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High-Stakes Practice

P

ogo said, “We have met the enemy and they
are us.” This particular slogan now appears a lot
in the environmental movement. It isn’t somebody
else who’s polluting the rivers—it’s us. The cause of
confusion and bewilderment and pollution and vio-
lence isn’t really someone else’s problem: it’s some-
thing we can come to know in ourselves. But in order
to do that we have to understand that we have met the
friend and that is me. The more we make friends with
ourselves, the more we can see that our ways of shut-
ting down and closing off are rooted in the mistaken
thinking that the way to get happy is to blame some-
body else.
It’s a little uncertain who is “us” and who is “them.”
Bernard Glassman Sensei, who does a lot of work
with the homeless in New York, said that he doesn’t
work with the homeless because he’s such a great guy
but because going into the areas of society that he
has rejected is the only way to make friends with the
parts of himself that he’s rejected. It’s all interrelated.
We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also
we help others in order to work on ourselves.That’s a
very important point. We could say that working with

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