The Carpenter Who Never Fixed But Only Destroyed

 

There was a sad and decrepit carpenter who saw a crisis looming in every house on his block. He informed one neighbor that his front porch was in danger of collapsing and that he was just the person who could fix it. The neighbor was alarmed because he knew little of such matters, and so he trusted the carpenter to take care of his front porch.

 That very day, truckfuls of material were delivered and the carpenter and a large crew of helpers immediately got to work. With sledgehammers and jackhammers they went at it, instantly demolishing the front porch, along with a bit of the front wall of the house (it seems there was some dry rot there as well). In no time at all what once was a front porch was now a pile of rubble.

 But after that, things went more slowly. And soon the owner of the house with the demolished porch discovered that the carpenter was spending all his time talking his neighbors into getting their houses fixed instead of keeping an eye on the few workers who were still on the job around the clock and yet didn’t seem to fix anything.

 After landing a job replacing someone’s garage, the carpenter moved even these few workers off the job and moved them all on to the next one. Again, in no time at all, the crew demolished the garage to nothing more than a pile of rubble. But after this was accomplished, along with a little collateral damage caused to the next-door neighbor’s tree (which was in the way of the wrecking ball they brought in), the promised improvements were slow to be delivered. In fact, things were much worse than they were, because while the garage the man once had was far from perfect, at least he could park his car in it. Now, men with expensive equipment stood around as if nobody had told them what the job was they were sent to accomplish. And then one day, the little carpenter ceased to appear at the job site at all, leaving behind a small contingent of hired hands who did little to nothing to make things better.

 And so it went, the little carpenter time and again warned people of the imminent danger they faced should they not place all their faith in him and allow him to use all the force necessary to fix the problem.

 Soon, half the houses in the neighborhood had piles of rubble where imperfect but serviceable edifices once stood. Many people were forced to leave their homes because they could no longer live there. And yet the little carpenter continued to convince people that he and only he could save the neighborhood from the looming disasters that no one really noticed until he gave them a good thorough investigation.

 Never once did the carpenter fix a house the way he said he was going to, although the prosperity he brought to himself and his partners was incontestable. Yet never once did anyone in the neighborhood seriously question him about the terrible work he was doing, for as soon as the subject was broached, a new catastrophe was discovered which needed the focus and attention of everyone if they did not want property values in the neighborhood to plummet.

 The moral of the story goes, if the word “moral” can be used regarding such a story, is that if you are a horrible carpenter that can only destroy and never improve, you better have one hell of a public relations firm to back you up.

War Without End (If We're Lucky)

The War Generation

We now have a generation reaching adulthood that has never known our nation at peace. We now have people old enough to join the military  to fight the war on terror whose earliest memories included the war on terror. Terror is all they’ve known, terror is the mindset they’ve been raised on.

And there is no end in sight for these children raised on terror. There is no end zone to be reached, no promised land, no ultimate objectives in this war. They have known nothing but war, and peace doesn’t seem to be raising its head anytime soon for them.

No other generation of Americans has ever been through anything like it. World War 2 lasted 4 years. People went to war and came home, intent on enjoying the peace and prosperity they fought for.  World War I lasted a brief year for us Americans,  and our entry into it was with the understanding that it was the war to end all war. That is after all the idea behind war, right? To put things to right so that the world is returned to its normal state and we can once again enjoy peace?

But that’s no longer the world we live in, not a world some of us have ever known. War is the new normal, war is just a part of life, a part of who we are, or at least who we have become.

And we’ve saddled an entire generation to the vision we’ve created. We’ve subjected our youth to an existence without the hope of--or the blueprint for--peace.

I wonder what it must be like for them. I was born in the Vietnam Era, can remember the end as helicopters rose from rooftops with people trying to hold on. I was of a generation who experienced wars that ended. Perhaps they didn’t have a clear-cut purpose or justification, but they eventually ended.

