By No Means Necessary
When the strident are
Up in arms
Staking their claims
By any means necessary
May such a battlefield
Arouse patience strewn
A bout
Of faith
Inciting our most gratuitous hopes
By any kinds possible
The prison door of necessity
Leaving us
Unhinged
Taking liberties
Only in dependence
On open hearts
In tact
In our chest
No longer hoard
Soles in a circle unbroken
Vaulting us
To claims unstaked
In arms above
Scaling untrodden heights
With such generous helping
Hands down
The best
Giving rise
By no means necessary
This poem is about hope and the possibilities that kindness open up to create a new and better reality. Claiming a need to reach an end “by any means necessary” is precarious moral ground. In common political parlance, the phrase might be “we are leaving all options open.” At best this is a casual amorality, at worst a cruel compulsion or “necessary” evil. I’m not big on “necessary” evil. Militancy focuses on a “you forced me to” mentality, fixating on our most base needs and instincts alone. No doubt, certain actions lead to likely reactions. Nonetheless, we can do better. Acting in hope with open hearts is an invitation to escape from closed-sum thinking and hurt feelings, and join together in something greater than the sum of its parts. Hope is a vulnerable invitation in that it may be rejected. If rejected, in retrospect, it may appear to have been better to have not made an invitation. I think that this is why humans have learned a certain reactionary approach in life. This makes sense, but such a reactionary approach does not represent all that is possible, or even all that is probable. Leaders make invitations. Leaders offer hope. Leaders make themselves vulnerable and put some actual skin in the game, in order to walk the walk not just talk the talk. We can make excuses by saying, “He made me do it,” but this denies our most basic freedom, to do something differently, that is our greatest asset in human progress. Not surprisingly, hope is by its very nature a community project. Only by joining together, with mutual invitations and mutual aid, can our highest hopes become real. And the highest hope is a circle unbroken, everyone in and nobody out. The cynical acts of confederates to “get ours” at the expense of others is ultimately self-defeating, degrading the vitality of human community of which we are inescapably a part. Of course, the hope that springs from the faith that humanity is ultimately one is like all other faith: something not fully realized but believed to be present. Such faith and hope cannot become fully realized “by any means necessary,” being by no means necessary; still it may be realized “by any kinds possible.” Do not rise to every occasion in kind, rather, in kindness rise to every occasion.
