Reason, Sentiment and Human Survival

July 14^th was Woody Guthrie's posthumous 100^th birthday. Listening to his songs of social injustice, especially Deportee and its lament at the careless anonymity with which we regard migrant workers, recalls an earlier age of American humanity. It elicits the pathos of so much of the world's poor and anger at the rank contrast between them and the waste and greed of excessive wealth. The fundamental human compassion of Guthrie's songs strongly suggests the missing element in so much of our efforts to deal with humanity's major and increasing problems ranging from famine to war for the world's remaining resources.

But compassion is not the only missing element and it often cuts short our attention to the realities, often overlooked, that underlie the situations that move us to compassion. Guthrie's song Deportee, lamenting the callous indifference of a report on a plane crash, which killed the deported immigrants, has behind it the fact of gross human overpopulation. Where is the lament over that gross tragedy? Why can we not bring our compassion to bear on the fate of children born into an overpopulated world that makes their lives even more desperate than that of their parents? Why can we not bring our anger to bear on the Catholic Church and the Muslim fundamentalists and the Christian fundamentalist Quiverfull movement which promote increased birth rates knowing full well the fate that awaits those born to a world having little use for them?

There is an old gospel song titled This World is Not My Home. The fact is this world is our only home. Yet the former elicits a feeling of longing for a non-existent place and the latter elicits little emotion at best.

The central concern in all this is to begin a process of engaging human emotions, especially those surrounding the concept of home. Carl Sagan in his brief Pale Blue Dot homage to Earth as the birthplace and only home mankind has ever had, made a poignant effort in this direction. It should be as ongoing a theme in human discourse as any religion. I have appended it at the end of this article.

Until humanity can or will devote its compassion to these fundamental causes of human suffering, remote though they may seem, we will make little progress in ameliorating that suffering.

Additionally, it is imperative that we divorce morality from religion. We need to return to that good old 18^th century notion of a moral sentiment inherent in all people. As our world continues its global integration it is equally imperative that that sentiment is guided by reason applied to the facts of human existence. Morality can be taught. Compassion is an imperative element in that education. We must do this before the bigotries now extant in society destroy us all. An example of the moral sentiment is the refrain from Pete Seeger's My Rainbow Race. This song was sung by 40,000 Norwegians, standing in pouring rain, in, as they said, Love and Defiance. This was a unifying protest against those who would pit Christians against Muslims and to that end murdered 77 members of Norway's socialist Labor Party, which promotes multiculturalism. The majority of those killed were teenagers at a summer camp. The singing event can be viewed on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q7CPNNWfME. For the meaning of moral sentiment I strongly suggest viewing this event and letting it fully sink in. You may want to view it several times to let its full dimensions sink in.

The refrain:

One blue sky above us, one ocean lapping all our shore
One earth so green and round, who could ask for more?
And because I love you I'll give it one more try
To show my rainbow race, it's too soon to die

Bob Newhard

aken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it sailed away from Earth, lion miles in the dista

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) from Earth.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Go Small. Go Big. Go to Hell?

That mankind has a future, tenuous though it may be, is a given. What that future should (must?) be is currently being contested primarily by those who insist we must go small, such as Bill McKibben on the one hand and those who insist we must go big, albeit with greater concern for humanity than current globalization has afforded, such as Joseph Stiglitz. Both are good people concerned for what is best for humanity, which allows us to focus on the evidence offered rather than the motivations behind both positions.

Those who would have us go small propose economic and political localism. Goods should be produced as close to the areas of consumption and use as possible to minimize the energy and environmental costs of transportation. Currently the average distance food travels to the United States consumer is 1,500 miles. The economy as a whole should also be localized to minimize the excessive accumulations of capital that underlie the ruinous speculation that occurs when capital is increasingly detached from production. Localism in politics brings the political process closer to the citizen and makes participation in the political process more relevant to citizen concerns.

