Today, the Sun, appearing to travel along the ecliptic, reaches the
point where it crosses the equator
into the northern celestial
hemisphere. Today day and night are of equal length.
I wanted to write this ratitor's corner six months ago as last September marked the completion of rat haus reality's seventh revolution around SOL. As a young boy I regarded eight as my lucky number. At some point before I was ten I concluded I was off by one, and that seven was the real gem. Since then I've come to feel that four is also highly significant but seven occupies the center.
Thus I had been looking forward to September 2002 given that the seventh anniversary of this process was filled with a heightened sense of personal meaning. Building ratical.org has been a fulfilling experience. But before expressing the significance surrounding that seven-year milestone, I felt an urgent need to fashion the best summation I could of the essential issues we in America must collectively address in "Broadening Our Perspectives of 11 September 2001." Since then a great deal of energy has been devoted to further expanding the Crimes Against Humanity area as well as other ratical additions of which more will be said later. This ratitorial is dedicated to Nina for all she gives me and shares of the luminescence within her self, and for the wholeness she is helping me discover and express for the first time in this journey of days.
|
We are in the sixth great extinction on this planet -- the first
one caused by one species. We humans are causing an extinction that
is proceeding more rapidly than the last one, . . . This is a
sea-change, an unimaginably big change. Yet every time the Earth
has gone through an extinction there's been a unbelievable burst of
activity, of creativity. We are seeing that burst of creativity
in the middle of the extinction this time, not after it's over.
That's why we're all here.
--Elisabet Sahtouris, The Big
Picture, August 1999
|
|
The SECOND dimension of the great turning comprises the new
structures, institutions, agreements, and ways of doing things. It is
extraordinary how swiftly these are springing up like green shoots
through the rubble of our dysfunctional civilization. I don't think there
has ever been a time in human history when so many new ways of doing
things have appeared in so short a time -- from ways of owning land, to
co-housing, to eco-villages, to cooperatives, to new
local currencies,
alternative schools, alternative
modes of healing. They reveal an amazing degree of ingenuity, an
awesome readiness to experiment and create. Even though these emergent
and often embryonic systems sometimes look fringe, perhaps, or
marginal, they are the seeds of the future.
Yet these new forms will wither and die unless they're deeply grounded in our values. So the THIRD dimension of the great turning is in the way we see things and understand our connection and requirements for life. There is a revolution going on in our grasp of what we really need, and it is quietly spreading now in the simple living movement.
--Joanna Macy, Dimensions of
the Great Turning, September 1999
|
The Gift
The following story about hope and renewal is one more instance of the living mystery of Change yourself and you change the world. Although life is constantly presenting us with situations that can expand and exceed our self-chosen limits, we don't always recognize them when they appear. In the middle of 1977, I was living in New Haven, Connecticut. After studying piano at the Berklee College of Music in 1976-77 I had moved to New Haven at the end of that school year. That summer I found my way to a local record store named Rhymes, less than a block from the old campus at Yale. Next to playing piano, listening to music was one of my primary interests and Rhymes had a very rich jazz section.
During this time I met and came to know Nina who worked at Rhymes and stocked the jazz section. She was a singer and knew a great deal about the genre. I was impressed by the fact that although Nina was a vocalist, she knew a lot about piano players. I had not previously considered the dynamic of pianists lyrical sensibilities but given the ability to "voice" harmonies across 2 to 10 notes (i.e., fingers) the giants of jazz in the piano dimension would necessarily have to possess the ability to hear and express themselves lyrically.
This period of my life swung into high gear when, with Nina's help, I got a job working at Rhymes in February 1978. For months I had been asking if there was room for me there. I vividly remember going to work before sunset a few days after the February new moon, when that "Cheshire Cat" grin was visible in all its glory in the western sky at four in the afternoon. A storm had just dumped a load of new snow, it was sparklingly cold outside, and the sky was a deep vivid blue. Beholding the new moon, I was filled with a feeling of potential and delight at the prospect of beginning my long sought-after job.
