Trust as Faith: 9/11 & Boston, Co-Existence, the Near Term, Whose Vision for Which Future
Where trust does not exist, nations cannot long endure, so much in life are we dependent upon one another. There are those who would pay any price to destroy that trust in each other, and thereby any trust in any good or positive future, and we must always be on guard that these visions of our future do not prevail. So many more good men and women have given their lives for the future, a better future, one where people don’t live in constant hate and fear, and it is to those who hoped so greatly for their children and their children’s children, for us, to live beyond their dangerous and uncertain times in an age of peace and goodwill.
These are the visions of the future worth believing in, however unlikely they may someday seem likely to exist, but due to others suffering long ago in less optimistic times than we can imagine, they held close to these extremely radical beliefs so out of step with their times as any could ever be, and made that optimism prevail on an Earth that comes tantalizingly close to what they believed could one day be achieved. Remember those people and what they hoped for us, how they were tortured and killed for their dreams they could not have known would one day become our dreams and define our world. Remember those millions gone, their hopes for this tomorrow, when contemplating those would kill to destroy that better world they died for. Whose vision for which future will prevail is no ones hands now but our own. No matter the odds, one cannot bet against the brighter future. It is a reality built on trust, and losing faith in it, betting against it, against ourselves, will destroy it.
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What we measure to be great accomplishments, achieving a just society or world, promoting and providing peace, these too, though honorable or worthy goals, are fleeting. A year of peace, ten or a hundred, or even a thousand and there will again be war as soon as people begin to believe it cannot happen, it will. Does this diminish the value of peace for those generations who might live and grow strong in its absence? Certainly not. But it does show that we only control the near term, the now and the near now. In the end nothing any future generations do, wars or lack thereof, are our faults or to our credit. Though history may indicate otherwise, show how one generations unfinished businesses, mistakes, or unresolved issues plagued subsequent generations, in the end it is only our examples which give us any significant influence over future generations.
We teach by saying, and we learn by thinking, but what we see around us is what we know is real, at least at this level of understanding. Teaching high ideals means nothing if they are not visibly into practice daily, repetitiously, and are ingrained into society in a way that never falters however hard times get, and treacherous the road may seem. What kind of world we make for ourselves now is our achievement. And if it is strong and just it will speak more than volumes to those yet to come. Great countries or civilizations did not become great scheming on how best to be around hundreds of years later in their present forms, they sought to be the best they could of their own time, to meet the needs of those people of those times, and that is why they survived and prospered. It is said examples speak louder than words, but in the end we can use words to prevent us from seeing the reality instead of what we wish to see, and obscure how little our worlds or our lives reflect our values. ...
Many still believe in a two tracked world. It is O.K. for others to be enslaved if some will live free. It is fine for some populaces to be manipulated so long as others have free will. Once applying that standard to other nations and regions invariably it is applied within. Treachery done for the sake of honor, injustice done when the cause is just, lying to preserve a greater truth. Of these inconsistencies no nation or people are blameless, no hands are clean. The more we try to have it both ways, the more the truth will escape unseen, unnoticed and will become despised by all who think the truth of what we are and what we do matters not to how we see ourselves.
History can be our judge only if in the end the truths come out and one day are known. A factual record of what we did and said, on so many levels too much to hope for and have done without biases, will matter more than what we thought we were doing or what we believed we were achieving. Those who keep the future in mind, those who believe future generations will one day see through our lies and misrepresentations, our manipulations of others opinions to validate what we should not be doing, what could never withstand open and universal scrutiny, who will have only what we have done to speak for who we were.
How then would we look to them? How much could we account for ourselves and for our actions? And how often did we convince ourselves we did not do what we did, did not say what we meant, and could not see ourselves for what we were? Whether God, Santa Claus, or future generations, it is always helpful to think that someone or something can see through you so that you might gain such insight as well. No words, no explanations, no bullshit. Just what was, unabridged, unabbreviated, and uncensored. There may not be much absolute reality in this reality, but what little of it there is we ought do our best never to run away from.
Trust as Faith / Sliver of Reality
Fall 2001
Towards Tommorrow \ Polsci.com
Curiosity may kill more than cats. If humanity survives the near term it will have countless discoveries with fatal eventual ends, and will one day need to show restraint in chasing after every one of them to see where they lead. And it does not help that the greatest amount of human resources is spent on finding new ways of destroying ourselves, others of our species technically, but if you term ourselves to be our species, it is ourselves we seek to destroy. To ancient members of our species, we would seem to have the powers of the gods at our resources, and in the far future, if we even have any, members of our own species would have at their disposal powers over their worlds that to us might seem equally as wondrous, except for the power to destroy. We understand that quite well now for humanity, in a way, longs after nothing else as greatly as this. ...
