I had seen it before, but that is not why I will not watch it again. “It” is Ken Burn’s series on the Civil War, and my distaste for it is now forming a pattern. At the beginning of summer, I could not watch the series on the Vietnam War. I had thought that it was because I had gone through that on a personal level, not as a soldier but as a youth tossed in the social turmoil that the war created. But I did not live during the Civil War, nor do I know of any great-great somebody in the family who did. No. I finally figured out that it was because it was war, plain and simple. I now see the soldiers as babies born to mothers who at least once cared for them, and to fathers who had given these soldiers as children lessons in life, looking upon them as their carnal future for time immemorial. I see them being ordered to actually point a rifle at someone and purposefully send a lump of lead into them to kill. What lessons learned does that kill? How crazy is that?
I am not a pacifist, and, except for a possible moment or two spent in adolescent idealism, never have been. Most Christian churches preach the right to fight against an unjust foe, and I have always and still believe that. Those who refuse to fight in all instances are doomed to be obliterated, unless, like the Amish, they are surrounded by countrymen who are willing to fight for them. I have read of numerous communities thus wiped out, from Buddhists in India to converted Algonquin tribes in Canada, who have no progeny left in our current age. At times it is a necessity, this self-defense, and sometimes it is just to use preemptive force to prevent the dire need for self-defense, or to prevent a much larger war later on. I get it. But I just can’t stand to watch it anymore.
I think it is age, and the odd clarity that comes from age even as other thinking faculties dim. As a kid and then a teenager, I thought war was a great thing. If not for the anti-Vietnam War movement, I would have been happy to become, or so I thought, a war hero. In later years, until almost now, I turned to see war more as a political and strategic thing, a part of the movement of history that has always been. The latter is true to this day. But now it hurts. In one way, it is because many “just” wars are fought, in hindsight, not out of necessity, but because tempers on both sides have become irrationally high. That was the Civil War as I see it. Slavery was on its last legs as a productive institution, morality aside. By 1882, the last bastion of slavery in the New World – Brazil, if I remember correctly – finally outlawed the practice. In the US, machines and cheap immigrant labor had become a better business model, and Anglo-American sentiment had turned sharply and irrevocably against slavery. The old plantation elite would almost certainly have been forced to turn away from slavery between 1860 and 1880. The 600, 000 plus dead, in a nation one tenth its current size, and the hundreds of thousands more wounded, probably had given their lives and health in vain. One might also say the same thing about those in WWI and Vietnam.
As for necessary war, if we were attacked by, say, a coldly expansionist China, I suppose I would load up the old 8 MM bolt-action Mauser and head to the hills, but I would not like it. I would not feel the hero. But that is unlikely. It is more likely that we will have war started by the flaring of tempers around issues that could have been worked out eventually, much like those before the Civil War. It will be the hotheads, not those clinging desperately to life, who will fight, neither side as just as they think they are.
“Where do the conflicts and disputes among you originate? Is it not your inner cravings to make war within your members? What you desire you do not obtain, and so you resort to murder…You ask and you do not receive because you ask wrongly, with a view to squandering what you receive on your pleasures. Oh you unfaithful ones, are you not aware that love of the world is enmity to God?” (James, 4: 1-4)
I write this now because our nation, as well as all the rest of the developed West, seems to be enjoined in a conflict of opinion not overly shy of actual civil war. I know this because I am no wilting flower, no man in the middle who lets life pass on by, even if that would be for the best. Frankly, sometimes I feel that war might be the only way to solve our problems. But I am wrong. The threat is great indeed, reaching into the very fabric of our moral lives, but would war improve our national morality? Our Constitution reflects many biblical values, but chief among those is one truly from God: that we have a choice. We have a choice as to whether or not we take on the mantel of the world, or focus our wills on that which is so much greater. Yes, our survival as a culture depends on it, but if the collectivity chooses the former, it deserves to collapse from its own hubris. This will force those in disagreement to not only preach their faith, but to live it. That is the world that James lived in 2,000 years ago, and perhaps the world we must live in in the near future.
If I sound overly dramatic, that is probably true. That is my nature. But greater and greater numbers believe that we truly are at the turning point, especially those in the younger generations. Such times have happened before, and most certainly will happen again.
We are not alone in our fears, either. Currently, I am reading a book, God-Sent, by Roy Abraham Varghese, that chronicles the approved apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Fascinating stuff, especially because of the shift in tone and the frequency of apparitions since 1830. In the years before then, the visions had focused on continuing the faith through, say, the building of a chapel. Since then, she (the Virgin) has appeared far more frequently, warning of catastrophes and the wages of sin. Since the 1970’s, she more and more has spoken of an ‘end-times’ that is immanent within a lifespan. Still, exactly when this will happen, as well as how bad things will get, will be up to us. At Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where I visited last March, the Virgin has stated that a cataclysmic change is almost certain, but that the bad can be limited, again by our choices. It is promised that afterwards will come an era of peace – but how many will enjoy it will be up to us.
You can be certain that I will return to this book in my writings soon, but for now, I, and many of us, should take a breath. In the long haul, what will be, will be because of our collective will. To crush some aspect of this will would probably give us what we got through our Civil War – a huge amount of dead, and enmity that lasted for a hundred years and more. As useless as it sounds, it is better now to pray, even if we do not believe in a spiritual realm. Prayer usually informs our consciousness from a position of peace, and that is precisely what we need - peace, calm, and a rethinking of what we want to be. If what we want collectively is a culture that justifies vengeance, inter-group (and inter-gender) conflict and crass self-gratification, then those who don’t wish for it will be challenged in a manner that is sometimes necessary for true faith. To the others, they will reap what they sow. Peace be on them, too. In the end, if there is no Truth, it will not matter; and if there is, then it must and will prevail.
