The AUDACITY OF HOPELESSNESS
There is a myth of greatness… a myth of empire. A myth that the American ideals of love and peace prevail across the planet. The truth of the myth is complicated.. It’s filled with decades–centuries–of great people battling not so great people within this nation in a quest to define what it is to be an American.
There have been lost causes.. Lost opportunities..
And squandered chances for peace and true prosperity around the planet.
There is a song by Billy Joel titled the ‘Angry Young Man.’ Anyone who lives long enough finally gets one lyric that says, “I once believed in causes to and had my pointless point of view. Life when on no matter who was wrong or right.”
That is true.. life does go on regardless of who can claim the mantle of truth or victory–for some.
The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had trouble going on after bombs were dropped at the order of Harry Truman.. people in Vietnam who just wanted peace did not have the chance in for decades…Iraqis were ‘liberated’ and never had peace since.. and now, the rattling chains of war are being threatened for pacific nations like North Korea and even China.
The current Administration is aiming to increase the size of the military budget by absorbent to numbers. The drums of war.. they are banging loud. But always have been…
Presidents and politicians often talk about peace — they use the flowery language of feminism until it comes come to have rubber hit the road. Then it’s war talk.
War speak.
Caveman speak.
I had a moment where ‘once believing in causes too’ was made less important by the reality of the warfare we were living in..
My son was born. The beauty of a newborn’s tears and the joy–the deep joy in the soul and heart of the parent–is enough to change your personal world. However, you then realize that the world around you does not share the same joy. Instead it is entrenched in the same war, hate, and pestilence so often forced onto humanity by humanity itself.
Just think of all of the lakes, filled with the love and immense reverence that nature provides, being torn by missile fire and filled with blood. So many lakes, streams, and rivers across this planet have run red with the body fragments and cut off limbs..governments, the rulers and elite, have made it so.
Not to any leaders mention peace much anymore. Perhaps it’s just not the manly thing to do? Maybe … maybe it shows weakness?
But peace is strong. Peace is more difficult to attain than war .. war is the antics of madmen and people in the past. Aren’t we at a point now where we have moved on from that? Should we not be in a place where peace is the honorable profession…?
Presidents aren’t peacemakers. Neither are other world leaders.
We so often in human history have taken the weaker road.. the path of least resistance. The buildings and droppings of bombs… Peace never came…
Peace will never seem to come.
Instead …drums of war. Constantly banging in the distance.
Lost in the distance of time? Peace…harmony..love.
Because those things aren’t masculine.
