Our economic woes have pushed the two wars we’re still waging out of the headlines. But our sons and daughters are still still fighting and dying;  our treasure continues to be wasted on Dick Bush’s legacy of war crimes.

Terrorists who would do us harm must be hunted down, but these unnecessary wars must end.  Only Barack Obama will end them.  Bullets must give way to Ballots.

Remember that when you vote.

Guess who took this picture.

John McCain still thinks someone wants to put him in a box.

“When you’ve lived in a box,  you “only have time for right,” says a deep cowboy voice oozing authenticity, while the orgasmically large flat screen shows the aged maverick returning to his Vietnam prison cell and “forgiving” his captors— and their nation— for, well— sparing his life— after napalming their city, their children, along with their mothers and fathers; you know— WAR.  As McCain says, WAR is:

. . .terrible beyond imagination.

Ya think? This is the (maverick) man who can casually imagine a hundred more years of WAR.

. . .I’m running for president to keep the country I love safe, and prevent other families from risking their loved ones in war as my family has. I will draw on all my experience with the world and its leaders, and all the tools at our disposal — diplomatic, economic, military and the power of our ideals — to build the foundations for a stable and enduring peace.

“Build the foundations for a stable and enduring peace“?  The foundations have been built since the end of WWII;  if anything they’ve been  scorned, ignored and abandoned;  but they still exist.

The 72 year old maverick says:

We’re going to reach out our hand to any willing patriot, make this government start working for you again, and get this country back on the road to prosperity and peace.

Willing. Patriots. Only. Willing patriots say: The senseless conflicts we are now engaged in with random individual terrorists throughout the entire world, whom we are sworn to track down and kill or imprison at our leisure, are not “the road” to world peace. And a “willing patriot” interrupting a Republican acceptance speech being given by a candidate who sees “more wars,” but never mentions specifics on how we are to actually pursue and achieve peace, is not incivility.  [Read more →]

IN THE PAST, a fierce war would bring about social changes and facilitate the adoption of new ideas, such as would not have occurred naturally in ten thousand years. But the terrible price paid for these certain advantages was that society was temporarily thrown back into savagery; civilized reason had to abdicate. War is strong medicine, incredibly costly and extremely dangerous;  and while often curative of a number of social disorders, it can often kill the patient and destroy the society.

The constant necessity for national defense creates many new and advanced social adjustments, and the society of today enjoys the benefit of a long list of useful innovations, which were at first wholly military.  War has had a social value to past civilizations because it:

• 1. Imposed discipline on men, enforced cooperation.
• 2. Put a premium on fortitude and courage.
• 3. Fostered and solidified nationalism.
• 4. Destroyed weak and unfit peoples.
• 5. Dissolved the illusion of primitive equality and selectively stratified society.

War has always had a certain evolutionary value in the past, but like slavery, it must at some point be abandoned as civilization slowly advances. Past world wars literally forced us to travel and promoted cultural intercourse; but these ends are now better served by modern transportation and communication. Olden wars strengthened nations, but modern wars disrupt all civilized culture. Ancient warfare resulted in the decimation of inferior peoples; but the net result of modern conflict is the selective destruction of the very best human stocks. Early wars promoted organization and efficiency, but these have become the obsessions of modern industry.

During past ages, war was a social ferment which pushed civilization forward; but this result is now better attained by ambition, and invention. Ancient warfare supported the concept of a God of battles, but modern man has been told that God is love.

War has served many valuable purposes in the past;  it has been an indispensable scaffolding in the building of civilization. but it is now culturally bankrupt— incapable of producing any dividends of social gain in any way commensurate with the terrible losses it produces.

Physicians once believed in bloodletting as a cure for many diseases, but they have since discovered better remedies. Likewise must the international bloodletting of war give place to more intelligent methods for curing the ills of even backward nations.

The nations of our planet— Urantia— have long been engaged in the gigantic struggle between nationalistic militarism and industrialism. In many ways this conflict is analogous to the age-long struggle between the first herder-hunters and the farmers of land. But if industrialism is to triumph over militarism, it must avoid the dangers which beset it. The perils of corporate industry are:

1. The strong drift toward materialism, spiritual blindness.

2. The worship of wealth-power, value distortion.

3. The vices of luxury, cultural immaturity.

4. The increasing dangers of indolence, service insensitivity.

5. The growth of undesirable racial softness, biologic deterioration.

6. The threat of standardized industrial slavery, personality stagnation.
Labor is ennobling but drudgery is benumbing.

Militarism is autocratic and cruel— savage. It does promote social organization among the conquerors, but it disintegrates the vanquished. Industrialism is more civilized and should be so carried on as to promote initiative and to encourage individualism. Society should in every way possible foster originality.

