Roughly 5 years ago a young guy claiming to work on Al Gore's TV network asked me to "friend" him on Facebook. He said he'd been reading my posts, especially when I wrote about "the life of the mind", that we had many digerati friends in common and he'd like to share ideas. I googled him and checked our mutual "friends" list and found him to be interesting, so I clicked "confirm". His name was Jason Silva.
Some of you may know who he and others will have no clue. http://thisisjasonsilva.com His website will give you an idea, for those of you who don't know. He's doing what he said he wanted to do, elevate discourse to the state of awesome investigations into worlds we've yet to imagine. He's been compared to Timothy Leary, associated with Ray Kurzweil/Al Gore/Fortune 500 companies, hosts National Geographic's "Brain Games", and narrates beat philosophy in his "Shots of Awe" YouTube series. He was born in Venezuela, went to college in Miami and now resides between LA and NYC. He is 20 years my junior and prolific in his ability to flow philosophy to the masses like a master jazz musician. https://www.facebook.com/jasonlsilva/videos/vb.1578052705792342/1579437918987154/?type=2&theater
As his popularity rose, I realized I was shifted from his personal fb page to his professional fb page. No biggie, I am still getting the content of his machinations and sharing in the life of the mind conversation.
Today is Memorial Day. It is a day where we are supposed to honor the soldiers who have sacrificed for our country. Many have given their lives, limbs and peace of mind for our flag and philosophies. A front line journalist who I used to represent, Markos Kounalakis, annually posts a film he made of Mark Twain's "The War Prayer" on this day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRVod4PwQHs He directed and produced it, along with some Grade A talent. Twain's Prayer is a harsh indictment of war. It was published 13 years after his death, as his family feared retribution for the ideas laid bare in it. Twain himself told a reporter when is was discovered and he refused to publish it, "No, I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead." When you view it, you'll understand why.
You see, our democracy is supposed to separate church from state. However we all know this is not yet achieved (even a hundred years after Twain's death and beyond our experimental nations bicentennial). I teach too many texts on war compounded with this corrupted philosophy: Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns" & "The Kite Runner", Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front", Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" & "Hamlet", Zola's "Jean Gourdon's Four Days", Helen Keller's "Strike Against War", Kingston's "Warrior Woman" and the films, "Joyuex Noel" and "Princess Kai'ulani".
My high school students, the people who will be both our next voting electorate and a disproportionally large population to enroll in the armed forces, become emotional weary of these texts. They depress and confuse them. The only texts that give them some hope are the Hosseini novels and the Princess Kai'ulani film.
And that is ironic! The wars in Afghanistan have been raging almost their entire lives (from 2001 to present). Yet, the characters they relate to and feel compassion for are the American annexed Hawaiian Princess, the Russian overrun Afghanistan female and male protagonists and the Scottish/German/French soldiers in the trenches of WW1! Most armies are young and male. The fact that the princess and Afghani girl are held in high esteem by my students is a new shift in the story telling and receiving lens.
When asked how many students have members of their families or loved ones in the armed forces, the hands of a majority of my students in all 5 periods will rise. When asked how many of those serving or who have served will openly talk or discuss what war is really like with them, usually there will be a hand or two raised. My classes are large, by the way, 20 at the smallest and 30 at the largest.
When asked why those who are serving joined, these are their answers: Education, 9/11, Family Legacy, Money, Technical Training or some combination thereof. When asked why they have enlisted, and a large number each year do, the answers are the same. None say: Country or Flag or Honor or National Duty.
When we study Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Martel's "The Life of Pi" they have two very strong reactions. The hate Kafka and love Martel. The angst and symbolism of Kafka is oppressive to them, and it takes a while for them the understand all the historical and philosophical context. What they also don't know, until I point out the method of my madness, is that Martel's tale is just as dark and oppressive, it just has a modern and global sensibility. Both deal with man's search for meaning. Both deal with overcoming loss of control. In each it isn't country vs country or government vs government, it's man vs man. That starts to be hinted at in Remarque's WWI novel, when the protagonist commits treason by giving the enemy food and cigarettes; he sees them as himself. We have long discussions about life being a series of choices at various junctures. We discuss the characters choices and by extension our own.
At several points during the year I summon my inner Harvard Professor, or rather I borrow liberally from a Harvard Course on Justice taught by Dr. Michael Sandel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY It is basically a course on choices and morality with the philosophical high stakes of who would you kill and why. The URL above is just the first of many, and it's entitled "The Moral Side of Murder". I'll have you know that once I start to pepper my lessons with these constructs the students beg for them often. The second one is "The Case for Cannibalism". Sounds grim right, but it's a feature of our human animal history that we don't like to discuss or bring to light often. Murder is much more common. So common that we have played homicide games since infancy. We even teach our pets to "play dead".
