Bury the grave-diggers – Bring on the visionaries - Alcyonenews

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Posted December 27, 2024

Bury the grave-diggers – Bring on the visionaries

“It is no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then” - Alice in Wonderland said. This is very important. In effect, Lewis Carroll was corroborating Heraclitus who observed that “Change is the only constant”. Living is being Dynamic - being Dead is Static, Isaac Newton insinuated. Was the Earth to be immobile like the Pontiff’s theologues tried to “teach” rebel Galileo, there would be day without night to cool us and the Sun would fry us.

We are often told to learn from history for if we do not, we are bound to repeat errors our forefathers made. This is a tad indeterminate. Harnessing horses to carriages was not an error. Nor was the use of steam engines to relieve the horses. But it was a tragic error to do Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Evidently we can err without precedent. Just look at the utterly stupid “error” of letting super-idiots “leading” us to spend 2% of our resources on Peace-protective nukes with which to kill our “enemies” before they incinerate “peace-loving and awfully righteous” us, thereby imperiling Peace-on-Earth by eliminating us and our peace-protecting nukes. Is there some link missing in my chain of thought?

We often read about instances of justice triumphing over time. We delight in cops swarming some decrepit centenarian who sometime in his youth evaded the Justice system and did a lasting DIY reform job on himself. This because such villains skip the reformatory courses written in law and provided in classsrooms with bars on the windows. When they are detected by alert justice chaps, such escapees are dashed to the justice shops for His Lordship to order them to cease and desist being decent of their own volition and justly compel them to behave as taught in Jail instead of doing right freely on his own will. We are lead to become elated when the “long arm of the Law” reaches so long. Incidentally, citizens Equality suffers as Charon may cut short the old-man’s reform.

Yes, we do have laws, “Statutes of Limitation” prohibiting this cruelty, but people of deficient sense of decency have punched holes in those laws rendering them into sieves to let revenge through.

I should be remiss were I to leave the impression that I talk merely about individuals having averted the Justice shops. I do know that whole societies have wronged others or even parts of themselves, especially “Minorities”. Yes, there are societies who, by imposing their “culture” onto people of other cultures, have done and do untold harm on lots of people and sometime to the whole humankind. Consider the Christians who imposed the Dark Ages on the world by outlawing and persecuting Civilization.

In the Greek grammar school I attended, it was drummed into us that our purpose in life was to kill Turks and retrieve the Hagia Sophia Cathedral for the Orthodox Christians. Can you imagine the amount of blood it would take to clean the Cathedral? All this to revenge a crime committed long years long ago with the perpetrators and the victims having vanished over the horizon of time.

Ok, let’s consider Crime and Punishment, the popular notion of Justice in our society. I glanced at the subject and ended up perplexed. I will try to forget what I “learned” and I will do as Humpty Dumpty and make words means just what I choose them to mean – neither more nor less.

I gather Justice meant to be “Fair Revenge”. But “fair revenge” is of course an oxymoron akin to “military intelligence”.

Yes, the instinct of revenge is common to living organisms, including humans of the “Bullies” version, plenty of whom hover about. If you kick someone’s butt, he instinctively will kick your ass. In Sicily of yesteryear this was “normal”, but civilization advanced and the self perpetuating renowned Sicilian vendetta diminished.

The scope of a true justice system is to prevent “kicking” altogether, at least outside a football field. This can be done in either of two broad ways: Scare the bullies with the prospect of being kicked back by a Judge, perhaps more than once, and the possibility of ending up caged. This sounds like terrorism, but so be it. The other way to prevent “kicking” is by impressing upon all and sundry that kicking leaves two losers and no winner. This is in the nature of things.

A villain, be an individual or a society, who has reformed itself is better than one who was forcefully “reformed” or who is merely restrained from offending. Enter into the equation the cost of incarceration and see the cost of judicial revenge growing unpalatable.

In wars big or small and in lesser adversarial processes, which “court battles”are, the greatest thing that can happen at any point in the battle is not the “Victory” each of the warring sides chase; far from that, the ultimate blessing is a “Cease fire”. Roughly accounting, was a cease fire to happen midway through WWII, 25 million people would not have been massacred, and $2Trillion would had not been spent on killing the “enemies” and destroying human habitat ( Million = a Thousand Thousands. A Trillion is a Million Millions). Having Half the War would have been half as as atrocious than doing the Whole, for all the “Enemies”. War must never be the path of least resistance to anything, be it a boot-kick or a Hiroshima! Bar none ...

At the stage of civilization we now are, it is easily arguable that the prevention of injustice is or must be the ultimate pursuit of a fair justice system. It is grossly imprudent to stand back, immobile as if pillars of salt, awaiting the current social set to self-correct.

Bury the grave-diggers, bring on the visionaries.