Matters of Degree

I recall two distinct images amongst many gleaned from History Class about the early Conquests of the Americas. British soldiers would offer blankets to the Natives... blankets for winter... blankets taken from a hospital whose every patient had died from smallpox. And also there were oral reports... recorded tales of rare survivors. Some by chance or fate had escaped after being captured by Native tribes. A few spoke of having witnessed their fellows...slowly being skinned while kept alive... only to be tied to a post to die screaming as they burned. Since then, I've always wondered about cruelty's victims... and equations of savagery. Knowing that cruelty answered alike but perpetuates endless cycularities...still, History's lessons are littered with the remains of those ultimately vanquished... rightly or wrongly so... none, I suspect, wholly innocent. In the final sentence of my final test I asked: "If the executioner must intend care for his victim... doth not the executioner de facto internalize, ingest his victim?; and, if, thus, there be a bridge between victor and vanquished..., then doth not the victor vanquish himself, in small measure, in the act of vanquishing his victim? Is not Cruelty, in part... ever so innocuously...always about killing ourselves...since both belong to the one bridge? Are we who ingest through our eyes-- and masticate with our minds-- so unlike the aboriginal cannibal that first chews, then digests its foe? Can the stomach of conscience ever truly excrete all that has been ingested, incorporated? Indeed, doth not the civilities wrought of Mergers & Acquisitions--with their many yielded benefits and excretory casualties-- reveal to us the very essences of ancient Warfare...and Cruelty... albeit, in refined efficient form? And in our wiser world of cost/benefit efficacies...of rights and breaches... and every phyla and species of justifying rationales... must we not see, do we not see... that while no murderer can ever be wholly bad...still, the scales must seek re-balance...of ensuing atonement...? And so, alas, did I confide such thoughts to my somewhat bored, frustrated Highschool teacher, saying only, "I have trouble choosing sides." Our eyes--with respect and deferrence to a recognized shared intelligence revealing the heart of an enduring predicament--met over an unresolved bridge of silence. --Uncle Greg Written November 21st, 2001 © on Nov 20 2001 04:29 PM PST    0 • 11 • 9