One acquaintance on Facebook promoted conciliation from a Muslim perspective, and another, Catholic, while appreciating the thought noted the speaker was perhaps unique. I know better than to buy that, but even with just one person expressing a lonesome thought, that thought has significance.
Herewith my response.
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One may take exception to the concept “a minority of 1″ — even just one human consciousness, just one soul, just one believer, just one good person can be and become any army, a civilization, a universe. ” . . . We ordained for the Children of Isra`il that if any one slew a person – unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land – it would be as if he slew the whole humanity.” () It would seem that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim literature — the language of each everywhere and the related recapitulation of each culture religious precepts through language — contains this most ancient of divine and human thought.
Recently, I asked a Pakistani progressive — and he was genuinely Pakistani (I am merely visiting in mind and spirit) — how many of us are there: “About one-half of one percent,” he said, speaking loosely and little cynically.
Whatever the numbers may be, IF you are reading this, YOU are a part of an extraordinary intellectual front in human history.
Diplomats and international traders have been this way too, but never the broad swath of a democratized global population, one socialized with each possessing at least a little of a common language currency by way of English plus access to the World Wide Web.
If there’s change coming — we know it is, for the history of human affairs everywhere always transforms — it’s coming through you, with jinn or without, with some foundation in the Talmud, Second Testament, or Quran, and out of the civilizational and cultural anchors of Asia, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere.
Elsewhere, I’ve used K2, the great and dangerous mountain, as a metaphor for the scale of the work. The sight of that mountain alone is awesome — easy to stare at a long time and fear, but some who have had the urge to climb have gotten past that and every other obstacle.
So it is here with much confusion, fretting, and, near or far, too much blood.
With the physical mountain, the climbers arrive by choice confirmed by the struggle to get to it; with this mountain, we’re already on it. It’s history itself, larger than any one soul and yet comprised — created — only by souls, one at a time, climbing, fighting that mountain — that is a global malevolence welling up from some portion of our own humanity — and constructing a new, more beneficent, more altogether free and secure and natural peace, word by word.
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When I was growing up, and hardly then one to love the synagogue, I was lucky, perhaps, to have attended in childhood a service in which the rabbi had talked about making a difference. Old readers know the old cliche: a pebble in a pond (or a fish feeding from beneath the surface of the water) sends out ripples that will find their reflection in energy at the very edges of their boundary.
These days, it’s “the butterfly effect”.
Still, whether a pebble, a fish feeding, two busy butterfly wings, or a lonesome human voice mumbling poetry somewhere or chatyping from the most obscure corner of the planet, such signals need be never lost.
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