Tricky stuff, this world of ours, these bipedal apes. And the heart-breaking thing is that I can hardly figure out my toaster oven, and so how can I add anything to this discussion, or even add one drop of good potion to this bitter alembic? The conditions of the previous generation shape the psychology of today, and it takes a rare person to continue to be gentle while licking bloody wounds. And one can lick wounds that go back a thousand years, and find wrongs to be righted as long as one other person exists on the planet. One who says peace hears the heart-wrenching how? and how can we deal with such people? All fortunes are relative, and the weakest and the strongest are both suffering from having been treated like garbage by someone stronger. These old wounds inform the heart-felt responses, good and bad, to a situation which Americans on the left or the right can hardly imagine; and they also inform the unfelt responses, the responses that come out of having no more feelings. Nobody wants to admit that their side has done wrong, or thought wrongly, or been cruel, but it is just absurd, everybody does wrong, just as Jesus did wrong, and Moses did wrong, and Mohammed did wrong, and all the more so their pompous interpreters. There is no dignity in insisting that ones own side is better than any other, because there is no dignity in having sides. But there is some dignity, it seems to me, in the words of Terence, who said, Nothing human is foreign to me. I reckon that theres more wisdom in those words than in the whole Sermon on the Mount, and that theres more of a blueprint for peace in seeing that, if I was born in Rome, I would have to be a remarkable person not to think like a Roman, and to wish, after two thousand years, to see the great empire crumble. When Rabbi Bunam was attacked on the street by a mentally disturbed woman, he said, She thought I was somebody else. When Hitler wrote his ridiculous book about the Jews, he thought WE were somebody else. Displaced anger is the most dangerous form of anger, and it seems to me that it is the ONLY kind of anger. As an activist for ANY cause, right or left, one has to recognize the danger of using anger, even justified anger, as a tool. The Jews are a very old tribe of Arabs that wandered across Europe and North Africa, and whatever funny hats we choose to wear, one day I hope we recognize that our fighting is the essence of the West African trickster story, where a man walks through a village with a hat that is blue on one side and red on the other, and the village breaks out into fighting because everybody saw a man with a different hat. It may be a simplistic analogy, and it may skate on the thin ice of an argument that absolutely refuses to invoke any structural analysis or ideological position except humanity. The dreamer in me wonders if peace will come on the day that the most pious Jew and the most pious Moslem go naked like a Sadhu, including the women, and the law of every land acknowledges that a bunch of hairy naked Semites is better than bloody conflict. When I lived in Abu Tor, I saw both Jews and Palestinians snacking from the bulk bins at the supermarket, and I knew that we were indeed cousins, and that one day we will have a lasting peace the only way human tribes have EVER found lasting piece, by having a bunch of babies together, and having the normal kind of headaches people have when they think not like businessmen, but like family. One day, Isaac will say sorry for the fact that his mother was a shithead to Hagar, and Ishmael will say, Eh, its okay, our father Abraham was a bit of a shmuck. And they can laugh about their bronze age traditions, and the Cosmos will hear them laughing, and after thousands of years, remove all of their ancient imaginary curses, and bless them as they build spaceships together, and have adventures, or scribble poetry, or do whatever restless bipedal apes do when theyre not fighting or starving or turning widgets all day and building somebody elses empire.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 22:49:06 +0000
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