William James, Mark Twain, I. F. Stone. Emma Goldman, Helen Keller, Molly Ivins. Jim Hightower, John Pilger, William Blum. Lewis Lapham, Michael Parenti, Victor Wallis. Vandana Shiva, Joan Baez, Naomi Klein. Ami Goodman, Abby Martin, Daniel Berrigan.
David Talbot, James Douglass, Thich Nhat Hanh. Oscar Romero, the Dalai Lama, Dan
Ellsberg. And, of course, Chris Hedges, Noam
Chomsky and Howard Zinn. These are just
a few of the torch-bearers of the spirit of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King
and John Lennon.
Peace is possible.
Progress has been made. Meanwhile,
the struggle continues.
A crisis can be ongoing and deepening for a very long
time. This has been the case with the
USA for forty years at least. 1968 might
well be seen as the pivot point. The
full and fatal swerve toward economic apartheid and the rollback of FDR’s New
Deal began in earnest in 1981 with Reaganomics.
The hammer-blows against social enlightenment have kept the war machine
in full throttle and kept too many Americans in thrall to sloganeering and
sophistry.
The earth groans, bees disappear, and in 2020 the wasteland
grows.
But danger is also opportunity. Breakdown is often breakthrough.
Behind the news there is a global dance. A collective invitation to give peace a
chance.
What is true for the individual is true for the whole. Fate is determined by the choices we
make. Let us use our freedom
wisely. What Kant said at the end of the
18th century is true now: “We live in an age of enlightenment; but
we do not yet live in an enlightened age.”
Perhaps the essence of life really is learning and
service. Siddhartha Gautama, Meister Eckhart
and Thomas Merton thought so. I believe
it too.
Keep the faith, my friend.
We may yet be on the verge of something great. A turning of the civilizational wheel toward
the wisdom of James and Twain and company.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
Material submitted by Lewis Randa, who received an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector from the military during the Vietnam War in 1971.
CO Memorial Stone at Cambridge Friends Meeting, Cambridge, MA. A gift from the Peace Abbey Foundation
May 15 is International Conscientious Objectors Day. Although conscientious objection to war is not a hot media topic today, respect, admiration, and appreciation for conscientious objectors (COs) will be expressed (mostly distally) around the world this Friday May 15; see here, for example.
The Peace Abbey, in Sherborn, MA, maintains a site that provides numerous materials regarding concientious objection, including historical information, a copy of the National Registry form , and a rich discussion of pacifism, reprinted here:
“Pacifism is opposition to war and violence. The word pacifism was coined by the French peace campaigner Émile Arnaud (1864–1921) and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress in Glasgow in 1901. A related term is ahimsa (to do no harm), which is a core philosophy in Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism. While modern connotations are recent, having been explicated since the 19th century, ancient references abound.
Pacifism covers a spectrum of views, including the belief that international disputes can and should be peacefully resolved, calls for the abolition of the institutions of the military and war, opposition to any organization of society through governmental force (anarchist or libertarian pacifism), rejection of the use of physical violence to obtain political, economic or social goals, the obliteration of force, and opposition to violence under any circumstance, even defence of self and others. Historians of pacifism Peter Brock and Thomas Paul Socknat define pacifism “in the sense generally accepted in English-speaking areas” as “an unconditional rejection of all forms of warfare”.[4] Philosopher Jenny Teichman defines the main form of pacifism as “anti-warism”, the rejection of all forms of warfare.[5] Teichman’s beliefs have been summarized by Brian Orend as …’A pacifist rejects war and believes there are no moral grounds which can justify resorting to war. War, for the pacifist, is always wrong.’ In a sense the philosophy is based on the idea that the ends do not justify the means.[6]“
Lewis Randa is a Quaker, pacifist, vegan, educator, and social change activist. He is the founder and director of The Life Experience School for children with disabilities (1972); The Peace Abbey, an Interfaith Center for the study and practice of Nonviolence and Pacifism (1988); The Special Peace Corps., an organization that provides community service programs for adults with mental challenges (1990); The Courage of Conscience Award, an international peace award for nonviolent contributions to peace and justice (1991); The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a register for people of all ages to publicly state their refusal to participate in armed conflict (1992); The Pacifist Memorial, a national monument honoring pacifists throughout history (1994); The Veganpeace Animal Sanctuary, a safe haven for animals that have escaped from slaughterhouses following the rescue of Emily the Cow (1995); Stonewalk, a global peace walk that involves physically pulling a two-ton memorial stone for Unknown Civilians Killed in War (Documentary shown on PBS) (1999 – 2005); Citycare, an empowerment program for the homeless (2000); R.A.T.C., the college-based Reserve Activist Training Corps; and The Lavender House, a Group Home for adults with disabilities (2002).
