NASA Image of the Day

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Thought for the Day

Nothing is quite as effective at erasing the creative spirit - the gentle gardener, the quiet painter, the passionate sculptor, the contemplative builder of men's spirits and men' natural aptitudes and abilities, including the gentle dignity of the reliable workman's sensibility - than the innate and complete destructiveness of the arrogant, braying assumptions of a bully.

Having no sense of the possible in themselves, their only satisfaction comes from killing it in others, and when it is finally turned on them, as a methodology, their bewilderment is the sadness of kings.

Theirs is the victory of the death of all things which bring healing, and solace, and comfort, and joy: music, and song, the growing beauty of flowers and good food, the smell of fresh baked bread on a sunny afternoon, and the warmth of a glass of wine, on a crisp autumn day. They know only excess, and so see only its surety, in even the simplest of pleasures or gestures - even friendship. A gesture of friendship becomes, instead, a harbinger of unfaithfulness, an indicator of disloyalty, and a measure of marital infidelity. It is the essence of ignorance and gossip, and all that these two, in tandem, cause. It has nothing else to spur it, save conjectures on these same, and the ensuring necessity to kill this, too.

Knowing only ignorance, violence, jealousy, mockery, passivity and aggression, without any real sense of prior celebrative creativity, and a complete disdain for the efforts of others to bring a different quality to life, rather than simply trying to protect this gift, this is all they can cultivate - and their fruits are the death, even, of a moment of Kindness. Even this becomes suspect.

Life is one unending pattern of competition without any clear purpose, and instilling this constant sense of bullying in others - not to create a gentle comaraderie, or a sense of "becoming one's best self", but to crush the individuality, uniqueness, and personal sense of purpose specific to each human being. One can never, thereafter, know joy, or celebrate success, since its own sure result is envy, avarice, and the resentment of others, rather than the good wishes of one's friends and relations.

It is the bomber's removal of the joy of the working man's economy, and the stability, and the laughter, and the possibility for the next generation, that this gentle hum of day to day accomplishment ensures, at last.....

It is its own death, and the death, too, of all sense of belonging, in an often brutal and uncaring world.

It never cares beyond what it provokes - instead of what it might inspire, and, truly, that is its greatest Tragedy. Even grief allows for the possibility of acceptance: bullying cannot even allow for this momentary withdrawal.

Seeing itself, finally, its rage is selfincendiary.