Justice does not come easy. Sometimes you have to fight for justice. Sometimes peace has to be defended, guarded, fought for. You don’t get peace by, in the words of Sheryl Crow, “not having enemies”. That’s a stupid way to look at the complexity of human conflict. Of human beings, in general. Without the Allies bombarding Germany, the Jews would continue to have been murdered en masse. That is a fact. Violence set those people free. Five years too late, in my opinion. Everybody appeased the Nazi regime for years, while Jews died by the millions.
I prefer to take a more common sense view to human affairs and people. I know that man is capable of the worst horrors.
I am suspicious of people who believe in utopias. Any ideology is utopian, and does not take into consideration human nature, which is messy, troubled, power-hungry, corruptible.
The Founding Fathers were brilliant in this regard. Yes, they had an ideal for their new country. They wanted to be a “city on a hill”. But it wasn’t just an idea. They put into the constitution all of the myriad checks and balances which keep us in line today. No, it is not perfect. Nothing is perfect. Anyone who dreams of a perfect society is a tyrant in the making. That’s what I mean. Utopias are supposedly perfect, and that is why they terrify me. Someone saying, “Follow me … I know the way to perfection” is the cue for you to run for the hills.
John Adams wanted the new country to be a “rule of laws not men.” Men are fallible. Power can corrupt. (Power does not ALWAYS corrupt, reminder). Power CAN corrupt. The Founding Fathers understood that man is corruptible, by his very nature, so let the LAWS be the rule of the land, not men. There is no such thing as a “president for life” in this country. The Founding Fathers were terrified of even the possibility that that could occur.
You learn in high school English the universal plots in literature.
Man Against Himself. Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. Although that would probably also be under Man Against Society…
Man Against Society. I would put Portrait of a Lady here. Also The Scarlet Letter.
Man Against Nature. Pretty much anything by Jack London.
Man Against Fate. Sometimes this is categorized as a sub-set of Man Against Nature. Man struggling with something he cannot control. Moby Dick? Captain Ahab, struggling with the loss of his leg, the loss of his control, battling with the fate the universe has in store for him. His date with the whale. Written in the stars. This book, all the great books actually, have elements of all of the plots.
and then, of course:
Man Against Man. This is such a universal plot that it doesn’t even need to be described.
There is no room for a utopian view of the world the second you have TWO people in the picture. Fine, you have a vision of a perfect universe … great for you. Go sit on a mountaintop by yourself and create it, because the moment you have another person beside you, you will have conflict.
“I think we should only eat berries and make our own clothes and play the autoharp every day from 10 to 11 am.” “Well … actually … I definitely need to have a cup of coffee and I’d like to bring my platform shoes along, because I love them so.” “NO. Platform shoes? And autoharps? Those two things DO NOT GO TOGETHER.” You get the idea.
Sheryl Crow, preaching to us not to have enemies, doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get that man against man is one of the most universal eternal things about being human. Bummer sure. But to get rid of it would be to get rid of all the good stuff too.
I am not talking about accepting horrible things as inevitable, so why fight them. Not at all. This is not Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book The Wave of the Future, where her basic message was: “The Nazis are an inevitable part of history. They are the wave of the future. We should succumb, and let them take over … because eventually they will burn up and burn out … but we must accept that they are the wave of the future.” The woman was rightly criticized for her defeatist views, based on nothing but her “feelings” about it all, her “feelings” of fear about war and violence. (Not to mention her husband’s clear anti-Semitism.) Anne Lindbergh paid dearly for that book, but her basic view of Nazism and totalitarianism is that we just have to wait it out, because war, in general, is wrong and violence is NOT GOOD. EVER.
Well, violence wiped out the Nazi scum, and opened up the gates of Auschwitz. The Nazis were not the wave of the future. They were a plague on the planet that needed to be eradicated. By force. No way would they give up and say, “You know what? You guys are right. What the hell have we been doing all these years?”
There was an Op-Ed column in the New York Times today, written by a Kurd (the co-prime minister of the Kurdish state) in Northern Iraq. This, to me, is what we are talking about when we talk about justice, and peace. Knowing that, actually, there are some things worth fighting for.
Barham Salih pleads with us to give the Kurds the chance to build a democratic Iraq. The Kurds are ready to go. I read something else yesterday. The Kurdish state in northern Iraq has something like 20 newspapers, all with competing viewpoints. Contrast that to Iraq proper, with ONE newspaper. All other newspapers banned.
The Kurds are not concerned about “collateral damage”, innocent civilians dying because of the West invading. For them, the collateral damage caused by an invasion of Iraq is PEANUTS compared to the thousands and thousands of people who have perished at the hand of Saddam Hussein. Yes, people will die. But they are dying ANYWAY, being gassed and murdered and tortured by their own leader.
Peace doesn’t come easy. Man is corruptible. What is worth fighting for? Turn away from utopias, reject utopias, and ask: Okay. What do I believe in? And when you can answer that question, you must then ask the next question: What can I DO? What the hell can I do? Because there is ALWAYS something to do.
