The Promised Land or a Better World? - A Lamentation

Copyright Brookings.edu

I will say that, on occasion, I have considered that should I be buried, which I probably won't because like so many other natural, normal things in life that in times past one could have taken utterly for granted have now become, in these modern times, prohibitively expensive; I should have had upon my tombstone the following words taken from a poem I wrote more than 30 years ago: "I cannot conform to this and yet I am a part of this, and to this part I do and must conform."

But as I ponder this same world, here and now, in the year Anno Domini 2014, still - for the most part - alive and well, I can resonate as strongly as ever with those spontaneous words of my youth.

This is not the world of my childhood innocence. It is not the world of my dreams and expectations. What savagery was a child to expect?

What measures of utter lawlessness, killing, slaughter, tragedy, illness - mental illness, manipulation, skullduggery and greed are right and appropriate? By whose determination have we mindlessly become our own worst nightmare? Is this what we really want?

 Whose land is it anyway? Did God say "this is yours - and yours alone", a Promised Land? And if He did, which I cannot believe for a moment, all others must go away, depart, and yield. 

What utter nonsense that a God that has created Worlds upon Worlds, Suns upon Suns, Solar Systems upon Solar Systems, Galaxies upon Galaxies by the billion, and all the Infinite Universe should so sub-divide us frail humans from ourselves.

Why? 

Science will tell us, for all the merit that I give to science which isn't much, that we have 99% in common with the chimpanzee.

Should we then, in the remaining 1% so alienate ourselves as Jews, or Arabs, Sunnis or Shia, white or black, good men or bad, from one another?

Chaos is not surprising - it is inevitable when we seek to divorce ourselves from any common whole. To love our neighbor is to mock our neighbor. To do that which is right and just and very meet is to spy upon, connive against, undermine and cheat our neighbor.

"I cannot conform to this and yet I am a part of this, and to this part I do and must conform."

I went on in that poem of my youth, as youths do, to contemplate a grander scale... "But there, in outer sphere, lies greater Truth", until the normalcy of this world led me to add: "That so lying is ruler and is ruled in equal consequence and ridicule."

People walk through crop circles in a field near Raisting, southern Germany, on July 28, 2014. KARL-JOSEF HILDENBRAND / DPA via AFP - Getty Images.

In recent weeks - when 298 passengers and crew were shot out of the sky, and grown men in that Promised Land killed milk-suckling babes, or else hid them in harm's way depending upon which lie we chose not to believe - some of the most startling unearthly symbols and metaphors have "miraculously" appeared in wheat fields in southern England and Bavaria. We call them 'crop circles' and dismiss them with the same ease and disregard as we would swat a fly.

And carry on the slaughter of innocents in Gaza and elsewhere.

 But in this philosophy - this world to which we all must belong and conform - I do not believe in innocents, no matter how tragically young they may appear. 

We are all a part of one immeasurable Whole. There is no Jew without an Arab, no Sunni without a Shia, no good or black man without a bad or white one. We are the human race, and only unless, or until, we see ourselves as inhabiting a world spinning noiselessly through space - though I suspect that had we those ears to hear, it would be the most exquisite and ecstatic of all sounds: that rushing, whirling Cosmic wind; a planet we are in the slow, uncalculated process of destroying through our mindless, wanton, careless, reckless abandon of all that it means to be human; of all the diversity and divinity of miraculous earthly life; of all such illumined beings we profess to follow and revere - The Christ, The Buddha, The Krishna, Moses and the like - we shall continue the madness and the lunacy that spells nothing but war, misery, and ultimate annihilation.

 I cry inside. I weep for a better, different world.

I yearn to awaken from this nightmare. 

Must we listen to the empty words of politicians - more than 40 alleged pedophiles amongst them from that England of my youth? Must we walk past beggars in the street to stand before the ATMs to fill our shopping carts?

I am not yet dead. If truth be told, I hope my better years are yet to come; but those words upon my tombstone - from all that I see in the turmoil of this senseless world - are yet to be erased.