If an adult places, a candy bar that a little four year old has been nurtured to like and a toy that the four year old has been nurtured to desire, in the middle of a highway, and then waits for the child to come along and run onto the road to get the candy bar and the toy, who is morally responsible if the child is killed by a car when he or she goes out onto the highway? The child? The person who enticed the child into a dangerous situation that the person knew the child did not understand? Would such a person not be morally guilty of murder?
The same question needs to be asked when the multi-billion dollar per year military recruiting budget is employed to use every high tech and low-ball advertising gimmick known—and some not known to the outside world—to entice young people into dangerous realities before they are able to comprehend what they are getting themselves into.
Consider the brain of the average young person 18 to 24 years old:
EVEN BRIGHT, MATURE TEENAGERS SOMETIMES DO THINGS THAT ARE “STUPID.”
But when that happens, it’s not really their fault. It’s because their brain hasn’t finished developing. The underdeveloped area is called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. It plays a critical role in decision making, problem solving and understanding future consequences of today’s actions. Problem is, it won’t be fully mature until they’re into their 20s.
It’s one reason 16-year-old drivers have crash rates three times higher than 17-year-olds and five times higher than 18-year-olds. Car crashes injure about 300,000 teens a year. And kill nearly 6,000. – Allstates
Consider now a once well-known and much admired as truth two minute song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A50lVLtSQik
This song is not a presentation of truth and never should have been admired as a statement of the truth. The artist’s intent I am sure was good. But the effect of this rather powerful presentation of a seeming truth is to obscure the truth and lead people to look for a solution down a path where no solution can be found. Like all persuasive untruths, this one also has to come packaged with the wrapping paper, ribbons and bows of authentic truth. So, the first three quarters of the song, with a question mark here or there, are basically the truth. It is the conclusion that is the half-truth deception. It reads:
“He’s the one who gives his body
as a weapon of the war.
And without him all this killing can’t go on.
He’s the universal soldier
And he really is the blame”
STOP! This is just an outright falsehood. The soldier on the battlefield kills but he or she is no more to blame for the killing and for getting himself or herself killed or maimed than the little child is to blame for going onto the highway—in order to get the candy and toy he or she has been nurtured into desiring—with no realistic understanding of what a highway is and can do to a person. The 18 to 24 year old person is not only missing the mature development of the section of his or her brain that relates to understanding what states, militaries and wars are and what they do to people’s bodies, minds and futures, but he or she is also enticed into the military by gimmicks that play to those very areas of the brain that lack fully mature development.
In street parlance the young person who finds himself or herself killing people on the battlefield was snookered into it by a well-trained, well-financed industry of slick, master con operators, that is, by the all-pervading cradle to enlistment military recruiting juggernaut. Practically everyone in the society is manipulated to make-believe that because an18 to 24 year old person has an adult body, he or she has an adult brain operating that can evaluate what the state, the military and war are and what they do to people. Everyone, including all the Constantinian Churches of Christianity, participate in this despicable charade to deceptively entrap the young, which charade results in the major form of child abuse in the world today and yesterday. Everyone particpates, that is, except the insurance companies, who know that this perception of 18 to 24 year olds is erroneous and who know if they operate by it they will lose big money.
“Just say. ‘No,'” seems to be easy enough to do. But it is impossible to do, if for the first twenty years of your young life you have been bombarded by the state, Church, military and media with a ceaseless and sophisticated propaganda barrage that indoctrinates youngster to say, ‘Yes,’ because ‘Yes’ is noble, heroic, good, holy, moral, worthwhile, Christian, normal, brave, patriotic and what everyone says. Ideas that never are allow to enter a person’s mind are ideas which that person cannot employ to perceive, interpret and evaluate what is put before him or her. The Constantinian Churches and their leaders—bishops, priests, ministers, pastors—are major players in this process of state/military mind control. By bracketing out the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies from their religious education programs and curriculums, and by dismissing and demeaning this teaching of Jesus—as unrealistic, idealistic, Utopian, not applicable in a sinful world, etc.—whenever it is taught, the Constantinian Churches and their controllers assure that few young Christians in their spiritual care will have the ideas or the psychological capacities needed to say, ‘No.’
Lynndie England (photo above), who was recruited into the army as a divorced twenty year old working a night job at a chicken processing plant is not to blame. She, like billions of other young people was “had.” She, like billions of others her age was cunningly and skillfully lured into the military, and then ensnared in a web of fear as strong as any web of fear that any pimp has around his prostitute. Neither Lynnie England nor the universal soldier is to blame. She, and the billions like her, are putty in the brutal hands of and ready-made scapegoat for the big time torturers and murderer, who conceal and protect themselves behind the cloak of state, Church, military, media and money.
Thomas Merton, not Donovan, has it right:
“The real moral problems of modern war do not occur in the rare instances of hand to hand combat, but in the remote planning and organization of technological destruction. The real crimes of modern war are committed not on the front—if any—but in the war offices and ministries of defense. It is this polite, massively organized, white collar murder machine that threatens the world. But our antiquate theology myopically focused on individual violence alone, fails to see this, and blesses and canonizes the antiseptic violence of corporately organize mass murder, because it is respectable, clean, and above all profitable…A theology of love does not exist merely to justify force in the service of established power, merely to appease the already untroubled consciences of the rich and the powerful.”
How long, O Lord, how long?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_O860l8u3U&feature=youtu.be
-ECM
