FOREWORD

Joseph R.Carvalko

Copyright 2005

The war well fought persists as the most poignant memory for my father, my uncles and many friends. I thank them for their success and sacrifice, but refrain from glorifying the combat they endured, that which we glimpse in the media and read about in books concerning one great generation or another. Some wars may have virtue, but we can never glorify the battle. Understandably we may desire only to assign meaning to the practice of war in virtue of the purpose served, but this implicitly credits an inherently evil episode. Such homage has a tendency to foster attitudes that perpetuate a righteousness that too often leads to political hegemony, or worse, other wars, ethnic cleansing and holocausts.   

Partly we accept maiming and killing in times of war, because we show a stiff upper lip to our adversaries and we give our beloved countries the benefit of the doubt, in their efforts to fight in our defense, for principles we uphold and the like. We accept maiming and killing in times of war as reasonable fallout in support of our leaders, our governments, and our sons and daughters in armed conflict. But, casually accepting the consequences of war also seems to engender a dearth of mercy or lack of empathy for those caught up in war’s wake. The United States government keeps confidential the statistics on civilians killed in places such as Afghanistan or Iraq. And, people do not ask. The nightly news about war becomes so familiar that it raises no more an emotion than do soap commercials. 

 A society that lacks compassion for those caught up in war, famine, disease and pestilence creates the predicate for alienation. And, alienation leads to hatreds that lead to cycles of retaliation. Indifference also marginalizes the downtrodden; puts them out of sight, so that otherwise good people do not have to look at them. I am taken by television programming these days that honor dead soldiers by showing their photographs and the towns they came from. However, I have not seen the face of one civilian casualty.

And, the law does not require empathy; certainly on more than one occasion, it has notably supported those that openly hated and those that showed indifference through their deafening silence. This happened when the Nazi’s executed on their final plan, when the United States burned villages during the Vietnam War, when Pol Pot harvested killing fields in Cambodia, when the United States backed the Contra in Central America (El Salvador law), when opposing tribes in Rwanda practically annihilated one another, and when the United States preemptively exacted retribution on both Iraq and Afghanistan for the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Governments that retaliate in the spirit of “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” must rationalize the innocent killing of civilians when it uses deadly force. The law, our cowardice and our detachment support nearly any rationalization a government chooses to proffer and propagandize for its actions in these circumstances. Such, in my view, has been the case to support the United States war against Iraq. Ultimately, we must test our intentions and actions against a moral and a legal standard. In respect of the later, a society’s law represents a social construct that plainly justifies a cultural and political predilection. But, Antigone reminds us that a standard for law does exist: “For me, it was not Zeus who made your order, nor did that justice who lives with the gods below mark out such laws to hold among mankind. Nor did I think your orders were so strong that you, a mortal man, could overrun the gods’ unwritten and unfailing laws. Not now, not yesterday: They always live, and no one knows their origins in time.”

So, by what authority do we transgress upon that which has the force of so fundamental a law? On what legal or moral grounds do we levy revenge and redemption? Perhaps the drum beat for nationalism, zealotry or patriotism beguiles us. Following the drummer leads to a deafness, where we fail to hear the mea culpa, “we were only following orders”. Perhaps not our hearing, but our vision clouds in times of war, a kind of blind obeisance, so that we fail to see those that do our bidding, those we send off to sacrifice life, mostly our youth, our proxies in khakis, who inevitably kill or die. What follows is not an anthem to glorify war, but a prayer to listen and to see the consequences of our action.

Philosophical Musings 2

Sparrows, Rats, Cockroaches, Ants

Joseph R. Carvalko

copyright 2008

Three years ago my father passed away and I realized a lifetime came to pass for me, too; time enough for me to observe both of us through the distance of time. I came to understand that we were no different from the creatures with which we shared this earth. Sparrows, rats, cockroaches, ants all born of parents, create offspring, live and die— the definition of a natural machine. We simply existed in a different form. In our case we called it human, a specie that overcame impediments to produce the things essential for survival (no more, no less). As we lived, we pushed against a never-ending assortment of obstacles. We only differed from other life forms and from each other in the personalized struggle to turn, twist and push each day in and pull each day out over and over. What we did to push, what thoughts we harbored while turning and twisting, and waiting to turn and twist and push the next obstruction in the queue— what we believed as our limits (whether actual or assumed) and when we decided to quit—perhaps this distinguished us from other creatures. This ritual made us who we were. And, why we did what we did, we called our “purpose”. We framed this purpose in terms of our narrow social reality, one that reflected our culture. However, regardless how we chose to think about ourselves and our purpose, fundamentally Nature determined this for us by virtue of our physical form in the context of the environment, an environment that inevitably connected us to creatures that likewise had a purpose that followed form. In the end our purposes merged to produce the things essential for survival (no more, no less).