Stars In A Parallel Universe

[RonPrice]

In 1994, as I was heading into my last five years of employment as a teacher, the ruling Hutu government in the then small African nation of Rwanda, set out to eradicate its Tutsi minority. The Rwandan Genocide, as this eradication program came to be called, consisted of the mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people. The Hutu people alleged that the Tutsi minority held an unfair monopoly of power in Rwanda.

 

The majority Hutu people had come to power in the rebellion, the revolt, of 1959–62 which overthrew the Tutsi monarchy, and established a republic. I was just 15 years old in 1959, had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and played a lot of baseball, hockey and football. By 1962 I was working on my matriculation studies and had begun to travel and pioneer for the Canadian Baha’i community.

In the colonialist period, under Belgian rule before 1959, the Tutsis and Hutus, the two ethnic groups concerned, had come to hate each other through systematized inequality and a struggle for power. It is a somewhat complex story that can be easily read by those interested. I shall say no more here. I certainly knew none of this back around 1960, occupied as I was with my local agenda, with growing-up, in the small town of Burlington Ontario.

 

In August 1998 the largest war in modern African history began. Called the Second Congo War, it began on the eve of my retirement after 50 years in classrooms. It directly involved eight African nations as well as about 25 armed groups. It took place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By 2008 the war and its aftermath had killed 5.4 million people mostly from disease and starvation. This war was the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II. Millions more were displaced from their homes or sought asylum in neighbouring countries. By then, by 2008, I was fully ensconced in retirement, had taken a sea-change, was on a pension, and was still as far removed from all this slaughter in Africa as I had been 14 years before.-Ron Price with thanks to All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, SBSONE, 8:30-9:30 p.m. Parts 1-3, 18/10/’11 to 1/11/’11.

 

So much of the world’s slaughter

goes on in some parallel universe

as one eats one’s evening meal and

tries to get through one’s own life

unscathed by the slings-and-arrows

of outrageous fortune. Ill-equipped

to interpret the social commotion at

play throughout the planet, we listen

to the pundits of error & sink deeper

into the slough of despond, troubled

by forecasts of doom and doing battle

with wrongly informed imaginations as

our days pass swiftly as twinkling stars.1

 

1 Ridvan message 1999, The Universal House of Justice

 

Ron Price

2 November 2011

[Guest MacPhee]

So much of the world’s slaughter

goes on in some parallel universe

as one eats one’s evening meal

 

Very true. But suppose one's evening meal contains meat, like steak or lamb-chops. While eating, shouldn't one reflect on the slaughter that goes on in the parallel universe of abattoirs. In which millions of cattle and sheep suffer disregarded death, on a huge industrial scale, so that their funeral baked meats may furnish forth the world's dinner tables?

 

There might be a moral somewhere, though I can't quite grasp it, unless it's either:

 

a. worry about animals, and become a vegetarian; or

b. only worry about humans slaughtering each other.

 

But humans seem very keen on mutual slaughter, as history shows abundantly. Perhaps best not to worry then. Just let us get on with it. After all, we'll all be dead anyway in 100 years, so does it really matter?