Two Truths and the Attacks on UCLA
Thoughts on our on-campus protests through the lens of the Noble Truths
This post has remained structurally and thematically the same since originally posting this 5/13. It has been edited for concision and framing as of 5/14.
A few days ago, I shared a fiery take on the recent events at UCLA. This is the follow-up to that deleted note. It’s also the second installment in my series on the four Noble Truths within Buddhist philosophy.
TW: Sections with an * in the title/sub-heading contain descriptions of violence or potentially distressing material.
Key Points:
We need spaces to listen and be heard.
Why aren’t we talking about the right-wing extremism?
Greed, hatred, and delusion make everything worse.
Choosing how you respond to emotions is liberating.
I’ll be holding a community circle this week for anyone who wants to be heard, has a UCLA email address, and completes a short survey.
Listening While Chronically-Online
Everyone has an opinion on what is going on at these university protests. Mine is that it shows a societal need to matter and be heard.
Many have compared these campus protests to the Civil Rights movement and the dissent over war in Vietnam. Perhaps. But they didn’t have social media.
Mark Kurlansky, in his book 1968: The Year that Rocked the World, quotes a student who said, “Everyone was talking.”
Ask anyone in Paris with fond memories of the spring of 1968, and that is what they will say. People talked […] Students on the street found themselves in conversation with teachers and professors for the first time. For the first time in this rigid, formal, nineteenth-century society, everyone was talking to everyone. ‘Talk to your neighbour’ were words written on the walls.
In 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt, Ronald Fraser quotes a student: “It really was another world—a dream world perhaps—but that’s what I’ll always remember: the need and the right for everyone to speak.”
Now that algorithms reinforce what we want to see, there’s less neighborly chatter and, according to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, social media has limited critical thinking, creativity, and made us extremely susceptible to mental health challenges. Everyone involved in these protests and their coverage is more isolated and afraid than ever before. Funny for something with “social” in the classification.
But it hasn’t replaced the need and right be heard. An offer for UCLA students to join a community circle will conclude this post. You are invited to share this post, or just the RSVP, with anyone you think might be interested.
But first, I’m not some great enlightened being, detached from the events of the past couple weeks.
Let me clear my throat.
*Why is No One Talking about the Right-Wing Terrorism?
*What the actual hell?
Author Disclosure: The primary victims were Pro-Palestine, anti-genocide protestors. Among their demands is university divestiture from Israeli companies. My goal is to share my emotional reactions to show how to diffuse them later in the post.
Some saw it coming. Anahid Nersessian’s beautifully sad piece, “Under the Jumbotron” describes the atmosphere a ten-foot-high screen created in the days leading up to the mob assault.
For the next five days, the Jumbotron played, on a loop, footage of the 7 October attacks along with audio clips describing rape and sexual violence in explicit terms. Mixed in among the clips were speeches by Joe Biden vowing unconditional support for Israel and ‘Meni Mamtera’, a maddeningly repetitive children’s song that went viral earlier this year when IDF soldiers posted a video of themselves using it as a form of noise torture on captive Palestinians.
This monument to violence galvanized local hate groups to (continue to) attack the peaceful encampment on the night of April 30th.
*Some have put their names and faces to the allegation that Proud Boys were involved. Others furiously gesture toward “right-wing nationalists.”
One colleague alleged making a head bandage out of masking tape for someone’s fractured skull while Proud Boys spewed racialized, sexualized threats at them. In a faculty meeting, two people alleged seeing the Los Angeles-based leader of the Proud Boys on campus the night of April 30th-May 1.
While these three claim the Proud Boys were involved, others made broader, less focused allegations.
A large number of the David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM) call the April 30-May 1 attack “premeditated, organized violence.” A smaller but significant number of their faculty concur: “attackers, including self-identified white supremacists and members of other right-wing organizations, were permitted to act violently and without restraint.”
In the words of the Gender Studies Department, “white supremacist racists stormed the campus.” The Department of African American Studies names “outside far-right extremists” as the attackers on multiple nights.
In their departmental statement, “History faculty who were present reported that many were middle-aged men; some shouted white supremacist slurs; and others brandished flags linked to violent, right-wing organizations.”
