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What About This…? 4.16.2015

By Wayne William Cipriano

We ask, “Why do they hate us so much?” I am talking about those in the Middle East that we see so often leading the “hate parades,” in rock throwing mobs, shooting at us, blowing themselves up near us, even beheading us.

We ask why are they so invested in attacking a people, a culture, a country that is thousands of miles from them when there are much easier targets closer? Find their location on a map and look in pretty much any direction and you can find many people who do not share their values, their religion, their economic philosophies that are much more vulnerable and yet, we and our closest allies are singled out for destructive attention.

Why do they hate us so much? Is it so very hard to lay out a list of their reasons?

But, rather than trace a history of tit for tat, of researching who went first, who had a just cause, who was the more injured or the most wrongly harmed, which side or sides lost the greater or acted the more unconscionably or with greater barbarity, instead of spending time arguing those issues, why not just… stop?

What is the difference now, in happenings that are so minutely intertwined that they can never be separated, who made the first error, committed the first “unforgiveable” trespass, struck the first “unreasonable” blow. And what would we do with that information even if we could ferret it out?

All of us understand how hard it is to let go of an injury done to us, especially when we feel such an injury was undeserved. But how often is that factual? How often is there NO reason whatsoever for the hurt we received? How often can such an injury be seen by everyone as without any sort of justification, but seen by one and all as evil, completely without reason? In the case of insanity, total irrationality, there may exist no reason at all for that first injury, but how often is that really the case?

Someone somewhere always seems to have a reason, crazy as it sounds to others, as wrong as wrong can be to the receiver of the injury, but a reason none the less. And, so the occurrence of such an injury with right on one side and innocence on the other side, makes retribution a requirement. And, off we go.

Seeking cosmic symmetry, even by fair or equal or proportional retribution is never achieved because it is never fair or equal or proportional, is it? Even when such retribution is accurately delivered, someone always objects.

And what about retribution, fair or equal or proportional, that mistakenly destroys people and things totally uninvolved in the bellicosity? What happens then? Who is responsible? The people who delivered the retribution or the people whose unforgivable actions required such retribution?

It would take a whole lot of people a whole lot wiser than I to make some sort of calculus by which we could judiciously settle such mind-numbing collections of circumstances. And without such a calculus, when we find ourselves in such a predicament, as we so often seem to do, that has no discernable beginning and will never stop unless we stop it. Why not just….stop?