The statement is quite vague. It alludes broadly to government policies and other social practices can cause suffering, including both the policies of the current administration and deeper “systemic” practices whose harms precede this administration. But the authors of the statement decline to name or precisely identify any of these policies and practices. So I imagine many people reading the statement will be quite confused about what it is calling on Buddhists to do, beyond its general recommendation that one engage in the world and try to do some good somewhere.
Regrettably, to my mind, despite its general call to protect “the vulnerable”, it refrains from using the word “Muslims” anywhere.
In their defense, it must have been quite challenging to come up with a statement that all of the signatories, who represent many different practice traditions, could all agree to. But if the leaders of the US Buddhist community wants to engage socially and politically, but avoid the impression that they have little to offer beyond a kneejerk and shallow establishment partisanship, they might deepen their critique of the systemic and structural problems they allude to, but do not define.
On the matter of systemic problems, US society, which is the most unequal in the developed world, is the scene of a great deal of structural economic and social violence and suffering. These structural problems did not originate under the Trump administration, although the current administration is indeed likely to exacerbate many of them. Some of these problems are special afflictions of specific communities facing racism and other forms of bigotry. But some are grounded in the economic organization and social mores of American society more broadly. Both parties are implicated in these harms because they have been tolerated - and indeed promoted - in a bipartisan form for many years.
The system we live under in the US is based on, among other things, ruthless competition; radical individualism and greedy acquisitiveness; the exploitation of the weak by the strong; the permeation of market-place values and practices into all areas of life, along with the suffocating atmosphere of lies and untruth that always characterize the bazaar and commercial marketing; class-conscious practices of systemic humiliation of the less fortunate by the more fortunate and desperate emulation of the more fortunate by the less fortunate; systemic (and deliberate) unemployment aimed at keeping working people weak and subjugated; laws helping employers prevent working people from organizing; the aggressive marketing of unhealthy and addictive forms of sensual craving and gratification; the glorification of violence and aggression; and inadequate limits on the accumulation of concentrated private wealth, along with the social and antidemocratic political power such wealth always brings.
The financial crisis of 2007/8, triggered by wildly greedy and fraud-riven financial speculation, especially in the US mortgage market, triggered a recession that ruined the economic lives of millions of people, has left permanent scars on our society, and made evident the unhealthy dependency of the whole society on its most ruthless, dishonest, aggressive and greedy members.
In addition, the US is a powerful and imperial state that maintains a security and military order spread around the world. It tortures its adversaries and presumed adversaries. It launches murderous conventional wars and covert wars to exercise political control over regions of the world that supply resources we deem vital to maintaining our very high, though unequally distributed, standard of living. These realities did not begin with Trump. The other candidate in the last election, Hillary Clinton, is widely understood to be in the “hawkish” wing of the Democratic Party, is a friend and admirer of the war criminal Henry Kissinger, and was expected to turn toward what the media in the US euphemistically calls a more “muscular” foreign policy.
I think some of the anger and despair in contemporary America is due to the intolerable psychic strain of the double-think we must maintain hereto perpetuate the rosy, TV-commercial view of ourselves while knowing we are also this country:
The current American way of life is sick at its core, and we are now seeing unprecedented declines in overall life expectancy due to what the Nobel economists Angus Deaton calls “deaths of despair.”
The photographer Chris Arnade has been documenting this despair and misery in some of the US’s most abandoned and forlorn communities: