"Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred." -- Vaclav Havel
Matt Welch's piece in Reason Magazine on his visit to the Czech Republic to celebrate the life of Vaclav Havel is a beautiful tribute the man, and also provides a caution against believing that electing a philosopher king will solve everything. There is no salvation in politics, even when a beloved hero of the people takes the reins.
Havel spent 5 years in jail as a dissident against the state dictatorship and led his country through the Velvet Revolution, a playwright turned president breaking down tyranny's barricades and wedding his nation to Western Europe. As president, he remained a champion of freedom and moral clarity, but could never gain the whip hand over the new republic's rumbustious politicians.
"Many ridiculed Havel for his words about truth and love," Schwarzenberg said. "Yet it is the essence of the human struggle. And we must never give up that struggle....Only love makes us listen to the truth of others."The Bureaucratic-Industrial Complex is Crushing Us
There's some wisdom there. Even the OWS crowd is onto something, if in a one-eyed, twisted way. As they scream for the death of bankers and corporations and demand free college and a minimum wage for doing nothing, they fail to realize that it is government that has enfeebled and impoverished us.
Government told us to stop working so hard, don't worry, it's not your fault... It's a nice sentiment, to remove a burden from the downtrodden (albeit with other people's money), but government also ended up snuffing self-sufficiency and rewarding failure and ignorance as it shouldered its way in to every last corner of our lives.
Meanwhile the Government-Corporate Complex continued building great bureaucratic bulwarks against competition, protected by concertina wire tangles of laws and regulations preventing the little guy or gal from challenging Walmart and Microsoft, or from even selling food on a street corner. And forget about manufacturing; too fraught with legal liability. Better to take your investment cash to China, or Vegas.
Our politicians are not listening to us, and the bureaucratic class is out of control. We want our lives back.
Truth without Love...
Truth without Love...
Truth without love is like facts without context, like music without passion, like a sermon without faith. That is to say, it is finally not truth at all. Parsing words to gain momentary self-advantage at the expense of deeper understanding spreads a kind of moral rot, one that inhibits development and blunts joy.
Havel found kinship with and inspiration from crazed rockers who insisted on living according to their own code despite an all-smothering state, which is how Magor probably intended the phrase that Havel would take and run with. Here, ultimately, is where truth fuses with love–love for music, for life, for Prague, for getting your drink on, and for taking advantage of every cracked-open door to bloody well do something with your life.Can we all resolve, in this upcoming year, to evaluate the sausage coming out of Washington, DC not by our partisan lights, but based upon whether it advances or destroys personal liberty? Don't try looking for love there. You will not find it.
Instead, look for politicians like this...
