A LESSON IN SPIRITUALITY, PART FOUR

 

‘Bless the kindness of rapists and dignity of rats..’

‘The Unwritten Song’ 1998

Bad people do bad things. Consequently, they are punished and sent to Hell. Good people do good things. They get rewarded and go to Heaven. That’s what we are taught by our betters. That’s what we see in movies and that’s what we read in papers. That’s how it works. We accept it and we love it. We love predictability. We love simplified fairness and justice. We love logical conclusions. Also, it’s quite reassuring to see everything as right and wrong or black and white. Colonel Gaddafi was bad, so he had to be killed. Why was was he bad? What did he do? Never mind. Don’t overcomplicate things. He was bad and he was punished for being bad. CNN said so. All is good, simple and all is as it should be. Go to sleep now.

At some point we grow up. We expand. We start poking our heads out of our shells. We don’t like what we see because it doesn’t make any sense. We scratch our heads a little and shrink back to the safety of social media, news outlets and peers who share our views. Here, in our little cocoon, everything makes sense, everything is logical, fair and predictable. We know what’s right, we know what’s wrong and we know what’s going to happen to all of us in the end. Good night!

When we hit our teenage years, we enter the ‘Age of the Ultimate Clarity and Total Knowledge’.  We feel there’s nothing else to be learned or discovered. We are complete in our understanding of the Universe. And so was I…At the gentle age of 13, my education was complete and my knowledge about the world was absolute. Totally.

Now I am 55 years old. I slowly enter the ‘Age of a Total Confusion’. My knowledge is shrinking with every day gone. I don’t understand what’s going on around me anymore. I don’t understand why we are so insistent on destroying our planet, I don’t see the point of Justin Bieber, and I can’t understand why people with enough intelligence to operate a microwave oven have chosen Homer Simpson to be their president. I don’t understand the reasons behind the Ford ‘Ka’ automobile, Brexit, virtual sex, vegetarian sausages, ‘Red Cow’ roundabout, Boris Johnson’s haircut, ‘May contain nuts!’ warnings on the packet of  nuts, and ‘You will die!’ warnings on cigarette packs. I’ve witnessed certain events in real life and I watched the same events on TV couple of days later. TV told me that what I saw with my own eyes was wrong. They said I was misled and brainwashed. It made me even more confused, so I gave up. I don’t believe CNN anymore, and I run away from anyone who says ‘I know. That’s how it is’. Unless it’s a dog. Or a kid.

I love kids. I love my students. I know they will eventually grow up. They will became chaotic, neurotic, irritated and confused just like everyone else, but for now they are clear, intuitive, honest and positive. Also, they possess healthy distrust of everything they hear from adults. Me, I always believed everything old people say, even if I was proven wrong again and again. That’s why I want to share this story with you. It doesn’t fit into any of the existing templates. It is wrong and it is very confusing. I don’t learn well and those events didn’t teach me much. But they definitely made me think twice before making yet another assumption about what is right and what is wrong. I’ll leave it for you to decide.

Introduction.

There’s something highly satisfactory about the way the average Hollywood movie is composed. One of the main parameters of the script is its total predictability, even to the smallest detail. You watch it for 5-10 minutes and you know exactly what’s going to happen with each and every character.  And no matter how bad and messy things get in the beginning, you can be assured that in the end everything will be sorted out to our complete satisfaction. Everyone will get what they deserve. Fairness, balance, justice and stability will be restored.

Let’s remind ourselves how things work in the carefully crafted world of the moving pictures.

An opening scene. A schoolyard. A rough looking, muscular boy (a bully), covered in tattoos and engine oil, abusing a skinny and spotty nerd (a victim).  A group of ‘popular’ students are enjoying the show. They are cool. The nerd is not cool. He carries a chessboard under his armpit and a full edition of Shakespeare works in his school bag. He is wearing sellotape-mended glasses and he has a friend who is fat and Chinese. You’ll see the oil-covered bully spitting in the nerd’s lunch and saying something like, ‘What you gonna do about it, you creep, huh?’ Then you’ll see scattered books on the floor and bully’s boot stepping on the nerd’s glasses. It will be overly exaggerated to the point of being ridiculous, but that’s a way it should be. In the next scene you will see a timid looking teacher who will try to confront the bully. The teacher will be told to F… off. 

The oil covered bully’s name will be Frank. The nerd will be called Richard and his mother Rosie will be a single, one-legged asthma sufferer, living in a shed with no windows and no running water, working at home making pizza boxes, eating cabbage and earning 3 dollars in a week, all in order to pay Richard’s school fees. We’ll learn that she’d sacrificed everything in her life to make sure little Richie doesn’t end up like his father Bobby (a muscular and tattooed alcoholic covered in engine oil). Bobby will appear in the middle of the movie. Drunk. He will beat up Rosie, take away her money and beat up Richard who will try to protect his mom. He’ll also break Richard’s glasses. 

