Doing Justice: Foreclosures and Evictions

Posted on October 13, 2010 by ehurst

God’s Word is pretty clear about some things, particularly in regards to His divine sense of justice on the earth. It’s bad enough not a single nation shows much interest in building on His laws, but some things are particularly egregious. Every nation flouting His commands will eventually be crushed in His wrath.

The Bible does not use the term, but most certainly addresses something now called “predatory lending.” In general, the accusation behind that term refers to suckering someone into believing they can safely borrow to purchase something, when the lender knows without any doubt the borrower cannot pay. The objective is to build up a mass of debt instruments, making the loan department appear productive and worthy of some extra bonus money at the end of the accounting period. Then the loans were bundled, sliced and diced and sold off as things of value to suckers for even more money.

Meanwhile, the poor borrower soon enough comes to the end of their ability to pay and loses far more than they ever had in the first place. God is not pleased with such lending practices. We read and hear a lot about honesty and accepting the consequences directed at borrowers, while the slimy lender gets off with a golden handshake. It’s nothing but bankers’ propaganda to keep the suckers on the hook. God calls it “lying.”

Without writing a book or two tracing through all the mistakes made getting us into this mess (it’s a sin to charge interest, for example), let’s note the Bible offers in terms utterly clear certain things which will invite God’s wrath staring right now. Eviction is a sin. Sure, you can reclaim your justly owned property if someone is tearing it up. But even if they simply live a trashy lifestyle, that does not justify eviction. The Bible makes a big deal out of having a roof over your head (unless you are a tent dwelling nomad) and how no one can justify taking that roof, or removing you from under it, without an extraordinarily good reason.

Simply failing to pay what is due is not a good reason. Yes, the Bible says that. You have to discern why they don’t pay. The Bible makes much of protecting orphans and widows. In a cross-cultural translation, that means folks who are disabled in the sense they cannot simply go out and get a job, at least not one which pays a living. You have to absorb the loss in their case.

The primary reason folks bite off more than they can chew is because someone else took advantage of common human weaknesses. I’d say here in the US, maybe 2% or 3% of commerce is approaching righteousness, and the rest just pretends they are (if that). Manipulation is a sin, and I have yet to see more than that tiny margin of advertising which isn’t manipulative, dishonest, aimed to suckering people into wanting something they don’t need and shouldn’t have. There is this command about not setting a stumbling block before others.

That applies to the entire residential market. Again, we have centuries of sin to clean up, but let’s start with one thing, and that should be a moratorium on evictions until we get this reworked into something which at least vaguely resembles God’s justice. I know; it won’t happen. I’m just offering a warning, so when it all comes apart and blood runs in the streets, there won’t be any excuses. God left plenty of prominent warnings long ago.

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Truth Is Free; Lies Are Expensive

Posted on October 12, 2010 by ehurst

The Tea Party movement threatens to be a very big presence in the coming mid-term elections. The people at the rallies are true believers, come at their own expense, and wave homemade signs. Some slogans are really very clever. You may not know the gatherings are heavily sponsored by major corporate donors. There is a lot of money spent on advertising. This does not mean those corporations started it, but they sure do like it. I’m sure they do have a lot to say about what is addressed, the main concerns raised, but I don’t think we can say they control it. They are probably taking advantage of something which is quite real as a grass roots movement. However, the movement has been compromised, and it will get worse.

Back when the radical progressives wedged open the representation of their viewpoints in the Democratic Party, it was pretty much the same. Except, the money came from typical liberal sources — foundations, limousine liberals, news organizations, etc. Today virtually every cause which clings to the progressive-socialist-communist axis is funded that way, though a few corporations have been more open about it.

The whole thing of political activism is long studied organization, heavy investment by something with a big bank account, and carefully planned attention getting activities to sell their message. There is not a single voice in the political arena which isn’t funded by deep pockets. The few without such funding are simply not heard. They don’t get any press coverage, and only the most obscure blogs, and the various groups of ditto heads of whatever stripe don’t echo their talking points.

Those who get the press are professional liars. All of them. That is, in one sense or another, they are struggling to steer money and power back to some thing which is most certainly going to hurt us. Most of “we the people” have no idea just how badly we are being hurt until way late in the game.

The truth is so very much simpler. You can offer it all day long, but you’ll find precious few takers. At the same time, truth which is heard — really heard — requires no funding and pushing to be accepted. Our biggest problem is getting it heard. In this world of vast resources buying earth-shattering noise which drowns out truth, and doing it for so very long, most people can’t recognize it.

