Pondering the Need for Hope on a Grim Day in Everyday Ramblings

This garden path on a steep hillside up behind where I live seemed appropriate on this difficult day for the whole world with yet more brutal carnage in a place once considered safe and civilized.

There is something wrong, something so deeply wrong with young people caring so little about themselves and their families and only for some shining abstraction that they would kill and maim strangers in the name of an ideal.

No, wait; young people have been doing that all along. But under more formal state sanctioned events called wars. I think as a species we need something to believe in, particularly when we are young.

These groups give the hopeless, the disaffected, the underemployed something to believe in no matter how evil or pernicious.

My heart aches for the families of the dead and wounded, of course, and for the loss of the illusion of safety that is even more eroded than ever before.

Last night because it is Easter Break here and generally where it falls on the calendar I had a small class and unlike any yoga class I have ever been to before we found ourselves talking politics beforehand.

I think the only major candidate for our Presidency offering hope of a better future for our young people is Bernie Sanders. And what he offers is not practical but it is certainly attractive.

It seems to me that the best possible thing we can do to fight terrorism and to stop this slide into even more nihilistic violence is to find ways to bring hope to those who need it most.

One of the things that disturbs me so much about the folks that occupied our local wildlife refuge and Donald Trump, and the man who shot up the Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs and…

…is this idea that violence is okay.

Just for the record here, violence is not okay.

No matter how marginalized or discriminated against, or taken for granted folks are. I understand the impulse, I do, it is human when one feels threatened to lash out in defense. If they are armed, we must be too.

What will civil war prove?

So how do we disarm and find hope?

I haven’t a clue.

But I intend to find out. No matter how circuitous the path.

Last updated March 22, 2016