If you came upon two men in the road with one fist gripping each other's collar and the other cocked back ready to strike, but not yet having struck, would you call that War?
The Dalai Lama spoke a truth - but there is the other side of that truth. As your own anecdote shows, both for you and the Russian scientists, the Cold War was a period of relative peace. For most people on both sides, there was no effective difference between the Cold War and peace. For the relatively few people like Peter Van Uhm, we were at war, but that bought the semblance of peace for the great majority. The client wars, Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, were visible evidence that war existed a short distance away from suburbia and housing collectives. Yet, almost half of people had no personal experience of those wars (i.e. been there or knew someone who was killed or wounded) - the wars remained something in the media. There has never been a time on this Earth since the rise of Homo Sapiens that there has not been violence widespread enough to qualify as "war". We can strive for peace - but most of the time the best we can do is make it so the largest possible number of people experience peace. On Feb 14, 2012, at 12:19 PM, Steve Smith wrote: "Some people say we never use nuclear weapons. The truth is we use nuclear weapons every day to keep the world safe..." -The Honorable Andrew C. Weber, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs "If you came upon two men in the road with one fist gripping eachother's collar and the other cocked back ready to strike, but not yet having struck, would you call that Peace?" - The Dalai Lama, Spiritual and (formerly) political leader of the Tibetan people and a worldwide Buddhist Community ________________________________ <rambling personal anecdote> When the Dalai Lama came to SFe roughly 20 years ago, I joined a Buddhist friend at a small gathering at the Stupa out on Airport Road. I had studied Buddhism from a very objective point of view... I had little if any direct connection to the system of thinking but was impressed by the mix of objectivity and subjectivity that they seemed to hold in close juxtaposition. I liked most of the Buddhists I knew. I identified well with Libertarian's values but found most if not all arrogant and mean-spirited... Buddhists were nearly the opposite... and I was strangely attracted. The Dalai Lama's personal presence, along with his very small entourage of Monks was impressive... I'd been in the presence of "powerful" and "important" people (e.g. Bill Clinton, Jack Kemp, Steve Jobs, etc.) but the serene unself-consciousness of this man and his entourage and their genuine good humor was nearly overwhelming. That evening I attended the larger gathering at SF High's auditorium... shuffling along for nearly an hour as tens of thousands of people, talking quietly amongst themselves about a range of things from radical politics to their personal experience as Buddhists or Buddhist-groupies, to what they had for breakfast (yes, mostly bland, low-fat, healthy stuff). It was polite, friendly, patient, orderly. I knew some of these people and I had probably been in line with them at the Paolo Soleri for a concert or at the grocery waiting to checkout... these were not all normally quiet, thoughtful, polite, serene people. In other contexts they might be hooting and hollering or pushing and shoving or at least snorting impatiently as I fumbled for my change. At the end of perhaps an hour "speech", the Dalai Lama opened the floor to questions and there were only a few, almost without exception, on the inane side... punctuated nicely by his polite and obvious (in retrospect) answers. "Are you here to urge the US to bring economic sanctions against China?" "I am not interested in violence of any kind and economic sanctions are a form of violence." "Are you going up to Los Alamos to urge them to quit making nuclear weapons?" "I don't believe we have much in common to discuss, if someone there would like to talk with me, I would be happy to travel there to talk with them." "But haven't Nuclear Weapons helped to keep the Peace for 50 years? Don't you have that in common with them? An interest in Peace?" "If you came upon two men in the road with one fist gripping eachother's collar and the other cocked back ready to strike, but not yet having struck, would you call that Peace?" As I remember it, this ended the questions. We all left the giant gymnasium as quietly and politely as we entered. There was no loud chatter to speak of, mostly quiet murmerings and observations about this and that from his talk and again, from each person's day... Within a few months, as I remember it... Bill Clinton had just visited Los Alamos and the Pope visited Denver. These are two other highly powerful figures. Both of these fellows had multiple layers of "fanged" security, advance people weeks ahead carefully arranging for security. Bill flew in on Marine One (or two or three... as all three arrived flying in low up the Rio Grande in a weaving pattern formation) with a huge retinue of Secret Service boys and girls. The Pope rode through the streets of Denver in his bulletproof glass cage atop his Pope-Mobile. There was no evidence of any security for the Dalai Lama... perhaps his 3-4 bald-headed monk-friends were secret Ninjas ready to fly off in all directions at once in Crouching Dragon and Flying Tiger moves... but even that I think not. The crowds in both occassions needed a police cordon to keep