“Ecce Homo”!  The phrase purportedly uttered by Pontius Pilate on the first “Good” Friday as he presented Yeshua to a crowd allegedly demanding his execution for blasphemy, unsuccessfully washing his hands of all responsibility for what was to follow.  Perhaps it is even more fittingly a phrase for our times and for what we have become: oxymoronically incoherent, awash in orchestrated poetic orthodoxy belittling empathy and keeping us chaotically in line.  “Ecce Homo”!  The collective image we would probably see were there a mirror large enough to encompass us all. 

A mirror that would reflect fear and hate in the name of love and tolerance.  Race, religion, ethnicity, gender, nationality, class, history and philosophy all perverted in order to divide us and set us at each other’s throats in orgies of faux self-righteous indignation.  Exuberant hate exalted.

The price of our folly in declining to exercise our better judgment, permitting ourselves instead to be manipulated through fear rather than embracing the courage of our convictions.  Bacchanalias deifying purportedly lesser evils.  Illusions of a democracy we’ve never attained.

Another message from Cassandra’s archives.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.