| by Amber Poole |
No.
Unfortunately.
No, is the answer.
As long as humanity equivocates over the issue of a child being murdered, either by war, genocide, famine, invasion, or acute neglect, then we shall not be at peace. When we justify the means by which a child is murdered and call it collateral damage and we justify this in our minds as the moral authority, the standard by which we base a principled life, then there will be no peace. As shocking as it is to me, there are those who are quite comfortable with Palestinian children being murdered, by whatever action, by bullets, bombs or by starvation; their suffering and their pain does not register on a human scale as they are not considered human, but Hamas. All the toddlers and the infants and the five year olds are collective terrorists as they voted Hamas in the last election and should rightfully be murdered. And if they didn’t vote Hamas, then they must belong to someone who did.
I think we all get caught in the trap of nationalism, religion, tradition, history, political party preferences, and develop our identity based on these constructs. Furthermore, there is a fear of judgement and the anxiety of uncertainty should we pick an uncomfortable truth or an eccentric path, the one less travelled as the saying goes. Stepping out of the stream as Krishnamurti was known to say is a hard thing to do, but to be held hostage to someone else’s talk, someone else’s ideology, will ultimately diminish our own abilities to think critically.
And, quite honestly, there is just not a single argument that I can sink my teeth into that would suggest I’m in favour of murdering any child.
Yet, I am complicit in that murder because I belong to this human race.
That is an uncomfortable truth.
Krishnamurti believed we were violent, conflicted beings who could not live in peace for these very reasons. However, he gave us hope that we could find a different way of living.
In a dialogue with Professor Allan W. Anderson, K. has this to say:
“And so gradually, as I see it, the mind becomes dull, restless, its curiosity is only in the direction of functioning. And it has no capacity to inquire. To inquire you must have freedom first. Otherwise I can’t inquire. If I have prejudices I can’t inquire. If I have conclusions about something I can’t inquire into it...if I want to inquire into religion, what is God, what is immortality, what is beauty – I can’t do it. I depend on authority. And I have no basis for reasoning...in this vast field of religion.”
- felt that war was the bloody projection of our own psychic conflict; all that was in us that is violent and conflicted makes war. If he’s right, then at some point, we will completely destroy ourselves; we have the technology to do so.
What did he mean in ‘A Wholly Different Way of Living’? I think he meant rejecting all forms of authority. He suggested we recognise the movement of our thoughts, to see the division in them, and most importantly to realise that it, is a psychological illusion to separate the observer from the observed. In his own words, ‘This timeless insight, brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.’
Czesław Miłosz wrote his poem, Campo Dei Fiori in 1943 during the Warsaw Uprising. He could smell the burning flesh. He wrote:
...they burned Giordano Bruno
Henchmen kindled the pyre
close-pressed by the mob.
Before the flames had died
the taverns were full again,
baskets of olives and lemons
again on the vendors’shoulders...
...But that day I thought only
of the loneliness of the dying,
of how, when Giordano
climbed to his burning
he could not find
in any human tongue
words for mankind,
mankind who live on.”
I remember when Zachary, my son, came inside the house from playing outdoors in the Houston heat. His neck was sweaty and his feet were dusty from wearing only sandals.
Dinner. I remember the smell of grilled hot dogs and the pungency of mustard reach my nose. The smell of the carbonation of the coke. Vanilla ice cream. It was summer.
The bath, his clean feet and his freshly washed neck, fragrant from the soap, from the bubbles in the tub.
Scooping him up in a towel and sticking him into his pajamas, lying next to him, falling asleep during story time are smells and sensitivities I cherish, nearly 40 years on.
What if he had been murdered during this day, at some point between the sweaty smells of his neckline and the pungency of the mustard or the clean feet and the sweet orange oil in the soap?
What if suddenly, within my reach, but not quite, a sniper got him and he fell to the ground, dead.
What if he hadn’t even the time to cry out, “Mama”. “Mama, come.”
The lonely, forgotten by the world, says Miłosz.
My baby, before story time, before the sandman comes, before dreams, comes death.
What if?
I can’t help but think of the mothers of the thousands of children murdered in Gaza. Not all of them survived, but the ones who did, do they tell a story of being within reach, but not quite; the loneliness of not hearing their child cry out: “Mama. Mama, come.”
The loneliness.
The murder of our children and what would I say if I stood before her and she knew I was complicit? How can I tell her that we do not carry our own chaos?
Mama. Mama, come.