You misunderstood? Someone has to pay!
Soon after I woke up this morning, I picked up yesterday's thread of misunderstanding (but first of all – and perhaps too late – I tried to nip in the bud a misunderstanding whose seed I left in the very post dealing with the problem) and I remembered my brief but invigorating argument with an admirable – in most respects - Welsh Catholic, with whom I had clashed over Margaret Thatcher's legacy outside the Cathedral.
To a large degree, I am sure, we must have misunderstood each other; additionally, I regretted that I allowed this to happen on a Sunday, which I’d been trying for a while now to make a shopping- and politics-free day in my life. I wondered who was more to blame for the tense exchange. On the one hand it was the tiny badge (of a workers’ organisation) in the lapel of his suit that provoked my question. On the other, I didn't really have to follow his answer up with my hard-hitting query - I should have left the sleeping mines lie.
So for a minute or two I had been turning Welsh miners, British policemen, Arthur Scargill, Keith Joseph, popes John Paul II and Francis in my head and recalling which of us (the Welsh syndicalist and the Polish libertarian) said what, when suddenly our tiny feud* paled into insignificance: I realised that I'm standing before one of the most cruel misunderstandings that I may ever witness in my life: a patriot widely hated for her patriotism; an honourable, honest, conscientious, self-sacrificing woman who devoted her whole life to the country she loved, who – through perseverance in face of fierce opposition and daunting obstacles – rescued that country from economic collapse... and was misunderstood and condemned by a large part of her fellow-countrymen. If there has ever been a semi-tragic** personal story of a nearly absurd political misunderstanding of truly shocking proportions, this is the one. This time round – I did cry, just like I did at her funeral.
And then I got overwhelmed by all those cross-purposes, wrong ends of the stick, confusions, misconceptions, delusions, misstatements, accusations, illusions, misinterpretations and damned lies***. In a sinister flash of memory, I went back to the times when, driven by a misunderstanding and suspicious mind, I assaulted unsuspecting, unscheming others cogitatione, verbo, opere et omissione.
It all crushed on me like a ton of suffocating calumnies. I felt that we'v produced simply too much misunderstanding and mistrust for this bloody world to go on – it either must blow up, or someone must die.
And having seen how our misguided minds work, I just imagined how - in the greatest misunderstanding this Universe will ever know - a completely innocent Jew could one day hang for our misconceptions.
*in which I declared a lot of the social teaching of John Paul II, and the Catholic Church as a whole, as mistaken (I am of the opinion that my Church misunderstands, in many respects, the way societies and markets work).
**a lot of her compatriots did understand her after all; when she was still holding office, or finally.
*** I'll leave statistics out of this for some reason; I haven't made up my mind about it.
