TIME TO THINK (BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE): TWO POEMS FROM TOM GREENING

United States Navy recruitment advertisement in Popular Mechanics, 1908. In the public domain.

Military Recruiters

by Tom Greening

Ghouls troll school halls

preying on the young

who have no better options.

A protester asks a teacher,

“Aren’t you afraid they’ll get killed?”

and is answered,

“Better a short life with meaning

than a long one without.”

That’s it?  Meaning is in short supply

and worn out like the textbooks.

There are recruiting quotas to be met,

so standards are lowered,

bonuses paid, hopes inflated,

felonies forgiven,

and patriotic delusions fueled.

This is the greatest military machine in history.

It grinds slowly, but it grinds exceedingly fine.

 

 OUR LEGACY

Let’s weigh the facts a little more

before we launch another war.

Are we so sure we’re in the right

and blessed by God to launch this fight,

and is cruel war the only way

triumphantly to seize the day?

Let he who lives devoid of sin

proclaim who righteously should win.

Survey all human history–

Is blindness our main legacy?

Tom Greening was educated at Yale, the University of Vienna, and the University of Michigan. He has been a psychologist in private practice for over 50 years, and is a retired professor from Saybrook University, UCLA, and Pepperdine. He was Editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology for 35 years. He is a Fellow of five divisions of the American Psychological Association and Poet Laureate of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry.

 

 

How do you get there from here?

International Peace Day poster. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: VectorOpenStock.

by Kathie MM

Consistent with its goal of promoting peace within and among nations, the United Nations, in 1981,  established the International Day of Peace;  in 2002, September 21st became the permanent date for the International Day of Peace.

Did you know today was the International Day of Peace?  If not, why not? You would know if it was Labor Day, or Memorial Day, or Halloween, right? So why is there no hoopla about a peace day?

At any rate, today is an internationally declared Day of Peace, and here  we are again, most of us hoping for, praying for peace, which probably seems as elusive as ever.  How can we get there, in our daily lives, our relationships, our messages to our government?  Here is one suggestion, from my friend Tom Greening:

RISE UP

Don’t be an angry, hurtful troll.

Rise up and show you have a soul.

Don’t waste your strength in violence,

don’t do cruel deeds that make no sense.

The world needs men, not angry boys.

Help others have life’s thrills and joys.

Explore the ways in which you can

show that you are a loving man.

As years go by you will be proud

you rose above the madding crowd.

 

Tom Greening

And to learn more about what YOU can do to help move the world away from war and more towards  peace, today and every day, check out this World Without War website

Tom Greening was educated at Yale, the University of Vienna, and the University of Michigan. He has been a psychologist in private practice for over 50 years, and is a retired professor from Saybrook University, UCLA, and Pepperdine. He was Editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology for 35 years. He is a Fellow of five divisions of the American Psychological Association and Poet Laureate of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry.

MESSAGE FROM A TERRORIST

By Guest Author Tom Greening

We knew we could count on you

to continue our mission for us.

We destroyed your World Trade Center

but that was only a dramatic means

to a greater end.

We knew you rich and industrious Americans

would soon rebuild the towers

bigger and better.

Our more ambitious goal

was to expose your barbarism

behind your pretense

of practicing humanitarian justice:

We got you to reveal your depravity

and become torturers.

At Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib,

at dark sites, we seduced you

into destroying yourselves

as moral human agents.

Tom Greening was educated at Yale, the University of Vienna, and the University of Michigan. He has been a psychologist in private practice for over 50 years, and is a retired professor from Saybrook University, UCLA, and Pepperdine. He was Editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology for 35 years. He is a Fellow of five divisions of the American Psychological Association and Poet Laureate of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry.

Atrocities Can Be Expensive

The brief video at the beginning of this post is horrifying but worthy of 15 seconds of your time.

Capt. Richard Koll, left, and Airman First Class Mike Eulo monitored a drone aircraft after launching it in Iraq. Credit U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Steve Horton

There’s thousands, maybe millions of them, out there. Some of them, invisible to you, are soaring around right now, doing their dirty business—spying and killing. And thousands more are still waiting to be set free to wreak death and destruction on babies, children, and adults who have the misfortune of being somewhere government operatives have decided to target.

Question: What allows the US drone program to get away with murder?

Answer: the usual thing. Tom Greening says it well:

PROFITEER

It¹s true I am a profiteer
from wars, and yes I know you sneer
at my crass immorality
that helps me live in luxury.
I feel no need to be defensive‹
atrocities can be expensive.
I revel in ill-gotten gains
from helping bad guys purchase planes,
and drones and bombs and other stuff‹
they never seem to get enough.
I must the politicians thank
for all the dirty cash I bank.

Tom Greening

Neither the death and destruction nor the dirty cash are featured in the corporate media but they are real enough.

I know your days are full of activities, and it is probably impossible to do all the things you should do, but if your government is going to do things in your names, things that are inhuman and violate international human rights, you might find it worthwhile to stroll a bit down the avenues where you can find some information—for example,  droneswatch.org  and  nodronesnetwork.blogspot.com.

For the military industrial complex, drone warfare is a great way to terrorize civilians in an area they want to control without stirring up the people back home and with a minimum of American casualties, but even drone operators, presumably safely behind their computers, can suffer from participating in murder.

Let’s get stirred up over the latest killing technology and welcome efforts to get more hard facts from the government about their missions of death.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology