EthicalDative

HJN, Apocalypse, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in.

I pay more attention than I’d like, for personal reasons, to news coming from a region of ceaseless conflict. Recently, three men attacked a secure place. One breached the gate by killing himself with explosives so that the other two could enter and mount their assault. The upshot: much loss of life. In other words, a Monday or a Tuesday in that part of the world.

I struggle to imagine the chillingly mundane planning that must precede operations that incorporate voluntary death as part of the plan: “You park your car at this place and kill yourself so that we can enter the gate and pursue the attack.” And perhaps it’s diagrammed on paper.

Such acts are celebrated and reviled by the usual suspects with the usual rhetoric, but what strikes me is the fearsome devotion to cause that must underlie such ruthless, calculated giving and taking of life. Also, the sheer difficulty of defending against attacks by persons whose exit strategy is not to have one, whose battlefields are neighborhoods, and whose targets are brazenly collateral.

The memory springs unbidden to me of bluestocking ladies of a certain age — mothers, grandmothers, widows perhaps — maintaining a card table on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. Their placard said “Pray for Peace,” and they invited passersby to sign a petition requesting that another long conflict be brought to an end. Their action seemed quixotic even then, but it gibed with a streak of idealism that was present in towns like that.

It’s been ages since I’ve seen or heard the slogan “Pray for Peace.” It even has a quaint, anachronistic ring to it. I’m not sure but what it might be taken as slightly heretical or unpatriotic now. But prayer for peace would not seem to argue with support of the troops. Now that I’m supporting one very specific “troop” I wish fervently for peace to break out where he will serve. It’s said all politics is local. War has turned local for me where my own blood is in it.

A kind fellow blogger left a comment wishing me well in what might prove to be my analogue to the non-quest that surprised C.S. Lewis with joy. The comment itself gave me joy. For some reason I think of the repentant slave trader who penned “Amazing Grace.” Also, of Francis Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven” poem in which the speaker, fleeing desperately from it, is virtually hunted down and subdued by the beast of salvation. I seem to resonate to the unsought or sneaked-up-upon aspect of these several tales
of spiritual revelation. A faint star’s light is brighter when we look not at but past it.

My mother, a practicing Methodist, would say now and then, “Send one up for me” when facing a challenge of some sort. I’m her very son and not beyond praying, though I be heathenish! I send one up for peace.

(Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

Isabella Rossellini and Friends

I read once somewhere that much of the violence inflicted upon the world is at the hands of young men who have never held a job or a girl’s hand.

For some reason the comment comes back to me with a sad ring of truth. Perhaps it’s triggered by the fact that today my son, a highly trained Navy nurse, is being deployed to a war zone.

Too many young men throughout the world are trapped in circumstances which, at a pivotal time in their development — adolescence and early adulthood — give them little or no outlet for the restless energies and ambitions that come awake in those years. Their cultures stifle them with lack of education, lack of careers, and with social and institutional mores that do not facilitate, perhaps even actively discourage, constructive interaction with females.

One-Woman Riot

Such men, in their young prime, stew with impotence, boredom and frustration; they become marks for exploitation by older men of a different sort — ideologues, fanatics, criminals, tyrants, myrmidons. And of course a percentage of the exploited young men turn into the next generation of thugs who exploit… young men.

Woman Conversing With Riot Police

It’s hard to see a way out of the global syndrome of undeclared wars, endemic conflict, and fleeing masses of people unless and until the reactionary, repressive, defensive measures widely resorted to by governing entities give way to attempts, however tentative, to remedy the underlying causes of dysfunction and turmoil at their source. Those causes are tiresomely familiar in the recitations of fools like me: poverty, ignorance, injustice, gender discrimination, greed…. The litany begins to sound almost biblical.

Close Encounter.

I resist most impulses to use my little blog for venting about inconvenient perceptions that don’t obviously correlate to art or language. I lost this particular skirmish with myself, but I’ll carry on the fight to say mostly nice things here and save despair for my pillow.

Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.