Richie will have a half-blind, half-dead, bold, paralysed, seventy years old dog called Nelson. At some point Nelson will be unnecessary and brutally killed by Frank. It will take at least three minutes of Whitney Heuston’s ‘And I will always love yoooooooooooooooou…..’ for Nelson to die.

At this point we’ll start feeling the unfairness of the whole thing. We’ll get angry. We’ll start wishing all sorts of horrible things to happen to anyone who is covered in engine oil. We’ll start yearning for justice. And a logical conclusion, of course.

Back to the school drama… We will see Richard who is trying to find his glasses, his Chinese friend who is being beaten up for trying to help Richard and the teacher (a Nazi camp surviver) who is hiding in his office (fade in black and white footage of the laughing, evil looking, oil-covered, books burning German soldiers surrounding the younger version of our teacher who is trying to hide the ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ in his underpants). The rest of the kids will be chanting ‘Fight, fight, fight!’, we’ll have our blood boiling and we’ll wish for Frank to be punished in most gruesome ways. Suddenly, a school darling, full blonde, rosy-cheeked, D-sized cheerleader Jessica will appear out of nowhere and confront Frank. She’ll tell him this is not the ‘American Way’ and she’ll tell him to be ashamed. She’ll tell him to go away. 

You still don’t know how it ends up? Really? Let’s continue then…

The cool looking group of kids will begin to realise how wrong the whole thing is. They’ll start to feel ashamed. They’ll help Richard to pick up his books and they’ll tell Frank to go away. Oil-covered Frank will retreat while cursing and promising to kill Richard. He’ll also promise to kill Jessica, the Nazi-surviving teacher and everyone who gets in his way.

In the next scene we’ll see Jessica helping Richie to get up and Richie staring at Jessica’s D-cup. Then we will have some idyllic shots in the Rosie’s shed – Jessica and Chinese kid discussing a theory of relativity, Richard reading Shakespeare, Jessica hugging half-paralysed Nelson. Rosie serving the boiled cabbage dinner and everyone being peaceful and happy.

While our friends are having a good time, Frank will be sitting in his truck outside Rosie’s shed, drinking beer, listening to the rock music and planning something obviously evil. He will notice drunk and angry Bobby (Richard’s father), walking towards the shed. He will stop and befriend Bobby by offering him beer and drugs. Together, they will decide to ‘get those sons of bitches’. The rest you can guess. Both of those characters will inflict a lot of pain on our heroes. It all will be very, very dramatic. Instead of walking through the door, they’ll burst into the shed through the wall, they’ll unnecessarily break most of the furniture, they will curse and they will pose and they will do lots of Evil Things to get us even more angry. At some point poor Nelson will try to protect Rosie and will be electrocuted, strangled and decapitated. Rosie will be cut to pieces, Chinese boy will have his spleen removed and Richard will be thrown through the walls. Jessica will be relatively unharmed in order to look cinematic. Making long story short – everyone will be saved by the old Nazi-surviving teacher, who’ll appear out of nowhere, having found enough courage to finally raise against evil. While our teacher is kicking Frank’s and Bobby’s oily backsides, we’ll be treated to another couple of black and white shots of laughing German soldiers surrounding our teacher, who is being slapped around by the officer who will look like Frank’s twin brother. The teacher will be played by Brad Pitt, who’ll receive 179.000.000 US dollars for his short appearance.

In the end, evil will be punished and good people will triumph. Jessica will become a missionary, Richard will marry Jessica, Chinese kid will become a fighter pilot and Brad Pitt will fall in love with Rosie. 

I forgot to mention – Nelson will survive. We will see him once more, in the last scene, right before the credits roll. He’ll be sitting in an armchair in a front of the fire, holding a cigar and a glass of Single Malt. Surrounded by Richie’s children, Twenty years later. On a different planet. He will explain to us that Frank and Bobby were bad people and that they got what they deserved. Just in case we didn’t get the idea.

So. The villain is punished. Our righteous anger is gone, we are deeply satisfied, the end of the story is logical and predictable, the moral of the story is clear and we all end up being happy and secure.

You might ask, ‘And what does this have to do with anything and why were we treated to the B movie script?’. I can tell you why. I wanted to make you feel angry about the bad guys, to feel pity about the victims, to feel satisfaction after the logical conclusion of events and to experience the comforting sense of justice, fairness and order.

And then get back to the reality and meet a proper villain.

