John Lennon – Page 2 – Engaging Peace

The Things We Carry Still. Part II

Posted on February 15, 2019February 14, 2019 by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

Members of Desert Lenten Experience hold a prayer vigil during the Easter period of 1982 at the entrance to the Nevada Test Site. Their sign reads “They will beat their swords into plowshares.” In the public domain. Author: National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office

Will we ever turn our swords into plowshares? The question haunts us still.

The kings of caprice cast shadows on the wall, and thereby turn us all into victims of their elephantiastical delusions. Plato’s cave . The matrix of manipulation. The self-crucifixion of what passes for civilization. A crime so horrific Thomas Merton calls it “the unspeakable.” Yet John Lennon spoke its polymorphous perversity with scorching clarity: “They torture and scare you for twenty odd years, then they expect you to pick a career.”

It’s been said that memory and imagination are what make humans human. If that’s true, then what we are – and what we do – is a function of what we remember and what we imagine. Difficult indeed to remember what one has never heard or read. Even more difficult, then, to imagine what could be.

Jean-Paul Sartre said: “A writer has a place in his age. Each word has an echo, as does each silence.”

Faulkner said: “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.”

Dylan said: “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

Thomas Paine said: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

We are all on trial now. Jeremiah’s prophetic warning was never more relevant: “You shall reap the whirlwind.”

“The Wasteland” is not just a poem by T.S. Eliot; nor merely a medieval legend, best portrayed in Parsifal’s quest for the Holy Grail. The Wasteland is our fate, unless we change our ways. The Weapons of Mass Destruction that threaten our collective survival are matched in power only by the Weapons of Mass Dysfunction which turn humans into lemmings stampeding toward the cliff.

Chogyam Trungpa invites us to “recollect the sanity we were born with.” To do so is to break the chains of illusion which cripple both memory and imagination.

Martin Luther King said: “We must choose between nonviolence and nonexistence.”

To be or not to be – the choice is ours. To educate or ignorate – that is the question. Courage of conscience is our only hope.

TO ENGAGE OR NOT TO ENGAGE – THAT IS THE QUESTION

Posted on January 7, 2019March 9, 2021 by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

Part One: YESTERDAY’S STORM AND TOMORROW’S RAINBOW

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music. – John Keats

Fifty years after President Eisenhower launched a multi-trillion dollar arms race with the Soviet Union, the Cheney-Bush Administration (in a version of “the boy who cried wolf”) saw fit to shout the greatest and most dangerous lie in American history, claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and repeating – day after day, week after week, in the post-9/11 rush to vengeance and preemptive war – “Mushroom cloud! Mushroom cloud! Mushroom cloud!”

Thus did Cheney-Bush – and their cabal of Gingrichian sycophants, aided by a cheering mainstream news media – bring to fruition the nightmare envisioned in Bob Dylan’s 1963 tour de force, “Masters of War.” Dylan sings, and the lyrics still resonate:

You’ve thrown the worst fear / that can ever be hurled:

fear to bring children / into the world.

In the dawning of the year 2019, it remains to be seen whether President Donald Trump will also escape punishment for his narcissistic and multitudinous lies, for his continuation of American militaristic violence, and for his Reagan-Cheney-Bush-like crimes – economic and ecological – against the American people and the planet.

In what Gore Vidal called “The United States of Amnesia,” the Orwellian ignoration of the citizen population continues unabated. For example:

I go to the store and buy some stamps. The clerk hands me a packet. Each stamp has an American flag on it. In the lower left hand corner of each stamp is written “USA Forever” – a truly insidious slogan. Nothing lasts forever. Not a season; not a life; not an empire. George Carlin said: “That’s why they call it the American dream. You have to be asleep to believe it.”

In 1821, John Quincy Adams warned that America should not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy,” for in doing so, “she might become the dictatress of the world, [but] she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

In the late 1890s, Mark Twain witnessed America’s imperial acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the Spanish-American war. Twain responded with an observation not taught in school: “America’s flag should be a skull-and-crossbones.” Then he added: “America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home.” Adams and Twain understood that empire and democracy are mutually exclusive.

Lyndon Johnson said in 1964 that he did not want “a wider war” in Vietnam, even as he was lying about events in the Gulf of Tonkin and planning the invasion that President Kennedy refused to launch. Richard Nixon said he would bring The Vietnam War to an early end with “peace and honor,” yet disgraced himself with a heartless disregard for peace and an utter lack of honor, becoming the first American president to resign from office.

Due to the lies and depredations of Johnson and Nixon, the American people grew increasingly suspicious of their political leaders. That distrust deepened into cynicism when President George W. Bush’s claim – that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” which he then used as a pretext for war – proved to be an outrageous lie. And now, alas, Donald Trump inhabits the White House, proving once again that a Nixonian neurotic and Bush-whacking ideologue can become the most powerful and most dangerous man in the world.

Yet all is not lost, not hopeless, not without redemptive possibilities. Despite the forces of obstruction, the American landscape is filled with a multitude of brave, inquisitive, vocal, active, dedicated justice-seekers and peacemakers. They recognize that they are not alone, that solidarity is our only hope, and that their collective voice indicates something like A Renaissance of The Renaissance. They – We! – know who Tom Paine was, and why he wrote “Common Sense” and “The Rights of Man.”

