In Part V of "An Open Letter to My Fellow Americans at the Dawn
of a New Decade," we conclude our appeal against partisanship in America and against war with Iran in Asia and make a final appeal for peace between the peoples and nations of the earth.
Peace through empathy with and recognition of the humanity of the other. Peace through courage, compassion and communication. Peace through reckoning, through the forever breaking and opening of the human heart and through the elevation of our individual and collective consciousness.
-Part V-
In A Murderous Time
“In a murderous time
“The Testing-Tree,” by Stanley Kunitz
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.”
In 2020, let us be bold, let us be brave, let us be free and courageous, but above all let’s let our hearts be fiercely vulnerable. Let’s let our lion hearts be strong, wise, achingly open, free of fear and filled to the brim with compassion, empathy, decency and love for all. Love even for our so-called enemies. In this way, we can indeed make America great. In this way, we can live, prosper, lead, learn and be America the Beautiful, instead of the ugly and dying American empire we have become.
“In a murderous time the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking,” as the poets teach us. “It is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn.” Reckoning with one’s heart, one’s self and one’s country, is never easy, is never for the faint of heart, for the cowardly and the fearful. It’s a hard, tough, daunting, even terrifying, task, but it’s necessary work.
Above all: reckoning can be liberating, and vulnerability can be not only beautiful but powerful and empowering. To be vulnerable is part of what it is to be human. In 2020, it is time for a national moral self-reckoning in our country. If we truly desire to be a force for good in the world, an inspiration to other nations who like us yearn for freedom, democracy, sovereignty and dignity, and if we really want to be on the right side of history, we must first face up to the destructive powers unleashed by us and our federal government across the globe and reckon with our own violent history as a nation, past and present.
Struggling to Awake
from the Terrifying Nightmare
of American History
“Our nation was born in genocide.… We are perhaps the only nation which
Why We Can’t Wait, by Martin Luther King, Jr.
tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population.
Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade.
Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject
or feel remorse for this shameful episode.”
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Ulysses, by James Joyce.
For the truth is this: for many people American history has been a brilliant and beautiful dream come true, while for many others, at home and abroad, American history has been a terrifying nightmare from which they’ve been struggling to awake for five hundred years. It is also a fact that for many human beings across the earth, Washington’s War on Terror has always been a War of Terror. This may be a hard truth for us to face as Americans, but face it and reckon with it we must.
Let Iran and Iranians take responsibility for what Iran and Iranians can take. But we as Americans must also take responsibility for what we can take. It takes two to tango. To be the land of the free and the home of the brave means more than the freedom of physical action and the bravery of facing down bullets on a foreign battlefield. Freedom and bravery first and foremost lie in the heart and the spirit.
Black Elk speaks to us still today: “No good thing can be done by any one man alone. It’s the story of all life that is holy and is good to tell.” Wisdom is in the heart, my friends, and the wise and brave heart of the world resides in your heart and in the heart of you.
In 2020, let us be morally brave. In this way, not only can we be great but we can be truly free. Let us be the unstoppable lions of morality that we are as human beings at our finest and our kindest.
Two Truths They Hide from You:
There is No Enemy,
Even as There is No Other
“There is no other.”
Paul Salopek, Out of Eden Walk.
For this is the real secret and the great truth which they work, day and night, to keep from you: You are not poor and powerless. You are not a dumb, disenfranchised and sinful animal who needs the good graces of their benevolent government or church to provide for you and protect you from the barbaric enemy lapping and seething at the gates. You do not need them to give you your freedom. For how can they give you that which you already possess?
This is the truth your rulers hide from you: You were born free. Nobody can give you freedom, for you’ve been free from the day you were born. At their civilized best, your representatives can help to uphold your freedom, but at their savage worst they will plunder you, swindle you, cheat you, rob you blind, they will steal your God-given freedom from you and put you in fetters of iron and in their invisible chains of servitude for the sake of infinitely expanding their own profits.
All the while, they will lie through their teeth to you, swearing to you that everything they do they do because they love you, our country and your freedom. But the truth is these sociopaths have no country, no conscience and no allegiance to anything other than perpetuating their own privilege and profit, their ludicrous wealth and wanton power, their hegemony and their obscene wars, and they are as incapable of love for others as war is incapable of bringing peace to the earth, for they are void of morality.
There is no enemy, my friends, even as there is no other. And if there is an enemy, the enemy is not raging beyond our walls, but within them. The enemy is not outside our borders, the enemy is high atop Capitol Hill.
The Pacific Dreams
of a Violent Nation
“You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.
Matthew 5:14
A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp
and put it under a basket. Instead, they set it on a stand,
and it gives light to all who are in the house.”
