Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

For want of a nail: agency, causality and consequence in a verse

First, a nursery rhyme that illustrates how our actions and details–both small and large–matter.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

The Upanishads express this causal chain elegantly with the following well known verse, previously quoted:

Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.

Lastly, some reworked wisdom — Niemöller for the New Millennium, if you will:

First they came for the peace activists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a peace activist.
Then they came for the Muslims,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Muslim.
Then they came for the refugees,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was not a refugee.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.

(After Pastor Martin Niemöller)

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Information

This entry was posted on 24 September, 2007 by in Activism, Agency, Folklore, History, Poetry, Quotes and tagged , , .

Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


Categories