I read somewhere about a group in England that is organizing a “human shield” contingency for Iraq. These folks have organized a group of radical pacifists from the US and Europe who will spend the next few months living in the major cities of Iraq, offering themselves as potential “shame targets” for American bombs and bullets. They hope that the prospect of killing westerners, and the media coverage that it will attract, will deter President Bush from invading Iraq. One guy in his 30s said that he knows he may be killed, but he’d rather die for a cause than live to 80 in desperation about the world as it is.

Wow, that brings some flashbacks for me. Back in the early ‘70s I was about to become a candidate for induction into the US armed services, and thus for assignment to the continuing hostilities in South Vietnam. However, the draft ended just as I became eligible. Still, I had seriously considered declaring myself to be a conscientious objector to armed military service. That was quite popular back in those days, given the unpopularity of the Vietnam war. But I didn’t want to be a “selective objector”, opposed to only stupid wars like Vietnam, which most conscientious objectors probably were back then. I was toying with full objectorship (which is what the draft board required, backed up by solid proof that you seriously held such beliefs for a long time). That required an intellectual commitment to denying the use of deadly force in any and all situations.

Yes, I had some spirited debates with people, as such a radical position invites. I was asked, what would you do if someone was about to kill you without any provocation but you could kill them first. Good old justifiable self-defense. Then they put the limbo bar down a bit lower — what if someone were going to kill your innocent mother and father. Then even lower — what if someone were going to kill a city of 100,000 people, and only you could stop it (by killing the guy)? I mean, come on, couldn’t you live with your conscience if the net gain were 99,999 human lives? And then, of course, they had to bring out Hitler. (Somehow, I don’t remember Stalin coming up in those conversations, even though Stalin killed about 20 million, while Hitler had to settle for around 6 million. History does need to be taught a little better.)

The radical pacifist would respond that the picture is much bigger than one killer and his victims. The whole thing is really a cycle, a sell-out to the cheapness of life. No matter how good the intentions of a “preventative” or “justified” killing are, in reality they uphold the principle that one person can find justification to prematurely shorten the life of another. From then on, it’s a slippery slope down to a cruel and brutish world. The otherwise-virtuous policeman or soldier who gallantly kills a bad guy unintentionally inspires the child who grows to become the next bad guy. The border between good and evil is thin. The only way to stop the cycle is for the truly good people to offer themselves in sacrifice to the bad ones, such that the children of the bad may remember and imitate their goodness (given that kids always rebel against their parents).

Well. To be honest, after years of thought on the subject, I really don’t know which idea is right, or even closer to right. Can we aspire to angeldom, or is the best we can do some sort of balance of terror? I can’t say. But I can say one thing for Saddam Hussein: he does put the pacifism question into sharp focus. There’s hardly been a lower, more cold-blooded example of depravity and human cynicism since Adolph and Josef. (I never went for that bizarre anti-war delusion that the enemy isn’t so bad; even in the depths of my anti-Vietnam war cynicism, I thought that people like Jane Fonda, who cozyed up to Ho Chi Minh, were nuts.)

For now, I’m going to duck the pacifist question by saying that we should at least ask whether the upcoming invasion of Iraq will be an “intelligent” war, whether it really is in our interest or not (hard to say that any war is really “intelligent”). Going back to the 40’s, Josef Stalin did some horribly uncivilized things, even more horrible than Hitler did; and yet for him, we decided to use an alternative to war, something called “containment”. It was expensive and not completely bloodless, but after four decades, it finally worked. There may be ways to keep Saddam Hussein pinned down for a decade or so, until old age or a military coup resolves the situation. And why is North Korea, a nation that brags of its development of weapons of mass destruction in violation of international agreements, getting off so easy? Why can we live with “Dear Leader” and not Saddam? What is our plan there? (Probably something like containment).

There is a very real possibility that America will take Saddam out without too many casualties, but as we raise the stars and stripes over Bagdad, the bloodshed in Iraq will just have started. Without a master of terror keeping a lid on all the various tribes and religious factions in Iraq, the place may get nuttier than Yugoslavia after Tito. We could even see an anti-western Muslim fundamentalist regime take power as in Iran, unless we keep our troops tied up there for years. If we do stay on, our soldiers would be caught in a lot of crossfire for a long time, requiring a constant supply of body bags and maybe even the resumption of the draft. And wow, pacifism amidst the college crowd might become popular again! Maybe those guys from England won’t have died in vain.