We should not make the mistake of glorifying war; rather should we discern what it’s done for society so that we may the more accurately visualize what its substitutes must provide if we would continue the advancement of our civilization. And if such adequate substitutes are not provided, then we can be sure that war will continue; maybe even “a hundred years.”

We will never accept peace as a normal mode of living until we have been thoroughly and repeatedly convinced that peace is best for our material welfare;  and until our society wisely provides peaceful substitutes for the gratification of our inherent tendency periodically to let loose a collective drive designed to liberate our accumulating emotions and energies born of the self-preservation reactions of our species.

War might some day be honored as the school of experience which compelled a race of arrogant individualists to submit themselves to highly concentrated authority— a chief executive. Brutal and savage old-fashioned war may have selected the innately great men for leadership, but modern war no longer does this. The leaders our society must now turn to are the conquests of peace: industry; science; and social achievement. Fortunately, that choice has never been clearer.

[Due to formatting limitations in the comments section, I have chosen to reply on the main forum.]

Hi Stan:

Thanks for reminding us of the bigger picture. I’ll have fewer bald patches from frustrated hair-pulling that way.

A few passages from The Urantia Book (TUB) lit up my synapses as I read along. But in the ecumenical spirit you showed by quoting Wallace Stevens, let me first add this related thought from the great German idealist, Immanuel Kant:

“Enlightenment is the emergence of Man’s self-incurred immaturity.”

You wrote:

For two days following nine-eleven terrorism had already been defeated in a spiritual sense, by the unity of the world community, and needed only forward-looking leaders who could help people sustain that unity and expand on it, calling not only for the capture of the perpetrators but also for a truly reflective investigation into what had led people to want to do such a thing. Without this curiosity, we began just another endless conflict. . . This need for reflection before action, especially when gripped by fear, is something self-righteousness will only blind us to.

There’s a lot to unpackage here. Explicitly: fear, world community, forward looking leaders, curiosity, reflection. And implicitly, the roles that intelligent patriotism and emotional maturity should play in the response to events like 9/11.

Adjusting the lenses in my UB kaleidoscope accordingly (i.e., making those kaleidoscopic adjustments in the comprehension of meanings and values), I find the following passages instructive:

1. Unreasoned fear is a master intellectual fraud practiced upon the evolving mortal soul.

2. Political wisdom. Emotional maturity is essential to self-control. Only emotional maturity will insure the substitution of international techniques of civilized adjudication for the barbarous arbitrament of war. Wise statesmen will sometime work for the welfare of humanity even while they strive to promote the interest of their national or racial groups. Selfish political sagacity is ultimately suicidal — destructive of all those enduring qualities which insure planetary group survival.

3. The ideal state functions under the impulse of three mighty and coordinated drives: Love loyalty derived from the realization of human brotherhood. Intelligent patriotism based on wise ideals. Cosmic insight interpreted in terms of planetary facts, needs, and goals.

4. A moral society should aim to preserve the self-respect of its citizenry and afford every normal individual adequate opportunity for self-realization.

Since the last shall be first, I’ll start there.

(4) Self-realization is, naturally, a product of reflection and curiosity. Imagine a society where reflective meditation was actively encouraged, if not mandated outright. (”Woman, get thee to a nunnery!” would have a radically different meaning.) Europe seems to have a head start on us, where shorter work weeks and much longer vacations are de rigeur. Locally, initiatives like employer tax incentives and community zoning variances could help establish appropriate mediation and reflection centers. (Inspired by this passage, I started a non-profit 503c corporation some years back to network otherwise vacant vacation homes, time share condos and the like, for the purpose of “serving the servers”— providing the necessary space to recharge one’s physical, emotional and mental batteries.)

(3) While the whole tone of your piece underscores the need for the realization of human brotherhood and the role that cosmic insight plays in the context of planetary facts, needs, and goals, I would add a word about “intelligent patriotism.” Intelligent patriotism naturally stands in contrast to the kind of knuckle dragging nationalism reflected in the “My country right or wrong” slogan that leads to an end-justifies-the-means, “Kill’em all and let God sort’em out’ ethic— the implicit and explicit mantram of so much right wing media. One can lay claim to loving and being loyal to one’s country, but until we shift our individual and collective identities to the brotherhood of all humankind, war and lesser conflicts will continue as population pressures and resource demands escalate.