Getting back to Church and State. I live in Massachusetts. I was born in Boston. We recently sentenced a man to death for a terrorist act, and I wasn't happy about it. Yet many were. I was raised by college educated, quasi-hippie, take it to the streets, write to your congress person, question authority people. I will mention that none of my blood relatives have served in a war since the Civil War, and then it was in a divided state: Kentucky. Mark Twain was living the last time any Nazor or Harrison fought in a war. Also none of us have attended church regularly since the '50s.
War has gone from being chess piece matches with platoons of men to systemic disruptions with a handful of men. Church has been slowly removed as first the Industrial and later the Scientific revolutions took hold. Yet America is still the child of England, and even though most anglos moved here for religious freedom, it's taken hundreds of year for us to finally see organized religion waning as an adjective by which we define ourselves. Many of my students, 10 years ago, still clung to their Catholic faith. Now fewer are being confirmed and fewer yet say they will continue to practice once they leave home. Many are starting to write college essays about separating from their faith and making choices based on who they are as individual vs a member of a congregation. This has been a seismic shift in the student body. It's also starting to change the way they think about family legacy and enlisting. They see, first hand, more of the effects of PTSD.
What the students learn from their families and the texts is that in order to win wars you must dehumanize the enemy. They have also learned that is only temporarily achieved. The energy of those you killed, maimed or crushed follow you home. The artist, like Remarque, tries to give it meaning or exercise it through writing. The professor tries to make it a moral lesson by imagining it and then taking it apart choice by choice. The psychiatrist does the same thing by talking the soldier through it, day by day, battle by battle. I lived with a Vietnam Vet, Ron Ouellette, for three years on a boat. He would have what we'd call "black spells". He'd been a truck driver who delivered supplies to the front lines in Vietnam. When he returned to the states he was broken, became a vegetarian, and had a vasectomy. He's seen innocent women and children killed and decaying by the side of the road. He said he could never bring a child into a world that could do that to people. He processed it after I left the boat, and while we stayed in close communication. He became an ICU nurse. First in the USVI and then in Florida. He was stable and content, until the vets started coming back from Afghanistan. Their stories were his story. The tapes playing in their head re-activated the stories he'd worked a decade earlier. When he retired a few years ago, he had to deactivate the tapes and has now regained a much deserved and hard won contentment. He started traveling again, this time not by boat, which was his primary mode of transportation since returning from Vietnam, but by car and to National Parks. They say that the state of awe one experiences in viewing the Grand Canyon shuts off all the usual patterns of thinking and jumpstarts you right into that much coveted place called FLOW. I believe that the National Park tour, with his latest lady friend, has been powerful medicine in restoring a sense of inspiration to my friend. He used to manufacture it himself: building two boats, one house, going back to school in his 40's, nursing vets and so on. Now he's receiving it and I'm so happy for him.
I took the kids to see the latest Mad Max movie on Saturday night. It's a post-apocolyptic tale of hope and redemption. It's a wildly feminist take on the old Mad Max franchise, like they threw in some Margaret Atwood and did hire Eve Ensler (who contributed to the screenplay) http://time.com/3850323/mad-max-fury-road-eve-ensler-feminist/. Seeds, breastmilk, breeders, male slaves and one female amputee truck driver will give you an idea of the landscape of "Fury Road". Mad Max isn't the protagonist, Furiosa (Charlene Theron ~ she's mad as hell and won't take it anymore) the warrior! I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen it yet, but it shows that the time of the woman, peace, contributors vs authoritarians and nurturing may actually be gaining root in our consciousness, and it may start to grow in the real world.
The above is the Peace Prayer by St. Francis of Assisi. I boldly pronounced my crush on the current Pope of the same name to my class of World Studies students last week before we took our field trip to NYC and the 9/11 museum. If you read the last word in each line it goes something like this:
Peace
Love,
Pardon,
Faith,
Hope,
Light,
Joy,
Console,
Understand,
Love,
Pardon,
Life.
You notice two Pardons. That is what we have to do to move forward as the human race. Pardon our trespassers and ourselves. That is the only way War will ever end and we can enter a time of Peace.
This will take a great deal of active thinking to achieve. It will take a great deal desire and inspiration. It will take more than knowledge, it will take imagination and determination. We will have to shoot ourselves full of AWE, and not longer commit acts of Shock and Awe!
This is my prayer for Memorial Day: That the world will learn to live together as one, so war will be impossible, as there will be no "us" and "them". Jason's "Shots of Awe" are a step in the right direction!
Happy Memorial Day, to young and old, dead and living, G'Day!
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