An Eye Toward the Positive Small ways to make a difference. BY SKYE BLAINE Every day the evening news reports violent divides between peoples, between religions, between countries, yet rarely takes note of human kindness. The news deliberately exploits the juice of human experience, stimulates fear — hoping we'll watch more news. As fear increases, so do our feelings of being different, or marginalized. I do not suggest we should avoid the news, or ignore what we must face and when we must act — in our own families, communities, and country. I am suggesting an ideal that Hazrat Inayat Khan calls "overlooking," (Volume VIII, Sufi Teachings, page 241) a practice of noticing unkind behavior, yet still choosing to put our attention on what is loving. When your friend snaps at you, instead of focusing on her irritation, concentrate more deeply, see straight into the goodness in her heart, and respond to that. When a television newscaster reports a car bombing, instead of focusing on the twisted wreckage, broaden your vision to include the periphery: Some people close by shield children, while others run to help the injured. Amidst the tragedy and in greater measure, courage and compassion stand beside the violence. Many people in Eugene are striving to look past what divides, toward a deeper kind of inclusion. The interfaith circle thrives; more than 37 different faith traditions in our community participate. New kinds of cooperative discussions are opening up. The interfaith community provides a one-hour prayer service the 11th of every month at First Christian Church. The services are aired on Community Television. Every month, there is a pot-luck dinner and time to share extended ideas on the prayer service theme. The monthly brown-bag Two Rivers Interfaith Ministries (TRIM) meeting and forum — which oversees all the activities — meets the second Wednesday for 10 months of the year. TRIM has a Faith in Action sub-committee for those committed to social justice activism. Articles like this one are printed regularly in local newspapers. Once a month, two local bookstores host a panel from a different faith tradition. Each of these events provides important service — building trust and friendship between disparate people who have discovered, over time, that our faiths are different, but we are much more alike than we realized. The ground is the same: We all look toward spiritual understanding seeking answers for the complex questions that plague us, we pray or meditate in one style or another, and we look for the best in one another. For me, it is not the individual tradition's offerings that are the greatest draw; instead, I am thrilled to experience people of different faiths gathered together in an interested, cooperative atmosphere. We have had to also practice overlooking with each other. If offense has been taken, we have long-term willingness, commitment, and the respect and love for one another to listen and dialogue until understanding is reached. Because these quiet activities are not reported on national news, collectively we remain unaware of the resulting positive shifts. What would happen if people focused on cohesive behavior, on what is going right in our world? Concentration on the positive does not grow overnight. The intention, however, can rapidly take seed. Every day I must make a conscious decision, and then nurture and feed that choice. I have setbacks and failures on a regular basis. Perhaps I have taken on too many tasks, am overtired, and have neglected my own well-being. It is time to sit quietly and pay specific attention to what and how I am thinking. I remind myself that passenger jets are off-course ninety-five percent of the time, yet they arrive at their destination because the pilot is making incremental corrections. I too, veer off-course and need to find my way back. As we walk the streets of our world — while we, ideally, act to relieve suffering and prevent harm — at the same time, we can uphold unity. In order to embrace the contradictions so blatant in this world, we have to create a metaphorical vessel within our own hearts sturdy enough for the whole messy stew. The practice of outward overlooking helps with inward mind patterns as well. When I catch myself in a cascade of negative thoughts, I acknowledge those thoughts and then look past them into the core of what I know to be true: we all breathe the same air; we are given a limited number of days to live; we are wholly responsible to one another, and beyond our differences, we are all one — one being, one family, one town, one country, one world. Skye Blaine is a member and minister in Sufi Ruhaniat International. This Viewpoint is coordinated by Two Rivers Interfaith Ministries (TRIM), a network of more than 35 religious and spiritual traditions in the Eugene-Springfield area. For information, see www.interfaitheugene.org or call 914-2614         America Programmed for War The Long War: from NSC68 to 2005 BY BRIAN BOGART EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first in a series of three commentaries in advance of public forums planned for the fall. The next viewpoint will be titled, "Our Schools: Cogs in the Machine," followed by "Pentagon World or People's America: Cause for Unity and Hope." In the counsels of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. — President Dwight Eisenhower upon leaving office, 1961 As the UO's first graduate student in the transdisciplinary field of Peace Studies, it is my responsibility to explore the role of the military in society and those conditions that most promote peace and human welfare. Unfortunately, this task puts me in direct conflict with UO administrators, including President Dave Frohnmayer, whose signature appears on my bachelor's degree. There is nothing personal about this conflict, and Frohnmayer has done nothing out of the ordinary. Like the presidents of more than 300 other universities that conduct research for the Department of Defense, he is simply leading the UO into an evermore intimate partnership with America's military industrial complex. Soliciting funds to cultivate teaching programs is necessary to compensate for the low federal priority of education and the diversion of state funds to the top federal priority of military supremacy. On the other hand, as I will explain in this series, such a partnership contradicts the inherent purpose of enlightenment (aka higher education), as most if not all of these outsourced projects will in one way or another result in the death or disabling of humans. Before I expand on the costs to our society and the active participation of our schools, it is worth noting that in my 50 years I wrote pen-pal letters asking President Kennedy to take down the Berlin Wall, marched with Martin Luther King Jr., worshipped John Lennon, worked for companies building Trident, MX, and Stinger missiles simultaneous to my involvement with