I want to share this piece I wrote after the beginning of Desert Storm in January 1991. I was shocked at how relevant it felt in these days just before the election.
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The week before the beginning of Operation Desert Storm in January 1991 had been a week of staring death in the eye – working with clients and world events. But it still seemed somewhat distant from my own life.
On January 17, I came home from seeing clients, turned on the TV, and saw that war had begun. Planes were dropping bombs on real, living, breathing people. Our young men were using giant toys to win an arbitrary game in which the goal was to kill the greatest number of their own fellow human beings. The point of the game was to support some vague cause that even our president failed to articulate in his rallying call to the people of this country. I saw an interview with one soldier who thought he was in the desert to fight communism. The poor fellow had gotten caught in the wrong war, but it didn’t seem to matter.
Yet even with this, I found it challenging to grapple with the absolute immediacy of the war. Then I picked up my phone messages. On the first message, I heard that the 16-year-old daughter of one of my clients had just witnessed her boyfriend blow his brains out. He was 21 years old. He said he had bought the gun to “protect” himself and his family. He treated it as a toy instead of respecting it as an instrument of death. As he was showing off his prize, the gun went off, and the bullet went through his skull, spreading his blood and brains all over. The result was that a young life, full of promise, was ended forever.
Suddenly, the folly of the war became real to me. Here we were, a country that believed it needed guns to protect itself and its friends. We were treating the idea of war as a plaything, spreading blood and gore, putting at risk the extraordinary potential of this country and our global village.
Frank was a troubled young man who wanted more than anything else to be noticed, to matter, and to feel that he counted. He couldn’t trust that life would ever bring him what he needed. It was apparent that this was not a conscious suicide attempt, but it also was evident that he had already allied himself with death rather than life when he went out to purchase the gun. In death, he was finally noticed. But how important can a corpse be? How much pleasure does a corpse take when tears are shed into his coffin? What a waste of a young life.
Our country has made the same deal. We seem to need to prove that we matter. We need to show that we are important. We strive to have more and more material goods to fill the emptiness of not knowing who we are. Enough is never enough. We aspire to be the best, the biggest, and the most powerful. If we can’t convince ourselves and the world that we are the best, then we are afraid we are nothing. There is never any rest for us. This is a constant occupation, leaving little time to live our lives. So we play this sad script out on the battlefields, and soon, our beautiful young men will be coming home in body bags. Our tears will fill their coffins, but we will have learned nothing.
My client is very young. She is only sixteen, but in some ways, she is very wise. She told me that if she were going to make it through the tragedy of this death, she was going to have to commit herself firmly to her own life. She could feel the strong pull toward death, and she knew that she needed to surround herself with her friends, her music, and the structure of her daily life. She could only transform the death energy that took her boyfriend by committing herself to the life force within herself.
The problem with war is that it starts to move people’s energy with the excitement of combat, the triumph of victory, and the fear of loss. As a people, Americans often look outside of themselves for the stimulation of their energies. This becomes dangerous when war is doing the stimulation because what feels like the energy of the life force is, in fact, the energy of death. Even victory celebrations in war are celebrations of death. Young men join the armed services to feel alive, but what they meet is Death disguised as Life. The media covers the war as if it were a circus. There is excitement and movement everywhere.
But this is not Life but Death. Even those of us who oppose this war or any war can easily fall into despair and, thereby, ally ourselves with the forces of Death instead of Life. If we are to help bring in a New Age where people can live together without war, then we must keep the Life Force moving. This does not mean we should accept the unspeakable acts that man is choosing to do against man. But we must stay in touch with the parts of ourselves that are in touch with the life force and keep the vibrations moving.
Individuals do make a difference. When we love each other, there is a real energy that moves in ever-widening circles. When we exercise our creativity and share it with the world, energy is released and vibrates with anyone who comes in contact with it. When we connect our physical energies with our spiritual energies, people around us feel more connected with themselves and with their universe. When we throw ourselves into life and really live, energy is released that invites others to live.
This does not negate the need for political action. However, political action that is not strongly allied with the life force has no foundation. There are those who feel that in light of the death and destruction of this war, we should rein in our pleasure in life. That may not, however, be the answer. It may be that the way to fight the darkness is with as much light as each of us can bring.