We know that John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed for their courage of conscience; and because we refuse to let their lives and deaths be in vain, we carry the torch they lit for a sane and better world. We dare, with John Lennon, to Imagine. We know that there are millions around the world who feel the same, and who are also doing their part to bequeath to a new generation the world of peace and beauty they deserve. Accordingly, we shall not despair; we shall not relinquish hope; and we shall indeed do whatever is necessary to restore America’s tarnished ideals to their once and future glory, for the sake of all humanity, and for Mother Earth and all her blessings.

Stefan Schindler

…………………….

Stefan Schindler is the co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection; a Board Member of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey; and author of America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War. His forthcoming book is entitled Buddha’s Political Philosophy.

Growing into The Spirit of The Sixties

Posted on December 10, 2018December 10, 2018 by kathiemm

Stefan Schindler with John Lennon collage

by Stefan Schindler

In my early childhood – born just north of San Francisco, and fresh from two years in England – I spent four years in Texas, then one in Alabama, unconsciously absorbing from both states a culture of racism and American superiority.

Then the family moved to Japan, where I spent three years absorbing a new culture, and, subconsciously, an alternative worldview. It changed my life, and I shall be forever grateful. When the family moved from Japan to Pennsylvania, I was shocked to discover fellow students who had never been out of their home state. I was like a visitor from the moon.

My formal education continued to be mostly ignoration, but the year was 1960, just in time for me to grow into The Spirit of The Sixties. As I watched The Beatles evolve into Peacemakers, coinciding with my college years, I began to realize just how brainwashed I had been.

My father, a bomber pilot in World War Two, was a career officer in the U.S. Air Force, rising through the ranks to become a Lieutenant Colonel. Hence our family’s many moves around the country and the world. Hence also my military upbringing.

When I entered Dickinson College in 1966, I joined ROTC (and its elite “Pershing Rifles” group). I quit after six weeks, having been ordered to do this and that my entire life, and now, in college, finally free from my father’s commanding influence, and joyfully participating more and more in the anti-establishment counter-culture revolution.

By my senior year at Dickinson, 1970, while President Nixon continued The Vietnam War, I was a member of S.D.S – Students for a Democratic Society – and with fellow peacemakers disrupting ROTC drill performances on the football field, and, more importantly, marching in peace demonstrations outside the gates of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, just a few blocks from Dickinson.

After graduate school, post-1975, I embarked upon a self-education program, leading to my further political awakening, a new appreciation for Mark Twain and William James as members of The Anti-Imperialism League, and the writing of my book, America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War.

Now, just about a year from 2020, I see The United States of Amnesia failing to learn the lessons of history, and increasingly becoming a high-tech version of Plato’s cave, governed by plutocracy, divided more and more by economic apartheid, and careening toward ecological apocalypse, nuclear war, and another Great Depression. John Lennon was right – “We are led by lunatics.”

Fortunately, the spirit of Emerson, James, and Twain lives on in the activism, writings and wisdom of people like H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, I. F. Stone, Martin Luther King, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, John Pilger, John Prados, Dan Ellsberg, the Berrigan brothers, Molly Ivins, Howard Zinn, Bertrand Russell, Amy Goodman, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Victor Wallis, Naomi Klein, Lewis Lapham, Thich Nhat Hann, Sulak Sivaraksa, the Dalai Lama, Vandana Shiva, and so many others.

Like Maya Angelou, I know “Why The Caged Bird Sings.” I know that the meaning of life is learning and service. And I give thanks for friends like Toni Snow and Lewis Randa, who help me keep the faith and keep on truckin’, as a Compassionate Peacemaker and global citizen, committed to Universal Brother-Sisterhood.

Note from Kathie MM: Please share with people on your email lists Stefan’s inspiring story of his journey to peace activism-and send us your own story for publication on engaging peace. Many families, many communities, include peace activists who go about the business of making the world a safer more just and human place. Share the stories.

Enlightenment and Social Hope, Part 4

Posted on April 18, 2018April 16, 2018 by kathiemm

For Enlightenment by Kathie Malley-Morrison

By Stefan Schindler

The recent triumph of anti-democratic Republican Party politics was made possible with the criminal complicity of the Democratic Party, the mainstream news media, and the rise to political power of Christian fundamentalism.

In the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, the Supreme Court halted the counting of votes, and then appointed George W. Bush the winner, in what was nothing less than a judicial coup d’état.

The Cheney-Bush Administration then launched a lie-based war against Iraq and Afghanistan, the cost of which now exceeds two trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the Middle East, and widespread Muslim hatred of America. In 2008, the Cheney-Bush Administration climaxed its reign of deficit spending and global terror with a domestic economic meltdown which saw American citizens suffer the greatest recession since the Depression of the 1930s.

Meanwhile, America’s homegrown economic apartheid becomes more extreme with every passing week; the Pentagon budget blooms to finance more wars; fifty percent of university teachers are slave-wage adjuncts; more than fifty million Americans are deprived of healthcare; and the planet careens toward nuclear war and ecological apocalypse.

Hence we might conclude that Immanuel Kant implicitly points to a national motto that ought to read: “Treat all people always as ends in themselves, rather than merely as means” to personal gain.

Hence also – as Voltaire, Rousseau, David Hume, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, I. F. Stone, Buckminster Fuller, John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou, Dot Walsh, Kurt Vonnegut, Lewis and Meg Randa, Howard Zinn and John Lennon would applaud – we should revise America’s Pledge of Allegiance to read:

“I pledge allegiance to the planet, and to all the people and creatures on her; one ecosystem, universally sacred, with nourishment and beauty for all.”