The World Arts and Cultures faculty agree, while distinguishing the outside agitators from counter-protestors:
Later that night, a mob of violent right-wing extremists, most of whom were outside agitators, attacked UCLA students in the encampment while university leadership watched without meaningful interference. These “counter-protestors” bombarded our students with racist, sexist, and homophobic epithets while pelting them with objects and chemical weapons, striking them, and spitting on them.
I wasn’t there, as I so clearly demonstrated to my class. I don’t know what organizations were where.
But it seems everyone else I’ve broached this topic with knows A LOT.
A Confused Mediascape
Over 210 people affiliated with UCLA were arrested the following morning, May 2nd.
“Everyone knows” what happened. University responses are “all the same.” What happened on UCLA’s campus is “happening everywhere.”
Judith Levine, writer for The Guardian, noted the Proud Boys were spotted on Columbia’s campus. She touches my concern with this italicized line: “Vigilantes staged an assault on unarmed civilians and the state let it happen.”
“L'état, c'est moi,” King of France Louis XIV supposedly said, claiming absolute power. The phrase was revived during the French Revolution, wherein laypeople claimed themselves as the state.
Ladies, gnc folks, and gentlemen, behold my personal hangup: Who is “the state,” in this democratic republic, as we all sleep on these possibly political attacks during an election year?
Le sigh. Remember though, we are here. Now.
Here. Now.
Whether clinging to the series or letting go of my pet issue, I’m delivering this second post in my series. The two wings of awakening don’t come from a bucket.
The Second and Third Noble Truths
On a cognitive level, many know suffering is inevitable. Still, we don’t like it.
My first post in this series covered the concept of dukkha, and how accepting a degree of stress can be liberating. I analyzed the movie Reality Bites to discuss major life transitions, like graduation, a diagnosis, coming out.
Life is innately unsatisfactory (dukkha)
Craving and clinging aggravates stress
…but liberation is possible
if you practice skillfully
The Second Noble Truth
The first Noble Truth is that life is unsatisfactory. The second is that craving and clinging can make things worse.
We get upset when things don’t go our way, but tight-fisted clinging to ideas, perceptions, or material possessions adds to suffering.
Three things motivate craving and clinging: greed, hatred, and delusion. How each is experienced can range from individual rumination, interpersonal conflict, or war.
It’s normal and natural to want things a certain way. Ethics are made on these qualities. Therefore, seeing greed, hatred, and delusion is, in many ways, a gift. It gives us the prescription for release.
And, fun fact: they often happen all at once!
What follows is an attempt to represent a range of on-campus attitude. Again, the goal is to illustrate a reaction to show its potential release. My endgame is dialogue.
Greed
Craving more of something, either accumulation or sustaining.
They say we all have our own tendencies. Some are more greedy types. Ask me about my fountain pen ink collection. Does one need more fountain pen ink? In reality, probably no, one does not need more ink.
Greed can also look like needing to be right and getting upset when others disagree with you. Do you obsess over your pet topic and stress when others aren’t taking it as seriously as you? (Cough.)
We’re seeing this unfold on campus.
Students who didn’t previously take a side are unifying against the protestors for causing disruption, against Chancellor Gene Block for lack of response, against professors who make confusing changes to the syllabus and those that rigidly stick to the schedule.
Some people say the real problem is the broken sauna in the men’s locker room in the Wooden Center. Broken windows, but this time a sauna at the gym. Many are sad about the canceled Spring Sing. Without communal art, what society is this?
Or, as I’ve complained here: what about my particular inquiry? What about me?
What do we want? Our way.
When do we want it? Now.
Hatred
Oppositional relating and protection of self. Creating a self-other dichotomy based on difference.
I personally align this with fear. Fear and hate shuts down connection. This can be self-hatred, hatred of others, fear of others.
I mean, fear, hatred, and division are reasons why the encampment was there in the first place.
Delusion
Confusion, lack of clarity, lack of perspective on the issue. Disengagement, dysregulation, disassociation.
Delusion is not caring, being willfully ignorant, or assuming you “already know.” This can also be self-directed. For example, not recognizing one’s own impact and power.
