“Since the world is made up of individuals, there will always be competing ideas. Ideas which, down through the ages, have usually resulted in one thing: war.”
This remark, which flew through me as a fourteen-year-old — it was the first sentence in an otherwise laborious book report on sufferings endured by prisoners of war in World War II — called the teacher to attention.
“Ann, will you please stay after class today.” Oh no! Why?
So, when I stood there alone in front of her desk, crossed arms holding books to my chest, I didn’t know what was coming next. All I knew was, it would be bad. Some kind of reprimand.
I was right. She accused me of plagiarism (not that she used the word; nor did I know what the word meant). She said that I couldn’t have written that sentence.
My face burned. She was right. I didn’t write that sentence. It just flew out onto the page. Even its cadence wasn’t mine. (Nor, of course, at that age, did I use the word “cadence” or know what that word meant.)
She continued: “If you did write that sentence, then it’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen from someone your age.”
Looking back, I can see that sentence as the distillation of the fury, despair, and instinctive analysis that had been building inside me since I was two and a half years old, when my mother and grandparents were listening to the radio, rejoicing. The atomic bomb had just been dropped on Hiroshima. It meant my father was coming home.
Their rejoicing bewildered me. Even at that age, I knew that what had just occurred was horrific destruction on a scale never before engaged in by human beings. And they were celebrating?
I date my own hypersensitive awareness to the horrors of WAR to that day; to the day when I morphed into Chicken Little, sure that the world was going to end. From that time on, hearing a plane overhead signalled my overheated imagination that it might be carrying the Bomb that would do us all in.
I date my own separation from the pleasures of childhood to that day as well. From that time on, I could only pretend to be a child, to run and play without a care in the world. At 5 p.m. I would run out to the doorstep, pick up the local paper, scan the headlines for news. No news was good news. We would live another day. At night I carried out a ritual, a long, involved ritual, it took me at least 20 minutes, turning from front to side to back to side to front, over and over again, lying there supplicant: “Please don’t make my daddy go back to war again. (One Hail Mary). “Please let there be peace.” (One Hail Mary). Over and over again. I still have the faded paper filed somewhere with those pencilled prayers. (My mother asked me to write them down.) And then, once I did fall asleep. The horror, the horror: nightmare visions of nuclear blasts, over and over again.
I could date my fascination with Death to that time, too. And I can say now, in hindsight, that the bomb was going off inside me as well. When Dad came home from the war he made sure that his fiery first born was stilled into obedience. Compliant, good girl on the outside; fury within, erupting continuously, in the unconscious.
I can date my disgust with standard epistemology to that time too, and to the origins of what I now call alt-epistemology, or: an expanded understanding of the (left brain, rational, logical, scientific) mind; I seek to transcend the left brain mind’s egocentric identification with its own (or borrowed, or mind-controlled) ideas, and its strong impulse to justify, defend, guarantee their “truth” by any means possible and/or necessary: including war.
“I am right. You are wrong.” On this polarity western civilization still hangs — by an ever-fraying thread.
Okay. Now you know my feelings about war, and how deep they run. So it is that on every Memorial Day, celebrated yesterday, I grit my teeth and wait for it to be over. War is a racket!
And if war is a racket, then why celebrate the poor (mostly young, innocent, even idealistic) fools who, mind-controlled up the yin-yang, along with their families and friends, serve as fodder for bankers and weapons manufacturers who fund both sides of any war? The same goes for war memorials. Why do these grace our parks and other public places? How about monuments to celebrate human creativity, compassion?
With this all in mind, here are some worthy newsmakers from yesterday, all of which I found on zerohedge:
And especially, this:
Making Sense of America’s Empire of Chaos
Without even reading the above all the way through, I’d say that wreaking chaos makes total sense to banks and weapons manufacturers who care not a whit “who wins.” They win; they always win, by funding both sides and, along with other interlocking international corporations, are called upon for “reconstruction” with central bank loans for massive infrastructure projects that leave entire countries bankrupt. Period. That’s how it works folks, now that the ego’s instinct for greed seems to have overcome the soul’s compassion and hell is loosed upon the Earth.
So, yes. You might say I’m very happy Memorial Day is over for another year. If we last another year.
