John Stoner – $10.40 For Peace

Think Family, Not War September 29, 2021

John Stoner — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 12:06:46 +0000

What would we have if we didn’t have the Empire—the American empire.? Like MAGA. Make America Great Again.

What would we have? A good question. Worth thinking about a little. Maybe even feeling a little. Let’s get in touch with this feeling about America the great. What is it…a feeling of strength maybe? A feeling of goodness? Something big to belong to. Something more than my little self (big as I am in my own eyes…at least some days).

It’s natural and right to identify with some group or community beyond ourselves. We like to belong to something bigger or greater. Th fact is, we can’t flourish alone, any more than a stalk of corn or stem of wheat can survive, let alone flourish, alone.

But the empire is troubled, big time, and it’s not clear that we’re getting what we need from it. We…getting…what…we…need….that’s one way to ask what’s happening. But it’s a pretty small way, after all, and maybe a bit selfish. I, me, and mine. A way of looking at the world, but kind of poverty stricken, really.

Another way to think about what “we” have would be to start with a bigger “we”—a much bigger we. We could, when we say “we the people” mean we the people, all of us, who inhabit this little blue globe of a planet.

We Americans could be thinking of “we the human family” which we totally forgot in the exploited trauma of 9/11. I called the human family “our other family” in a previous blog. We could expand whatever small or large goodness we have known in our biological family to a much larger family. Family is the place of second and third and more chances. It is what, in some form, gave us each and all our start.

What if we didn’t have the Empire. and decided instead to build our lives around the human family. That is, we could become honest about the fact that as a human species we will either survive by cooperation or die by greed and war. If that is not true, the earth is flat. If we cannot see that, we think that the earth is flat.

We could begin to imagine solving problems rather than making war as the way to live in a family. That would be instead of empire. A plan big enough to make a difference, and small enough to start with one’s own circle of friends. “Our other family” could be a family where we do to each other what we would like done to us.

John K. Stoner 9/29/21

Our Other Family September 12, 2021

John Stoner — Sun, 12 Sep 2021 11:33:51 +0000

Twenty years ago on 9/11, in our rush to act like an empire, we forgot something.

We forgot our other family.

I know, nobody forgets their family. You can’t do that. But we did.

It didn’t take a week that fateful year until the USA was acting like whole great swaths of humanity were enemies and terrorists. Anything but another family.

In a previous post I said I hope we will stop and think about empire.

Today I hope we will feel the warm reality of our other family.

Humanity, the whole sweet damn mess of us, is our other family, and no amount of forgetting or wishing it otherwise can change it. Here we are, interconnected, surviving or dying together.

So let’s do something different for the next twenty years Let’s live as if our other family, humanity, is real and it matters.

If we let ourselves feel it, we all have inklings of a larger family. From our biological family we branch out to friends, neighbors, strangers, opponents, and enemies, but we all need each other and our fate is bound together, so let’s have the heart, imagination and creativity to bind our energy and our outlook together.

Stay with me in future days to explore the possibilities of our other family as a better way than empire.

John K. Stoner 9/12/21

Empire: Let’s Stop and Think

John Stoner — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 13:01:18 +0000

“If one was to stop and think, it might seem unfathomable that people in the United States, living in the most extensive war-culture the world has ever known, have so little consciousness of it.” — Kelly Denton-Borhaug

Take this as an invitation to stop and think. To think about war-culture and empire, and to grow in consciousness.

I was reading two books at once (off and on) when I came upon the above sentence by Denton-Borhaug. And it did seem unfathomable to me…in fact it had been seeming unfathomable to me for some time, thought maybe I had not described it as unfathomable. But I was deeply troubled by this blissful ignorance of our culture—a war-culture— and our empire.

Yet I keep finding other people, a few of them, who are troubled by the same thing. Just this morning I read this terse description of the problem by Caitlin Johnstone:

“There’s more public criticism of ordinary people taking ivermectin than there is of planet-dominating power structures driving humanity to armageddon.” Interesting…to stop and think about that.

Besides Denton-Borhaug’s book AND THEN THEIR SOUL WAS GONE: MORAL INJURY AND U.S. WAR-CULTURE, these days I am also reading THE SORROWS OF EMPIRE: MILITARISM, SECRECY, AND THE END OF THE REPUBLIC by Chalmers Johnson. Here the key word is “empire.”

Do we think of empire? Do we think we live in an empire? How would you describe this country in which we live? If not an empire, then what?

Chalmers Johnson published his book in 2004. He was calling the USA an “empire” in 2004. Were you?

