Love & Hate - A Wedding & A Genocide

Yesterday I watched the main bit of the royal wedding of Harry & Megan at lunchtime. In the evening I watched the Dispatches documentary "Myanmars Killing Fields". You probably couldn't have two more extreme examples of love & hate. Such polar opposites do make one wonder whether it is true that "love conquers all".

The first core Precept of Buddhism is that "You should not kill or harm".  Buddhists should live their lives trying to achieve an "absence of violence". 91% of people in Myanmar are Buddhists. How can they possibly be so filled with hate that they will commit human rights atrocities? It is simple - they cannot be Buddhists. According to Time magazine in March 2018 - 671,000 Rohingyas have fled from the extreme violence. The numbers rise hourly. Yanghee Lee, the special Raporteur on human rights & UN investigators think that the number of dead "may turn out to be extremely high". It is thought that more than 43,700 parents are missing. I can't find any statistics for the number of babies & children who have been killed.

http://time.com/5187292/rohingya-crisis-missing-parents-refugees-bangladesh/
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/12/asia/myanmar-rohingya-un-violence-genocide-intl/index.html

 

A woman walks among debris after fire destroyed shelters at a camp for internally displaced Rohingya Muslims in the western Rakhine State near Sittwe. (REUTERS Photo)  

The royal wedding was the expensive specatacle you would imagine - with a twist, which I enjoyed watching.  I'm as sure as you can be that Harry & Meghan love eachother. I hope they will be happy & use their privileged position to help the many charities they support. In this world of press & media coverage of celebrities, which is what they are, they could be an effective "power couple". I'm afraid I see Royalty as a bit of a soap opera - nice clothes & entertaining but not as effective as they could be.

It is difficult to see Love as being in the ascendency today. There is so much that is wrong in our world. It is naive to imagine that this wedding changes anything much. In order to be effective against hate we need to have individuals working together with love to call out & challenge the things that are so wrong in our world. Things which are often totally man made. 

The polar opposite of these two events highlights how unequal, unfair, & disfunctional our world is. How do we fix this? A romanticised "love conquers all" & a big wedding simply isn't enough.