I feel rather like echoing Peter Riley's exasperated post and suggesting
that all poets shut up.
How does this "discussion" contribute to anything? Poets are impotent in
these situations at the best of times: let's not display our impotence in
crisis with meaningless displays of recrimination and bombast. Surely
Gabriel's admirable attempts to hang on to human qualities of openness
and courtesy towards other points of view are worth attending? If we
can't hang on to a common humanness, a common understanding, in the face
of overwhelming pressures to "take sides", then any ideal of discussion
might as well be abandoned now.
No, in saying this I am not making excuses for any of the horrific
crimes now taking place. Anywhere.
Nothing we can do here will make any difference to those people - on
either "side" - who are now suffering. I think this should be foremost
in our minds. It might be possible - if we believe in the possibility of
civilised discourse - to exchange information and ideas that might
otherwise be hard to find, and to piece together some picture of what
might be happening. And, perhaps, make a stand, however small, for the
fragile but crucial virtues of human kindness, tolerance, trust and
compassion, and the distinctions of complex truths in the face of
steamrolling and self-interested simplifications. These are things that
are being destroyed, even between us, as much as the homes and lives of
thousands of innocent people.
And where are the Serbian and Albanian poets?
Alison
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