| Stunning Animation of Every Protest from 1979 Reveals Earth's Immune System Trying to Heal Itself |
| Republished from filmsforaction.org By Tim Hjersted |
Stay with it till the end. Wow.
Does it look like the Earth's immune system is waking up to you too?
Via Foreign Policy:
This is what data from a world in turmoil looks like. The Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) tracks news reports and codes them for 58 fields, from where an incident took place to what sort of event it was (these maps look at protests, violence, and changes in military and police posture) to ethnic and religious affiliations, among other categories. The dataset has recorded nearly 250 million events since 1979, according to its website, and is updated daily…
The map also shows some of the limits of Big Data — and trying to reduce major global events to coded variables. Take, for example, the protests across the United States in late 2011: Some are Occupy protests, others are Tea Party protests, but the difference in the political identity of those demonstrations isn’t reflected in the map. There are some strange things that happen when the data are mapped, as well. A cursory glance at the map would suggest that Kansas is the most restive state in the union, but really the frequent protests popping up somewhere near Wichita are every media mention of a protest in the United States that doesn’t specify a city (the same goes for that flickering dot north of Mongolia in Middle-of-Nowhere, Russia).
(Thanks to Ultra Culture for bringing my attention to this awesome data-graphic. Check out their site for a lot of great articles, like this and this.)
Buddha on Strike: Meditating in Front of Goldman Sachs
THIS IS A COOL WEB SIGHT THESE STORIES ARE FROM THERE: http://www.ultraculture.org/
Taking After the Buddha in Front of Multinational Investment Bank Goldman Sachs
Max Zahn works as a waiter in a Mexican restaurant by night. But by day he’s a Buddhist superhero.
Zahn is meditating in front of the Goldman Sachs building in New York, working publicly to instill compassion in the multinational investment banking firm. Goldman Sachs was, of course, one of the key players in the 2008 market crash and subsequent bailout that gutted the American economy.
Zahn and a friend meditate daily while bearing signs like “Your humanity is important; so is ours,” “Begin anew with compassion” and “Let’s alleviate suffering—together.”
Zahn’s actions are an example of engaged Buddhism, or activist Buddhism, which was made popular by the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Naht Hahn. (Zahn trained at the Rochester Zen Center; I’m not sure how influenced he is by Hahn.) Compassion is a core teaching in every sect of Buddhism, which emphasizes that happiness comes from seeing other beings as interconnected to you and working for their happiness.
In the video, Zahn employs a basic Zen-style sitting or possibly Samatha meditation while radiating compassion to the Goldman Sachs corporate entity. This is a modern update of many classic stories of Buddhist meditators, who are often depicted in the literature subduing wrathful deities and demons with the force of compassion and enlightened awareness.
In an interview at his website, Zahn explains why he’s chosen to do this:
Over the past seven business days, I’ve been meditating for 3 to 4 hours directly outside the entrance of Goldman Sachs headquarters. And I intend to continue sitting silently at Goldman HQ every single business day for the coming weeks and months. Soon this effort will grow beyond me, however. Starting yesterday, we’re holding hour-long group meditations three days per week.
The reason for my meditating at Goldman is that I seek to extend compassion to its employees and demand that they do the same for the worldwide billions affected by the bank’s practices. By meditating, I’m quite literally modeling a technique that cultivates the capacity for emotional states like compassion and empathy. On another level, I’m trying to communicate that I come in peace; I understand that Goldman Sachs bankers are people just like you and me. There’s nothing inherently evil or malicious about them. Like all people, they are the beautifully complicated products of a personal and social history.
Does that mean that we allow them to acquire huge amounts of money, while exacerbating global inequality and its effects? Absolutely not. But we intervene in the way that a family might intervene when their son has a drug addiction. That’s how I think of Goldman Sachs: addiction to greed. And greed, in its various forms, is something that everyone struggles with. The difference with Goldman Sachs is that greed on this scale is causing atrocious human suffering. So we need to put the harmful practices to an end, but with the love and goodwill of a global family.
When asked what motivated him to commit to this public action, Zahn replied:
The large scale human suffering that is taking place, and the sense that our global trajectory is moving toward even greater amounts of suffering. That, coupled with the realization that our global and national systems of governance are simply not up to the task of preventing such harm. I’ve come to believe that a dramatic shift on inequity issues — like regulating Wall Street — will only result from a mass nonviolent social movement. I see myself as a small, sustained part of that effort.
More on Zahn’s spirituality-driven protest can be found at Buddha on Strike. Zahn explains more on engaged Buddhism here.
See the Ultraculture Facebook Group for more info and memes about engaged spirituality!
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