bonfire night

I am distressed.

I am angry and upset and confused and so very sad.

Tonight is the night that they "celebrate" the failed attempt to blow up the houses of parliament some 4 hundred years ago. Guy Fawkes day they call it, because he was the man chosen to light the barrels of gunpowder and end the non-catholic rule of James the 1st. While I completely disagree with Guy Fawlks' and his collaborators' reasoning behind attempting to blow up Parliament and the King, I wonder if it was prompted by a sense of desperation.

I wonder if those in and outside Paris right now just feel desperate. Because two boys were killed, because they feel they've lost control of their community.

And in Derry on the night of January 30, 1972 did young boys walk into the arms of the IRA out of desperation? Was the IRA itself formed out of desperation?

I hear fireworks outside my windows. I know several effigy's to Fawkes and others are being burnt in Lewes at this moment. I know about the 17 protestant martyr's burnt in Lewes that are also commemorated.

I know that people making effigy's tonight are not doing it out of desperation, or at least not on the majority.

I want to know how to make situations where desperation can lead to violence not happen. I want to know how to stop violence that isn't prompted by desperation. But I don't know how.

and I don't know how to tell the people in France to stop, and I wouldn't have known how to tell the people in Northern Ireland (on both sides) to stop. I have no powerful alternative.

I think of Gandhi and Martin Luther King- who both advocated and lived a life of radical non-violent protest.

And they were assasinated.

I think of the Dalai Lama who advocates non-violence not only to other people, but to other beings.

And he has not seen or stepped foot in his home country, of Tibet since 1959. He's been given a Nobel Peace Prize but doesn't get to go home.

And I know that these are just examples. And I know that they are just figureheads and that so much power lies in those of us that choose to be non-violent.

But what happens when we get desperate?

What happens then?




I know and know and know in the deepest depths of my mind, in every cell in my body, inside all of me that violence is not ever going to make anything other than more violence.


But we've got to find an effective alternative for the desperate, or make those who perpetuate violence desperate for a different method.