We still have four weeks to go.
I have been required to change my syllabus three times in two weeks and swap out a major in-person assignment meant to last three sessions. The university cancelled one of my classes last week after we already began and, this week, moved a class I was already teaching live, online.
Some might describe this as an unsatisfactory experience. Dukkha: the first noble truth.
If I get pissy about it, or think this is all about me, I make things worse. None of this is personal. Everything has, ironically, always been impermanent. That’s the second noble truth.
*The Third Noble Truth
*It is our right and responsibility to choose our focus and responses. Giving yourself space to choose your emotional response is liberation.
My uncle Danny died amid all this.
Texan families near my uncle are losing their lives and homes to floods.
Danny was helping his neighbor move a fallen tree. Danny got dizzy. My Aunt brought him home and sat him on the couch while she showered. He was in his late 50s: young for a sudden and unexpected death.
The future hasn’t happened yet and the past is gone. We respect our time by becoming aware of what’s aggravating stress and responding otherwise.
We have always been free, we just forget. We liberate ourselves again and again by owning our actions through skillful means.
Generosity and forgiveness can reduce greed.
Goodwill and kindness can reduce hate.
Listening and patience can reduce delusion.
These things don’t need to be directed at the most challenging targets. I have often been my own challenging person. During these times, it’s easier to begin practicing generosity and kindness with the people (and cats) I care most about.
This is work we must do ourselves, for ourselves. But we don’t need to do it alone.
Free Community Circles
This won’t be a “Buddhist” event, but it is informed by those principles.
bell hooks argues that “To work for peace and justice we begin with the individual practice of love, because it is there that we can experience firsthand love’s transformative power.”
She’s not alone in saying justice must be rooted in an ethics of care that begins within. Representing a different divinity, RuPaul asks, “if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love someone else?”
Dialogue rebels against the isolating self-judging, other-blaming, comparative cycles this competition-based world seeks to keep us in. In All About Love, hooks argues any and all movement toward love is a revolutionary act, and community helps us circulate goodwill.
Enjoying the benefits of living and loving in community empowers us to meet strangers without fear and extend to them the gift of openness and recognition. Just by speaking to a stranger, acknowledging their presence on the planet, we make a connection. Every day we all have an opportunity to practice the lessons learned in community. Being kind and courteous connects us to one another.
Being kind to ourselves together is the revolution.
I’m holding a community circle to air emotions this Thursday. If interested but unavailable, you can request to be included in any subsequent ones. I’m not a licensed mental health provider.
As facilitator, I will maintain the agenda for this 75-minute session geared toward cultivating empathy and bearing witness. This is NOT a space for advice, strategies, solutions, discussion, or debate.
Welcome, Community Guidelines (e.g. no recording, confidentiality, no advice-giving)
Anonymous Emotional Check (via Mentimeter or the like)
Short guided, grounding practice
Open sharing (a share might be honoring an emotion and its context with a short personal narrative. For example, “I feel angry and hurt about the alleged extremism violence because…”)
Closing grounding practice
These emotion wheels may help you name what you’re feeling.
To be eligible, one must have a ucla.edu email account, commit to upholding the community guidelines, and share a couple sentences as to why they want to join.
Regardless of university affiliation…
What emotions, if any, are arising in relation to the protests?
Of greed, hatred and delusion, I think my primary tendency is greed…though I can also be straight-up delusional. You?
Takeaway Practice
Guided Meditation
This ~5 minute environmental meditation begins with a breathing exercise and then walks you through an exploration of your space. It is adapted from an offering in Kelsey Blackwell’s Decolonizing the Body.
Everyday Mindfulness
Stop with the social media.
If you are emotionally charged, it’s very normal and common to turn to distraction. But recognize this is a sensitive time for you.
Honor yourself by dropping into your body. Take a shower instead of scrolling TikTok. Talk a walk instead of responding to trolls. Take a nap. You are allowed.
Currently Reading
The New Saints by Lama Rod Owens. A balm for the soul.
Bio and Mentoring Info
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) writes this here Substack and mentors via Light Hive Integration. If you’re interested in private mentoring, shoot me an email. [myfirstname]@lighthiveintegration.org.