I had seen it before, but that is not why I will not watch it again. “It” is Ken Burn’s series on the Civil War, and my distaste for it is now forming a pattern. At the beginning of summer, I could not watch the series on the Vietnam War. I had thought that it was because I had gone through that on a personal level, not as a soldier but as a youth tossed in the social turmoil that the war created. But I did not live during the Civil War, nor do I know of any great-great somebody in the family who did. No. I finally figured out that it was because it was war, plain and simple. I now see the soldiers as babies born to mothers who at least once cared for them, and to fathers who had given these soldiers as children lessons in life, looking upon them as their carnal future for time immemorial. I see them being ordered to actually point a rifle at someone and purposefully send a lump of lead into them to kill. What lessons learned does that kill? How crazy is that?
I am not a pacifist, and, except for a possible moment or two spent in adolescent idealism, never have been. Most Christian churches preach the right to fight against an unjust foe, and I have always and still believe that. Those who refuse to fight in all instances are doomed to be obliterated, unless, like the Amish, they are surrounded by countrymen who are willing to fight for them. I have read of numerous communities thus wiped out, from Buddhists in India to converted Algonquin tribes in Canada, who have no progeny left in our current age. At times it is a necessity, this self-defense, and sometimes it is just to use preemptive force to prevent the dire need for self-defense, or to prevent a much larger war later on. I get it. But I just can’t stand to watch it anymore.
I think it is age, and the odd clarity that comes from age even as other thinking faculties dim. As a kid and then a teenager, I thought war was a great thing. If not for the anti-Vietnam War movement, I would have been happy to become, or so I thought, a war hero. In later years, until almost now, I turned to see war more as a political and strategic thing, a part of the movement of history that has always been. The latter is true to this day. But now it hurts. In one way, it is because many “just” wars are fought, in hindsight, not out of necessity, but because tempers on both sides have become irrationally high. That was the Civil War as I see it. Slavery was on its last legs as a productive institution, morality aside. By 1882, the last bastion of slavery in the New World – Brazil, if I remember correctly – finally outlawed the practice. In the US, machines and cheap immigrant labor had become a better business model, and Anglo-American sentiment had turned sharply and irrevocably against slavery. The old plantation elite would almost certainly have been forced to turn away from slavery between 1860 and 1880. The 600, 000 plus dead, in a nation one tenth its current size, and the hundreds of thousands more wounded, probably had given their lives and health in vain. One might also say the same thing about those in WWI and Vietnam.
As for necessary war, if we were attacked by, say, a coldly expansionist China, I suppose I would load up the old 8 MM bolt-action Mauser and head to the hills, but I would not like it. I would not feel the hero. But that is unlikely. It is more likely that we will have war started by the flaring of tempers around issues that could have been worked out eventually, much like those before the Civil War. It will be the hotheads, not those clinging desperately to life, who will fight, neither side as just as they think they are.
“Where do the conflicts and disputes among you originate? Is it not your inner cravings to make war within your members? What you desire you do not obtain, and so you resort to murder…You ask and you do not receive because you ask wrongly, with a view to squandering what you receive on your pleasures. Oh you unfaithful ones, are you not aware that love of the world is enmity to God?” (James, 4: 1-4)
I write this now because our nation, as well as all the rest of the developed West, seems to be enjoined in a conflict of opinion not overly shy of actual civil war. I know this because I am no wilting flower, no man in the middle who lets life pass on by, even if that would be for the best. Frankly, sometimes I feel that war might be the only way to solve our problems. But I am wrong. The threat is great indeed, reaching into the very fabric of our moral lives, but would war improve our national morality? Our Constitution reflects many biblical values, but chief among those is one truly from God: that we have a choice. We have a choice as to whether or not we take on the mantel of the world, or focus our wills on that which is so much greater. Yes, our survival as a culture depends on it, but if the collectivity chooses the former, it deserves to collapse from its own hubris. This will force those in disagreement to not only preach their faith, but to live it. That is the world that James lived in 2,000 years ago, and perhaps the world we must live in in the near future.
If I sound overly dramatic, that is probably true. That is my nature. But greater and greater numbers believe that we truly are at the turning point, especially those in the younger generations. Such times have happened before, and most certainly will happen again.
We are not alone in our fears, either. Currently, I am reading a book, God-Sent, by Roy Abraham Varghese, that chronicles the approved apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Fascinating stuff, especially because of the shift in tone and the frequency of apparitions since 1830. In the years before then, the visions had focused on continuing the faith through, say, the building of a chapel. Since then, she (the Virgin) has appeared far more frequently, warning of catastrophes and the wages of sin. Since the 1970’s, she more and more has spoken of an ‘end-times’ that is immanent within a lifespan. Still, exactly when this will happen, as well as how bad things will get, will be up to us. At Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where I visited last March, the Virgin has stated that a cataclysmic change is almost certain, but that the bad can be limited, again by our choices. It is promised that afterwards will come an era of peace – but how many will enjoy it will be up to us.
You can be certain that I will return to this book in my writings soon, but for now, I, and many of us, should take a breath. In the long haul, what will be, will be because of our collective will. To crush some aspect of this will would probably give us what we got through our Civil War – a huge amount of dead, and enmity that lasted for a hundred years and more. As useless as it sounds, it is better now to pray, even if we do not believe in a spiritual realm. Prayer usually informs our consciousness from a position of peace, and that is precisely what we need - peace, calm, and a rethinking of what we want to be. If what we want collectively is a culture that justifies vengeance, inter-group (and inter-gender) conflict and crass self-gratification, then those who don’t wish for it will be challenged in a manner that is sometimes necessary for true faith. To the others, they will reap what they sow. Peace be on them, too. In the end, if there is no Truth, it will not matter; and if there is, then it must and will prevail.
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