Stop Fighting and Start Loving

[Post-dated addition: This blog post was written before thousands of brave and conscientious students of the United States (including students from Columbia, where I did my MFA (I have written about that experience in my book The Killing of an Author), community leaders and activists around the world, and many conscientious Jews including the astonishingly brave, committed, and principled Norm Finkelstein—whose parents died in Nazi death camps, and thinks Israel’s present treatment of Palestinians is equally reprehensible–have given us a glimmer of hope.]

This is not a suggestion. It is a command: Stop fighting, you world leaders and the media that enable them by repeating their lies, beating the drums of war, enabling warmongers to let slip the dogs of war. Yes you, Joe Biden with your bloodthirsty Normandy speech trying to be a Winston Churchill; yes you, Rishi Sunak, trying to be yet another Churchill, forgetting Churchill’s part in the Bengal famine: stop killing and starving innocents and the mostly-innocent alike, because I/we can’t take it anymore. Any more of this escalation [update: the US has just been officially designated as an enemy by Russia) and our species risks complete self-annihilation, depending on the effectiveness of Russia’s Doomsday Machine and the U.S. version, and how long the post-nuclear radiation lasts.

And who is the “I” or “we” issuing this command, you ask?

It is the command center and the heart of our human survival. Which, hopefully, has acquired some wisdom over the course of the 150,000 years our species has been in existence. And which is now telling us: your games are too dangerous. You have no more wiggle room to risk fatal mistakes.

Since becoming the undisputed lone superpower and sovereign of the earth, in 1989-90, thanks to the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States has, because of its hubris and the shabby quality of its short-sighted, ignorant, uninspired, power-addicted, and revenge-and-ego motivated leaders, sunk to the level of first among equals in a multi-polar world in which the two other Great Powers, presently, are Russia and China, who are now united in their decision to resist unfair, unjust, and totally unmerited hegemonic dominance (I’ve never used this overused and self-important h-word before, but the present situation seems to compel it). We lost our chance, on account of having trusted corrupt leaders and power-seekers to be visionaries and saints, and we must accept this new reality, because not recognizing it could be fatal to the whole of human civilization.

This is my view of present world situation, and I have never felt so pessimistic about the human species, that we are on the verge of letting a million people die of starvation (it’s still possible), and another40,000 die, and countless others wounded or disabled for life, and this view has resulted mainly from listening to non-mainstream voices that have mostly been deliberately shut out of the lying and billionaire-serving mainstream media: Prof. Noam Chomsky, Professor John Mearsheimer, Scott Ritter, Col. Douglas Macgregor, Prof. Richard Wolff, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Norm Finkelstein. Even Jordan Peterson, who pointed out to Piers Morgan. “I think we all have a bit of Stalin and Hitler inside us. More than a bit.” Either that, or we’re simply indifferent, or ignorant, victims of brainwashing and poor education.

Achieving a near-perfect or even partial world peace is the paramount priority for humankind now, because wasting our energy and goodwill on any cause or action that, while not unjust in itself, breeds division and enemies (especially long-term enemies driven by ego-wounds and past slights), destabilizes human cooperation and endangers the prospects of long-term stability.

What am I leading to? Here’s what I have been thinking of over the last year or so of disharmony or disconnection between me and my three highly intelligent sons: that if unhappiness or dissension within families cannot be controlled or even solved, indeed cannot be admitted or discussed (Why? “Because it’s a personal matter.” In that case, what about, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”). If love and compassion are lacking between highly-educated parents and children, or brothers and sisters (and all of whom seemingly have much surplus love to give to others), how much hope does that promise for peace and love and caring between nations, races, and classes? And this is what I say to myself and my children: Don’t do it for me or for you, but for the sake of humanity. Because we’re all part of the human family. The loss of family love and kindness and generosity cannot but be a drain on the capacity of human beings to love each other. Let’s make this our paramount objective: to Stop Fighting, and Start Loving.

