Cutting Through the Red Tape of Karma
(This is a response to Roz Warren’s fun alternative to Medium’s Writers’ Challenge, https://medium.com/the-haven/announcing-a-fun-alternative-to-the-medium-writers-challenge-1596b75aae97)
Until 2016, I relied on the doctrine of karma, not in the serious way that Buddhist scholars have parsed it into seven different doctrines. No, I first believed in it in the hippy-dippy way of the 1960s and 1970s — that the universe that had my, and everyone else’s number based on the past transgressions and good deeds we committed in our past lives. I believed that what came to me in this life from this universe would be my fair shares of suffering and good fortune that I deserved. But I also held out a modicum of belief in my free will to choose wisely in terms of whether I might return as a dung beetle, a swan, or a wiser or happier human.
But then there sat Donald Trump in the President’s office, munching daily on fast food and riding around in golf carts; spewing out vitriol and hatred to everyone in the universe with an Internet connection nightly, slashing away at safety nets, surviving an attack by COVID 19 while millions died as a result of his indifference and willful ignorance, ignoring the portents and signs of a drastically altered global ecology. He escaped the bad karma of sexual assault cases and of aiding and abetting the dictators who ruled America’s enemies. He escaped the consequences of a death-dealing pandemic and cardiovascular disease and even the karma of whatever exists in his tax returns.
He appeared and still appears, to be getting away with it all while living the life of a gold-drenched king. Even he acknowledged the king he most resembled in the title to his ghost-written book The Midas Touch. The origins of his actual wealth that fuelled his lifestyle and his political power remain shrouded in the mysteries of the deals he was able to make and with whom.
The bad karma of this country that elected Trump president began with the arrival of a group of Puritans on the shore of the place of many Indigenous nations and tribes. They arrived armed with diseases, guns, and beliefs that you could just occupy territory and plant crops and then own it and in the Protestant Ethic that equates material wealth with goodness and a chance at eternal life when Christ returns to the world. It continues with evangelical Christians who accept every sin their Bible inveighs against (with the possible exception of homosexuality) in their leaders and in the hopes of so many poor Americans that their hard work should be rewarded with a greater share of wealth and so elect members of the 1% who control it and make sure it doesn’t trickle down.
More bad karma of this country that elected Trump president accrued with the arrivals of ships carrying African slaves to its shore and the war that wealthy white landowners were willing to fight to keep their slaves. It accrued with the immigration laws that expelled the Chinese workers who had built its railroads and worked in Alaskan salmon canneries but who had the temerity to join in gold rushes, with laws that favored immigration from northern and western European countries over southern and eastern, and in the granting of citizenship rights to immigrants who proved up on homesteads on lands stolen from Indigenous peoples who had no such rights. The border wall was just an extension of turning away ships full of Jews fleeing from Nazism and Cubans fleeing from Castro.
Even the acts of bad karma I learned as a child — lying, name-calling, bragging, bad spelling, sneezing without covering my mouth — have apparently been suspended in this era of Trumpism. It has become possible to believe and legislate that what I learned about cause and effect in science is no longer in effect for the spread of global pandemics or for the consequences of burning fossil fuels on the climate. What I have relied on as a writer is also in question. What stories should we tell now if the fates of heroes and villains are no longer ruled by the consequence of their good and evil thoughts and actions? What if the characters in stories no longer need to be taught lessons to develop a good or better character? What if criminals are never punished, trauma no longer acknowledged, and the people who perpetuate it not accountable to civic or spiritual authorities? What if virtue and lawfulness are not their own good karmic rewards?
The mythical King Midas was taught a lesson by the outcome of his wish. After he turned everything he touched into gold, including his own beloved family, he begged the god Pan to reverse the wish. But then he was asked by Pan who made the sweetest music — himself or Apollo — he chose Apollo, so Pan reversed the wish but bestowed a set of donkey ears on King Midas. I can picture Trump consulting the priapic god Pan, but not him choosing Apollo, that great god of reason. The donkey ears, however, would be a fitting punishment. But he shows no signs of the remorse or repentance that precedes redemption, another Christian doctrine that seems also to have been suspended.
The Dena’ina, the Indigenous people whose traditional territory I live within, have a belief system that I understand as a version of karma. In their traditional belief system, all living beings are born into this world in a state of purity or grace, signified by the word “beggesha.” All but humans remain so. Humans have the unique capacity to taint and pollute what they touch through their negative actions and thoughts toward others, creating “beggesh” that could be absorbed and exude negative information and send unwanted messages to other Dena’ina, animals, ancestor spirits, and other spirits disrupting social and ecological order. The negative energy of killing other species for food or to make clothing, shelters, or boat skins could be dispelled, however, by returning their unused remains to the land or waters where they were taken, restoring beggesha. The human taint could only be removed at death by transforming human bodies and possessions by fire into smoke. The past is never really completely past in this world as long as the scent or trace of a negative change of beggesh remains. By our current standards, it’s a radical form of ecological and spiritual housekeeping.
But perhaps it’s just that the concept of individualized karma, similar to the concepts of individual human redemption or wokeness are too precise — the notions that what you accrue in this life will play out later in your future life, in the granting of eternal life to your soul, or in your release from rebirth that ends the dragging and rebirthing all your accrued negative energy that you trail behind you through the universe as tawdry baggage. Maybe it’s collective karma and accumulated beggesh that plays out for our species at local, national or global scales — a situation that lacks the precision that a string of connected lifetimes would require. Smoke rises from the combustion of fossil fuels and girdles the entire planet. Droughts create the conditions for wildfires that burn up communities that include people who didn’t vote for Trump and are striving to be anti-racist and live lightly on the beleaguered planet. Rivers burst their banks and sea levels rise, respecting only the laws of physics and the ones that allow development in 100-year floodplains. Viruses are transported around the planet by jets and cruise ships and are stopped only by the distance between potential living, breathing hosts and barriers to entry into them.
But perhaps we can salvage the concept of karma as no different than the consequences of ecological interrelationship. We can put our shoulders against the eternal wheel of life on the planet now being slowed in its tracks in the mire of our collective bad-faith ignorance of the consequences of our thoughts, desires, and actions on the food webs we are woven into. What good karma that may come to us will likely be in the form of the sheer survival of us and all our relations, but more of us and our possessions may also soon go up in smoke or be returned to the rising waters.
