Leaving behind the jungle from whence we come.
By Paul V. Montesino, PhD, MBA.
In his Jungle Books, written in his native India in the late 1800s, 1894 to be exact, Rudyard Kipling opened the door to children’s fantasies with a classic description of living characters from the forest that still leads us to a world where animals have transcended their habitat to behave a little like us or, is it us who behave like them? We have seen time and again that the jungle itself possesses an attraction to our nomad past particularly in the multitude of scenes created by Hollywood. We would need a whole series of articles just to mention a few of those. But that is not why we are writing here today. That would be out of character for this column.
Recently, like fascinated millions from all over the world, I witnessed the interview on CNN’s Larry King with Ingrid Betancourt, the recently liberated hostage from Colombia who emerged miraculously from her long captivity. Her long term ordeal, her symbol to a country she was trying to make better and an impatient world that is tired of violence and hatred, needs no more description. Nor from me anyway. And neither is the whole episode when she was finally freed from her captors. I am sure that Hollywood is right now drooling for the rights to portray the woman’s life and her experiences, and writers all over the world will be salivating if not lining up to write her biography, perhaps even her innermost thoughts about life and death. It is no secret that she has witnessed much and survived all. But most of all she did it with human dignity.
We were impressed by her composure, her unadulterated faith in something bigger, her positive attitude even after so many desperate years living near a volcano of hate that almost swallowed her in its ferocity. And most of all, we were transformed by her vision of what life and living is all about. Prodded by Mr. King several times trying to elicit some of the most tawdry details of her seemingly endless incarceration, details that I am sure many rewarded by such descriptions of abuse, violation and other sicknesses are after, she refused to budge. Her answers, time and again were: “I have left the jungle behind and I would rather leave those things back in the jungle from where I came.” How profound, how virtuous, how insightful, how sincere.
With those words that Mr. King honored time and again after obviously asking, also time and again, the same type of question as though trying to get at different angles of the same material that make him one of the most skilled broadcasting interviewers of the famous and the notorious, she continuously refused to play “the jungle game.” We all know that it does not really matter how big your transgression is if you have the audacity and nerve to disclose or justify it on television, but whatever happened in the jungle she had left behind it was neither sin nor tawdriness and she was willing to own it without exposing it. “Not, in my jungle you don’t” she appeared to be saying.
Ms. Betancourt hit it right in the nail: would not life be better for all of us if we left behind those events that have been part of our own jungles? That was, in essence, a clear description of what basic human existence is all about. So I pose the question, what is our jungle, yours, mine? Where is it?
Our worse shameful moments in our private lives, our worse recorded expressions of human behavior in history are moments and expressions of that jungle whence we came from. The Catholic Church has it right when it offers its believers a key out of those sinful jungles through confession. It is a recognition of that past where the priest hears but does not dare to judge because he claims his God does not either, we judge ourselves. The jungle is not our invention; we are its creation. I am convinced that the original sin is that jungle, whether you call it so as a Christian or as a member of any other religious philosophy where forgiveness-as Ms. Betancourt proclaimed she experiences towards her captors-is part of their beliefs.
The jungle is the dark ages of the momentous breaking from our animal origins through the long evolutionary process that got us here. The jungle is the period from the instant we stood up in two legs thousands of years ago and reached out with our hands to eat and kill. We have moved into this so-called humanity as Ms. Betancourt reminded us so honestly and eloquently when she expressed her discontentment, her outrage, her amazement at the constant inhumanity of human to human. She was not complaining, she was not whining and she was not even condemning or even hating her captors for displaying that condition: she just stated the facts plain and simple. Here she was pointing at us and we, the pointed, had nothing to say in our defense. We couldn’t.
So my question to all of us, yes even to myself, is: where and what are the jungles whence we come from? Where is the jealousy, the indifference, the hate, the abuse, the unending wars, the neglect of the weak and the poor come from? Where is that jungle that this woman so valiantly has decided to leave behind not to return in her heart? Could we come to an understanding that we are not perfect, not better or holier than thou and that we all come from such jungle? Could we be liberated as well not by rescuers who come from without to lead us away but by the freeing forces that come from within? Could it be that the philosophy and example provided by this brave, fragile but powerful woman will serve us to take a next step in the evolutionary ladder to finally make us free? You know the old saying: The truth shall make you free. Let us look bravely at the truth and become emancipated.
And that is my Point of View Today.
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