Once, in America, we dreamed of building a city on a hill. We dreamed of becoming a beacon for the world, a hope for humanity, a refuge for the oppressed, and we talked of leading by example. Perhaps it was a vain, insane and deranged dream and myth, from the beginning.
But that city of pacific light has long become a violent black hole of darkness, and the dream of leading by example and being an inspiration for the free world has long given way to the reality of American might makes right and to the brutality of our terrible shock and awe, to the twin derangements of American innocence and American exceptionalism, and so we’ve become not a hope and an inspiration, but a horror and terror to much of the civilized world.
Let us say it again, and let’s make no mistake about it: we’re a violent nation, from the beginning. Our country was wrought out of violence, and our nation was born out of bloodshed and barbarism and birthed out of the blood pangs of the Blood Meridian.
Genocide, holocaust, slavery, imperialism, exploration and exploitation, racism, war, violence, terror and terrorism, moral and racial insanity, and hypocrisy, hypocrisy, hypocrisy, have been part of the American experiment and the American experience, from the beginning.
These are not all we are, nor are they the sum and summation of who we are as a nation, anymore than they are the totality of who we are as a race and human species, but they are indeed an integral part of our exceptional American story, from the beginning.
In short: we must remember, celebrate and sing the banks of the river, even as we refuse to avert our eyes from the bloody stream of the river of history. Only in this way can we be whole, complete and free beings, individually and collectively, as peoples and as nations.
A National Moral Reckoning
“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful
“A Talk to Teachers,” by James Baldwin.
and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it,
so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible.”
We’re a violent nation, from the beginning. But that does not mean we have no hope, that resistance is futile, redemption impossible, and that doesn’t mean we can’t change our ways and aspire as a nation to be something better. But first we must reckon with this reality and face this truth of who we have been and who are still. It is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn. Our heart may break, and break, and break, individually and collectively as a nation, but through this breaking, we may live and finally be free.
In this way, reckoning is not about guilt, shame or America-bashing. Reckoning is about responsibility. Reckoning is about justice. Reckoning is about redemption. Reckoning is about liberation. Reckoning is about growing up and becoming an adult.
The enemy is not without. The enemy is within. Our enemy is not Iranians in Iran. Our enemy is our own corporate and corrupt, criminal rulers residing in the District of Columbia and their servile media forever striving to rot our brains, buy our minds, enslave us in fear, shackle us in ignorance, and hide from our eyes and from our visionary hearts the truth.
The enemy is our own fear and ignorance and the hate born from this unwise and unholy, foolish marriage.
Awakening From
The Nightmare of American History:
A Photo Gallery from 1492 to Today
-I-
or Awakening to the Nightmare of American History
-II-
The Choice
“Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with
Will & Ariel Durant
blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians
usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love,
raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues.
The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks.
Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks of the river.”
Finally, let us remember this: in our absurd Partisan Wars at home, even as in our imperial Forever Wars abroad, we’re constantly being berated from both sides and harangued from all directions by every party.
What they scream at us is this: Which side are you on? Step to the left or move to the right. Go farther to the right or move further to the left. Don’t meditate. Move! Choose a side, now. Are you in our party, or theirs? Are you a D or an R, a liberal or a conservative? Are you with us or against us, for us or for them? Which team are you on? What color is your blood, what color is your underwear, red or blue? Don’t pause. Don’t think. Don’t reflect. Choose!
In A Murderous Time
Gallery
Partisan Wars, Strawmen,
Ranters & Ravers, Leaves of Grass
and the Eternal Star-Sprent Sky
“This is what you shall do:
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman.
Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
Choose! This is what they forever cry at you. But what I say to you is this:
When all the world is berating you, when your media is screaming at you to choose a side, pick a party, step to the left or move to the right, go red, go blue or go home—take a deep breath, still your beating heart and simply: look up.
Look to the star-sprent sky above your head, to the good green earth beneath your feet, reach out and run your hands through the brilliant leaves of grass rippling and flowing all around you, look into your heart and into the heart of you. Look to your conscience. Look up, look out. Elevate yourself. Elevate your mind, your heart, your spirit and your consciousness. Don’t fall prey to their lie, to their trap, to their prison of the mind. You do not have to choose, and you do not have two choices alone.
In truth, your choices are unlimited and your possibility boundless, as is your potential. For you are infinite, like the leaves of grass that grow up from the earth, from the god of dirt, from one end of the earth even unto the other.
So do not choose between the lesser of two evils, for this is a false choice, a fallacy and a lie. Choose no evil. Choose freedom—true freedom—choose beauty, choose empathy, choose truth, choose fearlessness, choose wisely, choose compassion, choose courage, be brave, choose kindness, open your heart until it aches, open your heart until it breaks, go through dark and deeper dark, do not turn, and at the end of the long, dark way, choose love, choose light, choose to live, open your heart to the miracle of kindness and choose grace.
