New Clear Vision

Moving Beyond War in the Middle East — and Everywhere

by Winslow Myers

The seemingly intractable discord between Israel and Palestine not only continues to cause enormous suffering and anxiety, but also to reverberate around the planet as a kind of symbol of all our conflicts in what we might call the post-nuclear age.

The mid-20th century superpowers were forced to admit, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis, that war at the nuclear level was self-defeating, a victory only for war itself, not for the participants.

Isn’t that ultimately true for all wars, large or small? Yet the world, including the superpowers, continues to divide along the Israeli-Palestinian fault-line, almost as if one had to have an adversary to be clear in one’s identity. The conflict has functioned as an iconic symbol of general feelings of fear or powerlessness or injustice, let alone claims to the same territory, that give rise to the best or the worst in us as we humans try to resolve our endless differences. (more…)

Charting a New Course, a Decade After 9/11

by Ian Harris

September 11, 2011, marked the tenth anniversary of a terrible tragedy, when almost 3,000 Americans were killed by coordinated attacks by 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists. Within a month the Bush administration declared war on Afghanistan, “Operation Enduring Freedom,” even though the terrorists involved in the attack did not come from Afghanistan. Seventeen months later the Bush administration invaded Iraq, supposedly to remove the threat of weapons of mass destruction from that country. Ten years later the American people, while commemorating the tragedy wrought by the terrorists, would do well to examine the morality and utility of such militaristic responses to crises.

The 10-year war in Afghanistan has cost more than 2600 U.S./Coalition lives (and rising weekly, often daily), more than $439 billion, and we’ve killed more than 8,000 Afghan civilians — two and one half times the number killed in the initial attacks in this country. (more…)

Is That the Only Choice?

by Michael N. Nagler

Between Libya, which has endured more than 2,000 NATO bombings, and Syria, where more than 2,000 civilians have been killed by their own government so far, we see the two traditional responses to a perceived need for intervention by the international community in regimes gone wrong. It’s a grim picture — invaded Libya and abandoned Syria — and a sad comment on the paucity of human imagination, at least when that imagination is squeezed into the narrow confines of “realism.”

Fortunately this Hobson’s choice, and the comment it delivers on the creativity of our concern, is not, in fact, all humanity can come up with. (more…)

Finding Good News Amidst the ‘Windy Militant Trash’

by Winslow Myers

The brilliance of the “Mad Men” television series lies in the crackerjack acting and script, but even more in the way the series dramatizes the paradigm shift of American women from gross subjugation to rough equality. In an early episode, protagonist Don Draper reluctantly allows his wife to consult a (male) psychiatrist, and then calls the doctor, who casually violates confidentiality. The series explains much about how the males of my generation often haplessly misunderstood or deliberately ignored the autonomous subjectivity of females.

This begs two questions: what blindnesses operating in the present cultural moment might be illuminated by talented scriptwriters as they look back from the perspective of 2040? And second, what is the vision that orients us as we work to ensure that there will be a future to look back from in 2040? (more…)

A Gandhian Answer to Financial Collapse

by Michael N. Nagler

Last Monday the Dow Jones industrial average fell 634.76 points; the sixth-worst point decline for the Dow in the last 112 years and the worst drop since December 2008. Every stock in the S&P 500 index declined.

It is easy to blame bipartisan bickering for the impasse that led to Standard & Poor’s downgrading of the American debt, and in turn the vertiginous fall of the Dow. This bickering — this substitution of ideology for reason, of egotism for compassion and responsibility on the part of lawmakers — is a national disgrace; but while it failed to fix the problem, we must realize that it did not cause it. The cause — and potential for a significant renewal — lies much deeper. (more…)

Tim DeChristopher and the Defense of Necessity

by Jerry Elmer

Tim DeChristopher is the environmental and climate-change activist who was recently sentenced to two years in federal prison for an act of public, nonviolent civil disobedience.  On December 19, 2008, DeChristopher disrupted a federal auction in Utah of oil and gas drilling lease rights.  DeChristopher participated in the auction, openly and publicly, posing as a real bidder.  His high bids won rights to 14 separate parcels totaling 22,500 acres of land, for $1.8 million.  DeChristopher had no intention of paying; he had scooped the parcels as a means of making a dramatic public statement about the dangers of climate change. DeChristopher follows a long and noble tradition of civil disobedience that includes other practitioners such as Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (more…)