Obama and War: America’s Dead-end Vision
To President Obama’s Nobel Prize speech, we have a mixed and strange response coming out of the country. From a Peace Prize recipient, we are so used to a lofty vision, a vision of achievable peace, that Obama’s words about the necessity of war to achieve peaceful ends falls like a dull thud upon our dreams. It is a vision of perpetual war to achieve intermittent peace.
It makes many people think. It disrupts our normal commitment to the ideals of non-violence, of Gandhi, of Martin Luther King, Jr., as viable and achievable ends. It says there will always be war, and the necessity for war.
The response is interesting. From the right, from hawks, there is begrudging assent. From the left, there is dissent; but, underlying even this dissent , a kind of unspoken confusion and dilemma. This is the man they voted for, he was to be their hero, their dreams were finally on track.
And it posed a question: Perhaps Obama is right. Perhaps this is the reality of life. Perhaps we need, in the final analysis, to adjust our collective vision, to dim it down a bit, to grapple with eternal, unbending realities.
This has been the discourse since time immemorial; and now at this particular moment of time in America – America, the beautiful; America, land of the brave and free; America, the shining city upon a hill – we meet once again hard, seemingly intractable realities; and the pronouncements falling upon our ears and dimmed eyes is: War is with us always. Prepare.
For the President, many seemed to agree: All the choices were bad. To pull out of Afghanistan, would leave the land open to devils. To engage, means death and the always uncertain quagmires of war. And the American people are restless. They want answers. They want clear-cut solutions. They want to win, and they want to be absolved of war, and they fear where we are headed.
In the end, there is no way out, because there is no vision in the land. We are at a crossroads, and we will always be at a crossroads, until we begin to tackle the real problem: Ourselves. Each of us, as individuals, need to grow. We need to expand our own individual vision of our place in the cosmos. We need to see others as ourselves.
This is, of course, the realm of religion. There is no other way. It is beyond right and left, beyond politics, beyond us and them.
And at this point in time, there is no answer from the old religions. Everywhere, Christianity, Islam and Judaism are locked in a death-battle. This is our world’s reality.
It will take another revolution to upend this dead-end vision of history. This will be the greatest of revolutions, a human revolution played out on a mass scale such as the world has never seen before. It is already here, it has begun. It is emerging in the hearts of ordinary people, the housewife down the street, the mechanic, the department store clerk, the busdriver, your hairdresser. It is emerging by the people, of the people, and for the people. It is transformation, and it is hope. It is beyond President Obama, or anyone else leading us out of the wilderness. It is our own individual struggle. And then we can spread our vision, one by one, to others.
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