Nina taught me how the inventory system worked: putting stickers on each newly arrived album with the price, record label and number; pulling off these same stickers at the point of sale and sticking them on each record label's growing list; and tallying the list at the end of each day giving us our reorder list. She taught me about the cash register and closing the store in the evening as well as opening things up in the morning. And, more essentially, she exposed me to other jazz recording artists, pianists and otherwise, than those I had previously been exploring on my own.
We had loads of fun working together. It was especially rich when we were the only ones minding the store; we would laugh that much more deeply and uninhibitedly. Our sensibilities were very much in sync; we saw things in the same light, with the same sense of absurdity, the same sense of humor and personal values. I treasured the time we were the only ones in the store because then I had Nina all to myself and could drink in her friendship, beauty and presence without having to share her with anyone else. I adored Nina but felt inadequate as she always seemed to have a passel of guys swarming around her like moths to a flame. I felt I couldn't compete.
We enjoyed about four months working together and then Nina left New Haven that summer. She had felt for some time that she needed to change venues and went to Boston. We stayed in touch for a number of years. Once when I was in North Carolina studying with Mary Lou Williams I remember sharing how difficult it felt when Mary Lou got angry with me during our piano lessons. Nina responded, `She wouldn't be upset with you if she didn't care. If you didn't have the talent she wouldn't push you like that.' The time with Mary Lou ended when I returned to California in the spring of 1980. Nina and I fell out of touch.
On March 24th of last year, out of the blue I received an e-mail from Nina. From her work as a singer and actor, a friend had urged her to search on Google to see what people were writing about her. This was about the third time she had ever gone on the web (she felt people already didn't talk to each other enough, and felt the internet exacerbated this condition). Listed on the first page of results was a section from the rat autobio I had finished in early 1997: `a ratical branch of life: "JFK & Rhymes Records"'. I was very excited to "hear" from her after more than 20 years and wrote back with great enthusiasm. E-mail flurries began. Six days later she called me on the phone. As soon as I answered she burst into laughter that held us both for perhaps a minute. It was extraordinary to regain connection.
We commenced simultaneously travelling "fast and slow" (as Nina put it) in our letters, on the phone, and when I flew to Boston for twelve days in April and when she came to California for six days in May. Timing is everything; we were both ready and able to see the gift being offered to us by life in a way we could not perceive 24 years before, half a lifetime ago, or even in the recent past.
Already in April we both were experiencing the vision of being together. In the middle of June, I picked up and moved to the area outside Boston where Nina lives. Since my life was in flux in a way that hers was not, it was eminently more feasible for me to change venues so that we could begin seeing what exists and could grow between us. Since then, at the beginning of each meal each day, we reaffirm through prayer our gratitude and thanks for the blessings bestowed on us and for this chance to nurture and develop our sacred union. We could not have embarked upon this a quarter of a century ago but today we are fully committed to this journey together.
I have lived alone through most all my adult years. The largest influence for this was experiencing the dissolution of my parents' love and marriage. I was ten when they divorced. I adamantly strove to reject the changed reality of what was now home. My response contained the seeds of an estrangement from my self that grew deep roots over the ensuing years. Deeply ingrained on an unconscious level, I concluded that if this was the result of love, I would never let anyone touch me and matter to me as deeply as my parents had.
Walking through years that become decades can soften even the most obdurate of hearts. My April 2001 could-have-been-killed bike accident, followed by a second bicycle crash six months to the day later in October, imparted, with the greatest intensity, the awareness of the fragility and brevity of life. We are given blessings beyond comprehension with our life, wrapped in our unique human overcoat. By the time Nina wrote me, I was more psychically and emotionally available than at any point in my adult life.
So here we are, daily wading further out into the ocean of mutual being and love. The life-long fears once again rise to the surface: fear of genuine intimacy, fear of giving up/losing control, fear of letting another human being touch the greater depths of whatever `me' actually is, fear of letting another matter that much, fear of once more being vulnerable to the love of another human being. Added to this are the fantasy variations promulgated through cultural conditioning of fairy tales such as "they lived happily ever after".
