Reflections on Conflict and Human Nature
People ask me every day, as I
assume all people are asked, “Hello, how are you?” I give my usual response by
rote, a basic affirmation of life itself: “I am doing well, life is good.”
However, if asked to reflect a
little more deeply, I might confess that I have spent most of my life in a continuous
state of melancholy, a subtle sadness for the state of the World and its
conflicts which I find to be both distressing and depressing.
I have been told that this is no
good, unhealthy, that I should change.
I am left to wonder how I could, with
the world being in the state that it is. Setting aside the issues we have with
the leadership of our government in America in 2018. I have been having these
feelings my whole life, it seems. I grew up under the specter of the threat of
Nuclear War. I can recall the resignation of disgraced president Nixon. I was
in fifth grade when the Iran hostage crisis began. I was aware of the United
States’ illegal conflict in Central America, and the Iran Contra hearings.
Things crystallized for me on the 5th of June, 1989 (the day I started writing
this essay), when in China 2,600 people were killed for waging a non-violent
demonstration against their dictatorial government. Ultimately 10,000 people, maybe
more, would be killed by Chinese soldiers firing into the crowd of 1.2 million,
in Tiananmen Square, the gates of
heavenly peace.
Today, twenty-nine years later, as
a man approaching his fiftieth year, I look back on my life, and the times that
I have lived in and I see a continuous progression of tragedies and travesties
peppering it.
The Vietnam War, in which the
United States military killed 3,000,000 people. Some were soldiers, most were not.
My father served in it. We pulled out in 1975, the Vietnamese are still
recovering from what we did to them.
I have watched the failure of the
Palestinians to secure their freedom, and peace with Israel. More importantly I
have watched the failure of the international community to hold Israel
accountable for its persecution of the Palestinian people, and the apartheid
conditions they force the Palestinians to live under.
Last week the world looked on and
largely ignored dozens of murders committed by the Israeli defense forces as
they shot unarmed civilians, and target journalists with sniper fire, Killing
dozens, and wounding thousands.
I watched the mismatched conflict
of the First Gulf War, where the United States staged a grand display with
allied forces from around the world, and we slaughtered nearly 500,000 Iraqis, the
common soldiers of a despotic regime who had no hope of surviving, 30,000 people killed in one bombing run, a
caravan of troops heading North, fleeing Kuwait city, going home.
I was serving as a Hospital
Corpsman in the United States Navy at the time, though not in the theatre of
conflict. I was ashamed to listen to other Corpsman talk boldly of picking up
arms and fighting, of killing “the enemy,” when they had each sworn oaths to
save lives.
Fourteen years later the United
States prosecuted the Second Gulf War utilizing falsified reports and bogus
claims that Saddam Hussein’s regime had been stockpiling weapons of mass
destruction. We killed in another 2,000,000 Iraqi’s in that conflict, and
discovered that there were no chemical, biological, or radiological weapons to
be found. Those who perpetrated the conflict knew this to be true, they knew it
all-along.
I watched, together with the whole
world as we all stood by and did nothing in 1994, we watched as somewhere between
500,000 and 1,000,000 Rawandans were butchered by their countrymen, in a
conflict fueled by inter-tribal rivalry. It took place over the course of just
a few days, with most of the killings done by hand, up-close and personal with
knives, machetes and axes. They dumped the bodies in the rivers, so many bodies
and parts of bodies that it stopped the river’s flow.
These are just some of the more
sensational conflicts that have taken place in the past few decades.
Here in my home country, the
citizens of the United States are just becoming aware of how unjust and
intransigent our system of justice is, if your ethnicity is that of a minority
group, if and only if.
Un-armed black men are killed by
police with impunity. The police only have to say that they were in fear for
their lives, and they walk away from the killings without being charged, or if
charged found innocent, most of them keep their jobs.
They can shoot a man in the back,
shoot a man lying face down on the ground, shoot a man complying with their
orders, reaching for his ID, in the car with his wife and child. Men and women
can die in custody, handcuffed in the back of a squad car, hand cuffed in the
back of a police van, in their jail cell with the cameras and microphones
disabled and turned off.
The can pull up on a child at a
park with a toy gun and shoot him within two seconds of arriving, because they “afraid,”
and they will not be punished.
Our ethnic minorities, our fellow
citizens, our fellow Americans are more likely to stopped by the police, and
when stopped they are more likely to be searched, when searched and some form
of contraband is found they are more likely to be arrested. When members of
minority groups are arrested they are more likely to be charged with a crime, when
charged and prosecuted they are more likely to be found guilty, when found
guilty they are more likely to be punished to the maximum extent of the
criminal code than white people, members of the ethnic majority are in the same
circumstances.
In America, tens of thousands of
people die every day from hunger and disease. We have the resources to end
these injustices, but we do nothing.
Around the world we clear cut
forests, burning them up to make way for farms, at the rate of 100,000 acres
per day. We poison our fields and lakes, our rivers and oceans, the air we
breathe, the atmosphere we share, for short-term profits.
In America, in Michigan, in Flynt
we have allowed whole cities to be poisoned with lead, tens of thousands of
people, children, lied to by their government, which denied that the problem
existed for years and then failed to put a plan together to rectify it, all for
the sake of lining the pockets of greedy corporations who had contributed to
their political ambitions. Democratic rule suspended, emergency managers
appointed, selling off the assets of town and cities to the highest bidder,
cutting through “red-tape,” overturning regulations, covering up crimes without
remorse.
I cannot list all of the tragedies
that I have witnessed, the tragedies that are taking place all over the world, there
are too many.
Like me, there are many who are
saddened by the state of the world, disturbed by it, as we watch the continuous
progress we are making toward irrevocable disaster.
We are our own worst enemy.
When a person, any person, takes a
moment to become still, quiet, silent, when they open their eyes, when they listen
with the ear of the heart, they will understand who they are as a part of the
world. And members of the greater-whole
To experience one’s self as whole
and healthy is to understand yourself as a being in relationship, as a being of
relationships. Then, to experience one’s self as whole and healthy, the world
itself must be whole and healthy. This places the imperative on us to work for
the wholeness and health of the world, the whole world, planet Earth.
Genuine happiness, true fulfillment
is dependent on this.
Do you recall the wisdom in this expression:
Together we stand and divided we fall?
We must stand together.
We live on a planet, in a universe
that is one thing. Our world is one thing and we are a part of it, as every
person is.
The part resides in the whole, as
the whole resides in the part, as the nucleus of the cell contains the DNA the
forms the whole person.
Do you remember this expression: A house divided against itself cannot stand?
We must be in accord, be in
communion, if we intend on surviving and fulfilling our potential, both as
individuals and as humanity writ large.
Together we are strong, I am
strong, and you are strong. Humanity is strongest when we are together and there
is a great future ahead of us, awaiting all of our progeny, wherever we may go,
as far from home we might wander, even when we ravel beyond the light of our home
star.
We will fall apart and will
continue to crumble, so long as we accept the lies that allow the illusion of
division to keep us separated.
All life is one.
