War and the Small Nations (Kahlil Gibran, 1883-1931)

In light of the unpredictable machinations of Russia (more particularly Putin) regarding the Ukraine, this little story may resonate with some: 

 

Once, high above a pasture, where a sheep and a lamb were grazing, an eagle was circling and gazing hungrily down upon the lamb. And as he was about to descend and seize his prey, another eagle appeared and hovered above the sheep and her young with the same hungry intent. Then the two rivals began to fight filling the sky with their fierce cries.

 

The sheep looked up and was most astonished. She turned to the lamb and said, “How strange, my child, that these two noble birds should attack one another. Is not the vast sky large enough for both of them? Pray, my little one, pray in your heart that God may make peace between your winged brothers.”

 

And the lamb prayed in his heart.

Reflections on a peaceful time.

I seems a long time ago now – in a different “age”; in a different country and certainly in a different culture. But in reality it was only about fifty years ago.

I was attending Rhodes University, in Grahamstown, South Africa, as a student – a few years older that the teenagers around me, but still only in my early twenties. I soon found a comfortable place to reflect and be at peace  – which is something I have always found, somewhere, as I rightly or wrongly consider myself to be of a relatively solitary disposition, and have never been afraid of my own company. My peaceful place was a viewpoint on a hill behind the University campus. I have forgotten the name of the hill but it provided a wonderful view of Grahamstown and the hills and mountains in the far distance.

My preferred time for a “visit” was in the evening just before sunset. I would sit there watching as the twilight faded into darkness and the streetlights suddenly flicking on brightly. I also witnessed the lights in homes suddenly turn on as people returned from their work – giving a strangely domestic feel to the scene as it unfolded before me.

Poetry, as those who read my posts will attest, has always given me solace and this scene, as described, always reminded me of the poem “The Day in Done”, by the American, Henry Longfellow. I won’t inflict on you the entire poem but the first verses are what have stayed in my mind when I remember this time of my life. It is also apposite now, I suppose, as I find myself having to contemplate my future and whatever it may hold:-

The day is done, and darkness

Falls from the wings of night,

As a feather is wafted downward

From an eagle in his flight.

I see the lights of the village

Gleam through the rain and the mist,

And a feeling of sadness comes o’er me

That my soul cannot resist:

A feeling of sadness and longing,

That is not akin to pain,

And resembles sorrow only

As the mist resembles the rain.

Come read to me some poem,

Some simple and heartfelt lay,

That shall soothe this restless feeling,

And banish the thoughts of day.

Injustice is the Problem.

Amended January 31, 2020

I am no soothsayer nor do I have special access to any particular research but I do, sincerely, believe that what follows is true and applies, and has applied, for all peoples for all times.

I ask the question - "isn't their just one species of human? Homo Sapiens? Isn't the fact that different languages are spoken; that people have different coloured skins; that people worship (presumably) the same God in different ways; isn't all this dependent of where they were born?" 

And another question - "did anyone have a choice about where they were born or who their parents were?"

Where there is prejudice; where there is discrimination based on the colour of a person skin; where there is great inequality in the distribution of wealth between the very rich and the very poor; where  access to good health facilities and health care is determined by the amount of money they spend; where there is a perception that how any individual worships God matters to others; where justice is denied; where the concept takes hold that “profit” has precedence over “people”; where access to high quality education is limited or non-existent; where there are limited or non-existent employment opportunities; where there is corruption or a perception that the wealthy can bend the rules and “get off lightly”, the prospect of social unrest will inevitably arise.

This is the root cause of the current problems in the USA, in Europe, in the Middle East in Brazil and other South American countries, and unfortunately – for future peace prospects – in China and Russia, though both are struggling to contain the unrest.

Australia, Canada and other so called “Western” countries are not immune!

I just hope that ideology will be set aside and that statesmanship and commonsense will prevail. Both of which I might add, are notably absent today!

I'm not going to hold my breath!

There is  a speech by Frederick Douglass (African American, a former slave, social reformer, orator and statesman) on the 24^th anniversary of emancipation, Washington, DC, 1886, which has great relevance today, and I quote:- 

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” (From “Spirit Level” by Wilkinson and Pickett)

The Catholic Church and confessions.

In light of the Royal Commission into child abuse – set up by the Australian Government – it is important for the Catholic Church to accept that the world has moved on. The Catholic Church no longer has the influence it exerted in the middle-ages and the confessional is not what it once was.

The World is now, for better or worse, largely a secular world; a world in which spirituality is waning.

The confessional should be a place, a time, when a person admits to God before a witness that they have “sinned”. This may be satisfactory for them as they will have made their peace with God. But this can never be the end of the story. The “sinner” now has to make their peace with society. And society demands justice; society demands justice that is not only done but seen to be done. This means the courts of law to establish the extent of the “sin” (crime) and the determination of the type and extent of the punishment; this means a punishment according to the law as determined by the society in which the “sin” was committed; this means doing “time” or paying a penalty of some kind.