/
... They are also sharing in its history, both the past and the future. They have one common history or timeline of the entire Universe up to that point which they share between them all, such a small room of a seemingly infinite sized mansion of what could be or could have been to co-exist within. They also have the ability to interact with each other with a level of reality more real, in a sense, than any other within that reality and at that point in time, at least to them at that time. What they choose to do with that potential to make these interactions, these shared experiences, to become more real than any others that might have been at that time, that is the question each must and will decide for themselves.
When you know and understand it, you can't help but want these experiences to be positive, pleasurable, and fun. If not for others, the highest ideal or goal, then at least for yourself. When you can achieve both, any other reality you might envision, call it Heaven, Nirvana, or whatever, cannot compare as being better than this unless there too you are making the experiences, the lives, the realities, better for others as well as for yourself. That is the power we have in this reality, to shape it not only for ourselves but for others however we choose, to cause them pleasure or give them joy, or to cause pain, to experience these for ourselves too, and to decide which should be inflicted and which withheld, savage justice or higher compassion, and which makes the most sense for whom and to which others.
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Philosophically people may have a vague belief that what is right or works for some is not necessarily right for others but that is never the belief which gets acted upon, perhaps because that belief requires no action. The belief that does get acted upon is the belief that our (whomever the "we" might be, be it individuals or groups) ways of living and values are right and others must adhere to them or their people are unduly suffering and we are morally justified, if not obligated, to make them behave in accordance with our own beliefs, customs, or laws.
To let any other beliefs stand long as an alternative is to undermine the unquestionable rightness of one's own model, and dare invite others to make negative comparisons by one's own views, in regards to that others. One way of looking at things must dominate, or continually have to justify why it is better than another's. It is far easier to simply eradicate all others conceptually or physically than to always triumph simply on terms of merit. Without allowing, or moreover inviting, such possible alternatives or possible changes or revisions, one is forced into ridiculing or attempting to eliminate any or all other opposing ideas or beliefs.
To openly try to change another's views, viewpoints, customs, systems, and so on, is honest. When it is done openly, however good or bad you may value such changes to be, however much you believe in one side's rightness or moral superiority over the other's, it is far more justifiable than when it is done secretly behind closed doors with the submissive side never realizing or understanding such control or self-determination was lost.
The need to agree on many things is the requisite for peaceful co-existence. How such agreements will be, can be, if even if ever they could be realized is anyone's guess. If force is used what may be considered the most right and true, should humans ever be able to agree upon such things, becomes largely irrelevant.
Debate and force are at opposite ends of the spectrum of persuasion. Debate is the search for truth. Force makes its own truths, not necessarily deep philosophically but while enforced, somewhat on a surface level, indisputable. And the desired depth is the key.
Simply getting a person or people to ape the behavior and pay lip service to the beliefs one expects can be done by force from only one side. To have further deeper roots of conviction, one must be willing to put ones own beliefs on the line and be open to change and revision as well, through compromise and debate. Without provable give and take, the other quickly learns he is being spoken at and neither conversed with nor listened to.
To seek real mutual co-existence means putting aside as many expectations for others beliefs and behavior as conceivably possible. Not to judge or bring ones own standards to bear on another. As far as one cannot conceive or admit such relaxing of expectations or judgments is possible, continued conflict is inevitable with some or with many others. To the extent that they think they are right and just, and can afford to live in or with such continual conflict, or if they know of no other way to live, that is fine for them, their choice, and will remain their choice for as long as these factors do not change.
For those who have not the power nor the will to control others, the choices are easier. One can be forever upset with others behavior or nature they cannot change, or they can accept it for what it is. One path leads through only sorrow, the other eventually to peace.
If you cannot have expectations for others, nor always be able to help them save for when they request such help, how can you be of any use to any others if that is what you desire to do with your wants and wishes on how to make use of your own time? You can be there. You can be an example of what you believe is best to be. You can be willing to share your time and walk part of your separate paths together. That is all you have to give and all that can ever truly be given to another. Even hope cannot be given, merely communicated, and must be grown from within.