The war we’re involved in now has no end. It has no justification, summary, no purpose. It is merely war. It is the inheritance we bequeath to the generation that follows us. It is the unanswered question we never got around to solving because we were too busy taking our children to soccer practice and karate class. It was what we ignored in order to work extra hours so we could purchase a little something for under the tree come Christmas. I hope you enjoyed your new gaming system, junior.

I wonder how they view the world we’ve created for them, wonder if they can see things through the same twisted lens we see through. Perhaps when the television presents them with the information that we’ve bombed some country they’ve never heard of, it won’t register much in their consciousness. After all, why should they find it odd when it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s just what America does.

I can’t imagine them questioning it or evaluating the morality of it. It’s just something the government does, and they are not the government. The government is some foreign entity, unanswerable and uncaring to people such as they. How can they feel culpable for what the government has done, even though it ostensibly does it in their name? The people who make the decisions to bomb are as distant to them as the countries that are being bombed.

Given their lifelong immersion in it, how can they view war as anything other than a force of nature? How can they perceive of it any differently than primitive man saw the weather? Rainfall last night, bombs fall tomorrow. Earthquakes or explosions in some other part of the world but it doesn’t affect us.

How will they ever appreciate the value humanity has placed on peace when we have not educated them on the subject? How can they appreciate peace as a desired goal when we have for so long tolerated not having a goal or an honestly debated cause for war? Our wars are justified by lies and when the lies are discovered they are justified by the fact that we’re too far involved to stop. What do these children-now-become-adults think of when they hear the phrase “Blessed are the peacemakers?”

Maybe they’ll come to accept war the way other cultures accepted human sacrifice. Perhaps they’ll just accept it as a cost of existing: the gods, in this case weapons manufacturers, need to be appeased. Maybe they won’t see it at all, so detached from it as they are.

But just maybe they will see it with fresh eyes. Maybe more innocent eyes will see through the complex web of justifications we have spun for ourselves and see the incredible waste, horror, and immorality behind war. I’d like to think so. Somebody has to. For all the horror that war creates in the world today, it is but the birthing pains of the ultimate horror, one which we are marching closer to, our footsteps forward sounding with every explosion.

Nuclear war is every bit the threat it was in the cold war era, it’s just we don’t seem to worry about it, or even think about it much anymore. Once we had time for such matters but lately we’ve had other things on our mind: retirement investments, lawn care, and binge watching TV series on Netflix. We’ve gotten used to the possibility of nuclear annihilation, just as our children have gotten used to perpetual war.

So let us think no more about it and get back to matters more dear to our hearts. Let us return to Facebook and Fantasy Football. Let us shut out the world outside our window we can no more change than we can the weather. After all, there are new videogames to be played, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Battlefield. That’s an activity you can engage in with your child, a bonding experience. Or instead you can read a book, one of those post-apocalyptic ones that seem so popular these days. Don’t worry unduly about the children’s future, they’ll work it out, just like we did. What we don’t think about can’t hurt us, right?

Charlie Brown, Lucy, and War

I give Charlie Brown a lot of credit, he really tries hard to kick that ball. Granted he’s foolish for trusting Lucy to hold it for him when she’s lied to him EVERY SINGLE TIME, but he’s a trusting individual and he really wants to show what he can do.

And Lucy always has the best excuses. Well, maybe they’re not the best excuses, but they’re what Charlie Brown wants to hear.

All right, let’s face it, Lucy’s mean for constantly making Charlie Brown fall for the same old trick, and Charlie Brown is stupid for falling for it over and over. More than stupid, there is some egotism involved that urges Charlie Brown to believe her. There is something deep in his psyche that makes him want to believe.

But for all of Charlie Brown’s shortcomings, he is the one to pay for his folly. He comes charging up to kick the ball, Lucy pulls it away, and Charlie Brown falls flat on his back, knocking the wind out of him. Time after time. You’d think he’d learn, but he never does.

As George W. Bush once tried to say: fool me once, shame on you, full me twice, shame on me. At some point you have to stop feeling sorry for Charlie Brown, although you never have to stop blaming Lucy for her behavior. At some point Charlie Brown has to wise up. At some point you have to call him a blockhead for trusting someone who’s fooled him countless times.

