The Face of Anger

I am not the same person I was before arriving in India.  To some extent this is a ridiculous statement because everyone is changing and growing every moment – it is the condition of life.  But two months in India was like watching a sped-up reel of photographs on the wall of a dark room.

***

First, there was Gandhi.  I spent two hours in a New Delhi museum that is dedicated to his life, and is also the place where he was assassinated.  I walked through the corridors lined with images of him and his writings, and absorbed the impact of who he was.  Afterwards, I watched the three-hour biographical film.  Of course I had always known of Mahatma Gandhi, had recognized him as a political and spiritual leader, and would sometimes even quote him.  Yet, I had never been awed by him the way I was that day. 

For many years, I have been fascinated by Hitler.  I struggled to understand how so many people were won over by a man who seemed to be the incarnate of evil.  I stood in front of the crematorium at Dachau and let tears stream down my face as I grappled with who Hitler was – and who we are as humans.  Likewise, after more fully appreciating the life of Gandhi, I was once again amazed at how one man can so profoundly affect the course of humanity.  Albert Einstein expressed it beautifully when he said “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.”

Gandhi was to light what Hitler was to darkness, and respectively, they were able to draw out each in others.  Suddenly, Hitler’s feats seemed small in comparison to Gandhi’s.  To appeal to the weakness in man is surely less of an achievement than to bring him to his fullest strength.  In the face of insult, hatred, and degradation Gandhi bowed before his oppressors and convinced others to do the same.  He taught that one should not punish another for the same faults we all possess.

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After Gandhi, there was a woman named Sunitha Krishnan. Sunitha is a internationally reknowned anti-trafficking crusader whose story was featured in the book "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide."  A number of years ago, she started rescuing children one by one from sex houses and brothels. Responding to tips, she would go in and take them from the arms of their abusers. As a consequence, she suffered broken bones, black eyes, and split lips.  One injury left her with only partial hearing in her one ear.  The mafia beat her, harassed her and threatened her; yet she continued with her mission to liberate women and children.  As she built alliances with local law enforcement agencies, her numbers of rescued victims increased from one to 35 a month, and her organization, Prajwala, whose purpose is to rescue and rehabilitate trafficking victims - was eventually born.

Today, there stands a monument to Sunitha’s work. Near a small town in rural India, there is campus of freshly-built red concrete structures. It is set in the midst of fields, and in the distance there are mounds of piled stones rising from the ground.  Each building has a different purpose: intake and medical care, classrooms, vocation centers, cafeterias, and dormitories.  Among these edifices walk nearly 200 women and children that give no external hint as to the hell they lived through.  No one could tell by looking at them that they had been repeatedly raped and tortured. What is apparent is that the grounds are a holy place, a place of healing, and a place where lives are changed and people are reborn.

I had the chance to speak with Sunitha, and I confessed that during a period of my travels I had lost faith in humanity.

“My women and children are my faith,” she explained to me. 

After all that they had endured in their lives, the fact that they could place their trust in Sunitha - in anyone at all - was a testament to the strength of humanity.

“But I have this anger,” I told her. “I am angry that we can’t do better, be better.”

“Listen,” she said. “The Center is the face of my anger.  I don’t believe in good or evil; I believe in my anger. It is what has driven me all these years.” Sunitha had been gang-raped at age fifteen.

***
Lastly, there was Dharamsala, the home of the current Dalai Lama, which is situated on a mountainside at the edge of the Himalayas.  I wandered the streets of the small city, passing by wrinkled monks in maroon robes, women in traditional black skirts covered with brightly-colored aprons, and rows of tourist stalls selling prayer beads and singing bowls.

I watched the film, Kundun, which is about the Dalai Lama and the loss of Tibet’s sovereignty to China.  Tibet was an independent nation with the Dalai Lama as its head of state until 1951, when the country was taken over by China following an invasion. The Dalai Lama was received by India, and 150,000 Tibetan refugees have now followed him.

I was moved by the injustice of China’s actions, but more than that, the movie left me with a lot of thoughts and questions about the intersection of social justice and Buddhist philosophies.

I wondered if Buddhism didn’t wrongfully emphasize acceptance to the detriment of progress. Many spiritual leaders talked about anger as a harmful emotion, yet I had witnessed a positive creation that had resulted from Sunitha’s. I saw how anger could be a motivating force for change.

I was in Dharamsala when I heard about the bombings at the Boston Marathon. A day later, I picked up a book by Thich Nhat Hanh in a reading loft: Calming the Fearful Mind, A Zen Response to Terrorism.

In the book, Thich Nhat Hanh talks about how the belief that one side is good and the other is evil creates a world of suffering for everyone.  “Our real enemy is not man, is not another human being.  Our real enemy is our ignorance, discrimination, fear, craving, and violence.”

Above all, the message of the book was compassion for one’s oppressors.  Thich Nhat Hanh asks each of us to consider how much suffering those who harmed us must have endured in order to act so cruelly.
Thich Nhat Hanh, who was nominated by Martin Luther King for the Nobel Peace Prize, emphasized his friend’s principal as a solution to terrorism:

“Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can.”

***

In my life I have been a victim to other’s mistakes, but more often, I have been a victim to my own.
I have allowed my anger to stunt my growth, to sit inside me like a black residue, eating away at my good qualities.

I have been angry at whites for their treatment of minorities, at Americans for their treatment of immigrants, and at men, for their treatment of women.

I never tried to understand what drove their actions.  Then, living in Cameroon changed my perspective because above all, I was white and I was American.  Suddenly, I understood what it was like to be on the other side.  But I had not fully learned from my mistakes, and my feelings toward men and my identity as a woman rose to the surface as the primary face of my anger.

In India, in the most oppressive environment to women I have ever experienced, I was overcome by a rage I had never before fully allowed myself to feel. I thought I had lost all insight.  But once I let my emotions subside, I realized that this zenith of fury was also the pivotal moment in my healing process.  I had been sickened by a poison and I would not get better without first drawing it out.  I needed to see my hatred there in the light, black and sticky - solid.  Once I confronted my anger, it was as if a blockage had been removed that I was now finally able to move past.

My experiences in India, and the wisdom of the people I encountered there, both actually and metaphysically, were the lessons I needed to re-open my heart to humanity, and to remind myself that we are not good or evil; were are both and neither.

The Dalai Lama often recounts a story in which a monk, after years of imprisonment and torture, was asked to name his greatest fear.  He responded that he was afraid he might lose compassion for those who had tortured him.

I now see how my lack of compassion has been the greatest mistake of my life, committed over and over again, in different contexts and scenarios.  Likely, I will continue to make it.  But I now see how this fundamental error has hurt me, and how I have hurt others as a result.

Moreover, the knowledge I gained in India has renewed my passion for social justice.

Yet this time, I am not fueled by anger, but compassionate anger.

I realize that my drive should come from the desire to bring out the best in others, not my egotistical judgments as to who is right and wrong.  While it is okay to feel anger toward injustice, I must also feel compassion toward us as humans.

And I can only hope I am one step closer to being the change I want to see in the world.