Forgive and Forget? Not This Time

The work that needs doing

This is one of those mornings where my mind is a jumble of thoughts. A whole week has gone by since my last post and a lot has happened. It hasn’t really coalesced into anything resembling a coherent pattern I can write about, but still my duty remains to report back. This is a dipstick on my reality:

Nature is the constant template, the creation that reassures us that there is a direction to our lives.

The world of mankind, the cathedral we are building is secondary, but it is the arena of progress.

Family is the heart and soul of our identity without which we lose all direction.

Of those three legs, the lynchpin is the second, since it impinges upon and relies on the other two, whereas Nature and Family could get along fine without the world we have created of industry, technology, politics, the arts, etc.

So work, whatever the field, should take as a first principle the protection and safeguard of the other two legs, and whenever there is doubt about the efficacy and purpose of the endeavor, the precautionary principle should prevail of doing no harm.

It seems that we have lost our way by giving primacy to the middle leg and allowing it to rule, since it seems the most dynamic and the most prone to instant dopamine rewards for those involved in it.

Of course there is work for those involved in the cultivation and care of the other two legs, Nature and Family, but they seem distant cousins, and constantly under the stress of having to live up to the expectations and mechanisms that rule the life of the middle leg, the Ayn Randish world that celebrates the triumph of a certain kind of will, which periodically proves itself malignant. We seem to be living in an era of such malignancy. It has even given itself a name — the Anthropocene.

Society is an attempt to navigate by balancing all three legs, but there is an aspect of competition as we emerge into a global network of peoples that lends itself to the malignancy. War is the most obvious example of this phenomenon, and the most interesting thing to me will be to witness in the coming years the fallout of the Gaza debacle on this three-legged stool we call civilization.

Because we have a hard-wired revulsion against murder, and because the country dedicated to the life of the people who call themselves the Chosen seems to be swimming in the blood of innocents it has slaughtered, there seems to me an insurmountable difficult for the apologists of the middle leg in its most malignant form, the military industrial complex, of memory holing what we have all just lived through and will not easily forget, or forgive.

For me, the war in Gaza is just one of the many wars that sacrifices the innocent.

I’ll leave that there, and need to get outside.