Breeding little monsters
What follows is the story of two brothers that life brought together, as they were born and grew up in the same family!
The younger brother is Peter, known as the godless blind and the older brother is Tom, known as Peter’s brother. Peter was not born blind, nor he was godless before. He could see and he was a believer like his brother Tom. He lost his sight because of a stupid accident when he was twenty years young. The doctors told Peter that he couldn’t be healed by science. As a believer in the power of God, he resorted to them in helping him heal what the medicine couldn’t. After many unfruitful attempts, Peter lost any hope of recovering the use of his eyes, and with it, he lost faith in God and their emissaries. He became a godless blind, angry towards this world. He developed a grudge against his life. He couldn’t tolerate petty problems anymore. He started to disdain all material things. His company was not pleasant anymore, consequently he lost or got rid of all his “friends”, including his brother Tom. He was left alone with his loneliness. His imagination and his thoughts remained his only companions and his favorite pastime has been to wander together with them in a new world of absolutes and intangibles. With time, Peter started to see all things and beings, even the so-called gods, in a different new light and with an unprecedented clarity. With this deep, encompassing and powerful vision, his respect and kindness towards people grew bigger every day, as he understood better the reasons behind their meanness. This newfound wisdom made him stronger and more loved by the new people he met. What people appreciated the most in Peter was his empathy and humility towards anyone. Peter was always interested in other people’s lives, problems, joys, sorrows, not out of curiosity, but because he genuinely cared for them, he learned from them, and in very rare occasions he was able to help them, just a little bit. The more he found out about people’s fears and desires, thoughts and feelings, the more he understood that gods didn’t create humans, but rather humans created gods. Consequently, for his old friends, Peter became a helpless pariah, from whom they distanced themselves, and so did Tom, who followed the same narrow path that lead him to ignore the mere existence of his brother Peter.
On one spring day, after a long separation, Peter heard Tom’s voice in a park where they used to go play together when they were kids. He called him. Surprised, Tom finally made few steps towards Peter and they exchanged the typical brief greetings and mundane questions about insignificant things. Right after, Tom wanted to leave before the discussion diverts into topics he doesn’t like to discuss with his godless brother. Peter stopped him and said:
“Tom, I really miss you my brother! Before you leave I would like you to answer one simple question. Would you do that?”
Tom, secretly pleased by the unexpected declaration of love and this peculiar request, stopped and replied to Peter: “Ok, Peter, I will answer your question, as long as it doesn’t relate to God or anything connected to them”.
“Sure, it is not about this at all, I just want to know, in your opinion, who needs your strength more, the weak or the strong?”
Astonished by the simplicity of the question, Tom answered without much hesitation, except the one triggered by the perceived stupidity of the question: “the weak needs my strength to support him, of course! What a question! Can I go now?” and he turned his back, starting to depart.
“Wait”, Peter said, “don’t leave just yet, give me five more minutes of your time. Somehow, I am not surprised by your answer. My brother, maybe you don’t realize this, but your answer is against everything you believe in!”
Tom stared at his brother annoyed, a bit angry, and fearful that the conversation would stray into the sacred realm of his unshakable faith. Peter, not seeing the expression on his brother’s face, carried on saying:
“Tom, your answer is against your beliefs, simply because it is an injustice towards life, this same life that was created by your gods. Your answer undermines the principle of strength upon which life has been designed and thriving since the beginning of time. You and many like you, driven by the religiously acquired feeling of guilt of being strong without helping the weak, waste your strength and your power on many weaklings, who will remain as such regardless of how much strength and energy, you will give them. At the same time, you withhold a look, a hug, an encouraging word or a helping hand from the strongmen, who will not remain as such if their strength was not supported by the strength of people like them. One day, my brother, you and your likes might realize that you have made a mistake and you want to repair it by giving the strong what they deserve. You will look around you for a receiving soul and you will find yourselves surrounded by weaklings clinging to their fragile existence like patients, who, despite knowing that the end is ineluctable, hold to the serum that provides them with few more drops of their vanishing lives. At that moment, you will panic, and in your panic, you will cry in fear, camouflaged in outrage: “Peter, my brother, why have you forsaken me?” But, Tom, you should know that I’ve never left you, I have always been there, I have waited for you to make a step towards me, to try to understand things the way I see them, to put your ego aside and show me that you cared for me, to give me some strength in my struggle against the harshness of my life. Tom, it is you who have abandoned me, because you convinced yourself that I don’t need you. You always believed that because I were determined and strong, I wouldn’t need anyone. You have stayed away from me because you were hurt by my godlessness, you were suffering from my atheism, and you were stuck in your fabricated world of indignations and limitations. And yes, after all that, when you would eventually wake up to the truth, then it would be too late, because by then “everything would have been done!”
I don’t know what befell of Peter and Tom after this encounter. Did they continue their conversation? Did they get into another heated dispute? Did they just leave without saying anything? Did Tom realize that his brother needs him? Did Peter lose any remaining hope…? I don’t know and I will never know.
What I do know, though, is the following:
“our generous indulgence towards the exaggerated expression of the dwarfs’ little pains, their self-centeredness and their lack of care for the world around them, our lenient acceptance of their hypocritical and pitiful attempts to belittle or disregard the suffering of others and amplify their insignificant contribution to humanity, and finally, our excessive tolerance to their pernicious and harmful behaviors and their stubbornness to impose their stingy and miserable values on us, are among the most determining factors in the creation and proliferation on this planet, of little, but very harmful, social monsters!”
I say to all the giants of this world: “no more!”