Quo

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior, and another, inferior, is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned...well everywhere is war.

Clang!—That is the sound of words ringing true in my ears. Amazing, how we live in a place that has been fighting itself, for every and no reason imaginable since time immemorial, and how we've been doing it so long it's essentially become our status quo. Violence is abhorrent to most of us, and a personal confrontation will leave us marked for years, perhaps for life—but turn on the TV and we're all “oh, it's the news again...nothing new here. *Click.* ...Hey, Pats game is on!”

What did Stalin say? One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. Oh well. Our fragile minds cannot comprehend war, so they cease even to make the attempt. We live our lives as though we are disconnected from these other peoples in those other places.

This is, I believe, essentially the wrong way to do it.

And until there's no longer first class nor second class citizens of any nation; until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes, I've got to say war...

I remember 9/11. I was home that morning sick from school with a fake sore-throat. I remember how freaked out everyone was: my folks, and later my teachers back at school. I felt...dread. It was something of a new feeling for me. There was no silver lining to it. There was no sense to it, no little smile at the end of the phrase to show that things would, somehow, work out to be alright. I had as yet developed no mental box in which to sort war. And why ought I have, as a middle-class American teenager? What concerns had I then, in junior-high, age 13? Doing well academically? Making my parents proud, making friends, talking to girls, what? The most nervous and fretted I ever got was before a little-league game. Would I strike this kid out or would I lob him a perfect throw to smack a homerun and lose the game for my team?—that was it. Then either way I'd go home and have dinner and hang out and play.

There were always other games to win or lose and it was summer and the world was green and smelled of cool breezes and earthen dugouts and things moved slowly. My young mind needed take no time to contemplate death and brutality. In fact, such things did not truly exist for me.

Then wham, the “real” world hit me, hit all of us—much too hard—and so now here we are, everyone living in the adult world of fear and hope and desire and death, turning on our TV sets, being hounded by endless news of some horror or another, afraid of bad people doing worse things to us; afraid of other people, foreign people, domestic people. I remember I was asked to go into classrooms on 9/12 and read a written statement on what a tragedy it was that we had been attacked and how America would endure or something like that. I didn't do it. I couldn't bring myself to, and though I could barely comprehend how anything like that could even happen, something in me felt like it was better not to say anything—certainly more appropriate to do that than read a tepid little canned paragraph about freedom and terrorists. I didn't know what it could mean, I didn't know what changes any of it had wrought in our world, but it seemed very important, and I felt like I needed to have more time to understand it. I didn't want to screw it up and embarrass myself by reading words I didn't understand as though they were my own. I didn't read the cards.

I still won't.

Truth is, we've been at war for as long as anyone living (and probably anyone dead) can remember. Let's say you're not into the reincarnation model. Fine. Since I outright refute the idea that we are gone forever when we die—as energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transmuted—that means how many spirits of how many countless human beings are kicking around somewhere, then? What were their lives like? Were they free of violence, pain, strife, discord...free from war's creeping and virulent touch? Somehow I think not so much.

And until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race, I've got to say war, 'cause until that day, the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, and rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued, but never attained.

It's enough already. Give me the history behind my history. Tell me, please, what happened here. Are we a failed experiment? Perhaps the test is ongoing and the results remain inconclusive. Is this like in Brave New World where they set all those “A” people out on an island and they can't work together because they all want to give orders and they end up wiping themselves out? I mean, throw us a bone, I'm not the only one who wants to know about this stuff. We all get to grapple with it in turn, life from ground zero, whose epicenter is the heart of every one living.

I understand that perhaps that's a part of the experiment, or whatever it is. Put us in a box and don't tell us anything, see what we do. Or maybe, tell a few of us at the start, and then let their descendants a thousand generations later try and make sense of the whole game of cosmic "telephone". Thankfully, through a blessed personal connection with Divine intelligence, I've been permitted (at the very least) to find an order and see a harmony present in the design and the structure of this place; sometimes, I see it. And I wonder how such beauty can coexist with places like Gaza, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq and Afganistan, the Ukraine, the entire African continent, Guatemala and United Fruit, a million chiquita bananas of napalm raining down on Vietnam, on Cambodia, on Korea, on everywhere, our modern day Babylon hard at work in its finest form keeping us safe and protecting our freedoms by toppling nations like candlepins and sewing the black GMO seeds of fear and death over the whole Earth...it never seems to stop. All of it, all the time. Throw a dart at a spinning globe; wherever it lands, look up that place and read about its death toll in statistics too vast and wicked to comprehend.

And yet exactly there, in war-torn lands ravaged by disease and hunger and slow death of every kind, is where you'll find people singing the loudest, dancing the hardest. They have nothing and still they honor their creation. They remind us, as Stephen Lawhead writes, that "spirit is born of spirit, and with spirit evermore remains."

Is there no other way for us, truly, we proud men and women of Earth? Are we doomed to be walking statistics simply ignoring and changing the channel on one another, a generation at a time?

Le photographe est mort.

Perhaps we are. Perhaps, as some have said, we are charged with some humanitarian duty to feel as much as we can for one another. Perhaps instead it would be better to live in a fantasy and only focus on trying to create positive energy in our own little world, to push aside everything that does not fit our artificial Stepford Wives reality. But there is no little bubble, no safe place that isn't tied in one way or another to the realities of everyone else down here. Our prayers and intentions are effective...but, we ask, are they enough? Can they get the job done? Are we really cursed to repeat ourselves again and again?

And for that matter, will someone please tell me how I ended up as an American? Of all the places to be born, it's amazing I came to be here in this nation at this time. At least, on this go-round (I'm personally somewhat fond of the reincarnation model, if you didn't catch that). I struggle to identify with the culture, such as it is, in my little corner of the world. Most times, I fail. The people of Earth fascinate me; that, I cannot help. Sports games and Velveeta cheese dip do not. I'm not trying to rag on the NFL or FIFA or anything else, but it just happens to be an easy example to cite. Because when I chance to look around, at all the other people in my reality, I see nothing but a vast sea of emotion—and so I can't help but feel it, and feel my own emotions mirrored in that moment, and after experiencing that the only thing I want out of life anymore is to immerse myself in the culture and the histories and the experiences of the peoples of Earth, none really so dissimilar from any other. And still I marvel at the fear in the eyes of my peers, whom I cannot help but love.

We are all afraid, aren't we?

I wonder what kind of phenomenon it might take to alter our current course, change the conversation and the paradigm of fear, readjust the focus away from Netflix and the big game and back towards one another. Us. We are the point, I think. We are not mundane, we are not boring, we are not really so threatening, even. Jon Anderson sings that our greatest fear is not that we are nothing, but that we are everything, beautiful and special and precious. We're all just so cut-off from one another now. We work harder than we ever have, and are less satisfied than we've ever been, and more exhausted, by and large, than people have ever been. Perhaps it's the chemicals sprayed in the air all the damn time, or the food (the “food”) and water we consume, or the electromagnetic pollution bathing us everywhere we go, or just the emptiness in our hearts. I don't know. I feel it too, guys. And I feel better knowing I feel something. Because the last step, the final undoing, is to become numb, to turn our backs on the warmth of the Divine that is nature, that is our joy and our sorrow, that is our own celebration, our moments of awe and reverence at the inner workings of a beautiful, cosmic web of stars—a moment for each one of us with a light, a voice, a dream, a place.

And so finally I know what the card should've read: that freedom—true freedom—is looking into the eyes of the people and seeing their souls shining there, no longer afraid.

Do not spray into eyes—I have sprayed you into my eyes.