Barack Obama’s tears for the children of Newtown are in stark contrast to his silence over the children murdered by his drones

By George Monbiot
The Guardian, Monday 17 December 2012 15.30 EST

“Mere words cannot match the depths of your sorrow, nor can they heal your wounded hearts … These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.” Every parent can connect with what President Barack Obama said about the murder of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut. There can scarcely be a person on earth with access to the media who is untouched by the grief of the people of that town.

It must follow that what applies to the children murdered there by a deranged young man also applies to the children murdered in Pakistan by a sombre American president. These children are just as important, just as real, just as deserving of the world’s concern. Yet there are no presidential speeches or presidential tears for them, no pictures on the front pages of the world’s newspapers, no interviews with grieving relatives, no minute analysis of what happened and why.

If the victims of Mr Obama’s drone strikes are mentioned by the state at all, they are discussed in terms which suggest that they are less than human. The people who operate the drones, Rolling Stone magazine reports, describe their casualties as “bug splats”, “since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed”. Or they are reduced to vegetation: justifying the drone war, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser Bruce Riedel explained that “you’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back”.

Like George Bush’s government in Iraq, Obama’s administration neither documents nor acknowledges the civilian casualties of the CIA’s drone strikes in north-west Pakistan. But a report by the law schools at Stanford and New York universities suggests that during the first three years of his time in office, the 259 strikes for which he is ultimately responsible killed between 297 and 569 civilians, of whom at least 64 were children. These are figures extracted from credible reports: there may be more which have not been fully documented.

The wider effects on the children of the region have been devastating. Many have been withdrawn from school because of fears that large gatherings of any kind are being targeted. There have been several strikes on schools since Bush launched the drone programme that Obama has expanded so enthusiastically: one of Bush’s blunders killed 69 children.

The study reports that children scream in terror when they hear the sound of a drone. A local psychologist says that their fear and the horrors they witness is causing permanent mental scarring. Children wounded in drone attacks told the researchers that they are too traumatised to go back to school and have abandoned hopes of the careers they might have had. Their dreams as well as their bodies have been broken.

Obama does not kill children deliberately. But their deaths are an inevitable outcome of the way his drones are deployed. We don’t know what emotional effect these deaths might have on him, as neither he nor his officials will discuss the matter: almost everything to do with the CIA’s extrajudicial killings in Pakistan is kept secret. But you get the impression that no one in the administration is losing much sleep over it.

Two days before the murders in Newtown, Obama’s press secretary was asked about women and children being killed by drones in Yemen and Pakistan. He refused to answer, on the grounds that such matters are “classified”. Instead, he directed the journalist to a speech by John Brennan, Obama’s counter-terrorism assistant. Brennan insists that “al-Qaida’s killing of innocents, mostly Muslim men, women and children, has badly tarnished its appeal and image in the eyes of Muslims”.

He appears unable to see that the drone war has done the same for the US. To Brennan the people of north-west Pakistan are neither insects nor grass: his targets are a “cancerous tumour”, the rest of society “the tissue around it”. Beware of anyone who describes a human being as something other than a human being.

Yes, he conceded, there is occasionally a little “collateral damage”, but the US takes “extraordinary care [to] ensure precision and avoid the loss of innocent life”. It will act only if there’s “an actual ongoing threat” to American lives. This is cock and bull with bells on.

The “signature strike” doctrine developed under Obama, which has no discernible basis in law, merely looks for patterns. A pattern could consist of a party of unknown men carrying guns (which scarcely distinguishes them from the rest of the male population of north-west Pakistan), or a group of unknown people who look as if they might be plotting something. This is how wedding and funeral parties get wiped out; this is why 40 elders discussing royalties from a chromite mine were blown up in March last year. It is one of the reasons why children continue to be killed.

Obama has scarcely mentioned the drone programme and has said nothing about its killing of children. The only statement I can find is a brief and vague response during a video conference last January. The killings have been left to others to justify. In October the Democratic cheerleader Joe Klein claimed on MSNBC that “the bottom line in the end is whose four-year-old gets killed? What we’re doing is limiting the possibility that four-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror”. As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, killing four-year-olds is what terrorists do. It doesn’t prevent retaliatory murders, it encourages them, as grief and revenge are often accomplices.

Most of the world’s media, which has rightly commemorated the children of Newtown, either ignores Obama’s murders or accepts the official version that all those killed are “militants”. The children of north-west Pakistan, it seems, are not like our children. They have no names, no pictures, no memorials of candles and flowers and teddy bears. They belong to the other: to the non-human world of bugs and grass and tissue.