Man Becoming Death, Destroyer of Worlds /
Measure All Things Together / To Co-exist
Fall 2002 / February 2003 / April 2003
Deconstructing the Universe \ Polsci.com
Biology and biological drives define how and why you interpret events and experiences, as well as what purposes you hope to achieve through them or through the processing of them. The propagation of something, yourself, others, ideas, values, or organizations, motivates and therefore provides the context in how events are interpreted. Whether you believe what survives and grows (increases) should, and what shouldn't, decreases or lessens in importance, appeal, or strength. If gone, (people or a society) merely searches out some new "other" to destroy or turn against (which was previously) now a part of "us" or what we previously thought good enough to promote or advance. Find a new alien to define ourselves in opposition to, for the purpose of remaking them into something else.
A goal which required understanding multiple dimensions across multiple timelines from multiple individuals points of view. In short, how just about everything one can imagine about the universe fits together. Not optional. Required. And soon. Perspective-wise, unification theorists are like children playing with toy blocks (of a single 3D universe or timeline), where I must figure how multiple overlapping 3D closed spaces or universes fit together by playing with tesseracts (comparatively speaking in terms of goals only, I don't have any real tesseracts to play with, though physicists could really play with blocks if they really wanted to :-)
The (long term) future of humanity is not that important to me. People in the near future deserve a better chance at being good and doing good and controlling their own lives than those running the world now care to give them, and that is all I focus on. Each new generation must be as free to trash the world and do bad things as the one before them could. Giving them a good reason not to is the best we can do for them. Providing that for them is for me a means to an end and payment for a future debt to some yet to be. (That is a good way to view it, we owe certain things and on the whole "more" to those who have yet to be, and less to those who and that which were).
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I can't even count all the laws, limits, and circumstances on who is allowed to say what to whom and when, all to control what people are allowed to know or think about. If people do become telepathic, it mostly would be in response to this attempt to utterly dominate what they are allowed to know or think about.
Go there, do that. That will (give) make you think of something else to do. Then go there, then do that. I am just aware of when and what a bit further ahead than most but locked in as everyone else. The "why" for me needs to be bigger to get me to do anything, but is the same as anything else which motivates anyone else, just more externally directed in purpose (than with most).
Notes Part Three
Pg 83 / Pg 84
Spring 2005 / Polsci.com
These words, his words, will outlive those people because the world they advocate cannot endure, would not survive. A world which not only remember's these words but learns from them, takes them into its heart as I have into mine, that is a world which can endure. That is the future I work for, hope for, would live and die for, but the future we are creating now, what our present leaders wish to give the world, that is nothing I would want to be a part of. That world in which we have already recently killed tens of thousands of innocents in cold blood unnecessarily, and would kill millions if not billions to prevent the world from growing beyond the systems we have now, based on the need for war, the rewarding of aggression, and the sanctity of mass murders beyond scale in the name of country and in the name of God. May their notions not be passed on. Humanity could not long survive it if they do. The goal and the means to take us to that better world are found in the words below for any to hear, to know, and to feel, and to guide us back from the brink by remembering the slaughters we have done in the past, and are about to repeat again.
"It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are -- perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever."
When I think I might never see Hawaii again
blogspot.com/jareddubois \ jareddubois.com
September 24th, 2006
I know of the need to challenge the powers that be when they are wrong, and that challenge, if successful or not, is never wrong. They all, in one form or another, want the future to conform to the guidelines of the past or past ways of thinking, but there are times when common sense moves us to see that that is not going to happen, and in those brief times, humanity is allowed in large numbers to think for themselves. It is then and sometimes only then that real answers can be found. I have great faith in the common sense of people and for that reason I think democracy is a good thing, but not any kind of democracy in the present. They are built on lies, on untrue histories, patriotic, idealized, mythologized, and these manipulations of the truth leads to publics that are misinformed to be mislead, and democracy has nothing to do with it.
Ironically (or not) within this system of falseness, those who have the most contempt for democracy have the most control over it. People must be “guided”, their passions “restrained”, yet this “restraint” never seems to preclude war whipping hysteria, dehumanization of “enemies” and actually feeds into it because those doing the “restraining” are actually guiding societies towards their own goals their publics would never agree to. And thus the definition of “power”, to take others where you want, to use them and their lives as you wish, regardless of their opinions or desires to the contrary.