The sad part is it matters. You see, the truth is written into the very cosmos. The lies are like an attack on reality. Reality has this strange tendency to hit back. Yes, it takes a long time as humans measure such things. And frankly there is no PR team to clarify things, so most folks won’t recognize just why their world is coming apart. But truth will not be denied.

Lies are very expensive, indeed.

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Gloom and Doom Reality

Posted on October 11, 2010 by ehurst

We are already in Great Depression 2. The mental image of total chaos, a cessation of all economic activity, etc., is entirely false. People are not controlled by government and corporate policies, rather herded by them. Let’s clarify this image.

First, it will get significantly worse. No one in their right mind doubts that, but they also wouldn’t pretend to know exactly how it will play out, particularly in terms of your everyday experience. I can’t even offer meaningful statistics. Some of my readers will hurt badly; others will hardly notice. There are too many variables, and the study of Economics cannot rightly apply itself to individuals. It’s a part of the Social Sciences; it is intended to explain vast sweeps of human behavior. It is very poor at projecting trends, but not so bad at cleaning up afterward. Thus, only in retrospect would any of us have a decent explanation for our individual experiences. All we can say for now is most people in most parts of the world will notice a change in their fortunes for the worse.

There is plenty of this which is not a matter of Economics, but more of Criminal Justice. The first crime was the concerted effort from long, long ago to deceive the masses. It’s really nothing new; conspiracy is not a mere theory, but a word to describe a particular approach to understanding human history itself. Every government is a conspiracy to rule, and they have uniformly been untrustworthy, differing only in the degree of harm to various groups affected by their power. The second crime has always been nearly every government official ever born ended up seeking only their personal benefit. The difference between democratic governments and naked tyranny is the the necessity of deception with the latter. You are either find yourself bluntly forced or slyly manipulated. The Great Depression 2 is the result of the latter.

Nor is it all one thing, with everyone in the ruling class in on some vast secret. I doubt whatever the Illuminati actually are knows nearly so much as is alleged, but I do know their goals are not what most people expect. Whatever it is they may be, their primary mission is to control the debt of the world. Everything else is allowed to run its course, with all sorts of powerful people simply chasing their own personal pleasures and whims, regardless what noble and fine things they may say or write. A significant element in that package of personal pleasures and whims are various dreams unconnected with reality, which grand delusions they fondly pursue to assuage some personal insecurity, some sense of “I matter, dog gone it.” That they often want such wonderful things for the rest of us selectively excludes how frustrating it is for our deep desire for something else. But their vision trumps ours because — well, theirs has to be better simply because they gained the power to make theirs happen, see?

Here is an ugly secret about our entire global economic system: It steals from the future. You see, if we all followed our instincts, we would naturally find some rhythm of ebb and flow in economics. That is the nature of things, resulting from our very human inability to always allocate resources where they do the most good. This business of borrowing against future productivity is designed to smooth out that wavy business and keep everything on the upward trend. Advertising is designed to promote a bottomless sense of false need for the next new thing. It works for awhile. Eventually the borrowing outpaces the natural production and we have one huge crash, because we keep pushing off the obligatory drops until they are all bunched together.

We know the stimulus funds to boost car sales and home sales this past year were nothing more than borrowing heavily from an already declining future productivity. This gives the impending crash a much sharper drop when it comes. The whole point is we need to allow our consumption to drop back until it matches our production, which has been pretty poor for quite some time. It was masked by shifting around the borrowing so quickly the consequences couldn’t keep up — for awhile. They have caught up. What we have been doing instead of producing is employing an awful lot of people to find new ways to shuffle that debt in bigger, faster and more complicated ways. We called it “Information Based Economy,” as if there were anything productive and economic about shuffling economic information.

The Illuminati, such as they are, control the debt we have piled up to the moon. My cynicism about their actual brilliance is linked to my skepticism they can actually enforce their control of all that debt. Never mind how complicated it is with the mix of government and private obligations. If the common productive folks who have been suckered into all this obligation don’t embrace ownership of that debt, there is no way to collect. Once they lose that fear, it’s game over. I don’t mean common default, which simply shifts the debt to other hands and lowers the value, but simply denying they owe it, deny the whole system. I am not addressing this from a moral point of view, but the much more brutish reality of how people act. The Social Sciences are not about solutions, but about describing what has been happening all along so we have some realistic notion of what to expect. The Illuminati will have a tough time keeping together the system which would allow them to hold it over our heads.

