Esteemed Reader

‘Muhammed says,
Love of one’s country
is part of the Faith.’
But don’t take that literally!
Your real ‘country’ is where you’re heading,
not where you are.
Don’t misread that hadith [saying].
It’s right to love your Home Place, but first ask,
Where is that, really?
—Jellaludin Rumi

Esteemed Reader of Our Magazine:
How is a “war on terror” different from the terror it aims to quash? Won’t decimating a society, people in their homes and at prayer serve nothing more than to produce more “terrorists”?

The regime that came to power in this country through a sly coup d’état would have us believe they are waging a war on the milliards of innocents in the name of “enduring justice” and lasting peace. I propose this isn’t the case. In fact it is such a blatant lie that to believe it is, at best, silly. But there is a means by which to accomplish peace. This peaceful war isn’t a crusade against any particular person, sect or nation. It is a war against ignorance. Ignorance is the real terror. And it has penetrated as far as the heartland—as deeply as our own hearts. The war on ignorance begins at home, and ends at home. For without our ignorance we would see that there is nowhere but home.
The result of ignorance is to see everything upside-down. For instance, we assume that the value of possessing power is in the capacity to wield it over others—to use force to bend them to our will. In fact, the opposite is true: the value of having power is to use it to serve others; to use the gift of influence to liberate and help. Imagine what would happen if the power-possessors stopped using their muscle for their own benefit and began to use it for the good of those weaker than they. The world would be transformed by this simple metanoia, this very basic “change of mind.”
But how to “help”? Not by making others value like us, act like us. This is the fallacy that has caused so much proselytical carnage in the world. It is the urge to “convert the heathen”—in one form or another—so as not to avoid any recognition of our own emptiness. No, one helps by enabling others to fulfill the possibilities that are inherent to them.

We are admonished that to protect our American way of life we must keep buying things. “Whatever you do, don’t become lax in your consumption. Keep on eating to obesity, buying more stuff than you can fit in your house, buying new cars, eternally tethered to the system by a shackle of debt.” Only this, they tell us, will prevent what is, in our secular Church of Consumption, the equivalent of the Catholic idea of “hell”; that is, recession. To fear economic recession is as ignorant as dreading the exhalation after inhaling. It is only resisting recession that will make it terrible.

Unbridled consumption is the American Dream. You know, the one we are stumbling around in, like somnambulist zombies, ever on the treadmill of getting and having, endlessly pursuing the carrot, escaping from the stick.

Though we are at war, we are told, our corporations must not be lax in their efforts to open new markets for Uncle Sam’s products. Our currency of meaning and identity is reduced to just that: currency, the dollar. This hubristic delusion—that ours is the best and most enlightened way of life—along with insatiable appetite for new markets, allows US corporations and the government that serves them to justify a heedless imposition of their will on the world.
The big corporations are mechanical behemoths, whose purpose is profits, and continuous growth; growth into areas and peoples that perhaps don’t yet value their products. So these “ignorant” people must be “educated” about the value of the “illumined” Western way of life, and essentially empty values. Those who resist this cultural and economic incursion become the “enemy” and must be eliminated.
But how can the corporations be blamed for these crimes, committed in hubristic ignorance? They are machines. But as individuals wake up, and we become more than machines ourselves, we will connect to greater values. Individual tolerance and cooperation will replace division and conflict and the Goliaths will falter and fall.
In this “war for profits” those who see are all but helpless in opposing the crimes committed in our names. Which is right, as in general, activism serves little more than to empower that which it opposes. No, we must act not in opposition but more intelligently, in ways that are informed not by ignorance but by what we see to be true.
I read about a summer camp in Maine for Palestinian and Israeli teenagers. They begin the summer with the feelings of antipathy that reflect the conflicts of their people. But after weeks of making music, working, sharing culture, and just being together, they have seen beyond their differences, to what they have in common; to their common humanity and all the pitfalls and possibilities therein. And they take that experience of tolerance and cooperation into their lives.
This is the kind of effort that is needed on a much larger scale. Its primary tool is to keep asking the questions: What is this? Who is this? Who am I? And to never be satisfied with an answer. Every answer is ignorance. It is only in actively and openly questioning, that we can see to a deeper level, that we can find out who one another really is. As well, through asking, we can discriminate among the abundance of information that is fed to us, and perceive what is true, and, better yet, what is useful.

But useful for what? The question of usefulness only comes to bear when a person has an aim. Now, more than ever, our common aim needs to be harmony; harmony within ourselves, and harmony within humanity. Harmony must come first if this great experiment called Humanity can continue. Ask: Does this lead to harmony? And if the answer is yes, act, and don’t look back.

—Jason Charles Stern