W's War Senseless, Bullying

By: David Rozelle

In his short, momentous essay Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau accounts for his decision to serve time in jail rather than give his support to America's war against Mexico. In the process, he makes a tortuously persuasive case for the primacy of the individual's sense of right and wrong. If a government violates an individual citizen's conscience, Thoreau argues, then that individual is morally bound to oppose his government.

During the 20^th Century, both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King quoted from Civil Disobedience. It now begs us to quote from it as well: "How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."

In 2003, we will have to answer to our individual consciences for an American war that may extinguish the lives of thousands of innocent human beings. Thoreau himself, no doubt, would have chosen "at least to wash his hands" of it. I am not a pacifist. There are, I believe, just and unjust wars. I contend, however, that this one is unjust - not worth the blood of one of my fellow human beings, innocent or otherwise, let alone the blood that will be spilled throughout the world in its explosive aftermath.

My conscience tells me that George W. Bush's desire for war makes sense only as senselessness. It is, in a word, monomaniacal - fueled by a phantasmagoric mixture of greed, vengeance, evangelism, imperialist cravings, and personal insecurity. Worst of all, perhaps, his fixation on waging war reveals, for all the world to see, the shameful indifference of an American President to life's preciousness - most especially, Muslim life. As Thoreau might have said about Bush's predilection for bloodletting, "under the name of Order and Civil Government, we are all made to pay homage to and support our own meanness".

Furthermore, in just two years, we have squandered our national treasure, principally by disastrously slashing taxes for the wealthy while bulking up for this pre-emptive, global conflict. In conscience, much of that treasure should have been invested in ameliorating the misery of millions and millions of American poor, preserving - not pillaging for profit - our environment, establishing health care as a basic American right, restoring pensions stolen by corporate criminals, and safeguarding our personal liberties instead of consigning them to the whims of an Orwellian Justice Department.

Civil disobedience, however, tends to be an immediate reaction to an immediate outrage. While George W. Bush will not be President forever, we must also ask ourselves what can be done to ensure that no American President ever again wields such enormous power for ill. At this moment in history, the most powerful man on Earth has license to behave like a Napoleonic bully to the world, and a petty potentate to his own people.

The fault lies in a failed system of government for which President George W. Bush is a perfect example. The beneficiary by birth of unimaginable material advantage, a perennial ne'er-do-well dependent on his father's coattails, a superficial man devoid of interest or curiosity about our world - he became in 2001 the puppet President of America's rich.

"Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue", asserts Thoreau. He's right on both the personal and the political level. It's money that's poisoning our democracy. The wages of the wealthy buy everything in 2003 America from political campaigns to Presidents, legislators to Supreme Court justices, the media to foreign governments.

What's to be done? Damned if I know. But in the last paragraph of Civil Disobedience, Thoreau gives us a start: "Is a democracy the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further toward recognizing and organizing the rights of man?" Imagining a government "not yet seen anywhere", he calls for "a State at last that can afford to be just to all men and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor".