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0 of 3 Premium Clicks used this month SUBSCRIBE Print + Online Subscriber Activation | Register x Forgot Password | Need an Account? subscribe | newsletter | deals Home News Latest Stories 10 things to know for Friday They got algorithm Posters about missing teen will be distributed Competition keen at first city chili cookoff Alice Hardesty shares healing memoir Education Ashland schools expand chicken pox exclusion rules Students go behind the scenes at hospital Ashland robotics team aims to build a winner AHS ranked No. 7 by Niche College debt load balloons: What could, should be done? 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Looking Up: Comet passes by the Pleiades Suzette Martinez Standring: Chance advice was eerie Aging Happens Inner Peace Column Inner Peace Blog Classifieds Jobs Autos Real Estate FEATURED » Obituaries Photos Videos Blogs Business NEWS NOW Our View: A matter of survival ... Posters about missing teen will be distributed ... Brammo bought by Polaris ... Our View: A matter of survival ... Posters about missing teen will be distributed ... Brammo bought by Polaris ... RELOCATIONS Herb Rothschild Jr.: Fury impedes justice Comment DailyTidings.com Writer Posted Jan. 10, 2015 @ 12:01 am Posted Jan. 10, 2015 @ 12:01 am » Social News This column is about fury, fury as an impediment to justice. It builds on my column last week about Waco and Ferguson, but it was also prompted by the anger NYPD officers expressed toward NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio after two of their own were murdered, plus the virulently anti-Muslim remarks Gary Acheatel made in an op ed he published in the Dec. 24 Daily Tidings in response to my two columns on Israel/Palestine. We know that the Greek tragedians who submitted work for performance in the Greater Dionysian festival in ancient Athens had to submit three related plays. To our great loss, only one complete trilogy survived to modern times, Aeschylus’ The Oresteia. But what good luck to have it! It develops in the most dramatically powerful and intellectually insightful way the civilizing journey from familial and tribal revenge to political justice. In the last play the Furies appear almost from first to last. They are hideous creatures, heads wreathed with snakes, eyes dripping blood. They are pursuing Orestes, who, with great reluctance, killed his mother Clytemnestra in the second play because she, with self-righteous gusto, killed her husband Agamemnon in the first play. She killed him because 10 years before he had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods so that the headwinds preventing the Greek fleet from sailing to Troy would die down. And as the audience knew, the Greeks were sailing to Troy to avenge the Trojan prince Paris’ kidnapping of Helen, wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus. There’s even more such eye for an eye, but you get the point. The chorus says at the end of the second play, “Where will it end?/ where will it sink to sleep and rest,/ this murderous hate, this Fury?” Like other Greek deities, the Furies are the embodiments of natural forces, in their case the psychic force of human rage. For two acts we see them embodied in people like Clytemnestra, who are infuriated by their grievances. When Aeschylus brings the Furies on stage in their own embodiments, we finally see them as the loathsome realities they are. Additionally, we realize how partial they are. The ones haunting Orestes are the furies of matricide. When Apollo asks why they don’t take into account that Clytemnestra killed her husband, they answer that such acts are not their business. Apollo observes, “Some things stir your rage, I see. Others,/ atrocious crimes, lull your will to act.” To so reasonable an observation they reply, “Never try to cut my power with your logic.” Orestes’ case is settled by a jury presided over by Athena, the embodiment of wisdom. She doesn’t reject the Furies, but instead persuades them to become part of something more encompassing. Their rage over criminal acts is valid, but only as a prelude to the impartial weighing of all claims. Unless revenge is sublimated into justice, the cycle of violence will continue and right relationships never restored. Shall our own injuries make us so furious that we cannot understand how others are aggrieved? Should the police close ranks when two of their own are gunned down and despise anyone who has criticized them for wrongly taking civilian lives? Shall we Jews focus on the dreadful things some Muslims have done and lash out at those who point us to the brutality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank? Will we demonize our opponents and require that everyone else either be for us or against us? Our journey from barbarism to civility remains unfinished. Herb Rothschild Jr. is chairman of the board of Peace House. 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