I remember the Native American Women Studies class I took my senior year of college, taught by Linda Pertusati at Bowling Green State University who was actually present at the Wounded Knee incident in February, 1972 when the FBI busted in and shot up two AIM protesters, one of them a Vietnam veteran. Linda was most definitely not a Bush supporter but then again neither was I at the time.

And I remember there was this dude in the class, a smart handsome dude, who had just signed up to go officer in the Marine Corps and during one of the discussions, I jumped up on my firebrand soapbox and said something to the effect, “I don’t know why all these protesters waste their time blaming politicians for war; it’s the soldier who makes the choice to go to war that’s to blame for the fighting.”

It was an incendiary remark and brought a firestorm of debate where even the lefties in the class were defending the soldier as being just a pawn victim in the political game of global politics. But the handsome dude remained mostly quiet through the whole discussion, he kept something to himself. I still wonder to this day why he held back.

I’m sure he’s seen his share of deserts these seven years since that class.

This incident should give you an idea of how radically my core values and political viewpoint has changed these past seven years. But I am still fiercely independent and I believe that the individual human being is the only effective measure of freedom and that anyone who speaks about freedom like it was a collective condition is a lying god damn asshole who is either looking for your vote, your money, or your blood.

And I can understand the rage that many people feel in the world today. I imagine it’s the same rage that our ancient ancestors felt after running up a tree to escape a vicious mountain lion or the rage that Bill Clinton felt when he had to justify himself and deny a blowjob, something most Presidents before him probably considered a fringe benefit of the title.

But I could never express my understanding like Bukowski, a true master of the common man’s poetry, did in his poem “The Difficulty of Breathing:”

I can
almost understand
why
people
leap
from
bridges.

I even
understand
in part those
people who
arm themselves
and
slaughter their
friends and innocent
strangers.

I am
not exactly
in sympathy
with them
and I decry
their reckless behavior
but I can
understand
the
ultimate
undeniable
persistent
force of
their misery.

the horrific violent
failure
of any one
of us
to live properly
says to me that
we are all equally
guilty
for every human
crime.
there are
no
innocents.

and if there is
no
hell,
those who coldly
judge these
unfortunates
will
create
one for us
all.

That last stanza hit me like a kick in the balls when I first read it. Isn’t that what has happened to the mind of man-aren’t we living in a mental and emotional hell as a species? Sure, there are pits of happiness. I love my wife and my children and my family and friends and I’m even fond of a few of my co-workers. But if I’m being honest with you; once I go beyond that circle of influence, where inside resides the people whose lives I effect and who in turn affect me, I see very little but statistics, complaints, and abstractions. Can I be honest with you and tell you that I’m pretty sure the notion that some Middle Easterner gets to call themselves free while living under the tyranny of Western corporate apartheid neither adds to or detracts from my own vision of freedom for myself?

Can I be honest that way? Or do you want me to tell you that everything my country is doing is right? Or wrong? What would make you feel better?

Maybe if I said that church is the answer? Pick a church, it makes no difference to me–they’re all the same. Some kill with the notion of kindness and brotherly love and corporate slavery while others kill with old fashioned, stone your enemy, kill his wife and children and wash your weapons in the sea mentality. For my money, at least the latter is honest about it because it’s all killing in the name of an idea which is lunacy to me because each of us are composed of ideas and notions. Every single one of us is a bundle of half-interpreted sensory stimuli which are somehow composited into a mental entity we foolishly fortify and project into some eternal being which lasts beyond the electrical sparks jumping neural gaps that produce the very memories we revere and worship like golden idols tossed into a burning bush and then turn around and murder by the millions through alcohol, cigarettes, and various drugs of escape.

No, I’m sorry–I can’t say that churches or dusty old books are the answer either. Nor can I say that armed rebellion of any type will solve any problems. Or terrorism, armed or mental–that won’t do anything but exacerbate the problems we have and the common enemy we all face.

I said something else in that Native American Women’s Studies class, something even less popular than the blame the soldier not the war remark. I said that if American Indians (or whatever they want to be called nowadays) truly want to be free then they must release their attachment to their cultural identity and I took it three steps further and said the same thing applies to all minorities and to all majorities for that matter. Until human beings let go of the things they believe define them, true freedom will forever elude their grasp.

We are engaged in a vicious war on the other side of the world and there is no easy solution because human beings at war are nothing more than animals, no matter how complicated and flowery the language they use to describe their tactics or their goals of engagement. And when we descend to the level of animals, we can still achieve much noble greatness but it remains the greatness of animals, beings concerned primarily with health, wealth, protecting progeny and securing victory over the enemy (pick an enemy, it’s always “us and them” and they are always the monster).

America has tried to commit suicide several times in our brief but fiery history. We barely held together as a country in the 1800 election, only the second we ever had. Andrew Jackson initiated a campaign against Native Americans that subsequent Presidents continued and which would make Hitler salivate over in terms of efficiency and efficacy in removing and liquidating the culture of an indigenous population. These are indisputable facts but they make me love my country no less. In fact, I don’t believe you can truly love something until you see the monsters hidden behind its eyes.

The Civil War forever destroyed America and continues to affect everything about us to this day–it is, in my opinion, the most important war ever fought by man against man. I believe this because for a brief moment, the human animal almost raised itself in war to the level of the human being.

But America lived on.

And on–through World Wars, through a sitting President being assassinated in a time of subtle intelligence war over which loomed nuclear annihilation. On through an ideological war which became vastly unpopular under the influence of a pervasive media which eventually came under the thumb of corporations who conglomerated into producing a cultural hegemony of half-thinking half-wits who elect Presidents like they elect the cutest singers on reality television shows.

But we have never had a revolution that began and ended solely in the mind of the individual. We’ve never had a wave of true freedom sweep through the little universes that exist inside each of us. Freedom knows freedom and reaches out to embrace regardless of skin color, dialect, or the pontifical preference of deitous middlemen.

A revolution that begins and ends in the mind of the individual is the only solution to the War on Terror and the only hope for saving us from the hell that those who coldly judge the unfortunates among us will surely create for us all.

RELATED LINKS:

• Charles Bukowski

• The Wounded Knee Incident

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