Nightmare Portends the Future? Two days after Election Day I awoke from a terrible nightmare.  A torturer had just cut off my legs and was forcing me to walk on the stubs of my legs. I woke up screaming.  Who was my torturer? Why this dream? Why now? In August 2001 I experienced repeated waves of doom that something dreadful was coming.

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The Burmese Harp. Directed by Kon Ichikawa. Starring Rentaro Mikuni and Shoji Yasui. Based on a novel by Michio Takeyama. (1956)                                                                                                                                                                               Little Known AntiWar Film is a Classic This 1956 Japanese film is a profoundly moving meditation on the price of war and may well rank in the top pantheon of anti-war films.  It is in black and white and this sharp chiaroscuro increases its impact and quiet power.  It takes place in Burma as World War II  is ending in July  1945.  The first words on the screen are: “The soil of Burma is red and so are its rocks,” thus introducing a metaphor for what is to follow. Using Music and Song to Touch the Heart The camera focuses on a unit of Japanese soldiers, whose captain graduated from music school and has taught them the basics of choral singing.  One of them, Corporal Mizushima, has learned to play the Burmese harp and accompanies his comrades as they sing.  They long to escape to Thailand but it is too late.

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 War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.  Edward Tick.  Quest Books: Wheaton, Illinois (2005).                                                                                                     Wars do not end when the bombs stop falling.  The terrible price of war is paid over and over again, in sometimes for a lifetime, by the soldiers who survive those wars with PTSD.   Ed Tick’s book offers an new look at at this enduring human problem. The War Doesn’t End When the Soldier Returns Home Those of us living in the U.S are intimately connected with the problems of soldiers returning from war: suicides, homelessness, emotional dislocation, domestic  violence, substance abuse.  We may see these problems but most of us don’t have a clue what to do about them  except to “support the troops” when the next war comes along. Losing that Which is Most Deeply Human in Battle Dr. Tick is a psychotherapist who specializes in the treatment of veterans with PTSD. He begins with an inquiry into the human soul, through which we experience our human uniqueness and depth.  Dr.

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 (Note: I am indebted to Jane Mayer’s groundbreaking work The Dark Side for contributions to the ideas I wrote about in the following blog.) Bush Administration Response to 9/11 Rooted in Shame and Humiliation The tragic mistakes made by the Bush administration provide lessons for those of us who yearn to see a happier world.  Now that the Bush team’s decision making process is coming to light, it is critical that we understand what happened here. The Bush-Cheney response to 9/11 was rooted in shame and humiliation. They were caught, one might say, with their pants down. They had been repeatedly warned that Al-Qaeda operatives were in the U.S. and chose to ignore that information.  When the planes hit the Twin Towers Bush was the Commander-in-Chief.  Three thousand lives were lost on his watch.  Somewhere inside themselves Bush and Cheney knew they were responsible. The Lust for Revenge These two men are not self-reflective people.

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 Book Review: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.  Jane Mayer. Doubleday: New York, 2008.                                                                                                                                                               Prepare to be shattered. This is a difficult book to read. Mysteries of Bush Administration Response Post 9/11 Revealed Jane Mayer’s meticulous dissection of the actions of the Bush administration post 9/11 is an extraordinary service to Americans and to the world. Many of us have been trying to understand how this presidency went so wrong.

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Book Review:  Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West. Benazir Bhutto. Harper Collins, New York, New York, 2008.                                                                                                       Finished Just Before Her Assassination This book was finished days before Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan last December.  With the publication of this book we can now honor the contribution she made in leaving it to the world.  It is an important work and forwards the reconciliation and democracy building she was engaged in as she lived. I have never read anything as comprehensive as this about the Muslim world.

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The Long Hunt Is Over                                                                                                                                                                Radovan Karadzic, one of the most wanted war criminals in the world, was arrested Monday in Serbia, ending a 13 year manhunt. He will be transferred soon to the Hague for trial at the International Criminal Court. I hope that Ratko Mladic, the third chieftain of evil in the Bosnian wars, will also be arrested soon. All societies create agreements for people to live together. When someone breaks one of those agreements he or she is “called to account” by the community. He must satisfy the group that he will be safe for everyone to live with.

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Stop Violence without Causing More Violence                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           How do we stop people who are hurting other people? Is it possible to stop them while at the same time preventing violence that may happen as a result of the stopping process itself?  Last week the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, on charges of waging genocide and rape in Darfur.  This is the first time prosecutors have ever issued charges against a sitting head of state, a very high risk strategy indeed.  The international community is still ashamed of its inability to stop the genocide in Rwanda and its intervention in Bosnia came much too late.  These glaring failures led to the creation of the International Criminal Court as a permanent war crimes tribunal.  The Responsibility to Protect The responsibility to protect doctrine, worked out with incredible care and thought by diplomats at the United Nations, includes circumstances under which military intervention would be necessary in the event of genocide.  In Sudan, over the past several years the government has made war on its own people, employing the murderous janjaweed milita.  Two and a half million people are now living in refugee camps. Part of what makes this conflict so complex is the fact China buys oil from the Sudanese government and would likely block any action by the UN the Security Council to arrest Bashir.  Do No Harm–Borrowing a Lesson from the World of Psychiatry  Can violent people be stopped safely? I am a psychiatric nurse and I work with violent people all the time. On psychiatric inpatient units we use a process to contain people who are out of control that we call a show of support.  The purpose is to keep everyone safe and to treat the violent person with dignity and respect.  Staff go through rigorous training to insure they can contain a patient safely without hurting the patient or themselves.

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 Calming The Fearful Mind: A Zen Response to Terrorism.  Thich Nhat Hanh. Parallax Press: Berkeley, CA, 2005. On An Idyllic Fall Day In September Seven years have passed since those haunting days in September 2001 when the airplanes hit the twin towers in NYC and Washington DC. As I sit here on this idyllic summer afternoon, it could even be today, and thousands could be going to their deaths.  In fact, in Afghanistan right now, they are. For terrorism is not over. To read the newspapers  it has barely gotten started.

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(Editor’s Note: Today we welcome Andrew Himes, founder and Executive Director of Voices in Wartime, an Education Project dedicated to educating high school and college students about the experience of war. The Project has produced a film (Voices in Wartime) an Anthology of Poetry, and a curriculum for use in high school and college classrooms.)                                                                                                                                                     Q: Was there a particular event that fueled your desire to make the film Voices in Wartime?  What fueled the passion in the film, the anthology and the project, to create a less violent world and to heal the trauma caused by war?  AH: In the beginning 2003, as the Bush administration was on the verge of invading Iraq, I was on the verge of despair. I had protested the war and seen millions of others oppose this bizarre and misguided invasion, but it appeared to be going ahead no matter what was said or done to oppose it. I was one of an international movement called Poets Against the War, which gathered and published over 13,000 poems written in a global outcry against the impending war. But somehow the war proceeded.

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