Adam’s Peace

Today is the Fourth of July, Independence Day for citizens of the United States.

Two hundred thirty one years ago to the day, July 4th, 1776, thirteen of the British Empire’s colonies declared themselves to be a sovereign nation. Well, sort of. A small group of people who had some political power in each of the colonies, and who were also supporters of terrorist groups such as the Sons of Liberty and the Patriots signed a letter intended for the British Parliament which declared the thirteen colonies to be sovereign nations. Before this day, there were minor terrorist acts, such as the assault of soldiers in Boston with rocks hidden in snow balls. This led to the soldiers acting in kind, firing upon their attackers and killing eight, creating what is now known as the Boston Massacre. Also in Boston, the terrorist group, the Sons of Liberty, conducted financial espionage by dumping the contents of a government subsidized shipment into the harbor, ruining an entire boat-load of tea… enough tea to supply the town of Boston and the surrounding area for years.

These terrorists were protesting laws which were passed in Parliament. Because colonies did not have any official representatives in Parliament, the people who were affected had no say in these laws. The problems were not that the laws were unreasonable… indeed, a one-cent tax on official documents, adjusting for inflation, would be the equivalent of a person paying $10 (usd) to have a marriage certificate filed. Most official documents cost much more than this, when a person considers lawyer fees. The taxes were not outrageous… they were very fair and quite easy to pay. The problem was the way that these taxes were levied against the colonies.

Without direct input into the government, these people who had been living under a democracy for their entire lives were suddenly finding their freedoms taken away, without their consent. It was the principle of the laws, not the specifics, which sparked domestic terrorist groups to form. In response to these acts of terrorism, the British government began sending more soldiers to the colonies in the American continent, and because of the lack of government housing, these soldiers were housed in the homes of civilians. This took away more freedom from these British citizens. In order to disrupt the terrorist plottings, the government decreed that people would not be able to meet in large groups, except in church during normal services, taking even more freedom away. In 1776, every major town had an overflowing presence of soldiers, with strict orders to be suspicious of everything. Commerce slowed to a crawl, and even the staunchest supporter of their mother country was feeling the oppression and loss of freedom which they so recently enjoyed.

This is what prompted the Declaration of Independence. It wasn’t a document that was supported by the official local governments of the colonies… in fact, it was a pretty private document until the British troops got wind of it after it was delivered in London.

Open war followed the Declaration, except that, instead of using standard, ‘gentleman’s’ tactics during the war, the colonists used insurgent tactics, such as hiding behind hills, then running away, as well as sending in people who didn’t wear uniforms to set up bombs next to military buildings. The only army we had was a general, a few other officers, and a bunch of people who showed up to attack, then ran away before the British soldiers could turn around. There was nothing for the British to fight, but plenty of ways to be killed, so the regular soldiers of the British Army had no choice but to walk away.

What stuck with us from the War of Independence was the idea that a government can change from nurturing and protective to a stifling security state in a matter of a couple of years. At first, the colonies tried to form a nation of very loosely organized States, much the way that the United Nations works today, but as each state printed their own form of money, commerce across state lines was riddled with problems. Each state formed their own armies, but then these armies started to march against each other. Finally, in 1787, eleven years after the Declaration of Independence, representatives of each state met in secret to debate about how to fix the central, weak government.

What they decided, however, was to get rid of that weak government and create an entirely new government. After four months of heated debate in a very hot building, they finally created the Constitution of the United States of America, the current framework for our system of government.

It isn’t a perfect history… There were a lot of mistakes and misunderstandings. People fed their egos and distrust dealt a heavy blow to one empire and almost destroyed another empire before it even began. The steady voice of reason won out in the end, but even that could not create a perfect government, simply a flexible government. I definitely prefer this version of history to the one that I learned about in elementary school… the imperfections make it more human and more real. George Washington was a slave owner, and rather that vilifying him, it makes him more human… He was a rich man, used to luxury, yet he gave up luxury in order to lead one of the least disciplined armies the world has ever seen, all in the name of liberty. He was elected as our first president after the Constitutional Convention, yet he had matured enough, or perhaps had become disillusioned enough, that he didn’t pursue a third term in office. Thomas Jefferson was a deist, militantly opposed to the idea of Christianity being our ‘founding’ religion, or of there being any religion named as our official religion. Benjamin Franklin was an inventor and political satirist who slept through most of the Convention.