Caricature of Darwin’s theory in the Punch almanac for 1882. In the public domain.
The three pillars of high finance and international movers are:
oil,
armaments (legal and illegal),
drugs (legal and illegal).
International capitalism has become hopelessly dependent on the activities of
organized crime, in fact adopting its Modus Operandi.
Government officials are hostage to their complicity with lobbies. The mafia
entered the system and imposed its ethics. This state of affairs is not
resolved with terrorism, but with radical changes not only in the paradigms of
economic, political and social structures, but also and especially in the
minds, in the individual consciences/consciousnesses that are beget in the womb
of reality. We are the builders of our own realities–from the personal to the
collective.
Need for an Alternative
For each Hitler there is a Gandhi. For each Trump there is a Nelson Mandela.
For each Bolsonaro or Boris there is a Luther King. Those who are not part of
the solution are, by necessity, part of the problem in a world with a record
population of 8 billion interdependent beings where everyone affects everyone
and nobody is an island. We represent a colony on earth—not a globalization
construct, not merely numbers, statistics or resources to be exploited.
It is undeniable that societies classified as Civilized, First World or
Developed, led by the USA and the West but spread throughout, retain the reins
of world markets, politics, economics and culture, being the main producers of
weapons, technology, science and atmospheric pollutants as well as wealth (or
poverty, depending on the viewpoint) and materialistic values. As such, they
also retain the greater share of responsibility for the misery that spreads
throughout the so-called Third World. After the fragmentation of the former
Soviet Union, the number of members of the underdeveloped has increased, not
because poverty has expanded, but because the labels have changed places. In
English, there is a rhyme: the West and the Rest.
We need a viable alternative–more benign–to the ‘trickle down’ economy, more
aptly named ‘trickle up,’ which slowly and inexorably corrodes and erodes the
spirit of nobility in everyone’s character, whether labeled or believed to be
civilized, barbaric or savage. We become slaves to the monster we believe in,
our Leviathan. The so-called Capitalist/Protestant ethics is outrageous,
ignominious. God is not the God of the affluent, white people. This is an
incongruity, heretic, unadulterated primitivism.
Our mental paradigm must change, both individually and collectively, towards
cooperation, nonviolence, conflict resolution by peaceful means, and
sharing–with equity and reciprocity–of the planet’s resources, instead of
lethal competition for them; passing through the elimination of sick
nationalisms and sociopathic and homicidal patriotisms that kill legally
en masse. Our mental constructions must be modified by ourselves, by education,
and not by the state. If there were no soldiers logically there would be no
wars as generals do not fight each other. We must achieve a degree of
civilization that does not require authority, police, justice, militarism or
weapons of any type or size for collective control and destruction. Replaced by
social servants, leaders. Utopia? I believe not; if we work for it.
United in our diversity and accepting our differences instead of dividing us
into races, we may, in any future, acquire a Consciousness of Civilized
Beings–and act on it. Without this shift in consciousness any other meaningful
change is unlikely as Darwin’s myopic and ethnocentric theory will continue to
influence our lives, private and public, and our spiritual (not religious)
evolution.
