Buddha was known as the Enemy Destroyer because he fully defeated his true enemies: the mental disturbances and wrong views which chain beings to suffering. These are the true enemies of all beings.

Mental disturbances can be crude or subtle. Just as intoxicants distort perception so envy, jealousy, hatred and desire disturb our minds, distort the impressions we receive from the world around us, cause us to experience suffering and to behave in a way that perpetuates our suffering.

Sometimes we carry negative emotions from the past around with us. These produce a disturbance in our mind and we seek a way to relieve the disturbance we feel. If we are unwise about the way this works, instead of relieving our mental disturbance, we can make our situation worse.

Late one Friday night a call went out for a domestic disturbance. I went to the address and met up with another officer a few houses away. Even before we got to the door I could hear the shouts from inside. Screams of outrage and frustration, shouts and howls from people who had argued the same things a hundred times before, reaching their breaking point for the hundredth time. It’s a bad sound. Each volley would start “You said…” and crescendo from there… “How the hell can you…” “You can’t tell me…” These folks had practiced.

I looked through the small vertical window by the door and couldn’t see anyone but I could hear someone hit someone and someone cry out and go back at it again, and something went flying and cracked against the wall.

I said “Come on...” The officer I met was newly out of the academy. She did not want to go in. She said “No. We need to wait for back up. It’s an officer safety issue.” It was an officer safety issue. But then it was a citizen safety issue too, and I did not want to stand there while someone got killed. So I went in. She followed.

Inside we found five pissed off drunks who had probably never agreed on anything in their lives but suddenly came together, united in the conviction that I was not needed. Two of them were still shouting at each other and the others were grumbling at me. A busted cell phone was laying in pieces on the floor.

I just had to go for it. Get them all separated but keep them in sight. Sometimes cool heads prevail. Sometimes just keeping your composure in the midst of chaos works wonders. This was not one of those times. Perhaps I appeared nuts to them.  Somehow I was able to convince them that I was about to snap. One by one I persuaded them that it would be best if they would to go to separate corners until we all could talk. They went.

I picked one to speak to first. Through her tears, her mouth contorted by hurt and frustration, face flushed with memory and hate, I got a story. When another member of the party began to chime in, counter a statement, argue or comment, I told them they would get their turn shortly. This was not their time.

In a minute medics and more officers arrived, and each member of the group got the chance to tell their side of the story to their own officer. We conferred. We photographed injuries, took statements and collected evidence. The couple both went to jail. The rest called a cab.

The stories were venomous. They were each other’s victim. It had been going on for years. He said. She said. On and on. They had all been insulted, ridiculed, disrespected and cursed. They were outraged and they wanted to fight back. Against each other. Against us. Against whoever had disrespected them in the past. It wasn’t about the drinking, they agreed about that.

How was all that history going to be resolved? The cops come when society says it’s gone too far: when people injure each other and break their stuff.  The years of simmering and barbs and rage are a private matter. Until it boils over.

This fight is an example of crude mental disturbance. There are subtle forms that afflict us every moment. But, although we act on them, we rarely notice them because our minds are occupied and our understanding is limited.

Two of the vows we take as Buddhists, two of the “ten prohibitions” which, if we follow them, restrain us from acting on impulses which will perpetuate our difficulties, are to refrain from harsh speech and from divisive speech. Speaking directly, even sharply may be necessary. But speaking to wound people or to degrade them or to maliciously set people against one another is not.

If a therapist tells you to vent your emotions then you can help the therapist by telling them that you are not a pneumatic system. And venting does not work any better than bloodletting did, in the centuries when that was considered sound and scientific therapy. Hollering your angry feelings at people deepens those emotions, it does not reduce them.

To allow our minds to settle down so that we can observe the subtle disturbances we need to train to eliminate the crude ones. Then we can choose what we do instead of being slaves of impulse. As we remove more subtle disturbances we can begin to see how our mind works and examine the ways in which our mind participates in the fabrication of our experience. By continuing this process we eliminate both disturbing thoughts and wrong view – we too become Enemy Destroyers. We then can get the skills we need to also save others from suffering.

That couple that got arrested that night were in love when they got together a few years before. So in love they thought nothing else in the world would matter as long as they could be together.

But a few harsh words and a habit of resentment and hurt takes everybody downhill fast if you don’t know what to watch out for and what to do about it.

Government leaders use harsh and divisive speech to pit groups against each other. They inspire envy and resentment and produce mental disturbance in the mindstreams of the people that they lead.  Soon people who have lived side by side as friends and neighbors for generations or centuries are hanging each other and shooting each other.

All the great miseries of the last few hundred years were precipitated with harsh and divisive speech. That kind of speech produces mental disturbance and it also produces wrong views. Because although each individual has their own characteristics, flaws and virtues, people whose leaders persuade them to hate a type of person set that fact aside and attribute identical characteristics to every member of the group. So instead of having an undistorted view of an individual they project a mental fabrication upon that individual and hate them and want to kill them.

It’s happened in Europe, the Middle East and Asia and it is happening here. But no one has to fall for it. If we are aware of the poisonous nature of harsh and divisive speech and understand how to avoid getting caught in it. Then we are free to act as vigorously as necessary to save people from suffering.