ASK DR. WRATH

"Why Do Meditators Get in Fights?"

Dear Dr. Wrath,
All these ass-holes I know keep telling me to meditate, and I’m totally like “fuck you dude, you hippy New Age pacifist fucknut.” What’s their fucking problem?
Sincerely,
Too Busy for Buddha
Crescent City, CA



Dear Too Busy,

Lord knows I agree with you. Anyone who tells anyone else what to do (unless it is super helpful to them) is just a fascist dickhead anyway. But are you sure your friends aren’t just SUGGESTING you meditate?

Regardless, there seems to be this misconception that all one needs to do is meditate to become a better person. Excuse me?

I only need to bring up one example: a girl named Deidre who works as a nanny in Eugene, Oregon.

Manifest editor Paul Salamone met this woman at the Eugene youth hostel back in June of 2000. His first night there, they engaged in a pleasant conversation about politics, culture, and the magnificent trees of the Pacific Northwest, until Salamone brought up the subject of Seattle resident Bill Gates.

“Fuck that man!” exclaimed Deidre, “He is pure evil!”

“But don’t you think he’s at least trying to help the world?” asked Salamone. “Doesn’t creating a semi-functional word processing app even a half-blind octogenarian can use count for something?”

“Fuck that shit,” said Deidre, “the man is pure greed, just like the rest of the Boomers. Our generation [Generation X], on the other hand, is totally enlightened!”

“Oh, do you meditate?” asked Salamone, himself a half-assed Zen practitioner.

“Oh yes,” she said with a placid smile on her face, “every day I sit down for 20 minutes and just feel a total sense of peace.”

“Do you have an instructor?”

Her anger returned: “Fuck no! No one tells me what to do!”

A day later, Salamone returned from a long day spent touring the home turf of running legend Steve Prefontaine to find the inhabitants of the youth hostel in an uproar. Apparently, Deidre had beaten up the diminutive hostel groundskeeper from Sri Lanka when he failed to hand her the telephone quick enough. She had actually sent the poor, hairy-eared man to the hospital.

When Salamone encountered Deidre at the bus stop a few hours later, she beamed with pride over the fresh purple bruises on her legs.

“Did you really attack him?” asked Salamone

“Hell yeah,” she said, “I kicked the shit out of him… and it felt really good.”

Salamone boarded a Greyhound bound for Portland soon after.

This is not to say that, if done properly, meditation won’t make you less of an asshole, for it will (in spite of Deidre, who was probably doing it wrong). The whole point is to cultivate a more detached, “witnessing” stance towards yourself and the world in general. In time, you learn to no longer identify with and act upon every stupid whim popping into your brain (unless you live in Eugene, where it is encouraged).

But dealing with the contents of your mind is one thing, learning to mesh with those of another, especially a bi-polar childcare worker residing in the hometown of neo-primitivist guru John Zerzan, is an entirely different challenge. Sitting on your ass won’t teach you how to deal with insane people like Deidre, just like picking up Jai-Lai or Capoiera won’t make you a better chef.

So go ahead and sit 20 minutes a day, but also learn to treat all sentient beings with the respect they deserve. Anything less earns not the appellation “enlightened.”




Burning alive with a question of cosmic curiosity? Ask DrWrath@the-manifest.org. All topics welcome, but don’t expect a “nice” answer. He is a deity of wrath, after all.