What is amazing to me is that all of these strong personalities were able to reach an agreement at all. The one unifying idea was that of liberty… The government should never take away people’s freedom unless those people give it up on their own. The Bill of Rights, the first ten changes to the Constitution, were both the Constitution’s greatest strength and weakness, because it granted people those things which they desired and needed the most… but it created the impression that if a right wasn’t listed in the Constitution, it could be taken away.

The First Amendment is the one which I hold most dear to my heart. This amendment covers the freedom of speech. I could never demonstrate it as beautifully as Penn and Teller demonstrate it nightly in their magic act in Las Vegas. So, instead of trying to explain it, I’ll show it. Please take five minutes to watch their closing ‘trick,’ which is as much showmanship as it is a salute to the Constitution itself, and the nation which follows it.

RSS subscribers, please watch it on YouTube by following this link: Burning a Flag (Penn & Teller)

I don’t post videos often. In fact, this is the first time that I have ever posted a video. I’m posting this now because it is one of the most important videos, among the most touching and most profound that I have ever seen. If you haven’t already, please take the five minutes to watch it.

Penn and Teller do something which would create an outcry of rage in any “red-blooded” American if it weren’t done on a stage. Yes, it is a trick… but it is ambiguous. Could it be possible to burn a flag out of love? Would I be able to burn a flag?

Seven and a half years ago, I made the following sacred oath to my country before my gods.

I, Adam Adair Bryce Alexander, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

The order of those words are important to me, and determines how I interpret the oath. In making that oath, I swore first to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and swear true faith and allegiance to it. As long as I could continue to support and defend the Constitution, then I would follow the orders of the President and my commanding officers. If I could not do both, then the Uniform Code of Military Justice allows me to make a judgment call, to refuse to follow an order which I deem is unlawful. Of course, the risk of judging an order unlawful is that a court would then decide if that order is lawful or not, and if it was lawful, then I would be placed in jail.

What is most important to me, though, despite any risk of jail time, is following the oath as I understand it. My first allegiance is to the Constitution, to the form of government which it describes. My allegiance is not to the President, I only followed his orders. I lived for five years being held to that oath. Despite no longer being an active duty soldier, subject to the laws of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, I still honor that oath. It is the deepest oath that I have ever made, and I can never willfully break it.

While in the Army, I had to ask myself many deep personal questions. Am I willing to die for my country? Am I willing to kill for my country? Am I willing to do anything and everything necessary to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, though it may wreck my body or warp my mind?

Fortunately, I may never know the answer to the most horrible of those questions. I have never looked through the sights of a rifle at a living person. I have never looked at radar returns on my computer screen, passed on intelligence, and seen those dots disappear. Never-the-less, I have trained other soldiers in how to use their rifles properly, coaching them on how to breath, and to pull back on the trigger slowly so that the recoil surprises them. I have passed on tricks and fieldcraft that keeps people hidden and silent so that they can survive. I have trained people on reading radar properly, how artillery and bombers want to see information, and how to predict where those little yellow dots will be so that they can be stopped. I know that my knowledge lives on in the Army, and I know that the people who have inherited my knowledge are in combat situations. The language is sanitized, but it all means death… either for a soldier who I didn’t train well enough, or for someone else if my training was ’sufficient.’

There is, however, one question that I know the answer to, absolutely. I have run this scenario through my mind so often that I feel as though it has already happened.

In the military, there is one little-known and even more rarely practiced tradition. The flag is considered a living body of the United States. Just as it would be considered an atrocity to drag the body of a person through the streets to cheer their death, so too would it be an atrocity to drag a flag through the streets, to have it stepped upon, spat upon, and mutilated by the people who hate it. Burning a flag intact is just as atrocious as burning a man alive. If a military base were ever to fall into enemy hands, it is the responsibility of the last soldier to give the flag a proper funeral. To lay a flag to rest, first, the field of stars must be cut away from the stripes. This symbolizes separating the soul from the body, and marks the ‘death’ of that flag. Next, the stripes are burned, just as a body is burned in a funeral pyre. The field of stars is left untouched, and any desecration by the enemy afterwards is ineffective, as the soul can not be damaged.

