Musings
I’ve been thinking about war and stuff. What got me started was the way so many of Buenos Aires streets and monuments and parks and… are named for generals or battles or revolution, you get my drift. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything quite like it. But it’s not just that the roads and parks are named this way. The tour I went on spend more time pointing out statues to war heroes and martyrs than any other one thing.
Then take the national obsession with Tango. It is ostensibly a dance about love, but much of the dance is built around control, and the history of Tango carries a sense of unresolved violence in the way people treat each other, particularly the men of the women. Then you look at how Tango grew out of grinding poverty and you are reminded of the violence done by the rich to the poor, even as they claim to offer a hand up with the right hand while stealing any hope of real freedom that would allow equality with those who consider themselves ‘better’ with the left.
And what about the violence we do to each other in attempting to speak and be heard. Those who are not heard feel they need to fight to be taken notice of. Those in power feel they need to fight lest there be seen an alternative pathway that would diminish or remove their power. The demonstration I saw in BA was a fine example of this, protestors on the one side representing a deeply felt need to be heard while riot police stood on the other on the grounds that those who should be listening felt unsafe. How can that be unless violence is perpetrated in the simple act of ignoring the cares and needs of those less well off.
Then I read a quite unrelated article about how Britain remains deeply affected by the events of the two world wars and that it colours the thinking even of those for whom the wars exist only in history books. And that took me to another article about Russia and Europe’s relationship with Poland and the bizarre celebration of the invasion of Poland by Germany in 1939. What I fail to comprehend in all of this is why you would celebrate the ultimate monument to violence of one person toward another unless you have every intention of having another go at some point, perhaps not in exactly the same way, but certainly with the same underlying intentions of imposing your will on another without their consent or desire.
That led to thinking about how the media at least portrays American thinking about war and the way that it almost seems all-pervasive. Then before I got too wrapped up in my own goodness of being I thought about the growing scenes in NZ around ANZAC day and the desperate will with which we hang on to a defence force that we know to be utterly defenceless should push come to shove. And what about the constant talk about the ‘Nanny State’ we see in the media? Is this a way of deadening our senses to something deeply offensive to true freedom by hiding it in the open? If we talk about it enough with just the right amount of seriousness and tongue in cheek mixed together does it break down our resistance to the point that when things become really serious and the state begins dictating not minor things but the very essence of what and why we believe what we do about life, faith and the future, that we simply shrug our shoulders and allow it to happen with little more than a broken shrug of our shoulders?
Taking all of that together, and I don’t claim to be original on this, it’s just what is running through my mind at the moment, as a human race we seem to be intent on defining ourselves through violence. And lest some of us try to back out of this one, how about the violence we do to each other through what we so politely call the ‘Free Market.’ Never mind the few, and it is a few in the greater scheme of things, cases of physical abuse that we so loudly decry when they are flashed across our television screens. And leaving aside the murders and rapes, the car accidents and occasional student riots. The deepest violence we do to each other is in basic denial of the freedom to exist from day to day, month to month, year to year with sufficient to supply our needs. We loudly trumpet the capitalist mantra that demands that the strong grow stronger and the weak band together to support the elite in their excess. And we do violence to each other in the process.
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