Thoughts on Current Events

Westerners fill the colosseum to spectate the gladiators. They claim they don’t watch with glee, but so does the viewer of the action movie.

It is not happiness in the conventional sense. It is a vicarious thrill. We trick ourselves to believing that we face the risk of our protagonist. We get high off the adrenaline. We trust that when the movie ends we can go home safely with our high. We’re junkies.

They each pick their David and identify their Goliath. They curate stories to make Goliath seem mighty. An unmovable unit of force casting a shadow on the innocent. They project onto Goliath every bully they’ve ever faced. Everything alien that has conspired against them.

Colosseums attract opportunists. Every spectator walks through the gates with a vote and a wallet. Every ounce of anger can be redirected. The opportunist understand that the spectator wants to feel the fear of the battle without the risk. The opportunists are story-tellers, fabricating narratives for the battle they see before them. Narratives crafted for the thrill of viewer.

The sections of spectators split naturally to avoid any real confrontation among their fellow westerners. They know they’re nature, how quick they can be to devolve into gladiators themselves. They have the luxury to segregate themselves while they are immersed in the moment so that their jerseys and flags will be clean from blood.

The spectators feuds will be settled by the gladiators. They cheer the gladiators for donating blood to their causes. The gladiators believe that the spectators are donating their spirit to them.

Perhaps in some sense they actually are. But when the battle ends and the dust clears; when all the blood that can be spilled has been spilt; when a more entertaining fight appears; The spectators will leave. They have satiated themselves with the blood of the gladiators and their appetite focuses elsewhere.

I’m grateful for westerners who don’t enter the colosseum. I have hope when I hear people cry for God and not for vengeance.

Among those who abstain from the colosseum, are also those who believe themselves to have the solution.

The river of blood continues to flow, sweeping all life under its current. I have no blueprint for a dam. I am, however, skeptical that the blueprint is a five paragraph essay written in Boston or Washington.

Heschel writes: in The Mark of Cain:

A tale is told of a band of inexperienced mountain climbers. Without guides, they struck recklessly into the wilderness. Suddenly a rocky ledge gave way beneath their feet and they tumbled headlong into a dismal pit. In the darkness of the pit they recovered from their shock only to find themselves set upon by a swarm of angry snakes. For each snake the desperate men slew, ten more seemed to lash out in its place. Strangely enough, one man seemed to stand aside from the fight. When indignant voices of his struggling companions reproached him for not fighting, he called back: “If we remain here, we shall be dead before the snakes. I am searching for a way of escape from the pit for all of us.”

Our world seems not unlike a pit of snakes. We did not sink into the pit in 1939, or even in 1933. We had descended into it generations ago, and the snakes have sent their venom into the bloodstream of humanity, gradually paralyzing us, numbing nerve after nerve, dulling our minds, darkening our vision. Good and evil, that were once as real as day and night, have become a blurred mist. In our everyday life we worshiped force, despised compassion, and obeyed no law but our unappeasable appetite. The vision of the sacred has all but died in the soul of man. And when greed, envy, and the reckless will to power came to maturity, the serpents cherished in the bosom of our civilization broke out of their dens to fall upon the helpless nations.

I’d diverge from Heschel and say that good and evil have not become a blurred mist. In the eyes of the spectators there are no doubts over who is good and who is evil.

Humanity did not abandon morality, we learned to bend it to our will.