Holding Up The Mirror

A long time ago, when I was still a very nervous beginner driver, I was caught in a traffic jam right in the middle of the city. I was stopped at a red light and even though the lights had changed a few times, because of the crowds of pedestrians crossing and jaywalking, I was not able to pass and was honked at by impatient drivers behind me. Finally, as the light turned yellow, the way was free for me to turn right, which I did, when suddenly a pedestrian on the sidewalk rapped on my window and started berating me for not stopping at the yellow light. By that time, the light has turned red again and the cars from the other side started rushing towards my car. Something snapped in me: I got out of my car and proceeded to curse and scream obscenities at the idiot who knocked on my window. By then, the traffic was hopelessly jammed, with my car stopped in the middle of the road blocking everybody, and me yelling and shaking my fist. Now, you have to understand that, normally, I am an extremely (even pathologically) shy person, but that day, as I stood in the middle of the intersection, facing the whole world honking and hurling racist insults at me, I was determined to die rather than back down. I was thinking: Let them lynch me, I will spit at them with my last breath. Finally a cop appeared and eventually, we all drove away. But even today, I have a hard time understanding what happened to me that day: what turned me from a mild-mannered mouse into a stubborn growling mad dog. The explanation, from a Buddhist perspective, is that, as I was being attacked from various sides, my insecurity led to anger and rage and I was prepared to die to protect my ego, i.e. something that has no independent reality. I'm sure that you have all witnessed cases of road rage, where a driver is all the more enraged as he/she is in the wrong. The wronger, the angrier.

All this came to my mind as I read this very interesting explanation by D.A. Blyler (http://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/blyler/expatriate_bangladesh_reelect_bush_103.htm) for Kerry's inability to turn the public opinion in his favor. According to that columnist, it's not that the American people are too stupid to see that Bush is an incompetent leader, it's because they don't like to be reminded by Kerry of what has been and is being done in their name.

"Far from causing people to admire him for his conscience and bravery for
speaking out, his truth-telling simply reminded them of their own failures of
conscience, their own inability to do the right thing when challenged, and that
Uncle Sam is not always a shining beacon of emancipation and moral clarity.
That’s not the kind of stuff that wins elections."

When a mirror is being held up to our face, forcing us to confront our own faults, most of us refuse to acknowledge that we have strayed from the Way. We end up hating the mirror.