P.S., Al Qaeda’s ultimate aim is to install fundamentalist regimes throughout the Arab world. If we shake things up in Iraq too quickly and then leave too quickly, which seems to be the American way, we may be playing right into Osama’s hand.

SUNRISE:   There was an article today on The Economist Magazine web site about the Internet as the revolution that wasn’t. Back around 1996, a lot of techno-idealists thought that the net was going to become a utopian, borderless civilization unto itself. The article cites the “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” of Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. Mr. Barlow felt that the users of the net “inhabited a new world of creativity, equality and justice”. But as we know, along came e-commerce and pornographers and copyright lawyers and big corporations like Microsoft and AOL/Time-Warner, and so went the techno-utopians. Mr. Barlow has reportedly “lost heart” about the web, and so did I after reading the rest of the article.

But wait. Does it have to be that way? I’ve noticed that a lot of people are shelling out real money to maintain non-commercial sites just to put their ideas out there and offer the chance for public comment. I myself am doing it. There are a lot of non-profit sites with mailing lists and discussion boards, places where people are talking and interacting. The Internet can yet become a Wall of Democracy, if we teach our children well. That’s why an old fogie like me, someone who was around during the Summer of Love, someone who remembers the chants of “peace, pot, microdot”, stays interested in the net. Because it’s the last chance to get in on a real revolution before I die. The one from the 1960s stalled out pretty quickly, but this one could still happen. Sure, Napster is gone, but there’s much more to a revolution than free music. We can still fight the power on the web and find common threads of humanity, and thus help our world get past its addiction to stuff like prejudice, exploitation and war. But it’s gonna take some patience.

SUNSET:   In my January 4 blog entry, I talked about the horrors of diminishment, i.e. about what happens to you when you get old. I guess that I was reflecting a bit on my Mom’s situation. Mom is over 80 and gets noticeably weaker every few months. She’s in a wheelchair now and needs help doing just about everything. Thanks to a lot of sacrifice on my brother’s part, along with the help of some visiting caregivers, she’s still living at home. What’s wrong with her? Nothing much, other than being old and a bit overweight (which is true for about half of American adults these days).

There was a recent episode of The West Wing (on NBC) where C.J., the fictional White House Press Secretary, visited her father in Ohio, only to find his life falling apart due to Alzheimer’s. The theme was the same: the horrors of diminishment.

I’m not a senior citizen yet, although I’m now closer to retirement (or hoped-for retirement) than I am to college graduation. And even though my mind still doesn’t quite believe that I’m middle aged (I still listen to that zippy music that the young people seem to enjoy so much, e.g. the Red Hot Chillis and ИickelBack, still think that the opening to Ozzie’s “Shot In The Dark” is pure musical genius), my body is quite certain that I’m no longer 20 years old. I regret it most on Friday nights, when I get home from work and need to crash; when I was a youngin’, Friday evenings were for piling into a car with friends and driving long into the night, on a weekend road trip. Now a days, I just want to get to sleep by eleven.

Yes, getting old sounds pretty horrible, especially once you find out what it really involves. But you know what? A lot of people who are actually there, who really are old and are indeed falling apart, aren’t any more miserable than the rest of us. The worst part is when things change quite suddenly, just like the weather. Right now where I live, we’re having a cold spell; for the past few days everyone was griping about it and feeling awful, myself included. But after a while, you just get used to it and keep going. Same in the summer with the heat.

Diminishment sure isn’t fun, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy life anymore. It certainly is more of a challenge to enjoy life when you’re feeling weak or sick or tired a lot of the time; you’re certainly not going to find your kicks the same way as when you were 20 and went skiing or camping or partying all weekend. But people are amazingly adaptable creatures, and even when the air is colder and the shadows are longer (and you hair is gray or gone), people can still find ways to make life worthwhile. Believe it or not.

I’ve have a listing on a penpals site for the past two years, and I’ve gotten a lot of disappointing responses. Out of maybe 35 replies so far, only one person still writes me regularly (Deb in Colorado, who is definitely OK in my book). Most of the other responses came from normal people who just weren’t on the same wavelength with me (or so I guess; it was they who stopped writing). Hey, that you expect. Some of the other responses were a bit raw; some older guy out West said “sounds like you need a friend, so I’ll talk to you if you want”. Yea, buddy, well I don’t need a friend THAT bad. And then there’s the sad stuff from distant shores, the people from poor lands looking for economic sympathy. Or economic stupidity — yes, I was one of the thousands who got an e-mail from the alleged widow of the ex-dictator of Nigeria, who supposedly needed someone to park a few million for her, all for a 20% cut. I think they called that one a “409 scam”.

