New Clear Vision

America’s Perpetual War, and How to Stop It

by Michael True

“The same war continues,” Denise Levertov wrote in her poem, “Life at War.” Her lament is even more appropriate for 2011 than it was when she wrote the poem forty-five years ago.

Columnists and academics, including international relations professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, are finally acknowledging facts familiar to anyone “awake” regarding failed US policies, wasted lives and wasted resources during this period. Willfully ignoring such facts, as Bacevich wrote, “is to become complicit in the destruction of what most Americans profess to hold dear.”

At the beginning of the new year, consequences of “life at war” stare us in the face: the victimization of military and civilian populations and a huge national debt, including an annual military budget that is larger than all military budgets in the world combined and includes $5 billion that remains unaccounted for in Iraq, as well as aid to Pakistan that has wound up in the hands of the Taliban. (more…)

Thinking Whole, and Not Just Apart

by Winslow Myers

I still recall the shock of reading the philosopher Krishnamurti’s bald assertion, in his little book “Freedom from the Known,” that I was personally responsible for everything. The book was recommended to me by a remarkable man named Albert Bigelow. In 1958, Bert sailed his small ketch, the Golden Rule, into an American nuclear testing area in the Marshall Islands in an act of protest. Bert took seriously the obligation of being a global citizen long before the phrase “global citizen” was coined.

In 2010, the burden of trying to act responsibly for the planet as a whole has become overwhelming, almost paralyzing. There are so many huge challenges, all interrelated, and the cause-and-effect relationship between what I do personally in my daily life and those planet-wide challenges has become infinitely clearer than it was to all but a few in 1958. (more…)