To balance the past, not only have I had my own wants and desires which for me take no quarter with ANY powers that be, political, religious or otherwise, because I have been raised by myself by my own “visions” for the future and what it should or ought best to be. For me that holds precedence over all else, and makes me potentially as despotic and insensitive to others sufferings and wishes for the future as any now in power could ever be, yet there is much positivity in current religions (not stressed now by many at the tops of those religions) to balance that, to democratize the future in a way that does not need to conform to anyones views upon or for it. ...
The US has been sliding toward authoritarianism in secret and behind the scenes for decades now. The only difference is that it is beginning to be exposed for one and all to see, providing they are not so completely taken in by the constant mass media manipulations and lies which themselves have lost all subtly and veneer, at least among those still capable of rational and independent thinking.
The more wealthy a country is, the longer and deeper the corruption can go on, the more intractable it can become. All attempts by Congress to try to limit or mitigate their own corruption, inherent in both political parties, is as laughable as it is ineffective. Only through the present Constitutional crisis is there any real hope of finally changing this dinosaur of a system unwilling and unable to evolve anymore, even to save itself, into something new, something incorruptible, or at least something within even a vague semblance of its own self-image.
Countless times before in the past the American public could have done the right thing to begin baby steps of positive changes and instead chose the selfish paths, preferred the denials of reality and lies, accepted the corruption as inevitable and even a necessity. Instead, they let a minor slide turn into major and more chronic catastrophes which put at risk, not only their wealth, but their liberties and right to legitimately elected self-governance. They let it continue on and on and on until it became virtually irreversible and almost unthinkable that they would even in the near future have again even a portion of the rights they had a decade ago, never mind a generation ago. ...
Pretty much most of my life I have known my government is not what it portrays itself to be, what goes on behind the scenes which is now glorified in movies and on television, torture, framing the "bad guys" through bogus testimonies and planting of evidence, selling the most barbaric of techniques of manipulation discovered through experimentation which included torture, drugs, poisonings, and other such "fun" things on helpless people, first in this country, then in Latin America, and now in the Middle East. The Middle East simply represents new cultures to learn of their weaknesses, their mindsets, and how most effectively to "break" them. The refusal of the Administration to release admittedly probably innocent tortured suspects, still being subjected to torture no less, because they might talk about such "patented" techniques, now state secrets, the telling of which would, if not make them worthless, certainly erode their value if/when we wished to sell them to brutal dictatorships like we have done in the past. (Or share them with our allies. Feel the love.)
Things like this cannot be changed while they are not admitted to, while not constantly thrown in the public eye in a critical way by an antagonistic and truly independent press, instead of relegated to the shadows which even Congress cannot penetrate and indeed, does not want to know about. Yet on the other hand, we have been having a desensitization to these things going on for some time, as I mentioned in fictional films, and now in the news itself, or at least what passes for "news" these days. The hours for exposing it as a wrong to be righted, for that outing to make the slightest bit of difference, they are disappearing while it still retains at least some degree of shock value. Yet that opportunity has not yet completely disappeared. ...
... The "Justice" Department has served not as a watchdog of the corruption, but as a protector against investigations into its own leaders and top officers transgressions of the law more effectively than criminal mafias control their own "police"and "courts". It would probably take 50 years to sort through the last 5 years of blatantly illegal corruption within just about every branch of the government, not that it would ever allow itself to dissect its own rot. ...
The number of people trying to expose such rampant abuses of state power has grown so much it is now almost a cottage industry to change the laws from protecting whistleblowers to punishing them, threatening reporters with jail or worse for reporting the governments own violations of its own laws, and still they have been unable to stop it (though they have slowed it quite a bit). I have noticed that it has been the military and not the lawyers or politicians who have admitted to the most transgressions, at least prior to this new purge and surge. When ordered to, they break the laws, the Geneva Conventions, and their own codes get rewritten as fast as the President's lawyers rewrite the rules on what is legal and not, something that used to be Congresses job, yet they are not as willing as civilians to lie about it.
Hawaii, my Natural Environment, the Perfect Environment, and Reset Points
blogspot.com/jareddubois \ jareddubois.com
March 15th & 16th, 2007
It seems like I've been here before;
I can't remember when;
But I have this funny feeling;
That we'll all be together again.
No straight lines make up my life;
And all my roads have bends;
There's no clear-cut beginnings;
And so far no dead-ends.
Excerpt from "Circle" by Harry Chapin
There was an interesting meme developing in regards to the Boston Marathon bombing immediately afterwards. It did not pickup steam as much as the other ones, but that fact that it appeared at all was disturbing. The theme was, it was not what the United States was doing or might have done in the rest of the world which might have been a motivation for the bombings, but that people were allowed to talk about these things openly, as potentially "bad" things.
