The other day, I heard on the news that members of ISIS had demolished a treasured artifact, an arch of some kind. I stopped to ponder this act for a moment. What possible purpose would this have?
• It certainly has no military strategic benefit, right? Its physical properties mean nothing; it's just a bunch of old stone carvings, sitting there for hundreds of years.
• They didn't take it to sell for a profit, to finance their war efforts. They just blew it up. No benefit there.
So what's left? An act of "pure terrorism?" perhaps. No one was physically hurt. So what remains is an act to cause emotional hurt - sorrow on the part of those who think such antiquities should be preserved as a significant part of history or symbolism. OK, this may also have been done as a tool of recruitment that most of us don't understand.
But the way I saw it was as a tantrum. As if a toddler threw a toy on the ground forcefully, to express frustration and provoke a reaction from a parent.
I know this may not make sense to many people. But it's what resonated for me at the time. It still does.
My sense is that it may be possible to undermine this terrorism thing, wherever it is going on, whether in the middle east, or mass shootings here in the USA, by finding out what the real deep motivation is.
Sure, such violence is inexcusable. But perhaps we are just taking the bait by reacting the way we often do. Isn't there some way to step back, see this for what it is (my theory, anyway), and find some way to show love in return? OK, that may sound like an overtly Christian response, but really! Christians don't have a monopoly on this. Buddhists, and adherents of various other eastern philosophies posit that perhaps allowing the 'enemy' to waste his own energy back on himself, to the point of exhaustion, ... is a better course. At least that much. That's quite different from sending in drones, bombers, or troops to attack back with "more firepower."
But when I say Love, I mean striving to understand just what really hurts deep inside the people creating this terrorism. I can't say that I fully understand it, but I'll bet anything that there are people who do understand it quite well. And we're not hearing much about them. Why not? Are we concentrating on news reports that alarm us, rather than ones that shed light on a way forward?
Now, I ask you.
• It certainly has no military strategic benefit, right? Its physical properties mean nothing; it's just a bunch of old stone carvings, sitting there for hundreds of years.
• They didn't take it to sell for a profit, to finance their war efforts. They just blew it up. No benefit there.
So what's left? An act of "pure terrorism?" perhaps. No one was physically hurt. So what remains is an act to cause emotional hurt - sorrow on the part of those who think such antiquities should be preserved as a significant part of history or symbolism. OK, this may also have been done as a tool of recruitment that most of us don't understand.
But the way I saw it was as a tantrum. As if a toddler threw a toy on the ground forcefully, to express frustration and provoke a reaction from a parent.
I know this may not make sense to many people. But it's what resonated for me at the time. It still does.
My sense is that it may be possible to undermine this terrorism thing, wherever it is going on, whether in the middle east, or mass shootings here in the USA, by finding out what the real deep motivation is.
Sure, such violence is inexcusable. But perhaps we are just taking the bait by reacting the way we often do. Isn't there some way to step back, see this for what it is (my theory, anyway), and find some way to show love in return? OK, that may sound like an overtly Christian response, but really! Christians don't have a monopoly on this. Buddhists, and adherents of various other eastern philosophies posit that perhaps allowing the 'enemy' to waste his own energy back on himself, to the point of exhaustion, ... is a better course. At least that much. That's quite different from sending in drones, bombers, or troops to attack back with "more firepower."
But when I say Love, I mean striving to understand just what really hurts deep inside the people creating this terrorism. I can't say that I fully understand it, but I'll bet anything that there are people who do understand it quite well. And we're not hearing much about them. Why not? Are we concentrating on news reports that alarm us, rather than ones that shed light on a way forward?
Now, I ask you.
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