Love Your Enemy
There are no means of safety against superior
qualities of another person but to love him.
- Goethe
Ancient Wisdom about Love's Great Lesson
It can seem a very hard row to how, that you are supposed to love your enemies ... the ones who are trying to hurt you or the ones you love ... or destroy the things and principles you love and would die for.
From people who burn flags ... to those who burn people in effigy ... it can be hard to turn the other cheek when you know the first time was no accident.
So exactly what does "love your enemies" really mean?
I think there is much to be gained from understanding the world from your enemies point of view. People go to war for many reasons, but at the heart of it is the idea of injustice and the need to survive.
We can all understand the parent who is caught stealing to feed their hungry and starving children. Seeing your children crying and dying of starvation, at the brink of survival -- can change your values. Life has a higher value than the rights of property owners. Those property owners, if put into the same situation, might do the same for their children.
If your enemies are starving to death -- loving them means feeding them, and then going the extra mile and teaching them to feed themselves. You can feed a man a fish, teach him how to fish, or show him how to build a fishing industry that will feed and employ thousands.
It all depends on whether you are focused on helping him to survive, be sustainable, or thrive. The first makes him dependent on you. The second makes him dependent on himself. The third makes him a trading partner.
The funny thing is ... strong trading partners rarely go to war. Its the ones who are kept away from the trading table that go to war .. usually to get what they desperately need to survive but cannot buy, trade or steal. Stealing, such as the annexing of Faulkin Islands, the oil fields of Kuwait, and the breadbasket of Poland -- are all moves of desperate people who can not buy -- or can not afford -- the things they need to survive (or thrive in a changing world). So they steal what they need, or use it to acquire the leverage to get what they want.
If you loved someone, you would not let them starve. Or go without medical care. Or remain ignorant and poor.
Watching good people suffer and doing nothing when everything they need is within your power -- that creates enemies. Like watching a house burn down while refusing to lend a hose to your neighbor.
So, why turn someone into an enemy by letting them starve? Why let a generation of spirited children grow up in a world that only offers poverty, disease and death? Why let all the human potential in the world lie fallow in the field when all it would take is a little love to get things growing?
Teach a man how to fish and you have a friend for Life.
Turn your enemies in ... to adversaries that allow you to express all the compassion and good will you can muster. And when you have together waged war on poverty, disease and ignorance ... you will have found the common enemy that unites you both.
