The Dance of Destruction and Creation

Hatred never ceases by hatred,
But by love alone is healed.
This is a great and eternal Law.

This chant was said by CambodianBuddhists 

as their loved ones and friends were slaughtered

 at the direction of a Buddhist,Pol Pot.

Pol Pot was a minor 20th-Century Million-Killer:

Stalin in Russia, 
Hitler in Germany,
Mao in China killed more.

Roosevelt and Truman, in the Union of North American States, 
two great heros of mine and my generation,
 would be thought of as

Million -Killers;

had they not been victorious in War.

Victors are never thought of as Million-Killers,

by their own populations.

Do Some Somewhere now think of Bushco and Hussein Obama as Million-Killers?

They killed millions;

kill thousands a year. 

Just now Obama killed sixteen-year-old 

Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi . . .

. . .who was eating dinner 
by an open fire 
along the side of a road
 in Shabwa, Yemen;  
he was with his his cousin, 17-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki,
 and seven other friends
when the Hellfire missile stuck;



this hole is what was left of the boys.

The boys, not one of them, were implicated in any wrong-doing.




Bushco celebrated celebrated "victory" in Iraq.  
Obama notes with approval the Killing of an Enemy fo our People.

Lao Tse wouldn't approve:

Armies are tools of violence;

They cause men to hate and fear.

The sage will not join them.

His purpose is creation;

Their purpose is destruction.

Weapons are tools of violence,

Not of the sage;

He uses them only when there is no choice,

And then calmly, and with tact,

For he finds no beauty in them.

Whoever finds beauty in weapons

Delights in the slaughter of men;

And who delights in slaughter

Cannot content himself with peace.

So slaughters must be mourned

And conquest celebrated with a funeral.

I would that we had the ethics

of Fourth Century BCE China.

Obama is a paradoxical man.  

Can't quite figure him out,
and I voted for him twice
and am proud that I did.

I'm paradoxical, too.  

Are you?

I reckon paradoxical ambiguity is the human condition.  

I would like to better understand
the Dance of Destruction and Creation.