Canadian 16th machine-gun company soldiers at Passchendaele 

                       (credit: William Rider-Rider, via Wikimedia Commons)

We have to give top priority to the matters that matter. That, for me, is a prime aim in all of our political wrangling. So …what are our priorities and why do we say so? I think there is one giant principle that subsumes all the others. I think hardest about it on Remembrance Day.  

November 11 is a day of very solemn ceremonies in Canada. In fact, visitors to our country are often stunned by the seriousness of our Remembrance Day ceremonies. But, of course, we Canadians have reasons.

On November 11, 1918, the armistice that halted all the World War One fighting was signed. The worst war by far that the world had ever known up till that time finally ceased after four years and four months of bloodshed and horror and death. Cannons so big they needed rail cars to move them, tanks, fighter planes, dirigibles, machine guns, poison gas, flame throwers …all new technologies that were used first in World War One to achieve assembly line killing power.  

Drawing from a population of about 8 million, Canada sent an army of over 600,000 men to WWI. Of these, 1 in 9 died over there; three or four times that many were left permanently scarred physically; an even greater number were scarred mentally, doomed to lives of alcoholism, social dysfunction, and early death. Similar per capita casualties happened to the British, French, Italians, Americans, Austrians, Germans, and Russians, and all their allies. But I am Canadian, so I write from a Canadian perspective.

The nations waited only a generation and did it again with more nations, more terrible weapons, and much bigger numbers. 1939 to 1945. How many burnt lungs, busted skulls, dismembered legs and arms, and rotting, putrid corpses? And yes, those are ugly images and no, I don’t apologize for using them. 

Some of the young today get it into their heads still, after all the pain humans have inflicted on one another, that war can be glamorous, exciting, or heroic. A kind of adventure.

Eric Remarque’s novel “All Quiet On The Western Front” silences all of that kind of thinking completely. It ought to be required reading for all students in all parts of the world. The dedication at the beginning of the novel says:

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.

First novel the Nazis burned. I wept when I finished it. I wanted to tear my teeth out of my head. The uselessness of all that pain and cruelty hit me like an emotional tidal wave. But unlike many other stories I read as a younger man, which faded in power and significance for me as the years went by, this one has gotten harder, yet more profound, with the passing of the decades.

I was born after World War II. 1949. But I saw what war did to people, men and women, who lived in my neighborhood.

Len lived across the avenue from us. I played with his sons, Roy and Melvin, from the time I was 3 and they were 3 and 4. I knew the family well.

Len had joined up at 18 in 1939. He was a big farm boy who could shoot. He was the average Canadian soldier in both world wars, though those boys were anything but average. They took on the hardest fighting, and they won nearly every time.

But back to Len. My mom, looking out her kitchen window as she worked at making meals in my early years, could not help but notice that Marion, Len’s wife, washed an awful lot of sheets. She had at least two double bed sheets drying on her line every day, even in winter, and sometimes did up to 6 a day, along with her other laundry.

At last, after a year or so, Mom asked Marion, tactfully, why she washed so many sheets. Marion confided that Len had seen some very fierce action in Europe and that he had been seriously wounded twice. He did sleep most nights, but only in bits. He had terrible nightmares. He would sweat right through upper and lower sheets sometimes three times in a night as he struggled to achieve normalcy again.

I couldn’t grasp it at 5, 6, and 7 years old. Then, they moved away to a small town 100 km. from Edmonton, close to Len’s original farming community. He seemed to do better. Or maybe he was beginning to heal. The human mind can be an amazing survivor when it has to be. Anyway, I never did see them again. I only heard about them through mutual friends in our neighborhood now and then.

Today? Today, my heart aches for Len. And for all those that he represents. Boys. They were just boys. They went away to fight to the death in a foreign land because a whole lot of people around them, adults they trusted, said they should. They had no idea whatsoever about the thing they were getting into.

And, of course, I knew of some who never came back. My grandmother’s closest neighbor and friend, Mrs. G., allowed her 17-year-old son to sign up because he begged and pleaded and promised that he would get into the signal corps and stay out of the real fighting. He got only a few weeks of training. It was ’43 when he joined up. Canada was desperate for soldiers. They were sent up too young, too fast. He was sent straight to the hottest fighting in Italy in early ’44 and was dead 6 weeks into his combat tour. Mrs. G. never recovered. She went insane, was put in an asylum, and waited out the rest of her life in an emotional state so fragile that loud noises would make her shriek right into the late 1960’s when she finally died, at home, still under psychiatric care.

I could go on. Some of my war stories come from Canadian friends who went south and joined the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.

But enough. The stories all start to sound miserably similar. They stretch out to the crack of doom. We need to get to a point here.

And my point is simply this: We have to stop this insanity. And there is a way.

The way out is to overtly and universally teach kids in their schools to hate war and to resolve that they will find non-violent solutions to their disputes from the time they are in kindergarten on up. And to teach them negotiating skills. And to teach them that everywhere in the world all other human beings are like them inside. Vulnerable. Scared. Hopeful. Coping as best they can. Even the bullies are the same in their quiet, secret thoughts.  

