Hello neighbors—I apologize for letting this small plot of ground—this site—go mostly untended over the past several years. I have been off to the wars, so to speak. I’m now back home.
I know instinctively that literally millions and millions of Dads are Against Martyr and Military Methods, though other dads, of course, are deeply committed and faithful to such methods. Those of us from around the world who are against such methods have mostly come to this stance simply by living long enough to suspect that martyr and military methods simply and fundamentally don’t work to attain the ends to which they are purported. For many of us we see that martyr and military methods are akin to pouring salt on our fields hoping to increase the yield. We see that, at least in the short run, such efforts lead to the exact opposite of what we had hoped. So too, martyr and military methods.
But what to do? The battles continue to rage, the salt continues to be poured. We can raise our voices— don’t do that, don’t do that. Don’t pour salt on the fields. What you are doing doesn’t work. It just makes things worse. Alas, it seems our voices are lost, time and time again, amidst the cacophony of voices on both sides of the battles raging. I confess, I have felt despair and fatigue and fruitlessness in this effort to reduce the world’s reliance on martyr and military methods simply by speaking out against such methods.
But I have recently been re-inspired, renewed, and refreshed in this effort, and thus the change of names for this site. It’s a simple change based on a simple insight. The insight is this:
MARTYR AND MILITARY METHODS ALWAYS COME FROM A MARTYR AND MILITARY MINDSET.
Curiously, many of us who recognize the futility, the inhumanity, and the irrationality of using personal or communal violence as a means to bring about a purported peaceable end nevertheless inadvertently often use the exact same means in our efforts to quell the violence. We do this when we see any other human being, or collection of human beings as somehow separate and apart from “us.”
Such a separation—such a lie— is at the root of the martyr and military mindset.
It’s an easy lie to accept. We are encouraged to accept it by our best friends, our family and by society in general. For most of us, accepting such lies is how we were trained up. “Which side are you on—the left or the right? The upper or lower? The middle or the extreme? Which nation state, or football team, do you give allegiance to? “ And then looking at our own inner points of view, it’s fairly easy to see which “group” we are most aligned with— which group holds points of view most similar to our own.
Nothing wrong or unnatural about this. What doesn’t work, and is based on a lie, is the notion that those who do not hold similar points of view are somehow “other,” separate, illegitimate, unworthy, e.g. not fully human.
In my maturity I have finally come to see that peace will never come about when eventually everybody coming to the same point of view (my point of view) even though that point of view seems (to me) obviously right, bright, and functional. I finally understand that peace will only come about when I lose allegiance to my points of view, and rest, moment by moment, in peace itself.
(Here, at Great Freedom.Org is where I have found this insight most clearly articulated, and more particularly, here, with World Peace, Yes We Can. )
Yes, let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me—with us. This is not fundamentally so much a “point of view” as it is a way of life that is no longer governed by points of view.
Whew. Finally. The Armistice. Let the peace be lived, in us. Our sons and daughters will inherit.