It need not be a universal annulment of the debt obligation. There is some invisible tipping point at which the whole thing collapses, and I doubt it even requires a majority, either in terms of value amount or parties involved. Yes, there are key players who form choke points affecting everyone on either side of the flow, and they are hardly uniformly in bed with the Illuminati Debt Masters. It’s not a question of good or bad, and “Who will save us?” It’s that this thing is too complicated and messy for anyone to figure out so long as they are merely human, and grouping intelligence won’t help much. If your assumptions are all wrong, genius means little. All the manipulation in the world can’t keep the whole world in line.

Don’t think they aren’t trying. Part of the game is creating such a bogey man out of the coming collapse so as to scare folks into obeying government dictates. The whole thing rests on dependency. If you believe you need it, government owns you. If you know for certain you don’t, you will simply bide your time and break free when the coast looks clear. If you are crazy enough to believe you’ve been free all along, you’re the easiest of all to control. Let’s make this clear: The Illuminati — such as they are — were in control of framing the US Constitution, and ran the Revolution before that. They didn’t much care whether America won or lost, only wanted to ensure there was a catastrophic war to create debt and gain control of it. It is actually a bit more complicated, but that’s the essence of it. The one revolution they don’t want is the one where everyone simply starts over, in such a way it excludes dependency on anyone who isn’t your close kin.

Not exactly blood-kin, but a kinship of trust which means nobody has to be in charge. The very human bond of fellowship which defies all logic and law is the greatest threat to the Illuminati, and thus to every government in the world. We are all fully capable of agreeing to common expectations because we naturally prefer a fair and just society. We self-regulate just fine for the most part. Most regulation is built on lies about some desperate need which doesn’t exist. Humans who get along without leadership are the very last thing they want to see, and is the single thread of interest behind every attack they make on us. You see, this impending gloom and doom will hurt, but not nearly so much as we tend to imagine. If our imagination of such things is restrained by the reality of a very good interdependence of reliable kin, we are already free from most of the pain. The misery depends much on your level of dependence, on your sense of how badly you need the fraud sold to us as our grand American identity.

Stop trying to be American, or Canadian, Australian, or whatever. Try being a human instead.

The Great Depression 2 will hurt, but it will hurt a lot less if we understand certain things about what got us into it in the first place. That includes being a sucker for too much material junk, and borrowing from tomorrow, and dependence on a system which enslaves you to your insecurities. Learn to be secure on other terms.

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Raising Radical Peace-maker Children

Posted on October 10, 2010 by ehurst

As always, what follows is strictly advisory, my own exploration of the idea. The finest works of art in the world are each a singular product, something which cannot be duplicated, and which draws you by its beauty. Our children can be works of art.

When bouncing off what I see done wrong all around me, it serves as the starting place. The first and most important element is taking them seriously. A soul of peace takes everyone seriously, and children are people, too. Your own particularly deserve your full attention. Most people aren’t really paying attention to their kids when they interact. The adults are too full of their own insecurities and needs, and they project them onto the children. While guiding them is necessary, and the only time leadership is good and right, if you are lost yourself, it works out poorly.

To raise peacemakers requires you are first committed to making peace in yourself and your world. Children can model only the degree of sanity you bring to the task. As always, there are no absolutes, and you will most certainly see them reach adulthood while nursing a big pile of regrets. It is a work of art, passion, something far more than mere knowledge, not science. Your children will seldom turn out better than you are at your best. If you are a peacemaker, they will know it matters and it will matter to them.

Radical sanity and peacemaking requires you ditch most of what other people in this world consider important. Indeed, you basically have to ditch this world, itself. Not as the doper and fantasy gamer, addicted to something which cannot ever exist, but ditching it as the place where your heart lives. We can’t be sane if we want more of this mess, just a different flavor. We have to want something far, far better, so much better it won’t actually happen here, something for which we were designed. It will come in its own time, but not on this plane.

Examine it yourself: The mainstream of our society demands conformity. People of peace and sanity demand their children stop and consider before committing to a choice. We don’t pretend to know how they will turn out, how they should turn out. What we should hate most is removing from consideration genuinely sane possibilities. Common sense is generally the term others use to keep us from doing things they don’t like. There is a great deal we don’t like which is purely a personal preference, and no reflection at all of cosmic truth. So when you examine the process, examine yourself. You won’t perfect the results ever, but if you aren’t in the process, there is no hope at all for the results. Remove constraints in your own mind for your children.

