4. Given what Humans know about the Universe, the Planet, Life, and Ourselves from our Natural and Social Sciences; and, Given what Humans can do in that Universe, to that Planet, with Life and/or Ourselves thru our Hard and Soft Technologies; Why, then, is there still Poverty, Hunger, and Disease, Illiteracy, Injustice, and Inequity. Ecocide, Genocide, and Democide, Insecurity, Tyranny, and War?
[Note: As indicated earlier, this is an Overview of the answer to this Question that is still in the works. And has been for 54 years. See below.]
The primary, root cause of Poverty, Hunger, Disease, Illiteracy, Injustice, Inequity, Ecocide, Genocide, Democide, and Insecurity is that there is War. And the primary root cause of War is the fact that there is a lot of Wealth to be created and Power to be gained for certain, select Vested Special Interests: individuals, organizations, and institutions.
And the only way there can be War is if there is Tyranny, either by governments, organized religion, or most effectively, the two working together. And the ultimate root cause of Tyranny is Ignorance of the difference between Human Needs, on the one hand, and Human Rights and Human Responsibilities, on the other:
Human Rights are Life, Liberty, Property, Privacy, the Pursuit of Happiness, and Truth. Human Needs are Health, Prosperity, Security, Literacy, the Pursuit of Wants, and Peace. Human Responsibilities are to honor and protect the Human Rights of every Human Being, and to facilitate the meeting of the Human Needs of other Human Beings.
The most critical Human Need is for Peace. For, if there is no Peace ~ if there is War ~ Human Needs are forgotten, Human Rights are obliterated, and Human Responsibilities are ignored.
The linkage between Human Needs and Human Rights is that there can and will be no Peace unless and until there is Justice. And there will and can be no Justice until and unless there is Truth. And it is the Responsibility of every Human Being old enough to think for themselves to seek the Truth, particularly when it comes to their government’s waging of War against other Human Beings, and their society’s and its economy’s waging of War on the Planet.
The Beginning of the Search for The Answer to this Question
Fifty-four years ago, on January 3, 1970, at a military funeral in Van Nuys, California ~ five months after Neil Armstrong’s “One Small Step”; seventeen months after returning from my second year in Vietnam; three and a half months before the first Earth Day; and four months and a day before Kent State ~ i asked this Question, and have been pondering it in one way, shape, or form ever since.
It went like this:
It is November, 1969.
Tens of thousands of Vietnamese and thousands of Americans are killed
Among the Americans is a young helicopter pilot from Van Nuys, California.
His name is Larry.
He leaves behind a widow bride,
and two elderly parents paralyzed with grief ….
One Saturday Nite,
walking over the howling, bitter, driven, wind-swept empty nite cobblestones; a church
pealing haunting tributes to nites more silent and rocks more permanent, i am struck
with the metaphor that my living speaks with such stinging and affective allusion to my life.
My friend Larry is dead. – nite of notification, December, 1969
At the funeral the following January ~ four months and a day before four more young Americans were to be killed in a place called Kent, Ohio ~ in a massive, solemnly packed Russian Orthodox Cathedral ablaze with emblems of patriotic fealty and fervor, many words are spoken. Among those words are these by a young soldier, the only Enlisted man in the church. He was a door gunner who’d flown with Larry down in the Mekong Delta back in 1967-68. They’d survived Tet together. And more. Lots more. Too much more… .
EULOGY
It is difficult, my friends. Very difficult.
i know none of you, yet i call you my friends. Thank you for being here, for sharing this, for enabling me to bear it.
After two years of this War, i have finally lost someone i love. Buddies? There’s been plenty. Never, until now, someone I love.
It is said that tragedy is the fire that tempers the soul. i can only hope that my soul, and my heart, and my mind, and my life is tempered and forged from this nightmare into a design of dedication NOT to the forces and elements that killed him: rage, hate, lust for violent revenge, a mindless, headlong flight into, through, and finally submerged by insanity.
Not to that, but to the ideals and principles that should have been the forces and elements at work that could have kept him, you, me, us all nowhere near Vietnam, or Biafra, or Suez, or Korea, or Normandy, or Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, and on and on back thru the ages and the battlefields, back to the beginnings of time, the beginnings of man, the beginnings of War.
The ideals, principles, forces, and elements of understanding, concern, love, peace, and the knowledge of our status as but “the family of Man, fellow-passengers on the Spaceship Earth… .”
And how meaningless, empty, and vapid these words sound and are tonite. But, a man’s words are really nothing more than indicators, the elements of the metaphor that his living is, as it seeks to explain to him, and to us, his life.