So, to the question, can I burn a flag out of love? Yes. It is possible to burn a flag lovingly, and I would be willing and able to do it, so long as my tears do not extinguish the fire. I would never ask to do this horrific task, but if I saw no other alternative, then I would take the lead so that I knew that it was done right.

In case you didn’t know, as it is rarely sang, the words that Penn Jillette quoted at the end of the video make up the second stanza of The Star Spangled Banner. Just as I could not express the First Amendment any better than Penn and Teller, I could not give the background of The Star Spangled Banner, a song which still brings tears to my eyes, any better than Isaac Asimov does in his short article, All Four Stanzas.

Please, on this Fourth of July, take the time to explore your own nationalism, no matter what nation you are a citizen of. Consider your own nation’s history and origins, and reflect on the lives of the people who have brought you the liberties that you now enjoy. Listen to your own national anthem and allow the pride to swell into your chest, until it reaches your throat and you fight back tears. Then, look around at your community and explore the different ways that you can increase the liberty of those around you. The only certainty that I know, is that in every free nation, someone gave their life so that you can enjoy the liberties that you have today. I’m not asking anyone to give their lives. I’m only asking that you live your life freely, so that I’ll know that my troubled conscience is a worthy price to pay.

I think that it would be appropriate to close with the original Pledge of Allegiance, stripped of its politically hateful terms added as an affront to the U.S.S.R. in the 1950’s.

I pledge allegiance to the flag, and to the republic, for which it stands; one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Kara-Leah Masina, who owns the eponymous blog klmasina.com, asked me a very difficult question, one which, so far, I have at least two different answers for. Kara-Leah certainly seems to have a knack for stretching the minds of those she meets, whether it is in asking a deceptively simple question, or through her writings, both of fiction and of her own journey in her blog.

The four word question, for which I need to delve deep within the human psyche and far into the philosophical and spiritual words to answer, is this:

Why is there war?

War seems to be one of the central themes of life, recorded in the earliest human histories, and passed down by oral tradition from prehistoric sources. The Christian Bible is full of war, and even suggests that weapons of war have existed in the earliest ancestral memories of the people in the middle eastern region, with the flaming sword barring the way to the Garden of Eden. Even the Tao te Ching discusses war and its practices, despite its otherwise pacifistic philosophies. Beowulf, one of the earliest oral stories from England, includes war as one of its themes.

Even some of the States which now form the United States had marched against each other, during the brief time when the former colonies were all united as a confederacy, after claiming their freedom the the British Empire and before adopting the Constitution of the United States of America. Afterwards, of course, the American Civil War also showed us that, even with the unity of over 80 years as one nation, war could still be fought between brothers, and fathers and sons can fire at each other in battle.

The easy answer is the psychological one. There is war because groups of people will fight other groups of people over resources. This has been the primary reason throughout history, with land being the most common resource fought over. The Spanish fought the native Americans over gold and land… Citizens of the United States also fought native Americans over land, mostly for their farms. The most recent land-grabbing war was World War II, with Germany, Italy, and Japan being chief among those hoping to spread their territories. Another popular resource is people, particularly when those people can then be called slaves.

