The Parking Lot Sutra:
Ten Reasons Why It's Hard to Respond to Structural Violence
by Donald Rothberg

We sit together at this parking lot at Los Alamos, as nuclear weapons continue to be researched, developed, and used as the background for foreign policy, even though the Cold War has long been over. Such weapons are the manifestations of our society’s institutions, policies, and broad cultural assumptions. Particularly through their use as tools of threat and coercion, as well as through radioactive contamination, they represent a kind of ongoing violence. Yet the use of these weapons and the many effects of such use, including the vast expenditures that take resources away from meeting basic social needs, are largely hidden, or, when they are recognized, are seen as normal and acceptable rather than as examples of violence…

Sulak Sivaraksa remarked, at the BPF Summer Institute of 1992, that responding to structural violence is at the core of socially engaged Buddhism. He pointed to how greed, hatred, and delusion — the roots of suffering — are manifest not just in individual attitudes and actions but also in our institutions, social structures, and policies.

Yet responding to structural violence as a spiritual activist is often difficult, for many reasons. I’d like to identify ten reasons, and particularly make connections with our experience here at Los Alamos…

Excerpted from Turning Wheel, Winter 2001