The likes of Timothy Leary on child rearing is simply a piece of truth blown all out of proportion. He went too far in saying children should find their own restraints in all things. Let them learn fire is hot and will hurt them, but don’t let them jump into it. Somewhere in the reality of daily child rearing, you have to have some sense of how far is too far. Don’t let them destroy what matters because that’s not peace, it’s not concern for others. The essence of peace is not simply a lack of conflict, but reducing conflict actively when it’s in your power. Leary and his fellow travelers don’t comprehend empathy, the need to build security in a child because you are reliable about keeping them from unnecessary pain.

There are plenty of things which can’t be taught, only caught. You have to portray it, exemplify it, be fully conscious of their natural tendency to emulate. Let them explore what you do, knowing some day they must inevitably turn from some it. You aren’t turning out carbon copies of mom and dad; cloning is not natural, not peaceful nor sane.

You’ll notice I’m only addressing generalities. That is merely self-consistency. By awakening the spirit of peaceful sanity in the question of child rearing, you’ll operate under a far higher level of awareness, and the details will fall into place. And when you just can’t figure something out, trust the kid. Truly, this works better than you realize. No, there is no unfailing principle here, just a raft of suggestions which indicate a better way of looking at things. If you face some conflict in the process for which you lack the tools to resolve, what makes you think the child won’t realize that, and discover something truly important about the limitations of humanity?

Most importantly is your honesty. The one thing which makes me angry about the whole business of education and training, and regardless of the age or mission of the learners, is dishonesty. Keep private things private, but always offer all pertinent information. No, don’t overload them with extraneous detail, but never, ever hide things you would want to know in their place. Playing head games is cruel and hateful, a manifestation of insecurity. So it is with any form of entertaining yourself at the expense of others. Call it “sin” if that brings clarity, but it’s simply another way of saying any form of deception is totally inconsistent with peace and sanity. If someone does not agree to a round of head games, you are enslaving them and creating conflict if you slip it into the mix. Be utterly transparent to everyone, especially your children.

Peaceful and secure children become peace makers.

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Radical Peace and Sanity

Posted on October 9, 2010 by ehurst

Given insecurity is the cause of all human conflict, the only possible path to reducing war and conflict is promoting sanity and peace. Perhaps with the best intentions, thousands have tried for a great many years at this, but mostly with all the wrong assumptions about human nature.

You cannot gain peace and reduce violence by political action. Fixing politics will not bring peace. The problem is not bad politics but the existence of politics at all. Nor do I imagine we can simply stop that, either. We can’t go back and start over unless Jesus comes back, and His brand of starting over means this current world and reality itself will be gone. Barring that, we need to work for peace some other way.

Peace is merely the result of sanity. Sanity is defined in part as people breaking free from pretty much all human culture. Yes, you read that right. Stop being, or trying to be, this or that kind of person. Just be yourself, utterly individual, radically and completely leaving behind all the conforming you know. Granted, that’s a tall order, but that’s what it takes. You aren’t going to do this through some single great leap, but as a commitment to pull up out of this foul human existence and rise to another level. This calls for dismissing all loyalties on this plane, and embracing something at the cosmic level.

Nobody can do it for you, but when you see someone able to make peace everywhere they go, you realize something there is well above understanding. If peace and sanity do not find you, if they do not awaken in you a desire for them when you encounter someone like that, peace is not available for you. So long as you make peace an objective, a goal, something which must be planned and which requires organization and leadership, it will never happen.

When this radical peace and sanity is your commitment, the very nature of the cosmos itself tends to support that pursuit. People will find themselves drawn to cooperate in ways they can’t understand, in ways which aren’t entirely conscious, and the very air, water and ground around you — down to the smallest particle of matter — will also cooperate. By no means should you be silly enough to expect absolutes; but it remains unmistakable. Reality recognizes sanity and peace, and is crying out to support it. There will remain factors which inhibit that support, but it’s there, and peaceful souls can sense it.

It’s nice when I can run across people who want to share these things, talk about them, spend time with me because of them. What a relief to not have to play games, just be yourself and know it’s good enough, justifies acceptance in itself. But more important is that we carry that with us all around this insane world. The biggest favor my readers can do me is simply indicate in some way they get it, and are doing their own thing to make peace and sanity painfully obvious in their world.

