24/09/2017
Reflections from writing ROBERT BURNS – SCOTLAND’S RADICAL POET
For the 2009 Edinburgh International Festival Fringe
“We the people” was claimed to be the democratic authority of the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. And wherever “we the people” have claimed not to be servants of despots but to be served by those who would claim to be given the right to rule under the authority of “the people”, progress towards an end to the “us/them” mentality has been made. But today these events stand condemned by their aftermath of strife: the slavery that continued after the American Revolution, the reign of terror that followed the French Revolution, the slaughter of millions that followed the Russian Revolution, the cold war between capitalist and communist countries, and the terrorism which cannot be justified but has been provoked by injustice and bogus, dogmatic religiosity by a minority of Muslims and Christians who are violating the basic teachings of their prophets.
For does it make any difference to the suffering of a woman whether her child has been killed by a bomb tied around a waist or dropped from a plane? What difference is it whether any bombers who claim to believe in the prophets endorsed by the Koran or the Bible, whose teachings culminated in “turning swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks and to study war no more,” if they still commit these acts of crimes against humanity. And so long as “we the people” are complicit in this, what is the gain? Robert Burns believed in the writings of the biblical prophets demanding justice and compassion. To what extent do we?
So long as “we the people” allow our schools to spend more time teaching about the history of war and the story of warmongers taking them from one battlefield to another, rather than teaching them the history of peace and taking them from the story of one peacemaker to another, the mandate of the United Nations cannot be fulfilled.
But “we the people” can make the changes required by this and beyond it.. YES WE CAN! “We the people” can request that throughout the world, all the armed forces wear blue helmets and blue berets under the jurisdiction of the United Nations. We can begin here in Scotland and in the name of its Bard – who is, indeed, the Bard of many nations – and seek the removal of Trident to make Scotland a nuclear weapons free zone to encourage other countries to follow with integrity, not the hypocrisy of expecting other countries not to seek them when we have them. …
“We the people” can rise up – not in revolution but in resolution – and demand that our newspapers and television programmes focus more on the crunch of continuing social divisions than they do on the credit crunch, and more on enhancing the global community to make our world one family of human kind, than they do on cultural rubbish.
We can seek not to have what we want, but what we need; to live more simply that others may simply life. For so long as wealth is defined as the quantity of money and possessions rather than the quality of life, so long will there be poverty of mind, body and spirit throughout our world.
So we can take seriously and help export the precepts of the Scottish Radical Enlightenment as echoed by the four words on the mace in the Scottish Parliament: WISDOM, JUSTICE, COMPASSION and INTEGRITY.
To do this we can replace the sentimental symbols of the heather and the haggis with the tartan with its multi-colours representing the variety of all the people of the world together in one garment of unity.
“We the people” can help a new world to “be acomin’ yet for a’ that”.
Wally Shaw
