… but what if they threw a war and no one came?

 

… but what if they threw a war and no one came?

This anti-war slogan from the 1970s apparently did little to change public opinion that … what? …war is inevitable given human nature? For centuries, Mennonites, Quakers, Doukhobors and various secular peace movements have responded to the appeal to fight in wars by refusing to show up. They’ve always been minorities; the consensus being that the right, the patriotic response to aggression is counter-aggression-in-kind.

W.B. Yeats wrote The Second Coming in 1920 just after World War I and at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence. An exceedingly difficult time for humanity with little reason to hope for the Peaceable Kingdom any time soon. He might well have been writing about today:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

“The best lack all conviction.” Certainly, we all know that war is counter-productive at its core and periphery. We whose deepest conviction is that life and that which enables it is sacred (too valuable to be tampered with) can’t possibly claim that as a “conviction” if even the preparation to take lives doesn’t move us to rage and protest. Belief and conviction are impulses and understandings that govern behaviour. A complacent community isn’t one that fails to live up to its convictions, it’s one that “lacks all conviction …” 

… as compared in Yeats to those who “are full of passionate intensity.” Like me, you might well want to hear Yeats explain who these ones are who deserve the superlative adjectives, best and worst … at what? Was it more than the good Irish Catholics against the bad English Protestants, or his memory of the Axis powers in WW I? Our time yields another demonstration of the “passionate intensity” lies and hatred can ignite. 

I don’t mean to make of this a sermon, but I want particularly Christians to retrieve whatever convictions their faith claims that apply in tumultuous times: Love your enemy and act on it; feed the hungry and act on it; clothe the naked and act on it; recognize the folly of a fixation on money and security, and act on it. Speak truth to power, even if it seems only a whisper in the wind. 

I’m no Yeats and will never be, but I offer this poem as a whisper in the wind.

The Sniper 

on rooftop high above the crowded, shouting street

the sniper kneels, his barrett mrad

oiled and shiny

poised and ready

his itching finger twitches

a restless boot tap-taps a martial beat

his young eyes scan the seething crowd

first left, then right and back again

for threats to this, a pompous president

now holding forth as such are prone to do.

 

the orders are most clear and adamant

“protect the president at any cost

there are so many now who’d murder him

if give’n the dimmest chance,

and if it means that innocents should collaterally die

well that would simply be the cost

of saving him who’s leader to us all.”

 

Then through his scope the sniper fixes on a girl

one hand in mom’s, the other dad’s, he guesses,

could be his lovely niece, their kinky mops of hair

so much alike, their wide-eyed wonderment the same:

his hands begin to shake, sweat blinds him and

his knees like rubber, palsied hands betray

the sudden knowledge that the lie

—no, many lies—that led him to this roof, this day

must serve but those who know no empathy

for dad’s and mom’s and children’s fragile lives

unless they serve their self-indulgent,

disillusioned fantasies.

 

And as their leader thunders forth

with waving arms and scathing condemnations

of all who’ve threatened his ascendency

the crowd begins to mill and scream

with “hang them, hang them, hang the lot!”

and angry skirmishes break out below;

chaos portends a bloody, violent end.  

 

The sniper scopes the little girl once more,

his trembling hands remove,

discard the rifle’s magazine,

stands tall and turns his empty gun

upon the president regaling still

the tumultuous crowd below

with tributes to himself.

 

The sniper doesn’t hear the volleys from

the rooves across the street,

nor feel the bullets tear his uniform,

nor see the president whisked away by burly men

while thousands scatter from the plaza, shocked, afraid.

 

the TV news shows how the president

was saved from certain death

by valiant, sniping guards.

 

And history will record it on a page

with Booth, Oswald, Guiteau and Ray 

But those who knew him best will say

“he’s not the first to give his life to save the innocent;

Pray God he’s not the last.”