Trying to Make Sense of it All

 

Today in my daily ritual that begins with a cup of coffee accompanied by the opening of a book, I was challenged by which one to open first. Morning time is nonfiction time for me. I ultimately decided on the newest book that was sitting away from the current reading stack. Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future by Oliver Franklin-Wallis. It caught my eye on the new book shelf at the library last week. As per usual once the title grabs me enough to look between the covers, I decided it was worth the trip home to see if the writing was compelling enough to hold my interest. After reading the introduction a couple of days ago I decided it was.

Why that book this morning? I’m not sure. I know there was a thought that tonight I chair our recycling organization’s monthly board meeting and that maybe something I might read in it today could spark something in our meeting. But then, I’m also facilitating a different meeting later this morning with a statewide peace network, so why didn’t I pick up either Samantha Powers’ A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide or Cynthia Enloe’s Twelve Feminist Lessons of War from my pile?

I suspect, especially with the Powers book, that I can only handle small doses of the pain of stories of genocide from the past, as we are confronted with others who are experiencing this suffering as I write this. Too often, if not supported by my own government, we are complicit in that suffering. Having only read the introduction to Enloe’s book I don’t have enough of a sense to see exactly where it will take me.

The other two titles at hand, (there is still one up in the bedroom pile - Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States, a birthday gift from Ellen) are Robin Wall-Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses and Marjorie Kelly’s Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises. Gathering Moss is a book I bought for Ellen when it first came out, for she is my naturalist connection. She pulled it out the other day and secretly added it to my pile and I at once began to savor it, as I did Kimmerer’s indelible Braiding Sweetgrass. I read a short chapter each morning and it is like a soothing meditation so rich in the heart, soul, and science of this neglected life form, for which I have some unknown affinity for.

Wealth Supremacy was a recent gift from friends who thought I would enjoy this exploration of the financialization of our society. They are right. Her take so far is a fresh consideration of the demise of our cultural drivers, especially during my lifetime. After consuming a chapter in Wasteland, I picked up Wealth Supremacy and read a chapter that focused on the importance of the use of language in shaping how we think about and value things - “When language is biased …when it casts worker income as “expense” and capital income as “profit”—we enter a symbolic order that denigrates us, marginalizes us or others, and disparages what we wish to honor”. (p.29)

But as I finished that section, I began to wonder how do all these different books connect? How could I weave both my journey to accumulate and actually read them, and how on earth could I possibly describe their collective impact on how I think or live as a result of my encounter with them? I certainly seem driven to understand the intersection of many forces at work in our world. Perhaps it’s why I struggled as an undergraduate, changing my major every term from electrical engineering to journalism to psychology to sociology to political science to philosophy only to take a hiatus for a few years before returning to college. I finally connected and found a home in the field of geography that by design looks at many intersections of the human world with the natural one. It was through that discipline and those teachers that I became aware of aware of the importance of the living world and our interactions with it. I remember two significant papers I wrote back in 1974 – one on the El Nino effect  for a climatology course (it was a pretty new theory at the time) and the second, a proposal for establishing recycling program for the city of Detroit. Funny, how 50 years later those issues are much more visible.

The emerging field of sustainability builds on that awakening that geography provided for me. And the field continues to go deeper and broader in understanding all those many intersections. When I worked on the two volume encyclopedia Achieving Sustainability: Visions, Principles and Practices (2014) I was tasked with explaining these intersections. With the help of my gifted design colleague, Theresa Moore, I came up with this image

The concept tries to show that the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the society which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. The image also tries to convey these intersections are not static, but dynamic. As I glance at this now, I wonder if the UN Sustainable Development Goals had been agreed to then, if I might have substituted those 17 goals for the individual ones I listed, since most of them correspond to those goals.

Obviously, this is a an incredibly complex system to understand, especially since it is not static. We shape the systems in what we do, how we engage with each other and with the natural world. Wealth supremacy is the headline in the Washington Post and The Guardian this morning with the release of a new Oxfam report noting the incredible supremacy of the wealthiest impact on our climate – “TOP 1% Responsible  for More Carbon Emissions Than the Bottom 66%”.

“To take what we need to support our profligate lives, and leave a ransacked and destabilized world for our grandchildren, is not worthy of us as moral beings.”

(Kathleen Dean Moore, Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a time of Climate Change. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016. p.4)

I read to try and better understand how we might learn to live together sustainably and in peace. The Oxfam report is more evidence that the current approach is leading us towards an abyss. Our journey towards sustainability continues. It’s the least I can do with the time I have left. Keeping ideas of better possibilities alive in hopes, as Milton Friedman once said:

“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

Totally Ignored

GAZA, Nov 6 (Reuters) - Israeli fighter jets struck 450 Hamas targets in Gaza and troops seized a militant compound in the past 24 hours, Israel's military said on Monday, in attacks the enclave's health authorities said killed dozens of people.