“Are we,” Obama asked on Sunday, “prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?” It’s a valid question. He should apply it to the violence he is visiting on the children of Pakistan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

George Joshua Richard Monbiot (born 27 January 1963 in Kensington, London[1]) is an English writer, known for his environmental and political activism. He lives in Machynlleth, Wales,[2] writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000) and Bring on the Apocalypse: Six Arguments for Global Justice (2008).

Twitter: @georgemonbiot

Simulpost with Alternet
AlterNet [1] / By Meghan Murphy [2]/ Feminist Current
All captions and images by account of the editors

Legalized hunting is one depraved and anachronistic activity that fosters not only the proliferation of guns but the perpetuation of dominionist tendencies in men over anything that moves—and that often includes women and children besides helpless animals. As far as hunting is concerned in a modern nation, all the usual excuses aside, you can only wonder why anyone with an ounce of compassion would get his kicks by going out in search of a beautiful animal only to kill it. But with modern weapons, telescopic sights, and other paraphernalia guaranteeing even a blind moron a kill, where is the vaunted sportsmanship?—Eds

“But what about the men?” It’s a question that’s been avoided by the mainstream within the context of mass shootings.

The recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut sparked thousands of conversations across the continent about gun laws, mental illness, and violence. And sadly, we’ve been here before.

We’ve had conversations about access to guns – the victims would still be alive today, after all, if there were no gun. We’ve talked about the need to better address mental illness in North America – about how people need access to services and treatment. With proper support, potential perpetrators could get the help they need before it’s too late. And what about the media? We see violence all the time in movies [3], video games, and on television. Have we become so desensitized to violence that mass murder has become par for the course? Or, worse, a way to achieve fame in a culture obsessed with celebrity as a goal unto itself?

All these factors are relevant. All of these conversations should be had. But no one is asking what is, for once, the single most important question: What about the men?

In 1984, a 39-year-old man opened fire at an upscale nightclub in Dallas after a woman rejected his aggressive sexual advances [4]. The man, Abdelkrim Belachheb, went out to his car, retrieved his gun, and returned to the bar, shooting the woman to death. He then reloaded his gun and killed a total of six more people [4]. Capital punishment quickly became the center of the national conversation. In fact, Belachheb’s crime is most remembered as it lead to the passage of House Bill 8 in Texas —the “multiple murder” statute, which made serial killing and mass murder capital crimes.

That same year, James Oliver Huberty, a man whose ‘volatile temper’ and history of [5] domestic violence is documented, opened fire at a McDonald’s restaurant in California, killing 21 people before being shot dead by a police officer. At the time, this shooting was the “largest single-day, single-gunman massacre in U.S. history [6].” Shocked, liberal politicians used the incident to lobby for stricter gun laws. Others wanted to know why he wasn’t able to access the mental health services he needed.

In 1992, John T. Miller, angry that his wages were being garnished by court order, “claimed that child-support payments had ruined his life [7]”. He entered a county office building in Schuyler County, NY, walked up to the child-support unit, and shot and killed four women whose jobs were to collect child-support. Miller had been ducking childcare payments [8] since 1967.

We all know about the tragic day in 1999 when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire at Columbine High School, killing 12 of their classmates and teachers. Since, many have claimed the two boys were psychopaths [9]. In 2004, an article in Slate [10] commented, based on entries in Harris’ journal that: “These are not the rantings of an angry young man, picked on by jocks until he’s not going to take it anymore. These are the rantings of someone with a messianic-grade superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its appalling inferiority,” also noting a “lack of remorse or empathy—another distinctive quality of the psychopath.”

Others viewed the Columbine shooting as a ‘revenge killing.’ Some speculated that fame, or infamy, rather, was the driving force behind Harris’ and Klebod’s actions. We began a national conversation about ‘bullying’.  ‘Bullying’ as the number one cause for every youth-related problem in North America is another exhausted conversation.

In 2007, 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho opened fire at Virginia Tech, killing 32 people before taking his own life. Cho’s behaviour at Virginia Tech, prior to the shooting, was said to be ‘troubling’. He had been harassing female students and taking pictures of their legs under desks. Cho had been accused of stalking [11] female students [12] on three [13] separate occasions. Supposedly he left a note “raging against women and rich kids [14].” After the Virginia Tech massacre, the national conversation turned, once again, to bullying [15], to mental illness, and to gun laws [16].

This past year, 24-year-old James Holmes opened fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado shooting 71 people. Twelve people died. Holmes had a history of soliciting prostitutes [17]. One of the women he’d bought sex from claimed that he was aggressive, controlling, and violent with her, grabbing her hair and holding her wrists and hands [18] so tightly that she was left with bruises. The Aurora shooting reignited the gun control debate [19]. Some looked to violence in the media [20] as a factor, while others pointed out that Holmes was mentally ill [21].