I am a pacifist, a peace radical, but by no means a peace activist. Activism of any sort places you under control of another, because it requires surrendering part of your sanity to pursue someone else’s choices for you. Activism is politics, and politics always and inevitably leads to conflict, if only internally among those who feel the only way to get things done is by concerted action in pressure groups. Internal conflict cripples your intentions. Sure, you can steer some political responses, but you can’t change anything that matters. Participating in any way is surrender to insanity and conflict. People who don’t love peace and sanity won’t appreciate your yelling demands, and you’ll be just one more enemy, another source of conflict. You don’t make peace by creating conflict.

So I sincerely press for leaderless resistance to insanity and conflict, which can’t be called “activism.” Peace and sanity can only exist where no two of us do exactly the same thing, except by accident, and then only in appearance. Yes, there are some strong common grounds of action which our tortured reality wants to see, but that’s another discussion. You have to want it because of something within you, drawing you on your own terms to something which escapes full explanation. It has to be utterly voluntary, every step of the way, every breath, every heartbeat. It has to drive you; it drives me.

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Sanity Subversive 7: Tell

Posted on October 9, 2010 by ehurst

A couple of weeks later, this letter appeared in the school news paper.

The cause of human conflict is not some deep mystery. We all probably realize it is nothing more than insecurity. What seems mysterious is how we resolve the multiple insecurities we all carry with us from birth.

Changing the human circumstance won’t help much because no two of us will be satisfied with the same thing. No amount of conditioning can quash our individuality. So the mere fact we are all different becomes the excuse for violence, for wars, for needless death. But the problem is not our differences, but our sensitivity to them. When we feel secure, those differences are actually pleasant.

A sense of security is not absolute. It only has to be enough for the moment in which we live. The Peace Club is not deluded about how easy it is to pull people up out of their pitiful small existence into a sense of security and peace. All of us are still struggling ourselves. Yet for all this, we live for peace, and we would rather die than turn away from our cause.

This is the Peace Club Manifesto.

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Sanity Subversive 6: When

Posted on October 8, 2010 by ehurst

Two questions from opposite sides came almost at once.

“How do we keep this going when the newness wears off?” And, “How far can we branch out? The city? The state?”

He smiled. “Excellent questions, both of them! They have the same answer.”

Leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, he looked at them from a lower angle. “You need to branch out, broaden the range of activities. You gained more from this past week than the entire school together. Branching out requires a deeper understand of the philosophy behind making peace.”

As he straightened up, for once he almost wished there was a chalk board. “This is not about persuasion by logic and reason. We are aware of them and use them, but they are mere accessories. Recall I said at the beginning this is about awakening Peace in people who already have it. That we cannot really know whether that happens for anyone but ourselves is not the point. We don’t have to know they get it, only that we have been true to it ourselves. That is precisely the one thing which will work, if anything is going to work at all.”

He pointed to his head with the index fingers of both hands. “The head is not where all this happens. It’s somewhere else. Not emotions either, but something much higher and deeper at the same time. It’s somewhere beyond the five senses and our reasoning capacities. Your brain does all it can to hang on and organize the response; it cannot realistically evaluate the whys. If you get this, no one has to explain it, only help you do it.”

Dropping his hands, he rose to his feet. “But we have to meet the brain half way, or it won’t let us do much of anything that matters. Peace has a thousand identities, but it always calls to us just the same. It’s the ultimate truth, if you will. Making peace means coming to terms with reality, a reality too big for words and mere rational thought. Peace is the face and name we give to this core of being; it’s the excuse we have for a club which answers all the needs of humanity. What Peace cannot do cannot be done.”

As usual, he circled the group slowly. By now they had rearranged the junk desks to facilitate their usual meetings, so he didn’t have to dodge around anything. “When Peace owns you, it becomes your focus, not your self. Peace calls you out of your little world. People who are easily bored are boring themselves, because they are so empty. People who are full of only themselves have nothing when they are alone. People of Peace are never bored, because they don’t have much room for themselves inside, at least not in that sense. You don’t just live with Peace, in a sense you are Peace. When you pursue it full bore that way, you discover just about everything your little self actually needs is already met.”

The one quiet boy finally spoke. “It clarifies your priorities.”

He spun and pointed at the boy. “Absolutely! When you have something bigger than yourself, something worth living and dying for, all the silly and inconsequential things of this world fade to obscurity.” He held his palms together, and tipped his hands back to touch his lower lip. “No, you don’t get there today or tomorrow, or ever. I don’t claim to have arrived because it’s not a goal. It’s an ongoing mission.”