Recently I got a note from an otherwise nice person who said that she “hates organized religion with a passion”. Hmmm. I’m not exactly big into organized religion myself these days, but I don’t hate it. “The Church” never hurt me the way that it hurt a lot of people (victims of sexual abuse by priests and ministers being the most obvious example; it’s probably more accurate to say that people are hurt by the un-religious acts of those who strongly profess to be religious, and the victims wind up hating the religion as much or more than they hate the hypocritical perpetrator). In a lot of ways, I still sympathize with organized religion. Their liturgies are quite beautiful, and there is something inherently good when people gather to share their belief in something greater than themselves. Religions have some very good social outreaches that help the poor, and they occasionally challenge the government on peace and justice issues. And then there are the monasteries, where solitude and devotion to spiritual centering (sometimes) occur.

It’s just that I have found that every organized religion, including the most liberal ones, are much too focused on: 1.) preserving ancient myth or tradition; 2.) taking care of real estate; and 3.) enforcing social order, by regulating rituals for marriage, childbirth, educating and socializing children, and burying the dead. Hey, somebody has to do all of those things, and the Soviet Union proved that the state doesn’t do those things very well. I can understand why the churches take their social-regulation roles seriously, and why they fulfill their mission to preserve ancient teachings, and also preserve the many old and modern buildings that they own. But in focusing all of their energy on that stuff, the organized churches aren’t able to reach out to a lot of people like myself whose spiritual needs are outside of the traditional molds that they focus on. They don’t seem to have the time to rethink what they preach against the needs and realities of today.

The more traditional churches expect their adherents to uphold a literal belief in myths that are in the same league as Santa Claus. These churches convey a strong spirituality to their members, but they require the faithful to split their minds so that during the week they make a living in a science-oriented world of computers and TVs and other high technology, and on Sunday (or whenever) they profess the literal truth of things written in an ancient time when science and intellectual rationality were mostly unheard of. The modern religions like Unitarianism are more sympathetic to modern thought, but they seem afraid of the word “God”, or any other representation of a strong personal and spiritual relationship with something more than physical reality. But yes, I know there is good reason why God is either wrapped in unchangeable ancient doctrine or is mostly ignored. If you let people form their own spiritual interpretations, you can get wacky results, extending into superstition, sexual stupidity and self-aggrandizement.

Being the eternal student, I think the answer is education. Religion should be a life-long learning process, whereby adults are eventually allowed and encouraged to form their own relationships with the Divine, once they know enough to avoid the wacky stuff. Religion should absolutely proclaim the existence of the Divine, but be honest about the leap of faith involved. It should affiliate the Divine with that which is best about being human, i.e. love, community, art, learning, forgiveness, selfless accomplishment, etc. It should maintain the beautiful liturgies and preserve the ancient texts, but should not let myth and tradition become a handcuff and prison cell. It should maintain the preferred option for the poor and the focus on social justice and human need. It would also have to maintain its social-regulation role, balancing that off with a renewed prophetic mission. As to all of the old and new church buildings, I personally think that some can stay and some should go. If some people want a religion centered around a grand old building (and are willing to pay all the bills involved), then fine. But give some options to those like me who don’t (admittedly, I’m trying to get out cheap; but if organized religion was worth it, if it got closer to my own spiritual and social needs, then I’d consider paying my “tithes” or “love offerings”).

For example, I once knew a Catholic priest who was a “floater”, who didn’t belong to any parish, who would celebrate mass where ever he was, wouldn’t ask questions about who could or couldn’t receive communion. If there were more like him, I might still be in the fold. He was also sympathetic to the idea that the ancient church doctrines about the virgin birth and the resurrection and Jesus as God and Savior didn’t square with modern scientific viewpoints, and that the concept of “Christ” had to be reinterpreted in a more spiritual and less literal historical sense. And he would admit that the whole Catholic thing about women not being able to be priests was bogus, and that outreach and social justice was one of the most important things that a religion can be involved in. And he didn’t have that judgmental attitude that priests often seem to have, or the idea that “the church says that I’m above you”. Unfortunately, I never met another one like him (he works down in the Washington DC area, where I lived for a few years back in the late 70s). And from what I heard, even he isn’t quite as “radical” as he once was (but what can you expect for a guy out alone in such a regressive organization). Still, a younger Father John once gave me a glimpse of what religion could be like, and for that, I’m eternally grateful.

PS, as to faithful penpals from other listings, thanks go out to Jean in Mississippi, Mary in Illinois, and June in California.