One can attribute that to the occasional political nut-job, most likely in this case a Republican congressman, but that is the kernel which figures into all of which how US foreign policy and leaks and whistle-blowing is covered and thought of these days. I have no intention of getting into the Wikileaks or Bradley Manning issues with this post, but one does not have to take their sides or for even those who do not, to see that if we simply end debates on anything which we do as a nation which might cause people to do something bad in retaliation for simply saying what we are doing overseas, how does that not lead to a totalitarian or authoritarian mindset or approach?
As soon as one buys into the idea that there is no alternative to our foreign policies of drone strikes or "intervening" in countries when "necessary" one has already set the table for saying, so if we must do these things or cannot stop doing them, what we must do then instead is to stop people from drawing attention to them. That is what must be done, and just accept that talking about it is now off-limits, that is if one is effective at it. In the control-the-internet age, it is relatively easy to let people say whatever they wish if you know no one can hear or will read it or see it.
But for those who know their history, this can give them a very bad case of deja vu. It is very probable that any regime which did horrible things in history saw the problem primarily in terms of public relations. If people would just stop talking about these horrible things we "must" do to keep the peace or to keep our nation safe, then we would have no problems. And if the victims of those policies are never heard from or respected, or sometimes even acknowledged, then yes, from their point of view, their problems would just disappear as well.
I do not condone violence, nor have I ever, but I understand that it is not just the terrorists, Islamic or otherwise, who want to see the world degenerate into a violent free-for-all. Usually those with the most weapons, be they city gangs, mafias, jihadists, or armies, occasionally say, "what is the point of having these things if we are not going to use them?"
The more the idea that debate is unthinkable, the more negotiations are deemed politically incorrect or damaging, the more likely it becomes that those with the weapons will get to do all the "talking" from then on. It does not matter which side of the fight they are on, conflict serves ALL of their purposes, for conflicts when escalated is what they are trained for, it is their chance to do what they think they are meant to do.
In times of relative peace, people can think and talk and debate, and usually make less catastrophic decisions than when they are tense, or afraid, or angry. Those who try to work people up with anger or fear after a terror strike, we seem to have long forgotten, those politicians or journalists or bloggers, they may as well be working for the terrorists when that, by definition, is their aim:To make people afraid, to terrorize them.
As I said before, I wrote the essay below in response to the 9/11 attacks in the United States. I when I quoted it in 9 years ago on the first Polsci.com index page I added...
Trust as Faith was written in direct response to the immediate response to the events of September 11th, 2001. It was about the rapid erosion of the faith people must have in one another for societies to exist and prosper.
Anger turned to fear, fear to paranoia, paranoia to blind murderous rage, and anyone was fair game. Neighbors turned on neighbors, and innocent people had their businesses burned or beaten or killed for looking like the wrong sort of people. It was relatively small scale, but the minority involved was miniscule, and so it could not escalate as it might have if it had been a sizable percentage of the population. It was though, for me enough to see how Bosnia or Rwanda can happen anywhere.
As it says "A murder in and of itself is a horrible thing, but when it sets off a chain reaction leading to many, then many times many other horrible acts, it is an even greater horrible thing. And when that was the intention all along it is revolting to the extreme. The target is nothing less than our goodwill, our trust of each other, and nothing can we afford less to lose...it is easier when constantly shown trust and respect to trust in others and to believe that most people are good, for in fact they are, even if because of some few we stop treating them that way, or even worse, stop believing it."
People need to remember that often creating fear and causing an escalation of a conflict is the intended effect of many terrorist attacks. Bin Laden said openly he meant to drive the United States into a quagmire in the Middle East. Proudly, and rightly so, the initial attitude coming from Boston, a city near where I grew up and where I went to University, was that we will not be cowarded. We will not be intimidated by this. Then predictably, it was spun on the news, as with 9/11, as it is a different world now. People must be prepared to accept less privacy, be afforded fewer rights if suspected of crimes, and even accept "lockdowns," holding people without charges, and not only not telling them their rights, but insisting that they do not even have any when asking for them.
I am not saying that there are not cases to be made for the necessity for some of these things in extreme cases, but the endless parade of torture advocators in the media, saying the suspect should have been held as an enemy combatant and tortured a bit, this is insane. For those who said "they hate us for our freedom," probably the best single line of balderdash and propaganda ever dished out in my lifetime, (and that says a lot given the countries and histories I have studied) given what the television "intellectuals" say we must do whenever an attack happens, as no matter what happens, they always inevitably will, their preferred reactions will always give us fewer freedoms to be hated for.
