In spite of wars and rumors of wars, it's still a beautiful world...
Thoughts on a few things that disturb me.
Most of the time I steer myself away from writing about what’s going on in the world that horrifies and disturbs me—that hurts my heart. Usually I feel that I don’t know enough to offer worthwhile commentary. And I also feel that if I can’t say something nice I shouldn’t say anything. That’s a joke. But I also mean it, in the sense that ranting and raving are not necessarily helpful.
I want to write about whatever calls to me in the most sincere way I can. My danger in writing is getting too conceptual, too in my head, too heedless of the fragility and fragrance of the artmaking present.
When faced with so much that is wrong in this world, what I want to explore is: What makes people do all the crazy horrible mean crappy stuff they do, we do, in our confused and troubled quest for… what?
That’s the kind of topic I usually go for. What makes us tick? What matters and what doesn’t matter? What is sustainable and what isn’t? What works and what doesn’t? How can we evolve? As it says in my explanatory blurb at the end of this post: I'd rather be here now is an inquiry into the bittersweet, seriousfunny nature of the human condition.
In this post though, I’m sharing some thoughts about things people are doing that horrify and disturb me; that hurt my heart.
What Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza
I have been loathe to write about what’s going on over there. I know so little about
what is arguably the world’s most complex conflict.
(The basics on Israel, Gaza, Palestine and Hamas for local journalists, written right after the Hamas attack on Israel.)
I can only speak to what I am seeing now.
What has been firing people up, firing up all the young people on college campuses who have to inherit this screwed-up world, is that the Israeli government says it’s fighting Hamas, and yet they are killing tens of thousands of people who are not Hamas. And damaging the lives of many more.
Whatever the past has been for Jews—and it has been monstrous, unthinkable, traumatizing for generations—all these loud claims that Israel ‘has a right to defend itself’ as an excuse for the mass killing of women, children, and yes, men too, is like saying that the 6-foot-tall high school bully has a right to defend himself against a kindergartener who threw an apple at his back.
That is a terrible analogy. What Hamas did to Israelis on October 7th, 2023 was so much worse than throwing an apple at someone’s back. It was hideously cruel. I have no problem calling it evil.
The fact remains that as much as Hamas may wish to cause as much harm to Israel as Israel wishes to cause to Hamas, Hamas is the 98-pound weakling here and Israel is the muscleman, in part because of our support.
It’s not just the sophistry of ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ when it is so much bigger and stronger than what it is defending itself against; it is the reality that no amount of violence or killing is going to resolve or fix the situation. So far, there has seemed to be no plan other than what a lot of people, rightly or wrongly, are calling genocide.
The idea that Israel is going to destroy Hamas and then everything will be hunky-dory is bullshit. Hunky-dory for whom? Hamas is not an object that you can find and destroy; Hamas is a reaction. Newton’s third law of motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Oppression and suppression are always unsustainable. They go against nature’s grain.
Sorry, all you fools, you wannabe dictators, who think that any kind of suppression, including 'the final solution' is going to create your perfect little world with everything you want in it and everything you fear, gone.
You seem unaware that no matter how much pain, suffering, and death you cause, you yourself will die. Soon. This is your one little moment under the sun and you are blowing it.
Violence as THE solution to everything, not
Recently I watched several X-Men movies, which I had never seen before. There was so much about them I enjoyed. I love the creativity of this kind of science-fiction, the powers that people have, or should I say that mutants have. In the end though, these movies, like so much screen fiction, find their meaning in violence—whether mutant, magic, or standard issue—to save the day. Saving the day requires fighting great and small battles, the common denominator being destruction and killing of the enemy.
So many movies and TV shows depend on extreme violence for their excitement and resolution. Why? Why is extreme violence so popular and ubiquitous? Is it because it’s so simple and straightforward? It’s like sports only with more dire consequences. All you need to know is which team you support.
Good Guys and Bad Guys
Another TV show that I found disturbing was Reacher. I too am a sucker for a story where the ‘good guy’ is bigger and stronger than everyone else so the bad guys don’t stand a chance. It’s a comforting fantasy. And yet the excessive violence this good guy visited upon his enemies was a sickening example of how easy it to kill with impunity once you have decided that you are the good guy and the other guy is a bad guy.
In these and many other fictions, once we establish who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, the good guys are allowed to be as brutal and heartless as the bad guys. It’s okay because they are the good guys. The bad guys, who are bad, and who have no scruples in how they try to get what they want, are fair game for the good guys who have no scruples in how they stop the bad guys from being bad.
