Pondering the Need for Hope on a Grim Day in Everyday Ramblings
- March 22, 2016, 11:58 p.m.
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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 23, 2016
Lyn ⋅ March 22, 2016
Brava, good entry and fitting pic.
gypsy spirit ⋅ March 22, 2016
yes, violence is not okay. hugs p
=bernard= ⋅ March 23, 2016
Was listening to Charlie Rose this evening and according to one of the people he was interviewing this unfortunately is now the new normal.
noko =bernard= ⋅ March 23, 2016
That is so sad.
Deleted user ⋅ March 23, 2016
The only way to ever fight violence is to continue to practice and preach non- violence . Easy to say and hard to practice if you were sitting in the midst of war like the Syrian immigrants.
ODSago ⋅ March 27, 2016
Heartfelt and supported here. I do find that these young adult terrorists have found something to believe in that satisfies them. But it is a misguided belief.
Trump: someone said to me last week that he was a Trump fellow and that he has a good reason to vote for him. I turned away, replying, "Then let us not continue this conversation...there is no good reason."