And all
you really have to do is step away for just a short period of time, break
away from the daily news grind and the everyday wars and the talking-head
alarmism and the commonplace unrests and the wagging fingers of hissing
foreign leaders and then come back, and you can see it clearly.
It dawns on you rather suddenly, especially if you've just taken a relatively
lengthy hiatus/vacation where the pressures of the world all deliciously
fell away and then you calmly return and peel your suntan and open the
paper and scan the wires like you always have and suddenly it hits you,
smacks your anima like a brick: There are no peacemakers in the world
right now.
Crusty macho hawks run the planet like never before in our generation.
Violent money-addled males with far too much power and far too little
perspective are in charge of far too many corporations and lobbies and
governments.
You are appalled. You are saddened. You are blackened at the karmic level.
You realize you don't have nearly enough wine or painkillers or warm socks
for the imminent nuclear winter.
But you are not naive. You are not stupid. You realize this is essentially
the same as it ever was. It's a tragic cliche: Wars and violence and hatred
and injustice and cruelty and angry old men ordering their tribes to kill
each other in the name of oil and money and land and dogma. Film at 11.
Yet not all is bleak and bitter and Bush, of course. Plenty of good remains,
you tell yourself. It's just your average, bitter, ultraconservative,
anti-everything leadership right now and while it certainly feels more
sinister and savage than usual that's just the way the cultural pendulum
swings, you tell yourself, hopefully, trying to shrug it off.
But then again, not. Then again, it all seems much worse than it ever
has in your lifetime. You don't want to believe it but you look and look
and cringe and wince and it's all renewed nuclear strategy this and bloody
Israeli conflict that, heightened tensions with Iraq here and brutal civil
war there and far too much hey get your holy hands off me, Father, just
about everywhere.
You can feel it. We're aching to annihilate Iraq. Craving some nuclear
explosions in any of seven newly minted enemies. Actively avoiding the
Middle East conflict like the plague, terrified our alliances could be
imperiled, our oil interests compromised, Bush family friendships endangered.
World War III will not be two egomaniacal superpowers battling for supremacy
and bragging rights. It will be scattershot and bewildering, a hundred
different battles fought on a hundred different fronts for a thousand
ever-shifting reasons, each and every one twisted and distorted by regulation
GOP spin doctors who somehow convince the bulk of the populace that it's
somehow patriotic to be cavity searched and fingerprinted and beaten with
a stick when you buy groceries.
We are so close. We are on the verge of something very dangerous and irreversible.
You can hear Dick Cheney breathing hard, just aching to press The Button.
The human animal is capable of staggering atrocities and deadly choices
and the thick-necked frat boys in charge right now are the most darkly
capable we've suffered in decades.
No one is preaching peace. No one striving for genuine camaraderie or
balance or compromise. And too few of us seem willing to believe that
9/11 has mutated into a brutish hollow excuse for the Bush administration
to perpetuate a war for oil and to proclaim new enemies and to chip away
at the Constitution and your civil liberties in the name of increased
federal control and fewer dissenting voices.
And you have two choices, given your rather privileged American status
allowing such choices at all: You can either quickly close the paper and
turn off the TV and thank goddess that the world is variegated and colorful
enough that you can live in relative happiness without having your soul
pummeled on a daily basis by people who seemingly have zero connection
to any sort of healthy spiritual reality or perspective. You can detach.
Spin down. Avoid.
Or you can carefully dive back in, try to make sense of it all, get informed
and slog through the macho muck and try to keep your soul from getting
overly tainted, make a valiant attempt to make it though the day without
slapping both hands to your head and screaming and jumping in front of
a speeding ideology.
All the while realizing that if there's one thing the world needs right
now, it's positivism and laughter and good sex and connective energy and
an enlightened populace to counteract the forces that would drag us down
to cesspools of thin-lipped white-knuckle rage. Too simplistic? Too naive?
Hardly. Peace is always much braver and more difficult than war. Just
try it.
