Author: RJ

 

It’s been said more than once that human beings are governed by three key motivators:  money, power, and sex.   Certainly we don’t have far to look for confirmation, the media chock full of daily tidbits and then there is our own recall of people who have failed us and, more humbly, the strength of these tempters in our own lives.  I am reminded of the biblical injunction, “He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.”

But fortunately, this isn’t the whole story.  The vast majority of us have a capacity for thinking and doing the right things.  The other day, I read of a man finding $40,000 and turning it in;  a few months earlier, of a man who donated his kidney to a complete stranger.  I’m sure you have your own stories to tell.  One thing I always marvel at is the abundance of altruism unveiling itself in every disaster such as the recent tornado in Joplin, with stories of individual heroism, sacrifice, and mutual caring.  When we listen to the news, we rarely glimpse this positive dimension, the news feeding on the aberration, ultimately distorting our perspective as to the norm.

If there does exist a diabolic trinity for wrongdoing and, yes, downright evil, I would counter there also exists a trinity of salient potential in human beings for truth, beauty, and goodness, those classical verities of what make for an ordered civilization and happy living.

By truth, I mean our quest for the meaningful life, or as Tolstoy would have it, “For what should I live?”  I write in Aristotelian mode, holding that truth is learned rather than innate, the aggregate of empirical witness via observation and correlated experiences.  Truth, however, is more elusive than ever in our contemporary era, given the shrinking of temporal and spatial boundaries in the Information Age,  digital driven, with a resulting conundrum of universals washed away by a tsunami of alternatives.  Abetting ambiguity, is the rise of Post Modernism with its relegation of certainty to the landfill of relativism, truth simply personal perspective.  Me, I think what matters is that we are engaged in trying to find truth, at least for ourselves, truth not subject to our personal whims, truth validated by thorough, unbiased research, truth ready to be shed should we find tomorrow we believed yesterday’s falsehood. As the poet Browning put it,  “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.”

By beauty, I mean not simply what excites because it’s “pretty” or makes me happy.  That’s  Hollywood stuff.  I mean something in the classical sense possessing wholeness, proportion, and the insightful.  Beauty is related to truth.  A sad story, a tragedy if you will, can still transcend pathos when it depicts life wholly, or with verisimilitude, free of sentiment and need for closure.  If I leave off a book somehow made wiser, then I have found beauty.  Keats had it right when he wrote at the end of his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,”  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty–that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” 

By goodness,  I mean something akin to what the Greeks called ethos, which I equate with integrity–the giving of one’s highest measure, a workman never ashamed.  Of the trio of classical virtues, this is the most neighborly, the one  most consequential  for the social, or interpersonal, since it implies our responsibility to be mindful of others.  It’s the glue holding society together.  As the term suggests,  it’s the virtue embracing the ethical.  Whatever I do when no one’s looking, or in anonymity, I test my ethos, or caring and social responsibility.  I still stop at the stop sign, even though no one’s there.  I still pay my taxes and do so honestly. I do not cheat in the class or on the time clock at work.  I do not forego fidelity to my spouse or betray a friend.  I think of the chaos of a world where each of us played by our own rules.

The Greeks had a marvelous word for the coalescence of these virtues:  arete, or wholeness.  Together they provide balance, the secret to the elusive happy life.

Despite the disasters that happen so frequently these days, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, and tornadoes, there often exist those aspects of courage, kindness, and the miraculous where, even against all odds, perseverance wins out and the heart is warmed and inspired.  We sometimes forget, however, that animals also suffer in these calamities, made worse by their dependency.  Surviving, they oten find themselves without their human families, with slow starvation or death by exposure their ultimate prospect. A lucky few, all too few, find rescue through dedicated teams of animal relief organizations.  And a very few make it on their own.  Let me share with you by way of You Tube the story of a little terrier in Alabama who did just that, becoming a symbol of hope for human sufferers as well. 

 

The news media has widely reported the capture yesterday of the notorious Bosnian Serb war criminal, Ratko Mladic, wanted for his leadership role in the massacre of 7,500 men and boys from the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995.  He will now be handed-over to the International Criminal Tribunal to face trial.  It’s justice long overdue.

Concurrently, yesterday saw the capture of one of history’s worst mass killers since Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and yet it’s a story you have to search for diligently, since it’s been so grievously under reported by Western newspapers in their callous, ethnocentric dismissal of third world people. Do they not value their own lives, too?

In any event, the UN announced yesterday the arrest of 52 year old Bernard Munyagishari in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  He was wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity in Rwanda in 1994.  Bad as Mladic’s crimes are, they pale in the context of Munyagishari’s chilling machete bloodbaths, resulting in the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus in 1994, while the Western world and Africa itself looked the other way.  Obviously, white, European Yugoslavia and African politics were in play, not the black members of a minority tribe in a distant country once colonized by the Belgians.  Former President Clinton, however, did recently express regret for his administration having looked the other way and the American government has been offering a 5 million dollar reward for information leading to his capture.

A former teacher and soccer coach, Munyagishari  became the major leader of the Hutu militias that carried out the genocide taking place in just 100 days between April and June 1994. He also co-founded the Interahamwe, a militia whom he stocked with weapons.  Their specific mission was to capture, rape, then murder Tutsi women.

Munyagishari will be extradited to Tanzania, where he will stand trial before the Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).  Since 1994, it has rendered 46 judgments, with 8 acquitted and 9 under appeal.  Recently it sentenced army general Augustin Bizimungu to a 30-year term for preparing lists of Tutsis to be executed.  Unfortunately, there are still nine other major players being sought, among them Felicien Kabuga, a financier at the time.  A number of Hutu militia may have emigrated to Canada.

It’s been 17-years, confirming that often the wheels of justice grind slowly and, alas, sometimes not at all.  What sticks in my throat, however, is our frequent Western indifference and ignorance, for  cruelty has no border.  I remember the poet Yeats’ trenchant observation of volatile contemporary life:  “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”  We are all brothers and sisters, whatever our color, ethnicity, religion, or politics.  The horrors of Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo retain their indelible wounds and cry out for justice, but do those of the third world bleed any less?