Silence of Agony, Noise of Death

Many of the friends, clients, and correspondents of my private practice are from the U.K.; and I doubt that's a random coincidence. I'm an unabashed anglophile myself: from Hamlet to Harry Potter, the literature of England is distinct in its greatness; and when it comes to humor, every nation must sit in laughter at the feet of Brittania.

No one's laughing in England tonight, though: there is just pain and shock. I'm sure you've read or heard about it: across London, four bombs in under three hours, 38 dead, some 700 wounded. For the victims and their families, words will not avail: only the silent heart-energy of Love, sent from wherever you are to wherever they may be, can help. May healing and recovery begin invisibly for you, even amid grief. If you're in London and you feel as if you need help or simply wish to talk, go to my Contact page and then pick up the phone or write an email. There will be no talk of money, but only of your need.

Times like these are for private connections between those who suffer and those who can help. Political grandstanding and militaristic rant are not appropriate to these moments. That kind of crap only lends power to the people who have wreaked this carnage on a great city.

But apparently, the mighty and the powerful in the world today choose to ignore that reality. Calls for revenge (let's call it what it is—when these people cry for "justice" they are asking for revenge; it's pure bloodsport to the Bushes of this world) have issued from the G8 conference site, and on this side of the pond it's even worse. Here's something from John McCain, who as a former soldier really ought to know better:

"We understand again the nature of this cruel and despicable enemy and we have to fight and we have to win...This is an enemy that we must destroy in battlefields all over the world." (full text here).

Where are these battlefields, Senator? What uniforms are the enemy wearing? What flag do they carry onto the battlefield? Haven't we been fighting on these battlefields for nearly four years now? What progress has been made over that time, or have we rather regressed? Is it not true that, thanks to the war in Iraq, our enemy is stronger, more numerous, and possessed of a more fanatical following, than he was four years ago?

Senator McCain, why don't you just shut up? Is it too much to ask that the ordinary people of this earth, who must endure the bombings and the crime and the poverty that your illegal wars create for them, be allowed a single day's silence for picking up the pieces and the sharing of grief—without a fat politician blowing hot wind for revenge from the safety of a heavily guarded television studio?

The Brits know how to handle this kind of thing, Senator McCain—almost certainly better than we Americans do. They have the people, the resources, and the historical experience to get to the bottom of what happened and deal with it. But right now, they don't need to be distracted by the noise of inner death—the cries of war-dogs like you, baying from the security of your front-porch view.

In fact, at this point, the kind of message they need to hear is already being shared among them, with no help from the great and mighty America. The following is a simple note from the website of Jonathan Cainer, a popular British astrologer:

Anger begets anger. When Jesus said, 'Love thine enemy', that's precisely what he meant. If we want to stop a cycle of violence and evil, we have to step outside it, no matter how shocked we may feel or how much harm it has done to us. We have to be guided by hope and inspiration, not fear or fury. We don't have to forget. We don't even have to forgive. But we do have to keep walking away from the darkness of hatred and towards the light of love.

The rhetoric of battle and all the military bluster of the right wing is entirely inappropriate to this moment. And if my own private impression of the British people is correct, the shrill Medusa-noise of revenge that is coming from the Bushies and their following will be grimly but firmly turned away by a wise and gentle people as they work to heal and protect themselves. They will not respond to the John McCain call for ratcheting up the volume of violence in a world that is already choking with death and fear.

Those who wrought this slaughter will pay a toll beyond the reckoning of kings and senators. But more din of war will make only more mounds of dead, until the only survivors will be the stiffly moving corpses of state power, alone in their sanitary palaces of vapid, alabaster wealth.

Peace and healing to my friends in England.