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Saturday, July 10, 2004
Sunday, July 11, 2004
It's Sunday, and another 8,219 people will die of AIDS today.
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Saturday, July 10, 2004
"Mind you now: there may not actually be an enemy! All along we are speaking of the idea of an enemy. It is not the enemy that is essential to war and that forces wars upon us, but the imagination. Imagination is the driving force, especially when the imagination has been preconditioned by the media, education, and religion, and fed with aggressive boosterism and pathetic pieties by the state's need for enemies. The imagined phantom swells and clouds the horizon, we cannot see beyond enmity. The archetypal idea gains a face. Once the enemy is imagined, one is already in a state of war. Once the enemy has been named, war has already been declared and the actual declaration becomes inconsequential, only legalistic. The invasion of Iraq began before the invasion of Iraq; it had already begun when that nation was named among the axis of evil." James Hillman, "A Terrible Love of War"
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Thursday, July 08, 2004
Friday, July 9, 2004
According to the United Nations, 8,219 people died of AIDS today. This was not reported anywhere in the newspaper. The lead story on today's news was that John Kerry made a funny comment about how he and John Edwards have better hair than their opponents.
The current reduced cost for a protease inhibitor regiment that can save the life of a person with AIDS in the developing world is approximately $500 per year. So for about $4 million, we could have saved the lives of all those people that died today. The number of people who died of AIDS today is approximately three times the number that died in the world Trade Center bombings. We have spent, by the most conservative estimates, $150 billion to prevent that from happening again, or, approximately fifty million dollars per life lost.
No dollar amount can ever equate the value of a human life, we say. But apparently, a dollar amount can devalue a human life. We can safely conclude that the life of a person in a developing nation is not worth $500. What would a young South African Boy go for on E-Bay, I wonder? Well, definitely not more than $500.
And in the eyes of all those people that died of AIDS today what was the value we added to their lives - we the educated, the privileged, the powerful?
Precisely zero.
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Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Thursday, July 8, 2004
James Hillman on the media: "The unrelenting bombardment of the people with the toxins of hypocrisy, TV's own weapon of destruction of the masses, may indeed call for sanctions and censorship - not by the government but of the government - because TV hypocrisy evokes a subliminal response of disgust and impotent anger, alienation from civic participation, existential worthlessness, degradation of the citizen's innate intelligence, dignity, and perception of truth, igniting a powder keg of terrible rage. Yes, TV is to blame." James Hillman, "A Terrible Love of War"
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Wednesday, July 7, 2004
Several months ago I wrote about soldiers who were quoted in the L.A. Times talking about the adrenaline rush of battle - even the thrill of shooting or killing the enemy. Once again, the "what you resist, persists, what you allow to be disappears," axiom holds true. We say that we hate war. We say that we want peace. Yet throughout modern history, we have war after war after war - many of them going on simultaneously. If we truly hate war, why do we keep having them? Here's a radical thought: maybe we don't hate war at all. Maybe somewhere inside we love it. That would explain why we keep having it. If we resist our own hard-wiring for war, destruction, the thrill of battle, then it will persist. If we cover it over with a call for peace, without recognizing the seething hatred and vitriol and destruction inside our own spirits, then we will never have peace. Jung wrote about the dark side - the shadow side of the personality and how, if it is not acknowledged openly, it will find covert and destructive ways to express itself. Maybe we love war, and it is this love of war that must be acknowledged and somehow satisfied within us. Perhaps it could be satisfied with wars on AIDS and on hunger. Perhaps the courage that we believe is proven by our willingness to go to war could be proven to ourselves in other ways, satisfying the same need.
There is a book out right now that I encourage anyone who is truly interested in peace to read. It is a book about our love of war. Written by James Hillman, who wrote "The Soul's Code," it is a brilliant exploration of this whole question. He may have, for the first time, found a crack in the armor of war. The book is called, "A Terrible Love of War." It's about a twelve hour read. Really, no one who is serious about peace can afford to be without his perspective. It is original, new, counter-intuitive, and, for that reason, brilliant.
Some of it is hard slogging - he's brilliant and I find his intelligence a bit difficult to navigate at times. But there are enough islands of huge insight to go hopping to to keep you afloat. He has articulated an answer to war, and it is war itself.
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Monday, July 05, 2004
Tuesday, July 6, 2004
Our methods for "creating change," as the Left calls it, are obsolete, outmoded, and completely ineffective. This is becoming clearer and clearer to me with each passing day. By this I do not mean that we need to find new, much more clever ways of defeating the Right. I mean we have to try to stop defeating them, and they us. Until we can listen with a sympathetic ear to their deepest longings and their worst fears, and make them real to ourselves, everything will be ineffectual. There will be more of the same and it will grow worse.
There is a principle of metaphysics that what you resist persists, and what you allow to be disappears, and I have often repeated it in these blogs. To the degree that we resist the Right, they will persist. To the degree they resist the Left, the Left will persist. It is on the day that we can allow one another to be that Left and Right will disappear and a new day will dawn.
This sounds like magic hocus-pocus. I don't mean for it to. Take a simple example where someone calls you a jerk. You tell them you are not a jerk and they tell you again that you are. And you say you are not the jerk, they are the jerk, and they tell you that you are becoming an even bigger jerk. On the other hand, if a person calls you a jerk and you are able to rise up to another level of compassion and understanding, and to realize that they wouldn't have said it if it weren't absolutely true for them, and thereby realize that in their reality you are, in fact, a jerk, and therefore say to them, "you know what, you're right, I am a jerk," then guess what will happen. They will begin to say, "well, you're not really a jerk. I mean sometimes I can be a jerk too."
We need to recreate one another's experience. This is how true change will come about. The current political system not only does not encourage this, it works actively against it, and so we are all headed over the cliff with both sides pressing down the gas pedal.
We need not worry half as much about Iraq as we do our way of interacting with one another right here on our own soil. Does the American Left not seem to hate the Right more than they hate the terrorists? Listen to KPFK or read Z Magazine if you doubt it. And does the American Right not seem to hate the Left more than they hate Bin Laden? Lincoln always said that the enemy would come from within. Carl Jung would have taken that a step further and said he was referring to two warring sides of the personality - that each of us has an enemy to ourselves living right inside us. This is where we will find a way out. By understanding our hatred for ourselves, and then our hatred for our own countrymen, we will arrive at enlightenment.
I can guaranteee you that such enlightenment will not come from any of the organizations to whom we are looking for change - moveon.org or the American Family Values Coalition or, you name them, the hundreds of others.
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Monday, July 5, 2004
"The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." - Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, 1862
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Sunday, July 4, 2004
"We have it in our power to begin the world over again." - Thomas Paine, "Common Sense," 1776
We do too, and we must.
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Saturday, July 3, 2004
"We have been preserved these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!
It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness." - Abraham Lincoln, proclaiming a day of national fasting, March 30, 1863.
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