He held up one finger. “That’s our starting point. Peace is our ultimate truth, the name we give whatever it is on our plane of existence which matters most.” Holding up a second finger, “It leads us to a capacity to care. We know what it means and we do it reflexively. We want this same wonderful Peace for others, because a shared peace is a much bigger peace and more powerful peace.”

Then a third finger. “We can afford to lose. Indeed, we must lose all sorts of things. We start with losing ourselves, in a manner of speaking. We will fail a thousand times in a thousand ways, because we can never quite overcome our own limitations, but we don’t turn back. Start now building up permission for yourself to screw up; get it out of the way. Then you won’t be expecting much from anyone else. We give people room to do everything wrong, and we don’t get involved until they invite us, or Peace compels us to act. Most of our actions aren’t poking into the lives of others, but holding up Peace as a beacon in the dark. We don’t pretend to know who or how others are affected, or not affected. We do what we do because Peace demands it.”

The girl with the perfect hair was weeping, and had to blow her nose. When everyone looked at her, she managed to blubber out, “I’m sorry. I’ve never had anyone give me permission to mess up. I just realized I don’t know how to give myself permission to fail … at anything.” There was more snuffing and wiping of eyes.

He stood holding his hand under one elbow, the other cupped his chin between thumb and index finger. “We have all the time in the world for you to cry. Peace was here before us, and will be here when we are all gone. We need you, and we need you at peace, so don’t be embarrassed. What you express so obviously is what we all feel now and then, regardless how we show it.”

Some of the students gathered around her, patting and hugging, offering words of encouragement. After a few minutes, he offered, “This is how we make peace in the small. Take that out into the large. You can’t touch the whole world, but you can surely bring the new dawn of Peace to your own world.” He help up his enigmatic hand sign again. “Make Peace.”

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Sanity Subversive 5: How

Posted on October 7, 2010 by ehurst

Over the intervening week he got several email reports from the sponsoring teacher.

On the first morning after the last meeting, the students and staff were greeted by numerous brightly colored messages drawn in sidewalk chalk on the front steps, a couple of concrete walls and other fixtures. A few were simply, “Got Peace?” Some were more graphic, vaguely psychedelic, and one quite extensive in size and complexity. Each bore at least one of either the old peace sign, a dove, or olive branch, but always some variation on the sunrise emblazoned with “Peace Day Dawning”.

On another day, quite a few students showed up decorated with variously colored t-shirts with large peace signs and doves. On one sleeve everyone had the sunrise symbol again. The staff one morning found fresh cut flowers, one in each of their mailboxes in the lounge, with a simple card saying, “Peace!”

There were other creative expressions, but one in particular stood out. During a lunch period, a mixed quartet stood near an entrance with a boom box, and began singing very soulfully the old Chi-Lites tune, “Have You Seen Her?” However, the lyrics had been changed to make it clear the lady being sought was Peace. Half-way into the first verse, a girl slipped out of the ladies room nearby. She was dressed in a colorful psychedelic full body suit with numerous peace signs, over which she wore a diaphanous dress with long flowing sleeves. Atop her pixie-cut hair she wore a headband with doves mounted atop long springs, waving constantly with her movements. She darted around, touching the various singers who pretended they were trying to catch a glimpse of her. She kept this up, until the last verse, when she danced around in front of them, teasing as they reached for her, spinning away.

So it was no surprise when it became somewhat fashionable among the students to wear variations on some of the peace symbols, with a bit of the hippie-era revival of peace, love and flowers, and flashing the two-fingered salute.

At their next meeting, their greeting of him was a bit more enthusiastic. They had been quite busy and the response was fairly strong. He grinned broadly and allowed them to tell him about some of it. The group was well over twenty this time.

“So, you’ve at least created a certain flush of awareness. By no means could I criticize any of it. Excellent, all of it.” He sat down in the middle at his usual place. “You know, of course, most of this will die down.”

They agreed, and no one seemed to dampen much.

“Good. You understand this is just the first salvo. They know you are here, and what you are all about. I like your logo of the dawn. Keep that; use it in more places. It’s the branding for your message, which cannot be confined to just this one institution. We know everyone in the world deserves a chance to have Peace awakened in them, but we can reach only so far. As others are awakened, we want this to be inclusive, not just a thing you have here at this school. Indeed, this is something for the entire human race, and the symbol of dawn is fairly universal across cultures and languages.”

