Point of View

I am reading a book about the the conditions of living within a civil war, in Belfast, Northern Ireland in the 1980s. It is creepy to see the similarities between that dysfuctional environment and ours, in the United States after the first decade of the twenty-first century. All the methods of dividing people, extra-legal actions of the government including torture, the deliberate antisocial and partisan actions of the just about everyone, and the use of unchecked violent speech to incite violence are just some of the parallels between that time and place, and ours. The result of their condition was ungovernability at all levels from cultural to personal.

At the same time that I sense that I am reading about our time and place in this book, it also strikes me that, because of the universality of the human condition, that any story mirrors all times and places, if the hearer of the story choses to let it. Having just finished a biography of Montaigne, the description of the french religious civil wars of the late 1500s sounds much the same as the story I am reading now.

In both those stories, the plot is violent. I bet there would be a relief of the emergency we feel at this moment, and an attendant change in the world around us, if we sought stories about these issues where human beauty, trust and strength were the focus, rather than temporal power.