A PRIVATE LETTER TO FIVE COLLEAGUES:

You might all have thought it odd that I, opinionated as I am, have not weighed in with something in this long tirade the members have held against the US election on the discussion site, one that mirrors much of what the European press have expressed. The reason is simple – my thoughts are much too grey to be a part in such a black and white discussion. I see faults and gains on both sides; others who share the blame for what is happening in the world. I see the French in the Ivory Coast, the Russians in Chechnya, the Belgians in Ruanda; I remember IndoChina and the Congo and Kuwait and Timor and Talibans and cold wars, and in a further perspective the Holocaust, the Same genocide and Spaniards raping South America.

Bush's hegemony is short and his effects will soon become part of the maelstrom of history. They will be less if we do not push him away from the center with hate and rancor and evil words. We have him and we cannot remove him without copying the hatred we claim to abhor. No lengthy, impassioned discussions of if this and if that will suffice. He is there and will remain and we must make do.

Whatever mistakes Kerry made in the campaign, they were made and they brought effect. That is done and, however murky and grey it may seem, we must accept and make the best of it. Running will not do. We cannot escape what the world is going through, wrought in a crucible that extends back into the 1800s, through two world wars and the terrible arrogance of colonialism.

Thank you for Yeats*. We need more such soberings and less of the unthinking hatred that engenders Civil Wars, Ruanda, Zimbabwe, the Congo, mindless terrorism and state sponsored destruction and more. Not forgetting the Middle East or the Sudanese disaster. We do not know and will never know what Kerry might have done, though his final speech was good. Nor do we fully know what Bush will do now. But we do know that humanism and empathy are not the ruling philosophies among today's political power hierarchy and that we must fear more deeply than any one man, however powerful.

These thoughts, I feel, would not have been accepted in the discussion and so I did not offer them. I send them to you and a few others because I find it hard not to express them. My silence may have been a coward's navigation between Scylla and Charybdis, but it did not mean a lack of feeling.

I would borrow from Cadfael's author: "There is no profit in ifs. We stand where we are." And it is there we must begin.

* Those who might not have read the poem posted by Dan on the discussion group:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
  The best lack all conviction, while the worst
  Are full of passionate intensity.
  Surely some revelation is at hand;
  Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
  The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
  When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
  Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

  A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
  Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
  Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
  The darkness drops again; but now I know
  That twenty centuries of stony sleep
  were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  W. B. Yeats, 1921