They say, Where goods don’t cross borders, guns do. I’d like to propose a corollary: When words aren't exchanged, bullets are. Bullets may be exchanged anyway, but the absence of dialogue makes it more likely. Now, a hardened hater might not respond to reason, but what about before he got into that condition? Maybe. Who knows what an extra ounce of prevention might have done?
Things build. Merely annoying misunderstandings can get quite ugly, especially should the conflict serve the interests of others, like identity politicians. So, I'm losing patience. I'm losing it with those who don’t appreciate the practice of commending and defending their most important ideas and values. And I am growing in appreciation of reasoned conversation unto truth, or dialectic. That simple childlike wonder could do so much good in the world (with grown-up acumen), that amazes me.
Merely inconvenient anti-intellectualism is one thing. One time, I politely made a theoretical comment at a new bible study, and the pastor's wife dismissed it (and me) as being “all head and no heart” (Lady, you just met me. How much heart is that? 🙂 ) But things seem more than personally inconvenient now, and the antipathy enrages me today. Why? The propaganda that fosters all the heinous violence on the news is so very thin! What happened to thinking for ourselves? People have lost interest I guess, and with it, skill. Also, they don’t see anyone caring, so why should they? It’s not a thing, to them.
Public school doesn’t help. “Think for yourself, oh, but not anything that's not on this card of acceptable secular-liberal belief.” Also of no help: the whole pseudo-polite aversion to ever talking politics and religion. It just makes us bad at such talk, which reinforces the aversion. (The state of that art is abysmal.)
So, the young are vulnerable to lies, and the lies foster violence… and all that is fostered by the neglect of those responsible for them. Now, I don’t mean to excuse the violent. It’s more that, as with transitioned kids, many passive parents are culpably not helping.
There's nothing new under the sun. Lies lash out, or people lash out with them. It happened to Socrates, Jesus, Solzhenitsyn, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and on 9/11. It's all over the news, and it's happened to many of us. It just seems like a good time to remember that the pen is mightier than the plane. The planes haven't stopped. Neither should the pens.
Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.