The Killers Are Everywhere, But Love Endures
By Edward Curtin
November 30, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - I am writing this
on the afternoon of the anniversary of the cold-bloodied murder of
President John F. Kennedy by a conspiracy organized and led by the
CIA on November 22, 1963.
I try to understand these people, how they could
so lack human feeling, how they could blow a man’s head apart
without hesitation. I can’t. I see his wife and small children at
his funeral.
I think of the drone attacks chosen by President
Obama that kill so many innocent people. I try to comprehend his
heart. I can’t.
I am sickened by the killers everywhere,
terrorists of every stripe who have no hesitation at extinguishing
lives. I keep picturing the young Palestinian boys blown apart on a
beach by Israeli soldiers as they kicked a soccer ball. What did
those Israeli soldiers feel? What do they feel now? Do they feel
remorse? Are they disturbed?
All over the planet, the killers are at their
trade. What did those killers feel as they pumped bullets into so
many innocents in Paris? I try to fathom their minds and hearts. The
French government, blood dripping from its hands, savages Libya and
Syria; the Americans, more countries than I can count. Their leaders
give speeches in their crisp shirts and suits; speeches about more
killing of those they’ll never see. They seem like zombies to me.
How can they do it? Bombs blow up in shopping malls and marketplaces
all over the world. Planes with innocents are blown out of the sky.
Hooded men execute people. What do the perpetrators feel? I am at a
loss as the deadly beat goes on. And I seek hope everywhere.
Do all these killers feel anything? Is it
indifference or hate? Am I an innocent who is missing something? I
know I am sick at heart.
Here in the United States we live in a systemic
bubble of denial, pretending that we, through our government, aren’t
killing innocent people throughout the world, that we are not a
terrorist state, that we have not created terrorists by our
systematic violence around the world. We wallow in our innocence and
await change through elections. But our elections are about choosing
the lesser of two killers.
People talk about elections as if killers weren’t
involved. Americans care about their candidates. But what about the
victims of their candidates—can they picture them dead? They think
the lesser of two evils is not evil, as if Hillary Clinton is
different from a Republican rival, Obama different from George W.
Bush. All the while we spread deadly violence around the world and
create its reciprocation in the process. I think of Fr. Daniel
Berrigan’s words after the burning of draft files by the Catonsville
Nine on May 17, 1968, to protest the American savagery in Southeast
Asia.
Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of
good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering
of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could
not, so help us God, do otherwise. For we are sick at heart; our
hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children.
. . . We say: Killing is disorder; life and gentleness and community
and unselfishness is the only order we recognize.
And then I think of the lovers. Hope rises in my
heart. I need hope. I need the love, as I think you do. I think of
all the lovers who have gone before us and the witnesses of abiding
faith whose cloud trails behind them. Those who chose life over
death, love over killing. Gandhi, King, and all the many other
martyrs for love and non-violence. Witnesses all. Those who knew
that the circle of violence would remain unbroken until all lovers
united in an upsurge of non-violent resistance to the killers
everywhere.
I understand the politics of the killers, the
political machinations. I know why they kill, but not how they can.
Do monsters roam the earth? Where has humanity gone? What are the
killers trying to kill—their own deaths?
These thoughts were prompted by remembering JFK
and a message sent by a young Parisian, Antoine Leiris. Antoine’s
wife was killed by gunmen at the Bataclan concert venue in Paris,
leaving him with a 17-month-old son and a grieving heart for the
love of his life. Rather than returning hatred to her killers, he
penned this extraordinary message on Facebook:
On Friday evening you stole the life of an
exceptional person, the love of my life, the mother of my son,
but you will not have my hatred. So no, I will not give you the
satisfaction of hating you. You want it, but to respond to
hatred with anger would be to give in to the same ignorance that
made you what you are. You would like me to be scared, for me to
look at my fellow citizens with a suspicious eye, for me to
sacrifice my liberty for my security.
You have lost. The player still plays. I saw
her this morning. At last, after nights and days of waiting. She
was as beautiful as she was when she left on Friday evening, as
beautiful as when I fell head over heels in love with her more
than twelve years ago. Of course I am devastated with grief; I
grant you this small victory, but it will be short-lived. I know
she will be with us every day and we will find each other in the
heaven for free souls to which you will never have access. Us
two, my son and I, we will be stronger than every army in the
world. I cannot waste any more time on you as I must go back to
[my son] who has just woken from his sleep. He is only just
seventeen months old, he is going to eat his snack just like any
other day, then we are going to play like every other day and
all his life this little boy will be happy and free. Because you
will never have his hatred either.
No doubt there are those who will think that those
are nice sentiments, but to focus on the response of one Frenchman
to his loss is to play into the hands of those in the West who
generated the original violence and who are waging a fabricated war
on terror to spread their dominion globally. Perhaps some might
think that this is Western propaganda aimed at eliciting sympathy
for Western Europeans at the expense of the millions who’ve died at
the Empire’s hands. I don’t think so. Antoine Leiris’s response is a
cri de coeur of such human love and tenderness that it should awaken
in us all the urge to turn from hate to love and embrace the only
path that will ever end the cycle of violence—non-violent
resistance.
Tolstoy put it thus: “As soon as men live entirely
in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now
revealed to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and
therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence—as soon as
this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions,
but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual. .
. . The law of violence is not a law, but a simple fact that can
only be a law when it does not meet with protest and opposition.”
The personal is the political. By showing us that
love is stronger than hate, that he and his son “will be stronger
than all the armies of the world,” Antoine Leiris, one man grieving
for his one woman, has sent a universal message that we avoid at our
peril.
When thinking about JFK, his love of poetry, and
Leiris’s beautiful sentiments, I was reminded of a poem by another
Frenchman, Jacques Prevert, the poet beloved by Parisians after the
barbarism of WW II. I think he speaks to the deepest part of us all.
Love
This love
So violent
So fragile
So tender
So hopeless
This love
Beautiful as the day
And bad as the weather
When the weather is bad
This love so true
This love so beautiful
So happy
So joyous
And so pathetic
Trembling with fear like a child in the dark
And so sure of itself
Like a tranquil man in the middle of the night
This love that made others afraid
That made them speak
That made them go pale
This love intently watched
Because we intently watch it
Run down hurt trampled finished denied forgotten
Because we ran it down hurt it trampled
it finished it denied it forgot it
This whole entire love
Still so lively
And so sunny
It’s yours
It’s mine
That which has been
This always new thing
And which hasn’t changed
As true as a plant
As trembling as a bird
As warm as live as summer
We can both of us
Come and go
We can forget
And then go back to sleep
Wake up suffer grow old
Go back to sleep again
Awake smile and laugh
And feel younger
Our love stays there
Stubborn as an ass
Lively as desire
Cruel as memory
Foolish as regrets
Tender as remembrance
Cold as marble
Beautiful as day
Fragile as a child
It watches us, smiling
And it speaks to us without saying a word
And me I listen to it, trembling
And I cry out
I cry out for you
I cry out for me
I beg you
For you for me for all who love each other
And who loved each other
Yes I cry out to it
For you for me and for all the others
That I don’t know
Stay there
There where you are
There where you were in the past
Stay there
Don’t move
Don’t go away
We who loved each other
We’ve forgotten you
Don’t forget us
We had only you on the earth
Don’t let us become cold
Always so much farther away
And anywhere
Give us a sign of life
Much later on a dark night
In the forest of memory
Appear suddenly
Hold your hand out to us
And save us.
Edward Curtin is a sociologist and writer who
teaches at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.