And let the crazed cacophony of the fanatical furious cry their seething lungs out, let them rant and rave, for they are indeed nothing but poor players who strut and fret their hour upon the stage and will soon be heard no more, idiots full of sound and fury, windbags brimming and bursting with hot air, spewing rot, signifying nothing, heartless and hollow as strawmen in a wind-ravaged field at sundown.
The Way of the White Clouds
“I hold to no religion or creed,
Rumi
am neither Eastern nor Western,
Muslim or infidel,
Zoroastrian, Christian, Jew or Gentile.
I come from neither land nor sea,
am not related to those above or below,
was not born nearby or far away,
do not live either in Paradise or on this Earth,
claim decent not from Adam and Eve or the Angels above,
I transcend body and soul.
My home is beyond place and name.
It is with the beloved, in a space beyond space.
I embrace all and am part of all.”
They are all of this, while you, my friend, are a meditative mountain of cosmic consciousness, calm, monumental and unmoving, no matter the weather and what the howling gales and whirling winds hurl at you.
They are fanatical warmongers and terrified fearmongers, ignorant peddlers of propaganda and greedy traffickers in hate, while you are a bodhisattva on your middle way—not the centrist way, but the Middle Way, the way of Buddha, Laozi, Krishna, Allah, Christ-Consciousness—walking through this tangled wilderness and turbulent storm of our partisan times, each of your perfect steps determined and firm, as you move lithely, steadily and light-heartedly up the sacred mountain between the twin dueling sides, as you pass between and through all opposing opposites, leaving the warring hordes wonder-struck, bemused and delighted, if not yet united, if not yet awake, in your terrible and beautiful wake, in the radiant aura of your sublime passage, even as you begin to see through the illusion of duality and the illusory nature of war to the interconnected nature and awesome harmony of all things when balance is attained, advancing toward enlightenment and oneness with your true self and with the true nature of all living things.
While they signify nothing, you signify everything there is and everything there will ever be on earth or in heaven. Heaven and earth, earth and heaven. Which you now see, in truth, are here and now, one and the same. Heaven, paradise, enlightenment which you now see with breathtaking clarity and hilarious joy is not somewhere out there over the rainbow and beyond the biosphere, but within you and the heart of you.
For you are infinite awareness. For you are cosmic consciousness. For your potential is infinite, as is your capacity for love, your power for good, and your creative ability to become the beauty you yearn to behold in this one miraculous world. You transcend body and soul, you dwell in a space beyond space, in the pearl that is outside of time, and you embrace all and are part of all. Your tender embrace spans the whole world.
And as for your way? Unlike them, your way is no wayward way of savagery and obscene warfare. Your way is the way of the white clouds.
We the People
& The Hero’s Journey
“We have not even to risk the adventure alone
The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell.
for the heroes of all time have gone before us.
The labyrinth is thoroughly known.
We have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomination
we shall find a God.
And where we had thought to slay another
we shall slay ourselves.
Where we had thought to travel outwards
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone,
we shall be with all the world.”
Our presidents cannot save us. Congress cannot save us. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can save us. The electorate cannot save us. Only we the American people can save ourselves. It’s a daunting task, for sure. But the truth is that its formidability lies in our own perception, for we possess the power. The choice is ours.
We can choose whether to see the task as a colossal and terrible burden with a slim shot at victory, or we can choose to see the opportunity as the chance to embark on a great adventure and epic journey together, a heroic quest, in which lies the awesome possibility for us to become our own heroes and the saviors of our own republic.
The Hero’s Journey beckons to us. Do we possess the courage to answer its call?
Humanity Is But a Single
Brotherhood & Sisterhood
Neighbors, Family, Friends & Countrymen:
A Collection of Photographs by the Author
from his Travels in Islamic Asia
-2010-2019-
The Sun that Rises,
the Rain that Falls
And one of the elders of the city said,
The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran.
“Speak to us of Good and Evil.”
And the prophet answered:
“Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.
For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
Verily when good is hungry it seeks food
even in dark caves, and when it thirsts drinks even dead waters.
You are good when you are one with yourself.”
To all who read this, my love and best wishes. Much wholeness, too. Happy New Year, friends. In 2020, I hope and wish that you become everything you’ve ever dreamed and yearned to be. I hope that your prayers are answered, your dreams achieved and your yearnings fulfilled.
As for me? Peace on earth and good will between men. This is my desire as an American, my American Dream, and this is my hope and my prayer as a human being alive on earth at the beautiful dawn of a new decade.
The poets and the prophets tell us that the sun rises on the good and the evil, even as the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. But we need no prophets or poets to teach us this organic truth of the earth. All we need do is to look to the world beyond our windows.