This is Justice.

Now, to have a clergyman, however exalted, say that a confession is inviolable and above the law of the land is plain wrong. It may be sacred (according to the Catholic Church) in the “eyes of God” but people, both perpetrators and victims live in the world; people suffer and will seek redress of some kind. For the Catholic clergy to hide behind the “sanctity” of the confessional and therefore ignore the plight of the victim(s) will not work today.

This is not justice.

If a clergyman – or any person for that matter – is guilty of child abuse of any kind they need to be tried in the courts – they need to pay the penalty.   

This is justice.

Israel - Stolen goods bring no prosperity.

I am not quite sure where I first read the phrase, “Stolen goods bring no prosperity”, but it rings true. Just think of any individual, business or government that has deprived anyone of what was rightfully theirs; just think about those who have fraudulently or unjustly used or taken advantage of someone’s intellectual property; think about those who make a living by avoiding or evading government regulations.

What brought this phrase to my mind has been the ratcheting up of the Israeli/Gaza impasse which has been bubbling away since 1947. I strongly disagree with anyone who advocates violence as a solution to any problem. Violence begets violence. People who feel aggrieved should avoid conflict at all costs – no one wins a war. Oh yes! Battles may be “won”; “victors” may assume sovereignty over land and peoples; trade may follow the “gun” but at what human cost? Violence is the last resort of the morally bankrupt.

After the end of the Second World War the dispossessed Jews and those who had survived the appalling treatment meted out by the Nazis with the infamous “final solution” known to history as the Holocaust were “given” what is now Israel. This is a historic fact and I am in no position to argue the merits or demerits of this “gift” by the sympathetic Allies who had defeated Germany. What I can say with certainty however is that the Palestinians who were living in the Palestine/Israel area and who had been living there since Biblical times were now (in 1947) dispossessed of the land (and in many cases their possessions as well) to make way for the “new” nation of Israel. Many of these dispossessed Palestinians ended up in Gaza. It is my understanding that no compensation was ever paid or reparation ever made.

This injustice rankles. They were never asked; they never gave “permission” for the land to be expropriated. Injustice is never forgotten; injustice is burned into the soul – just ask the Jews! The Jews have been treated very badly by all peoples – from ancient Babylonia to modern day Christians and Muslims. They have been fighting and striving for millennia for Judea, their “home land” – what they consider their Holy Land, their God given right. Why should the Palestinians, dispossessed by the Israelis feel any differently about their “home land”; their Holy Land, part of which is now Israel?

The fact is that the ultimate source of land is beyond human ingenuity; we may surmise how land was formed aeons ago – but no one can create a single grain of sand. Land just “is” – therefore by default land belongs to no one; land, Holy or otherwise, belongs to everyone. We humans are merely the temporary caretakers.

The Israelis, if they want peace and stability, will, ultimately, have to share the land they occupy with the original inhabitants – the Palestinians. This land was in effect “stolen” from the Palestinians in 1947, and until the Israeli recognize this and accept sharing as a future reality the phrase that opens this post - “stolen goods bring no prosperity” – will haunt the Israelis and torment the Palestinians.

War and violence will never, ever, solve the problems caused by injustice.

Consequences.

There are always consequences for anything we do. These consequences cannot be avoided or limited in any way – each one of us feels the effect of these, both negative and positive, on a daily basis. We do ‘good’ things and good things happen; we do ‘bad’ things and bad things happen.

The thing is that we can never, or at best very seldom, tie any specific action or behaviour or sequences of actions or behaviours, to any particular consequence or sequence of consequences. There are some obvious ones certainly – aim a gun at someone and pull the trigger and there is a very good likelihood of injuring or killing them; spend more money than you earn and you end up in debt. These are brutal, up front, in your face type consequences. What I am talking about are the subtle ones that are not immediately obvious; the ones that may take years to work their way through the ‘system’ as it were.

Take two current problems the World is facing at the moment, which are consequences of activities, actions, behaviours and thought patterns that go back many years – generations in fact. The first one is ‘climate change’ and the second is the Middle East (Israel, Gaza, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan).

Now whatever you think about the science behind the various claims and counter claims supporting or denying Man’s involvement in this debate one fact (to me) is obvious. We CANNOT continue to despoil, pillage and exploit the resources of the world as we are doing at the present moment. We cannot continue doing what we are now without suffering consequences of some sort. More of the same will be disastrous – there will be consequences we cannot predict but only sense.

I know that climate change – natural change – has always been a feature of geological time; ice-ages, extreme volcanic activity playing havoc with weather patterns and such like. This is natural and I have no argument with this – we can’t do anything about it anyway – it just happens and we (here we go) have to live with the consequences. My point is that by doing nothing we are not HELPING nature, the World, the Gaia, or whatever you call it, to recover naturally. And it will recover naturally – with time but we are not giving it that time.

Exploitative human activity is damaging the Nation and ‘our’ World to the detriment of all.