them back from these "important men" and there was a mixture of (mostly) cheering and (a tiny amount of) jeering. This simple contrast made the Dalai Lamas words ever more poignant... I came to Los Alamos myself as a young idealist... a bit of a pacifist in many ways... including being a staunch vegetarian. But I believed Andrew Weber's story. I believed in Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). I believed in the West African Proverb brought to us by Roosevelt of "Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stick". It had the nice overtones of isolationism coupled with the ego-enhancer of the big stick. It sounded like a high road to me in those days. I wasn't working directly on nuclear weapons myself but I understood that my work in computer science was only one level of indirection away and was mostly if not entirely supported financially by the nuclear weapons program. I thought MAD was at worst a necessary evil. About the same time as the Dalai Lamas visit, the implications of the end of the Cold War were sinking in. Los Alamos was no longer allowed to drop bombs down holes in Nevada and light them off... we were now spending the same (or higher?) budget on computer simulations... I was happy to see the enhanced interest in my career choice... and generally happy to know that the good people of southeast Utah (not to mention Las Vegas) might not need to worry as much whether one of our "tests" might go awry and vent more nasty stuff into the air they breathe and the water they drink. I wasn't a huge anti-nuclear activist or anything... just aware that the work I was involved in was anything but benign. Among the things I was learning as the shadow of the Cold War receded was how wild and prolific the Soviet Nuclear program had been. Even if the US was being uber-safe in it's testing, the USSR had taken some pretty big risks and done a lot of questionable things, the "Arms Race" while keeping a certain "Cold Peace" had set a very wicked precedent and probably left some even more wicked consequences. Another was that I was beginning to meet "real Russian Scientists", doing a stint reviewing project proposals solicited by the State Department in their "Keep a Russian Scientist Off the Street" program. They were mostly humble and thoughtful and many had as little interest in weapons and warfare as I had, even if they had been working in the general domain of nuclear weapons. Many were a lot like me, despite the image of the Angry Bear we'd been given as children and reinforced as adults. At this point, It is the US and it's allies who have their fist cocked back, but have not yet struck. India and China, India and Pakistan are in a clench like the one the Dalai Lama described... vacillating from relatively relaxed but wary to highly tense. Israel has had each of it's Arab neighbors in a once sided Clench for decades, and now is facing (with ourselves and perhaps Europe) standing in line behind them in a fresh version of that Clench with Iran. Peace? I can't claim that our "Big Stick" isn't a good reason that worldwide violence as retreated to a national or regional (think Korea, SE Asia, Bosnia, Iraq, Subsaharan Africa, Central America, etc.) level without blossoming into another international conflict on the scale of WWI and WWII but I would not call what we've lived under (and especially much of the rest of the world) *Peace*. Perhaps it is not in (hu)man's constitution to be at peace with his neighbors (now all one global village bristling with weapons pointed akimbo?). But what I saw and heard that evening when the Dalai Lama visited gave me hope for something better than this, something better than MAD. </rambling personal anecdote> Why I choose not to own a gun (to be shared in another rant another time). - Steve On Feb 12, 2012, at 6:23 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: When I spent 2 years at Syracuse University helping 273 draftees avoid going to the failed Vietnam war, I was completely surprised by the military: they were smart, willing to listen, and amazingly, decided to let 273 war protesters not go to the war. This was in stark contrast with the civilian authorities (the Draft Board) who were deaf, dumb and blind in comparison. So this led me to watch this strange TEDx where the talk was on "Why I chose a gun" http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_van_uhm_why_i_chose_a_gun.html -- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org<http://www.friam.org/> Ray Parks Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager V: 505-844-4024 M: 505-238-9359 P: 505-951-6084 NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov<mailto:rcpa...@sandia.gov> SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov<mailto:rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov> (send NIPR reminder) JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov<mailto:dopa...@doe.ic.gov> (send NIPR reminder) ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org<http://www.friam.org/> Ray Parks Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager V: 505-844-4024 M: 505-238-9359 P: 505-951-6084 NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov<mailto:rcpa...@sandia.gov> SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov<mailto:rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov> (send NIPR reminder) JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov<mailto:dopa...@doe.ic.gov> (send NIPR reminder)
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