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| The "Road of Death" in Bolivia crosses the Andes Mountains, some 200 miles or so from La Paz to villages in the jungle headwaters of the Amazon on the other side of the mountains. Note that it is a one-lane road. |
I
know you're wondering what to make of this photograph of the Bolivian
"Road of Death," in a post with a title suggesting it's a response to
the controversy over recent mass shootings in the U.S. I'll get to the
Bolivian connection later, but let me start by saying that I had hoped to get
this post up on April Fool's Day, which also this year was Easter day. So
you understand why I capitalized Foolish in the title. I'm not going to try to
explain that, assuming that you, gentle reader, are familiar enough with the
long mythopoetic and historical tradition of the Fool, who is sometimes even
the Holy Fool. For example like that rabble-rouser we're told about in the New
Testament whose Foolish advice was "Love your enemies."
Once
I missed April 1, there was April 4, actually two significant anniversary
opportunities (1967 and 1968) to talk about Martin Luther King's Foolish
attempts to stop the killing. Missed that one. And then there was April 12, Yom
HaShoa, Holocaust Remembrance Day. I was going to talk about Anne Frank's
statement, "In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and
gentle spirit." But didn't get that done either.
Now
it's Tax Day, and here I am again, but on this Day with another aspect of
Foolishness to deal with, the killing our taxes enable our government to carry
out.
Back
on Easter/April Fool's Day, I had planned to tell real-life stories
illustrating how "loving your enemy" turns out in many individual
cases to be quite practical life-saving advice. For now I want to focus on
"death and taxes." The best analysis I have seen about the recent
U.S. mass shootings was by Matt Taibbi in a 2/16/2018 Rolling Stone article
titled If We Want Kids to Stop Killing, the Adults Have to Stop, Too (https://preview.tinyurl.com/ybseclkd). Taibbi
makes the case that "America's rage-sickness trickles down from the
top." Especially relevant:
What about the fact that we're an institutionally violent society whose
entire economy has historically been dependent upon the production of
weapons? And how about the fact that we wantonly (and probably illegally)
murder civilians in numerous countries as a matter of routine?
Apart from a few scenes in Bowling for Columbine, this
is an explanation you won't hear very much. Military spending is the lifeline
of virtually every federally-elected politician in the country. You've been to
trained seal shows where the animals get a fish every time they perform? The
same principle works with members of Congress and defense contracts. The
U.S. is more dependent than ever on a quasi-socialistic system
that redistributes tax dollars to defense projects in even fashion across both
Republican and Democratic congressional districts.
In an era of incredible division and political polarization, military
killing is the most thoroughly bipartisan of all policy initiatives. Drone
murders spiked tenfold under Obama, and Trump has supposedly
already upped the Obama rate by a factor of eight. The new
president apparently killed more civilians in his first seven
months in office than Obama did overall, making use of our growing capacity for
mechanized murder.
Maybe this is just hippie-ish whining about the military, but if we're
talking about where the rationalization of violence comes from in our society,
Jesus, how can you not look in this direction?
So,
51 years after King's denunciation of my country as "the greatest purveyor
of violence in the world," that culture of violence prevails, encouraging
individuals angry about whatever issue to think first about buying themselves
an NRA-15 assault rifle, and provoking "terrorist" blowback from
other countries we have invaded, bombed or otherwise threatened. No, George W,
it's not our "freedoms" they hate but what we are doing in their back
yards. I love America and I know all the good things we do. A large copy of the
Declaration of Independence hangs on our living room wall, a noble document our
country still fails to live up to. And I find it hard to deny that in large
part the U.S. government, in cahoots with its corporate masters, operates as a
criminal enterprise, extorting wealth from the rest of the world at the point
of a gun, drone or nuclear warhead.
So,
what is to be done? Most simply put, the best way to stop the killing is to
stop killing.
What
can I do? Well, at least stop paying to support the U.S. government's killing
machine. About those supposed inevitabilities "death and taxes," I'm
happy to report so far holding death off for 82! years, and for most of the
last 33 years paying no Federal income taxes. On April Fool's Day of
1985, I resigned from the last full-time job I ever had, resolving to find ways
to live more simply, lowering my carbon footprint and staying below taxable
income levels so as not to be paying for War. And in those few years when I had
some (usually not much) taxable income I at least refused to pay the taxes
willingly, making them come get it (costs more in interest and penalties, but
at least sends a message). Relevant websites: War Resisters League and National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.
About
that Bolivian road of death, I want to recommend another fairly close-by
organization I have some personal acquaintance with and confidence that they
are worth supporting: Servants in Faith and Technology (aka Southern
Institute for Appropriate Technology), based near Lineville AL. SIFAT
is another group, like CDCA I mentioned in the previous post, working to help
poor people in poor countries. The website is https://sifat.org,
and if you go to their homepage, click on About Us and scroll down to Our
History, then scroll to and click on Welcoming the Enemy, you
can read one of those stories I had intended to tell you about in this post. In
the middle of the night in one of those Bolivian jungle villages in 1979, the
soldier thrusts the muzzle of his rifle against the stomach of an American woman, who says .
. . (https://sifat.org/pdfs/Welcoming_the_Enemy.pdf)
SIFAT is also on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sifatbook/