A thousand conversations. None of them about men.

As we are all aware at this point, 27 people were shot and killed [22] in Newtown, CT on December 14th. The gunman, Adam Lanza, killed his mother first, before driving to Sandy Hook elementary school, where he proceeded to take the lives of 26 students and employees before killing himself.  Some have speculated that Lanza suffered from mental illness. Others want to know why he had access to guns, pointing to his mother, Nancy Lanza, apparently a gun enthusiast [23].

In the midst of all this horror, we are, understandably, up in arms, demanding change, grieving all the while. But within all this righteous anger, we are very carefully tiptoeing around the common denominator.

In 31 of the school shootings that have taken place since 1999 [24], the murderers were all men. Out of the 62 mass murders which happened over the past 30 years [25], only one of those shooters was a woman. [26]The overwhelming majority of the gunmen were white.
Jackson Katz [27], an author, filmmaker, social theorist, and anti-sexist activist, whose work has focused on manhood and masculinity, is baffled: “The gender of the perpetrator is the single most important factor, and yet it’s not talked about in that way in most mainstream conversations.”

So liberals have, once again, jumped on the gun control issue (and I won’t deny that guns are an important issue here) and the right have reached for their handguns, arguing that the only way we can protect ourselves is to be armed (as Ann Coulter tweeted [28], mere hours after the shooting: “more guns, less mass shootings”). Others still, want to talk about mental illness [29] and the health care crisis in America. It should strike us all as more than a little odd that, amidst all of these conversations, whether it’s the progressives, the right, or the mainstream media – no one is talking about gender.

“Imagine if 61 out of 62 mass killings were done by women? Would that be seen as merely incidental and relegated to the margins of discourse?” Katz asks, “No. It would be the first thing people talked about.”

In the U.S., where health care is privatized, it’s true that many people don’t have adequate access to mental health services. Racial and ethnic minorities are even less likely to have access to health services [30], as well as, more generally the poor and unemployed. But not only are these mass shootings committed largely by white men, but by middle class white men. If this were primarily an issue of people not having access to mental health services, it would stand to reason that far more mass shootings would be perpetrated by poor minorities, particularly women of color [31].

But we’re talking white, middle class men — the members of this society who have the most privilege and the most power. The question everyone should be asking is not: “Where did he get the gun?” or “Why wasn’t he on medication?” But: “What is happening with white men?”

This isn’t to say that men are somehow naturally inclined towards violence. It isn’t reasonable to argue that men are born angry or crazy. Masculinity, on the other hand, is something worth thinking about.

“It’s hidden in plain sight,” Katz adds. “This is about masculinity and it’s about manhood.” Other factors are important too, for example, how masculinity intersects with mental illness or emotional problems or with access to guns. “But we need to be talking about gender front and center.”

Even the gun debate needs to be gendered, Katz points out. “So much of gun culture in the U.S. is about masculinity but it’s unspoken.”
What is it about masculinity that leads to these kinds of tragedies? Katz argues that violence is a gendered way of achieving certain goals. Femininity simply isn’t constructed in a way that teaches women to use violence as a means to an end.

“One of the ways we can understand violence is as an external manifestation of internal pain” Katz says. Men, according societal expectations and norms, are only allowed to experience certain emotions – one of those being anger. Violence and anger are accepted and expected forms of men’s emotional expression. “Men are rewarded for achieving certain goals and for establishing of dominance through the use of violence,” Katz says.

Just look at war.

Of course war is yet another factor that is left out of these conversations. The U.S. is a militarized state. America, as a nation, establishes dominance through the use of violence and war is distinctly a male domain. Men wage war and men fight in war. Men run countries that go to war. Men make decisions about whether to continue drone strikes [32] and about where to fire missiles [33]. War is a man’s game. Winner takes all.

“Militarism is, in a sense, a projection of force and power as the assertion of national manhood,” Katz says. There is no way we could live such a militarized culture and not see that manifested in our understandings of manhood and culture at large.

And what of revenge? We often talk about revenge as a reason behind these kinds of attacks. “ Violence is a form of revenge. So often men are enacting violence as a way to take back something they believe as been taken from them,” Katz says.

“Often these shooters are harboring resentment — they retreat into themselves and then develop these revenge fantasies,” Katz says. “Most of the school shootings over the past couple of decades have been revenge killings.” The innocent victims are just “props in the shooter’s theatrical performance of his anger and his resentment,” he says.

When men commit violence, they’re fulfilling expectations of their gender.

