Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

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Why I am a socialist

July 8, 2020 by Jeremy Mohler

I’ve written often about capitalism’s flaws, and about how capitalism distorts how we think. But never about why I feel the way I do about capitalism — why I’m a socialist.

No one ever has asked me why — but even if they did, I’d fumble through an answer. How did I get here, nearing middle age as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America with a “Bread and Roses” tattoo on my arm?

Was it hearing my dad complain about delivering packages for FedEx? Was it watching the most handy and resourceful person I’ve ever known get treated like he was expendable?

Was it watching my mom struggle to unwind after work? Was it hearing the most hardworking person I’ve ever known fret about her boss ignoring her ideas because she’s a woman?

Was it hearing white neighbors when I was growing up use the N-word to describe lower class people moving to our town?

Was it because I couldn’t make it as a musician? Was it the bartender’s eyes when he could only pay me in free beer because the club needed to make rent?

Was it watching the Occupy movement take over McPherson Square a few blocks from my band’s rehearsal space?

Is it because my heart hurts when someone says people caged in prison or living on the streets “deserve” it? Is it because my heart hurts less when I read a line like this: “’Deserve’ is a word which the possessors use as a weapon against those they dispossess,” from the communist journalist Agnes Smedley?

Is it because I found in Karl Marx’s Capital — which I first read with people as fed up, tired, lonely, and heartbroken as I was — a way of understanding why I was fed up, tired, lonely, and heartbroken?

It’s all of those things, of course. We don’t pick what encourages us to grow. We meander like a vine growing in a forest, propelled by our own inner process but also contained and guided by what we’re growing into.

But if there is one thing that’s made me a socialist — made me disinherit capitalism and want to help build something better — it’s that I’ve never wanted to accept the “singular loneliness of American individualism,” as the writer Vivian Gornick calls it.

Capitalism didn’t invent loneliness — but it deepens it. Socialist feminists like Nancy Fraser have shown how it warps social relationships:

Production moved into factories and offices, where it was considered ‘economic’ and remunerated with cash wages. [The creation and maintenance of social bonds] was left behind, relegated to a new private domestic sphere, where it was sentimentalized and naturalized, performed for the sake of ‘love’ and ‘virtue,’ as opposed to money.

Historically, [the creation and maintenance of social bonds] has been gendered. The lion’s share of responsibility for it has been assigned to women, although men have always performed some of it too. The rise of capitalism intensified this gender division.

In other words, capitalism turned the creation and maintenance of social bonds — or building community — into “women’s work” and hid it away in our homes. Inside our homes we are family, and caring for each other is too often done out of duty. Outside our homes we are individuals, rarely part of something beyond ourselves unless it’s organized around making money. Even then, the power to be free, to fully be ourselves, is uneven — there are bosses and there are workers.

I’m a socialist because we are capable of relationships beyond business owner, worker; producer, consumer; husband, wife; family, not family. We are capable of so much more with each other, and capitalism holds us back.

Why even label myself anything, let alone a socialist? Why declare that I’m against the way this society is organized, against its very DNA? Good questions. The poet Audre Lorde wrote after a close scare with breast cancer, “I was going to die, if not sooner than later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. If you’d like to work with me on your meditation practice or being more mindful in your life, reach out.

Download my free ebook on starting and sticking with a meditation practice here.

Why we can’t imagine a world without police

July 1, 2020 by Jeremy Mohler

The prison and the police are in our heads and hearts, therefore this system is naturalized in a way that makes it almost impossible for folks to step back and think that it wasn’t always like this. I think we can’t underestimate the fact that we think these institutions keep us secure.

Those are the words of the prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba, and they make my heart hurt. I do think police and prisons and bombs and guns keep me safe. Think being the key word.

The truth is, they don’t. Kaba and Angela Davis and Alex Vitale and the #DefundThePolice movement are teaching us that. Every video of another black person being killed by police, of a protestor being shoved to the ground by a militarized stormtrooper, of a mother wiping tears from her eyes, is a reminder that something is very wrong.

But my mind assumes things. It can’t handle the awkward space that opens up after the question: “Wait, do we really need police?” It anxiously fills the gap with questions: Who’s going to stop the murderers and rapists? What about serial killers? What if someone is breaking into my house?

In reality, cops spend most of their time responding to noncriminal issues like noise complaints and people living on the streets. They commit murder and sexual assault disturbingly often. Two-thirds of people who experience sexual violence don’t report it, presumably because they don’t trust the criminal justice system. Nearly 40 percent of murders go unsolved (yet violent crime rates are at all-time lows). And what about corporate crime, like wage theft, which robs workers of billions of dollars every year? Why aren’t the cops going after Jeff Bezos for Amazon dodging all of its federal taxes?

But these facts don’t stop my mind from worrying. And they for sure don’t make me feel safer.

