Back to my home page/introI claim the source of this brokenness is that we can see others as different, as not like us. Once, perhaps you can imagine, we could walk all our lives in a dreamtime where every person, every animal, every rock and plant and stream was alive and met us with its own bright personality, which was not different from our own. Parity was broken. We descended into the world we live in now, where we are playing 'Murder in the Dark' with real knives and never know, if we touch another's face, whether they will touch us back or lash out to maim or kill. Even after we begin to see that we are at root the same as the others we encounter -- the first touch of empathy -- we still have to live and stumble in the dark with the other blind murderers like ourselves.
I hear a story like James' and I am filled with a deep rage. I want to hunt down the man who could commit such a crime against an innocent stranger, and batter him into a bloody wreck. That impulse, I fear, is first cousin to the twisted hatred which made such a man go out and beat a total stranger, for the satisfaction of lashing out at someone different and hence wrong.
This is not just idle daydreaming for me. I've "seen the elephant", as James has. A few years ago, I found myself with a sheath knife tucked down the back of my jeans, going into the apartment of a neighbour whose boyfriend had just beat her up. (I feared she might be beaten to death if I waited for the police to show up.) I will spare you the description of the scene. I felt sick, and angry at myself that I could do nothing to help, and hated myself for not getting there sooner, and wished that I could kill the bastard who beat her, and was very glad that he had gone before I arrived. From that, ultimately, came a clearer recognition of my own hateful side, and of how much I shared with those I hated.
Opting out is not wrong, just impossible. There is no escape. We carry the seeds of evil with us. All we can hope to do is keep seeing our own flaws clearly enough to disarm them and keep them in check.
Let any saint come preaching self-understanding and forgiveness and peace and brotherly love, and let him or her just draw that first line of difference between "Us" and "Them" -- in 10 or 12 years, he and his followers will be drilling with full-auto weapons, stockpiling stolen arms, and planning to poison the neighors, all to protect "Our" commune against "Them." The Bhagwan Rajneesh was writing and saying some fine things when he started out on his career.
Hawaii is relatively peaceful, which is one of the reasons I live here. Even here in "Paradise", though, you don't get away from the dragon, and in rural America you don't get away from the dragon, and on tiny islands in the South Pacific you don't get away from the dragon. It lives where we live and it goes where we go.
Maybe there are a few things we can do about it in the relative sense of the day-to-day world -- trying to see that evil gets punished, trying to live somewhere more- or-less sane, trying to help kids grow up understanding that it is wrong to hate and kill the different. There is not much we can do to heal our society. There is nothing we can do about the dragon itself -- the brokenness in all of us -- but try to face it with some courage and dignity, and not lose our own humanity in the process of confronting it.
-- Pope C
Back to my writing section (rants)