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The meaning of life

June 21, 2018   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

I have a terrible feeling that it is easier to be cruel, an impulse more spontaneous, quicker to surface in our behaviour. Cruelty happens so fast sometimes; it happens before we know we’ve said it; it just “blurts out” but it does the same damage every time, little or large.

Cruelty in too many places rules the day, encourages the worst of insanity: the murder, separation of children and their parents and deprivation of home to many thousands of people at a blow which is, increasingly, common practice. Genocide or something like it has  become – as from a deep dark science fiction movie – fashionable over the last hundred years.

It is pre-meditated as well: planned and carefully rationalized: that is the kicker. To present information, without regard to the truth of it, the population on a local, national, or the internet can believe in the cruelty. A portion of them can accept the cruelty as necessary for “security,” setting an example, preventing an unwanted situation.

This intensity is new. In spite of history, when overrunning other countries was all the rage; troops marching in, taking over local governments,  killing any native objecting to the idea: we’ve been doing that – always.

Yet and yet. This century, I don’t know, there seems to be a new energy to cruelty. Perhaps, because there are so many of us now; this burgeoning world population; no matter how many people are slaughtered, the population is expanding wildly.

In general, people don’t want to give up everything they own to rush away from it all and live in another place that is really alien to them. Mostly, they love their home and native lands, with sunshine and music that goes back into their histories. With history, for that matter, evidence of being there for thousands of years; living with that is wonderful, grounding, assuring the soul of a lineage.

Lots of people do immigrate willingly, with plans, to places where they think they will have better opportunities for themselves and their families.

Those who are forced from their homes, to flee for their very lives – they don’t want that. So, those huge numbers of people chased from their own countries by war or invasion or desperate criminals  -die or go! – what can they do but what they do: seek refuge elsewhere, where war is not raging; foreigners are not overrunning; to a life of a kind, to eat, to sleep, to know peace again, to have days, months – the rest of their lives – without molestation. So, they come and, where there is nowhere else to go, they camp.

Enter kindness and compassion. Much harder work, indeed, to deal with and counter the effects of so much cruelty, with apparently, no answers that make sense on the horizon.

Is it strange to say? Kindness is the answer.

That is a tough answer, for its obviousness. The only way to stop the madness is to cure it. Every philosophy and religion, in its original premise, advocates for kindness. To love one another and care for the planet. There is no such thing as a religion that promotes rabid killing and poisoning this earth. That war was ever (and it always was) presented as the work and dictate of a prophet or deity was/is a dire falsehood.

Where to begin. Well, nowadays, on the internet. The internet is this  century’s completely wild west, where there are no laws, only civil pressures to keep some of the superficial damage at bay. No authority, police or international committee keeps the darker, darkest corners of the internet under control. There is no punishment for the worst of the influences on the internet. Ah, child pornography, you will remind me. Bad, yes, and there are some successes in curtailing it.

There is so much else that promotes cruelty, that infiltrates the bedrooms of disenchanted youth, that whispers idealogical lies; seduction is so insidious, slipping unknowingly down that slope into the comforting, even affectionate, dark.

Here is what is needed: a revolution against wholesale cruelty. A deeply committed attack on it by kindness, by compassion, by sanity.

Where there is corruption with hate, let there be the equally strong light of true companionship.

Where there  is the rationale to do harm, let there be the truth of the issues, a dissertation of cause, a road map to resolution.

Nobody is paying enough attention to the heart of the matter. We cannot stop the madness with more madness. Catching the hearts of the youth, bringing them home away from their mentors of cruelty on a huge scale, using the very tools that have taken them, is the way out.

This cannot be a some time plan. It has to begin, big time, and now.

For, as long as we accept the status quo of ravage, shooting and wholesale damage to the environment, which is another victim of it all, hardly mentioned, cruelty will win.

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