Tearing Down Our Emotional Walls

TMS PEACE JOURNALISM, 9 Dec 2024

Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service

4 Dec 2024 – War, war and more war.

It’s only possible for one reason: the belief that only some people are fully human. Those who aren’t . . . well, they can be killed when necessary. My inner scream at this false reality we feed ourselves — via the media, via mainstream politics — keeps getting louder and louder. Is there a way to get things to change?

To put it another way: Is there a way to transcend the abstract view of Planet Earth in which global politics operates? We have religion. We have values: Be kind, be loving, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — but they don’t seem to manifest collectively. At the collective, that is to say, the political, level, only so much kindness can be tolerated. In terms of security, kindness is weakness.

I quoted these words of Kamala Harris, delivered last August at the DNC as she accepted her nomination to be the Dems’ presidential candidate, in a previous column, but they still strike me as relevant, even though she lost the election:

“So, fellow Americans. Fellow Americans. I — I love our country with all my heart. Everywhere I go — everywhere I go, in everyone I meet, I see a nation that is ready to move forward. Ready for the next step in the incredible journey that is America.”

She added that this is “an America where we care for one another, look out for one another and recognize that we have so much more in common than what separates us. That none of us — none of us has to fail for all of us to succeed.”

Wow, sounds great. Unfortunately, as I noted at the time, the love and empathy of which she spoke stopped at the border. In essence, she was expressing love for an abstraction, a swath of land defined by random lines on a map, created via several centuries of brutal land theft.

Nonetheless, I understand that love is specific. It has limits. We love our partner. We love our surroundings, our community. The problem, as Harris quickly went on to illustrate, is that “love” at the national level — a.k.a., nationalism — doesn’t actually exist unless there’s also an enemy: someone to fear. Our empathy stops at the border. And beyond the border . . .

Harris continued: “And America, we must also be steadfast in advancing our security and values abroad. As vice president, I have confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances and engaged with our brave troops overseas. As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Oh, how wonderful! The great lie manifests: We need that trillion-dollar annual military budget, America! How else can we remain secure? And our allies also have to remain secure: Israel has the right to defend itself (some love, apparently, does not stop at the border). And it’s not as though Harris’s opponent — what was his name again? — in any way challenged this basic context, nor did the prevailing media: There’s always a “them” out there, who hates us, who wants to steal what we have (what goes around comes around, I guess) . . . who wants to kill us.

So we’ve got to be prepared to kill him first — which means, dehumanize! And here’s where my internal — and, at least in this moment, external — scream begins. I don’t want to be led by a “commander in chief.” I want humanity’s understanding of itself to begin with the awareness of our collective, and planetary, unity. The time for this is now, for an endless number of reasons, all of which are related to the “security” our leaders claim to be so obsessed with.

The most obvious reason, I guess, is that nobody wants nuclear war — yet Russia and the West are playing with this possibility now, as the good guys and the bad guys fight it out in Ukraine. War is the only answer — defeat the enemy, bomb Russia! And Russia responds with “inflammatory nuclear rhetoric,” denounced by the West as, gosh, inappropriate. At some point this game could blow up in everyone’s face. Yet in the current political dialogue, our security requires playing with global suicide. Any questions?

And, of course, even if “mutually assured destruction” holds tight and humanity avoids nuclear Armageddon, the unaddressed climate crisis is something else that could explode in our faces. Shockingly, “climate” doesn’t recognize the borders we’ve worked so hard to create.

What I’m trying to say is that we — all of us — need to turn evolution into a conscious process. How do we connect with one another, especially those we fear? How do we expand our sense of community and shatter the hatred we now allow to swell unabated toward our declared enemies, especially those beyond our borders? How do we shatter the divide between spiritual and political values? How do we bring, let us say, the wisdom of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin into the political realm?

One of his most well-known quotes is this; “Some day, after mastering the wind, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of Love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

How do we explain — to the ones in power, to the ones who write about and bow to power — that, by “discovering fire for the second time,” Teilhard didn’t mean developing nuclear weapons? How do we explain it to ourselves?

Perhaps the place to begin is by removing the “national” border from our minds and hearts.

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Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com

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