A Reuters journalist in the Gaza Strip described the overnight bombardment from the air, ground and sea as one of the most intense since Israel launched its offensive in response to a surprise attack by Hamas on southern Israel a month ago.

 Health officials in Hamas-controlled Gaza said more than 9,770 Palestinians have been killed in the war since Hamas killed 1,400 people and seized more than 240 hostages on Oct. 7.

We are seeing similar reports daily of the human casualties of this most current war. What we don't hear or read of is the incalculable impact of war on the environment. Look at just this one AP photo, of which there are no doubt hundreds if not thousands of.

 

This photo from a story that emphasized the challenge of Gazans seeking some safe place amid the shelling and bombing of their neighborhoods. Just think of all the energy and materials that went into the construction of Gaza and what it will take to someday clean-up and rebuild a city of 2 million souls. The numbers will be staggering and they will add greatly to the carbon emissions we are trying to slow and reduce.

Today, November 6,  happens to be perhaps the most ignored UN International Day. It's the International Day for Preventing Environmental Exploitation in War and Armed Conflict. There is of course the total waste of energy and materials that war amplifies, but there are other "externalities" ignored in war that we will pay for - exposure to the toxicity for those who do the eventual cleanup and who live nearby; the extra toxicity from use of weapons like white phosphorus and depleted uranium; the contamination of soils, air, and water; the death of animals and destruction of plants and landscapes.

Each day the world community fails to impose a ceasefire, the tragedies grow and will ensure that future occupants inherent the costs. How many more have to die or be wounded; how much more destruction will satisfy the vengeance that war feeds?  Will the human family destroy itself and the community of life via unleashing these weapons directly or through those weapons of war destroying the ecology that provides us all with life? 

We need a Ceasefire NOW!!! Not just in Israel and Palestine, but Ukraine and Russia and all the other arenas of war. I am outraged that our government feeds this destruction and fails to call for an immediate ceasefire. It's a moral failure. As Edwin Starr so clearly noted 

"War! What is it Good For? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING? "

Ok, maybe. weapon makers.

Stop the Killing

 

 

As I start to write this I don’t know where it is headed, but I have to write it. Perhaps I may never share it.

 I have not experienced war. Sure, I have seen movies, even documentary clips, and I’ve read a bit. But I’ve never smelled the decaying bodies, seen the ripped flesh and bones or heard the cries of the family members of those slaughtered. So what do I know. This morning’s news:

At least 400 Palestinians were killed in Gaza in the last 24 hours, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, and 70 were killed overnight on Sunday in bombardments of the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp and streets close to two hospitals in Gaza City.

Early on Monday, the Israeli military said it had hit more than 320 “military targets” in the last 24 hours, and that ground forces had conducted “limited raids” to kill gunmen and search for hostages. Hamas said the day before that it destroyed an Israeli tank and two armoured bulldozers inside the territory, which it has ruled since 2007.(The Guardian, October 23 )

-----

A United Nations investigation has found further evidence that Russian forces committed “indiscriminate attacks” and war crimes in Ukraine, including rape and the deportation of children to Russia.

“The collected evidence further shows that Russian authorities have committed the war crimes of wilful killing, torture, rape and other sexual violence, and the deportation of children to the Russian Federation,” a United Nations commission of inquiry on Ukraine said in a report submitted to the UN general assembly.(The Guardian, October 23, 2023)

My experiences with war come through others. A cousin, returned from the Korean War, whom I shared a bedroom with as a young boy, had many scars of shrapnel wounds which plagued him his whole life. Later, I grew to understand some of the mental and emotional wounds he also suffered. But he never spoke to me about them. Perhaps I was too afraid to ask. Veterans of the Vietnam tragedy I lived with in my early 20s, shared a few sanitized memories of their times at war as have other veterans I’ve met over the years. But I have never experienced war.

The one bone-chilling experience I experienced that might have  more viscerally awakened me to the real terror of war, was the murder of a young man a few hundred feet away on a cold November morning in 1970 on the campus of Wayne State University. A little context to this as I recall it 50+ years ago. I was struggling with school, wrenched with trying to understand how to stop a senseless, illegal war in Vietnam. I was changing my major every term, I was involved in the birth of a Free University, including beginning a class on nonviolence. Anyone could facilitate courses, what we now label as ‘co-learning’ groups, around any topic. I was also a draft counselor assisting others in finding ways to avoid being sent off to Vietnam and had filed my own conscientious objector application months before.

