War Vs. Love

There are certain books that all of us pseudo-conscious, bashfully intelligent book worms must have in our private library. One can easily glide their index finger past the books of Dr. Chancellor Williams, Voltaire, Fanon and Sun Tzu just to name a few. But no one book besides the Bible or Holy Qu’ran is pointed to as much as Niccolo’ Machiavelli’s The Prince; a book about high military science. Machiavelli wrote the book and called it The Prince as a guide to the monarchs of Europe on ways of royal etiquette and how to maintain control of their subjects. Though the rigid African that I am has always adhered and appreciated some of the views espoused in The Prince duo to my search for the answers to the many social ills that infests parts of the African American community, my spiritual appreciation for individual will to define his/her own reality has always serviced a confusion within me until this weekend. I recently took four high school students to the Georgia Technology Student Association State Competition. Among them were two black males, one Vietnamese girl and one white girl. While walking around the competition, I couldn’t help but notice the diversity of the hundreds of high school and middle school students. The conference held individual and team competitions of which teams were multi-racial as well as bi-gender. All of this on a college campus that once was barred to many of groups of which these young people are a part of just 55 years ago. It was in this meditation that my quandary had finally reached a resolution. One of the points of discussion in Machiavelli’s, The Prince, was whether a monarch should foster fear or love in his subject(s). As some of you may already know, the answer was fear because fear lasts longer. But there I stood with my multi-racial group of students participating with other multi-racial and gender groups reaping the benefits from the love of one man, Martin Luther King, Jr. I guess fear can only last as long as the generation of those who create it, whereas love blossoms over time. Over the years I’ve bought three copies of The Prince, if I lose this one it will be replaced with some more Rumi.