What if we can’t tell who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?
Outside of knee-jerk good guy/bad guy set-ups, it gets more complicated and confusing. What we are witnessing in Gaza is not just a war between Israel and Hamas; it is a clash of values between the routine aggression of capitalist systems of power and control and the shocked response of so much of the world—a recognition that the wanton killing of many thousands of people is wrong—that this kind of wholesale violence, with its dream of total domination, is not okay.
The condemnation of Israel’s actions coming from many directions has nothing to do with anti-semitism. Being for or against Jews, or for or against Israel, or for or against Hamas, is to participate in zero sum thinking—the goodguy/badguy equation—that one side is right and one side is wrong and that’s the whole story.
The world’s shocked response to Israel’s relentless aggression shows that something is shifting. The response is not about who is justified in their actions and who is not—who are the good guys and who are the bad guys; it’s about an old way of seeing and a new way of seeing.
The old way believes in violence and domination as a way to get what you want; the new way believes that sustainability requires adherence to natural law—to balance, humility, creativity, to faith in human potential freed from fear and oppression.
I want to add that I am well aware that there are times when the only way to stop a bad guy is with physical violence. Hitler wasn’t going to stop himself. He managed to cause unfathomable harm before he was stopped by the concerted effort of many people, using physical violence aided by intelligent strategy and the vigor of knowing that Hitler was an unadulterated bad guy who had to be stopped.
The perfect world Hitler was hoping for was never going to happen, just like all those perfect worlds people imagine could result from killing and/or suppressing everything they hate and fear will never happen. The way of life is too strong.
How do we protest what we believe is wrong and uphold what we believe is right? How do we help open the way for change?
This brings me back to the being/doing balance. The expression of passionate conviction has to find its balance in the humility of interior quietness; otherwise it becomes only sound and fury (or worse).
The yin and yang of this is yes, speak up, use art and passion to express yourself, and also, as much as you can, abide at the center of your being, for in that way you will be supporting and encouraging what we need most to solve our problems. As it says in the I Ching, only collective moral force can unite the world.
Collective moral force means enough individuals who are abiding at the center of their being to work together to create change. Not faux change that is the result of violence, real change that is the natural effect of greater awareness.
If you feel moved to go to protests and speak truth to power, do that. That can be an effective form of creative action. If you feel moved to sit in your room abiding at the center of your being (scrolling through Instagram doesn’t count), that can be an effective form of creative action. If you feel moved to dance in your room or in the street or on a stage, that can be an effective form of creative action. Anything you do with love is an effective form of creative action, and it all helps.
I ponder and question how I can best contribute all the time, and I don’t have an answer. As I am fond of saying, being an artist means not knowing exactly what you are doing or what it adds up to.
I believe that is always true, whether you call yourself an artist or not. By the way, I call you an artist. We are all life artists and the more we accept that the better our life art will be.
In spite of all that is tragic and heart-rending in this human experiment, it’s still a beautiful and mysterious world, dear friends. May we make the best of it.
Below are a couple of previous posts that discuss the pointless idiocy of trying to control and dominate people by force. They reference American politics and the convicted felon who shall not be named.
This was a good piece, but I was sorry to see Richard III included as one of the bad guys. RIII was actually one of England’s better kings; the portrait of him painted by Shakespeare was way off the mark. It was in fact an example of the winners painting the losers as evil.
You might read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time a really enjoyable walk through the true history. I can loan you a copy.
“The old way believes in violence and domination as a way to get what you want; the new way believes that sustainability requires adherence to natural law—to balance, humility, creativity, to faith in human potential freed from fear and oppression." My favorite quote from today’s post, Janina! Although you have expressed more than once that you’re not sure what your blog is about, and I am struggling with the same question except I have yet to produce more than two pieces. I have decided that it is actually about “harvesting.” We’ve lived a good while, and our lives and our ideas and experiences have expanded and don’t seem to be in a process of contracting yet. And in my case, I am reluctant to go down just one path when I see so many still before me where there is gleaning to be done. So I welcome your diversity and what an amazing model you are for my own process.
Parenthetically, I was participating in a conference this morning from IONS, the Institute of noetic sciences, all about consciousness, and how science has too many limits to really go where it wants to go. And someone commented during one of the lectures, “dobedobedo”!
Was that you?!