On this particular day, I had arrived on campus early, and bought my typical coffee at the student union. Having finished it and reading the student newspaper I began to walk from the Union to State Hall. It was early, maybe 8:30-9:00, and the campus mall I was walking across was sparsely occupied. The chill in the air was notable, but I was warm with a long wool overcoat wrapping me up. To my left near the Library I heard two, or was it three, loud bursts. I looked to see someone falling and another running away towards Cass avenue. I reacted, I didn’t think. I ran to the fallen victim, a youngish, maybe 17 or 18 year old African American. He was breathing, but he was choking on blood. I held his head up hoping it would help him, telling him that help was on the way and that he’d be ok (I really had no clue). He was shaking. I took off my coat and put over him and gently re-lifting his head in hopes of preventing him choking on the blood. Another person came by and ran to call police. Within perhaps 10 minutes they arrived and I was shunted out of the way. Once the ambulance arrived, I asked if I could get my coat back. I did.

I don’t remember the police talking to me then, or getting my name, but maybe I recounted to them what I saw. That part is definitely foggy. Although to this day I remember the young man’s face and especially his eyes like it was yesterday. I was walking around that day and surely for a week or more, as if in some dense fog, trying to make sense of this experience. Trying to fit myself into this crazy and too violent world. The young man died with 24 hours of the shooting. News account suggested that the shooting was the remnant of game of pool the night before that upset the shooter.

A singular shooting like this is certainly not the same as a war with many bodies strewn across landscapes. Yet, that I can still feel the torment of that experience 50 years later reveals an indelible truth to me: that killing and war are, as veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges writes, “The Greatest Evil”.

I’ve been pushing myself slowly through his recent book The Greatest Evil is War, and in so doing reflecting on current wars in Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Sudan, and so many more. Why do we keep on thinking that “only killing shows killing doesn’t pay” as 60’s folk singer Phil Ochs sang about capital punishment? Why is even the urging of a ceasefire objected to (the U.S. vetoed a recent attempt at the United Nations Security Council!!)? Does one need to see and smell the destruction firsthand? To experience the fear of impending death or grave injury? To hold their dying family member in their arms?

I surely can’t adequately summarize Hedges’ recent book or his many other works that rip open the veil of war. Short of being on the battlefield, Hedges depictions and his deep reflections on the sources of war should be required reading for all potential recruits and their families. I will share a couple of excerpts:

I know the instrument of war. War is not politics by other means. It is demonic. I spent two decades as a war correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, where I covered wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. I carry within me the ghosts of dozens of those swallowed up in the violence, including my close friend, Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork, who was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone with another friend, Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora.

I know the chaos and disorientation of war, the constant uncertainty and confusion. In a firefiight you are only aware of what is happening a few feet around you. You desperately, and not always successfully, struggle to figure out where the firing is coming from to avoid being hit.

I have felt the helplessness and paralyzing fear which, years later, descend on me like a freight train in the middle of the night, leaving me wrapped in coils of terror, my heart racing, my body dripping with sweat.

I have heard the wails of those convulsed with grief as they clutch the bodies of friends and family, including children. I hear them still. It does not matter the language. Spanish. Arabic. Hebrew. Dinka. Serbo-Croation. Albanian. Ukrainian. Russian. Death cuts through linguistic barriers.

I know what wounds look like. Legs blown off. Heads imploded into a bloody, pulpy mass. Gaping holes in stomachs. Pools of blood. Cries of the dying, sometimes for their mothers. And the smell. The smell of death. The supreme sacrifice made for flies and maggots.

I was beaten by Iraqi and Saudi secret police. I was taken prisoner by the Contras in Nicaragua, who radioed back to their base in Honduras to see if they should kill me, and again in Basra after the first Gulf War in Iraq, never knowing if I would be executed, under constant guard and often without food, drinking out of mud puddles.

The primary lesson in war is that we as distinct individuals do not matter. We become numbers. Fodder. Objects. Life, one precious and sacred becomes meaningless, sacrificed to the insatiable appetite of Mars. No one in wartime is exempt.

I am wrestling with the same demons that troubled me 50+ years ago and I still don’t have a good handle for how to steer us away from war and violence. We surely have more bread and circuses that distract us from staring at the terror of actual war and violence. Sure, I write letters, sign petitions, organize programs, pass along the wisdom I bump into, even phone our representatives asking them to reject war and militarism and to address the accelerating crises of climate change, income inequality, and attacks on democracy. No doubt this is another struggle that will outlast me, yet I feel compelled to continue to search for nurturing the seeds of true peace.

As Qunicy Institute President, Andrew Bacevich notes today in his post synthesizing his new book, we need to realize that “To solve our problems requires that we see ourselves as we really are.”  From the safety of our sofas and central heating we need to stir ourselves awake to all that is unraveling and join with others to end violence and war upon each other and the planet that is our home.