Here’s a possibility. Thinking of the United States of America as an empire might help us understand ourselves as Americans, and our troubled moment in world history. Let’s stop and think: what if we could understand ourselves better if we recognized not only racism and white supremacy as debilitating moral injuries in our culture, but imperialism and assumptions of American supremacy as also profoundly injurious to our collective health?

John K. Stoner 9/10/21

SOUL CARE—AMERICA’S FIRST WAY OF WAR 9/14/20

John Stoner — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 21:30:11 +0000

Who ever thinks about how many ways of war there are?

In chapter three of the book AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, readers are introduced to “America’s first way of war.” It’s a grim, but probably necessary, project for us to think about our country’s ways of war.

In 2005 military historian John Grenier published THE FIRST WAY OF WAR: AMERICAN WAR MAKING ON THE FRONTIER, 1607-1814. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz quotes his description to open chapter three, titled “Bloody Footprints.” Here is the text:

Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders….In the frontier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two elements—unlimited war and irregular war—into their first way of war.

Those morally abhorrent practices have influenced America’s warmaking ever since. Proposing moral distinctions between forms of the fundamentally depraved practice of war itself seems strange to me, like ranking forms of racism or slavery, but there it is. A graphic description of the kind of war used against the Indigenous Peoples on this continent, and now for the war of terrorism in the “war on terrorism.”

Our souls’ search for redemption, to say nothing of innocence, in this historical milieu is fraught with difficulty, to say the least.

Soul Care—A Vast Inhabited Land

John Stoner — Sun, 30 Aug 2020 13:19:19 +0000

Only by increasing our awareness of the large populations and skilled lifestyles of the indigenous population of North American before European setter colonialism devastated them can we begin to appreciate the scope and depravity of the destruction of those original inhabitants and their way of life.

So today, for the health of our souls and selves, a few facts from the first chapter of AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

When Lewis and Clark began their trek up the Missouri River in 1804, ethnologist Dale Lott has observed, they beheld “not a wilderness but a vast pasture managed by and for Native Americans.’” Native Americans created the world’s largest gardens and grazing lands—and thrived.

Native peoples left an indelible imprint on the land with systems of roads that tied nations and communities together across the entire

landmass of the Americas. Scholar David Wade Chambers writes:

“The first thing to note about early Native American trails and roads is that they were not just paths in the woods following along animal

tracks used mainly for hunting. Neither can they be characterized simply as the routes that nomadic peoples followed during seasonal

migrations. Rather they constituted an extensive system of roadways that spanned the Americas, making possible short, medium and

long distance travel. That is to say, the Pre-Columbian Americas were laced together with a complex system of roads which became

the roadways adopted by the early settlers and indeed were ultimately transformed into major highways.” pp. 28, 29.

Gardens, grazing lands and roadways in North America, including Mexico, lived upon by approximately 200,000,000 people. (p. 17).

Two hundred million people.

John K. Stoner 8/30/20

Soul Care–Where We Are Today

John Stoner — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 14:30:00 +0000

I promised more reflections on the book AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

So here I go to the last chapter of the book, a paragraph which summarizes painfully well why and how our world and souls today are shaped by the genocide of America’s first inhabitants.

The conventional narrator of US history routinely segregates the “Indian wars” as a subspecialization within the dubious category of “the West.” Then there are the westerns, those cheap novels, movies, and television shows that nearly every US American imbibed with mother’s milk and that by the mid-twentieth century were popular in every corner of the world. (1) The architecture of US world dominance was designed and tested by this period of continental US militarism, which built on the previous hundred years and generated its own innovations in total war. The opening of the twenty-first century saw a new, even more brazen form of US militarism and imperialism explode on the world scene when the election of George W. Bush turned over control of US foreign policy to a long-gestating neoconservative and warmongering faction of the Pentagon and its civilian hawks. Their subsequent eight years of political control included two major military invasions and hundreds of small wars employing US Special Forces around the globe, establishing a template that continued after their political power waned. p. 218
(1) Slotkin GUNFIGHTER NATION.

None of this is normal or acceptable human behavior—hence the searing damage to our souls.

John K. Stoner

Soul Care–On United States History

John Stoner — Sun, 16 Aug 2020 11:18:20 +0000

For my own mental and spiritual health I will in the future have a moment of contrition every time I touch a $20 bill, which carries the image and inscription of the homicidal and genocidal Andrew Jackson, the 7th and most popular to that date president of the United States.