Cliché? You bet it is. It’s just never seriously been tried. Naïve, the cynics say. I say otherwise. We’ll do this and do it right or we won’t anything.

We live in a time when another full-out war between the superpowers could end human life on this planet in less than six months. Three quarters of the human race could die in an afternoon. The rest from radiation, starvation, disease, and so on over the next four or five months.

However, we also live in a time when communication with any other human individual or group anywhere on earth is possible for all of us at anytime. We really could write a world Social Studies course that would teach the simple lessons of peace to all kids, kindergarten on up, and we could require all the nations of the world to put it into the curricula that they teach to their young.

Enforcement would be by social pressure, or as consensus of the world grew, by economic sanctions. In short, it really could work. No one would want to openly argue against the measure. To do so would draw the wrath of the vast majority of the rest of the world. The curriculum could be promoted on social media and on television. And so on. It really could work. 

If I sound like a dreamer to you, then I have every right to rejoin …what do you suggest? We have done war over and over for as long as humans have been human. I know that. But what is different today is that we now have the weapons to do it one final time. Absolutely final time. And we will if we do nothing but pray and meditate and hope for the best. Saving our species is going to take more.

We cannot sit, as individuals or as complacent groups, in our social fortresses on our social islands. The evidence of history shows unequivocally that if you try to ignore the nastiness in the world and hope it will all go away, it will not only not go away, it will come for you. As Obama said, the brutes of the world are not going to go away because we close our eyes and sing a particularly touching rendition of “Kumbaya”.

I say we need to do more than pray and meditate and hope for the best. The Brits did that in the interwar years. Where did it get them? We must start to put in place measures that will stop the warmongers from occurring. Peace education in the schools. Everywhere on earth for all kids.   

Yes, there will always be differences and disputes between humans. No, they do not have to end in violence. We can teach the kids that democracy and rule of law offer a better way.

Therefore, all other issues involving men and women, black and white, Asian, Caucasian, African, Indigenous, gay, straight and so on can be put under this one giant umbrella. Peace Ed.. If we make that our prime goal, the rest will follow.

At the core of our peace curriculum will be this guiding principle that all the children of the world will learn: all forms of unfairness and persecution have in common the simple fact that they are not just hurtful, they’re stupid. The strongest society will always be the one that contains as many different kinds of people with as many varied knowledge and skill sets as we can produce.

In a universe that evolves in unpredictable ways, pluralism is the best gamble. It maximizes our chances of surviving. Racism, homophobia, sexism, and so on are the opposite. They are bad gambles because they diminish our talent pool.    

We’ll teach the kids, all the kids: let your neighbor be. As long as he/she is not directly harming you, let him/her be. Negotiate in all disputes. Or at most, let the law handle it. When you get used to the other person’s ways, even the ones that used to make you nervous, you might even find it easy to just be nice.

Spend your energy on the improvement of your own knowledge, talents, and character, not on ridiculing others. Love your neighbor. Work for your living.

If it’s truly necessary, defend those whom you can see are not able to stand up for themselves. Just remember that the objective is always to achieve fairness in your town, not promote one race or one creed over all others, or any other promotion of one slice of humanity over its competitors, and that goes for men and women, gay and straight, black and white, etc.. Open free markets of goods, services, and ideas and if all else fails, the rule of laws written and amended by elected officials from within your own ranks.  

Live and let live. Officially, overtly, and publicly. 

Do not withdraw from the troubles of the world and hope they will all go away. That withdrawing is just what the bullies of the world love. It makes their path to power so easy.

Our days of declining to say what we really think and placidly hoping for the best are over. So is fighting to solve our disputes. They both must end or they will end us. World democracy is the third way, the way out.  

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a decent day. 

                                            United Nations building, New York City, U.S.A. 

                                                   (credit: Neptuul, via Wikimedia Commons) 

"There is a war between the rich and poor, a war between the men and the women.
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn't.

Why don't you come on back ...to the war?"

                                                         (Leonard Cohen)                     

                        

                                 Frederick Douglass (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                      A Common Thread

There is a common thread that runs through all of the social justice issues now being disputed in pretty much all of our world and it is this: if you wish to revise or even dispose of some moré or custom or law, and if you are an adult citizen, the onus is then on you to explain what you will put in its place.

The social order is an easy thing to take for granted when it has been basically stable for generations, and, for the most part, it works. We mustn’t forget what life looks like when all social order stops working. There are only a few societies in the world now in which roving gangs of bandits rape, plunder, and kill with little or no fear of consequences.

But make no mistake. The bullies have always been about, and they are there in your neighborhood today. They would take what they wanted in ten minutes if they believed they could get away with it. A basically cooperative community of citizens used to supporting each other via laws protecting what we call “human rights” is all that stands in the way of the bullies in your hometown.

A nation in which most people no longer care about their own laws is speeding down the road to collapse. Anarchy. 

Somalia comes to mind. It is what we call a “failed state”, which only means that over most of its map, no rule of law exists. There are only local warlords whose empires keep changing by the month. They hijack ships, buy ammunition and guns, and kill any who dare to interfere. They rape at will. We need to keep in mind that there are such states and there is nothing in the nature of humans here, in the West, or anywhere else that makes any of us exempt from falling into similar straits.  

