“…nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too…”
I’ve prevaricated, hesitated and procrastinated. I wasn’t sure whether to write anything. I don’t want to enrage my friends, alienate my colleagues or estrange myself from a few of my closest relatives. But I’m saddened, I’m maddened and the only way I know to process my thoughts is to write it down, swear it out and just maybe share something constructive around an act so destructive.
I went to a fee-paying Anglican high school. For 7 years, I was subjected to songs about a God I’d never seen, stories about a prophet I couldn’t be certain ever existed and writing papers about a science that could not be proven. We spent hours in chemistry validating the existence of science-y stuff with equations and experiments that required exacting measurement, painstaking processes and a dangerous amount of fire (especially considering the largely teenage boy audience and a school located in the bush). Most of our week was about truth, proof and certainty. Then for one hour, an hour that counted towards our grades, we’d sit in a room and share fairytales. #seasdontpart #waterdoesntbecomewine
My Anglican education was broken at 16 with a year in a state-funded high school in France. Science and history and language were still very much the order of the day, but one of the first questions my friends would ask was ‘are you right or left’. Kids were into politics, real life, Mitterand and Mururoa, not fairytales about Mary or Magdelene. In our history class we wrote papers about what we thought and then spent hours debating actual philosophy. ‘What do you think about’ was a question I couldn’t remember being asked during my years of incandescent indoctrination.
My year in France taught me to think, taught me to question, taught me to be me. Napoleon, that short second son of Corsica, had such distrust of religious institutions he separated the church from the state a century before I ever stepped out of the plane. You can’t be legally married in a church in France; the state is the highest authority in the land, not the temple. Which is why it is so frustrating that this insanity is playing out in Paris, a city of the freest peoples, a city that has been the playground of warmongers for centuries, but a city that allows its citizens to pray to whatever god they choose, to read whatever fairytales they wish, a city of religious freedom. (Except for Scientology because the French rightly classify that as a corporation, not a religion)
I don’t regret that I went to the school I went to, I’m very lucky that I had the good fortune to receive any education at all. If I were born somewhere else in the world, I’d perhaps have been forbidden a day in a school because a dusty book written by someone who has been dead for millennia said girls should stay dumb as a post and open their legs and cook and clean and worship a man. Malala took a few bullets in her brain to prove that girls can do whatever they want, and her parents, her friends and her family all read that same book. But they, like me, benefit from a bit of perspective a bit of context, a bit of common sense. #itwaswritten2000yearsago
I very much live with a keen sense of spirituality, a sense of energy and aura and balance and being. What I don’t have is the ability to read a book written in a language I don’t speak, that NO ONE speaks anymore, and believe word for word that I must behave the way the book says I should. I believe that if I am a good human, other people around me will be good humans too…regardless of their colour or creed. #dountoothers
I don’t get why you want me to pray for Paris; isn’t that what got us all in this trouble in the first place? One guy, with an army and a flag, said that his book was more valid than the other guy’s. That guy didn’t have a flag or an army a few years ago, but he sure does now, and he is so colossally blinkered that he’ll point his gun wherever he wants, wave his flag, and then die for his fairytale. He’s learned his opponent’s rules, he’s standing behind his book and country, with his own songs, his own code and his own twitter feed to mesmerise his comrades and he has no fear. He believes in fairytales too.
Well I propose that from this day, my fairytale be the one we all believe.
Once upon a time there was a land of people of all the types, kinds and colours; this land was call Sanity-Land. The people of Sanity-Land loved to read, they read all the time, but they were clever and kind and knew when a story was just a story and not the absolute truth, certainly not worth massacring your neighbours. The people of Sanity-Land didn’t mind if one person read stories about trees, and another person read stories about trucks and another person read stories about butterflies. Everyone read their stories in peace and then they hugged their children goodnight and slept soundly because they were good.
The people knew that the rules in the stories were not rules for everyday living in 2015. Obviously being a Jedi is a fairytale, obviously a land filled with mermaids under the sea is a fairytale, obviously travelling through time is a fairytale and Mr Darcy is too perfectly hot to have ever been a real person, so he must be a fairytale too.
The Sanity-Landers cared about food, making enough food for everyone to eat. They cared about shelter, and building enough roofs for all the people of Sanity-Land. The people made music and movies and danced and apologised when they pushed in front of you at Waitrose. They didn’t think that pushing in front of you was cause for a violent knife injury; they didn’t film it and pray it went viral on YouTube. The people just recognised that we are all different and unique and if we just imagined that the borders and the books were just that, imaginary, the world would live as one.
What a thought provoking piece of writing. I always love reading your posts. I share your sadness and pain....too much in fact, to ask you some of my own hard questions with respect to some of your comments. It doesn't seem the right time. Maybe I'll revisit this post in a few months and have the guts to ask them then. Thanks for your honesty.xxx.
Posted by: Natasha | 11/15/2015 at 07:35 PM