We can all agree I hope that two of the constants from the beginning of time have been love and hate. And right up to this day, both are pursued with fierce vigor. It is said that there is a very thin sometimes barely identifiable line between the two extreme emotions. Perhaps because both of them are fueled by raw emotion, passion. Crimes of passion are known to have been committed all over the world
Today, new revolutions have sprung up all over the world fuelled by this same passion. A need for change, an end to inequality, perhaps better lives for the oppressed who have been suppressed with depression being a likely destination. With this comes two outcomes, hopelessness or a fierce and burning desire to influence a change. It was not so very different centuries ago either. One such time is the French Revolution of the eighteenth century.
During the latter parts of the eighteenth century in Paris, a revolution broke out and in the midst of all that and at the centre, a couple, Queen Marie Antoinette and King Louis xvi, bound by love but eventually separated by death brought on by hate, death at the guillotine non the less. Perhaps they might well have avoided the guillotine if the queen had not changed their original escape plan. Instead of allowing the king to leave Paris separately in a fast coach, as had been previously agreed upon, she insisted that the Royal family should travel together. Perhaps she could not bear to be parted from her loved ones for even a second?
As a result, a larger and therefore slower coach had to be used. Because of the delay, they missed their rendezvous with an armed escort of loyalists, and it was pitch dark and difficult to find fresh horses by the time they reached the village of Varennes, which was only sixty kilometers from the French border. Unfortunately, they were to be made out and reported by a young man named Drouet, who had recognized them and was able to catch up to them. Their escape route was then blocked by pro-Revolution troops. It was at this very young man’s stable that they had stopped to acquire fresh mounts for the rest of the journey.
That very revolution marked a blood-thirsty era in the history of France. It did result in the ending of the monarch but at the cost of many lives. Yes it resulted in the forming of a much fairer system of governance but the lives can never be brought back. Fast forward a couple of centuries and another monarchy was brought to a screeching end.
And still the two constants are alive and kicking. Everything sacrificed, for the love of freedom, desire for a man or woman, a liberated people and nation or scorn for a system that has kept its people in tyrannical bondage over decades? Still in every such uprising, lives will most certainly be lost. We who are not the creators of something so precious, something we have not the slightest clue of or how it is formed, take it, most not fully understanding the magnitude of that irreversible act.
After the dust has settled, then what. Do the new leaders remember the cause, the sweat and blood that paved their path to where they are; do the people ever see what they felt they fought for? Or is it just a brief interlude before the blast from the past hits? We still wonder.
Perhaps the journey has come full circle and the good coach of change is finally upon us. I mean, a quarter of a century ago, no one would have dreamed that a black man would be piloting the United States. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream he never lived to see, one that President Barack Obama lives today. Remember, it doesn’t have to be as it used to, so let us try to make a worthy difference TODAY. Choose love's coach.