Every area of the world has known such times, Europe and America included. And all of Africa, Latin America, China, India, the rest of Asia. We humans are depressingly similar in our vices. We don’t want Al Shabaab, the Taliban or Isis ruling in any part of the world. They are mostly hated even in the territories that they still control, and for good reason. They hurt people. But they will conquer and rule if we dissolve our own democracies and open the road for them. 

I believe that people who criticize any system anywhere, if they are adults, know this. They may hate some features of their nation’s system, but they do not want to, as some SDS leaders said in the 60's, "burn it all down". Responsible adult citizens can see what we get if we simply "burn down" whatever current system is in place in our society and put nothing in its place. The Bully Wars leading to the Big Bully rule.

                                            

              George Francis Train (credit: Matthew Brady, via Wikimedia Commons) 

What makes much better sense is for us to dismantle the parts of our society that we can see are unjust by democratic means and then replace them with better institutions, ones that take the health and happiness of all the citizens into account and try to make provision for them. The order needed in society if commerce and daily life are to go on must be balanced with measures that protect the rights of individuals and/or oppressed groups, especially their right to work to reform the parts of the system that they abhor. A democratic government’s job is to balance these elements and enable many different kinds of people to live together, work, trade, and get along.

I repeat: adults know this. First, we get a system that, for the most part, works. Then, we figure out how to make it better, to update it regularly, without having to go to war with each other as we try to make social evolution happen.  

This is why the deeply moving thing about some of our biggest peaceful heroes all through history into modern times is that they offered a vision of a society that really could replace the corrupt one they were trying to fix.

                                                        

                                                                  James Mott                                          

       (credit: Anna Davis Hallowell and Lucretia Mott, via Wikimedia Commons)

Nelson Mandela said that he envisioned a “rainbow nation, at peace with itself and the world.” He did not say all non-Africans had to leave. Martin Luther King’s political effectiveness came in large part from his attracting millions of white people to his marches. As white people looked at their society and the events of daily life there, and then they looked at Martin’s way, his marches and his speeches, they saw that the status quo’s way of life was wrong in many ways. But more importantly, they also saw that it did not have to be so. Keeping an effective social order did not require that the citizens endure with these injustices. Decent people really could replace the bad and build a better world.    

                                       

                          Henry Blackwell (credit: Library of Congress, via Wikipedia) 

My point today is that this insight applies to the hardest dispute of all, namely the ongoing struggle being waged by millions of women against the male-dominated world in which they must live. The women of the world, especially of the West, I feel, can learn something from Mandela and King. 

Get inside the heads of the people who are not female but who nevertheless see that you are living in a system that puts unfair limits on your opportunities. Reach out and make allies of them. In short, ladies, you would be wise to get inside men’s heads; you will discover that many of the painful things in your world are in the male one as well. From finding common ground, you will then begin to build a coalition analogous to that found by Nelson and Martin and, in more recent times, Barack. 

And Susan Anthony and Cady Stanton. They had male allies, lots of them, who were fed up with the male order of their time. They had lived through the Civil War and seen how its horrors were driven by the racism and sexism of patriarchy. They were men who saw that to deny people who were just people, just as capable of rational thought as men and who brought some fresh and valuable insights to all tables at which they were heard – to deny women these basic democratic rights -- wasn’t just wrong: it was stupid. It robbed the state in which it occurred of half of its most valuable assets, namely its human assets, its capable citizens.

Yes, there are plenty of words and actions of women in what are nebulously and loosely called “feminist” organizations that are hypocritical or naïve or outright cruel. No, men, that should not mean that we should shut them out, anymore than male naivetes and hypocrisies and cruelties will ever justify their shutting us out. We are justified in telling them that we will not put up with, for example, female teachers who hate little boys. (I've known such people.) In short, we are justified in discussing real grievances with candor, reason, and evidence. But we are never justified in shutting other people out just because they aren't "like us". That view makes no sense in any case, but especially not in this one. If they can speak, they deserve to be heard.  

Why? Because along with our different sensibilities and worldviews in the real world comes this basic fact of reality: men and women have been built for one another by literally billions of years of evolution. The women, with all their gifts and flaws, are an emotionally and politically necessary part of our reality and their reality and in other words, the world as it is. Nothing is ever going to change that. So however hard it may seem at times to communicate to the other sex what we really think, we have no other choice. If we don’t make and keep making that effort, our world is not just going to stay stupid and cruel. It is going to get worse. Catastrophic climate change. Nuclear arms proliferation. I don't need to sketch images of how these scenarios end. 

Get motivated. Articulate. Compromise. Find consensus. 

We have only a small chance of fixing these things if we, the socially conscious of all genders and races, work together. But if we fall into squabbling and squander our energies in wrangling, we have no chance at all. 

My thoughts, anyway, to all the troopers in the gender wars. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a fine, pluralistic day. 

                              

                                  Martin Luther King Jr. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)