Now imagine what we would think of Charlie Brown if each time he fell for Lucy’s prank, people died. Imagine if he went to kick that ball, Lucy pulled it away, and little children got blown into bloody chunks. How tolerant would we be of Charlie Brown then?

Because that’s what is happening, over and over again. Every time a nation gears up for war, it (Lucy) prepares its population (Charlie Brown) by telling it anything necessary to get it to go along.

There are many reading this who remember the Gulf Of Tonkin incident. It was an alleged attack on a U.S. ship by the North Vietnamese that President Johnson used as a pretext for escalating our involvement in Vietnam. Except it never happened. Lucy, dressed as Johnson, held the ball for us, the American public, and we charged. Only when she pulled the ball away 58,220 of us died, far more scarred for life by a war that shouldn’t have been. Oh, and if we count the suffering of non-Americans, a million men, women and children more died, a country defoliated, and generations of suffering ensued.

Fast forward to the First Gulf War. Babies were being ripped out of incubators and thrown to the floor to die, said Lucy, posing as a nurse who had actually witnessed such things. Except she wasn’t and it didn’t happen, but we all fell for it and fell flat on our back. Fortunately, few people died in the ensuing war, less than a hundred and fifty. Well, unless you count Iraqis, in which case tens of thousands died, not to mention the hundreds of thousands who died as a result of later sanctions, not to mention the deaths caused by depleted uranium used by us. But we don’t have to worry about depleted uranium, Lucy said so.

How about the time Lucy dressed up as Colin Powell and started talking about chemical labs being transported on trains and trucks around Iraq? Boy we sure were going to clobber the ball that time, weren’t we? We’ve gotten up and moved on from that incident but people are still killing and dying because of our naivete. What has it been, now, 14 years? It’s hard to keep track, especially since Lucy’s been keeping us occupied with her old games since then.

Remember Libya and how we were going to help them? This is what it looks like today.This is what happens when we let Lucy sweet talk us. Shame on you, Lucy, shame on us.

And yet we go on with our lives as though nothing has happened. And Lucy now holds the ball for us and somehow we’ve all forgotten our entire history with her. But it’s not cute and it’s not funny because people die. And while we try to pass the blame by saying it’s not our fault, we are responsible. Charlie Brown had issues, but they were almost endearing. We have issues and it’s costings millions of lives. It’s costing people their limbs and their health and their sanity. The billions of dollars we spend on war is money taken from those who do not have enough to eat, do not have a decent education. Hell, we can’t even afford drinking water for Flint. But Lucy is sweet-talking us, and what she says appeals to a weakness within us.

I’ll tell you what that weakness is. We are lazy cowards. Working for peace is hard work and can even be dangerous. Look what happened to Martin Luther King.  So instead we permit the government to make our decisions for us, so that we don’t have to be responsible. We fear in moments of crisis to stand alone against the herd and speak against the popular narrative. We wish to blend in, not make waves, or else shout loudly as one in the crowd. We prattle on about peace all the while acquiescing to the warmongers.

We don’t want a nation of the people, by the people, for the people, because then we the people might have to make adult decisions and that idea terrifies us. Better to listen to someone else, even if in our heart of hearts we know that that someone else is lying, has always lied.

This is the road that leads to fascism. Fascism is the bending of the individual’s will to the state, to power, to war. That is our fate if we do not choose our course for ourselves, if we continue to listen to the seductive lies Lucy speaks.

Governments don’t demand peace, people do. If we ever want peace, it’s up to us as human beings to create it. We cannot leave it up to our governments, because they will always insist the way to peace is through war. How many more times will we let the ball pulled away from us? Because when we fall flat on our back, people die.

For Those Who Fight, The Warriors

Courage, bravery, loyalty, honor. These are the traits we look for and admire in a soldier. It is a soldier’s duty to fight when they are told, to obey orders unquestioningly.