Among the downsides of localism is provincialism with its attendant narrow mindedness that can lead to violence when the differences between local groups are unmitigated by a cultural consciousness of our commonality. One of the virtues of large cities is the cosmopolitanism they can produce. McKibben sees the Internet, with its plethora of cultural and informational content as a major offset to localism’s potential for provincialism. Localism also fails to take into account that the earth’s resources are not equally distributed. Those humans living in the Sahel aridity of northern Africa, subject to frequent drought, have far less in natural resources than those living in temperate zones in Europe and the United States. Interestingly, South Korea seems to understand this. They are currently developing prefabricated, enclosed farms growing produce hydroponically. These immense enclosures could be placed anywhere and powered by locally-generated electricity. As population continues to grow, humans will have to live on less productive land. Even in the so-called developed world agricultural resources are being depleted. In some parts of the American Midwest top soil that was initially 2 feet thick is now down to 6 inches and has to be intensively fertilized with fossil fuel-produced fertilizers to maintain its productivity.

Proponents of globalism point out that humans are one species. That the planet is our only home and that we have to manage ourselves and our resources in global terms to even begin to effectively address the problems we have created. If we do not do this we risk perishing as a species as we quibble and kill over our differences. It can be argued that globalization has not been the problem. Globalization in the hands of immense profit-driven financial institutions has been the problem.

But let us look at a third alternative. Not what we ought to do, but what are we likely to do. The global economy and hence global power is in the hands of those who are focused on immediate financial and/or political objectives. As an example, the recent meeting of the G20 on global warming took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The first such meeting took place 20 years ago. Currently about 25% of the Amazon rainforest, sometimes referred to as the lungs of the planet, has been lost. Yet this enclave of global power meeting in the very country that contains most of that forest could come to no firm plan of action. Brazil, one of the larger economies of the world, pleaded that it did not have the resources to stop the steady encroachment on the forest. There was no attempt by these world leaders to bring together the world’s resources to stop the destruction and begin restoring this essential feature of global geography. We can globalize financial speculation to a 24/7 world-wide operation, but we cannot find the resources to protect life on this planet. That is but one of many instances that illustrate mankind’s inability to deal effectively with problems of this magnitude. It is, in my judgment, more likely that this incapacity to take seriously problems that will take more than one human generation to eventuate, compounded by the inability to overcome the relatively petty issues that have always divided us, that will spell the end of our species or at least spell the end of civilization and send us back to the tribal cultures of our forebears. We know how to obliterate our species. The idiocy of scientists' creating a much more virulent version of the pandemically deadly avian flu virus is testament to that.

Evolution produced an animal with a brain that has done absolutely amazing things, but encased it in the usual emotion-driven, narrow focus of the rest of the animal kingdom. This brain, that with its discovery of the Higgs boson is now in a position to understand the universe it inhabits, that sees inadequacies in its thinking as opportunities for further understanding and because of that does not war and kill over major differences such as Newtonian or Einsteinian cosmology as religion does over its differences, was unfortunately encapsulated in the same emotion-driven body as the rest of the animal kingdom. Our curse is knowing more than we can ever be and the inability to control that small portion we can be.

Bob Newhard

The Drone as Symptom

The first thing the drone should call to our attention is the issue of unintended consequences. This is often a euphemism for a failure to think about or take seriously the longer term impact of the technology on society. This is notoriously true of military technology.

The machine gun is an example. Invented in the mid-19^th century, its earliest use was by colonial European powers to quell the mass attacks of indigenous warriors. Subsequently, when applied in the intra-European World War 1, it horrified Europeans who saw factory productivity applied to killing on the battlefield. The startling losses in just one battle, that of Verdun, produced 714,231 casualties of which 262,308 were dead or missing, were substantially attributable to the machine gun. Eventually this weapon was reduced in size from the initial horse-drawn carriage to the submachine gun used in the gang wars of Prohibition in the 1920s. If the larger ramifications of this weapon are of interest to you I would suggest reading The Social History of the Machine Gun by John Ellis.

Again, we dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We killed between 150,000 and 240,000 people to demonstrate our new awesome power to the Russians. This time we had a very knowledgeable prophet in J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of developing the atom bomb, upon witnessing the first test uttered these fateful words from the Bhagavad Gita, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”  He resisted subsequent development of a nuclear bomb. For this he was pilloried by this nation’s leaders, especially that citadel of the short view we call Congress. Here, in the glow of our atomic dominance of the moment, there was little consideration of the bomb’s employment by small countries like Israel, Pakistan and North Korea, not to mention the small “dirty” bomb that can be carried in a suitcase.

During the resistance to our invasions in the Middle East the first roadside bombs have now passed to suicide explosive vests and the explosive carried in a shoe to destroy an airliner loaded with people. One of the pronounced tendencies of modern technology is to go small.

With this evidence of our profound inability to learn, what are we to expect of the drone? Already it has passed from large missile-carrying aircraft to a small, model-airplane sized device called the Switchblade. It is launched from a mortar-sized tube carried, launched, and flown by one person. It kills by crashing into the victim. Wired Magazine reports that drones the size of insects are being tested in England in networked swarms. Surveillance of cities is an intended application.

All this technology dumped on an unaccustomed population that has problems with red light surveillance at traffic intersections, requires a deep understanding of the human psyche and how it functions in a social context. What, for example, does it mean to abandon privacy? Do we know enough about the relationship of privacy to self-identity to subject large populations to mass surveillance unannounced?  People in Southern Yemen have become accustomed to seeing drones overhead. When there is an exceptional number of them they know the Americans are looking for somebody.

 In short, they know danger lurks, but they know not where. What happens to the human psyche living in an environment such as this?

George Orwell dealt with this kind of world in his novel 1984.  A technology that undoubtedly will be promoted to the public as a provider of safety can easily, and probably will, turn into the all-encompassing dictatorship Orwell describes. We simply do not know enough about human beings that have evolved over many millennia in a context of disparate tribal groups, the psychology of which is on constant display in everything from the tribal violence of the Middle East to the tribal violence following a European soccer game.

Where are the sociologists and social psychologists that could lead a well-publicized effort to warn the citizenry of what their corporate-driven government is doing? Where is the Green Peace of military technology?

Bob Newhard

Two Types of Morality: What Happens When One is Mistaken for the Other

There is a personal morality in which values such as honesty function. There is also a social morality in which values such as justice function. When personal morality takes the place of social morality, dictatorship or some other form of authoritarianism usually results. As an example, Plato does this when articulating his ideal state in the Republic. For Plato the highest good or value is knowledge. This is a personal value. States or other groups do not have knowledge; only individual humans do. As a result, when Socrates in this dialogue is asked who will guard the citizens from the guardians of the Republic , Socrates introduces the philosopher king, a wise dictator. Plato had no use for democracy so this result did not bother him. Because we use language so sloppily (and often pay the price) we sometimes attribute knowledge to society as when we talk about a "knowledge-based economy."

A second feature of personal morality is that its values in and of themselves are absolute. The problem with absolute values is that when they are applied to the real world, which is highly variable in its content, this results in either awkward modification of the absolute value or denial of the facts. This latter consequence is illustrated by the Catholic Church's banishment of Galileo for asserting that the Earth revolved around the sun and hence mankind was not the center of their deity's universe. Again, the value expressed in the imperative "Thou shalt not kill" is quickly modified when applied to the real world. Some forms of killing are less heinous than others, e.g. murder versus manslaughter or perfectly moral, e.g. self defense or killing in military combat. The fact that this value so quickly becomes inoperative unless its moral injunction is modified should teach humanity something about personal moral values, namely, they need to be thoroughly evaluated before being applied to the real world. The current conflict over abortion is another case in point. Despite the factual evidence that the fetus, at least in its earlier embryonic stages, is not human, e.g. it does not have the nervous system to be human, many people are prepared to assert that a woman must carry that fetus to term unless her life is threatened no matter what the consequences for the rest of her life. The same argument is made even when there is no fetus. Moral injunctions against birth control are premised on the wrongful interference with their deity's desire to create a new soul. Cases such as these show how morality, given free reign, can be so damaging because it is not subject to the same level of initial and ongoing evaluation that people often exercise in buying a home or a car.  

Social morality is concerned with what a society ought to be and do. Social morality appeared in the 18^th century as part of the Enlightenment. For instance, Immanuel Kant justified the moral injunction against lying not as a violation of God's law or a moral code, but as deleterious to society. His argument against lying was that if everybody did it society could not function. Again, Jeremy Bentham's measure of morality was "the greatest good for the greatest number."

Several things follow from Bentham's definition:

1) It leaves the "good" undefined thus giving it maximum applicability to many cultures and promoting a global ethic.

2) It is open to investigation and modifications as the human condition changes. In this it is much closer to the scientific method than the arbitrary injunctions of previous moral systems, which sometimes tried to apply millennia old tribal moral values to modern society.

3) This reality-based moral system is founded on intelligent inquiry not on the intellectual vacuity and untestability of faith. Unlike faith, testability is less manipulable by those who use "faith" for devious political and social purposes.

Finally, this approach to morality avoids the "dumbing down" of humanity at a time when its intelligence is most needed.

Our current value systems are killing large numbers of our species. They are endangering the future of our species and promoting increasing violence. They are doing this because they deal in absolutes rather than with the facts of human existence. As an example, the Catholic Church has long held that contraception is an evil because it interferes with God's will in procreation. In Genesis, an ancient tribal text, their deity commands them to "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…"  On a planet that now has 7 billion people and counting and is faced with rapidly diminishing resources, this injunction to an ancient small tribe seeking to insure its growth is creating havoc in the modern world. They also vigorously pursue an anti-abortion agenda even at the point of first cell division because they believe a soul is created at that point. Again, with no regard for future humans and the chaos and suffering they will experience. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. At the social level the unexamined value is not worth having and can be very dangerous.

Bob Newhard

Holy War on a Global Scale?

That the U. S. military was teaching its officers at the Joint Forces Staff College that it was necessary to destroy the Muslim religion, including nuking Mecca and Medina, is horrific in its utter disregard for human life and for the unrelenting chaos it would unleash in a world containing 1.4 billion Muslims. The fact that this was being taught to the officers who will comprise the next generation of military leaders evidences a military clearly out of control or conspiratorial at the highest level.

That the recommended target was not a nation or other political entity, but Muslims themselves and hence the Islamic religion, demonstrates that this is a proposal for a massive, global holy war. But how did such a proposal reach this level of advocacy in the U.S. military?

Jeff Sharlet in an article titled Christianity In the Military: Are Chaplains Becoming Increasingly Fundamentalist? on Huffington Post describes the process of biased selection and promotion by which  the military's chaplaincy has been taken over by Christian fundamentalists. The chaplaincy, which for most of its existence has been apportioned to religions and their denominations by percentage of the nation's population, is now about 80% fundamentalist. The chaplains themselves previously had a liberal university or college education along with their seminary training. Many chaplains now come from bible colleges and have limited background in world and cultural history. The chaplaincy was intended to serve the religious needs of soldiers of the various denominations. Fundamentalist chaplains view their task as converting soldiers to their religious views, indeed, Sharlet points out that they regard the military as a mission field. Sharlet recounts the experience of one chaplain who protested this Christian fundamentalist bias in the chaplaincy and was forced from the chaplaincy.

Seymour Hersh, the highly regarded New Yorker Magazine investigative reporter, in an article titled Seymour Hersh Unleashed, which covers Hersh's speech to the American University campus in Qatar, is quoted as saying "Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta." The JSOC is the Joint Services Operations Command.

Hersh also said that much of the mind set among the higher echelons of military leadership is that of the Crusades in which they are defending Christians against Muslims.

Finally, Jeff Sharlet in a Harper's Magazine article titled Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military, records, among other things, the bizarre practice of some Christian soldiers stationed near a small Afghanistan village of painting "Jesus Kill Mohamed" on the front of their Bradley Fighting Vehicles, broadcasting this taunting slogan with a bullhorn from the roof of their compound, an erstwhile public school, and then charging out into the night to shoot angry Muslims who fire at them from the windows of their homes.

In all this it should not be forgotten that G. W. Bush, when launching the war against Iraq, used the term "crusade," for which he later apologized. It has become the fashion of politicians, especially  Republicans, to convey their impolitic meaning and then apologize for it. Generally the press lets them get away with it.

It is evident that a powerful group or groups of fundamentalist Christians are intent upon taking over our government, especially its military, and using it to further the global conquest of Christianity. The dimensions of the holy war that will result are staggering, especially considering the nuclear and biological weapons now available. In my judgment the so-called "War on Terror" is but the first overt step in this process. The gravity of the situation requires that we make a vigorous effort to make this a public issue demanding thorough government investigation, transparently carried out and reported. There will be a deafening cry of an attack on religious freedom, but Christian fundamentalists have made their religious beliefs a threat to our society and through our society to the rest of the world. There is already a good deal of information available on the web and in books by Susan Jacoby, Jeff Sharlet and Anne C. Loveland.

  Newhard

Suggested reading on this topic:

Books:

The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby.