Our relationship runs the gamut of being: love, joy, wonder, confusion, uncertainty, avoidance, excitement, delight, fear, anger, remorse, gratitude, sadness, respect, compromise, struggle, and on and on. When I was a child, I did not experience the expression of anger as something that was safe. When Nina and I had our first big fight last fall, my response was to shut down and run away. In the fight-or-flight mode, I had only ever experienced flight. In areas of one-on-one intimate personal interaction, I didn't know how to stand up for myself and mix it up. We were able to come back from the brink of this with some visits to a therapist who has helped Nina. I then set out to find someone to carry on and further the inner work of finding more of my wholeness which I have explored on and off and on throughout this life.
A number of indicators have shown Nina and I how wondrous is the mystery of our finding our way back to each other after almost a quarter of a century. The first was my having unconsciously set the beacon on the net in early 1997 with the Rhymes segment that Nina found her way to. Last March, just before Nina responded to that beacon, I was speaking to my brother Bruce. I described how it was hard to imagine how I would ever meet someone who was a good enough match for my own foibles and eccentricities. He responded, `But you don't know; you may have already met her.'
Another affirmation that I am precisely where I belong is how I found my way to John Ryan Haule ("Hau" is pronounced "hew"). I located the Jung Institute of Boston website and on their list of New England Society of Jungian Analysts page, only two of the many names included a website link. John's was one of these and what I read there interested me. After meeting him I felt an affinity so essential to collaboration. I also proposed trading services -- my expanding his site contents and ease of navigation for his helping me find more of my wholeness -- to which he was amenable. He last updated his site in 1996 and, while he has much material to add (he has written a number of books, including manuscripts of works previously unpublished), he simply was not able to make the time to do so. We began our work together in November.
The Readiness Is All
With John's help I am finding my way into an heretofore unknown dimension of being that is the stuff of relationship. The primary difference between this current and prior relationships is how ready I am for this extraordinary journey of couplehood. Previously I had run away before very much depth was able to be explored between the person I was with and me. Walking this path together with Nina, I am embarked on the course of sharing our lives with the commitment I was never before now ready to express nor accept. The outward affirmation of our union, expressed by picking up my home and traveling to the other coast (in time, we hope to return to Santa Cruz), is matched on the inside by my psychic readiness for this next step in my own growth and further creation of consciousness. One of the core elements I am finding with Nina is seeing more of those patterns within that unconsciously attempt to project a rejection of parts of my self that I am not in harmony with, and that I have fearfully hidden from myself for most of my journey here.
In a general way I wrote about aspects of this growth in the last ratitor's corner, The New Myth For Our Species: The Creation of Consciousness. Quoting from that text,
It is precisely this process of manifesting change within by re-embracing and re-integrating one's rejected self that produces an equal and opposite change in others in the world who are similarly trapped in their own avoidance and rejection of their estranged selves. Such a "leap of faith" enabling one to mount this profound commitment to inner change and growth can occur only by acknowledging the formidable and transformative powers of responsibility each of us as human beings is endowed with and capable of summoning when we are ready. When we are ready to truly and fundamentally discover and explore change within ourselves, issues previously considered unmovable and fixed have a tendency to become flexible and fall away with extraordinary ease. As Laurens [van der Post] so aptly reminds us harkening back to Shakespeare's Hamlet, "when the time is out of joint, as ours certainly is, the readiness is all."