Perhaps these moments of futility, emptiness, and tragedy are the price we must pay for having had the privilege of his company, the strength of his presence, the happiness of his warmth and joy, the security of his being.
We have all lost something. A friend, a husband, a son. But there is a greater loser, a more tragic victim from all this than we, his wife, his parents, his family, and his friends. And that victim, my friends, is the world.
It is this world ~ this world that murdered him ~ that is the big loser.
The terms i think it might understand are that he is no longer at its disposal; that he is free and no longer subject to the prices that the world and mankind demand from its children as they attempt to struggle as individual human beings, with individual lives and loves, and concerns and cares, and projects, plans, and goals, and wins, losses, and rainouts.
The world requires that You be more than a man or a woman~ which, until death, is impossible.
It requires that citizens of nations become us all. Citizens of nations, and pawns to realities revolving around such grandiose, eloquent, pompous terms, tenets, and ideas as ideology and geopolitics, alliances and balances of power, negotiations, diplomacy, and treaties, and on and on ad nauseam: the vocabulary of government.
And much more real, final, and meaningless terms as enemy and body-counts, and hot LZ’s and .SO-caliber machine gun positions, and frozen rotor blades at 300 feet, and notification of next-of-kin: the vocabulary of the logical conclusion of the rhetoric of
Government: the vocabulary of War.
The world required this of him, and he agreed to pay his portion of the price. Tonite, however, the world’s account is overdrawn. Tonite, there is the matter of revenge. No. No, not revenge. Avenge. Avengeance. aVengeance: Revenge without Vengeance;
Revenge without Violence.
But against Whom does one direct it? And How?
Is it to be directed against those people and places and principles that killed him? Against other young ~ and old ~ women and men from other nations who, too, are but playing their part and paying their price as their world ~ this world, our world ~ demands? They are but pawns as we. And as long as we pawns keep fighting ~ and paying for ~ all these Wars, there will be War.
What, then of the kings and queens and bishops and rooks and generals and knights and such? They, too, are but pawns. Their bloodshed is not their own; rather, it is of those that they like to call “their Peoples’.” These, too, however, are paying a price: the price of being those most directly associated with the true killers ~ the ideas, and terms, and tenets, and vocabularies. And, having to live with them, by them, and for them, they thus become the emptiness, the insanity, the impotence, the wretchedness that these words are.
No. It is neither the pawns nor the princes ~ the presidents, premiers, and propagandists ~ that are to be sought out and made to give retribution for Larry. It’s not the people who are directly, and thus apparently responsible for his having been there, and thus being no more.
Rather, it is those who are truly, though indirectly responsible. It is those that could have stopped it, could have prevented this specter from becoming the spectacle that it is.
It is, indeed, those who permit the world to make them pawns and slaves, and legions to, of, by, and for these ideas and words. Those who permit themselves to go and become but the bit-players in this passion play, the finale of which is the death of their brothers and their sisters, their sons and daughters, their fathers and their mothers, their selves.
A death as meaningless, as senseless, and as empty as their lives. Lives spent under the tyranny of ideas, killing and thus dying under their effect. Lives lived under the anarchy of this self-imposed despotism, rather than in and through the fulfillment that is to be found in the truth, the beauty, the reality of the mind’s products ~ ideas~ as they are used instead to eliminate the trials, tragedies, and traumas of man. Rather than, as today, propagating, perpetrating, and perpetuating them.
HUMANITY is the object. HUMANITY and LIFE. All of LIFE. Ideas are but vehicles. The price for avenging Larry shall have been extracted when that simple statement becomes a world-truth.
We live now in the insanity of Human Beings being the vehicle, and terms, tenets, vocabularies, ideologies, and ideas being the object. The object that Humans have permitted to become, at not only Its expense and thus Life’s, but at the World’s, as well.
The guilty, my friends, is You and me and him and her and everyone. Each and every one of us all. Including Larry. And we begin, now, to pay the price for this. We have lost someone for whom Humanity and Life was the object.
Larry, as the rest of us, the Young, was at but the beginning of this realization, at the beginning of this work. Because those of us that could have helped, long ago, to prevent what has happened did not, we are now paying the price.
Again: HUMANITY is the object. HUMANITY and LIFE. Ideas are but vehicles. The price for avenging Larry shall have been extracted when that simple statement becomes a world-truth.
The question, again, is “How?”
If, in fact, a man is ready to die when he knows himself completely, i am at last ready.
With this experience, with these words, i have come now to know and to understand the meaninglessness of the meaning i have permitted the world to attach to my, to your, to Larry’s, to everyone’s existence, life, and being. And knowing this, i swear… No more.
aVengeance will be mine. i pray, my friends, Yours as well. The question, at last, is HOW?
This we will learn. With help…