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet.

American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 1942-1993 by Anne C. Loveland.

Articles:

Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military by Jeff Sharlet published in Harper's Magazine  may be found at http://harpers.org/archive/2009/05/0082488

U.S. Military Taught Officers: 'Hiroshima' Tactics for 'Total War' on Islam, Wired Magazine May 10, 2012. This article may be found at http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/total-war-islam/all/1

The U.S. military's 'anti-Islam classes.' This is a video showing some of the slides Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley showed in his course urging the nuking of Mecca and Medina. It can be found on Al Jazeera at http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2012/05/2012512105527585215.html

Christianity in the Military: Are Chaplains Becoming Increasingly Fundamentalists? This article by Jeff Sharlet on Huffington Post may be found at

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-sharlet/christianity-in-the-milit_b_747585.html

The Job

The job has become central to much of the global unrest. Joblessness was a primary force in the Egyptian revolution. Greeks have to emigrate to find jobs. The Portuguese government has advised the jobless to do likewise. The want of jobs has caused large riots in France and England. And job creation keeps being a focus of American politics, albeit a very fuzzy ineffective one. Most importantly, the massive movements of people from poor rural areas to urban areas, creating enormous slums, is occurring because people are seeking jobs.

The global impact of joblessness may lead one to think of the job as an economic entity. But what is the job? It is more than a system for distributing the gross domestic product, radically unequal though that is. It functions heavily in providing self identity. One of the most common questions we ask of each other is, "What do you do for a living?" The job dominates a large part of our lives as we perform the duties for which we are paid. We rely on it to provide the wherewithal to accomplish whatever else is of prime importance to us. The job often positions us in society. With a job you are somebody, without it you are nobody. My father, an auto mechanic, was proud that he never "went on the dole" during the Great Depression even though on occasion, he earned less than a WPA worker on relief. When joblessness rises so do the divorce and suicide rates. Once we realize the burden we have placed on the job we can begin to appreciate its significance in contemporary society.

In capitalist societies we have left this crucial sociological element in the hands of those who have no fundamental interest in it other than to minimize the number of them to increase profit. Is there not a glaring contradiction between the fundamental necessity of jobs for humanity placed in the hands of those who see them as a liability? This is compounded by the fact that the companies that provide jobs are themselves pawns in the financial world of arbitrage and to the rumor-driven greed that can alter that company's stock value and the employment of thousands overnight. This is no foundation for as fundamental a purpose as the job is supposed to fulfill.

Work was not always in the form of a job as we now know it. The job as we understand it is a rather recent invention dating roughly from the 18^th century. In his book The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 Robert Steinfeld describes the emergence of so called "free labor" from the feudal environment in England. He is at pains to demonstrate that much of this labor was not free because of English legal restrictions on the worker. He also stresses that a contract between an employee and an employer does not constitute free labor, e.g. indentured servitude. In general things were heavily weighted in favor of the employer. They still are despite the union movement to try to balance the relationship by pitting numbers of workers against ownership wealth.

We thus have, in addition to the above noted liabilities, a system that is inherently unfair to workers. With all these liabilities, what are the remedies?

In an article by Frank Joyce titled Is It Possible To Build An Economy Without Jobs?  to be found on Alternet at

http://www.alternet.org/visions/155186/is_it_possible_to_build_an_economy_without_jobs_?page=entire, the remedy for the unfairness of the employer/employee relationship is to be found in employee owned cooperatives. The examples offered by Joyce are small to medium sized businesses, although some are international in scope. This size range indicates to me that this form of business organization may require a level of interaction not available to large organizations such Bechtel, a major infrastructure builder or an Alcoa aluminum plant. It also does not change other onerous features of the capitalist system, e.g. uncontrolled speculation.

Others, including FDR in his Four Freedoms speech, which included a freedom from want as a right and Jefferson in his desire for an America of small farmers see economic security as a necessary condition for democracy. Robert Theobald in his 1966 book titled The Guaranteed Income: Next Step in Economic Evolution? saw that democracy's requirement for an independent citizenry made economic independence a prerequisite for democracy's existence. Without this economic support the capitalist system will progressively move wealth and the power it generates into fewer and fewer hands. Plato long ago delineated this progression from democracy to oligarchy to tyranny. In the end the job, as currently understood, cannot be the economic basis for democracy.

