War, Violence & Suffering - My Random, Wobbly Thoughts

“War, Violence & Suffering” is my topic today so I need warn you, my dear audience, that this subject matter by its nature might be disturbing. We are born via suffering, we die via suffering, and life in between - although illuminated with joy, love and humor - is also plagued with pain, anger, sadness.

I justify my presentation of this topic by quoting the Buddhist priest Thich Nhat Hanh, who says in the 4th Precept of his 14 Precepts of Engaged Buddhism:

“Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world.”

All right, are you ready? I will start safely, with a childhood memory.

I grew up on a large dairy farm in the La Puente Hills. It was a great place to have dry cow-pie fights with my siblings, but an impossible place to Halloween treat-or-treat because we had no neighbors.

We needed a sugary suburbia to terrorize, so every October my Dad called Uncle Bud, a pale frail man in Pomona who had arthritis, a pale frail wife and two pale frail children. “Yes” quavered kind Uncle Bud, “bring your brood over.”

My costume was always Native American, pseudo-Apache. I wore a black wig with a macrame headband that secured filthy feathers. My face was smeared with war paint. My war club was a chunk of gnarled driftwood that I let my bloody nose drip on. I wore a loincloth that exhibited a problematic amount of prepubescent flank, I had a homemade bow and arrow and a quiver of disintegrating deer skin. I loved Halloween, especially the Double Bubble gum with Bazooka Joe cartoons and tiny fortunes on the bottom, that I regarded as 100% prophetic.

When I was seven years old, my mouth was stuffed with gum after raiding Pomona, as I chewed ten pink rectangles together. I unwrapped an eleventh piece and read the fortune, it said, “You will be a brave soldier someday.” Immediately I coughed out the massive wad, I started blubbering like my baby sister, I ran to my mother screaming “NOOOOO! NOOOOO! I DON’T WANT TO BE A SOLDIER!”

I believed, and I still do, that there’s nothing more horrible than war. I knew, at seven years old, even though I was wearing the garb of a warrior that was seeking to slay enemies, I knew that was just make-believe, I knew I didn’t actually want to kill anyone and I certainly didn’t want to anyone to kill me. I didn’t want to ever shoot bullets at anyone’s face, I didn’t want to ever get disemboweled by a bayonet, I didn’t want to ever get blown up by a grenade, shrapnel turning me into a red puddle, I didn’t even want to hate any enemies because I knew they were just boys like me, that I could be friends with if we weren’t supposed to massacre each other.

My mother calmed me down eventually, slowly I moved out of hysteria, but after that I gave up Double Bubble Gum forever because it lied to me, to scare me, and I lost my appetite for sugar entirely because it was obviously a portal to destruction. I was an impressionable child.

Seven years later, when I was 14 I was bullied in my high school swim class, I was half-drowned by chortling boys I didn’t even know. I developed a temper after that and a pushup routine and bigger muscles, quickly, so I could survive at school with less fear, so I could climb up the masculinity ladder and not be a target.

Another seven years went by, the Vietnam War was hungry for flesh, but my draft number was 355 so I was hugely safe but I knew that I would never have gone anyway, I knew exactly how I could cut a tendon in my forefinger like Bill Kilby did to get a medical deferral, or the Greyhound route so I could move to Nova Scotia in Canada like Mark McDonald.

My blood relatives have engaged combat. My Uncle Leon fought in WW2 at Guadalcanal and afterwards he was alcoholic until he died, totally pickled. I was told the funeral director didn’t even need formaldehyde. My Dad fought in the Korean War, a Captain in the Artillery, the experience left him half-deaf, paranoid and haunted, my Mom says “he came back completely different.” My cousin Jimmy went to Vietnam, he came back cynical, shaken, so relentlessly vocal against all wars he was banned from family parties. My nephew Ethan decided to join the Army at 17 because he was skilled at paintball and Call of Duty, fought in Iraq, as a gunner in an Armored Personnel Carrier, he shot off someone’s head, now he always sits silently by the rear exit door at Christmas, scanning anyone who enters the front door. Another nephew, Eric, almost joined the Navy Seals but he dropped out he said all the other canddates were psychopathic.

Are men naturally physically violent? I’m amazed when my two daughters argue, they only insult each other, picking mercilessly at each other’s most vulnerable spots. Verbally cutting. I can’t do that easily because I primarily have just a fight or flight response, with a third option: paralysis. Men commit 90% of the violent crimes, murder, rape, assault and they join gangs and armies.

