Nonviolence and Comparison

As much as I love those long summer nights, I am enjoying that it is dark by 9:30 now, it means I can get to sleep at a reasonable hour. I finished the Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest and then a PD James book and now I picked up The Source again. I was more than half way through and then the Rabbis started debating writing the Torah and they just go on and on, if the darkness doesn't help me sleep, that book will.

The next two topics in Wisdom of the Ages are Nonviolence and Comparison. Nonviolence includes part of an essay by Martin Luther King, Jr. This is not the one included in the book,

The Power of Non-violence
Martin Luther King, Jr.
June 4, 1957

From the very beginning there was a philosophy undergirding the Montgomery boycott, the philosophy of nonviolent resistance. There was always the problem of getting this method over because it didn’t make sense to most of the people in the beginning. We had to use our mass meetings to explain nonviolence to a community of people who had never heard of the philosophy and in many instances were not sympathetic with it. We had meetings twice a week on Mondays and on Thursdays, and we had an institute on nonviolence and social change. We had to make it clear that nonviolent resistance is not a method of cowardice. It does resist. It is not a method of stagnant passivity and deadening complacency. The nonviolent resister is just as opposed to the evil that he is standing against as the violent resister but he resists without violence. This method is nonaggressive physically but strongly aggressive spiritually.

Here is the link to the entire essay:
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1131

I do not completely agree with the idea of nonviolence, but perhaps I really believe in self-defense. I stood in the way of a raised hand and stopped it's effects with reason, I know it can be done, and understand the power of positive thinking and love. I also understand the film, No Country for Old Men, and believe that kind of evil exists and cannot be answered with nonviolence.

There is a better story in the book of Buddha. A man decides to test Buddha's reputation for peace and nonviolence. The man follows Buddha around for three days and is verbally abusive. For three days Buddha responds with love and kindness. The man finally asks how Buddha does this and Buddha replies, "If someone offers you a gift, and you do not accept that gift, to whom does the gift belong?"

The next topic is Comparison, with a poem by Ogden Nash,

So That’s Who I Remind Me Of
By Ogden Nash

When I consider men of golden talents,
I’m delighted, in my introverted way,
To discover, as I’m drawing up the balance,
How much we have in common, I and they.

Like Burns, I have a weakness for the bottle,
Like Shakespeare, little Latin and less Greek;
I bite my fingernails like Aristotle;
Like Thackeray, I have a snobbish streak.

I’m afflicted with the vanity of Byron,
I’ve inherited the spitefulness of Pope;
Like Petrarch, I’m a sucker for a siren,
Like Milton, I’ve a tendency to mope.

My spelling is suggestive of a Chaucer;
Like Johnson, well, I do not wish to die
(I also drink my coffee from the saucer);
And if Goldsmith was a parrot, so am I.

Like Villon, I have debits by the carload,
Like Swinburne, I’m afraid I need a nurse;
By my dicing is Christopher out-Marlowed,
And I dream as much as Coleridge, only worse.

In comparison with men of golden talents,
I am all a man of talent ought to be;
I resemble every genius in his vice, however heinous—
Yet I write so much like me.

I suppose it will help if you knew who all the people he is talking about were. Don't compare your insides to other people outsides. If you could put your problems, or your faults, in a bucket with everyone else's and then had to take some out, believe me you would pick your own.

I liked this Nash poem much better,

Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man
By Ogden Nash

It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important,
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant,
And the other kind of sin is just the opposite and is called a sin of omission
and is equally bad in the eyes of all right-thinking people, from
Billy Sunday to Buddha,
And it consists of not having done something you shuddha.
I might as well give you my opinion of these two kinds of sin as long as,
in a way, against each other we are pitting them,
And that is, don’t bother your head about the sins of commission because
however sinful, they must at least be fun or else you wouldn’t be
committing them.
It is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin,
That lays eggs under your skin.
The way you really get painfully bitten
Is by the insurance you haven’t taken out and the checks you haven’t added up
the stubs of and the appointments you haven’t kept and the bills you
haven’t paid and the letters you haven’t written.
Also, about sins of omission there is one particularly painful lack of beauty,
Namely, it isn’t as though it had been a riotous red-letter day or night every
time you neglected to do your duty;
You didn’t get a wicked forbidden thrill
Every time you let a policy lapse or forget to pay a bill;
You didn’t slap the lads in the tavern on the back and loudly cry Whee,
Let’s all fail to write just one more letter before we go home, and this round
of unwritten letters is on me.
No, you never get any fun
Out of things you haven’t done,
But they are the things that I do not like to be amid,
Because the suitable things you didn’t do give you a lot more trouble than the
unsuitable things you did.
The moral is that it is probably better not to sin at all, but if some kind of
sin you must be pursuing,
Well, remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing.

You never get any fun out of things you haven't done. I should have saved that for my anniversary post, since that sounds like, go ahead and go on that adventure to Idaho.