All we need do is to take a light-hearted walk outside and stand in the warm green light of the golden sun or the cool blue patter of the falling rain to understand that the earth reserves judgment for none, vengeance for nobody and hate for nothing under the sun, and that the sublime light of the sun warms all and the rainwater nurtures everything there is, giving her nourishing life openly and freely to us all.
At the Dawn of a Beautiful New Decade,
Let us be Fearless and Full of Grace
“Years ago, I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made
Eugene V. Debs,
up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth.
I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it;
while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison,
I am not free.”
Statement to the Court Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act
“When I say it’s you I like, I’m talking about that part of you that knows
Fred Rogers
that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch.
That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which
humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises
triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.”
So the choice is ours. Whether we wish to work good or evil in the world, and whether we yearn to be just or unjust in our relationships with our neighbors and fellow men. The choice is ours, and either way the earth will warm us and nurture us all the same, the earth will still love us as we are.
Americans, Iraqis, Iranians, before the brilliant face of the sun we all stand and we’re all warmed the same, even as when we bow our heads, cup our hands and lift a cool pool of water to our lips, the water we drink nourishes us and gives life to us all equally, without prejudice of nation or race. Good and evil, in the presence of the earth, we’re all worthy of life and we’re all the same.
This, my friends, is what we call mercy. This, my fellow loved ones, is what we know as grace. The mercy and grace of the earth is absolute, unending and unconditional. The mercy and grace of the earth are eternal.
In 2020, let us learn from the earth and from the wisdom of creation. In the new decade ahead, let us yearn to be full of mercy and strive to be fearless and full of grace.
The Time Is Now
The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever,
which has nevertheless always been,
like a sharp iron hoof,
at the center of my mind.One or two things are all you need
to travel over the blue pond…
But to lift the hoof!
For that you need an idea.For years and years I struggled
“One or Two Things,” by Mary Oliver.
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“Don’t love your life
too much,” it said
and vanished
into the world.
In a murderous time, in a warring age rife with rage and bristling with beauty and barbarism, the time for peace is now. The time is always now.
Peace
“Humanity is but a single Brotherhood:
The Prophet Muhammad and Jesus of Nazareth,
so make peace with your brethren.”
“Love your neighbor as yourself.”
“Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.”
The Quran 49:10, Mark 12:31 & Matthew 5.9.
In 2020, and beyond, let us work for truth, justice, freedom of the heart and mind, and human dignity for all. Let us be kind, let us practice compassion and aspire toward courage. Let us work for a peace that is more than the absence of war, a peace rooted deep, deep, deep, deeply in human dignity and justice for all, at home and across the earth. For beauty is the work of the world, but our work is peace and our aspiration grace, even as ecstatic love is surely our deepest yearning and the wild longing of all things that live and sing under the sun.
Finally, let us come together and stand up to our true enemies, the Masters of War, with not the hate of monsters but the love of humanity in our lion hearts. Let us unite, stand up and fight the Masters of War, before they line us up and march us off, one-by-one-by-one, into the unholy brickkiln of war and the ungodly hell of hate, before they sicken our hearts with fear and deliver us up together like sheep to the slaughter of yet another world war.
Love without prejudice, empathy for the other, fearlessness and freedom from hate, and praise for everything under the star-sprent firmament. Praise, presence and joy in the perfection of all things. In the new decade that now dawns before us, this must be the moral way. This must be the American way. This must be the way of the human race. In a murderous time, in a violent and terrified age, in a warring era and a generation sick with rage, we must have the courage to be compassionate, the moral genius to be empathetic, and the heart to be brave and humane.
Together, as neighbors, as family and friends, as earthlings, as members of the same human race, for the sake of humanity and the preservation of our planet, in the brave new decade that is now here, that is here and now, let us put our great faith and deep belief not in the force of war but in the power of peace.
Peace to you. Peace to all. Peace between partisans in 2020. Peace between America and Iran. Peace on earth and praise to everything under the sun.
Thanks
“God breaks the heart again, and again,
Hazrat Inayat Khan
and again until the heart stays open.”
Thank you for reading this open letter and peace essay and for visiting The Land West of Long Mountain Project. If you missed parts one through four of this piece, you may find them through the links below. If you’re new to the Long West and would like to learn more about the project, you may read our first dispatch here.
We welcome you again, we welcome you always, to the Land West of Long Mountain. Until then: peace, salam alaykum, and much wholeness to you.
An Open Letter to My Fellow Americans
at the Dawn of a New Decade
– An Appeal Against Partisanship in America –
& Against War with Iran in Asia
Part I: The Info War Blues
Part II: Breaking Through the Blues
Part III: A Bipartisan American Rebuke
Part IV: The Forever War on Iran
Part V: In A Murderous Time
Joseph is a former Peace Corps China volunteer
by way of West Point and the creator of
The Land West of Long Mountain Project.
