The maze at German adventure park Erlebnispark Teichland. Sometimes, life’s like that. Copyright © 2014 by HuffPost.
War, war is stupid
And people are stupid
And love means nothing
In some strange quarters
“The War Song,” Culture Club
THE WORLD seems to be at war. Inside our homes and outside, on our streets, at this moment at the start of 2024. Families that have known each other for decades and strangers who will never meet. My world, and yours, with all the conflicts of everyday personal life, and the wider world—the Middle East, Asia, Africa, South America, Europe…the thudding beat goes on, heavier, harder, racing to burn up more hearts and lives. We are at war with ourselves as much as against each other. World War 3 by any other name.
You might ask how we got here. We’ve always been here, at some time or another. How crazy is it, that we have weapons of mass destruction we’ve agreed to as acceptable, “legal"? Crazier than that, because we’re always angry. The aftermath of a pandemic, unnatural natural disasters, hot hot summers, rising prices and lowered expectations, all kinds of people who don’t get all kinds of things they really should get…this has ever been our lot, in cycles. We’ve a right to be angry and to our means of expressing it.
Only there’s a tipping point. As a colleague and friend recently pointed out to her constituents: Don’t wait until you’re boiling to let me know something’s wrong. Tell me before you get that pissed off. Please.
Maybe that’s what’s missing, who is missing: the thoughts, words and actions of a reasonable man or woman. There was a time consensus was good for business, for resolution and progress. Now, the poles we gather round proudly isolate and divide us. We are, presumably, safe in our ignorance—or denial—of another way.
Where others see silos, though, I’m trying to see the dots failing to light up. They are there; they’re just not showing the connections.
Looking Outward
Don’t tell me we like it. Don’t tell try to convince me, as many on either side would have it, that we enjoy being at odds with our brothers and sisters. That this is the truest aspect of our human nature. I know I don’t like it. I have two older brothers and one sister, the youngest of us at fifty-three, now, with the oldest being sixty-three. I have never liked fighting with any of them, at any age, even when I knew my cause was righteous and just. I’ve never felt I’ve gained as much as I’ve lost, it didn’t matter if the difference between us was great.
Maybe because our Dad always used to say, “People have to dialogue to get along.” And Mom would back that up with “That’s right. And respect each other, and love each other as they would wish to be loved.”
Looking outward from the home front, I’d also say no one likes being accused of genocide, or to be called a mad aggressor, or sore loser. No one likes to be viewed as a destroyer, unjust and unjustified. None of us likes to subjugate or condemn, be accused of vengeance, avarice or spite; not if being human, truly, and giving expression to it wholly as such, means anything good to us. Something useful, upon which we can collectively build and move forward.
In our defense, it may not be that we’re fighting fights we shouldn’t be fighting (though we’re doing that, too). We’re fighting fights that—advanced as we are, enlightened as we are—we should by now know how not to fight. It was painful to see the lack of meaningful interaction and interconnection between Bajan blacks and whites at the NIFCA literary arts gala last November. While everyone came to support some of our literature, not everyone came to support all of our stories, racialized as they couldn’t help but be. The evening was an uneasy yet entertaining socio-cultural mix of book launch by Emile Straker of The Merrymen fame and celebration of the best of our local literature as curated by the National Independence Festival of Creative Arts over the last fifty years. Rather telling was who left pretty much right after the launch, who seemed ready to rush to the second half of the program.
Red Pills and Blue Pills
No one is untouchable, or unreachable, in our world of conflict over land, resources, nationalistic pride, or the need simply to dominate. The young, our children, remain most at risk. What kind of society do we really want them to inherit? We can’t hope for an improvement in our environment or circumstances until we initiate the necessary improvement in ourselves, as individuals, first.
Yet we haven’t figured out the option that is neither A or B, black or white, stay or go, retaliation or capitulation, the red pill or the blue pill...rather an antidote all its own. That third way we used to talk about.
Part of the problem is that we’ve come to view every conversation, every interaction, every relationship as a negotiation—or not. We want, in other words, what we want, regardless of shared perspectives or common goals, regardless of the consequences of having what we once wanted. Even when our own works, what the late noted Barbadian writer John Wickham called “the things worthy of care and respect and preservation,” such as millennia of “paintings and carvings and landscapes and music and animals,” teach us repeatedly that acts of tyranny or revenge are not a sustainable policy for the peaceful prosperity of the human race.
Most choices we make are made in ignorance of their full consequences. Art/history is a great teacher, but it’s usually after the fact and when the circumstances of events have changed. We can’t see the future in our present. It’s often hard to say we’d honestly make better choices even if we did. But that is where it starts: not with what the other has done or will do, rather with what we do.
One of the greatest strengths of our things worthy of care is how they compel us to seriously, constructively consider and confront who we truly are, including why we view others as we do. And, in so doing, this helps us to gain a better understanding of other ways of thinking, feeling and reflecting. These things worthy of care, “our own things,” Wickham called them, both identified by and belonging to all of us, like the works produced at NIFCA, could still plot the path to that third way. They could still be a choice for shared higher ground.
Robert Edison Sandiford is the cofounding editor with the poet Linda M. Deane of ArtsEtc Inc. He is the author of several award-winning books and well-received graphic novels. Read more by Robert at dcbooks.ca, nbmpub.com and writersunion.ca/member/robertedison-sandiford.
Last Modified: August 13, 2024
