For the second year in a row, USC (University of Southern California) Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts & Sciences is partnering with the Los Angeles Times for a public opinion poll about the state of California.
The poll finds Californians would rather release prisoners than pay for more prisons or have their taxes misappropriated, reversing a trend promising to get "tough on crime" that has bankrupted the state without making it any safer. In fact, politicians, the private prison industry, and the prison guard's union have been enriched at staggering taxpayer expense. Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics, and Evan Halper, Sacramento Bureau Chief from the Los Angeles Times, discuss how the public feels about what to do about the current prison system. Visit USC Dornsife Web site for more info: dornsife.usc.edu/poll
Hating hateful actions (like murder) or hateful actors (like murderers) makes us guilty of hate. Hate is toxic to all who harbor it, and it is not cured by vigilantism or revenge.
There are those who give free rein to hate when it arises like stampeding horses. There are others who pull the reins and control their chariot even when the horses are bolting. The Buddha called the latter "charioteers," whereas the former are merely holding the reins.
American hatred has grown so great -- animosity at a mother or a trial gone wrong -- that citizens are ready to lynch anyone named Casey Anthony.
Searching Facebook, many have found a man by the same name and tormented him. His response to the vigilante mob? "I can't change my name, ladies and gentlemen."
"Casey Anthony" is a 43-year-old African-American male. He lives in Darby, Pennsylvania, and just happens to share the name of a 25-year-old Anglo-American female from Orlando, Florida, who is infamous for being found not guilty of killing her 2-year-old daughter.
PHOTO: The other Casey Anthony from Pennsylvania (NBC Philadelphia)
Mr. Casey Anthony has been bombarded on Facebook. He estimates that he has gotten at least 300 friend requests, messages, and posts, all targeting the other Casey Anthony.
"After the verdict that day, it went crazy. It was like everybody wanted to know and wanted to comment on this Casey Anthony situation," he explains.
The Antidote is the Opposite There are Three Poisons of the heart/mind: greed, hatred (often expressed as fear), and delusion. It is wise to root them out at every opportunity. It is easier to transmute or transform them into something useful than it is to rid oneself of them.
But surely if they remain, they are serving as the basis of unprofitable karma (unskillful action of mind, speech, or body). Their "antidotes" are categories of opposite states -- nongreed, nonhatred, and nondelusion. Three immediate remedies are given as:
Why would one even try to avoid or abandon hatred if it is manifesting as "righteous indignation"? Surely, that justifies it and strengthens us to act in opposition!?
No, what it does is obscure the mind, cause one to act in ways that result in remorse, that bring about suffering for us (when those actions later ripen), the bring humans down to subhuman states.
Hate helps no one. And those who say it does are trying to make the best of a bad situation. Transform it, transmute it, let it go, be freed from it, free others from it -- for it will surely drag us down, and we will only realize it too late.
April 15, 7:00 pm: (Ross Chapel, Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church, Pasadena) Reverend Hannah Petrie presents Bleecker Street Cinema’s film, "Bastards of the Party." This film is about the historical creation of gangs in Los Angeles. It deals with Malcolm X and other black leaders around the time of the Black Panthers and FBI fear of African-Americans and other sixties-era revolutionaries.
