I have experienced the past week+ as exhausting. Not much able to write. Feeling more like nesting inside my own little space and tribe. Napping more than usual.
Dammit!
Someone should give two hoots .... nay! two shits ... about how tough it is for the very young to hear and/or experience the broadcast hatred ... how upsetting it must be for those who spawned these youngins ... how sad for the Last Quarter Boomers to realize that each generation's attempt to quell gratuitous animus and avoid "justified" wars has been futile ... empty ... fucking vacuous.
After WWII, there were -- as there had been before after other Wars -- a bunch of anti-War movies and Broadway productions .... good songs, too. In the melodic South Pacific, the lyricists tossed into the mix "You have to learn (or be taught) to hate." Oklahoma was about the absurdity of the range wars ... "One man ropes a cow with ease; the other steals her butter and cheese ... but that's no reason why they can't be friends." Poor Jed still and all ends up dead. Some films had no lyrics ... just the pathos of similar men being taught and coming to question why they were poised to kill the different other; it wasn't until the second time when I was a bit older that it became clear that the American Battleship Captain Richard Widmark saw everything about himself in "The Enemy Below" and its U-Boat Captain played by Kurt Jurgens. Too bad Richard was sent to blow Kurt out of the water.
Then we had the latest version of Romeo and Juliet played out on the West Side of New York City. The exquisite staging of balance between the two sides ... the Sharks and the Jets ... with love being one of the obvious victims. "Good Morning ...Viet Nam" ... Boys killing boys at Kent State. Freedom Riders buried by the side of the road .... maybe for daring to blur the lines between White Jews and Black Christians.
"I take my scotch neat ... Don't fuck with my 50 year old single malt Glenlivet ... "
Years of trying to learn about each other in the Old City of Jerusalem? ...
broken into pieces.
Centuries of Jeffersonian experiments in melding modified capitalism with the social contract? ... now, unacceptable ... "Keep m'Scotch neat, Boy."
The borders that blood were spilled over?
No longer acceptable.
The right to differ religiously?
Settled on wars with automatic weapon fire.
The duty to witness and journal?
Punctuated by beheadings.
225 years to the appearance of an Ebony and Ivory leader of the Free World?
Met with stonewalling hatred.
And all the talk in America about the conversation we need to have about race? That conversation ain't gonna happen, nor will the one about gender. A conversation requires the willingness of each party to imagine seeing the other side and coming out with different beliefs. Not in the World that I imagine to see, today!
I know. I know. It's gonna come together. "Keep your eyes on the Prize ... Hold on ... Hold on." This morning I feel utterly hopeless and disillusioned; optimism is in short supply. My thoughts turn to the tears shed by some who were visiting my office, this week ... crying for all those "For whom the bells toll" (Donne's bells) ... for the helplessness and they we feel. An ancient prayers cries out: l'Saken Olam b'Malchus Shadai" ... to better-refashion the World according to the Kingdom of God.
We cannot, I hear myself saying, be speaking of a God (neither Real? nor Ideal?) who sees the Other as the enemy painted in Basic Armed Forces Training ... as that nonredeemable Demon who must be buried alive, beheaded or driven onto a Mountain-top high or into the Depths of a Sea. Maybe this is the Saturn-God Devouring his Children in Goya's bloody portrayal.
Sorry, readers ...
With any luck, this Older Guy ... me ... will recall all "the Summer dreams beneath the Tamarind Tree" (Poe) that in my dark moments I feel have been stolen from me and are lost to me -- if only temporarily.
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