Easter Sunday bombings

Apr 24, 2019 Editorial

Now what could justify those deadly bombings on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka? Nothing can. No one should try to rationalize such barbarities on any day, much less on a day like Easter Sunday.
People are huddled, bowed, and kneeled in prayer. Rapt in attention or prostrate in homage before a force bigger than that of paltry humans, and then this abomination of desolation. In fact, a series of them in a well-rehearsed and most likely long premeditated attacks. Now who could be so cruelly inhuman? Wantonly destructive? It is in a far corner of the world very distant from Guyana, but the horror is diminished by neither space nor hour.
Easter Sunday is one of those extraordinary days that brings a sweet lilt to the human spirit; one of those times that is sacred, and brings a sense of grace. There are not many such moments in what has become an increasingly ruthless and destructive time, where broken bodies and maimed lives, shattered communities and degraded morale sweep with remorseless frequency across a disfigured world.
From the semi war zones of sectarian Pakistan to the cloistered schools of Middle America to a mosque in New Zealand and now to its Christian counterparts in Colombo, as well as the near and far peripheries of that long-stricken capital city, the stories are the same ones: shocking brutality, reckless disregard for human life, and an even more callous dismissal of those restraining, civilizing bonds that hold together in fragile embrace.
There are too many weapons in the wrong hands; of those who sometimes do not even have an agenda. It seems as there is just killing and terrorizing for the sake of doing so. There is simply too much hatred spewing from twisted minds and hearts bursting with overflowing poisons. The problem is that hate leads to more hate in a vicious cycle of rage and retribution.
It becomes torturously difficult to turn the other cheek; in fact, to turn anything away: the gaze, the interest, the hard revulsions; the trajectories of uncontrollable violence spiral. Today, it is several churches; tomorrow, it could be anywhere where people gather for social or business or everyday interaction: a crowded restaurant, a massed train station, a school. Nothing and nowhere and no one are off the radar of attention; or the sniper scope of fatal intention.
From the ancient Greeks, through the timeless wisdom of Sophocles, one of its best tragedians, came a superbly fitting saying in Antigone: “evil appears as good in the minds of those whom god leads to destruction.” At this rate, it seems that a savage god has converted a whole world into target practice, since so few nooks and crannies are exempt from the mayhems that multiply with such seeming abandon. And that a universe of evil has engulfed whatever may have qualified to be called good in this pale and progressively accursed sphere.
More and more, it is man against fellow man, man against wife, and man against society and nature in an endless outpouring of violence that knows neither limit nor sanity nor the godly.
For careful contemplation by the cynical of the many barbarous acts perpetrated under the banner of religion brings to a bad place: there is enough for many to wonder whether Frederick the Great (a Holy Roman Emperor, to boot) was not on to something when he ventured to speak rather uncharitably about the three founders of the major denominations to which so many millions, indeed billions, pay unswerving allegiance. Some of their most devoted adherents do make a mockery of their words, examples, and teachings.
As these rampages unfold, it is hoped that other places that are palpably tense, simmering, and well-armed are paying close attention. Saner minds must prevail.

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