POLITICS
Namaste Donald Trump
While Donald Trump may be seen as a hero or a villain, the greater opportunity is to look for the subtleties. By being in the moment we can each find our appropriate next step.
by Cameron Burgess
T
here have been many words written about the election of Donald Trump over the past
month, and no doubt there will be many, many more. And while those words inevitably swing between elation and despair, such responses are far too easy. The harder, more essential response, is to practise compassion, and find out who is elated, and who is despairing, and why. Compassion requires the willingness
to feel another so deeply in ourselves that we no longer know where they begin and we end. Compassion is not selective, it is universal. Without it, we continue to experience ‘the other’ as somehow being separate, as being ‘not us’. And this is the core of our dysfunction. We are so used to projecting our
empathy and our compassion beyond our own boundaries, and especially toward those who have suffered through economic and social marginalisation. We feel socially bound, it seems, to experience compassion for those who have traditionally been on the fringes, while failing to recognise that, in many ways, the edge has moved from where it once was.
10 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
We have failed to appreciate that the colour of one’s skin, the nation of one’s birth, and the extent of one’s privilege may be correlated, but cannot always be considered to be causative. All people suffer. All people. So if we,
in our relative privilege, are at times plagued by rage, fear and grief, is it not possible, perhaps even more so, that others with substantially less privilege are as well? The election of Donald Trump is not
the only instance in recent times where we have seen the rise of the extreme right. In The UK we have seen Brexit, and in Australia, the forces of neo- liberalism have helped to normalise domestic and foreign policies that have had disastrous consequences for many, not all of them people of colour. How else do we explain the election of Pauline Hanson to the Senate? What I’ve been investigating of late is
the failure of the left, of progressives, of those devoted to social and economic justice. How did we so wilfully ignore our responsibility to each other that we presumed that all those who are white are somehow free of the suffering that comes with poverty, with the disrespect of their sacred institutions, with the
collapse of their industry, and the abandonment of their working class, mostly rural communities by their young? ‘White’ and ‘privilege’ do not always belong in the same sentence, regardless of what privilege may be automatically inferred on the basis of colour. I am the poster child of privilege, and
I know that I am not living the same experience as an unemployed white shop machinist with three kids, and a mortgage, in a rust-belt town that has been abandoned by industry in favour of cheaper off-shore labor. And while it’s true that the negative consequences for people of colour in almost every country in the world are significantly higher, that doesn’t eliminate the suffering of others. It can’t. The problem that I see that we liberal,
progressive people have is that we are righteous. And in our righteousness, in our patent unwillingness to shut up and listen, we have missed one of the single greatest opportunities available to us to practise compassion – to turn to our angry neighbours, those people with whom we share buses, lunch queues and workplaces, and offer them our support.
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