I am 95% anti-military. I want the USA to shutter its 750 international military bases. I would never buy weaponry stock and I’m disgusted that friends of mine do. Raytheon, Lockheed. I’m nauseated by military alliances like NATO, foreign interventions like Libya, Syria, Serbia, war hawks like Lindsay Graham, Nikki Haley.

When you’re leaning anti-military like me, it’s a slippery slope. Next thing you know, you’re anti-nationalistic, then you’re anti-patriotic, and eventually, you wake up one day and realize you’re anti-state, you’re an anarcho-pacifist like Henry Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, or Dorothy Day. With side effects, like you want open borders or you might stop eating meat.

I’m not 100% anarcho-pacifist, though. I’m not even thoroughly committed to non-violence, I find Gandhi a bit cringy, too performative with his fasting threats and diaper costume. I smile, without guilt, when I see Free Luigi graffiti. I wouldn’t turn the other cheek, I’d slap you back. I know I want bad guys to die, so that good people can live. I’m not alone in this. Think about the #12 precept from Thich Nhat Hanh, he says “Do not let others kill. Find whatever means possible to protect life.” Doesn’t that sound just like the Malcom X saying “by any means necessary”?

Let’s talk about harming animals, for a while.

I had a semi-nervous breakdown when I was 20. I traveled in Europe with two college friends who were extremely cheap - I lost 15 pounds in two months and I was majorly sleep-deprived from only sleeping on the second-class trains. I started collapsing mentally and emotionally in Malmo, Sweden, I was sitting on a park bench. A big black fly decided it would die right next to me. Flies die noisily, they spin around on their back, wings beating furiously, twisting spasmodically in circles BZZZZZZZZZ BUZZZZ BUZZZZZ. I had to leave the bench, I had to move away, I couldn’t watch that horrible bug die because I was experiencing, in my own body, its insectoid pain.

When I got home my Dad took me fishing and right away I caught a very stupid trout that completely swallowed the hook, I realized I had to pull the barbed metal out of his stomach, tearing through his tender esophagus, while it flapped in agony, but I just couldn’t do it, I threw the fishing pole down on the sandy riverbank and I ran weeping into the woods. I felt the pain of the fish. I was ashamed and regretful.

But still, at dinner that night, I ate that trout, cooked in butter and sprayed with lemon juice.

My hypocrisy is huge, and yours might be too. I can say I’m theoretically opposed to violence, but, in actuality, is anyone, really, not violent?

I studied the Jains of India in college. The total ahimsa people. Jain monks wear face masks all the time to avoid inhaling small insects because they don’t want to harm them. Jains don’t kill ants, they don’t even kill mosquitos. They don’t even walk on wet grass in the springtime because they might crush a slug. I am not one of those guys and neither are you.

I’ve gone vegetarian multiple times, until I relapse with a Big Mac or Whopper.

I never eat veal, but when I do, I think it’s delicious.

I understand animal pain very intensely because I’ve witnessed it, growing up on a farm. I have branded cows and I tell you, they scream in agony and fear as much as you would if we shoved a red hot iron on your soft sizzling butt. I have seen every farm animal slaughtered, pigs are psychic, they hide under the trough when they see a shotgun. I saw a goat skinned once, it was a kid, just like me (ha ha - comic relief) it was exactly my ten-year old 100 pound size, it looked human with its skin cut off. Eating it seemed like cannibalism, but I crave the taste. I buy goat meat regularly at a Halal Market on Telegraph and 30th. I have killed chickens, I decapitated 55 in one day with an axe, they really do fly with their heads cut off. And cows, wonderful cows, docile descendants of the powerful Great Auroch, they are the most tragic, we separate the gentle mothers from their beloved calf-children right after they gave birth, wicked humans break up the bovine family because we want to steal the milk for themselves. No cow lives long. They are culled. When her milk production drops, she is turned into tough steak and glue. But still, ice cream. Wow. I love it.

Now I will surprise you, and redeem myself, perhaps, with my next opinion. I am an advocate of the Plan to Eliminate Predators, from the Blueprint for a Cruelty-Free World designed by British empath-philosopher David Pearce. Those of us in this society of the anti-carnivorous - we see existence in the wilderness - the forest jungle or savannah - as relentlessly cruel. Imagine you’re a wildebeest, every day you are hunted, by a pack of slobbering lions, or stinking hyenas who want to eat your genitals and liver first while you’re still alive, or crocodiles hiding submerged in a muddy fetid pond. How is that fun to be a wildebeest? Or fair?

