I’ve been thinking a lot about loyalty. When your homeland is corrupt and has been for decades longer than anyone really realised, how can you be loyal to it?
And when you have experienced not only the rank corruption of your homeland but of the two other countries you best know, then how on earth can someone oblige you to profess loyalty to such a mess as all that lived experience leaves behind?
What right does someone have to demand of you that you stop seeing things in black & white? Like if the person who raped me back in 2004 I should see as the victim of the event? Like not see things in this kind of black & white but in pleasing shades of grey instead? “Oh, it’s ok love: it was just a thing of greys … that thing you made me do.”
Because some things are black & white: that’s why the couplet exists and has arisen in the first place as a figure of speech. And tbh, as a writer I should advocate a right for anyone to say at the very least they have every obligation to write in black & white. The colour of words on paper or a screen, if nothing else.
Love is love. Yes. But sacrificial love of corrupt people and places is not love. It’s not. And the relativism that says that sacrifice as a discourse of choice of this same idea of love rather than a tragic outcome of the circumstances surrounding the same is just not on: no, sir.
Sir, lady, any-gender, all-genders … it makes no difference. It’s not what love is about.
Certain forces in our societies across the globe have poisoned our capacity to trust not each other but the fact of life’s final ability to bless us daily. It’s true. I once wrote about it: a blogpost on what I called the Petri-dish theory of creating better society. Not particularly original, granted; but penicillin representing the good people most of us are versus the bacterial cultures that are practically all powerful persons and organisations. The idea being to create our own Petri dishes out of which parallel worlds so overwhelmingly attractive would emerge and serve to quench the fire of the powerful with the water of the rest of us.
Not fire with fire any more: fire with water. Intelligent and quite stealthy victory. Without breast-beating in the least. Just achieving, covertly behind the scenes … and the bad guys realising nothing in time.
But even as I write these words and sustain their value, I’m also firm about what I call macro- & micro-strategising. The former, the big picture. The latter, the journey and its sometimes hugely unpredictable details, which unavoidably will cumulatively impact, surprisingly always, on the original projections.
This is why fighting fire with water — love — must be our big picture, whilst fire with fire is the journey, occasionally.
That is, sacrifice.
I now philosophise both into concepts I will never abandon. The first, my crime and loophole work. The second, happier cleverer societies.
And underpinning both, love on my part. For the humans we all can be.
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