Discussion Facilitator: Bruce Cantwell. October 26, 2019.
On this Saturday before Halloween we're going to look at something scary.
According to the original mindfulness text,[1] the second hindrance to a mind liberated from habitual reactivity is byāpāda.
Some English translations are hatred, malevolence, and vengefulness. A continuum of responses based on these emotions might be wishing someone misfortune, wishing to actually harm them, and actively seeking to harm them in return for a perceived injury.
We'll begin with a case study of the birth of hatred, malevolence, and vengefulness arising courtesy of Hidden Brain.
Excerpt from: Screaming Into The Void: How Outrage Is Hijacking Our Culture, And Our Minds
SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Saturday, January 19, 2019 - Julie Zimmerman checked Twitter and saw something that made her upset. It was a video filmed hundreds of miles from her home in Ohio at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
JULIE IRWIN ZIMMERMAN: There was this older Native American man, and these kids surrounded him and were yelling things at him and laughing at him. And they were blocking his path. He apparently was trying to, you know, walk over to the Lincoln Memorial or something like that, and they wouldn't let him through.
VEDANTAM: The kids surrounding this man looked like 15-year-old boys. They were nearly all white. A few were making gestures that looked like tomahawk chops. Some wore hats that read Make America Great Again.
ZIMMERMAN: These kids were making fun of this guy because he was Native American, because he had a drum and was chanting something unfamiliar to them. It was pretty cringeworthy.
VEDANTAM: Like many others watching that day, Julie fixated on one boy in the video. He was standing directly in front of the Native American man staring at him. He had what looked like a smirk on his face as the older man sang.
ZIMMERMAN: His image evoked all the horrifying things Americans have done to Native Americans throughout the centuries.
VEDANTAM: As the day went on, more details emerged. The boys were students at Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky just across the river from Cincinnati, where Julie lives.
ZIMMERMAN: I started seeing tweets that the kids were chanting build the wall, build that wall.
VEDANTAM: Julie's son was around the same age as the kids in the video, and he also went to a Catholic school. Julie texted him.
ZIMMERMAN: I said, you know, if I ever caught you acting that way, I –I mean, I'd be horrified.
VEDANTAM: While Julie's friends were texting her messages of outrage, her son was having very different conversations about the same video.
ZIMMERMAN: His friends had started texting him at some point on Saturday saying, you know, I think that these guys are getting a bum rap. I don't think they're guilty of what they're being accused of.
VEDANTAM: Sunday, January 20, 2019 - in the late morning after church, Julie checked Twitter. She saw that someone had uploaded a nearly two-hour-long video which showed much more of the confrontation between the Catholic school students and the Native American man.
ZIMMERMAN: I started watching because I wanted to show my son where the kids had been chanting build the wall. He challenged me on that point. And I watched the hour-plus video of the incident, and I couldn't find anywhere where they had been chanting that.
VEDANTAM: And that wasn't all. This is what the longer video showed.
ZIMMERMAN: The kids were on the Mall.
VEDANTAM: For the annual March for Life.
ZIMMERMAN: Which is an anti-abortion march that happens every year in January.
VEDANTAM: It was right before Martin Luther King Day. The Mall was packed.
ZIMMERMAN: And there was a group called the Black Hebrew Israelites. And they were yelling vile things at the kids.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: A bunch of babies made out of incest.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Trailer park baby.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Right, trailer park babies. This is what America makes - Make America Great looks like.
ZIMMERMAN: You know, somebody yelling something at you doesn't give you justification to yell anything back, but I thought that set a tone that these kids, some of whom may have never been in a situation like this, might have been feeling nervous or attacked or–I don't know. It–the insults being yelled by the Black Hebrew Israelites definitely altered my understanding of what happened next.
VEDANTAM: The Indigenous Peoples March was also taking place in D.C. that day. Nathan Phillips was the older man in the original viral video.