Biologist Richard Dawkins describes the wild situation: 

"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear." 

I am not a biologist, I am a part-time ethicist, but - I want all the predators - the big cats and wolves, too, the drooling packs that prey on infant or elderly buffalo or musk ox or elk. I am that ungulate, deer me, let me grow old in peace, nature is cruel unless we intervene and stop the slaughter. - I want them all bio-engineered so they only eat fruit or tubers.

The Hebrew prophet Isaiah predicted the demise of the ghastly food chain in his Chapter 11, verse 6 “And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the goat, and the calf and the lion will rest together.”

If you disagree with me, it seems, on this issue, that you are more violent than me.

Let’s get back to war now, and what should we do about it.

I don’t like death. When I read about the war in Ukraine, 1500 people dying daily, I mourn all the lost consciousness, the lost loves and memories, the lost receptacles of thought and emotion. Like Walt Whitman, I see myself and every other living thing as a precious irreplaceable universe. Whitman says,

“I am a cosmos, whose scope of mind includes the whole known universe—the great thoughts of space and eternity fill my soul! I am limitless, east and the west are mine, north and the south are mine, I carry threads to the sun and the stars. I have thousands of globes and all time.”

What can each of us do to end war? How can we end violence? How can we reduce the suffering in the world?

I have four suggestions - the first two I stoled from Engaged Buddhism, the third I stoled from the IWW, the fourth I stoled from Crosby, Still and Nash.

The first - BE MINDFUL - asks us to pay attention. It is easy to look away, it is more comfortable, I don’t like looking at starving children, it ruins my day. But if we look away, if we pretend we can’t see it, we become ostriches with our bird-brain heads in the sand. Paying attention to war and violence won’t kill you - Thich Nhat Hahn lived to be 95 and empaths live longer than ostrich-headed people because they are socially connected. Being Mindful also means - don’t let anyone convince you to “Demonize the Enemy.” Don’t slip into seeing “enemies” as less-then-human, as only monsters, because if you do that, it will become psychologically easy to justify killing them. When people call other people “vermin,” “savages,” and “barbarians” and refer to civilians as “collateral damage” this justifies their destruction - if you think “they not like us” you cut off your compassion, you only see people you are in conflict with as projections of the fear and hatred that has consumed you

The second advice - TAKE RESPONSIBILITY - tells us ordinary people, like us, actually condone war if we make wrong choices in our daily life. We need to see war as a collective responsibility. We need to think about what we eat and what we buy and where we go on vacation and who we support. We need to stop buying products from war-profiteering companies. We need to actively work for peace. We need to demand policies that promote peace, reduce military budgets and halt foreign interventions.

My third advice is either called GREED IS THE PROBLEM or you can use the Wobbly jargon, NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR. Buddhism calls greed a poison of the mind that is frequently the motivation for war. Greed craves more territory, more resources, greed wants economic dominance. Greed motivated colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, for extraction and profit benefitting the rich and powerful in every colonizing nation, using soldiers from the working class, recruited via propaganistic lies, claiming wars are about freedom, or democracy, or safety. In WWI, socialist leaders like Rosa Luxemburg and Eugene Debs opposed the war, saying workers should not kill each other for the profits of capitalists. Iraq wars were battles for oil. Wars receive immense support from weapons suppliers and their investors, who make extraordinary profits via the slaughter provided by their death-machines.

My last bit of advice is designed around the title of a Crosby Still and Nash Song called TEACH YOUR CHILDREN. Teach your children that all creatures want to live without pain, all creatures deserve compassion. Teach your children all humans everywhere in the world are equal and deserve the right to be free, to be educated, to be fed, clothed, sheltered, and listened to with consideration. Teach your children it is a gift to weep when animals and humans suffer, because it indicates you feel our interconnection. Teach your children that Greed, Hatred, and Ignorant Delusion are poisons in the brain and the cure is to simply recognize this and telll the poisons to disappear. Teach your children peaceful communication, teach them to see non-violent role models as heroes, teach them to see struggles for liberation as the great moments in history. Teach them what is true, when I was a preschool director I asked the children where milk came from, the children told me milk came from boxes in stores, I told them milk came from cow’ nipples, they looked at me like I was a pervert. Children don’t know anything. We need to tell them. Teach them to share and to give.

And now, Go forward in Peace and Hope, all of you, this speech about violence is finally over. I apologize if it caused you to suffer.