THE LONG VIEW

An Address at Mo'oheau Park, Hilo, Hawai'i

Saturday, October 25, 2003

I sense that I stand before you simply to confirm in my own fashion what you already know. The only way I can be original and thus not just waste your time, is to share what is in my heart. It is by sharing that we form community, and community is our crying need at this time.

Just a year ago I stood here and declared that we're in it for the long haul. I still think so. At that time it seemed that a war on Iraq was inevitable in just a few months. Sure enough, it started this last March and Iraq was ruined in a matter of weeks. Now we know that we were deliberately given false reasons for the invasion. There is no need to review that history, I think. You will agree that our government played fast and loose with the facts as it pursued an agenda of ruthless smash and grab.

It isn't a new agenda by any means. Our hero Christopher Columbus exploited the Arawak people of present-day Haiti, and eventually exterminated them. Everybody in an entire nation was wiped out, their language, their culture, their traditions, their family jokes, their very genes, lost forever, impoverishing the rest of us. Cortez, Pizarro, Ponce de Leon, Coronado, and Desoto belong in that same roster, as do the settlers of New England. In the French and Indian Wars of the 18th Century, an English officer, with the approval of his superiors, presented two blankets from a small pox hospital to Indian friends. It is the first known case of biological warfare. An estimated 100,000 Indians died in the epidemic that followed. The Trail of Tears in the 19th century was the deliberate effort at ruthless ethnic cleansing of traditional peoples on the entire North American continent east of the Mississippi. In Texas there was a bounty on Indian scalps until 1870. Any scalp, male, female, juvenile. 1870 was not a long time ago. All four of my grandparents were born by then. Sterilization of Indian women and brainwashing of Indian children in BIA schools continued until our own times.

It wasn't until I was a grown man, that I ran across a history of the Philippines that included a chapter on "The American War." News to me, but it is a story every bit as disgraceful as the wars on Native Americans.

We know the history of our own Hawai'i Nei. After Captain Cook landed on Kauai in 1778, he sailed off to Alaska for a while. When he returned, he made landfall on the Big Island. There he found people infected with syphilis that his men had introduced on Kauai just a few months earlier. It isn't quite as outrageous a story as the deliberate biological warfare that wiped out entire nations of Indians, but it was the beginning of the decimation of the Hawaiian people.

Slaughtering and exploiting people and despoiling the land for power aren't practices that are confined among Stupid White Men. Columbus and his minions weren't the first. In far earlier history, we learn of wars in China, for example, that left countless thousands dead and homeless. Southern planters weren't the first to make slaves of Africans. The Arabs were busy in that industry many centuries earlier. And right here on Moku Hawai'i, the story of clear-cutting the sandalwood forests with forced labor undermines our reverence of Kamehameha.

There is just one thing new, and that's technology. As human beings our alligator minds devise better ways to slaughter people and create slaves and despoil the land than we could earlier because our weapons and our communication and our machines are more efficient. That's all. That's really all.

So let's not point the finger. Corruption and exploitation is not the purview of men who justify their cruelty by the injunction of Jesus to convert the world. Yet, at the same time, we must acknowledge four things. First, The human race and indeed all beings of the Earth are in grave peril. Second, we inherit a history of movements for decency and compassion that have brought about change for the better. The third is the matter of the human conscience that fuels these movements. And the final point is the inherent peace and harmony which we can each of access without waiting for change. Let me enlarge on these four points.

First, with technology in the hands of criminally insane leaders today, we face the unprecedented danger of end time. The apocalypse now. The Armageddon at hand. Quite literally. Nuclear poisons with a half-life of eternity can wipe us all out. Not just a nation, but the very human race itself, languages, cultures, family jokes, our very genes, lost forever. Bach, Rembrandt, Shakespeare, the Buddha, the Christ, Plato, Confucius, and all the arts and wisdom of native elders--poof. All the joys of parenting, all the aspirations of children--poof. And not just the human race, the race of all beings, animals and plants, humbly working out their destinies and evolution--poof.

Is there any hope? Yes, there is. For one thing, we can direct our technology to the problem of nuclear waste. I'm not a scientist, but I suspect that eventually the requisite technology can be worked out and the danger can be controlled. At least we can give the problem our very best push. In the context of this effort lies the second point, which is our best push in the in the political realm, in face of difficult odds. It is likely to take a long time and require endless patience.

The Abolition Movement to free the slaves in the United States is an excellent example from the past of a good, long push. It began before our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. For some citizens, the practice of bondage was clearly at odds with the freedom from bondage their new county was experiencing. In 1790 the state government of Pennsylvania responded to this troubling of conscience, and began a gradual program of emancipation. It was the beginning of a long campaign that finally ended with the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments a hundred years later.

A similar history can be traced in the campaign for women's rights, beginning with convincing polemics by Margaret Fuller and others in the early 1800s. To make a long and important story short, women were given the right to vote by constitutional amendment in 1919, again, 100 years later. The Equal Rights Amendment was then introduced into Congress in 1923. It was at last approved by Congress in 1972, forty nine years later, and promptly ratified by 35 states (including Hawai'i ) out of the required 38, and it is stuck there. Give us another generation of organized appeals to conscience.

Do we have another generation? That's a huge question, but here too I find hope. This is my third point. In many ways it seems that we human beings are becoming more aware of ourselves and of our responsibilities to one another and to the world. Here and there the alligator mind we all know so well shows signs of subsiding. There may be a natural evolution toward decency. This is my third point.

I spent my childhood in Honolulu in English Standard Schools. From 1923 to 1945, all children took a little test before they began school. Those who could respond in conventional English to a few simple verbal questions were sent to Lincoln or Ali_iolani schools. Those who could not were sent to Central Grammar or Kaimuki Elementary schools. The entire system was in two parts, with McKinley High School for the dialect speakers and Roosevelt High School for those that spoke California. Finally the community woke up to the segregationist nature of this arrangement, and it was quietly phased out, as so many benighted institutions have simply disappeared.

The possibility of a natural evolution in the direction of decency leads me directly back to my heart and yours in this very moment. This is my fourth and final point. I submit that it is vital to take the slogans seriously and personally. "Peace Now." "Justice Now." "Protection of All Beings Now." One of my colleagues turned out for a demonstration with the sign, "Regime change begins at home." He didn't mean, "Impeach the rascals," he meant something more intimate.

Buddhist Peace Fellowship members sit in meditation each Friday afternoon from 3:30 to 5:00, facing the Federal Building and Post Office in Hilo. We just sit there practicing inner quiet. We don't wave signs at cars, though we are friendly with Malu Aina farmers and others across the avenue that do. If I must give a message for those of us who sit there quietly, I would say that we are showing original peace as best we can. We appeal to your conscience of original peace and harmony.

Our ancestors in the many peace and social justice movements were religious in a formal sense, or simply humanist in their response to their conscience, and here it is important to look at etymology. Conscience is the sense we have in common. The deepest such sense is that we at rest in the peace and harmony of the stars. To paraphrase A.J. Muste, "Original peace is the way."

It is time to turn to the traditional teachings, if you are so inclined, or simply to search on your own. Take heart, and from your own heart and mine we can weather this war that ranges all round us, and together we can embody and present the Way.

-Robert Aitken 2003

posted 2004.02.03

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