upon the king

Before I found any empathetic jingoism to the propaganda of Henry V’s Crispin rally cry, I found myself drawn to his pre-battle soliloquy that wrestles the burden of being a king. It struck a strange chord with me at age 19 when I was trying to determine whether to remain on the straight and narrow path to stay in college or go out and do my own thing. I’m not sure why his lament over the burden of the fate of so many souls on his shoulders resonated with that part of my life. But I repeated the lines over and over that spring of 1995 to seek some sort of peace in my brain.

It’s fallen out of context of late… well, in that I don’t think about it and try to connect my inner struggle with that of an overly ambitious twenty-something king. Then today (maybe because I had some of Patrick Doyle’s themes shuffle into hearing or because I found myself drawn to another silly story about Kate Middleton’s headwear or because I finally saw The King’s Speech and decided I must revisit all and any media relative to that period of royal family history) the lament echoed in my mind.

If you don’t know it, have a listen. 

If you are too impatient, basically our King Harry is distressed by the fact that he accidentally (as in pretended he wasn’t the king to get in on the gossip) hears one of the poor men in his ranks condemn the king for sending his army into battle and thus to death and thus… if they die and must go there… to hell. And the king, for all his determination of might and right, pauses to consider if that indeed might be true. And if so, is there any freedom from that responsibility? Even if the person going to hell goes to eternal damnation not for battling the French but for, say, robbing their dead bodies? Yes, the king might be accelerating the journey, but the person who did the bad thing… well isn’t he… the one who earned hell in the first place?

Anyway, I could spend the rest of this blog analyzing Shakespeare or the karma that sends one to hell – even if he is comic relief like Bardolph – but I am thinking in a modern context. This time, it isn’t my own journey. It is how we like to put burdens and condemnations on our ‘kings’ without taking any claim to the things that set us down the path to hell in the first place.

 It is one thing, certainly, to have a king. A king that is born into his status… and responsibility. It is another thing to live in a country where people choose that responsibility. Maybe they choose to pursue the ambition of the status. But… there is such an atmosphere of anger against those people. Yes, some are corrupt. Some abuse their status and forsake their responsibility. But, really, not everyone in government deserves to carry the weight of everyone else’s mistakes. Nor should they be punished for every fool, whose sense no more can feel.

It is easy to blame the ‘kings.’ They are visible… and one could even argue in today’s world there are other elements at play in the hatred of some elected officials. But… blaming them is not an answer. Punishing them is not a solution. Deciding that the people who work for the greater good of society must be paid less and respected as less than good and hardworking individuals isn’t going to get us out of this crap economy any more than saying the king’s to blame is going to get anyone out of hell.