Why be critical of human nature, in all its splendour, in all its rage?
Do I love every Chinese person because I love the foundation upon which that culture is founded?
Do I hate the individual Jew because I loath Zionism - or love each and every Palestinian when factional infighting eat away at their potential unity?
It would be as silly - that’s a useful word - as giving every greybeard automatic ‘high regard’ just because they look like a tribal elder.
We don’t need to invoke karma and its implications to see that collective guilt is the unjust burden that the peoples of a nation bear when their governments indulge in Empire building by force.
Witness the Germans and the Japanese people who - fifty years after that World War - still suffer ripples of hatred and distrust.
I got to talk to grandson about the unfairness of life - specifically in respect to family or the lack of it.
Gandhi - when asked what he thought about Western Civilisation - said that he thought it would be a good idea.
Leaving aside the cold blooded calculations which our leaders implement ‘on our behalf’, most of us do what we do because we’re ........ ‘right.’
The suicide bomber thinks he’s ‘right’. The stark raving mad general
who would ‘bomb ‘em all - back to the stone age’ thinks he’s ‘right’.
Hitler, Ghengis Khan, various Popes, Ayatollahs - all think they’re ‘right’ and operate accordingly and destruction is always involved.
My Empire physically resides in a garden block. There isn’t a spot with which I am not familiar. I don’t neglect the far boundaries. By making myself familiar with this territory, I prevent unwelcome guests - snakes, funnel web spider colonies. It doesn’t take much action to keep everything happily balanced and I wish I had this sense when it came to the emotional Empire. It’s not so clear - to me - when it comes to friends and family and I do what most of us probably do, which is to use ‘benign neglect’ much of the time and regret it later.
Anyway, that’s why we have a life in which to garden and the same ideas translate from the practicalities of gardening to the nurturing of the family, the tribe and the nation but as we are all ruled by human beings who all know they’re ‘right’, we’re ‘better off’ as individual nations - quarrelling lot that we are - than to pass sovereignty to a ‘One World Government.’
My ‘lodestars’ aren’t the destructive creatures of history’s fame.
Give me Idries Shah for my nourishment. Big, beautiful Buddha and the Christ...... and whatever it was and still is which provided the spiritual reality for those untold generations who lived aeons before ‘our’ Great Souls of the last few thousand years.
Off to work and next week will be good for early seedlings to complement the daffodils, hyacinths, snowdrops and polyanthus already in flower...... and, of course, I ‘forgot’, there is no dark side to the moon..... it’s just the farside ......so it is dark inasmuch as we never get to see it.
I revisited ‘The Life of Brian’ yesterday. This is always profound and profoundly funny and probably explains today.