Ode to Our Viola

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22. Curse you H2O Man, lighting up not a rocket but a whole 4th of July display of deep seated issues.

I wonder if I shall ever have the good fortune to spend an afternoon exchanging stories with Waterman about interesting people. Rubin Hurricane? Well yes that would be interesting. I have had a few but I digress.

Non Violence is both an absolute principle and a discrete strategy.

It simply doesn't work for me as an absolute principle. Wind the clock back and put me in close proximity to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge Central Committee and I would have worn the suicide vest without a tinge of regret. I saw the killing fields and the hundreds of thousands who crawled into Khao I Dang on the edge of death. Its a calculus that has to be faced. One for millions.

I know people, mostly Mennonites, who live it as principle. Max Ediger worked in South Vietnam at a Mennonite workshop to make prosthesis limbs. He may have been the only American not affiliated with the North (there were a few) to have stayed when the NV came. The battle surrounded his area, his shop and he never moved. He went to work every day, took his lunch every day and returned home every day on a fixed schedule and no war was going to deter him. The NV eventually came by, let him stay for a few years and asked him to leave. He has a deep religious belief that transcends my mortal calculus.

There is a mortal calculus. I remember a graduate seminar we were having on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We were coming up on the end of the 3 weeks we spent on DB and it was late on Friday and we were kind of exhausted and wanted to leave and start our 4 day weekend so the Professor said that he would let us leave if we could identify the single most important lesson, among many that Detrich Bonehoffer provides. Many eager ideas were thrown up about the cost of discipleship and when it grew quiet I offered that while it was courageous to go back to Germany and while he might have given confidence to the 5 plots to kill Hitler that he was involved in the most important point is that Hitler wasn't killed. The professor quietly walked out of the room.

The question that haunts me about your beautifully remembered story about your nephew is that seeking to not respond with violence after the fact is a calling to our higher nature but what if his life was in danger and the only way to save that life was with a violent defense then I would have gone with Malcolm X on that one.

Malcolm X is not an extremist but actually very conservative if you read him without and prior bias. Lots of lift yourself up by your own bootstraps encouragement. But is yielding to a murderer really a higher purpose? Well that is the question, the calculus.

As a tactic to gain moral superiority against a governmental policy then I am with Gandhi, Mendella and King. Not right up there next to them but struggling and buoyed by their strength, and more than a few feet behind them but I stay in line and try to catch up.

But if there is car heading towards Heather I just wish I had a rock I could throw and take the driver out. As the sign held by the old lady says "I can't believe that we still have to put up with all of this shit".

Against this particular demon we need a particular strategy. It seems to me that that we should use what is emerging these last few days, arm everyone with cameras, take pictures and hold the haters to public identification, not because it is non violent but because it is non violent and effective.

Me, I would like to take a Nikon D 800E. Takes great pictures, or so I am told, but it is just big enough that if someone comes roaring by in car it would be big enough and heavy enough to enforce Malcolm X's side of the equation. I am not 100% like Max Ediger but I try really hard to keep it over 50%.