 

In the current debate about jobs progressives should make a large issue of the requirement of democracy for an adequate  income for citizen independence. It is not a question of whether people do or do not deserve it, but whether democracy will be made viable. Along with all the other reasons for an adequate distribution of the gross domestic product, e.g. crime reduction, family wellbeing, adequate food, etc., the viability of our democracy should figure importantly in a progressive push for a guaranteed citizen income. We need to articulate a well developed plan and then push it. The political right senses this need, which is why they have tried to make "entitlement" a dirty word and why, at root, they are enemies of democracy.

 

Bob Newhard 

Will Norwegians give us another Lesson in Democracy?

Anders Breivik killed 77 people, mostly teenagers. All but eight of the victims were members of the Workers Youth League, an affiliate of the Norwegian Labor Party, at a summer camp. He was dressed in a police officers uniform and shot children as they came to him for protection and as they froze in fear before him. Why this slaughter, which at his trial he declared to be "necessary?" Because the Labor Party supported multiculturalism, which Breivik calls cultural Marxism and which he believes fostered Muslim dominance of Norway. He accuses the multiculturalists of being ideologues, when he was actually an ideologue in its final stages, i.e. that point at which human beings become merely objects.

Ideology this extreme has become a plague on this planet. In politics we get Timothy McVeigh and Anders Breivik. In religion it plants bombs in market places they know will kill people no matter what their beliefs because they have become objects. In the American military, soldiers murder civilians, including children, because they have been reduced to objects. The military is known for training that reduces human beings, called the enemy, to objects. They are "ragheads" etc. This makes killing easier for young people brought up to be civilized. Unfortunately this reducing those we oppose to objects is an all too frequent human response to conflict. It permeates society. It has become so bad in this country that people say they have found "closure" when the killer of their child is executed. They find peace in yet another death. We have sublimated revenge, for that is all the execution of killers amounts to, to the peace of closure.

Amid all the antagonism, killing and maiming that has gone on in the name of national interest, in a continuing cultural compression, the Norwegian people and their government have shone as a beacon for humanity. They rejected a cultural antagonism that killed their children, and responded not with vengeance, but by focusing on humanity and its needs.

As an instructive contrast, faced with the 9-11 terrorist attack the  American government immediately declared war, which the imperialists Cheney and Rumsfeld had long planned for. The American people, long accustomed to a military response to any kind of attack, ebulliently waved flags and sent their young people off to war. As a result hundreds of thousands have been killed and more than that maimed and the coffers of the United States drained and the lands of the Middle East trashed. So much for the eye-for-an-eye response that is this ten-year long "piece of cake."

As of this writing we do not know what the Breivik verdict will be. Hopefully, it will teach us another lesson in humanity. The people objected to an initial psychologist's finding that Breivik suffered from schizophrenia. A second psychologist found that Breivik was not schizoid at the time of his murders and is not so at the time of his trial. However, in the midst of Breivik'a barbarous testimony, including his desire to behead the Prime Minister,  40,000 Norwegians gathered in drenching rain to celibate multiculturalism and defy the Breivik and his followers in their attempt to insinuate vengeance into their society. As a beautiful testament to their appreciation for humanity and their determination to defeat Breivik and his ilk they sang Pete Seeger's Rainbow Race (See some of lyrics below.) It was a heartrending testimony to the best in human nature. A video of the event can be found on the Common Dreams web site. Norway has no death penalty and the maximum sentence is 24 years in prison. Will they give us yet another lesson in the sentencing of Anders Breivik?

To my mind, the Norwegian people and their government should be awarded the next Nobel Peace Prize. May we all learn from them.

Bob Newhard

Refrain from Pete Seeger's song Rainbow Race:

One blue sky above us
One ocean lapping all our shore
One earth so green and round
Who could ask for more
And because I love you
I'll give it one more try
To show my rainbow race
It's too soon to die.

Some folks want to be like an ostrich,
Bury their heads in the sand.
Some hope that plastic dreams
Can unclench all those greedy hands.
Some hope to take the easy way:
Poisons, bombs. They think we need 'em.
Don't you know you can't kill all the unbelievers?
There's no shortcut to freedom.

Go tell, go tell all the little children.
Tell all the mothers and fathers too.
Now's our last chance to learn to share
What's been given to me and you