One should not look more closely at the criminality or stupidity in the things the United States does or any other country does because that is the aim of terrorists, any more than we should go off half-cocked and spend trillions of dollars killing literally thousands of "uncountable" civilians and making thousands more terrorists or would be terrorists in the process. But NOT talking about these things is not a solution either. If we were not discussing these things before a terrorist attack, it does not make it any more shameful to not be discussing them after it, simply because one ass-ole commentator, or many, would say, that's just what they want us to do. The same argument did not hold water after the Connecticut school shootings. "Now is not the time for this discussion," but when is it EVER? Shouldn't it then, if never, be ALWAYS, not just when bad things happen?
The fact is we need to be discussing these things ALL THE TIME, and we are most certainly not, so then when the inevitable attacks happen, we will not suddenly need to say, why were we not considering these things before? Those who do not wish to have such a discussion, on your side, my side, our side, their side, these are the people who will always gain money, power, influence, and prestige from future attacks, whether by improvised explosives or ballistic missiles, and often even from just the threat of using them, it all suits them the same.
Many bad terror attacks have happened in the US worse than the Boston bombings and people's rights were not suspended, the Constitution's protections were not then thrown out the window, and democracy and freedom still moved on the same as before. But we did not have a media then that would elevate a lowly state senator or state congressperson to a national celebrity for advocating torturing a US citizen already in custody. People need to wake up to why the media throws the panic switch into overdrive, and then tells people, well everything is different now. What is different is that we used to have a media that was responsible in how it covered events like this and had politicians not so afraid of that media that they could actually stand up to it when it hyperventilates for ratings sake and the benefit of increasing the likelihood of more costly interventions and wars to come, sooner rather than later.
I often am amused by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, or Martin Luther King Jr.'s professed faith that the "long term" arc of history is toward justice, and toward greater freedom and more democracy. Its not that that would not be nice and may in fact be always provable if you step back a bit and ignore the things you wish to ignore and see the things you wish to see. The "near term" which I focus on, as evidenced by the quotes above, is what worries me. If the longer term is going to be all heavenly and roses, the near term still is looking like fallout, blowback, authoritarian mindsets, quashing of "irresponsible" debates, and limiting dissent and political expression to smaller and smaller acceptable "parameters" defined more by corporations and lobbyists than anyone else. Thus our new "bought and paid for" democracies.
That may sound cynical, just a tad, but that is unfortunately the way the "near term" future is headed, and it still has an open road ahead of it. But I still believe in every word I wrote in Trust as Faith which I am reposting below. Whether it is rational or not, one must have trust, or to trust as an act of faith. It may not be warranted. It may not be wise and often it can get you killed a lot sooner than later.
But it also is a testament of what kind of world you wish to live in, and your paranoias, or justified fears (and you can always find justifications for suspicions) in sum creates the world you live in, your mental world, and you pass that on to the next generation as well. As I said at the end, whose vision for which future is ALWAYS the question. Assuming the worst, expecting the worst, you bring about it that much quicker and make that reality and mindset a way of life that much easier. But when you take a chance, bet on the humanity of those you demonize, and take a leap of faith, you empower that goodness in some, and often in many others, to do the same gradually, just as easily as you snuff it out when attacking them or berating them unjustly. I cannot say it better now than I did twelve years ago, so I will just end it now the same way again....
Remember those millions gone, their hopes for this tomorrow, when contemplating those would kill to destroy that better world they died for. Whose vision for which future will prevail is no ones hands now but our own. No matter the odds, one cannot bet against the brighter future. It is a reality built on trust, and losing faith in it, betting against it, against ourselves, will destroy it.
7 Trust as Faith
Society depends on trust. Trust that your money, stocks, and other commodities will keep their value. Trust that invaders from far off lands will be kept off our shores and outside of our borders. Trust that the police and others entrusted to protect us from ourselves will not become yet another force to fear. Trust that our leaders and politicians are not too tainted by corruption to remember who they represent, and how much of humanities hope lie upon their shoulders. But above and beyond all else society depends upon trusting one another.
This trust did not come easy, nor was it at first warranted. It came after brutality too immense to comprehend and too painful to long remember. Thousands of years of endless slaughter culminating in recent wars in which the number of victims not long ago would have surpassed the number of all humans living.
