Paris Mourns Again & We Continue to Manufacture Arms for Extremists

Good vs. Evil. It's such a wonderful, black and white thing. I almost envy people who believe they're two opposite absolutes; it's such a simple concept to get your head around. But it never worked for me. It makes more sense to think there's a continuum from absolute ignorance to absolute consciousness of love. We're born with our consciousness being somewhere along that continuum, depending on our last life, and we use our emotions, experiences and intellect to shift along it, always being inextricably drawn towards the light.   

Since I was young I believed that nobody commits evil or hurts somebody else if they've had enough love. That everybody can be reached, no matter how depraved and/or cruel they are, and that the reason a person can't get through to somebody is because that person's understanding is lacking.   

I still mostly believe that but now I also understand that whatever people who maim, hurt and/or kill do or don't have by way of the essential experience of love, they have massive, twisted, distorted, rage and monumental entitlement to act it out, and self esteem is obliterated. It's a lethal combination. Sometimes they can be reached, sometimes you run great risk in trying and it's OK if you choose not to. And I realize now that maybe some people can't be reached in this lifetime of theirs.  

Yesterday, before I heard the news of the Paris tragedies, I watched a news clip about Mohammed Emwazi, allegedly killed by a drone strike. I was glad he was dead. The civilized part of me was overrun by a regret that he couldn't now be made to suffer in the way he inflicted suffering so viciously on others. But I wonder where his spirit is now. I wonder if it was always wrestling ferociously to escape the dark ignorance of Emwazi's consciousness that kept it from finding the light. I wonder if things have to get worse for it in the next couple of lifetimes before they get better, or if this was the nadir.

There’s so much of that horrible man's kind of entitlement, all over the world. It’s terrifying. It's also easy to focus on the extremists but let's not forget that the developed countries enable the violence with their massive arms industries. The top seven weapons exporters are USA $10bn+, Russia $5,9bn; China $1,9bn+, France $1,2bn+, Germany $1,1bn+, UK $1bn+, Israel $1bn+.

Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of Costa Rica, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987, said in 1998; 

“When a country decides to invest in arms, rather than in education, housing, the environment, and health services for its people, it is depriving a whole generation of its right to prosperity and happiness. We have produced one firearm for every ten inhabitants of this planet, and yet we have not bothered to end hunger when such a feat is well within our reach. “Our international regulations allow almost three-quarters of all global arms sales to pour into the developing world with no binding international guidelines whatsoever. Our regulations do not hold countries accountable for what is done with the weapons they sell, even when the probable use of such weapons is obvious.”

So many weapons being sold by countries who then suffer devastating loss, as in the US, UK, France… Governments try to contain the evil, the violence, to protect the innocent. They really do.

But only up to the point of stopping the manufacture and export of arms. That one they won’t do. 

They won’t even talk about it. I don't ever hear analysts, journalists, TV anchors, politicians say “the primary reason for all the violence in the world is that we all make too many guns. We all need to stop. Now. Today. This week. This month. This year.” Well, whether we want to face it or not, it's the biggest and most operative part of the problem. 

It's co-dependency of the worst sort, making weapons so psychopaths can act out their inhumane urges.