This world is extremely complicated if you ask little old me. But I am small potatoes when it comes to waxing philosophical.
Confucius once said, “Life is simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
I guess Confucius and I will just have to agree to disagree on this one.
He didn’t have the internet, and I imagine he lived in a pretty small village, there in Qufu, Shandong Province, China, in 551 BC. Maybe life was a little simpler back then.
I just read that on this date, February 8, 1942, the United States Congress gave President Franklin D Roosevelt a piece of advice. They told him that Americans of Japanese descent should be locked up en masse so that they wouldn’t oppose the US war effort.
This seems complicated to me. As you know, we were at war, not only with Japan but with Germany and Italy too. So what about the German Americans, or the Italians? I mean, my dad was of German descent. My mom too. Shouldn’t they have been locked up?
It all makes me wonder. I guess the Germans and Italians were harder to spot.
Yesterday, in those history notes, I learned that Dr. Josef Mengele died on February 7, 1979. He was the infamous Nazi doctor who performed medical experiments at the Auschwitz death camps. The horrible man who wore those white gloves and tortured people while conducting ghastly experiments on them.
That guy escaped from prison after the war and moved to South America. He became a citizen of Paraguay and later moved to Brazil. So, for 34 years after that war, he lived his happy life down south before dying of a stroke while taking a swim. Somehow, this doesn’t seem like a fitting sentence for his crimes against humanity.
To complicate matters further, I ask myself, who am I to judge? Of course, I think he was a repulsive human being, to say the least, and that he should have been punished as such. But the truth of the matter is? There are a lot of people in the world, even today, who would disagree with me. In fact, they may hold him in regard as a hero.
As I mentioned up top. Life seems complicated to me.
I saw a piece on the morning news yesterday, a glancing mention of the conditions in the Congo, the unrest there. That’s putting it mildly. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has been described as the “Rape Capital of the World.” Each day, women wake up, not knowing if they will be raped, killed, or left alone on any given day. The sexual violence there has been described as the worst in the world.
Other world powers know about this, and yet it continues. How can this be? I’m sure the world leaders would tell me the answer is complicated.
These things weigh heavy on my mind and my heart, some days more than others. Mostly because I feel helpless in my capacity to affect change.
Marchers march. And protesters, protest. Some of us sign petitions and write letters. But all of that seems to fade away. We now have a member of Congress who harasses school-shooting victims, and even more who support her.
I wonder how Confucius would make simple of that.
The only way for my mind to survive these questions is to believe in the little bits of good I can do, where I can do them. Whether this is true or not, I have to be convinced that acting in an upstanding manner will somehow make a difference in the world. I continue to hope that Desmond Tutu was right when he said, “Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”
So today, I will look at this complicated world and try to act only in kindness.
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“If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
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“Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.”
― Terry Pratchett, Snuff
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“It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
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The complicated things of the not-so-simple.