• Soil degradation. Much of our precious topsoils is either blown away (dust storms) or washed away (soil erosion) each year. Poor environmental planning and farming practices are the cause.

• Excessive use of chemical fertilizers. Because of the soil degradation more and more chemicals are being used which produce foods that are not as nutritious as they should be. They are deficient in essential minerals.

• Water. The essential element for life on earth. In the case of fresh water, in quantity, storage and quality, improvements are vital for the future health of the Nation and the World.

• Industrial activity. In the quest for ever increasing profits enormous quantities of toxic and polluting substances are being pumped into the atmosphere, the soil and water (both fresh and salt) of our Nation and the World. Huge tracts of land are being cleared of trees and other vegetation for what – profit?

These are just a few aspects of the immensely complex and interwoven matrix which I consider comes under the umbrella of ‘climate change’. We are in a position to do SOMETHING (my preferred option) rather than NOTHING (as advocated by the sceptics). Just think about it, even if, as some of the sceptics believe, the world is getting colder, not hotter, how will this help? It will just herald a new dark-age with shorter growing seasons.

From an economic point of view I suspect we are going to suffer, one way or another. This will be the consequence of thoughtlessness, of greed and the extreme capitalistic ideal of ‘profit’, no matter the cost (in the lives of all flora and fauna and economic cost).

Now for the second big problem – the conflict in the Middle East. This goes back a long time. Without going into a detailed history of the region one could really consider the problem as being the consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (after the First World War) and the British withdrawal from India (and Pakistan) and Iraq and the West’s interference in Iran and Palestine. The immediate cause, I suspect, is the false idea that the ‘West’ can impose its will, its ideas and its manner of living on peoples who trying to work out their own responses to their environment and to world events.

To think, even for a moment, that peace will be established by the production of greater numbers of ever more complex weapons is madness. Most of us have still to learn that peace is not external, but an internal state, that then translates to all things external. How can there ever be peace if nations or groups of people are constantly thinking about and preparing for war? How can there ever be peace if people are constantly thinking violent and warlike thoughts? It is never going to happen.

A cessation of violence or truce may be established if someone or some nation subdues another by being stronger or having a bigger and better army. But that is not peace. Think of the Korean conflict in the 1950s and how about the various Israeli/Palestinian conflicts. There has never been peace in these areas. We need to think ‘outside the box’ and use our accumulated wisdom in a rational, measured and reasonable manner.

There is no peace because the underlying problem has never been addressed – injustice, perceived or actual, is at the root of most conflicts and will be the root of the Middle East and the Korean problems. Sort out the injustices (perceived or otherwise) and the reason for the violence is removed. There is nothing that rankles and festers in the mind as much as injustice. If individuals have a feeling they have been hard done by and bear a grudge because of this then, rightly or wrongly, they will feel justified in fighting (as they may think) to redress the injustice.

We need some harmony and order in the world.

Nothing is permanent in Life. Nature is dynamic. Life is dynamic. It must be so, because everything that is alive, either moves, grows or in some way changes with time. Nothing stays as it was and trying to keep something as it was is similar to chasing rainbows. This is the order of Nature. The order that dictates that a salmon shall return to the river of its birth; the order inherent in the cycle of the seasons, in the ebb and flow of the tides; in the spiral galaxies, in the stars and their courses, the order can be sensed in the regularity of all turning things.

We may not appreciate it but the universe is unfolding as it should – there is order and harmony in the way things happen. Nature is harmonious in its entirety. When order is absent and chaos reigns then there are problems. And have you noticed something – we humans are the only creatures on the face of the earth that can actually create disharmony? An ant cannot create disharmony, because an ant will always behave as an ant should; it is in its nature to do so; likewise with parrots or any other creature that you care to name. They cannot be anything other than the way nature (evolution, creation?) has dictated they shall be. Human beings on the other hand can and often do behave in strange and violent ways that cause havoc with the natural order of things.

The natural world is in our genes, we are all from the earth; when we die we return to the earth. We need order, we need harmony – chaos disturbs us, we become afraid and then panic sets. We cannot, as a species abide disorder and lack of harmony in our lives. Disharmony creates fear of the unknown and unhappiness is the result. Just look around at the world.

But we cannot expect harmony and order in the world outside, if there is no order or harmony within each of us, within ourselves. I cannot be happy and have harmony and order in my life if I know that my wife, or my children are unhappy, because of some emotional ‘disorder’ or ‘dis-ease’. It disturbs me greatly that there are others who are unhappy; who lack harmony within themselves and therefore are instrumental in creating disharmony amongst others.

Harmony between people can only come about when we treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. Harmony and internal peace and order will only be evident when we remember the Law of Cause and Effect. That what we do will affect not only our families but also many others. Remember the ‘six degrees of separation’? Knowing six people is alleged to give us a link to everyone in the world. So we must treat all sentient beings in an ethical way because we are all interconnected – it is in our genes. To do anything else is to invite chaos and unhappiness.