“Caring, compassion, and empathy aren’t innately feminine characteristics. Those are human characteristics,” Katz says. Yet men learn the opposite. They learn to shut up and take it like a man. They also learn that they are entitled to certain things in this world: financial success, access to women, power – when they can’t acquire these things, what happens? Well, sometimes, apparently, they seethe. And without any other tools to deal with their anger and resentment, some men resort to violence.

“As a white man, the assumption is that you are the center of the world. Your needs should be met. You should be successful,” Katz says. When that doesn’t pan out men will often end up seeing themselves as victims. “This explains the cultural energy on the right in this past generation – so many of these men see themselves as victims of multiculturalism and of feminism,” he adds. “It’s undermining the cultural centrality of male authority.” Katz points out that we can see this worldview manifesting itself in the Men’s Rights Movement. “They are at the front line making the argument that men are the true victims.” All this isn’t to say that all men who feel they are losing grip on their perceived entitlement to power and authority will become perpetrators of mass shootings. But these broader patterns are something to consider.

Are these shooters psychopaths or sociopaths? Maybe. But what’s a sociopath? It’s a person who lacks empathy. “Well,” says Katz, “we socialize empathy out of boys all the time.” If we aren’t allowing boys to experience and express vulnerability, pain, and fear because that’s somehow connected to weakness (a feminine quality), then how are they going to be able to relate to the experiences of others? “Sociopathy is the extreme manifestation of the way we socialize boys in our society,” he says.

The question of not only: “What about men?” But “What about white masculinity?” should be, according to Katz, on the front page of every newspaper and on every talk show.

Somehow, people seem more comfortable seeing these shooters as twisted psychopaths. We’re more comfortable blaming objects – guns – than we are asking: “Who’s behind the gun?”

After the Aurora shooting, Erika Christakis wrote that [34] “The silence around the gendering of violence is as inexplicable as it is indefensible.” And here we are again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Meghan Murphy is the founder and editor of Feminist Current. Launched in July 2012, Feminist Current is one of the most-read feminist blogs in Canada. Meghan, a freelance writer and journalist from Vancouver, B.C., holds a Masters degree in Women’s Studies from Simon Fraser University and is completing a graduate degree at the University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism.

REFS
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/gender/what-it-about-men-theyre-committing-these-horrible-massacres
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/meghan-murphy
[3] http://kottke.org/12/12/roger-ebert-on-the-medias-coverage-of-school-shootings
[4] http://parakovacs.postr.hu/1105-abdelkrim-belachheb-tomeggyilkos
[5] http://articles.latimes.com/1985-07-14/local/me-6403_1_james-oliver-huberty
[6] http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/years-later-san-ysidro-mcdonald-s-massacre-remembered/article_2ba4343e-7009-54ce-98df-79a23ff8d0d7.html
[7] http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/16/nyregion/gunman-kills-4-who-collected-child-payments.html
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/17/nyregion/shooting-followed-tougher-efforts-to-collect-child-support.html
[9] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-04-13-columbine-myths_N.htm
[10] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/2004/04/the_depressive_and_the_psychopath.single.html
[11] http://www.the-two-malcontents.com/2007/04/va-gunman-had-2-past-stalking-cases/
[12] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/21/AR2007042101223_2.html
[13] http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/item_cin505UGPw3rsJaGxQGfaK
[14] http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2003669403_shoot17.html
[15] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18169776/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/t/high-school-classmates-say-gunman-was-bullied/#.UM4vK7Z_QoU
[16] http://articles.cnn.com/2007-04-19/us/gun.laws_1_gun-dealer-gun-laws-gun-buyers?_s=PM:US
[17] http://www.businessinsider.com/prostitute-calls-colorado-shooting-suspect-really-nice-says-he-felt-bad-her-business-was-lacking-2012-7
[18] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2181025/James-Holmes-Denver-Dark-Knight-killer-paid-prostitute-sex-just-week-massacre.html
[19] http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/does-the-colorado-shooting-prove-the-need-for-more-gun-control-laws/james-holmes-proves-need-for-tighter-gun-ownership-regulations
[20] http://www.theroot.com/views/exposure-violence-begets-violence
[21] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2186336/James-Holmes-Colorado-shooting-suspect-mentally-ill-claims-defense-team.html
[22] http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/12/14/1336101/elementary-school-shooting/
[23] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/adam-lanza-had-something-just-off-about-him-mother-nancy-was-a-social-but-reserved-gun-fan/article6458929/
[24] http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/12/14/1337221/a-timeline-of-mass-shootings-in-the-us-since-columbine/
[25] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map?page=2
[26] http://mylifeofcrime.wordpress.com/2006/02/07/update-jennifer-san-marco-shooting-spree/
[27] http://www.jacksonkatz.com/
[28] https://twitter.com/AnnCoulter/status/279694604633272320
[29] http://thebluereview.org/i-am-adam-lanzas-mother/
[30] http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Publications/Chartbooks/2008/Mar/Racial-and-Ethnic-Disparities-in-U-S–Health-Care–A-Chartbook.aspx
[31] http://nwhn.org/health-care-reform-%E2%80%94-woman%E2%80%99s-issue
[32] http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/27/as_obama_expands_drone_war_activists
[33] http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2012/11/21/in_gaza_its_the_occupation_stupid
[34] http://ideas.time.com/2012/07/24/the-overwhelming-maleness-of-mass-homicide/#ixzz2FA1ppX6d
[35] http://www.alternet.org/tags/male
[36] http://www.alternet.org/tags/massacres
[37] http://www.alternet.org/tags/men
[38] http://www.alternet.org/tags/gender
[39] http://www.alternet.org/tags/murder-0
[40] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Plus ça change…It’s America after all.