Where do my worries come from? Why do I assume that society will turn into a dumpster fire without cops? Why do I assume our society isn’t already a dumpster fire for a lot of people? Who gave me this fear?

Zen Buddhist teacher angel Kyodo williams says thoughts fill our mind like it’s “that drawer that collects everything in your house.”

They’re moving at an incredible rate of speed. And, for the most part, we almost never get the opportunity to observe them and sort through them. You say, ‘Oh, but wait a minute, someone lived in this house before me. And some of that stuff is not mine. Actually, this is not mine. That’s my mom’s. This is not mine; that’s the inheritance of white supremacy.’ And we have no real way of being able to discern what is mine, what is yours, what we’re holding collectively, what I have inherited, what I have taken on as a measure of protection, of a way to cope at some point in my life.

No wonder I think someone is about to break into the house. Cop shows are among the most popular on television. Politicians have been going “tough on crime” for decades. I’ve been robbed at gunpoint, assaulted by strangers, and had my car stolen. I grew up watching “Cops” and shooting guns with my dad.

But when I slow down, take a few breaths, and “observe” and “sort through” my thoughts, something shifts. I can even imagine for a split second a world without cops — or at least far fewer. A world like the one imagined in a Facebook post I saw recently:

Can you imagine a world where social workers rather than cops help someone having a mental health crisis? Where we spend more money on public education and less on policing? Where everyone has a safe home, clean water, and enough to eat so that committing crime is unnecessary?

It’s really hard. The thoughts come rushing in. We can’t do that. How are we going to pass that through the Senate? How are we going to pay for it?

But thoughts are just what they are: thoughts. Not reality. Not necessarily true. And usually not even ours. If we don’t slow down enough to remember that, if we just react like a programmed robot, thoughts become a prison in our heads and — worse — our hearts.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. If you’d like to work with me on your meditation practice or being more mindful in your life, reach out.

Download my free ebook on starting and sticking with a meditation practice here.

Is it wrong to feel compassion towards cops?

June 10, 2020 by Jeremy Mohler

I recently bonded with a friend over the work of meditation teacher and psychologist Tara Brach, who just published a new book called “Radical Compassion.” We kept coming back to the same question: Is it wrong to feel compassion towards the police?

I’m angry at the cop who killed George Floyd. I’m outraged about cops harming protestors. But I’m also a little empathetic towards the police. It’s embarrassing to admit, but it’s true.

Let me be clear. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do something about police brutality. I’m with Black Lives Matter: #DefundThePolice. Fire cops and hire more social workers. Build public housing instead of sending cops to terrorize the homeless. Give people well-paid work so they don’t have reasons to commit crime.

If anything, humanizing cops highlights the systemic nature of the problem. Cops are just doing their jobs — and that job is a violent tool used by the rich and powerful to control poor and working class people.

We might think that cops “protect and serve” the public. But modern policing began with slave patrols in the South. After slavery, cops helped break up labor strikes, regularly shooting and killing workers.

Today, cops are asked to do way too much. For decades, we’ve cut public budgets for things like education, housing, and social services while spending more and more on policing. Kids don’t need cops in their schools — they need higher-paid teachers, safer buildings, and more counselors.

That is to say, there are no “good” cops. There are good people who are cops. But policing in America is inherently violent and racist.

So, here’s my issue. I’m mad about the cops, white supremacy, capitalism — yet I know in my bones that compassion is the strongest catalyst for change.

I can’t just turn off my empathy. I used to hate the hustling part of myself that’s always striving to do more and more work. But then I started listening, trying to understand why that part wanted me to work so hard. Turns out it was trying to protect me. It thought that if I wasn’t always working hard, I’d be worthless, a loser, a nobody. Once I empathized with that part, I gained the ability, for the first time in my life, to actually, truly, authentically rest. (See Chapter 2 in my ebook “How to Get Out of Your Head” for more on this.)

And you know what? The more compassionate I‘ve become towards my workaholic part, the more empathetic I’ve become towards others who can’t stop working. As Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön writes, “By being kind to ourselves, we become kind to others. By being kind to others — if it’s done properly, with proper understanding — we benefit as well.”

She goes on: “So it is with aggression. When you get to tell someone off, you might feel pretty good for a while, but somehow the sense of righteous indignation and hatred grows, and it hurts you.”

I’m not going to lie. It feels really good right now to hate the cops. I felt a complicated sense of joy watching the Minneapolis Police Department 3rd Precinct building burn. But I’m also feeling compassion. Not towards police buildings, or for that matter any property. Towards the human beings who think they’re protecting but are in fact hurting us.

Again, that’s not to disarm your anger towards cops or whoever has hurt you. I’m just laying all my feelings out on the table, hoping that allows you to give yourself permission to do the same.

For now, all I’ve got are questions. Does compassion make me a less effective fighter against injustice? Is it just making me feel better in a fucked up, broken society?

Or better yet, here’s writer bell hooks: “For me forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”

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