One of the most deceptive of popular half-truths is the saying that history repeats itself. Only unredeemed, unrecognized, misunderstood history, I believe, repeats itself, and remains a dark, negative and dangerous dominant on the scene of human affairs. Although the Bushman has gone, what he personified, the patterns of spirit made flesh and blood in him and all he evoked or provoked in us, lives on as a ghost within ourselves. This is no subjective illusion of mine evoked by the special relationship I have always had with him. Something like him, a first man, is dynamic in the underworld of the spirit of man, no matter of what race, creed or culture. I know this as an empiric fact because of all the books I have written and films I have made about the Bushman; his story has been translated into all languages except Chinese, travelled the world and been taken into the hearts of millions as if it were food in a universal famine of spirit. What this means for our own time depends in the first instance on our rediscovery of these patterns in ourselves and our readiness to cease being accessories after the fact of diminished consciousness, of which murder is the ultimate symbol. As Hamlet in his haunted fortress had it, when the time is out of joint, as ours certainly is, the readiness is all.
This dynamic of how "the readiness is all" has resonated inside for some time. The readiness to risk moving to Nina's community and commit myself to an expression of love and relatedness like nothing I have lived before is the driving force in my life today. A common thread in the eloquent writing of Laurens van der Post is how the inner and the outer are a reflection of each other.
World without and world within, after all, whether one knows it or not are expressions of one another; interdependent and ceaselessly in communication, serving something greater than the sum of themselves.
A Story Like The Wind, p. 123-4I am greatly affirmed in my path by a passage in Laurens' story, at about the same time in his life, of his journey to find the Bushman of his youth and apologize and ask their forgiveness for the terrible things his ancestors did to them. As a boy he had made a pact with himself when he was eight.
. . . Later in the afternoon I locked myself in the study of my father, who had died some weeks before, and took out a diary in which secretly I had begun to write poetry and record my thoughts. The day was October 13, 1914, and in High Dutch I wrote: "I have decided today that when I am grown-up I am going into the Kalahari Desert to seek out the Bushman."
In the following chapter, and more than 40 years later, after reaching the moment in his life when he decides to commit himself to fulfilling his childhood pact, he is describing how things fell into place.
. . . Yet even there I was amazed at the speed with which it was accomplished. I say "amazed," but it would be more accurate to say I was profoundly moved, for the lesson that seemed to emerge for a person with my history of forgetfulness, doubts and hesitation was, as Hamlet put it so heart-renderingly to himself: "the readiness is all." If one is truly ready within oneself and prepared to commit one's readiness without question to the deed that follows naturally on it, one finds life and circumstance surprisingly armed and ready at one's side. In fact, I would say now that the tragedy of Hamlet was precisely that he always found a reason for not obeying the readiness of his own spirit. I say this, not because I raised my own small problem to Shakespearian proportions, but merely for the order that the parallel helped to bring to the perplexities of my own mind and for something else that it revealed beyond: how what we sentimentalize as forgiveness is an iron enactment of life. Indeed, life does not merely exact but sets the example. Vengeance, revenge, forgiveness and bitterness are all reactions of the retarded Corsican in ourselves: they play no role in the abiding assertion of life. It is too urgent for that, and in order not to stand still in mere action and reaction, it moves on only with the effect that has freely forgiven its cause. The fact, I believe, will one day be capable of mathematical as well as emotional expression. Meanwhile, here was one more proof of it for me in that if anyone had deserved a rebuff from life after so many fumbled years, I had. Yet I found myself pardoned and my plan welcomed as an old friend.
Ibid, p.72There is a great deal about the above that has stuck in my mind and my heart since I first read it, and later listened to actor John Nettleton speak it (in the audio book version). The essential image that has stayed with me is that life is at one's side like an old friend when one is truly ready to embark upon one's chosen purpose.
The Power To Choose
In recent years I have been increasingly struck by our human ability and power to choose. In the 1969 Star Trek story, "Requiem for Methuselah" Rayna is an android woman created by an immortal man Flint, to live with him for all time. Flint manipulates Kirk to stir and bring Rayna's emotions to life. At the end she discovers the secret of her not being human and Flint and Kirk fight over her. Rayna yells for them to stop, and in a moment of expanding consciousness she realizes, `I choose, where I want to go, what I want to do . . . I choose.' Almost immediately she collapses and dies. When Kirk asks what happened, Spock responds that `She loved both of you. . . . she did not want to hurt either of you . . . There was not enough time for her to adapt to the awesome power of her new-found emotions."
