The long view on tyrants and murderers

September 21, 2013

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In the heat of the moment, it’s hard to have the long view about tyrants and murderers. But that’s one thing Gandhi was good at–looking at the long view, the bigger picture–and reminding us that there is more than the moment.

Is there anyone who wasn’t horrified by the photographs of the victims of chemical warfare coming out of Syria last month? You’d have to be cold, indeed, not to feel for the suffering of these people and especially those children.  As a pacifist, it is a challenge to remind myself that violence and war are not solutions I believe in. It is a challenge, also, to find a way to take out those chemical stockpiles without decimating the surrounding population.

Evil people and governments have gotten better and better and developing more effective ways to kill others. Chemical weapons are killers we can’t easily protect ourselves against.

I am struggling to avoid feeling despair. To see it as Gandhi does. That in the long view, tyrants and murderers fail. Truth and love win.

Because, really, I’m not sure truth and love really do win in the end. We have yet to see them undertaken large scale as a way to govern, a way to live.

And yet, on an individual scale, it really is the only way to live, in my opinion.

8 comments on “The long view on tyrants and murderers
  1. I always wonder how some people are so future looking and some people are so past looking. I do believe in the truth of it, that truth and love win. I have to believe that in order to face each day.

  2. Jenny says:

    Truth and love have been winning. Overall there is less violence in modern life than there was in the past.

  3. Frances D says:

    Wonderful quote to start my Sunday. I awoke to dark rainy weather, and that quote brought in the light. Well-done.

  4. I believe this to be more of a ‘goal’, a destination, a marker with humanity. And , yes, very personal, but sadly not the way the world works. One of the problems is that where one tyrant falls another replaces him.

  5. Tyrants can never succeed long term as all things contain within them the seed of their own destruction.By long term I am meaning over hundreds of years.Many empires rise and fall,others adapt,change their name and become religions or other institutions.

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