I-YOUniverse

I’m doing my annual read of Lord of the Rings, a myth of war.

Soldiers of Peace?

As much as I love Tolkien, I realize

(1) he wrote when his city was being bombed by the Germans and his son was in the military.
(2) He was a veteran of World War I.
(3) He wrote from the Germanic tradition that glorifies the war hero, depicting Jesus as a hero who leaped onto the cross as to a battle.

For example, take these lines from Dream of the Rood, one of the oldest poems in English:

The young hero stripped himself–he, God Almighty–
strong and stout-minded. He mounted high gallows,
bold before many, when he would loose mankind.

(ll. 39-41)

A Tradition Explolited

More than to Boromir, the elder brother, I’m drawn to Faramir, the younger brother, who longed for peace. He said:

War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom.

LOTR, 1994, p. 656

In the past the desperate straits of war often called forth human response at its best. Civilians worked long hours, sacrificed for the common good. Soldiers gave their lives to defend home and loved ones, and ideals such as freedom. Today it’s still true some individuals offer their very best in time of war.

Politicians and corporations exploit this tradition of honor and valor.

Mass Destruction in a Bottle

Today is different. The capacity to destroy the earth lies within reach of small groups as well as nations. All the progress of science will be weighed against the development of weapons of mass destruction including weaponized gases and viruses, which can be transported in small bottles. The good accomplished by warfare will be obliterated along with everything else by its indiscriminate violence.

History will judge as a grave error the decision to treat the attack on the World Trade Center as an act of war rather than as a crime. Once we responded with violence, with our own WMD, we became the aggressors, the destroyers; the terrorists became defenders of their homes, their culture, their religion.

A Corporate Shell Game?

The war on Iraq is more about economics, oil, than ideals. It’s about the military-industrial complex. It would be interesting to analyze corporate bottom lines in relation to the cost of war and so-called aid to Iraq, the development of its infrastructure, schools, hospitals. I believe the incredible sums of our children’s and grandchildren’s money we are spending are chiefly going to corporations.

I also keep asking who benefits from keeping the world’s second largest oil reserve off-line?

Is Violence a Vestige?

Violence is a vestige of our evolutionary past. Dictionary.com defines “vestige” as:

a degenerate or imperfectly developed organ or structure that has little or no utility, but that in an earlier stage of the individual or in preceding evolutionary forms of the organism performed a useful function.

Viewing footage of sheep or rhinos or other male animals rutting, competing for the right to mate, you see that violence once served to select out the healthiest, strongest, and most adept individuals to contribute to the gene pool of the species. But we humans don’t determine individual rights based on brute force. (At least, most of us don’t.)

The Courage of a Non-Violent Future

It takes more courage to put down your weapon and fight using non-violent resistance. Yet Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. both demonstrated that non-violence is more persuasive than any weapon. Non-violent resistance is not passive, it is not weak. It takes all the courage, wit, and will humans can muster.

In the coming Presidential election, Americans face a daunting choice. John McCain stands in the tradition of military force. He is honorable, though his temper could have deadly consequences if it had the world’s strongest military at his command.

Barack Obama represents the future. Much of the world identifies with him. He would be the first person of color to hold the office of President. But, more important, he voted against the war. He can demonstrate to the world that this war is not the American people’s war, but the war of a business and political elite, perhaps even the war of America’s enemies seeking to run the U.S. financially into the ground.

Not a bad strategy. You explode an IED that cost a few hundred dollars. Americans respond with weapons that cost tens of millions each. Before long, that amounts to quite a tab.

And even one life (on any side) is one too many.

A New Species?

Jesus never fought in war. His saying about bringing not peace but a sword cannot be used to justify war.

I believe that, in Jesus (yes, uniquely Son of God) and a few others, a new species is evolving, whom I call Homo spiritus, a species whose strength lies in the spiritual capacity to love and be loved, especially in the sense of agape love, and especially in the case of loving those whom it’s not easy or “natural” to love.

We have reached a turning point in human history, in fact in the history of all life on the planet. We will either learn to live together in peace, mutual respect, and cooperation, solving together the immense problems that we face, or we will die.

Unlike the dinosaurs, we still have a choice.

Dust blows in every crevice, grit sifts into your boots, through every piece of clothing next to your skin, your lips, your nostrils, cakes around the rim of your protective goggles. Who wants this god-forsaken country? Why the hell fight over this?

The rifle slung over your shoulder, the tension in each step because it could be your last if you trigger a land mine, the profane chatter of your buddies, however, assure you: it’s real. This dust is fought for. Somebody calls it home.

Just not you.

And the interstate north of town, the A&W where every car in the county ends up after Friday night ball games, the green fields of corn and soybeans, the white steeple church where you learned Bible verses by heart for bookmarks, the smile of your sweetheart, the tears of your Dad, and Mom’s Sunday roast beef and mashed potatoes-all shimmer, a mirage beyond your fingertips.

You think sometimes you’ll never get home again. But you deep six that thought. You’re gonna make it. Death, dismemberment, is somebody else’s fate, not yours.

You’re gonna make it.

Maybe the hardest thing, though, is how most people back home don’t notice you’re here, so very far from home. Preoccupied with the price of gas, the mortgage, the race for the White House, what Brittany Spears is going through, they scarcely even realize you’re putting your life on the line every damn minute for them.

Brian Williams announces five, ten more Americans killed in the war (not to mention uncounted Iraqis, Afghanis). “Honey, what do you want to drink with supper?” somebody asks.

Far from home.

Far from hearts that beat a little faster when the national anthem is played, that believe in what this country stands for-freedom-believe enough to give their life for the guy fighting beside them.

The big debate, WMD, how many 100s of billions of dollars spent-it costs the arm and leg of one amputee, the life of one who planned to go to college or work in a factory or raise kids. That’s what it costs, ten thousand times over. The big debate is irrelevant out here where the dust blows into every hole, and longing for home wells up in every silence.

Far from home is where you discover the high cost of the war, one heart at a time.

Yet, in each beating heart here is home. Such courage, devotion, and steel of commitment no matter what is the very best any human being is capable of.