The capacity to choose bestows great power upon us while simultaneously demanding that, as David Korten puts it, "we bear the burden of responsibility to make our choices wisely" (The Post-Corporate World, Life After Capitalism, p.137). We choose what we will believe in. We choose how we will respond to each situation life presents us with. We create the reality we experience by choosing how we will interpret what we perceive.
My good friend and ratical.org partner rebecca lord challenged me back in the mid-nineties with the awareness that when we become physically mature adults no one can hurt us inwardly. We can choose to be inwardly hurt by another but they do not have the power to do that; only we do through the power of choice. For me this is the meaning of maturity: recognizing that I am responsible for the state of my inner world. I alone chose. Others certainly have a profound influence on me. But in the end, I am the one who chooses. rebecca reflected on this in a letter in 1997:
this a.m. i was thinking/dreaming about the vulnerability of teens -- my own children in particular. the wounds they carry are much deeper than if certain events had occurred either when they were younger or older. i also saw clearly the fact that everyone in the family wanted me not to see what was happening and the fact that i chose not to. i'm able to put down some of the baggage i've been carrying.
i'm finding more often the ability to trust, when i trust, i relax and my awareness of the moment increases. i can respond from an uncluttered, clear place. responsible. it isn't so much that i trust more -- rather i'm more aware of how much we all trust. we trust the floor to be solid for our feet, we trust our food will nourish us, we trust our families to love us even when they don't accept us, we trust joy when it catches us by surprise.
This brings back the fundamental point I wish to emphasize. Many of us yearn for the world to be made whole, for the lion to lie down with lamb, for the strong to protect and care for the weak, for our single, fragile human family to grow up and live out its greatest promise and potential as self-reflecting, conscious beings. We all have the power inside our selves to manifest this life-honoring sacred purpose; it is part of our birthright. The process for this places the burden squarely upon each of us: Change yourself and you change the world.
Living Myth and Meaning
While the rational mind balks at such assertions, I find the unfolding river of change now carrying me along in its strong and swift current is giving a palpable experience of meaning akin to what I wrote about in The New Myth For Our Species. Meaning is as essential to our being as food and water. We cannot survive without it. At the beginning of his 1984 book The Creation of Consciousness, Jung's Myth for Modern Man, Edward Edinger pin-points a central element of the sadness and desolation we are confronted by in the world today with the loss of a sense of meaning.
History and anthropology teach us that a human society cannot long survive unless its members are psychologically contained within a central living myth. Such a myth provides the individual with a reason for being. To the ultimate questions of human existence it provides answers which satisfy the most developed and discriminating members of the society. And if the creative, intellectual minority is in harmony with the prevailing myth, the other layers of society will follow its lead and may even be spared a direct encounter with the fateful question of the meaning of life.
It is evident to thoughtful people that Western society no longer has a viable, functioning myth. Indeed, all the major world cultures are approaching, to a greater or lesser extent, the state of mythlessness. The breakdown of a central myth is like the shattering of a vessel containing a precious essence; the fluid is spilled and drains away, soaked up by the surrounding undifferentiated matter. Meaning is lost. In its place, primitive and atavistic contents are reactivated. Differentiated values disappear and are replaced by the elemental motivations of power and pleasure, or else the individual is exposed to emptiness and despair. With the loss of awareness of a transpersonal reality (God), the inner and outer anarchies of competing personal desires take over.