There are other wars, though. These wars are over intangible ideas. One of the most common of these intangible ideas is liberty in one of its various forms. Another intangible reason for war is to exert ideological supremacy, sort of an anti-freedom. The difference between the two is very hard to see, and it’s almost impossible to know the difference while the war is still raging on. Both of these types of wars come as an internal revolution, where groups of citizens overthrow their current government. One shining example of a liberating war is the American Revolution, but I think that many Americans would be surprised if I also mentioned that the Bolshevik Revolution was also a shining example of a liberating war. In both cases, the citizens who led the uprising were living under a government that had lost touch with the needs and desires of the most common citizen, and those people fought for an ideal that, on paper at least, promised greater freedom and equality. The problem with the Bolshevik Revolution wasn’t the revolution itself, it was the leaders who came into power afterwards. The founders of the United States understood that corruption in office was inevitable if the people did not hold their representatives accountable, and they remembered that it was their own people they were fighting against. In Russia, the Bolsheviks overthrew a monarchy, so didn’t recognize the threat of corruption that anybody faces. In America, however, the Patriots had overthrown another democratic government, so had seen what becomes of people who hold office when there aren’t enough restrictions in place. (King George still had some power at the time, but the decision to tax the colonies without their vote came from the Parliament… Those involved in politics at the time knew this, but it was easier to use a single, seemingly corrupt person as a scape goat.)

Is there a good reason to fight a war? Well, perhaps. An analogy of war is of a hot iron or poker. Simply sticking a hot iron into someone’s arm will cause a lot of damage, but if the hot iron is stuck into a deep wound, it will prevent the person from bleeding to death and remove some of the infection. If the burn isn’t kept clean and taken care of afterwards, a new infection can spring up, though, and may undo all of the good of the original poke. War is never a good thing, but sometimes, it is better than the alternative. Fortunately, now, we have antibiotics and surgery, just as we have diplomacy, embargoes, and the United Nations, so just as cauterizing a wound with a hot iron is obsolete, war is also becoming obsolete.

Now on to the hard part of this question.

I am assuming a lot about people’s spirituality here, so let me make is clear as to where I’m coming from and what assumptions I’m making.

From what I’ve observed, the most common view of divinity is of a creator, or a small group of creators, who has humanity’s best interests at heart. Now, from that perspective, why would it be in humanity’s best interest for war to exist? Why is it in my best interest to have knowledge of war?

Well, from a spiritual perspective, the only thing that we keep with us after we die is our knowledge. This leads me to believe that the purpose of living is to learn. Why are we learning? What will we do with this knowledge later? Well, that is up to you to decide… I won’t be pretentious enough to say that I know what goes on in the spiritual worlds, since my knowledge is filtered through my senses. I see what I expect, so I don’t want to change other people’s expectations, since there is a chance that I could be wrong.

Whatever goes on after we die, since we retain our knowledge and our purpose here is to learn, I would say that the purpose of war is to suffer. Nobody directly benefits from war, we only benefit from what happens after the war. Those who participate in the war, whether as a soldier, a refuge, or a spectator, learn about the suffering.

This leads to another question… Why is there suffering? Can’t I learn about good things all of the time and, since that is the whole of my experience, only do good things?

Well, there are two underlying dualities in the world. The opposite of peace is suffering, and the opposite of passion is indifference. If we have a lot of suffering and passion, we call that emotion hate. If we have a lot of peace and passion, we call that emotion love. Unfortunately, the more indifference we have, the less of either peace or suffering we have. War, as one of the figureheads of suffering, helps to push us away from indifference, so that we can experience a broader range of emotions. It isn’t easy, and may even be impossible, to climb out of indifference simply by staying on the side of peace or suffering, but by swinging back and forth, we can progress steadily.

Yes, I’m saying that suffering is good… but it is only good for those who are able to take themselves fully out of the subjective mindset, or have fully embraced the model of subjective reality. In other words, suffering is good if you don’t have an ego. For the individual, suffering is very, very bad. It is one of my most firm beliefs that an individual should never try to cause suffering in other people, simply because there is enough suffering in this world that people bring on themselves. The cycle of overcoming suffering and bringing on more suffering to overcome is how humanity grows.

I would love to see war stop altogether. War seems to be unnecessary suffering, but humanity as a whole would have to step up to a higher level of consciousness and realize that everybody is a human, with feelings, desires, and the capacity to suffer. Everybody is your neighbor, even if they live eight time zones away. Once we realize this, we’ll be able to stop pushing our suffering off on other people, and deal with it personally, and it will be the end of war, but as I said to Damian, that day will probably be in the distant future, and we’ll never be able to know exactly when that day has come.

Strive for peace, but do not ignore suffering. They are both opposite sides of the same coin, and while they are opposites, they are also the same.

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