“…to dream the wild new dreams that may yet save us.”
November 11, 2010 | 4 Comments
Some thoughts on this day, from Dr. Dawg:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” said George Santayana.
Wrong.
Remembering dooms us to repetition. We remember everything and learn nothing. We absorb and reproduce the patterns of the past. Look around.
We are losing men and women in Afghanistan, because war is still the answer. We glorify (and profit by) the production of weapons of war.
We fret about the allegedly devious aliens among us. Once it was Japanese, Germans and Italians, now it’s Muslims.
We fearfully close our borders. A few decades ago it was to keep out Jews, now it’s Tamils, whose mass murder at sea was recently advocated (“lock and load”) by a leading Canadian newspaper…
Read the whole thing.
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4 Responses to ““…to dream the wild new dreams that may yet save us.””
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November 11th, 2010 @ 11:02 am
I’m remembering those who fought for those who needed defending.
I’m remembering all those whose lives were interrupted or ruined by conflict and war.
I’m remembering all those left behind.
I’m remembering that war is an evil thing. It is human failure, failure to live in God’s world as She would have us live. When it is necessary, it is no less evil, no less a failure. Lest we forget…the terrible cost of war.
[Reply]
November 12th, 2010 @ 9:17 pm
How come no one wants to glorify war any more? It’s so boring to all be singing from the same hymn book (Onward Christian Soldiers anyone? anyone?).
It seems the objection – raised via nationalism and militarism – is that war is too easy to glorify. All it takes is a few dozen poppies and a marching band.
But perhaps the nagging nut of truth behind the protestation is that war *is* glorious.
Think about it, if it weren’t glorious in some way, why would men (and women) worldwide sign up for it every year by the millions? Why would we continue to year-after-year (for thousands now) smash armies together?
Is it so unfathomable that there might actually be some sort of beauty in the massing of men thusly? In the countless acts of courage? In the severest of adversary overcome? Or not, and death comes – as it surely does to us all – comes not with a cancer diagnosis or with a speeding bus, but with an explosion, or bullet, or blade. Could it really be that there is nothing of substance in the him-or-me existential moment of hand-to-hand combat?
The capacity for violence is just as much of human nature as empathy. Castigating out of hand the storied history of that violence is to misunderstand it and its allure.
Much like the Victorian disdain for sex, or the Temperance Society’s attack on booze, the pacifist’s assault on war works against human nature, not with it.
I submit the (counter-intuitive) assertion that the odds of peace would be much improved if the peace movement acknowledged – embraced even – the glories of war. To paraphrase Sun Tzu: know thy enemy.
[Reply]
November 12th, 2010 @ 9:27 pm
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