Under the Lens of World Politics

I spent long hours of my childhood exploring those things that children explore: the little yellow butterflies that are drawn to marigolds in the summer sun; the worms that make their way through the loam; the ants that march busily; the endless variety of insects that buzz over the lawn. Occasionally I would witness great confrontations of life and death when a Praying Mantis met its prey. I noticed that flowers are all built differently. Our camellias were never quite as colorful as our neighbor’s roses. Calla Lilies were especially fun because the pollen was so abundant and so yellow. The Modesto Ashes in our front yard produced such a thick canopy that I could hide in their branches for hours and no one could see me. The alley behind my house was always revealing treasures of one sort or another. Sometimes I would find money, but most of the time I found BB’s or bits of chain or rusty nails – the odd nut or screw. My world was small in size, but big in discoveries.

When I tired of my normal perspective, I would get my dad’s big six inch magnifying glass and go hunting around the house for smaller worlds to conquer. I could see the weave of the fabric on our couches and curtains. My dad’s nose looked as frightening as my own did in the mirror, when spied through the glass. When I held it at arm’s length, the world turned upside down and I remember falling down when I couldn’t figure where to step next any more.

Outdoors, the magnifying glass made everything bigger and more menacing. The insects became monsters and movie stars. The summer was never at a loss for a bright, sunny day and I could burn a hole in a twig in just a couple of seconds. For awhile I kept a small collection of sticks with small round holes burned in them. I only kept the ones where the holes were evenly spaced and perfectly round. I did have my standards where perfection was required. When the fun of burning holes in sticks was depleted I turned to the ants. I became their worst enemy. I scoped out their path on the sidewalk and tried to anticipate their arrival by making the cement burning hot with the magnifying glass. Ants may not be possessed of superior intelligence, but like most living things, they avoid death whenever possible. They always walked around the hot spot I created. Then I tried to trap them within a circle of deadly heat as I moved the glass in a circular motion around the ant. The ant would always test and pull back. Then when I put the glass down to give my eyes a rest from the glare, the ant would find the coolest path and race across to safety.

I tired of this game easily enough and went straight for the kill. Finding the ant with the magnifying glass close, I watched it move, test, touch antenna with other ants. Occasionally, a larger ant would happen by and I considered these worthy opponents of the glass. I would start the glass in close, then move it upward toward the sun until the beam was so focused the ant snapped liked popped corn. This was cruel I now know, but at the time, it was just playtime and discovery. This behavior did not translate to dogs or other animals, just ants. I even tested this technique on the back of my hand with the most unpleasant result. It was after this proof of concept that I decided that there were other things to do to occupy my time.

It is not difficult to draw a direct inference from these experiences to the larger perspective of the world at large. That magnifying glass gave me absolute power over the world of the ant. If that feeling for power is tempting enough and is coupled with the right economic philosophy, dictators are born. The world is rife with trouble makers.

I had often thought that my experience with ants and the magnifying glass was a common one. In fact, almost every one I have ever talked to since is familiar with and guilty of the sun-induced cremation of ants. Not everyone carried the experiment to the back of their hand however, and that is the underlying problem. The world of the ant is a small thing -- inconsequential. Frying a few ants on the sidewalk did not materially impact my life in any way shape or form. I would never have cared about the ants had I not gone looking for them. Destroying one is a small thing unless it happens on the back of your hand. It is easy to be detached from your actions when the consequence occurs beneath your pain threshold. You cannot know the cruelty of the experience until you feel the thing yourself. If people who are driven by power were touched by the pain they inflict perhaps they would temper their choices. Perhaps not, but it is as good a wish as any.

Like the ant, we strive in our society to be industrious, maybe even entrepreneurial. In our society, industry is rewarded with things associated with a good life – money, house, family. The American dream is a house with “…a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.”

But, I would offer a simple observation of our less fortunate brothers in societies less fortunate than our own. I make this gender specific for a distinct reason; it is the young men who lack industry, but not testosterone. Who lack employment, but not desire for something better. Who lack that something better, but not the power to take it from someone who has it. Nomadic people, who have long been at wander, now demand homelands that are only valuable because they are occupied by someone else who was more industrious, or less oppressed, or more politically astute, or prays to the same God with a different name. The grass is always greener and the sand is always sand, and it always will be.

Karl Marx was depressed and sick, tired of the gloomy London weather. There was no better time to compose a “Communist Manifesto.” He was very smart and he was much disenfranchised. The flaw in his perception of his own reality obscured his personal pain. He found comfort in his utopian ideas, but was not sensitive to the acute discomfort of a restless soul. Had he been able to bring the lens into focus on the back of his hand he might have recognized his authentic truth. He was tied to this planet, but he did not want to be.

His ideas were thrown into the political primordial goo that was Russia and the “other” great experiment was underway. As a boot strapping economic system, communism works great. When you are holding the magnifying glass on an ant, you don’t have to worry about all those pesky ethical questions that plague the rest of us. Unfortunately, Machiavelli had it right; that “…power corrupts absolutely.” And communism is destroyed by the very forces that it was meant to supplant, the human spirit, and the overwhelming desire to make something of the gift of life we are given. The industry of the ant and of man is ultimately indomitable.

In these current times there are geopolitical areas of strife where there is basic conflict in religious practice, and more importantly in economic systems. Not the systems themselves necessarily, but the lack of efficacy in their market places. We are not seeing the traditional excuses for strife brought into play here; the usual oppression by the “haves” of the “have nots,” but the very real manifestation of the utter failure of whole societies (or a communities without traditional political boundaries) that are impotent to provide for their own future without diminishing someone else’s. When that is the case, there are a lot of young, idle men with magnifying glasses and no industry with which to focus their dreams. The suicide bomber is born.

It is difficult to distinguish the rightness of one cause versus another and history is certainly more kind to those who survive to write it. More is the pity that the bomber only knows the worth of his life measured in the death he inflicts on others.

I think it safe to say that Shakespeare did not write Hamlet for today’s suicide bomber. His character ponders a much larger life.

“To be, or not to be: --- that is the question: ---
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? --- To die: --- to sleep; ---
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, --- 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, --- to sleep; ---
To sleep! perchance to dream: --- ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.”

It is easy, in the essence of my reflection, to think that the magnifying lens was the key to open Pandora’s Box and let loose all the maladies of the world. However, the story of Pandora is always told as though the key was useful for only that purpose; but keys both lock and unlock. So, to the question of the absolute power of the magnifying glass, I say we would all be better off to have one time felt its heat. If, with that knowledge there are some who are still willing to unlock the box, the only comfort for the rest of us is to know that Hope has been locked in the box as well.