The instance of the prez and Melania contracting Covid brings up some core and crucial philosophical issues, and perhaps some “spiritual” ones. Whether or not the illness is real or a flash in the night for our president, the core issues it raises are an excellent opportunity for discussing core values.

I am not a spiritual person, at least not in the popular sense. I detest popular spirituality, actually, and find it to be largely and ironically violent (due to its lack of paradox and adherence to linear and dualistic dynamics).
I am into humanness, justice, and embodied living. This includes compassion, but not in a linear, fixed definition, but a sometimes paradoxical one that revolves around the pillars described below.
 
The issue of wishing ill upon another is something I have contemplated and sat with for years since his inauguration. His illness will likely bring out the “unconditional compassion” from the “spiritual” community as well as their discompassionate shaming of others who believe or feel differently. This is a subjective matter, and I don’t share that brand of compassion in this case, especially when ordinary channels of justice are ineffective against the monster Trump. 

Someone who maims without means to be stopped needs to be stopped anyway possible. I wish ill to such monsters, whose likes have walked among us before, for too long.
 
A desire to wish the president well might also hinge upon spiritual bypassing beliefs—fantasies actually—such as linear compassion, that this illness will give him a change of heart, that it will cause him to “come around.” The chance for a sliver of this occurring are essentially zero. This kind of magical thinking precludes justice and a better world, which is how spiritual bypassing is violence in disguise. The chances of trump’s using this illness to gain favor, to manipulate, and to cheat are far higher.
 
When anyone, especially families, or even nations, experience the violent and cruel death of a loved one, or many loved ones, including their land and sense of home, justice is wished for and supported by the broader community. We rely on courts for that justice and in many cases they fail, especially more severely in other countries.

So how about a compromise and an ultimatum (hypothetical, anyway), since no one and nothing should suffer longer than needed for greater good: Change your ways, Mr. Trump, or we will wish for you to be stopped however necessary.

It might be that some views on compassion are for one’s comfort at the expense of the grater good. Linear compassion may be used as a defense against feelings of animosity and righteous anger and what it takes to deliver tough justice. In such cases, ironically, the challenge may be to suffer the untidiness of embracing reasonable malice and the discomfort of wishing one person unwell so as to truly hope for the wellbeing of the many. 

In other words, unconditional, linear “compassion” may be a selfish, ideological clinging that jeopardizes compassion for the many.

Can we really keep a promise of compassion when this compassion directly leads to even greater suffering? Is it truly compassionate when one mans’s wellness (who shows zero sincere promise for reform and places himself above justice) means suffering for the entire globe? We in effect wish suffering on the many via our compassion for one.
 
In my heart-mind, this doesn’t compute to the greatest gain for compassion. Indeed, compassion is not so tidy as we’d like and the world is far more complex than unconditional love would want us to believe. Is it more likely that a miracle will occur and trump will reform his ways, or more likely that he won’t and will continue to cause others unbearable suffering? I think this is a no-brainer. 
 
Who speaks for the hundreds-year-old saguaro cacti and long-preserved ecosystems decimated by Trump’s pathetic wall? Who speaks for the children ripped from their parents at the border, thrown into cages, and those many still missing? Who speaks for the hundreds of thousands perished to Covid and to varying degrees by the negligence of our president?
 
Where is justice, and who metes it, when a person perpetually positions himself above the law so that he can continue killing and maiming everything we hold dear? Some perhaps don’t understand that this president is literally precipitating the death of our entire human community, as we teeter at the lip of full climate catastrophe, not to mention the plain menace he is to the environment generally, disadvantaged humans, and every institution of sanity.
 
Some mention Gandhi and his alleged saying “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Yet, I have read that Gandhi also advocated for violence when non-violent protest doesn’t work. “When there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence,” the lawyer-activist from South Africa said in 1920.

One luminary mentions that to hate disfigures us and injures our souls. But we don’t have to “hate” trump to that degree if our hearts are truly focused on compassion for the collective. We can just wish him unwell so to celebrate the liberation of so much more. Whatever anger or outrage at his actions can be adaptive, in service of greater compassion, when we grasp that stopping one man, to any degree, means liberating billions.

The result of cowardice is an inability to take bold action to mete justice, which is essentially equivalent to being unable hold a perpetrator accountable. So when one person, and/or a group of GOP bullies, willfully asserts and positions himself above the law and no imminent justice can be sought non-violently, let nature take its course: “It is what is,” as our president has said of those dead from Covid.
 
How ironic that the natural world Trump disdains and desecrates is the one that has come closest so far to any kind of justice. We don’t know what the disease means and will become for our president. We don’t even know for sure if it’s real, or just another one of his thousands of lies. 
 
I wish for this Earth to thrive again, for people of color to be dignified, and for science, reason, and honesty to gain the upper hand. For that to happen, serial offenders with zero signs of compassion and humility must be stopped by any means possible.

All this said, if I were in front of DT on his death bed, I would have a tough time wishing him badly. Like killing an animal for necessary food, I’d rather someone else do the job, like a virus.
 
 


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