Volume 62. April 12, 2025
In the 1955, folk singer Pete Seeger wrote a song that asked,
Where have all the flowers gone? Long time passing.
Where have all the flowers gone? Long time ago.
Seventy years later, in 2025, the question has become more dire:
Where has all our humanity gone?
During the last three months, over a hundred thousand workers have been dismissed from the altruistic ranks of public service.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has been defunded, along with thousands of local arts and cultural groups.
USAID has been terminated, ensuring the world’s richest country will stop giving food to the world’s poorest families.
Another day another dagger to the heart of American humanity.
Ebenezer Scrooge is jumping for joy. What’s going on?
The Buddhist answer lies in the six realms of existence.
According to Buddhist cosmology, one can exist as a human being, a god, an anti-god, a restless ghost, a hell being or a wild animal.
Humanity is the very best existential state. Only human beings can achieve enlightenment in this present incarnation. Humans do so by helping one another. Humans realize we are all in this together.
Human beings act selflessly, with kindness for all.
The very worst existential state is that of wild animals. Beasts live by the law of the jungle: Eat or be eaten. Survival of the fittest. Wild animals are in it for themselves. They act selfishly.
Businesses of all stripes act like wild animals. They survive by eliminating waste, increasing efficiency and maximizing profits.
In America today, business values have replaced humanistic values.
We see this in government as well as in higher education.
Liberal arts colleges, university humanities programs and schools of continuing education are disappearing as rapidly as butterflies because their leaders are driven by the profit motive.
College students are no longer learning how to be human beings.
They are learning how to make money.
Once you smell money, you want more. Wanting, we compete. Competing, we hate. Hating, we separate.
Not wanting, we don’t compete. Not competing, we turn peaceful. Peaceful, we enjoy unity.
Take humanity out of human beings and what are we left with?
Individuals who are more self-centered, more disconnected from each other, and less concerned with the well-being of others.
In a word, animals. Come now, America, we’re better that.
One can imagine a pitiful Buddha shaking his head at us and singing Pete Seeger’s closing words of poetic admonishment:
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
The Buddha Times 