War, like anything that seeks to injure others, is a waste of time, a failure to savor what time so slightly, so conditionally, offers.

Efforts to inflict injury on others are a waste of one's scant existential stint, because they guarantee that one's intentions will not be fulfilled. Violent or aggressive actions taken by one group against another, or by one individual against another, are born of a sense of injury, lacking, or hunger. It is the overwhelming experience of this sort of existential hunger, or discontinuity, that pushes otherwise rational beings to commit acts that can have no fulfilling outcome.

Individual or communal wholeness cannot be restored through destructive acts, because one depletes by those same acts the humanity which is the basis of one's own character and import.

And yet, we made war, in our way. We used the weapons available to us, from intimate knowledge of emotional geometries, and we took on aggressive projects of mutual retaliatory attack. This does not, cannot, bring about the end of emptiness, but amplifies it, exponentially, deepens it, stratifies and entrenches it.

So easy it is to let go of all the wisdom acquired in hopeful and engaging times, and to begin to trade on the gamble that there may be wisdom to be gained from darkness as well. All the drudgery of decent living, all the harmony of inaction, cannot repay what is sacrificed in fits and starts of lazy, luxuriant aggression...

© 2002 Joseph Robertson

 

THE GIFT OF WHOLENESS
JOSEPH ROBERTSON

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