Mike Ingles

The crazies are rumbling. Former Secretary of Education, William Bennett, said on Meet the Press yesterday, in response to the massacre at Sandy Hook, that all schools should have armed guards stationed on the school grounds. Ditto says Louie Gohmert, crazed Congressman from Texas, who went on to decry, “I wish to God she (Dawn Hochsprung, school Principal) had had an M-4 in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands and takes him out and takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids.” Louie, has a real problem with verb tenses.

My emails this morning were full of untruths spawned by the Tea-Party folk, including quotes from dead people— “Any guns in the hands of a decent person is no threat to anybody—except bad people,” Charleton Heston, AKA Moses. And, I received a great photo of an Israeli school teacher, carrying her automatic assault rifle, escorting her class on a field-trip, juxtaposed to a photo of a “No-Weapons” sign outside a school in America. Subtle.

Here comes the NRA.

Children died—yada-yada-yada, blah-blah-blah—sorry. “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”

This time it’s different. So says the media, so says the liberal politicians flocking to microphones. Diana Feinstein is going to sponsor a bill: yada-yada-yada, blah-blah-blah. Football players wrote “Sandy Hook” on their taped-up muscles before their Sunday games.

It won’t make any difference. Nothing much will change. The issues that will be brought up are the same as they were last month in Portland—it’s a mental health issue, it’s a Constitutional issue, it’s a emotional issue…and their right! We must take in all of these concerns if we are going to rid ourselves of this evil that has befallen us.

But we won’t.

The NRA will begin with the logical sequence of—let’s not rush into anything, let’s take our time to study the effects of a weapons ban.

Committees will be formed. Time will pass. Congress will look at what’s happening with mental health, and will find that it’s too expensive to fix and will allow the issue to wane. Time will pass. Tea Party types will begin waving the flag—the only way you’ll get my gun is to extract from my cold dead hand. More time will pass. A law will be issued limiting either: the amount of bullets that can be in one magazine, or limiting the sale of certain automatic and semi-automatic weapons. It will have a sunset provision, and, in a few years—yada-yada-yada, blah-blah-blah.

Somewhere out there is another loner kid, with worms in his brain telling him to get even. His parents bought the Glock 9mm because there had been a number of break-ins in the neighborhood. The Glock can kill up to 30 invaders at a time—just in case it’s a gang of thieves and not just a simple single-man robbery. The loner, after having spoken with his psychologist or therapist or councilor, just last week, will acknowledge the worm god growing in his brain and telling him that people at the Mall or at the movie theater or at the school have wronged the worm—wronged the loner.

He will have no choice.

Yada-yada-yada, blah-blah-blah…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mike Ingles is a freelance writer living in Ohio. He has a degree in American Literature from Franklin University, Columbus, Ohio.
duckrun2@aol.com

Refusing the Military:

Healing the Virus of Violence

From the Book

RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War

By William T. Hathaway

A young Buddhist novice contributed this account, which we then revised together. To protect the people who have protected him, he wishes to be nameless.

Back in high school I’d been good at languages but couldn’t afford to go to college, so I joined the navy for the language training. They have a program where if you pass an aptitude test, they’ll send you to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, for an intensive course that’s worth almost a year of college credit. Plus they have an active-duty education program that offers college courses. I figured after my discharge I could finish my education on the GI Bill, and with my language skills, I could get a job in international business.

The other military branches offer programs like this too, but the navy seemed the best way to stay out of the fighting. I was hoping for a major language like Chinese, Russian, or Spanish, but they assigned me to Pashto, which is spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After training, I’d be stationed on a ship in the Arabian Sea monitoring phone calls and radio broadcasts, listening for key words that might give a clue about where the Taliban were, so the planes from the aircraft carriers could bomb them. I didn’t think about this last part, though. I was focused on my future.