Carl Sagan's anti-Cold War Space Bridge project, and helped build the B-1 bomber and parts for the Aegis Weapons System (capable of directing 20 missiles at once) on the Ticonderoga-class battle cruiser — much of this while attempting to deconstruct the obvious conflict between what I wanted (peace) and what I needed (a paycheck). So, I know a thing or two about conscience. But only after 500 hours of research this year (some 14 years after leaving the defense industry) did I come to appreciate the simple nature of the dilemma confronting a world dominated by a war-driven America and to identify the opportunity it presents. A single policy decision made in secluded chambers of the White House shortly after World War II explains why our financial and intellectual creativity focuses on lethal technologies, why 51 percent of our taxes go to defense and less than 5 percent go to education, why there are 6,000 military bases in the U.S. and 1,000 U.S. bases overseas, why comprehensive agendas support warfighting and weak agendas address human services and the environment, and why our top industry since 1950 remains the manufacture and sale of weapons. Our dilemma stems from the postwar adoption of a military-based rather than a people-based economy. This policy, authored by Wall Street's Paul Nitze, is embodied in NSC68, a document signed by President Truman in 1950. Along with then Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Nitze convinced — some say coerced — Truman into recognizing the Soviet Union as an evil and imminent threat, and into adopting NSC68 and launching the Cold War. Assessing key indicators in 1947 and '48, Truman's advisors acutely feared an economic collapse back into the Depression, and, as Noam Chomsky points out, there was scant debate among them: "It wasn't really a debate because it was settled before it started, but the issue was at least raised — should the government pursue military spending or social spending?" All U.S. military actions from 1950 to 2005 flow from this decision, made without the consent of the American people. There is no fundamental difference between the Cold War and today's so-called permanent war on terror — perfect fuel for our military-based economy. For 55 years, America has been waging a crime against humanity, a crime for profiteers. I call it the Long War because "permanent" is defeatist. As satellite photos and extensive post-Cold War interviews have revealed (including interviews with Acheson, Nitze, and Paul Wolfowitz, our current Deputy Secretary of Defense), no Soviet threat existed in 1950. NSC68 was a for-profit ploy. Paul Wolfowitz cites Nitze and Acheson among his role models: "Paul Nitze has had a huge mark on my career over many, many years, starting with 1969, when I was still a very much wet-behind-the-ears graduate student who came to Washington to work with three great men: Paul Nitze, Dean Acheson, and Albert Wohlstetter." When the Cold War ended, longtime admirers and associates of Paul Nitze, led by Paul Wolfowitz — mentor to Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Richard Perle — immediately began searching for another means to justify America's permanent war economy. Plans for today's war on terror surfaced in 1992 as President George H.W. Bush pulled out of Iraq. Realizing that the follow-up to the Cold War was not playing out according to their expectations, blueprints for re-invasion and global expansion were drawn up by Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Lewis Libby, Cheney's current chief of staff. When not promoting fear ("Today we face an even greater threat, an enemy that not only hates freedom; it hates life itself and worships death"), Paul Wolfowitz provides our rationale for the Long War: "This is not about America imposing its values on other people. It's about America enabling other people to enjoy the values from which we benefit so enormously." In other words, our permanent war policy is about imposing our values on others, and it therefore thoroughly contradicts the objectives of the Constitution to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. A war-driven economy requires conflict — there have been more than 200 wars since World War II ended. But those in power today have also retooled our corporate industry (through the weakening of safeguards), our national intelligence agencies (through top-down coercion, firings, and policy changes), and the public mindset (through consolidation of media) to optimize war profits and popularize the notion of the need for permanent war. Today our war-driven economy is justified by a "necessary" war on terror. But which came first — America's global military-economic outreach, or international terrorism? Terrorism is a blowback of our own policy, and as Chomsky says, the way to stop terrorism is to stop participating in it. In the pathological pursuit of profit and power, government and corporations (and university executives) march hand in hand, realizing President Abraham Lincoln's worst fears: I see in the near future, a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic destroyed. The cause of our problems — the adoption and maintenance of the Long War policy — is well defined and its proponents are self-identified. We know what the future holds as long as we have leaders who sustain this policy as the engine of our nation. Yet, with the problem identified, the people can begin to implement a solution. To motivate ourselves, we might also consider at stake the control and meaning of creativity, for in today's America, heroes are made of dark insights. In 2004 Paul Nitze was honored for his creativity in the interest of serving peace by having a ship christened in his name. About that celebration, Paul Wolfowitz declared: "To name a destroyer after a living American is an honor bestowed on very, very few people." Peace bears no arms, erects no barriers, and plays not upon the fears of people. Call our foreign policies offensive, contentious, and coercive, but they do not serve peace. In the words of the Roman historian Tacitus, Rome creates a desert and calls it "peace." We the people serve neither Rome nor any empire, and in serving peace, we shall neither create conflict nor consent to exchange our rights so leaders may profit. Rather — as written — we are obliged to exchange our leaders so humankind may prosper. Our constitutionally guaranteed rights rest beneath the deliberate manufacture of war for profit. Fifty five years of the Long War is long enough. It is time to rise and organize for a peaceful world in the name of the people for whom America was born. Brian Bogart is planning free talks on these topics at 4 pm Aug. 12, 19, 26, and Sept. 2, 9 at 128 Chiles Hall across from the UO Bookstore. To help fund and complete his project, IntelligentFuture.org, contact him at bbogart@uoregon.edu
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