Man Sitting in Front of Goldman Sachs

Human beings are amazing.  Below is an article about a man, Max Zahn, who has chosen
to meditate in front of Goldman Sachs's headquarters.

"They also serve who only stand and wait."--John Milton

A 'sitting man' at Goldman Sachs
By Nathan Schneider - Waging NonViolence

Max Zahn, founder of the new website Buddha on Strike, is currently on strike in front of Goldman Sachs. I asked him a few questions about what he’s up to.

So what is it that you’re doing, and why?
Over the past seven business days, I’ve been meditating for 3 to 4 hours directly outside the entrance of Goldman Sachs headquarters. And I intend to continue sitting silently at Goldman HQ every single business day for the coming weeks and months. Soon this effort will grow beyond me, however. Starting yesterday, we’re holding hour-long group meditations three days per week.

The reason for my meditating at Goldman is that I seek to extend compassion to its employees and demand that they do the same for the worldwide billions affected by the bank’s practices. By meditating, I’m quite literally modeling a technique that cultivates the capacity for emotional states like compassion and empathy. On another level, I’m trying to communicate that I come in peace; I understand that Goldman Sachs bankers are people just like you and me. There’s nothing inherently evil or malicious about them. Like all people, they are the beautifully complicated products of a personal and social history.

Does that mean that we allow them to acquire huge amounts of money, while exacerbating global inequality and its effects? Absolutely not. But we intervene in the way that a family might intervene when their son has a drug addiction. That’s how I think of Goldman Sachs: addiction to greed. And greed, in its various forms, is something that everyone struggles with. The difference with Goldman Sachs is that greed on this scale is causing atrocious human suffering. So we need to put the harmful practices to an end, but with the love and goodwill of a global family.

Read the rest of the article here