He stood. “Keep it harmless. Be obtrusive, but measure skillfully — artfully — how far you should push in each context. Peace has a thousand names, and does far more than just de-escalate tensions. Peace means doing the right thing all the time, everywhere. Another name is Love, or Compassion, or Charity, but always the aim is to awaken Peace in others.”

“Sounds like a religion,” one fellow said, laughing. He didn’t laugh alone.

He turned to face the lad. “As you know, the system is militant about dampening any religious expression on the taxpayer dime, so I’m not going to give you openly religious talk. Ask me about it privately; your sponsor will give you my email address. But you can figure out for yourself what it should mean for you in those terms.” He turned to face the rest of the students, slowly rotating to engage them all with his eyes. “There is nothing I can do to avoid making this sound like some sort of religion. It is most certainly all encompassing like one, making claims on your entire existence.”

He sat back down in his seat. “I know of few religions which don’t value peace on some level. In the long run, I strongly expect if you carry this even half so far as I am encouraging, you’ll get into trouble with every source of authority in your life — government, church, family — everyone will be at least inconvenienced by your choice to be a full time peace maker. Some will be openly hostile. You’ll have to find your own balance, your own level of commitment.”

A girl asked, “So if we want to make of this nothing more than another silly activity with friends, we can?” Her tone implied she had no such attention.

“It’s only what you make of it. If you want me involved, we’ll keep talking and doing the same way it’s gone so far. Otherwise we can contact one of the major peace institutes and get you a more traditional leader. There are hundreds of overpaid time wasters like that out there. But I warn you again: It won’t be Peace you are promoting, regardless of what you call it. If you really want peace, I believe I have some and I’m willing to share how I got it. You can’t have mine, but you can surely have your own. The last thing you should want is anyone else’s control, at least as you know of it in this world.”

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Sanity Subversive 4: Who

Posted on October 6, 2010 by ehurst

When he entered the room at their next meeting, they all echoed his parting salute from the previous week.

He responded, “A symbolic gesture which matches perfectly. Each of you affected your own version of the hand sign, and you were not in unison. Unity without uniformity.”

The group was smaller. Over half of the students from last week did not return, but two new ones came. There was a cluster of five, a trio, and three loners. Eleven was better than he expected.

One asked, “So what should we call you?”

He chuckled. “Whatever suits you. Our sponsor” — waving his hand at the teacher — “will handle the administriva, taking names, counting noses and offering some report of what took place. That is simply so we can continue in this setting.”
The last words came as he looked askance around the room, and earned a few chuckles.

He went back to his previous seat from last week and sat down. “Peace is the only person who matters here.” He paused while they digested that for a moment. “It won’t matter whether you think of Peace as he, she, it, because it is far above all that. But Peace is surely a personal entity, a spirit if you will, who lives in some people in this crazy world. In any given context, people of Peace can come together and make peace.”

He gazed down at the floor. “It would be wonderful if we could do something concrete which changed the situation in which we lived. People have been working at it for centuries, but we still have violence and wars, and the more it seems we study and know about peace, the worse it all gets. It’s futile.”

He suddenly stood up. “It’s futile if you plan to fix politics the way the Peace Movement has been at it so far. They keep getting suckered into the same game, trying to take over the turf of the war makers. They make peace something objective, sucking the life out of it. Whether it is actually possible to change politics, to stop wars and violence, we can’t know, because no one has actually tried it the right way. As long as we follow the path of so-called ‘Peace Studies’ we’ll never get there. We will always be under the control of the war makers.”

He began the slow circuitous walk again, but in the opposite direction this time. “The only leaders you can dare to trust are those who refuse to lead in any sense typically recognized. The very existence of political power is itself a moral disqualification of those who hold such power. The true moral leaders are so rare we might as well presume they don’t exist in our expectations, only in retrospect.”

One of the loners said, “What about Ghandi?”

“Ghandi had that rare and exceptional talent, but made some mistakes. He used the power of peace making to achieve what was, in the end, a political goal. His work ended British rule, but by making that a goal, he lost the opportunity for something much bigger. We have yet to see in human history the result of going after that bigger opportunity.”

He picked up a metal rod broken off one of the desks. Holding it in one hand, he laid it back to rest on his shoulder and began walking again. “If we expect to march around concentrations of power to get out the message of Peace, we can do no better than Ghandi. Once he was dead, his movement was hijacked by others whose hopes were not peaceful. Today India murders her own people because they won’t conform to the will of the government leaders, not unlike the British they once threw off. Changing political leadership accomplishes nothing, because leaders will always lead you where they want to you to go for their own personal needs, not yours and certainly not peace.”