The study itself was a real grind — drills, exercises, and vocabulary all day long and a couple of hours at night. But no classes on weekends, so we could take off.

I couldn’t afford weekends in San Francisco, but in a bookstore in Monterey I saw a poster for a two-day retreat at a Zen Buddhist center nearby. It sounded weird enough to be a good break from the military, and the price was right, so I signed up for the first of a two-weekend introductory course.

The place was beautiful, deep in the mountains and forest. The course was called Buddha Breath, Buddha Mind and was led by a bald-headed woman. Instead of an orange robe she wore blue jeans and a sweatshirt. She said first we were going to learn how to breathe. I thought, What have I got myself into?

We spent an hour just breathing in and out, and you know, it turned out to be pretty interesting. When thoughts came up, we were supposed to just nod to them, then let them go and return to our breathing. Thoughts and breathing, thoughts and breathing, and then as I kept doing this, I noticed something more, some part of me that I hadn’t known before, that was watching all this going on, a quiet, wise old part who was just looking at it all and nodding OK. He’d been doing that all along without my knowing it. I thought of him as an old guy with a white beard. But he was me, that was my Buddha mind.

The next hour we were supposed to keep breathing and watching our thoughts, but at the same time notice everything happening around us right here and now. That turned out to be quite a lot. It’s amazing what all is going on that we don’t pay attention to because we’re shut off in our thoughts — worrying about what happened in the past and what might happen in the future. Esther, the group leader, called this our monkey mind because it’s always jumping from one thing to another. It gets lost in each thing and doesn’t have any perspective on itself. But the Buddha mind, that silent witness, can give us a peaceful perspective on ourselves and the world.

From that deeper level I noticed how much beauty shone in simple things: a beaded curtain of eucalyptus buds swaying in the breeze, dust drifting through sunlight, a fly walking on the wall. Watching these while quietly breathing in and out, I could tell the buds, the dust, the fly, and I were all part of the Buddha mind. It wasn’t just my mind but something we shared. This was a bit spooky because it meant there was more to me than me, or there was less of me than me, depending on how I looked at it.

Esther said each of us isn’t an autonomous monad but an aspect of a larger wholeness. She compared the Buddha mind to the entire light spectrum, which is mostly invisible to us, and individuals to the colors we see. Colors and individuals appear to be different, but they’re just sections of the overall spectrum. Continuity is more basic than differences, but we don’t see it that way. The same analogy works with the ocean. We are waves that think of ourselves as self-contained units, but we’re really just water that has temporarily taken on this form. Our true identity, the water, isn’t born and doesn’t die. It just is. The wave suffers because of its delusion of individuality, the water doesn’t. This principle simultaneously destroys our concept of ourselves and gives us a greater one.

What she was saying was heavy-duty stuff, but it clicked in me because it described how I was feeling just sitting there breathing and paying attention. I signed up for the next weekend.

During the week I practiced mindful breathing and awareness as much as I could, which wasn’t very much. It was almost impossible while I was listening to Pashto in the language lab. I could sort of do it during the regular classes between having to give answers. I could do it best when I was alone, but I was hardly ever alone. We did everything as a group. At meals people wanted to talk, and if I would’ve told them I just wanted to pay attention to my breathing, they would’ve thought I was crazy. Finally I came up with the trick of putting my MP3 in my ears but with no music. During meals I could eat in silence, and no one bothered me because they thought I was listening to rock songs and that they could understand. Some of the people I usually ate with did think I was being unfriendly, but I didn’t know how to explain it.

One night as I was doing mindful breathing trying to go to sleep, all these scenes of war came rushing out at me — people getting blown up, crippled orphans, survivors filled with a grief that turns into hatred. They took me over like an invading army. My throat tightened, and I started to hyperventilate — gasping for air, feeling like I was suffocating. Not exactly the desired effect! I kept with the mindful breathing, though, and rode the turbulence through into calmness again. Gradually I stopped trembling, and the thoughts backed off, but I knew the war was still out there waiting for me.

The second weekend was called Buddha Heart, Buddha Hands. We did walking meditations where we integrated our breath with our steps, walking slowly and noticing everything happening in and around us from the deep inner peace of mindfulness. Now we did more than observe it. We tuned in to the feeling level of what was going on. Esther told us first to feel our own emotions as we were walking, to open up to them, accept them, and embrace them with compassion. When we can accept our pain without resentment, we’re ready to love our whole self, warts and all.

