If you are a person of “a certain age,” you no doubt remember Pete Seeger’s big hit from 1955, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time passing.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time ago.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Young girls picked them every one…

It is a soft, mellow folk song that is usually sung around a campfire after the s’mores have been eaten and the blazing logs have been reduced to glowing orange embers.

If you were like me, you were probably so blissed out by the moment that you totally missed the sneaky gut-punch of the question posed by the chorus…

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

When, indeed. 

Pete wondered when they (or, more accurately, WE) would ever learn that waging war is never a way to resolve a dispute. He wondered when they/we would ever learn that life is too precious to be wasted in pointless ego battles about who is bigger, who is badder, who is more righteous, who is more virtuous, or who is favored more by God. Pete then ends his ballad by painting a vivid word picture of a flower field trampled into the muck by the bloody, marching boots of enemy combatants.

 When will they ever learn?

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? By Pete’s logic, all it takes to call a halt to the inhuman way humans often treat one another is by LEARNING. If we could only learn more about the deep, rich, precious humanity of the people we disagree with, we would have no choice but to treat those people with dignity and respect.

If only we could LEARN their customs, their languages, their faith practices, their family ties, their histories, we would accord them all the esteem we wish for ourselves.

Great plan, Pete. But have you somehow forgotten what LEARNING is like? Learning – the activity that is so hungrily pursued by the younger versions of ourselves – seems to be a much more forbidding task as we get older. 

We seem (or maybe it’s just me) to feel our days of learning are done when we leave the cozy, warm confines of the formal classroom. Our teachers have thoroughly prepared us for the vagaries of the world and now it is our assignment to charge out there and APPLY all those valuable lessons. 

“Learning” here in the heat of battle of Real Life is often a costly undertaking. It usually involves laying down a beloved map of the world and picking up a different one. A map we are less familiar with. A map that has a completely different heft and feel to it. A map that we are not nearly as sure of as we were of the last one. 

And frequently, because our drive to be sure drowns out our drive to be right, we crumple that new map into a tight ball and drop-kick it into obscurity. 

I guess what I am saying is that HUMILITY seems to be a necessary “ground breaker” for actual LEARNING to take place. We must first swallow the hard pill on which is printed, “You know… there is a chance I am wrong about that.” And honestly folks, who among us can get that pill down without gagging a little?

But as the Psalmist reminds us: “It is good for me that I was humbled, so that I might learn your statutes.” Psalm 119:71, NRSVU. 

Pete, your question is the right one. “When will they ever learn?” hits the nail right smack on the proverbial head. 

But it also drives me to ask, “When will they ever stop being AFRAID to learn?” 

There seems to be no arena where learning – preceded by deep and genuine self-examination – would be more valuable today than the POLITICAL arena. Yet as we are seeing in vivid technicolor proof every day, there is seemingly no arena where learning is LESS in evidence than in the high-stakes, rough and tumble world of politics. 

When? You ask. 

Hopefully any day now.

Abundant blessings;