Reaping the Whirlwind
Remembrance Sunday, 2004

Children’s Story

Once an otter came to King Solomon and complained, “Your Majesty, didn’t you decree that wild creatures must live in peace together?”
“And who has violated my decree?” demanded the king.
“The weasel,” answered the otter. “When I went down to the river to hunt for food, I gave my babies to the weasel to watch over, and it devoured them all. He deserves to die!”
So Solomon summoned the weasel and asked him, “Did you kill the otter’s children?”
The weasel replied, “Yes, your majesty, but I didn’t do it on purpose. You see, I heard the woodpecker pounding on the war drums, calling me to battle, and as I rushed to fight, I accidentally trampled the otter’s children.”
So Solomon called the woodpecker and asked him, “Did you summon the weasel to war by thundering on your drum?”
And the woodpecker replied, “I did, my lord, but only because I saw the scorpion sharpening its dagger.”
So the king had the scorpion brought before him and said, “Why were you sharpening your dagger?”
The scorpion answered, “Because I saw the tortoise polishing his armour.”
The tortoise told the king, “I was only polishing my armour because I saw the crab honing it sword.”
And the crab explained, “I was honing my sword because I saw the lobster swinging its javelin.”
And when the lobster stood before the king, it said, “I was swinging my javelin because I saw the otter coming down to the water to devour my children.”
Then the king turned to the otter and said, “The weasel is not guilty. He who sows death shall reap it.”

(Traditional Jewish tale, taken from The Soul’s Almanac, Aaron Zerah, page 76)

A short passage in the newspaper caught my eye last month. It concerned a letter received by a head teacher.

The letter is written in capitals in black pen. At one point, black has been substituted for red and the sentence underlined. The tone is aggressive and threatening, and implies that legal advice has been sought. It is a letter from a parent to the head teacher of middle school in the south of England. It is an accusation of bullying. It is the first the school has heard of it.

The father who has written the letter has not come to discuss the problem with the child’s teacher. He has gone for the nuclear option. He believes his child can bear no responsibility and the other child has to be removed immediately from his vicinity. He wants a phone call TODAY and a response IN WRITING because he has “BEEN ADVISED TO RETAIN ALL DOCUMENTATION.”

So, a bullying letter complaining about someone else’s bullying, hopefully the kind of correspondence a head doesn’t have to contend with too often. Except they do.
(Education Guardian, page 6, 19th October 2004.)

The irony of his attitude was probably lost on this particular irate father. His son was being bullied, so he would use bullying tactics to remedy matters. But it’s always difficult to perceive these ironies from the inside: the irony of Christian groups fighting each other over which one is following the Prince of Peace better; the irony of Muslims and Jews – sons and daughter of Abraham – fighting in the Middle East; the irony of a religion-saturated and immensely wealthy world which consistently countenances the appalling fact that a significant proportion of its inhabitants live in abject poverty and fear. And, of course, the ultimate irony, that, like the otter in the story I told the children, we never really see ourselves as involved in the mayhem we witness all around us.

The disturber of the peace is always someone else. Anyone who has ever worked with children can see this principle demonstrated daily. Anyone who has ever tried to sort out a playground brawl will know what I mean. “He started it!” “No, I didn’t!” “Yes, you did!” is the general pattern, and it leaves the exasperated teacher with little option but to separate the participants, calm their tempers, and send them off in different directions, leaving the question of who instigated the fracas up to God to sort out. Apparently, when Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he set himself the task of writing a history of the world. One day a scuffle broke out outside his cell and he went to investigate, but even after a close questioning of the men involved he couldn’t get to the bottom of how the row started. Going back into his cell he realised the futility of his self-imposed task: if he couldn’t determine the cause of a fight which took place that very day outside his own room, what chance did he have of making a fair assessment of the epic conflicts of history?

Sir Walter Raleigh’s humility is salutary, and it might be no bad thing if contemporary politicians were as alert to nuance and complexity as he was. Wouldn’t it be interesting if President Bush were to say, “I’m really at a loss to know what’s behind all this trouble in the Middle East. Maybe we should put our operations on hold for a while, stop pointing the finger at supposed terrorists, and look at this issue afresh. Maybe we’re more to blame than we realise.” Of course, had he said this before the election, he would have polled fewer votes than Ralph Nader. We get the politicians we deserve, and Bush received the largest personal vote in American history precisely because his own simplistic finger-pointing reflects the scapegoating mentality of the electorate.

Yes, the perpetrator is always someone else. This is what our politicians tell us, and this is what we want them to tell us, so that we can go on behaving as we’ve always behaved, comfortable in the knowledge that we are the innocent victims of other people’s malice. But the spiritual traditions cut across this delusion. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus confronts the complacency of those who would protest their own virtue. With characteristic hyperbole, he challenges those of us who claim, “But I’ve never killed anybody,” to look a little closer at our own motives and our own actions.

“You’ve heard that it was said to the people of the past, ‘You shall not kill, because whoever kills will be brought before the judge.’ But I say to you, that whoever consistently maintains anger towards another person will be brought before the judge. And whoever uses words of contempt about another person will also be liable to judgement; and whoever calls someone an idiot deserves the fires of Gehenna.” (Matthew 5:21-22, my translation.)

