The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside
"We can do better" (Kennedy)
Richest fluency
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman
The older I get the more puzzled I get. It's a common sentiment, expressed in various combinations of words. I find myself now in a state where not only am I puzzled by a few major things (I think I have been since I was a little fella) but I am puzzled by virtually everything I see and hear in the news about the behavior of my soon to be 9 billion fellow human beings.
Here is a common theme on blogs. Some news item will appear about Castro or Chavez, Cuba or Venezuela, and hatred will pour out on to my screen, hatred so virulent that you can only picture keyboard keys being melted in the face of incandescent rage being directed through fingers. Or there will be an article about the Short March of global warming, and the outraged responses will appear linking those concerned about our rapidly changing climate to those accompanying Mao on the Long March. Rarely far into a thread before those of us calling for urgent action on greenhouse gases will be accused of fomenting world communism.
The question is - why this hatred? I understand nationalism (I even understand, though I don't do it myself, screaming abuse at an opposing football team) and jingoism, though I prefer patriotism. I understand that people prefer their own country, and have doubts ranging from minor to severe about whether they could live in another country that eats this kind of food, plays that kind of sport, speaks this odd language, wears these odd clothes, has a certain kind of electoral system, has odd religious habits, treats women in various appalling ways, has the death penalty. We all feel most comfortable in, love best, the country we were born in, or chose to move to.
But why, among all of those cultural and social differences between the 190 plus countries of the world, is it the ones who, among all their other features, have a socialist/communist government that are singled out for this hatred? If you think of every aspect of society as a rainbow across the world, with every shade of language, and music, and sport, and clothes, and religion, and agriculture, and transport, and law, and government, why, out of all that huge variety, would you direct your hatred only at the socialism part of the political bit of other countries?
Labor governments are not hated, or social democrat, or liberal democrat, or christian democrat; nor it seems, at the other end of the political rainbow are nationalist, or conservative, or fascist. Doesn't matter whether the electoral system is some shade of democracy, or pure dictatorship, as long as the guiding philosophy is not a socialist one.
So the question to answer my puzzle, I guess, is - what are you afraid of? Is Hugo Chavez planning world domination, coming to take your money from under your bed? Is Castro going to invade America? Why then do you care whether they are, respectively, running Venezuela and Cuba? I know why the giant corporations care - these are countries where they may not get their own way, less chance there of adding to the giant profits of, say, Exxon (a bit like pre-war Iraq, really). So I get it that the mainstream media would be hammering away, 'Hate Week' after 'Hate Week', trying to convince you that socialist governments are the enemy.
What puzzles me, though, is why you are buying it.
"You are a person of some interest,one comes to you and takes strange gain away." (Pound)
"I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world." (Keats)
"nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights - or if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel." (Keats)