I don’t get into worldly politics on here much, and I’m not going to start now for the simple fact that these are subject far too broad and far too deep to chock up to left vs right. That said, I’m sure you can gather from the hippy-dippy undertones of what I like to write about, in tandem with my arts background, penchant for animal rights, and various other indicators that my preferences lie more on the side what’s best for the group rather than what’s best for the individual.
That said, we can all be greedy. Greed may be one of the few things you can really count on in this day & age, because when someone is greedy, they are somewhat predictable.
When a war is declared over resource… oil, for example – we can anticipate that the aggressor is going to be very careful in their attack, in an effort to not destroy what they are after. Therefor, there are safe places for vulnerable people to seek refuge – near the refineries and storage facilities, in this case. Once the prize has been won, the aggressor will leave, and the affected country will rebuild. It may not seem like it, but these sorts of engagements have rules, and breaking those rules has repercussions.
A holy war, however… a war based in some perceived moral superiority, wherein the aggressor seeks to impose a genocide on an entire group of people over a difference of faith is another thing entirely. No one is safe, and no care is taken – if the goal is to wipe an entire demographic off the face of the planet, then there is no calculable loss to be concerned with. This is true terror.
There are examples of both throughout the ages, and we tend to downplay our own historical misgivings while pointing the finger at others. Nobody alive remembers the Napoleonic Wars, or the Crusades – both of which were brutal and long, and both of which have been given names that sound a lot nicer than they would have been to experience, as opposed to… say; The Holocaust.
War is an extreme case though, isn’t it?
On a more granular level we have people we know, who are not really in powerful enough positions to exact war on anyone else, but there are haters and there are abusers, and scaled down, their motivations are the same… and we see low-level efforts of both all around us.
Right now we’re witnessing our own families and friend groups engage in a form of nationalism as we shop Canadian to avoid paying unnecessary taxes to an overreaching foreign government. This isn’t a thing we should do out of spite, but a thing we should do in the spirit of support – something we should have been doing before, but now we have stronger reasons to do so. But I believe that the cause of our motivation matters. It’s important to remember that there are people on the other side of that international border who are hurting, and that although we can’t necessarily do anything to alleviate that hurt, that is who is over there.
There is no moral superiority.
We have all the same bullshit here as they do there.
And while we’re concerned with what their government is doing – a government that we can’t vote for or against, and have no say over what they do – we have our own governing bodies, and we should be concerned with what they are doing while we’re distracted by what’s going on over the fence.
That goes for an even closer-to-home look at things, as well. there are people in my own family whom I completely disagree with as far as lifestyle, initiative, what decisions they’re making. It’s easy for me to label them – and I often do – and it’s easy for me to write them off – and I often do – but hate and exploitation are pretty far off in the distance from where I am right now.
If they were to actually put forth an effort into improving their situation, I would help them.
The only thing holding me back is the notion that I cannot do it for them… and to force my ideals of what should and shouldn’t be is no better than condemning them for not doing things my way.
I guess what we’re talking about here, is grace.
The Conscious Pilgrim 