A Fun New War

February 24, 2018 Bartleby

[Editor’s Note: This essay is included in “First Essays”, available for sale (or free — write us at Editor@PureLoveShop.com and we’ll email you a copy) on the Buy Our Books! tab of this blog.]

Yes! Finally! A nice, safe fun war

Remember all those wars where everyone ends up bloody stumps lying in the cold mud or burning sand or, if lucky, the cool springtime grass, gurgling vagueries to the twittering skies? Do you remember the bombs that fall, the cities that burn, the people evaporating at the center and melting on the edges?

So what a great idea Brother Bear’s proposed! Now here’s a place for US American know-how, can-do, and go-get-em to shine bright and pleasant as a laughing spring day of fresh air, light-tunneling streams and limegreen leaf-underbellies flipped up by tickling breezes, soaking in and giggling out a broad clear sunshine!

All we have to do this time is figure out how to make voting machines secure, catch false news, and train every red-blooded American in the fine art of critically considering all ideas. How we’ll investigate and pick apart not just ads, but also conjectures, pop-off comments, well-argued but not necessarily therefore actually-reasonable soliloquies, imagery, everything! And one more tool to complete our victory: if fake news seeks to divide us, what better weapon have we but to unite? What better way to deny an attack on collective goodwill than building up the mighty arsenal of togetherness, of shared sympathies and joys, of love between all of God’s creation?

Step down, if you would be so kind, to a little lower layer*. Eye in eye here in the dark, in this old wood hold of an ancient wooden ship**. Here we’ve the privacy and salty old-oak odor conducive to confidential, earnest discussion.
Now, what if I were to tell you that this time the Russians weren’t our enemies?

You heard that right!

Those members of the Russian government seeking to unbalance and discredit our democracy with fake news and the real or merely-believed corruption of our elections: these are our enemies.

No, not so fast. Not even them!

Those elements within human beings that would live in this mean-spirited way, that would guide their overall selves to behave in this way and to take these steps: these are our enemies. Our enemy is bad-will, the desire to hurt, to maim, and the mindsets and efforts born of these spiritual errors.

We people always dream of holy wars, and now we have one. Oh happy day! The battle for the soul of the nation and the world is here clear as day! Liberal democracies win when clear-eyed, honest, kind thoughtful community wins. Can we answer this cruel, this sour-hearted salvo with clear, honest, careful, loving thinking, feeling, living, acting? Can we make lemonade? I think we can. I think we should.

Then, as we apply our love of good machines, good systems, good thinking, and shared joy to defeat those strange foolish desperate tugs within the human heart — those evil flinches that desire power more than Goodness — , as we fight the good fight against the efforts of foreign bodies to damage our democracy, we will be fighting not just outside invaders, but also corruptions within our own system and culture, even within our own hearts.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy! A neat war. A fun war. The nukes are still piled up and the intrigues yet swirl like feathery shadows on all sides; the war against imaginable horrors never ends for us vulnerable little humanthings. So we should be grateful for this provocation, this inspiration to be more proactive, to fight for what is on the whole still a really wonderful set of possibilities before it is too late, before our own greeds and bitternesses and powerlustvaunts and thoughtlessnesses steal away our own beauty. The power-grab at our hearts/minds/souls by marketers and other psyche-manipulators has been going on for some time, but now the very weapon we’ve used to sucker ourselves out of money, health, community, and wisdom has been turned against us by a foreign government in a clear attempt to break our collective back: surely a sufficient wake-up call!

Let us take our stand here, so that together the Goodness within all human hearts will win and those aspects of human hearts and minds that feed and breed in rancor, meanness, greed, selfish indifference and all such snippy mean small-minded screams will have less and less resources, less and less inspiration, less and less fuel, less and less to say and do. In this way we humans can focus more and more on creation, exploration, sharing kind joy. Why not? We’ve done enough of the other stuff.
Oh happy day!

Signed,

Rick Assessment
Chief WAP Military Strategist
[From an early-2018 memo]
Author: BW
Editor: AW
[Editor’s Notes:
*a little lower layer:
See Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (Chapter 36: The Quarter Deck)
**eye in eye:
See the same book, but Chapter 132: The Symphony]

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