“Wheel and turn, wheel and turn the knights of old would when facing distress or the rare opportunity to serve their quest.”

Dear President Obama,

Your daughters and family are precious to you, the stability and richness of their present a motivator to your every action, the importance of their future woven into all of you and your wife’s hopes and dreams. Ironically, or perhaps because of your love for them, you stand at the controls of an engine, the world’s most militarized political force, that eats away at monstrous portions of their present life and darkens the very opportunity for their future. The issues that drive these apocalyptic shadows are economic collapse, peak oil & global climate change, and worldwide militarization & war.

Economic collapse will continue being the unavoidable result of unsustainable and ultimately unjust lifestyles fostered in the industrialized nations and spreading like cancer throughout the developing second and third tier nations. Peak oil and climate change were challenging concepts for your Orwellian predecessor but like gravity the obvious disparity between shrinking resource and the alarmingly growing world population presses upon even a Neanderthal mentality, now vividly apparent as the geo-political reality of our 21^st century.

War, however, is the most powerful driving factor in our growing planetary demise, avoiding careful scrutiny because of the following: huge institutional and financial investments in global militarism; a nationalistic tribal mentality maintained and re-shored repeatedly about “defense” and the supposed “glory of sacrifice”; the hypnotically repeated meme of victim, perpetrator and rescuer that dominates main stream news and the inurement to violence fostered upon our children and adolescents through video games, films and almost every form of cultural exposure.

Far more than half of our annual national investment goes into militarism - the research and development, manufacture, purchase and deployment of sophisticated instruments of destruction. Besides consuming finances, our globally based military machine is one of the largest consumers of petroleum resources, although one premise for its advancing presence is the preservation and guarantor of such resource.

Abundant anthropological and sociological science verifies that when societal groups are challenged with survival, in the face of such attack or threat populations rapidly increase. Does this explain the exploding populations in the areas of starkest poverty and the grim resource wars of Africa, the mid East and Asia?

As President you may counsel your citizens concerning consumption and lifestyle. You may pour money into the financial morass of international banking hoping more debt will cure debt. You may encourage alternative energy and family planning and provide leadership and funding to these endeavors, but ultimately the dragon in the field is war and our nation’s parasitic relationship with the forces of military manufacture and proliferation.

War is the antiquated shell of our millennial potential, the hardened husk preventing the chrysalis of our collective future from emerging into our next generational and historic day. Every encouragement and advance you make in war forces a logarithmic decrease in our economy, our natural resources and to our planetary environment. Beyond these pragmatic effects, war is also a disease upon our collective soul, a regression in our spiritual evolution, for all war is war upon the Earth and an affront to the Creator.

Here is your challenge Mr. President. As you seem to draw more and more resource for direction from the dark side (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090525/zirin2), there is a largely untapped source of power and enlightenment in our citizenry to support a change away from war while glacial forces of financial greed and institutional ignorance oppose it. The fulcrum is in leadership and the reins of control are largely in your hands.

Continue to lead down the misguided path of empire and you ignore not only those you love but their future for which you and I and each of us are responsible. Take counsel from the knights of old. Wheel and turn, away from war and institutionalized violence and toward the sources of real richness and life, toward peace, justice and environmental wholeness. Wheel and turn. The people will be with you.

For the complete post click here: Leaving War Behind

Peace,

Don Hynes

Vantage Point