The loss of a central myth brings about a truly apocalyptic condition and this is the state of modern man. (pp.9-10)
It is critical to be clear about our terms here. Today all too often in our hyperliteral culture, myth is mistakenly assumed to mean something false or not real. By doing so we do our selves and our world great disservice by failing to grasp the essential relevance myth has to our own psychic groundedness and vitality. In 1957 Laurens van der Post explored this at great length in a booklet entitled Race Prejudice as Self Rejection, An Inquiry into the Psychological and Spiritual Aspects of Group Conflicts:
I find it so tragic and ironical that the age in which we live should regard the word "myth" and "illusion" as synonymous, in view of the fact that the myth is the real history, is the real event of the spirit. It is this immense world of meaning with which the image links us. The myth is the tremendous activity that goes on in humanity all the time, without which no society has hope or direction, and no personal life has a meaning. We all live a myth whether we know it or not. We live it by fair means or we live it by foul. Or we live it by a process or a combination of both. We have a myth that we live badly. The Christian myth is a myth in the real sense of the word. (p.18)
What is the myth in which each of us lives? For a long time I have felt I have lived outside whatever this culture is that I was born into; that I was not part of it. As the 20th century progressed, especially after World War II, alienation has been a deeply-rooted theme in many people's lives who are embedded in post-industrial culture. But such a dynamic can hardly be called a living myth that sustains and nourishes our sense of psychic wholeness.
Regarding choice and the search for meaning and a living myth, I have become more and more emphatic in my belief that the process of changing myself contains great power and is the most direct path to changing our world in the way we must if we are to survive our species adolescence, grow up, and begin to genuinely live the responsibility that is the irrevocable counterpart of choice. Like two sides of a coin, they are forever joined. As I wrote the dedication to Ending Corporate Governance in February 1996:
If we think there is no hope, that is our reality.
If we sense we are powerless, it is what we are.
And if we truly see the fact that we are solely response-able
for the way we choose to interpret what we perceive,
then we change the world in ways otherwise unimaginable.Today our species is moving into the most monumental moment of transformation we will experience in our lives. Old values and ways of being such as "dominion over the earth and all its creatures," "might makes right," and "the law of scarcity" are increasingly being questioned and challenged as the world view and framework of reality they project becomes more and more transparent for all to see. The imperative to see clearly is being caused by the momentum and inertia these values exert that continue drawing every one and every thing closer to the abyss of oblivion. Committing ourselves individually and collectively to change is no longer simply a nice idea. It is essential to our existence.
Waging Peace
The singular significance of this moment of human time was augmented when I received a message about Dr. Robert Muller being honored in San Francisco on February 5th at an event called The Vital Role of the UN in Preserving Planet Earth, sponsored by the United Nations Association of San Francisco. Lynne Twist (Representative to the State of the World Forum, President of the Turning Tide Coalition, Co-Founder of the Pachamama Alliance, Founding Executive of The Hunger Project, Board Member of the Institute of Noetic Sciences) authored an account of Dr. Muller's remarks:
Dr. Robert Muller, former assistant secretary general of the United Nations, now Chancellor emeritus of the University of Peace in Costa Rica was one of the people who witnessed the founding of the U.N. and has worked in support of or inside the U.N. ever since. Recently he was in San Francisco to be honored for his service to the world through the U.N. and through his writings and teachings for peace. At age eighty, Dr. Muller surprised, even stunned, many in the audience that day with his most positive assessment of where the world stands now regarding war and peace.
I was there at the gathering and I myself was stunned by his remarks. What he said turned my head around and offered me a new way to see what is going on in the world. My synopsis of his remarks is below:
"I'm so honored to be here," he said. "I'm so honored to be alive at such a miraculous time in history. I'm so moved by what's going on in our world today."
(I was shocked. I thought -- Where has he been? What has he been reading? Has he seen the newspapers? Is he senile? Has he lost it? What is he talking about?)
Dr. Muller proceeded to say, "Never before in the history of the world has there been a global, visible, public, viable, open dialogue and conversation about the very legitimacy of war."
The whole world is in now having this critical and historic dialogue -- listening to all kinds of points of view and positions about going to war or not going to war. In a huge global public conversation the world is asking -- "Is war legitimate? Is it illegitimate? Is there enough evidence to warrant an attack? Is there not enough evidence to warrant an attack? What will be the consequences? The costs? What will happen after a war? How will this set off other conflicts? What might be peaceful alternatives? What kind of negotiations are we not thinking of? What are the real intentions for declaring war?"