He tossed the rod across the room where it bounced noisily off a stack of desk parts. “It doesn’t matter what you call me, but I refuse to lead. When people of Peace gather at any moment, in any context, their devotion to peace will determine what is the best way to make peace, to show the power of Peace, so those others there who have the seeds of Peace inside can fumble around for that awareness. Whatever we hope Peace might do for our world won’t happen until we become peace makers full time.”

He returned to his seat, and collapsed into it. “I can’t tell you what peace making means in such a way as to fit all occasions. What I can tell you is what it is not so you can eliminate barriers inside yourselves. Once you do that, you are in position to do the one thing which has never been done to any extent so far as I know: Make more people aware of Peace. I am in no position to judge whether every one in the world has the seeds of peace, but we will never find out if we don’t work for that intermediate purpose. Without making peace with others and in others, we simply cannot hope to change the way the Peace Movement has gone so far.”

“What happens when you walk out that door? Can you devote yourself to Peace and start seeing everything as an opportunity to rise above the same old crap? Can you shrug off distractions, genuinely let people do whatever it is they will do, while you do what Peace makes you do? Your sponsor here will do what’s required of her administratively. If you start to do something the bureaucracy won’t permit, she’ll tell you not to do it. Not because she necessarily believes it’s wrong, but because that’s how she maintains her position and official support for this club. Beyond that, it’s just a matter of tactics and strategy, and in the end you alone can decide what you will do.”

He stood up and moved outside the vaguely circular formation of students. “You each have your own talents. When Peace cries to be let out, you’ll each find your own way to express it — fine arts, drama, mundane labor — it won’t matter what it is, only that it is. Until we unwrap our own individual issues with this insane world, we can’t help anyone escape the madness which makes violence and war so inviting. I’m just offering my own understanding, but everything really is on you. Take charge, but don’t fall into the trap of leader and follower. Simply negotiate and agree to act together in whatever way you find comfortable.”

He stepped away from the group and conferred silently with the teacher. Slowly at first, with almost nervous chatter from a few, they began hashing over what they had heard.

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Sanity Subversive 3: Why

Posted on October 5, 2010 by ehurst

“So, we just come and do what we like?” The girl’s tone sounded like an honest question.

He smiled, “Exactly.” He rose and put his foot on the seat, leaned his crossed arms on the raised knee and faced the girl. “Throughout human history, all the trouble and wars have been caused by leaders. The path to making peace is doing all we can to weaken every leader over us, and every leader around us, and every leader with so much as the potential to touch our lives. We must dedicate ourselves to acting leaderless.”

“Dude, we in a government school, in a state which does everything possible to prevent alternative education schemes.” One young man was catching on.

He straightened up and began slowly threading his way among the broken desks in a wide circle around the group of students. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking there is some well defined goal in all of this. Making peace in the world is not an objective, but a commitment regardless of consequences.”

The smallest boy in the group said, “So if we don’t need leaders, why do we need to you to explain it?”

He chuckled, “I’m glad so many of you are actually awake.” He took a few more slow steps in his circuitous route. “I’m not leading you. The only way you can be a peacemaker is if it lives in you already. All I do is share my own perception of things from a much longer base of experience. I am surely wrong on some things, but it’s the best I know.”

He stopped at a vantage point where he could see all their faces at once. “If making peace lives in you, my words will only awaken it. If what I say grabs hold of you, not in the desire to be my disciples, as it were, but calling you to your own fire, your own plans, then I succeed. I am making peace.”

He gestured with his hands inclusively of the crowd. “If to any of you I sound like a rambling fool, then you aren’t actually a member of the club, regardless of what the forms in the office say. You are certainly free to hang around, play along, or even make trouble if you wish, but you won’t actually be a part of what happens in the long run.”

He glanced meaningfully at the teacher. “Depending on whether your actions afflict this lady’s conscience, you may get into some sort of trouble for some things you might do. You’ll have to negotiate with her, but not with me. If this doesn’t interest you, nothing I can say or do will make it work. But if by now some spark has been lit in your minds, this meeting will be its own reward. You’ll come back next week ready to discuss your own ideas, and I’ll gradually fade farther and farther into the background. You will each lead yourselves in making peace.”

He held up his left hand, palm out. The thumb was extended directly horizontal, the first two fingers were almost straight, and not quite together. The other two fingers were limply curved. The gesture itself was almost indistinct. “Make peace.” Then he abruptly turned and left the room.

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