Hello Roger,
I love the intention behind, the lofty purpose, the ultimate goal of a forum like this. A common ground is from all possible views the only possible starting point to find the solution to any conflict or dilemma, all the more to something as great as what this forum is purportedly aiming at - in fact, as the entire world should seriously be aiming at. Above all, I like the fact that it is your forum and not anyone else's forum what we have here because I trust you and your criterion a hundred percent as to seriousness and integrity and as to something that hardly ever can be seen nowadays: equanimity.
Of course, it is very easy to fall into negativity and see your lofty purpose as something impossible to achieve, as a mere dream. I confess that I myself, having lived through one of the world's most atrocious onslaughts from terrorism ever, the one my country suffered from those criminally insane terrorist group who called themselves Sendero Luminoso ("Shining Path"!) over twenty years, tend to consider it impossible to find a common ground with those fiends. Imagine you are playing soccer against a team who will not follow any rules, ever. Do you think that you can win any match with them if you keep your fair play to the end? Impossible, right?
Please correct me if I am wrong. Just to remember those atrocities, the fear, not only for my own safety but for that of my family and my relatives and friends, the permanent blackouts, the news in the papers, and the fact that you never were sure whether the car a few meters from you was going to explode and kill you, I begin to shake with fury. And much to my regret, I must say that I can not trust, and will never trust, any person who has committed such atrocities who now come out in the open and say that they have changed.
Look, I am not saying that all of them are the same. Some may have been induced to those inhuman acts by the wrong, inhuman acts that they or their folk suffered first. Some may have not committed atrocities themselves but just collaborated with their beastly leaders in perpetrating the most horrible onslaughts against innocent people, even children. Some may in fact regret having collaborated.
But not their leaders. In my country, Abimael Guzman, the leader of Sendero Luminoso, and his close associates in it have come of late in the open claiming that they haven changed and their ways are no longer atrocious. They pretend to get involved in my country's political activity in the future. But they have never said that they regret their past fiendish acts. They don't apparently see the evil in them. They justify their past atrocities on political grounds. I am sure that they would ultimately resort back to the same inhuman acts if they just felt it to be necessary in order to reach their goals of "rightness" and "justice" for all.
So I am afraid that there can be no compromising with evil. No possible deals with them, as quite simply, they would break them at the first opportunity. Above all, there is no possible unity with them.
Nowadays we seem to be at a dead end with no possible way out in the future. In the one hand, killing the wicked or sending them to jail forever as “final solution” would only create new “heroes” among them, apart from the fact that by making inhuman war to the fiends, and in the process becoming beasts ourselves, we would be provoking further retaliation and an eventual nuclear conflagration that could destroy the world in the end. In the other hand, I don't believe that we can do anything about it all by ourselves; but more or less passively awaiting a peaceful solution stemming from our own effort seems to be as well out of the question, as the terrorists’ activity will be mounting every day and we could be condemning ourselves to lose the race - and our world with it.
At this point, something else must come into the picture, something that we do not know about or, rather, that so far has not been mentioned but is the only way out to our predicament.
To be frank, I don't really see what that "something else" could be either - short of asking for help from "above". Things have mounted too much, too far, and if we don’t want to just step aside and watch how our folk, our nation, and ultimately our world are destroyed, then, naive as it may seem, we only have left God to look to for his guidance and help.
Why? There is every reason to believe that we are now at that dreadful moment, in apocalyptical terms, when the forces of light are facing the forces of darkness at the end of a great world age. And if we want to participate of such a momentous, cosmic event and fight the dark, we must take sides with the light. The sooner we do so, the better it will be.
You of course have heard that old saying that "If you want to save the world, then you first need to change yourself." Yes, that old fight between the forces of light and darkness is also carried out within ourselves. And odd as it may sound, only when the light has won at last within ourselves will the salvation of the world be finally ensured.
Sincerely,
Luis Miguel Goitizolo