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While working with a team of Buddhists responsible for hosting His Holiness the Karmapa visit to Seattle, my most brilliantly creative and artistic wife came up with a theme, the underlying current for all humanity – I Am You. It’s simple. It’s true. It’s popping up in campaigns in Capitol Hill Seattle as a response to hate crimes. I saw it represented in Ford Foundations commitment to erase inequality.
I Am You.
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We are all constructed from the same basic strands of DNA. While DNA reflects our uniqueness, it also shows how closely related we are. The genetic difference in humans is about 0.1%. Regardless of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, economic background, essentially we are one. We are reflections of each other and the choices we make. We are in this together.
So if you go shoot up a church or a school or a movie theater, essentially we’re all shooting up those places. We are the people killed and we are people killing as we comprised of the same genetic material. We are the breeders of ill well, of hurt, of isolation, of contempt. The hate speech that slips from my mouth when I think I’m being funny or the hate speech somebody preaches on the web because they believe they are superior, for whatever motivates that speech, you saying it, me saying it, it’s all same.
I Am You in hatred. I Am You in fear. I Am You in love. I Am You lonely. I Am You hopeful. I Am You in dis-ease. I Am You in joy. I Am You feeling threatened. I Am You feeling powerful. You are a reflection of me. My mirror. Your actions, my greatest teacher. And my actions, yours.
I marvel at the family members, the victims and survivors from the Charleston SC shooting, and wonder could I be as god loving, as generously forgiving as they are, looking at their family member’s killer in the eyes and saying “may god be with you”.
They know something that we must not simply witness. We must realize we share that same capacity. To forgive a killer. To release oneself from anger and more hatred. To view a very sick and deprived person as a human, as the same. As somebody who flipped, whose balance is so far eschew, so deeply out of reality, that I have to wonder what we, the global we, did to allow this being, and the others who decided to see their reflection in hatred, in fear, in murder, what permission have we given for this to happen? How did our fear grow so big in light of our love? Is it truly easier to fear? What makes us believe that we are not the same?
I Am Youis an awareness of our interdependence. Its essential purpose is to reflect, illuminating our likenesses, our most common human experience of love, loss, joy, sadness, worry, hurt, accomplishment, disappointment and so on. Emotions we all know to be true. I Am You ties us to our humanity, isolating our tribalization, unifying in simplistic trust. We are one. I Am You.