These are traits to be respected not only in a soldier, but traits many of the rest of us aspire to, though few of us achieve or have the opportunity to achieve them. But even those who do not fight must exhibit a certain degree of bravery and loyalty, especially when it comes to protecting those who have sacrificed so much for us. Let me make for you a bit of a comparison and see if it doesn’t make sense.

It is the job of a boxer’s corner to be looking out for him, to give him what he needs and to protect him from his own courage if need be. A courageous boxer, the kind that we most admire, will look to take on any opponent. A boxer in the ring against a determined and skilled opponent is the epitome of courage. He knows that he has to dig deep and that he has to be willing to risk it all, perhaps even his life. Any boxer who’s been around for a while knows the risks involved. He knows about brain damage, Parkinson’s, the fact that all his efforts have very little chance of any real reward or glory. And yet the fighter fights on, driven by some deep pride and a need to show his true metal. Someone who has proven himself within the squared circle is a man without anything hidden in his character.

But all the courage a boxer has must be tempered by those in his corner, those who are on his team and whose job it is to look out for him. Theirs is the task of encouraging him when he needs to go the extra mile but their job also is to make sure his courage does not lead him to make bad decisions.

It’s an old story, the boxer who’s seen too many fights and gets used by those around him. Unscrupulous fight promoters and greedy managers send brave men into the ring when they have no business being there.

It’s the same thing with a soldier, really. There are those willing to put the soldier’s life on the line for their own personal gain. There are those who will ask everything of a fighter and when he’s given his all will turn his back on him while counting the profits they’ve made from a warrior’s sweat and blood. You see, as far as they’re concerned, there’s always another brave young man willing to take his place, desiring to prove his quality and his bravery. Courage and the desire to test one’s greatness are in no shortage in the human race, something for which we can all be thankful. But the willingness to profit off the labor and sacrifice of others is also deeply imbedded in the human race, something we must always be watchful of.

Lots of people who’ve never fought a round themselves make a lot of money on the fight game, leaving many of those who do the work penniless and broken for their efforts. It’s a sucker’s game but the fighter goes into it with the best of intentions. Most are noble people looking to better themselves, looking to take care of their family and loved ones.

I’ve been a fight fan all my life. I’ve seen guys show unbelievable strength in the ring, guys fighting for little more than pride. God help me, I’ve seen men die in the ring. And in some small way I can’t help feeling responsible for them.

I’ve cheered men on in a brutal sport. I’ve encouraged others to watch, hell, I’ve even wanted to be a fighter myself. Like so many others I wanted to know what I was made of, wanted to know if I could take the best the world or another man could throw at me.

But I’ve seen enough. I no longer feel good about asking others to step into the ring for my sake. I have come to feel personally responsible for a sport I believe does more harm than good. I won’t ask someone not to test their courage, because that is their decision to make. But I will not encourage the sport. I will not pay money to some ruthless promoter to make a fight happen. I’ve seen too many valiant warriors be allowed to push themselves beyond where they ever should have gone, who fought too many fights and received too much punishment. And while I salute their courage, I will no longer allow my own interests to overtake theirs. I will no longer bask in the reflected courage of another but will instead try to be brave in my own right, and for me that means to look out for their interests when others are trying to make a buck off of their sacrifices, to stand up and make a scene if necessary when brutality is nothing more than a money-making scheme.

The same with our fighting men and women. It’s easy to stand behind them as they walk off to battle. There is no bravery in that, no bravery in asking others to do what you will not. It is harder to stand in front, to put oneself in harm’s way between two opposing warriors about to prove their bravery while rich men get richer off them. And while I don’t ever expect to put an end to the fight business, I myself promise to stop watching war as a spectator sport. Because while I’ve never been a warrior myself, I do have some idea what it is like to feel the need to prove yourself in a game you wouldn’t have thought of on your own. I know to a degree the kind of life that leads people to want to prove themselves in ways that the wealthy and fortunate seldom choose. And while my courage in opposing the game will never equal those who partake in it, perhaps exhibiting some courage myself might lessen the need somewhat for courage in those who fight. We owe them that much. Because too often, while it takes a brave man to go to war, it merely requires a nation of cowards to send him.