ZIMMERMAN: I saw Phillips walk over to the kids on this longer video, and, remember, the original video had just shown Phillips surrounded by these kids. And the extrapolation originally was that these kids had walked up to Phillips and surrounded him and blocked his path and not allowed him to pass. Well, as you watch the longer video, you see Phillips and an entourage. I mean, there were a lot of people with Phillips all walking over to talk to the kids. So Phillips had not been trying to get somewhere and these kids blocked him. He actually went up and initiated the interaction with the kids.
VEDANTAM: And what were the kids doing? What were they chanting? What were they shouting?
ZIMMERMAN: Some of them were trying to make their friends laugh. They–some of them were being offensive. I think, you know, doing a tomahawk chop is an offensive thing to do.
VEDANTAM: And the student who was smirking at Nathan Phillips...
ZIMMERMAN: He was laughing for a while, and then they kind of locked eyes, and I don't know what he was thinking. I don't know what he was feeling. But I've seen that look on teenagers where you've got waves of thoughts passing through your head and your underlying thinking is, what do I do? I don't know what to do, you know. He looked nervous to me.
VEDANTAM: Julie told a friend about her change of heart, and her friend encouraged her to write an essay about it.
ZIMMERMAN: And I wrote that essay probably in 15 minutes. I mean, it just spilled out. And I submitted it for publication, and it was published very quickly.
VEDANTAM: The essay was published in The Atlantic. The headline read "I Failed The Covington Catholic Test." In the piece, Julie admitted she had been hasty and quick to judgment. Almost immediately after her essay was posted, it prompted howls of outrage from the right.
ZIMMERMAN: My essay was weaponized against liberals, against progressives. And I - you know, it made me uncomfortable to see that. Like, oh, gosh, did I make a mistake here? My brother-in-law called my husband to say, Rush Limbaugh just mentioned your wife's name on the air. And I thought, oh, gosh, what have I done?
RUSH LIMBAUGH: One of the drive-by media outlets that really roasted these kids from Covington was at The Atlantic. And a writer at The Atlantic has published a piece, "I Failed The Covington Catholic Test: Next Time There's A Viral Story, I'll Wait For More Facts To Emerge." Julie Irwin Zimmerman -[2] she was one of the early pilers on and she's begging forgiveness. She failed the test. She went along with it - why does anybody in their right mind - I know the temptation, but why isn't there even a moment's pause when anything from social media becomes source material in drive-by media? It is a cesspool. And everybody knows that it's a cesspool...
VEDANTAM: Rush Limbaugh was wrong in several ways. Julie didn't work at The Atlantic and had nothing to do with their initial coverage. And she was not an early piler on. Before she wrote her essay, she herself had posted nothing on social media about the Covington Catholic students. In addition, lots of journalists had, in fact, covered the story with nuance. Ironically, Rush Limbaugh was doing exactly what Julie had initially done. He was leaping to sweeping conclusions - about liberals, about Julie, about journalists - with very limited evidence.[3]
Discussion
Since this mental hindrance isn't always present, it's said to be adventitious. It sneaks up on us and grips us.
To minimize the damage that it does, the instructions are to notice when it's present, when it's absent, how it comes to arise, and what to do when it arises, and what we can do to mitigate future arisings.
To begin: how do we notice when it's arising? What are the physical indicators. What are the environmental indicators?
Complete Series on the Four Fields of Awareness
[1] “MahāsatipaṭṭhānaSutta.” Mahasatipatthana Sutta - The Great Discourse on the Establishing of Awareness, www.tipitaka.org/stp-pali-eng-parallel.shtml#36 .
[2] Zimmerman, Julie Irwin. "I Failed the Covington Catholic Test" The Atlantic. 21 Jan. 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/julie-irwin-zimmerman-i-failed-covington-catholic-test/580897/
[3] “Screaming Into The Void: How Outrage Is Hijacking Our Culture, And Our Minds.” NPR, NPR, 7 Oct. 2019, https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=767186846.