Sad feelings came up in me, as if they’d been waiting for this invitation. Rather than just nod to them, I asked them what the trouble was. They started complaining about all sorts of things from long ago, or they were afraid of things that maybe might happen. I felt like a parent listening to a child tell its problems, but my parents had never listened to me like that, and I’d never listened to myself either. I was in a lot more pain than I’d wanted to admit, and I just walked along feeling sorry for myself for a while. But the more I listened to the pain, the quieter it got until it sort of talked itself out, and in the silence I could feel compassion without really feeling sorry for myself. I just accepted what was there without judging it. This was the way it was. This was me.

We expanded this technique to the people around us. In sitting meditation we held the image of each of us in our minds and tried to feel what the other was feeling and to embrace that with love. Then we did this with all of humanity, practiced being aware of their pain, accepting them and loving them.

In walking meditation we applied this to all creatures and the environment they exist in. We felt the suffering of the spider starving because no one comes to its web. We felt the suffering of the fly caught in the web of another spider. None of us is separate, Esther reminded us, we are all held together in a web of suffering and love. The differences between us are a surface illusion.

As I was walking, I gazed out at the Ventana Mountains — they reminded me of home in West Virginia. Then they looked like Afghanistan. I realized West Virginia was the same as Afghanistan. Lots of suffering in both places — people caught in hardscrabble poverty, intolerant religion, rigid family roles, creating more suffering because they don’t know any other way. My family and the Taliban — the same. I started to cry because I was training to help bomb my kinfolks.

In the Buddha Hands sessions Esther talked about acting on these principles to change the world and reduce suffering. She described Buddhist projects to help battered women defend themselves and forgive their attackers, to help prisoners find inner freedom, to help former child soldiers rediscover their childhood and heal their trauma. She played a video about Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who opposed the violence of both the communists and the anti-communists and was therefore persecuted by both sides. Suffering is caused by ignorance of our true nature, he explained, and violence is acting out that suffering onto others. We need to both overcome the ignorance with mindfulness and to end the violence with social action.

During the week I had a hard time back in the navy. I could see I’d been deluding myself by thinking I’d be away from the fighting if I was sitting on a boat out in the ocean. I’d be an assistant killer, an accomplice to murder. I thought about the bombs being dropped right now, people blown apart, families destroyed. And for what? Because our government didn’t like their government. It was obvious to me now that the whole thing was insane, and I couldn’t do it. No way could I spy on people’s phone and radio conversations and send a jet to kill them and anyone else who happened to be around. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to, it wasn’t possible. They were all me. I couldn’t even be in the navy anymore because killing was the purpose of the whole show. But the certainty of this decision scared me. The military is kind of like the Mafia — you can’t just quit. They come after you.

Needing time and a clear head to figure out what to do, I cut classes (a crime in itself) and did a walking meditation on the beach. I took off my shoes to connect to the earth and water. Thoughts are like shoes: they’re useful in certain situations but cut us off from contact with the deeper dimension, so I tried to get rid of them too. Our senses isolate us in our egos, so I closed my eyes and walked blind. As long as I walked from my Buddha mind, I knew where to step. I just had to trust that. It was a good exercise in living in the moment. I got my pant legs soaked and stumbled over some driftwood, but I belonged to it all. I wasn’t afraid and alone anymore. Selfless, I had the strength of the universe and was filled with a calm determination to refuse to obey military orders. I knew that would mean prison, but I would treat that as a stay in a monastery and would practice mindfulness through it all. With this decision came a rush of freedom.

That evening I told some of my classmates what I was planning, in hopes a few of them might join me. If several of us refused to obey orders, that would have a lot more effect than just one person. One they can just shove away in prison and write off as a fluke. But a group would get press coverage, and we’d have a chance to explain why we were doing this. It would encourage other people, and the discontent would spread. I’d read about the Presidio 27 mutiny during the Vietnam War, how that helped turn the country against the war. When they refused to obey orders, the army threatened to execute them all, but because of public pressure it released them after a year and a half in prison, and they came out as anti-war heroes.

But instead of solidarity, I ran into solid hostility. The group turned against me. Some of them said I was on the side of Osama bin Laden, others that I was making all of them look bad.

I was disappointed but said, “If that’s the way you feel, forget I mentioned it.” But they didn’t forget it. That night they gave me a blanket party.

I woke up to a towel being crammed into my mouth. I tried to scream, but I was gagged. Someone punched me in the stomach. I tried to get away, but I was held tight by a blanket pulled around me. They pounded me with all their might, working from the chest to the knees with particular preference for the groin. They didn’t say anything so I couldn’t tell who it was. They just hit. Hard.

Finally they stopped. I was crying and shaking; I hurt all over, not just from the beating but from who it was that did it. These were my mates. We’d been through a lot together. I’d thought we were friends.

I tried to come back to my breathing. Although each breath hurt, I managed to calm myself. The pain was still there, but now I had some distance from it.