If we call civilization the peaceful co-existing of differing cultures or nations, most often these differing nations met first under the reality of war. Sometimes they were enslaved by one or another of these other nations or ethnicities, brutalized in ways too disconcerting to write here, with atrocities beyond almost even all but the worst psychopathic criminals today would elect to subject others to. Yet they fought back, regained their freedom, mended as best they could their battered spirits, and one day maybe generations later, made peace with their tormentors.
What reason had they to do this, make peace with those who committed unspeakable sins to their entire populations and upon their own soil? Had they forgotten what as done to their people, how they swore they would avenge them?
No. They made a minor but world altering change of strategy, they would first try to make peace with them and try to come to some understanding if at all possible. Maybe they did not mean it, maybe it was just a ploy to buy them more time or to try to catch their enemy off guard. If that was the intention, it backfired because between those two differing cultures a fragile peace began to take hold, upset at times with frequent flare ups of more wars, but eventually those wars became shorter with greater times of peace in between.
How amazing it was this happened and how far apart some nations today remain from it happening for them now. The peace became more important than the wars, and the wars were somewhat ironically fought under the guise of how best to keep the peace, but the mindset had changed, at least for two, then three, then many nations or cultures.
It was no longer about killing all others, or enslaving them, or even subjugating them. It was how best to coexist with them. The greater and more damaging the wars between them, the more reasonable the path of peace became.
This growing affinity progressed until leaders of opposing lands would journey to the others to pay respects and honor the dead of those who fought against their own people, literally their own sons and brothers and fathers. Amazing. They were at heart and sometimes in fact still enemies but war was the greater enemy and in that fight they needed to be allies.
Yet this trust between nations sought to foreshadow a greater trust. If it was merely a truce, if it was not believed by the majority both regions that these bitter enemies, tormentors, doers of unspeakable evils in days gone by, could not now be trusted, re-humanized and rehabilitated in the minds of their former enemies, any peace effort would be sure to fail.
Any change in political winds, changing fortunes of political parties, any act by individuals, could re-ignite the wars. The people had to believe in the humanity of those who they had learned to hate. And they had to trust in them.
Once they imagined that trust, the road to peace got smoother. Now flare ups of tensions or sporadic fighting became the faults of radicals or leaders out of touch with the wishes of the common man or woman. The people of the other region were now still human, still worthy of trust, and sometimes considered helpless victims of a war they did not desire either.
People were not punished for airing these views, leaders after the fighting subsided even claimed similar views, for now so great the stake in keeping the peace had become. The same events happened as before which would have lead to escalations, but the interpretations had changed.
As the bonds of trust grew between nations or ethnicities and more importantly, between most of the people of those nations, they began to see others in those other regions as being as diverse a lot as themselves. No longer was the enemy a monolith sworn to our destruction. There could be people over there every bit as honorable and decent as anyone we know over here.
They could have terrible leaders but fine composers, musicians, playwrights, or scientists indifferent in demeanor or tastes to our own artisans, intellectuals, and elite. This seems so natural now, so accepted, for such cultural exchanges and travel have been going on now between peaceful countries for hundreds of years now but how unthinkable and peculiar most at first and some even now must have thought such views to be.
Not to admit the humanity, and that decency and goodness can exist in someone else within another group with which they are currently at war with. Such beliefs by the populace of some groups will determine to keep them perpetually at war.
But it is not the common people of countries to bring upon wars. Throughout history the average person has been kept quite busy trying to provide themselves with adequate food, shelter, and a slim guarantee to keep these in the foreseeable future. It has often been the acts of a few that engulf the many and eventually affect all.
Whether it be some ancient grudge or some newly created enemies, there always are and always will be groups that wish to start or restart the cycle of violence. Most people are generally in some ways free of prejudice in thinking that not all of another country or ethnicity all think and act alike. But when others who view all of this group or that group as being the same, all equally bad or equally guilty for whatever any one member of that other group did to them, they can create a chain reaction of hate.
Suddenly attacked by one of another group not for who I am but as a member of this group or that, I am now likely to do the same. Who is in your group, who can I hurt that you know that can cause you to feel bad? Criminal organizations do it, family feuds do it, gangs do it.
It no longer matters who you are, it matters to what group you belong to, this determines who your friends and enemies are. You may not wish this, but apparently someone else has made it so. Someone who wanted it to be this way.
