Blessed are the meek – Viva!life 80

Tony Wardle takes a look at ‘us’ and ‘them’ to see what divides us – and what unites us

Featured in Viva!Life 80/Summer 2022

Most mornings when I wake up, I reach for my phone and check the latest news stories. It’s the journalist in me but I have no idea why I persist as usually it makes me want to roll over and go straight back to sleep again. Is the world really in such a terrible state that it seems to slough away hope like dead skin and splash cold water on residual optimism?

Yes, I know there have always been threats and turmoil and having once been a military copper on an atom bomber base in 1960’s Germany, I know the meaning of threat. Every time an alert sounded and the base leapt into action, aircraft roaring angrily into the sky, I expected to be frizzled and fried in a gigantic nuclear skillet. But crises seem to be like reality TV shows – the ending of one is immediately followed by the start of another. How and why do they happen (crises, not reality shows)?

At the heart of most crises is the failure of someone’s grand plan for a ‘better’ world – which usually means ‘better’ for them. Religion or politics are the usual sources of these grand designs although messianic individuals are also included in the mix. Whoever it is, once the plan is implemented it becomes immutable and anyone who challenges it is likely to be excommunicated – often head from body.

Like most people, I have enough to do confronting the simple decisions that need to be taken just to navigate through life. It has certainly never crossed my mind that I am so gifted, so far-sighted that I can set out a plan to guide a nation – even the entire world – to the sunlit uplands. And thank heavens for that as grand plans rarely end well.

There is, it seems, an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. ‘Us’ are people who care about living things and abhor suffering and just want a world in which all creatures are respected and valued. A world where destructive greed is outlawed, an acceptance that to survive we need to respect the natural balance of an incredible world that has grown out of billions of years of evolution. We have no grand plan just a simple plan – to live and let live which, ironically, trumps any grand plan in every regard.

‘Us’ are those who look forward to going on holiday, worry about the cost of living, our mortgages, rent, our kid’s exam results, relationships and why early evening telly is such crap. ‘Them’ are the ones whose grand plans are going to save us from these mundanities, elevate our lives and smite our enemies (that we didn’t know we had).

In my lifetime alone, we’ve had a pretty chilling selection of grand plans that have been hatched by ‘them’ and cost the lives of millions of ‘us’ and spread despair and suffering for many others. Take your choice from Stalin (communism), Hitler (fascism) or ISIS (religion).

To that you can add Pol Pot, Pinochet, Kim Jong-un (and his familial predecessors), Franco, Mussolini and a few others. Some got to power through force of arms, others ‘democratically’ such as Hitler but they all behaved in much the same way – erasing democracy was the first step for all of them, to disenfranchise the ‘us’.

And now, of course, we have the latest ‘them’ – a former communist spy master whose whole life has been a kaleidoscope of suspicion, duplicity, violence, torture and death who has followed the dictator’s creed to the letter. His grand plan seems to be to rebuild Russia’s lost empire as if that was somehow a model to be emulated when it was, in fact, rejected by every country it embraced, including Russia itself.

And so the tanks roll, the bombs drop and the soldiers shoot, while death, destruction, misery and fear spread like a pall across a country that did nothing to invite it. It is chilling! But we as a nation need to cast the mote from our own eye – just a few years ago, we did to Iraq precisely what Putin is now doing to Ukraine and with similar threadbare justifications. In the process, we tore the lid from Pandora’s box and unleashed a pestilence far worse than that which beset ancient Greece. That was Tony Blair’s and George Bush’s grand plan (and those in the shadows behind them) and like those that have preceded them, neither has expressed any doubt or regret about their actions.

So once again, the suffering is immense and yet out of it comes scenes that bring tears of gratitude and hope to my eyes and reaffirms my belief that, if we are to survive on this planet, it is the ‘us’ who must triumph and the ‘them’ who must fail – there is no alternative.

The old lady who walked for days to find safety with her disabled German shepherd on her shoulders was one of ‘us’. So were the teenage girls who carried their little Yorkshire terrier for 15 days in a back pack without a grand plan. The woman who was asked to open her bag at a check point and revealed a bunch of squirming little puppies, who she would not abandon, threatened no one. Both the man and the wide-eyed cat who peered out between his jacket lapels had no desire to change the world – he just wanted to save his beloved friend.

There are frightened people and their families fleeing to save their lives, and their families so frequently include their companion animals

In almost every piece of footage I have seen from Ukraine there are frightened people and their families fleeing to save their lives, and their families so frequently include their companion animals. We have met so many of these principled, caring but frightened people on the Polish Ukraine border and at Warsaw’s refugee centres and we have offered them practical help. It is often quite small in nature – food, water, a lead, a harness, a carrier, a kind word or two – but its emotional impact is huge. They realise that there are others who care about them, their lives, their animals, their peace of mind (and that is part of what your donations have helped to produce).

Since the age of 12, I have been an atheist and have not once doubted that position. Over the decades, I have observed that organised religion is too often part of the problem and not the cure. However, some of Christianity’s teachings offer hope – not least Matthew 5:5, the most well-known of the Beatitudes. “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the Earth.” If I prayed, I would pray that this time is rapidly approaching.