making the governments and corporations more responsible. All of this as more of our money goes to make weapons, new fighter jets, and more effective, "smart" bombs to blow up our brothers and sisters in the Third World.

I'm sorry, but I don't believe in reform, and feel that only by revolutionizing the current governmental and capitalist systems are we going to see a society where all people can make a living, are not alienated, and where true dignity and human respect reign. And in this society that we need to create, we need a new sense of who we are culturally as a people, and a renewed sense of spiritual unity and inter-connectedness.

But even beyond all of this, we as Asian Pacific Islanders must be willing to sacrifice in order to see a better society developed. As the image on the cover exemplifies, there have been people throughout time that were willing to sacrifice their lives in order to address the problems of their people and to make a better society. As we continue to head into a time of social upheaval, and as the contradictions of the capitalist imperialist practices of America continue to demonstrate themselves, we must be ready for the times ahead. But most of all, we must be ready to sacrifice for those times when they come. And our sacrifices must be guided out of the sincerest love for our peoples.

Issue 5
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