(2) If one needed to provide an example of the exact opposite of how an ideal state functions, one need only note the track record of the Bush Administration. Led by an incurious, emotionally arrested adolescent who has never had to account for his actions, it has brought monumental suffering to untold millions of innocent people. It’s neocon driven, “unipolar” foreign policy, and its “might makes right” national security strategy is exemplified by its self-proclaimed right to wage preventive war on anybody it wants— the very definition of war crimes that emerged from the Nuremberg Tribunals.

(1) Like the modifier “intelligent” used with patriotism, the modifier of “unreasoned” with respect to fear is a typical use of nuance by TUB’s authors. Evolutionarily speaking, fear is a survival function of our repto-mammal limbic system, a highly efficient threat assessment computer that emerged from millions years of adaptation to various environmental challenges. (This legacy of animal fear is what TUB refers to as “the mark of the beast,” so powerful that it isn’t completely expunged until considerable adjustments are made in the afterlife.) Politically speaking, it is the target of so much right wing Republican propaganda that it has succeeded it painting the Democrats as weak on national security. This, in turn, has prevented them from bringing the Iraq war/occupation to a close by the simple device of refusing to provide further funding for this highly immoral and destructive enterprise.

The good (and bad) news is that the economy has finally reached the breaking point where further expenditures cannot be sustained. Foreign countries (like Kuwait), which have provided the money (at interest) no longer seem willing to do so for sheer economic, if not political, reasons.

I would close with this very timely passage from TUB, which can be excused for being a bit self-referential, given the problem it addresses. It also serves as a useful theme for what I see as the purpose and potential of UrantianSojourn.com:

Hunger and love drove men together; vanity and ghost fear held them together. But these emotions alone, without the influence of peace-promoting revelations, are unable to endure the strain of the suspicions and irritations of human interassociations. Without help from superhuman sources the strain of society breaks down upon reaching certain limits, and these very influences of social mobilization— hunger, love, vanity, and fear— conspire to plunge mankind into war and bloodshed.

PARAG KHANNA writes in “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony“. . .

It is 2016, and the Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Barack Obama administration is nearing the end of its second term. America has pulled out of Iraq but has about 20,000 troops in the independent state of Kurdistan, as well as warships anchored at Bahrain and an Air Force presence in Qatar. Afghanistan is stable; Iran is nuclear. China has absorbed Taiwan and is steadily increasing its naval presence around the Pacific Rim and, from the Pakistani port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea. The European Union has expanded to well over 30 members and has secure oil and gas flows from North Africa, Russia and the Caspian Sea, as well as substantial nuclear energy. America’s standing in the world remains in steady decline.

Why? Weren’t we supposed to reconnect with the United Nations and reaffirm to the world that America can, and should, lead it to collective security and prosperity? Indeed, improvements to America’s image may or may not occur, but either way, they mean little.

And that is so because, not only did we not “reconnect with the United Nations,” but we remain clueless about the growing urgency of establishing the working rudiments of a genuine federation of all nations, bringing about a global government.

The cruel irony is, the nation of independent states who surrendered their sovereignty to a federal government and thereby created the strongest, freest nation on planet earth, has shown neither the moral insight or leadership ability to engineer the same workable model on a global scale. Instead, we have a moronic cowboy who takes democracy to other nations through war and occupation, killing a million or so of the natives in the process.

Condoleezza Rice has said America has no “permanent enemies,” but it has no permanent friends either. Many saw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the symbols of a global American imperialism; in fact, they were signs of imperial overstretch. Every expenditure has weakened America’s armed forces, and each assertion of power has awakened resistance in the form of terrorist networks, insurgent groups and “asymmetric” weapons like suicide bombers. America’s unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial counter-movements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order. That new global order has arrived, and there is precious little Clinton or McCain or Obama could do to resist its growth.

Yep; the hegemony wielded by Imperial America has done just as much to grow an “alternate world order” than anything Europe or China has done. Nor does it serve America’s interests to do anything to inhibit their growth. Perhaps when we find the collective wisdom to use the power jointly in an effort to insure peace throughout the world, we can begin solving the grievances smaller nations have concerning their place in the “alternate world order.”

