Snowflakes form when conditions arise that are favorable for the formation of ice crystals in water droplets suspended in the atmosphere. From simple natural rules, the flakes grow into incredibly complex patterns, which take on a quality which we know as "beauty." They are exquisite gifts that nature provides which in overly large quantities lose their beauty except to those fortunate enough to have school canceled as a result of their accumulation. Without shelter, heat, and sustencne, however, snowflakes can never aquire beauty, but instead make thier appearnace as harbingers of doom.
The statement that "no two snowflakes are alike" is unprovable, but almost certainly true. In complex systems which are so dependent on initial conditions, no two crystals will grow in exactly the same manner. Yet even within a single snowflake, it is almost certainly true that no two people can ever "see" the same snowflake. The snowflake will appear much more beautiful to a child who has just been told school is canceled than to one who is told to prepare for school despite the snow. I do not write of this merely because the snows that fell on last Friday were more beautiful to my children (whose school was indeed canceled) than to me, who had to drive through it, but because in the most fundamental way, no two people can ever know what the other experiences. We take it as an act of faith that when I say a thing is blue, I mean the same thing you do when you say it is blue. I would leave it to the philosophers and the cosmologists to discuss this at the most elemental levels; my interest is in exploring how this basic idea is misunderstood by so many of our opinion leaders.
It is an aspect of Narcissism to not be able to recognize that another person's mind is organized in ways that are different from one's own (thier "blue" and mine must be identical; it is a given.) To cite a specific example: a patient in analysis, with great shame and anxiety, describes an event from their childhood in which they committed an unforgivable sin. Part of their anxiety occurs because of their unconscious assumption that I will see their act with exactly the same unforgiving eyes with which they see it. The idea that my Superego may not be as harsh as theirs, or that my primary interest lies in learning what could drive them, as a child, to such straits, so as to help them better understand themselves, is foreign to them. I have seen the dawning recognition in my patients that I am not interested in judging them, but in understanding them; the surprise, shock, and relief can be profound. Unfortunately, too many people are never able to make that step.
Which brings me back to snowflakes. On Thursday, my Middle Son came home from his job at an after school program where he tends to elementary school children for several hours until their parents come to pick them up, and told me that the lovely woman who runs the program had been told she had to remove the paper snowflakes she had put up around the school because they might be offensive to people. The carefully cut-out paper essence of snowflake, with its six sided symmetry, was somehow found to be, not a thing of beauty, but a sinister symbol of something evil. How have we come to this?
The extreme secularists who have taken it upon themselves to eradicate all signs of religious belief in the public square have allowed a solipsistic belief in the primacy of their own minds to overpower what should be their joy in the beauty of the season. Because they have a fanatic's belief in the correctness of their cause, they assume that those who oppose them are fanatics as well. Fanatics who believe in God are indistinguishable from one another, and thus an Islamic fascist and a Christian fundamentalist are one and the same, brothers under the cloth, despite the fact that one will behead infidels and the other might try, usually very politely, to proselytize unbelievers. In fact, to the extreme secularists, they find the believing Christian a greater threat than the believing Muslim. (This is complicated by the fact that the modern day liberal is also unconsciously quite dismissive of those who are "primitives"; that makes it hard to take the threat as seriously as it deserves.)
[And, by the way, I am still waiting for the threatened theocracy to appear; doesn't Bush realize he is running out of time?]
This can be extended to those who cannot disagree with their opponents without imputing base motives to them. There are those who literally cannot conceive of anyone who is not a fanatic being willing to risk their life for a cause; after all, to the Narcissist, there is no more important cause than himself. The intervention in Iraq must, therefore, be for evil motives and those who are evil will lie, cheat, murder, and steal to forward their agenda. This then allows them to lie, cheat, murder, and steal, with the rationalization that they are fighting a greater evil. One of the unfortunate outcomes of such demonizing is that there is no real discussion of the rightness or wrongness of the strategy involved. For instance, if we are doing "everything" wrong in Iraq, as John Kerry insisted recently, what in particular can we do differently to rescue the situation. Of course, he has no answer, nor do those who appear to be taking an opportunistic approach to the major issues of our time.
We need a responsible debate about foreign policy. Iran is close, perhaps within months, to a nuclear bomb, despite recent CIA papers suggesting they are still many years away. How do we address a country whose President believes that Armageddon will hasten the return of the Mahdi? As long as so many Europeans and Democratic party leaders spend all their energy demonizing the Bush administration, we will have less energy available to mobilize a response to the danger. This is from Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld & Gen. Paul Vallely:
One wonders what will it take for the international community to understand that Iran seriously intends to use its nuclear power to attack the "infidels."
Iran's latest move to ban international inspectors is just one more step that the new Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmedinijad, has taken to herald the return of the 12th Imam al-Mahdi, who is believed to have been born 800 years ago and went missing in 941 and whom the Shi'ites and Mr. Ahmedinijad believe will return before judgment day "to lead an era of Islamic justice." According to the prophecies in the Muslim Hadith, (the traditions and sayings of the prophet Mohammed), the 12th Imam al-Mahdi will be resurrected only after "one-third of the world population will die by being killed and one-third will die as a result of epidemics." Indeed, last year's tsunami and this year's devastating hurricanes and earthquakes are being used as propaganda by the radical Shi'ite clerics, claiming that the recent calamities are part of these prophecies.
It might seem like a long distance from snowflakes to nuclear attacks, but there is a common ground. The elites believe the Iranians and their allies, the Syrians and Palestinians, are basically just like us. They are posturing for political advantage and just need the right combination of incentives to come around. Because they occasionally meet urbane Iranian diplomats, they make the unwarranted assumption that the Iranians see the world in the same way they do. This is how the European media and elites can maintain that the United States and Israel are the dangers to peace in the world rather than the nurturers and purveyors of suicide bombing.
The Iran government has stated and restated their intentions to use their weapons of mass death; the IAEA now tells us they are closing in on a bomb. It is past time to get serious about the crisis.
Snowflakes contaminated by radiation are not things of beauty; they are bringers of death.
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