I don’t remember his name. I don’t even remember his face. He was ordinary. A man of average age and average build. He was an officer. He carried the rank of ‘Praporshik’. Prapor, in short. He did a tour of Afghanistan, got injured and was sent to the ‘Chemical Defence Battalion’ to serve his remaining years before the retirement. Because of his injury, he was allowed to wear civilian shoes, and that’s all we knew about him. Then we started to hear things…First, he was put in charge of a battalion shower unit where he practically boiled alive two soldiers. Just for fun. They both survived, but had to be discharged on medical grounds. It was put down as an accident. Then he was transferred to the hospital where he caused the death of Reso, a young soldier from Georgia, who was recovering from surgery. Prapor told Reso to get up and get dressed. He ordered him to go down to the yard and to do a bit of snow shovelling. Which is exactly the sort of thing you do when you just had your appendix removed. Our medic tried to protest, but Prapor was not in the mood. He wanted the hospital yard to be spotless, he gave an order and that was it. Reso’s stitches burst and he bled to death. He was half-sitting, half-leaning against the wall when they found him. There was no sign of blood. It was soaked up by his ‘Vatnick’ – a heavy winter coat and pants made from the cotton wool. Our medic later said, ‘I thought Reso was having a rest. I didn’t want to say anything. I was hoping Prapor wouldn’t notice’.

Prapor got off the hook. They put him in charge of a warehouse. Two or three weeks went by. Then he did it again. He slammed a first-year soldier’s head against the wall and put him in the hospital. The first-year apparently wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way.

It was a garrison prison next. A grim place it was indeed. One of the cells had no windows. We called it a ‘swimming pool’ as it was always full of water.. It had only one occupant at the time – Adson, a truck driver from Estonia. Adson was big, slow and harmless. According to the sergeant on duty, Adson asked ‘Prapor’ if he can smoke. ‘Prapor’ replied by opening a cell door and emptying a bucket of chlorine flakes into the water. Adson ended up coughing bits of his lungs out. 

During his time in the kitchen, one of the cooks was driven to suicide…a week or two later, a driver was crushed between the truck and a staff car, because against all safety regulations Prapor ordered him to hold a towing cable. There were dozens of cases of beatings, abuse and even torture, but practically all of them were covered up by our CO’s. For some reason, Prapor was untouchable.

I only got a taste of his antics once, during the 25km ‘Fast March’. It was 30 degrees Celsius, there was a very strict time limit and on top of that we had to carry 20-30 kg on our backs. He ordered us to run in gas masks, just for the hell of it. You can’t breathe properly in those things even when you are walking, let alone running. Some of us managed to take the filter membranes out. We thought we were smart and we hoped nobody will check. Prapor didn’t have to check though. He knew exactly what was going on and he knew exactly what to do. He prepared a little surprise for us. To complete the run and cross the finish line, we had to go through the long field tent. It was full of tear gas. If you still had your membrane in, you were ok, if it was out…..too bad. 

Mine was out.

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‘The F1 hand grenade has a steel exterior that is notched to facilitate fragmentation upon detonation….The radius of the shrapnel dispersion is up to 200 meters (effective radius is about 30 meters). Hence, the grenade has to be deployed from a defensive position to avoid self harm’.

‘Wikipedia’

 

During the war it was given a nickname ‘Limonka’ – a little lemon. Nasty thing, this. Just imagine, everything within the 30 metres radius is shredded to bits. Actually no, don’t imagine, you’ll sleep better. 

The very first time you shoot a rifle, you don’t feel scared. It’s ok. When you hold a live grenade for the first time, you are very much aware that there are only four seconds between your life and something else entirely. You are scared. You don’t want to hold it. You see the world with different eyes. It gives you a different perspective on quite a few things. It’s heavy and it’s slippery. It’s slippery because your hands are sweating. You don’t hear your instructor, you only hear your own heartbeat. You freeze. You are afraid to let go. It’s not rational, as there are trenches to hide, you have to wear a steel helmet and there is an officer near you in case of something going wrong, so it’s kind of safe. In theory, that is. In practice, not so. In the army, there’s always a ‘human element’.. 

At this particular day, a ‘Chemist’ unit was brought to the grenade range. Prapor was in charge and he was not in a good mood. He was cursing, swearing, slapping and kicking everyone who got in his way. He ordered the whole unit to get out of the trench and to line up behind the kid who took the pin out and froze. The kid panicked and switched off. He refused to let go. Prapor kicked him in the butt. The grenade fell on the ground. There were 12 kids standing around. They had 4-5 seconds to live. None of them was old enough to shave. 

Are you ready for the logical conclusion?

Here goes. 

Prapor, a sadist, maniac and criminal, threw himself on the grenade and by doing so, saved 12 young lives. 

He was given a military burial. His combat awards and medals were carried behind his coffin on little red pillows. A battalion commander gave a speech. Apparently, Prapor was a war hero, and his ‘selfless bravery has saved countless lives’ during his time in Afghanistan. 

Moral of the story, anyone?

I have none.

Good night!