I could see that the guys probably thought I’d betrayed our friendship too — one of their mates turned traitor on them, made them feel immoral for being in the military. Seeing it from the point of view of their pain helped me get back to mindfulness. This was just another example, like war, of people acting out their suffering by inflicting it on others. I could feel these guys’ pain at being working-class dorks, Bush’s pain at being a rich loser, the Taliban’s pain at their helplessness to stop the world from changing.

Through my own pain I could feel the huge mass of collective pain that explodes into wars which then generate more pain, infecting more people with hatred. I could see that violence reproduces itself like a virus, and the way to stop it is to relieve suffering wherever we find it so it doesn’t build up.

I thought about military prison and the suffering that awaited me there. I wouldn’t be locked up with pacifists but with regular criminals who could be a lot meaner than the guys tonight. I might get beat up, humiliated, raped.

A few hours ago during walking meditation, going to prison to uphold my principles seemed noble. Now lying here trembling in pain it seemed nutty. I didn’t need any more suffering. Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt.

I was going to do more than just refuse to obey orders; I was refusing to go to prison too. I was deserting. Right now.

Aching all over, I tossed my few civilian things into my bag, hobbled out of the barracks, drove off the base, and spent the night in a motel outside Monterey. In the morning my body was bruised, swollen, stiff and sore, and my piss was pink, but my mind was clear and free. As soon as I thought about the future, though, I got scared. Now I was a fugitive.

I soaked in a hot bath, then meditated to bring the mind back to right now, where all the problems seemed manageable. For the first time since joining the military, I felt like a warrior, but a different kind — for peace.

I drove to the Zen center and told them what happened. They said they’d help, but we agreed I shouldn’t stay there because I’d mentioned the place to a couple of the guys. Esther called around to other centers and found one where I could stay. Their roof needed mending, and I could earn my room and board that way.

I bowed to Esther in thanks, and she bowed back to me. She’d taught me an amazing amount in two weeks, really changed my life.

I sold my car so it couldn’t be traced and took a long bus ride with lots of other poor people. Looking around at them, I knew that some of the younger ones were probably thinking of joining the military. They’d still be poor, but at least they’d have something. In exchange for a bit of security, they’d help their government kill people. That was their best chance in life. What does that say about our society?

Working on the roof at my new Buddhist center was a great way to experience the interconnectedness of all life. Up there in silence, I could feel how the sun was becoming part of me. It was also giving life to the plants in the garden that would then give life to us, and later our bodies when buried would give life to other plants. I thought about how the atoms of my body had been formed in the core of other suns. The people downstairs were cooking food for me while I was keeping them dry. I thought about my family and the people who would come after me, and I knew we were all more closely tied together than I’d ever imagined. At the most basic level we weren’t separate, we were all just cells in this great body of God called the universe. That body was held together by the laws of physics but also by laws of love and compassion, the need to treat each other kindly and not generate more suffering. Once we see the interconnections, killing anything becomes suicide.

That made me think about how our economic system is based on ignoring these connections. People are deluded that they are separate, and that makes them so insecure and frightened that they have to grab everything they can to defend themselves, build walls of property they can hide behind, then armies to guard the walls.

I could see all that from up on the roof as I was nailing shingles mindfully, breathing mindfully, and occasionally screaming mindfully when I banged my thumb with the hammer. After finishing the roof, I worked in the garden, where it became even clearer that the plants and bugs and dirt and I are just the same divine energy temporarily expressing itself in different forms, all of it sacred and fragile and worthy of care.

I’ve been here a year now. Eight of us are working on staff, and many more come for courses. We do sitting and walking meditations together and try to live in each moment because that’s all anyone has, but that’s enough since each moment is eternity. At night we read and discuss the scriptures with our two monks, chant the Pali suttas, and go to bed early.

One of the monks is from Japan, and he’s teaching me Japanese. It’s a beautiful language.

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“Escaping the Military” is a chapter from Radical Peace: People Refusing War, which presents the experiences of peace activists who have moved beyond demonstrations and petitions into direct action, defying the government’s laws and impeding its ability to kill. Recently released by Trine Day, it’s a journey along diverse paths of nonviolence, the true stories of people working for peace in unconventional ways. Other chapters are posted on a page of the publisher’s website at http://media.trineday.com/radicalpeace.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William T. Hathaway is a Special Forces combat veteran and currently an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. His first book, A World of Hurt, won a Rinehart Foundation Award for its portrayal of the psychological roots of war: the emotional blockage and need for patriarchal approval that draw men to the military. He is also the author of Summer Snow, the story of an American warrior in Central Asia who falls in love with a Sufi Muslim and learns from her that higher consciousness is more effective than violence. Chapters are available at www.peacewriter.org.