All of this, he noted, is taking place in the context of the United Nations Security Council, the body that was established in 1949 for exactly this purpose. He pointed out that it has taken us more than fifty years to realize that function, the real function of the U.N. And at this moment in history -- the United Nations is at the center of the stage. It is the place where these conversations are happening, and it has become in these last months and weeks, the most powerful governing body on earth, the most powerful container for the world's effort to wage peace rather than war. Dr. Muller was almost in tears in recognition of the fulfillment of this dream.
"We are not at war," he kept saying. We, the world community, are waging peace. It is difficult, hard work. It is constant and we must not let up. It is working and it is an historic milestone of immense proportions. It has never happened before -- never in human history -- and it is happening now -- every day every hour -- waging peace through a global conversation. He pointed out that the conversation questioning the validity of going to war has gone on for hours, days, weeks, months and now more than a year, and it may go on and on. "We're in peacetime," he kept saying. "Yes, troops are being moved. Yes, warheads are being lined up. Yes, the aggressor is angry and upset and spending a billion dollars a day preparing to attack. But not one shot has been fired. Not one life has been lost. There is no war. It's all a conversation."
It is tense, it is tough, it is challenging, and we are in the most significant and potent global conversation and public dialogue in the history of the world. This has not happened before on this scale ever before -- not before WWI or WWII, not before Vietnam or Korea, this is new and it is a stunning new era of Global listening, speaking, and responsibility.
In the process, he pointed out, new alliances are being formed. Russia and China on the same side of an issue is an unprecedented outcome. France and Germany working together to wake up the world to a new way of seeing the situation. The largest peace demonstrations in the history of the world are taking place -- and we are not at war! Most peace demonstrations in recent history took place when a war was already waging, sometimes for years, as in the case of Vietnam.
"So this," he said, "is a miracle. This is what `waging peace' looks like."
No matter what happens, history will record that this is a new era, and that the 21st century has been initiated with the world in a global dialogue looking deeply, profoundly and responsibly as a global community at the legitimacy of the actions of a nation that is desperate to go to war.
Through these global peace-waging efforts, the leaders of that nation are being engaged in further dialogue, forcing them to rethink, and allowing all nations to participate in the serious and horrific decision to go to war or not.
Dr. Muller also made reference to a recent New York Times article that pointed out that up until now there has been just one superpower -- the United States, and that that has created a kind of blindness in the vision of the U.S. But now, Dr. Muller asserts, there are two superpowers: the United States and the merging, surging voice of the people of the world.
All around the world, people are waging peace. To Robert Muller, one of the great advocates of the United Nations, it is nothing short of a miracle and it is working.
We're Not At War
In a modified form of meaning, Robert Muller's statement, "We are not at war," and "There is no war" speaks directly to something I have wrestled with since 11 September 2001. After that day people in the U.S. Executive Branch immediately chose to label the bombings as an act of war by a foreign aggressor rather than as a criminal act requiring redress through legal remedies. Since then the U.S. corporate regime justifies everything it is doing by claiming we are war. The war powers of the presidency is cited in the courts as justification for the military to hold citizens. Public discourse is largely locked into a tacit acceptance of legitimacy for what has been done because "We're at war" -- from making aggressive war on peoples that cannot defend themselves and rejecting international treaties and laws, to justifying and implementing the unthinkable-before-September-11th police state now codified on the law books here at home.
But there is no war. The 9-11 bombings are not acts of war. The 9-11 bombings are crimes against humanity. These acts are clearly crimes against humanity (as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court) because they are deliberate and intentional killing of large numbers of civilians for political or other purposes. That is not tolerable under the international systems. And it must be prosecuted pursuant to the existing laws. We don't need new laws. We need to apply the existing laws. Emphasizing the fact that what happened was not an act of war but a crime against humanity is the purpose of the Crimes Against Humanity section on rat haus reality [http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/]. This is one of the central points that can collapse the imperial house of cards.
