Early December

Sid and I exchanged our presents early this year—it was hardly even December but this seemed to be an appropriate moment, perhaps because we needed to cheer one another up. There are simply times when it doesn’t seem good to be alive and with the economic meltdown and the violence in India, I’d say this is one of them.

I don’t want to over exaggerate the difficulties—after all, it’s hard to find people who lived in a time that wasn’t desperate. The various groups who spread across Europe—Celts, Gauls, Norse, Germanic, Romans among them—didn’t occupy the land without inflicting harm on the previous inhabitants. Even when the various tribes had settled into their areas, there were continuing disputes over boundaries, trade, religion, and power. Asia and the Steppes have had an unquiet history as have the various regions of Africa.

More recently, our parents and grandparents lived through two world wars, a major depression, a police action in Korea, whatever it was in Viet Nam, followed by two gulf wars, and this doesn’t even begin to include various hot spots. Fact is that the human species occupying the planet is as restless as the planet itself.

Even given all that, though, I find the current upheavals profoundly depressing. In WWII, at least, there was a relatively clear purpose and everyone was involved in one way or another, if only collecting scrap at home. Korea was further removed, but by the time of Viet Nam (when I first started teaching college English) things were murky indeed. Afghanistan seems more clear to me, but our decision to go into Iraq seems to have been based on whatever justification someone thought might work: Hey—if you don’t like the reason for this war, wait five minutes and I’ll come up with another one.

What sets this age apart, I think, is the understanding that much of it has descended into mindless and random violence. Consider the confusion about knowing who’s responsible for the explosions and rockets and bombs that fill our newspapers. Strange new hybrid groups spring up, detonate something (often themselves), and then disappear into the crowd. In Mumbai, the gunmen sought people with US and British passports (I would have been shot twice), but for what reason since most of the people they killed were Indian? It seems someone believes the greater the number of people killed, the more serious the purpose behind it, except that the purpose is sometimes not even clear either.

When I was in college some eons ago, I had an assigned reading on relativism. It disturbed me. It wasn’t that I minded different cultures and different beliefs (no—I don’t justify cannibalism just because it’s practiced in New Guinea--that, after all is not good manners to the person being subject to it). I objected to the lazy, intellectually bereft offshoot that claimed that something was right if it felt right at the time. I could accept different viewpoints as long as they were based on self-analysis and a modicum of respect and compassion. In today’s violence, I’m not seeing anything beyond the raw expression of passion and misogyny masquerading as purpose, perpetrated by a group of people who have raised personal vendetta to political philosophy. Don't they realize this is how Sicily managed to depopulate itself?

What scares the hell out of me, though, is not the violence, terrible as that is—but what will follow it. Even if all the perceived injustices in the world were to be removed: the kashmirs, the Palestinian state, Zimbabwe, and Sri Lanka among them—I am afraid that our species will just find other reasons to justify violence. Once this chain was begun, I truly see no end. I hope I am wrong, and I hope that someone will come forward with a magic way to end this cycle while we still have a planet left.