Gratitude and Sorrow

I woke up this morning, stumbled out of bed. Opened the blinds. I looked out on a silent, peaceful world. A slight breeze rustled the stalks of lavender flowers in the garden.

I had nothing threatening me. I don't have a palace or a mansion or even own a house but I rent an apartment with lots of space and light that looks onto a garden I don't have to maintain and an ocean that changes every minute of every day.

I have challenges and fears that keep me awake at night. But nobody hates me because of my religious beliefs or my nationality. Nobody believes I don't have any rights, or if they do I don’t have to pay attention to them. They have no power over me.

The country I live in is run by a corrupt lunatic but we still to a large extent have free speech. Citizens aren't imprisoned and tortured. He doesn't unleash chemical weapons and others of mass destruction on us. My village wasn't overrun by a sect composed of the most twisted of psychopath serial killers who hate women and who get off on torturing and executing anybody who disagrees with them. The women and children weren't raped and taken as sex slaves, or else killed.

I haven’t had to watch in terror as bombs rained down all around me, killing friends and family and razing the buildings until my town and my life was ravaged beyond repair. I haven’t had to risk a long and very unsafe boat journey to get away from the land and the home that in my heart I love, just so that I and my children could stay alive.

I haven’t had to witness my own child drowning and know that leaving home was for nothing after all and be in a strange land where I’m not welcome and I don’t know how long I can stay alive.

I haven’t had to walk for hundreds and hundreds of miles with nothing, through inhospitable territory, with winter coming on. I haven’t had to watch people erect barbed wire fences to keep me out as if I was some kind of rabid dog. I haven't had to explain that to my child.

I’m not the target of bigotry and prejudice from conservative citizens and politicians who hate me even though they’ve never met me. Who prop up their prejudice and fear with lies and don’t care about the truth. Who don’t care whether I or my children have food and warm clothing and shelter. Whether we find safety and even a bit of happiness or weep through day and night in despair. Whether we live or die.

Who in fact would rather we did all die so we wouldn’t be an inconvenience. For whom we have not an atom of value.

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.