New Moon Edition February 2026
If we think at all these days, rather than just reacting, we must periodically at least wonder what it is that makes so many people so angry. Including ourselves, of course. It seems like everyone’s pissed off about something all the time. Pissed about lots of things, more often than not, and often for good reason. While high above us the gods of commerce skillfully trigger our frustrations and desires, we focus on the handiest sources of our displeasure to express our agitations. It’s the predominant American mood and we might well wonder why. I believe it’s because of overstimulation.
We’re addicted to stimuli, images, headlines, click bait, high wire performance in very short bursts. Like addicts of every sort, we need more, and more again immediately thereafter, to be sated. Junk food for the senses. All the time we spend seeking that fix and all the time sensing it fade away are riven with anxiety. They have a frantic edge, those spaces in our process, an unsettling state of being that’s searching for its center even as it’s being consumed. It’s life in the technocracy.
Consumers being consumed. It seems like a paradox and yet it is happening with great dependability and more intensity as the techniques are refined. Commerce used to seek our attention by whatever means to sell us things. Now they blithely scream for our attention so they can sell us. Once they capture enough details of who we are and what we can be made to want, once the suite of biometric data is assembled and packaged, there are plethoras of purchasers. Free enterprise indeed.
Do you watch football? Lots of people do. And whether or not it is your thing, I’ll bet you at least tune in the Super Bowl if for nothing more than the halftime show. More than a hundred million people do and all of them this year, like it or not, witnessed a signal moment in time. A performer summoned the power of art to show us a story that needed to be seen, the portrayal of a people as they truly are with all the beauty and the pathos of their lives on display as a measure of our common humanity.
Those who exploit anger for political gain, all the duplicity they produce and promote, and all the forces their power enables them to deploy paled in the moment of an artist and his colleagues who showed us the simple truth. In an extraordinarily sophisticated and soulful production of less than 15 minutes, this great performer laid low the lies, slander, and the shameless exploitation of his people that have been engaged with prejudice in extremis for more than a year. Shaming the shameless is no small feat.
It was the pure simplicity of what we saw that resonates so deeply, in contrast to the context of anger, hostility, mayhem, madness, murder with which our federal political leadership conducts the social order of our days. We were presented an inflection point of such clarity that even in the manufactured hysteria of our current ways it can’t be missed, misinterpreted, or misunderstood. Despite the best efforts of the official disinformation machine that follow every challenge to its cruel story, the artist Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show rings true as a bell. Can you hear it?
The monks who walked 2,300 miles through bitter cold from Texas to Washington, DC. offer us another ringing of that bell, of a simple act in a world impoverished and imperiled by its own manic momentum. Theirs is the anti-screed of political discourse, a focused demonstration of quiet intention and manifestation, showing rather than telling us there is another way forward to make a case for composure and decency.
No one paid them to do it, nor were they selling anything. They were an enterprise of tranquility, a long walk for peace, passing through some of the most agitated parts of America with purpose (HERE). The four months of their journey was about seeking calm in a messy world, but of course, as Buddhists, that is always their mission, as is their willingness to share the experience with the rest of us.
Crowds followed the procession on social media and in person. They transcended social divisions, drawing people of every age from every walk of life. For each of them in some manner it inspired hope. Bhikkhu Pannakara, who leads the effort, says of the walk, the goal was to provide a diversion from whatever was weighing on the people they passed. It would cause them to slow down, he said, “and let go of everything.” May we heed his invitation.