To batter and pulverize, then ignore and let die hundreds of thousands of civilian Gazans, including children, or to batter an already wounded and weakened close relative, and then ignore him as he fights for his life: that’s not my definition of heroic. The far more courageous course would be to give love, an abundance of love. To love unconditionally, my parents and my children, just because my parents and children didn’t arrive on the planet and instantly reach their present state. A long sequence of events and influences, including historical and biological accidents, brought them to where they are now. We are mostly limited by our experiences and our genes (which, even in a family, vary from one person to another), and by our humanity. We have to make a constant and strenuous and uncompromising effort to stretch our visions so as to accommodate at least a bit of the other.

To love would not be limited to saying the words “I love you,” and trying to put some feeling and sincerity into each such statement. Your love should include showing active empathy and understanding towards the other–an understanding arrived at by letting the other person talk, and listening to them, and trying to imagine going through those same experiences, and being subject to those precise influences. Lots of talking and sharing, between members of the same family, and between countries and peoples.

In other words, what we need is the ability, backed by determination and effort, to see the other person’s point of view, to see and consider what the world looks like while standing in that other person’s shoes. As John Mearsheimer, Scott Ritter, and Jeffrey Sachs point out, what is the point of being the president of the United States if you cannot pick up the phone and call Putin and say, “Let’s talk. Let’s try to end this senseless loss of life and of resources that our brothers and sisters on this planet need. We can’t afford to destroy the world. We may have made a mistake. I may have made a mistake.”? The first thing the President ought to be doing, says Mearsheimer, is listening to Putin, and trying to understand him.

It’s possibly the only remedy we have left in the long battle to bring peace and dignity to the lives of the people of Gaza, and to all the people of Ukraine and Russia who have been hurt or lost family members and a family life because of the inability of grown men (and women—don’t  forget some very jingoistic and pugnacious women leaders in Europe) to sit down and listen to others, and determine to talk and to understand until they have reached an agreement that solves the problem without shedding a single drop of blood. (However, donations of blood to blood banks in hospitals for the critically wounded: yes!) This is the only way humanity can win, with the only losers being the arms merchants and the deeply corrupt and avaricious.

Right now, we also have a war between Russia on the one hand, and Ukraine and the Western powers of Europe and the U.S. on the other hand, a war that threatens to spill over into a catastrophic nuclear war because of misunderstandings (one of the writers I have been following expects nuclear war to happen by the end of the month), bloated egos, macho rhetoric, undisciplined, curse-hurling politicians, those who have been brainwashed into seeing things and people as black and white. This war is more dangerous because the two main powers that could be involved possess, between themselves, more than ten thousand nuclear warheads, or enough to blow the entire earth up many times over. And who was right, and who was wrong: it won’t matter when we’re all pushing up radioactive daisies (I assume that the U.S. president and a few mega-billionaires will escape into their underground bunkers just in time, but I feel sorry for a world that would have to depend on these specimens to regenerate mankind).

So, for fuck’s sake (one of the first times I have ever used the word fuck, whether in my writing or speech, but nuclear apocalypse deserves it), drop everything else you can to ask yourself and others: What can we do, right now, to achieve humankind’s overwhelmingly top-priority objectives:

1. Stop the war in Gaza, prevent any more deaths by famine or inadequate medical attention.
2. Stop the war in Ukraine, and work for a peaceful solution.
3. Hug, kiss, and love your parents, your children, your brothers and sisters, after having realized you have the same DNA, that you are separated only by an illusion or an accident, and combinations of the two.

Until we have wholeheartedly worked on the three suggestions given above, humanity as a whole cannot afford to expend its limited energy on its remaining priorities or even their order of importance. The underlying principle is this: Lines on maps are meaningless when compared to the highly variable value of human life (the present market value of which is 240 brown lives equal  4 white Israeli lives (and Biden thinks that’s quite dandy, and he’s, after all, the most powerful man in the world).

But for most of us non-fanatics, Life is precious, however precarious. And it is infinitely preferable to No Life. Also consider that, without life, the energy wasted in arguing over gender-neutral or gender-specific bathrooms, in a world that has been completely rid of any signs of human life–it is a tragic waste. Cockroaches will survive the Holocaust, but possibly, precisely because they don’t much care about gender-specific bathrooms.