Pat Tillman

The LA Times reported today on the death of Pat Tillman. Pat was a NFL football player who gave up that career, and a 3.6 million dollar contract, to enlist in the US Army two years ago. As a Ranger serving in Afghanistan his unit was ambushed and he was killed.

The article lauded Pat as a hero, quoted his friends and loved ones. They said many good things, that he was a meticulous thinker, he was one of a kind; his former coach at Arizona State said “Tillman had the intellect, the courage and the toughness to be president of the United States’ and other great things.

Yes, here is another lovely, young human being with great potential, cut down in the fields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Heros all

Proclaimed a hero! Must we wait till our young men and women get shot up or killed to raise them up to an exalted plane? Are they not all heros? Every Black American, brown, Asian, Native American, every American of color, every white American, mostly all poor Americans, are these not heros also?

And if they are heros, how dare this, or any other, administration deprive them of everything they needed, reduce their benefits, forcing some to work part time just to make ends meet? How dare each and every one of our heros not get a page and a half spread in our finest newspapers, and quality time on our air ways? Is not each one special, as some might say of Pat?

How dare leaders send these heros to be maimed and killed for reasons that are at best questionable (even just prior to the Iraqi invasion, when inspections for WMD was working well) and at worst, criminally contrived to manipulate public support for personal ideological and political gain? It is well documented that the CIA strongly advised Bush that Hussein’s possession of WMD was questionable and his ties to Al Qeida was virtually non existent.

The Greeks and Romans knew how to treat their heros. They lavished them with top drawer life styles and the material means to which they became accustomed. They were made near gods. We are largely a faith based and religious country, it has been said multitudinous times, especially by many of those who say they know. Why not make our heros, those who are willing to make the “supreme sacrifice,” as many of them do, like near gods, and treat them accordingly, before they bleed and die?

Every young man, every young woman, particularly from that despicable and dehumanizing level of existence we blithely call “poverty”, or by that other cowardly euphemism “disadvantaged,” is indeed a hero.

This is true whether or not they volunteer to serve in the armed forces. How many among us take the time to put aside our own fearful preoccupations, as well as the compulsive pursuit of things that makes us “feel good,” to think about what it takes to stay alive within a culture addicted to the habit of hostile competition?

Heros: Against the Odds

Shakespeare’s soliloquy reads, “To be or not to be. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or by opposing end them...”

What are the slings and arrows afflicting our men and women entrapped in such a culture? Assaults to their validity, to their intelligence, to their emotional system, to their value, to their age, gender, skin color, ethnicity, religion, “class”; to their right of self determination, to their chance for true access and equal opportunity, to their peace of mind, inherent confidence and courage; to their hope. In short what all of us experience to one degree or another.

These slings and arrows are among the features of an environment characterized by the historical habit of hostile competition. These oppressions are the mechanisms that operate on every level: between business competitors, between owners and workers, between groups, between locales, between bureaucracy and constituents, between and within families, between individuals. These mechanisms operate for the purpose of winning control and domination over the other. These societal patterns are driven by a deep seated, instinctual, fear of non-survival.

These abuses and assaults, subtle, masked or visible, are felt by everyone to one degree or another, starting in our families and reinforced every day by the world “out there.” As children we seem to get over abuse very quickly (have we not seen young ones in the midst of danger and deprivation still play and joyfully exercise imagination and invention?). Over time, over the years, the abuses stick in our psychic craw and seem to gain weight.

By the time we are older children or in our teens, and certainly by our adult years, we feel the weight, act out the learned patterns of rigid, habitual behaviors, forget the hope and joy of our youth. We become desperate for the approval of others, or hopeless about ever getting it.

But our remarkable abilities of survival, in the absence of real listening and healing attention, cause us to go numb to the pain, to repress the bad memories and dive into “denial.” And while we smile for the world, the damage underneath erodes our health, immune system, strength and hope.

Nevertheless, so many of us survive for so and so many years, suffering the “slings and arrows,” trying to do our best, sometimes achieving great things. This makes everyone of us a hero. True heros, deserving of validity, of honors and love.

Even the criminals among us, those who have been severely abused, (have you read the studies of jailed, habitual criminals: their life stories of youthful abuse are horrific) do their best. The killer could have killed more; the robber could have robbed more; the violent assaulter could have assaulted more.

The National Calamity

What perpetuates the oppressive society and its hostile competition? Why do we put up with this misery generation after generation? Those who automatically do not use the remarkable brains they are endowed with, will answer with something they have learned like “that’s the way it is.”

Whether natural or divine, we have evolved from the one celled animal to the primates of which humans are the most complex. We have a certain quality of thinking that far exceeds that of our closest cousin, the chimpanzee (some say the bonobo). We have complex, spoken language, the ability to invent phones and TV, write poems, songs, symphonies, paint pictures, throw up satellites into space, observe and contemplate the universe.

We verbalize, synthesize, visualize, philosophize, extrapolate and prognosticate.

In short, we humans have the inherent ability to think rationally, flexibly and creatively, thus the ability to come up with fresh, new ideas. This is how humans progress in so many ways.

This human thinking is completely capable of figuring out what causes war and conflict; thinking about what can be done to extinguish the habit of war, of reacting with violence, of sending our young men and women to kill one another, of laying the groundwork for the next war. And we follow the rules having been conditioned, and peer pressured into calling it “patriotism.”

What keeps us from using our remarkable intelligence to think of such urgently needed and desirable ideas?

I mentioned, above, the deep seated fear of non-survival, have I not? This primitive drive exists in other species. It compels individuals to fight for domination, for first choice for mating and producing offspring , for the best part of the game, for the softest, safest spot on which to rest. All this to perpetuate one’s genetic pool. Survival of its kind.

This is fine for the lion, the bear, the walrus, the chimp. It works for these species because they have no alternative for survival, and because it is benign fighting. They do not kill their opponent. Some instinctive signal is sent to one of the fighters that the other is tougher or more fit to rule the roost (or pride, clan, herd, etc.) The “loser” takes on another useful role as guard, baby sitter, hunter or even founder of another group. Thus the entire population survives together.

But when we humans fight as in war or other conflict we kill. (Do this often enough and we won’t survive as a specie). Why is this so?

First, because with our cleverness we have developed efficient means, WMD if you will, with which to fight: from the club to nuclear weapons. Because we humans, still having one instinctive foot caught in that old primitive fear of non-survival(PFN), we are also driven to dominate and control. Control what? The resources and riches of the other, of course. Survival in a big way, that is, until the other returns to take back the riches. Another fight, another war, more killing.

Secondly, we humans have evolved intuition. This intuition instructs every human being that he or she is equal in inherent value to anyone else. This natural pride will not allow one to happily comply with being a “loser,” that is to take the one down position. We take this role only out of fear of being further hurt, and often being conditioned by abusive, invalidating treatment (oppression) to believe we are not as good as, as smart as, as worthy as, as capable as the “winner.”

The conflict between our intuition of self-value and the invalidation by oppressive conditioning, coupled with the fear of further punishment, is exactly what installs in our psyches patterns of depression, anxiety, guilt, hopelessness, helplessness and powerlessness.

But the need to survive requires us to repress such pain as best we can. Our cleverness and intelligence, which is by now constrained to operate within the boundaries of these patterns, find and learn rationalizations to justify our role of “loser”: ‘The big ones know best,” “the rich are more deserving than us,” “The intellectuals and professionals are smarter than us,” “we have to trust our leaders, they are more fit to lead.” We seemingly adapt.

This begins when we are young. People of like patterns affiliate into larger and larger groups, individuals may not know one another but the cohesiveness of like “minded” people grow into large, ideological blocks.

And this cultural conditioning is precisely what blocks the rational, flexible and creative thinking we need to solve the pernicious habit of killing and war. As well as the habit of hostile competition, i.e. the oppressive hierarchy of the status quo.

This is the national calamity. We are socialized to follow. But down deep in our psyches we do not forget the indignation, the anger nor the rage at being dehumanized and dominated. Our intuition of equality and deservingness will not permit it. Yet, we are socialized to fear punishment by our authorities if we dare try to strongly assert our rightful place. When things do get bad enough we rebel, as in the American Revolution for example.

Generally however, we also learn from our elders, from society and from historical practice, the syndrome of “scapegoating,” that is, of blaming the weaker one, the outsider or the different one for our troubles. Our leaders call them bad, savage, evil, thugs, not as good as us, they declare them as ‘enemies” who hate us and want to take what we have or to destroy us.

We vent all that repressed indignation, anger and rage against that other. We call them names, we bar them from opportunities, we beat them up, and when the perceived threat is drummed up high enough, and certainly when some or a few of the “other” actually inflict hurt on us, we see blood in our eye, we cry for vengeance, label the whole of “them” as the “enemy” and we go to war in patriotic fervor.

Never mind the secret agenda of leaders (on both sides), the gain and profit from the war by the powers who supply the means for war, while our heros get shot up and die. While the heart of their loved ones is ripped out, and their stunned minds allow their mouths to utter the learned slogans, “our son or daughter believed in what he or she was doing. We are proud of him or her.”

The Start Of The Solution

We need to, and we can, reclaim the fuller use of our rational, flexible and creative minds. We need the faculties of our inherent intelligence to think about conditions, about the cause of the conditions, about researching and learning the issues and histories of the conflicts we are asked to engage in.

When we are asked to send our youth into danger and expend our hard earned resources we need our intelligence and courage (to resist disapproval) to question why; to demand the truth of our leaders; to uncover who is to gain and what is to be gained through the most deadly and serious business of war; to pursue every other means of conflict resolution to the fullest before the act of killing, dying and destroying begins; to envision and evaluate the consequences of war, to walk in the shoes of the other in order to understand the needs, the culture and history of the other; and unless there is an actual, proven threat of attack, to require all the time needed to achieve these alternatives and this knowledge.

Knowing the historical pattern and agenda of political, military and business leaders, it is not good enough to say “this understanding is the job of our leaders; they know and we must trust them.” In the nuclear age, especially, we can no longer afford this abdication of personal responsibility.

This requires a personal healing and an empowerment by each one of us. By a healing and empowerment I mean a reclaiming by word, by mind, by action and by unflagging commitment of one’s own inherent gifts, whether obtained Divinely or naturally. Each and every one of us is given that obligation to be fully human, and for believers, to be worthy of God’s love. It is a joyous obligation for it will lead to a personal reward and level of contentedness and fulfillment not otherwise attainable.

Each one of us can reclaim this reward of humanity by scorning the hurtful and disempowering messages of socialization we learn and come to believe as true. Each one us can claim “I was not born to make anyone like me by blindly going along and joining the frenzy, no matter how popular. I am too good, too smart, too human and too worthy to do this. I have the ability and I will think for myself.” And keep to this commitment persistently, you are worth it.

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