And, of course, a little later he tells us that we are all very quick to point out the speck in someone else’s eye, while blithely ignoring the log that is in our own. (Matthew 7:3)

What applies to individuals applies also to nations. How we love an enemy to project our fear and our hatred on to! The recent magnificent three-part BBC series The Power of Nightmares, showed how our collective need to fear and to hate have helped to create demonic figures out of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein (neither of whom I would particularly like to have dinner with, by the way), and sinister organisations of terror such as Al Quaeda, just to give us pegs on which to hang our hatred. When Russia’s “evil empire” fell in the late eighties, a hate vacuum was created which was psychologically disturbing. Against whom could our leaders fulminate? Whom could we blame for our problems? Thankfully, the gap has been filled, and again we have someone else, or something else, to blame for our anxieties. George Orwell saw this coming half a century ago. In his novel 1984, the world is divided into three warring factions, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, with alliances shifting periodically, but “always the enemy of the moment represented absolute evil.” Orwell saw that in all totalitarian states – and even in states like our own which pretend to be democracies – in the absence of genuine religion, domestic control is always easier if there are enemies abroad.

Of course, you may point out that such considerations don’t apply to us living here in Ireland, because, as President MacAleese said at her inauguration on Thursday, we are a neutral country and our neutrality is our strength. But just how neutral can any country be if its economy is driven by the twin fuels of gasoline and greed? We may stand apart formally from both Britain and the USA, but their guns and tanks keep the pipelines open, and their consumers buy our products, facts that were not lost on the Irish government when it prudently allowed American warplanes to land at Shannon last year. Ideological principles, it seems, will always take second place to economic prosperity.

So, if our pragmatic politicians are oblivious to the ironies in which we are immersed, who will point them out to us? Our religious leaders? Hardly. The religious authorities are generally committed to the political status quo and to convention, and their ludicrous dogmatism helps to perpetuate the very divisions they purport to lament. Just last Wednesday, as I was returning from England, I picked up a free copy of the Catholic weekly newspaper, The Universe. The headline on the first page told of a scandal in the Marian shrine of Fatima in Portugal, where the Dalai Lama had recently said prayers for peace at the altar which stands on the very spot where the Virgin Mary allegedly appeared in 1917. The article said that thousands of emails had been sent to the authorities in protest against such a desecration, and that the Vatican had called for the Bishop of Fatima to be replaced. You couldn’t make it up! And religion is supposed to be a source of healing and unity in our world.

Sometimes the ironies of our situation are best pointed out by the unlikeliest of people, the genuine prophets that the world throws up in places where we least expect them. Remember, it was the little child who was prepared to say that the emperor had no clothes. One such prophet in recent times was the American comedian Bill Hicks, who sadly died from pancreatic cancer in 1993. Bill Hicks had no time for time-serving religious authorities of any persuasion. “You have women priests now,” he said. “Fine. Now there are two sets of people that I won’t be paying any attention to.” But for all his mocking and his apparent blasphemy, he was able to expose contemporary idiocies and hypocrisies with almost messianic zeal, and in a way matched by few others of his generation. Performing at the time of the first Iraq war in 1991, he punctured the patriotic rhetoric in formidable fashion.

“Oh, Iraq, they have incredible weapons, incredible weapons,” (says President Bush).
“How do you know that?”
“Well….we looked at the receipt……but as soon as that cheque clear we’re going in. What time’s the bank open? Eight? We’re going in at nine…for God ‘n’ country….

As Bill Hicks says, if the people in the world’s so-called trouble spots were fighting each other with sticks and stones or bows and arrows, we wouldn’t need to send in our peacekeeping forces. But, in the Middle East, in Kosovo, in the Sudan, and in numerous other places they are using some pretty sophisticated equipment. And where does it come from? From America, Britain, Russia, France, China – the world’s biggest manufacturers of armaments. And, just to compound the ironies, these are the very nations which comprise the Security Council of the United Nations!

America, says Hicks, is the biggest culprit. It keeps arming these countries and then blowing them to bits. “We’re like the bullies of the globe. We’re like Jack Palance in the movie Shane, throwing the pistol at the sheep herder’s feet.

“Pick it up.”
“I don’t want to pick it up. You’ll shoot me.”
“Pick up the gun.”
“I don’t want any trouble, mister. I just come to town to get some hard rock candy for my kids and some gingham for my wife. I don’t even know what gingham is, but she goes through about ten rolls a week. Let me get back to my sheep farm, mister. I don’t want no trouble.
“Pick up the gun. (three gunshots) You all saw him. He had a gun.

A gross oversimplification, no doubt. But sometimes we need to strip off the fancy wrapping and expose the tawdry mess in all its starkness. The plain fact is, that like the father in the piece with which I began, we are helping to generate the very things we so strenuously condemn. The western economies are heavily dependent upon arms production and arms sales, on a continuing supply of cheap oil, and on ever expanding markets, factors which involve us in activities which are intrinsically aggressive. Our popular culture, which we see as liberated and innocuous, is viewed by many as debauched and decadent and corrupting, and they are prepared to fight to prevent its incursion into their own territory. The western world helps create the terrorists it has to fight. We are bullies who don’t even know we are bullying. And, in the words of a more conventional prophet than Bill Hicks: If you sow the wind, be prepared to reap the whirlwind. (Hosea 8:7)

14th November 2004