In his book Rogue State William Blum points out that "Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship." In her autobiography, Agatha Christie observed "One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing, that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one!" The so-called victors of war are those people who profit financially from the spoils of war. Smedley Butler was a Major General of the United States Marine Corps. He was twice awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor (1914, 1917) as well as the Distinguished Service Medal (1919). After he retired Butler offered his assessment of how war is just a racket in a speech he gave in 1933:
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
. . . I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. . . . I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. . . .
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
Robert Muller is an inspiring and gifted representative of peace. As he describes himself in his acceptance of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's 2002 World Citizenship Award,
I joined the United Nations in 1948 as a young man who had been in a German Gestapo prison, a French Resistance fighter and saw the most horrible atrocities of war and destructions. I come from Alsace-Lorraine, a province of France bordering Germany, where my grandparents knew three wars and changed nationality five times and my father was once a German and once a French soldier. Almost all my male schoolmates of the year 1939 were killed in German or French uniforms. . . .
In the disaffected armaments factory in Lake Success where the United Nations was first located, and where I was an intern, a British delegate asked me what I was doing there. I answered: "I came here to work for peace, because I do not want my children and grandchildren to know the horrors I saw in World War II."
From his personal experience Dr. Muller knew the pursuit of peace was the necessary path humanity must follow if it is to mature as a species. In the spring of 1963 President Kennedy -- who also knew the horrors of war first hand -- felt there was a genuine opportunity for movement towards reconciliation with the Soviet Union by his making, as special assistant Arthur Schlesinger put it, a `peace speech.' President Kennedy gave this address in June. Kennedy's science adviser Jerome Wiesner said afterwards,
The speech at American University made a profound impression on the Soviet Union. Intelligence reports indicated that Chairman Khrushchev had said it was the best speech ever made by an American President. We were hopeful that this would finally mean real progress on a nuclear test ban treaty. Ever since the development of nuclear bombs, we had been attempting to bring them under control.
Kennedy's words and vision are extraordinarily relevant today. They remind us that there are many possible avenues to explore for creatively solving conflicts and that the greatest barrier to such realities is in the way we choose to think about things.
What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children -- not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women -- not merely peace in our time but peace for all time. . . .
Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable -- that mankind is doomed -- that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.
We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made -- therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable -- and we believe they can do it again.
. . . let us not be blind to our differences -- but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.
Commencement Address at American University,
Washington D.C., June 10, 1963
What the World Wants Will Resolve 9-11
As much psychic resistance as there is to seeing alternative approaches to the endless spiral of violence we now appear to be terminal locked into, the solution to the puzzle posed by 9-11 is actually quite simple. However, choosing to change the annihilative course of empire lust, blind hubris, and avarice being pursued by the unelected-in-2000 U.S. regime, starkly high-lights the bankruptcy of what is called United States policy. On September 30, 2001 Oglala/Lakota-born Russell Means wrote
George W. Bush has the opportunity to become the greatest President this country has ever produced and to change the course of history. All he has to do is turn the other cheek and reach out to every country and to all peoples in the world.
"What the World Wants -- and How To Pay For It Using Military Expenditures" is a project of the World Game Institute. The What the World Wants Project is an magnificent demonstration of how clear thinking lays bare such falsehoods as the United States' avowed commitment to and desire for peace as well as the moral legitimacy of the U.S. as the sole so-called world super power that squanders its treasure on war-making.
In the above link a 2-dimensional chart measuring 34-by-23 minus 2 little cubes represents "annual costs of various global programs for solving the major human need and environmental problems facing humanity. Each program is the amount needed to accomplish the goal for all in need in the world. Their combined total cost is approximately 30% of the world's total annual military expenditures." 1 cube equals $1 billion. The total chart contains 780 cubes representing annual world military expenditures of $780 billion. Below the chart is the following table.