Each day I get a Picture Quote from the Gandhi Research Foundation in Mumbai, India, www.mkgandhi.org . Most of the quotes and some of the pictures are meaningful. Today’s picture was not great but the quote was right on to reflections and struggles in my daily life now. The Gandhi quote today was: “No man could look upon another as his enemy unless he first became his own enemy.” (Mahatma, Vol. 7, p. 204)

In America today we are trained, I believe, to look on everyone as an enemy or friend or both. There are some obvious enemies like those we call “terrorist” today and times before “communist”. There are some clear friends, like people who think like we think and are like us in concerns, be it for a new car or a ‘cause.’

We cannot talk with our ‘enemies’ and if our friends betray us they become our enemies. Sometimes are enemies are just in our head. I have many a person, including myself that create enemies in their mind at times. Betrayal of a friend is hard to take and normally ends in end of friendship. Reconciliation seems to be a virtue of the past for many.

The quote also relates well to the one I used in a posting a few days ago by Rumi, the Persian poet: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” We must set up a barrier, becoming our own enemy, before we can look upon another as our enemy.

How often do we find ourselves or others thinking that something that is said is about us. I had two friends point this barrier out to me today. This attitude of taking everything personally, a stare or casual word, as being about us is taught in America. I find it sad that even children are trained to think this way. A cute child dressed in some funny clothes can run in a room of adults and the adults laugh. A child trained to believe the adults are laughing at the child will cry. Most of us want to have people think good of us and to please people even if it means compromising our values and beliefs. This aiming to please is rampart in America.

Tonight on TV I heard a now popular comedian say that when he threw away his standard jokes and just spoke bluntly and honestly he became famous. When he “just did not care anymore” what people thought of him he was refreshingly funny?

Going back to Gandhi’s thought when we look upon ourselves with love and respect we find it difficult to find enemies. I guess Pogo had it right when he said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

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