From Ralph

07/09/05

Innate Capacity for Violence

From a letter to Owen Philips at the New Yorker:

Dear Owen

BANG! What do you do? What can a drawing do?? What can anything do when reason is no longer on the cards. The frightening confession is that we have all done it in the name of freedom in some way. If one could only find the fine line that may thread and wind between honor, freedom, conviction, idealism, fanaticism, fundamental belief, atheism, revenge, aspiration, hope, courage, human frailty, gossip, poverty, ignorance, desire, injury,global imbalance - and justice!- well, we may have found a reason. but their is no reason, other than a strange kind of forgiveness we cannot find. At the moment we have no mechanism in place to forgive everything and start again. The 'greed and me' world we live in never really works and instead we have G8 talks and then more talks, but nobody wants to admit that they may be wrong, so they prefer to waffle through this crisis and talk of more talks later. Nelson Mandela understood that the only way forward was to declare,'Let bygones be bygones'. Try telling that to a bereaved family.

Man has an innate capacity for violence, but can only justify it in the name of justice. There is no truly global justice. There are only talks which lead to more talks and tribal 'get togethers' which go on while someone else, sitting on a tin of rat poison in a dark corner beneath the stairs, is already fixing to make another bomb for someone else.

I have done nothing myself yet. Except write you this letter. Shit! I might even put it on my website. Justification is not possible, but if it is national, international, religious or just plain whacko, man will find a reason......

OK