Jackson, who rose to fame and power by terrorist attacks on America’s indigenous inhabitants, said to the few survivors, after decimating the Muskogee (Creek) Nation in Alabama territory, 1814: “We bleed our enemies in such cases to give them their senses.” (p. 100, AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014.)

As a spiritual discipline in this COVID-19 time I am trying to learn American history, because I believe that we can know neither where we are or where we are going if we do not know where we have come from.

About the book I am now reading, Robin D. G. Kelley said, “This may well be the most important US history book you will read in your lifetime.” At 78 I think it is time for me to be reading the most important US history book.

There are facts in USA history which need to replace self-congratulatory myths and cover-ups if we are to think honestly about who we have been and are. This paragraph from AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is the first of a few thoughts I will share from this history published in 2014.

“Neither superior technology nor an overwhelming number of settlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the United States or the spread of its power over the entire world. Rather, the chief cause was the colonialist settler-state’s willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess their land. This trend of extermination became common in the twentieth century as the United States seized military and economic control of the world, capping five hundred years of European colonialism and imperialism. The canny Prussian Otto von Bismarck, founder and first chancellor (1874-90) of the German empire, was prescient in observing, ’The colonization of North America has been the decisive fact of the modern world.” Jefferson was its architect. Andrew Jackson was the implementer of the final solution for the Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi.” (p. 96).

John K. Stoner

Self Care—White Supremacy and American Supremacy?

John Stoner — Sun, 02 Aug 2020 10:30:13 +0000

At a time when the ideology of white supremacy is under critical scrutiny across the land, is American supremacy remaining intact and embraced by all? It is possible to wonder how history will judge this current USA military occupation of the world.

Seventy five years ago the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people in the blast and firestorm. Tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days after Hiroshima the U.S. dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Thousands more there died from the delayed effects of radiation poisoning. With Japan on the cusp of surrendering, did the U.S. really need to do that?

Probably yes, if American supremacy is the starting principle.

In the 1990’s a right wing think tank called “Project for the New American Century” (PNAC) produced a document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” which called for “Full Spectrum Dominance” of land, sea, air and space by American forces—a bold doctrine of American supremacism. PNAC was the brain child of such ideologues as John Bolton, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, non of whom ever saw a war they didn’t like.

The endless war on terrorism, skyrocketing military profits and uncontrollable military budgets which have come in the wake of PNAC seem to be accepted as a reasonable norm for national behavior, noticed by few and deplored by even fewer. One great enabler of this pandemic scourge of war is the annual, unheralded cozy cooperation of Republicans and Democrats in Washington to pass military budgets like $740.5 billion for 2021. Here is one congressional action where all differences are laid aside, and RepDems make something happen. A wonder to behold.

On this another Hiroshima/Nagasaki anniversary, let’s pause to ask whether there will ever be remorse for the greatest of all human evils, war itself. Will we allow American supremacy to replace white supremacy without a second thought?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his Nobel peace prize speech, “Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.” This is as true of nations as it is of men.

Stay human,

John K. Stoner

Still refusing to look at the virus as the only thing that matters.

Soul Care—Freedom to Answer

John Stoner — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 13:53:05 +0000

Yesterday I asked if we are protecting our freedom to ask ANY question, no exceptions. I think you told yourself that of course, you maintain your freedom to ask any question.

Today I want to ask if we’re free to accept an answer which is radically different from the public consensus on politics, health, etc. Or do we know, in our heart of hearts, that we never have and never will take a position, never accept an answer, which is really far off from the majority answer to any question which we feel quite free to ask?

Stay human,

John K. Stoner

Soul Care — Freedom to Question

John Stoner — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 14:29:26 +0000

Every day during this COVID-19 time I ask myself: Am I, are we, maintaining our freedom and our duty to question everything? To keep asking questions, however hard or unpopular?

I start with this question: Is a thing true just because everybody, or seemingly everybody, believes it? There, I’ve asked it as a “yes” or “no” question, and I should question whether that is a good or necessary way to ask it.

So I will begin by granting that the best answer is not a categorical “yes” or “no.” But I will maintain that a “no” answer is better than a “yes” answer as a starting point for the discussion.

A thing is not true just because seemingly everybody believes it. In our culture/nation, virtually everybody thinks that war is a necessary function of the state/government. That is the consensus, and I don’t grant for a minute that it is right. That is not a trivial case for my point that a thing is not true just because everybody believes it. Add to this some other cases: predatory capitalism, white supremacy, women’s suffrage.

So where do I go from there? Well, if the majority can be wrong on a few big ones like that, on what other big ones might they be wrong?

John K. Stoner 7/23/20