Buy No More

Reports keep surfacing about the increasing numbers of military personnel who commit suicide.

Just last evening there was a segment on Jim Lehrer’s PBS NewsHour focused on the single case of a U.S. Army Reservist who, after a year in Iraq followed by orders that his unit would be called up again, shot himself dead in his home, where he lived with his wife and two small daughters.

You don’t have to have been at the scene to imagine the psychic wounds that must have inflicted upon his family.

According to the NewsHour report, the Army is mobilizing to address the suicide problem, which it believes is exacerbated by multiple deployments without sufficient down time between them and inadequate mental health services, both before and after deployments.

Well, we can’t expect the Army to admit that the real problem is war itself. But we might expect PBS to talk to someone who would draw that conclusion.

There probably are some people out there who love war, but you don’t hear them often admit it, even if they are soldiers high in the chain of command. I forget which general it was who said “War is hell.” I’m pretty sure I heard Gen. Wesley Clark admit, in effect, that “no one wants to go to war.”

And then, of course, there’s Dwight Eisenhower’s famous farewell warning about the military-industrial complex—which, of course, he did a lot to put in place.

But if soldiers and generals do not love war and, in effect, warn us against waging it, and if we see alarmingly high numbers of veterans returning from war, if alive at all, with serious mental and emotional problems—not to mention physical disabilities that will leave many of them dependents for the rest of their lives—why will no one central to the discussion of military suicides step up and admit that the cause of the problem is war itself?

Similarly, not too long ago I tuned into a local public television program in Hampton Roads called “What Matters.” Among the several topics covered that evening in a New Year’s round-up of issues facing the current Virginia General Assembly was transportation.

Here in Hampton Roads, as in many urban areas of the country, traffic gridlock is a persistent problem, especially because the area is divided by several major rivers flowing into the mother of all large waters, the Chesapeake Bay.

Planners and legislators have proposed additional roads, bridges, and tunnels to alleviate the congestion, but in a binding referendum a couple years ago a master plan was voted down by tax-shy Virginians who feared their hard-earned dollars would be misspent by a profligate Department of Transportation.

As a result, not only does the gridlock continue but the furrowed brows have grown deeper among pundits and officials who ponder and endlessly discuss what’s to be done about “the transportation problem.”

And now there’s no money anyway, not even to fix the roads, tunnels, and bridges Hampton Roads already has.

Just about every afternoon vehicles traveling from jobs in Norfolk to homes due north across the Bay in Hampton or Newport News are backed up, literally, for miles.

The same is true at every crossing—from Norfolk, for instance, south through the tunnels to Portsmouth and Chesapeake, and on the well-traveled freeway east from Norfolk to Virginia Beach.

Yet no one in any discussion I’ve ever heard has said that the problem is too many cars or that the solution is to find a way to reduce driving.

We can’t solve problems unless we get to the core of their cause. Otherwise, we’re just blowing hot air.

The cause of military suicides and the host of personal and social suffering that accompanies them—domestic assaults, divorce, mental illness, addictions, unemployment, and homelessness—is war. Pure and simple.

Just as the cause of traffic congestion—not to mention accompanying air and water pollution—is too many cars.

We have to end war.

We have to get people out of their cars.

Any volunteers?

No, I didn’t think so.

I realize it’s no small order. The American way of life depends on war, which currently is going badly, and not just because soldiers are killing themselves or their family members.

The American way of life also depends on automobiles, which currently are choking our roads and our atmosphere and, as an industry, are taking us many miles down the highway to bankruptcy.

But I don’t believe technology—smart bombs or smart cars—is going to rescue us. I’m not even sure anything can rescue us.

But one thing that might help is to give up the American dream of world supremacy and material opulence and simplify our lives.

Demand decent public transportation. Convert those McMansions into extended family communes. Plant gardens in those suburban lawns or in porch and balcony planters. Stay home with the dogs and cats. They’ll love you for it.

Disconnect the cable, turn off the TV. Let suckers switch to digital television while you read serious books instead. Ride a bike to the public library and borrow some.

We the people on this planet have been sold a big bag of bullshit right from the start. Somehow, the worst ideas peddled by charlatans and profiteers have become the operating principles of our societies, creating enormous burdens for us all our lives.

But it’s our fault. We bought it.

The time has come to buy no more.

It won’t be easy. Conversion never is.

But when the money runs out, what better time to try?

What’s the Damn Hurry?

As I listen to the brisk, sometimes heated economic discussions underway in our national forums these days, I wonder if there are any right—by which I mean “correct”—answers.

One thing seems plain—if it’s coming from self-described conservatives it’s probably discredited by its own history. Clearly it doesn’t work to put unfettered business in charge of the common good. We were sold a pile of fool’s gold on that one.

If, on the other hand, it’s coming from the left we have good reason to believe that a working class dictatorship trips over its own contradictions. Didn’t that system essentially fail twenty years ago?

Presently, it seems that some sort of temporary quasi-socialism will become the economic policy choice, with the apparent hope that it will soon revive capitalism so we can hand it back to the capitalists and resume where we left off somewhere in the past—2007 for some, 1996 for others, but you’re invited to fill in your own best year from the good old days.

For my part, despite many pleasant memories, I don’t think there’s a past I really care to get back to.

And as for going forward, which way was that again?

I think it’s worth considering whether to let the old system go. By that I don’t mean do nothing. I mean don’t try to fix it.

Instead, go organic. Address need. You’re unemployed? Your school is failing? You’ve been wiped out by medical bills?

Let’s talk. What are your dreams? What do you need to get started? A loan, a grant, a reliable car?

Some things can be put off, some things demand immediate attention. Meanwhile, change is happening, new solutions are arriving in place, patched in as individual situations require. Old stuff fades away as new stuff takes shape out of its lost or forgotten parts.

We could be very busy, very soon. We may not be making any money, but we’ll be providing goods and services to one another on a daily basis. Isn’t that what an economy is supposed to do?

We have the institutional infrastructure, public and private, capable of handling this on a wide scale. All we need is our own permission.

We’ll have to take stock. With the old system of prejudice and privilege lying on the ground in a useless heap like Humpty Dumpty, what kind of a society do we want to build in its place?

Does everyone get counted in or not? Do we need loafing leaders to tell us what to do, or can we trust ourselves and others to do the right thing for the health and welfare of everybody?

How much do we really need to live? What will it take for us to live together without envy or violence?

Where is the line between human beings and Nature? How much can we use up before we are poachers on the property of Universal Life?

Our collective answers to these and similar questions will define the kind of society and social relationships we’ll build as the old system, like the feudal castle on which it was modeled, topples into rubble.

It seems we have some time to think it over. Let’s promise one another to choose wisely. There’s an old adage which applies here which I’ve found to be true.

Haste makes waste.

We Americans have always been a people in a hurry. And we’ve created incredible waste.

How much more can we really afford?