The Geopolitical Marketplace

At best, America’s unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war “peace dividend” was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing — and losing — in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world’s other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three.

And we will continue to lose. . . unless we recognize we all sink or swim together. Each passing year brings new urgency to solve the increasingly complex problems our interdependent world brings; and these problems will persist as long as we continue to cling to the illusive notions of unlimited national sovereignty.

The growth of political power must continue to encompass larger and larger segments of the total of mankind, until the stage is set for the final consummation of political growth— the government of all mankind, by all mankind, and for all mankind.

Urantia [earth] will not enjoy lasting peace until the so-called sovereign nations intelligently and fully surrender their sovereign powers into the hands of the brotherhood of men—mankind government. Internationalism—Leagues of Nations—can never bring permanent peace to mankind. World-wide confederations of nations will effectively prevent minor wars and acceptably control the smaller nations, but they will not prevent world wars nor control the three, four, or five most powerful governments. In the face of real conflicts, one of these world powers will withdraw from the League and declare war.

You cannot prevent nations going to war as long as they remain infected with the delusional virus of national sovereignty. Internationalism is a step in the right direction. An international police force will prevent many minor wars, but it will not be effective in preventing major wars, conflicts between the great military governments of earth.

As the number of truly sovereign nations (great powers) decreases, so do both opportunity and need for mankind government increase. When there are only a few really sovereign (great) powers, either they must embark on the life and death struggle for national (imperial) supremacy, or else, by voluntary surrender of certain prerogatives of sovereignty, they must create the essential nucleus of supernational power which will serve as the beginning of the real sovereignty of all mankind.

Peace will not come to Urantia until every so-called sovereign nation surrenders its power to make war into the hands of a representative government of all mankind. Political sovereignty is innate with the peoples of the world. When all the peoples of Urantia create a world government, they have the right and the power to make such a government SOVEREIGN; and when such a representative or democratic world power controls the world’s land, air, and naval forces, peace on earth and good will among men can prevail but not until then. —The Urantia Book

In a March 13th videoconference call, President Bush surprised U.S. military and civilian personnel as well as recently returning veterans of the Afghanistan War with his wistful responses.

“I must say, I’m a little envious,” Bush said. “If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helpin’ this young democracy succeed.”

“It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, ya know, confronting danger. Yur really makin’ history, and thanks,” Bush said.

Bush sat at the head of a White House conference table that included a powered-down Dick Cheney, and lap dogs Robert Gates and John Negroponte. A Reuters reporter was actually allowed to observe the proceeding.

Bush, articulate as always, told U. S. Ambassador William Wood, “You’re looking beautiful but you’re not sounding too good.” Bush was allowed to have the remote control for this conference, and he masterfully increased and lowered the volume at will.

Sigh.

I’m not worried. . . I’m not worried at all;
I’m not worried at all; I’m not worried at all. . . I don’t worry. . .
I’m not worried at all; I’m not worried at all; I’m not worried at all. . .
I’m not worried at all; I’m not worried at all; I’m not worried at all. . .
I’m not worried at all; I’m not worried at all; I’m not worried at all. . .

So long, George. See you on down the trail, pardner.
Your time at the helm of our ship of state has proven to most fully sentient Americans that a well-oiled clownboy and a seething, villainous sidekick who have governed by fear, war, and terror (Wake the fuck up— torture IS terror) you were not the captain we were looking for.

If and when you leave office, a great burden will lift off the shoulders of the planet. No, it will not allow the nation to regain its once proud posture as the beacon of genuine freedom in the world. For some time we will stumble ahead, crippled by the catastrophe your malevolent and murderous idiocy as The Decider has wrought. Despite your ludicrous assertion that Jesus is your “favorite philosopher”— a lie that may have eternal consequences for you, bro— the sheer criminal insanity of your days in public office as the leader of our nation has rendered us all but permanently deformed in the eyes of all nations, both good and bad.

Undoubtedly, the lessons we will learn from your rampage in office will ultimately make us a stronger, wiser nation. But now is not the time to savor that ultimate moment of triumph over evil. Now is the time to galvanize our nation with a healing balm of hope, and the promise of brighter, truer days that re-align us with the flow of truth, beauty, and goodness in the universe.

May the Ancients of Days judge you divinely.