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The other day, I was happily writing up a post about, basically, how we can overcome religious division and then the news came that the United States and Israel had started bombing Iran. I just chucked the tablet aside. 

Why is unity so important today? Because, as Antonio Guterres said a few COPs ago, we unite, or we perish. It makes you feel sick in the gut knowing the toddler next door is facing a horrific future. You feel foolish to believe that people can overcome their differences and rise to the challenge of addressing climate change. You feel anger and that the human primate deserves what’s decidedly already here and can only get much worse. All species have an expiry date; most often, I believe, it’s about 200,000 years. We may have reached it, but we can drag other species to the brink of extinction. It’s an old theme: in the early fifties movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, the alien is shocked when humans refer to Earth as “our planet.” We share it with other species, and the human primate is duty-bound to keep its activities well within the limits of what the planet can sustain. Planetary boundaries, as the scientists call them.

From nature’s point of view, all our industrialised civilisation does is grab everything we can get our grubby little hands on and turn it into toxic waste. Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything transforms. As said by French scientist Antoine Lavoisier. All toxic waste created by reckless polluting is there, piling up, and will snuff out, not just us, but also many other life forms.

That brings me back to what I was writing about, and I still feel it is useless. And yet on a train, a cheeky little boy walked past and gave grandpa a tap on both knees. The first tap is, yes, the challenge exists, the second tap, a reminder that we, the adults, have work to do, and it’s not dropping bombs on his peers.

Bless him.

That one page section of Musashi’s “Book of Five Rings” is the most important. It’s Zen, the ‘religion of the samurai’ and where it appears confusing, it is in fact simple. There are a few things in it with which I respectfully disagree with the old samurai, and I think it’s worth explaining in a post. Actually, I’m not alone, Zen academic D. T. Suzuki, appears to have had the same thoughts about what is ‘in the void.’ 

The old man meditating at sunrise is not me. It’s an AI image.

About a week ago, I sat on a park bench watching a protest in the city — mainly young people, loud and passionate, demonstrating against new laws limiting free speech. Watching them, I felt something settle in me: it’s time to pass on the baton. They’re doing well. Making mistakes, probably, but so did we — the boomers who in 1968 genuinely believed the world revolution had finally begun. At this point in my life, I think I’m better suited to the role in that picture. Though I may need to work on my physique.

Silence suits older people. It can even be golden. But a story on the ABC a few days ago disturbed me enough to break it.

Youths claiming allegiance to IS were bashing gay teenage boys and insisting that what they were doing was not a sin. It brought to mind a photograph I once saw of a young girl holding a placard that read, “God Hates Gays.” Wrong, I thought — wrong in every way possible. Simply put, God cannot hate. If He could, He would not be God. He would be the other one.

There is another dimension to these bashings worth considering. If a characteristic appears consistently within a species and at a stable proportion across populations, it is reasonable to assume that the characteristic serves a function in the survival of the whole. In human communities, we need only look at where homosexual men and women have historically concentrated to get a sense of what that function might be. Culture, education, and the military — in each, their contributions have been significant and often decisive. The military may surprise people, but across cultures and centuries, you find outstanding commanders who were, or can reasonably be assumed to have been, homosexual. The right person, in other words, for a particular kind of job.

I should be honest about my own position. My feelings on this are coloured by a youth partially spent as a street boy — not hatred, just a residual unease I’ve never entirely reasoned away. I remember, perhaps ten years after returning to Australia, finishing work on the night of the Mardi Gras parade and deciding to take a look. I lasted twenty minutes. Walking away toward the train station, a strange image came to me: the wounded thigh of an ancient warrior, bleeding, on a black horse slick with sweat. Battle. A different homosexuality entirely.

That image has stayed with me. I’m still not sure what to do with it, except to say that reducing any human complexity to a placard — whether one of hatred or of celebration — has always struck me as a way of not really looking at all.