Someone who shot one man, one leader, began World War I. It does not matter now as much as it did then to what group he belonged or what he believed he would accomplish by doing so. He wanted to start something with that assassination and he succeeded beyond measure.
As nations learned to view war as an enemy, this too is a different kind of enemy. The enemy is not the man, though he is more to blame than his ethnicity, the greater enemy is the effect of the actions.
A murder in and of itself is a horrible thing, but when it sets off a chain reaction leading to many, then many times many other horrible acts, it is an even greater horrible thing. And when that was the intention all along it is revolting to the extreme. The target is nothing less than our goodwill, our trust of each other, and nothing can we afford less to lose.
Once the chain reaction starts it is difficult to put down. Once attacked for simply being a member of a group, I have been subjectified, classified, and codified, it is only natural that I cannot help but to react to it in one way or another, but react nonetheless.
If I were to be cautious I would try to find out who else might be inclined to view me in a similar negative way and be wary of them. Or at the other end of the spectrum I might be pleased with myself for not treating people differently who have not done anything themselves to warrant being treated or viewed differently.
Surely just being wary of this one group of people who might look like that group is nothing to be overly concerned about. There are still many groups different than my own I can look to the same and forget what was lost. It may seem like an insignificant loss of trust but no loss of trust is insignificant, especially when spreading quickly.
For countries unaccustomed to long periods of peace it need not even have to spread. It is a given fact of life that those people are not like us. They don’t think like we do, they don’t value the things we value. They kill twenty of our people, we kill forty of theirs, it does not matter which forty they are for they are all the same.
For someone who has been fortunate to have lived in a region free from this mentality, it is nice to view it from a distance, though that distance is what makes the difference possible, and the struggle to see beyond that point of view is not as hard as it is for others. Nothing could matter more than which forty others, lest one is drawn deeper into the endless cycle of violence some regions might never escape from.
Once trust is gone, especially undeservedly, it is hard to view people the same. Imagine everywhere you go people shy away from you or go out of their way to make you feel uncomfortable, even threatened. It is hard not to resent them back, even wish to get back at them for treating you badly when you have never done anything wrong to anyone yet suddenly made to pay for something someone else did. For those who wish foremost to sow the seeds of hate, no result could be a greater success.
Once one begins to accept always feeling suspicious or wary around others it becomes second nature. They may take to carrying weapons to feel safe or frequent only those places where those others rarely go. It becomes a way of life.
For those who have not known such ways of living can appreciate their own all the more when traveling to places where such a lifestyle is commonplace. And once that foothold of fear takes root, it can quickly spread toward other groups which have some unsavory members. Soon no fears seem unwarranted and no precaution too great or too costly. No more human sea of differences, just clusters of groups all ever more wary and conscious of each other.
For me now I can still go home to a place where everyone still trusts each other and likewise enjoy the company of all others without fears, whatever the truth may be. Yet this has become rare and seems destined to become rarer still yet to come.
Yet openness and trust, however misplaced and irrational it seems at times, can have subtler chain reactions of their own; to walk past someone on the street and not have them clutch their bags tighter, to ride in an elevator not having someone not so secretly holding onto mace in their pocket just in case. It is easier when constantly shown trust and respect to trust in others and to believe that most people are good, for in fact they are, even if because of some few we stop treating them that way, or even worse, stop believing it.
Where trust does not exist, nations cannot long endure, so much in life are we dependent upon one another. There are those who would pay any price to destroy that trust in each other, and thereby any trust in any good or positive future, and we must always be on guard that these visions of our future do not prevail.
So many more good men and women have given their lives for the future, a better future, one where people don’t live in constant hate and fear, and it is to those who hoped so greatly for their children and their children’s children, for us, to live beyond their dangerous and uncertain times in an age of peace and goodwill.
These are the visions of the future worth believing in, however unlikely they may someday seem likely to exist, but due to others suffering long ago in less optimistic times than we can imagine, they held close to these extremely radical beliefs so out of step with their times as any could ever be, and made that optimism prevail on an Earth that comes tantalizingly close to what they believed could one day be achieved.
Remember those people and what they hoped for us, how they were tortured and killed for their dreams they could not have known would one day become our dreams and define our world. Remember those millions gone, their hopes for this tomorrow, when contemplating those would kill to destroy that better world they died for.
Whose vision for which future will prevail is no ones hands now but our own. No matter the odds, one cannot bet against the brighter future. It is a reality built on trust, and losing faith in it, betting against it, against ourselves, will destroy it.
posted by Jared DuBois | 2:59 AM
