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Brian's Essays
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Blog Archive
S. Brian Willson
This site contains essays describing the incredible historic pattern of U.S. arrogance, ethnocentrism, violence and lawlessness in domestic and global affairs, and the severe danger this pattern poses for the future health of Homo sapiens and Mother Earth. Other essays discuss revolutionary, nonviolent alternative approaches based on the principle of radical relational mutuality. This is a term increasingly used by physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists to describe the nature of the omnicentric*, ever-unfolding universe. Every being, every aspect of life energy in the cosmos, is intrinsically interconnected with and affects every other being and aspect of life energy at every moment.
*everything is at the center of the cosmos at every moment
Brian's Blog
All blog entries and essays posted on this site are authored by S. Brian Willson.
One Person’s Freedom Fighter/Hero Is Another Person’s Terrorist
February 3, 2010 – 8:32 am
On left in photo, Chinese student stands in front of military tank in Tiananmen Sq in Beijing, June 5, 1989. He was lauded by US Pres Geeorge HW Bush as a brave, courageous hero, causing tank to stop. On right, USA Vietnam veteran sits in front of military train in California, Sept. 1, 1987 (21 months earlier). It was hauling weapons to illegally arm Pres Reagan’s terrorists in Nicaragua & El Salvador. This man was condemned by Pres Reagan & his FBI as a terrorist threat, & military officials ordered train to accelerate & run over, nearly murdering him, taking both his legs & fracturing his skull.
We Are the Antidote – Every Choice a revolutionary Act
January 30, 2010 – 8:18 pm
There is a deeply uncomfortable but clearly structural explanation for the pattern of historic U.S. war-making that continues to this very moment. US Americans, people like you and me, are addicted to insatiable consumption that makes the American Way Of Life totally dependent upon massive exploitation of others and their resources, and the earth herself.
The political-economic market system we have grown up with and support with our tax dollars and voting patterns is a significant contributor to the problem.
Part of the revolutionary antidote, if it occurs, will be in radically changed choices each of us makes as to how we travel, what we eat, what we consume or don’t consume, etc. Take travel, for example. Air and private auto travel not only emit massive amounts of carbon molecules, accumulating as particles of mass destruction in our biosphere, they also consume inordinate amount of petroleum for each passenger mile traveled.
If we are not committed to taking radical leaps in our own consciousness that manifests in corresponding radical changes in our lifestyles, then we choose complicity in business as usual, i.e., continuing to live as we have been conditioned and to which we are now addicted – comfortable materialism. It is absolutely and totally unsustainable. We now have an evolutionary opportunity for a leap in consciousness to integrate ourselves into a cosmological reality of living in mutual respect with all other life. So, we are the antidote, not the government or the market. As we become conscious, each daily choice we make from eating, traveling, and consuming, or not, is a revolutionary act.
Why Do We Kill, Maim, and Colonize? Chief Sitting Bull Told Us in 1877
January 29, 2010 – 4:27 pm
The great Lakota Sioux Chief Sitting Bull resisted forced settlement on reservations in the 1870s. In 1877, after he defeated General Custer at Little Bighorn, he decided to migrate to Canada. He had mixed feelings about such migration as he pronounced the following words:
“Behold my brothers, the Spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love!
Every seed is awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land.
Yet, hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.
They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path.
We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that away from us. My brothers, shall we submit or shall we say to them: “First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland…”
Our love of possession is our disease.
The Problem Resides in the Nature of our Thought Structure
October 13, 2009 – 1:07 pm
Quantum physicist David Bohm has said that to become wholistic thinkers and feeling beings we must drop the mechanistic order that virtually all of us have been conditioned in for the past 400 years. Our thought structures, and therefore the manner in which we conceptualize and communicate, have been guided by mechanistic themes, rather than from a deep sense of the whole weave each of us is an intrinsic part of, that everything is richly interconnected with everything else. Such mechanistic order is expressed through what Bohm calls the Cartesian Grid, where virtually everything has been contained and conditioned by our notions of order, our thinking, our senses, our feelings, our intuitions, our physical movement, our relationships with other people and society, in fact, every phase of our lives. We have been in a terrible, claustrophobic box that cannot see life as it really is. We make it up.
So we have to look at thought itself as a major cause of our problems. We accept the political and economic structures that exist as if they are written in stone, and have been with us forever. It is helpful to remind ourselves that everything cultural is a creation of human beings, and can be changed at any time it is deemed important or necessary to enhance species survival and enjoyment. Modern Western man has become addicted to materialism which has contaminated our thinking process and values such that we have become individualistic rather than communitarian beings, acquisitive rather than inquisitive, and competitive rather than cooperative. We are working against our intrinsic, archetypal nature.
The wise Australian archaeologist, V. Gordon Childe, in his classic work, Man makes Himself (1936), concluded (now the language would substitute “human(s)” for “man/men”): “Just because tradition is created by societies of men and transmitted in distinctively human and rational ways, it is not fixed and immutable: it is constantly changing as society deals with ever new circumstances. Tradition makes the man, by circumscribing his behavior within certain bounds; but it is equally true that man makes the traditions. And so, we can repeat with deeper insight, Man makes himself.”
Woodstock – 10 Days Out of Viet Nam, I Wanted A Revolution
August 17, 2009 – 12:56 pm
Ten days out of Viet Nam 40 years ago yesterday, I was vacationing with my wife at a B&B in Woodstock, Vermont. At our first breakfast we read the morning newspaper about an incredible happening in a small town in upstate New York by the same name — Woodstock! I had not known about it but was ecstatic that perhaps it signified a radical shift in our cultural consciousness against war and capitalist economics.
Sitting next to me at breakfast were a couple from Connecticut who, it turns out, were on a healing vacation recovering from having lost their son, their only child, a month earlier in combat in Viet Nam. He had been a draftee, reluctantly serving his conscriptive assignment, hoping to return to start a career in the healing profession.
When all this news converged — 500,000 people celebrating at Woodstock, my excitement as a fresh war returnee that a new spirit was in the wind, the couple’s mourning over their killed son, and my deep sadness about their son’s death, I started sobbing. Those mourning parents then gently reached for my hands, and as I clasped theirs, we cried together.
More than resistance at that moment, we wanted a revolution in our society that would make war impossible ever again. That is how we experienced Woodstock in that moment! I was stirred by feeling part of a collective energy for emergence of a new man, and a new woman.
I am still wanting to feel the stir of a zeitgeist of consciousness that recognizes deeply within that when others are suffering and hurting, I am also, and that everyone else is feeling similarly. If we could grasp in the depths of our archetypal souls that there is a boomerang force inherent in any toxic energy thrust at others, meaning that that dark energy will return in one form or another, sooner or later, to the thruster, then war would end, just like that. It would be an evolutionary breakthrough.
