"Man is not our Enemy" - a hard phrase to accept
Thich Nhat Hanh composed the phrase “Man is not our Enemy” in his 1966 letter to Dr King entitled “In Search of the Enemy of Man”...
“Our enemies are not man”, he wrote, but “intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred and discrimination which lie within the heart of man. I believe with all my being that the struggle for equality and freedom you lead in Birmingham, Alabama… is not aimed at the whites but only at intolerance, hatred and discrimination. These are real enemies of man — not man himself.
In our unfortunate fatherland we are trying to yield desperately: do not kill man, even in man’s name. Please kill the real enemies of man which are present everywhere, in our very hearts and minds. ”
The above is tough to swallow like how eliminating things can seem right (including people) but a fine-tuning of this means a deeper look at what and where things comes from which is a might longer fix... some would say arguably right to 'kill' in certain ways especially if those people know what they do the same way as they know what we do and try to kill us or make us pay for our peace perpetuating our prison.
A fine-tuning which I will think about.
Rest in peace Thich Nhat Hanh and let us find how to rid / heal ourselves of things in life while still almost paradoxically practising certain rules for which there maybe is only rarely exception but mostly not.
"Man is not our Enemy" - a hard phrase to accept
"Breathe in, smile out"
I keep gently returning to in the course of a day and it gives an enormous sense of calm.
From page: "Thich Nhat Hanh has died"
https://plumvillage.org/articles/thich-nhat-hanh-and-martin-luther-kings-dream-comes-true-in-mississsippi/