A
Letter To My Son Regarding
The Problem Of War
By Doug Soderstrom
12 July, 2007
Countercurrents.org
I want
you to know how very much I love you, how much I have always loved you
since the very day you were born. From that moment on I have given you
my best as a father. I taught you everything I knew, everything you
needed to know in order that you might one day become a man.
However, during the past
few years the world has changed, and as a result I, as well, have changed.
When you were but a child, I believed that a man had no choice but to
love, honor, and respect his country, that one should, without question,
obey the laws of his land. Since that time, however, I have come to
believe that there is something of much greater value…….
that of doing the will of God. Rather than meticulously carrying out
the rather capricious commands of those who administer the affairs of
this world, I suggest that you set for yourself a more demanding task,
one of doing what you can to create a world of peace, love, and justice,
that you do your best to serve a much higher calling, that of being
a servant of your fellowman, one dedicated to the best interests of
the human race.
During the past six years
(ever since that of 9-11) our world has been transformed into a seeming
“holocaust of horrors,” a world in which our president speaks
of “wars without end.” For your own welfare as a human being,
I ask that you take the time to listen to what I have to say, for how
you respond may well determine if you become a man of honor, one controlled
by the inner voice of his conscience, or that of an automaton, a mere
piece of machinery, an inanimate cog, doing what it has been told to
do.
The lesson of Nuremberg (a
set of trials in which an International Military Tribunal convicted
Nazi leaders for having committed crimes against humanity, for having
essentially followed orders to wage war against their fellowman) was
quite clear; human beings are sacred. We, each and every one of us,
are more than mere citizens, more than the holders of a simple deed
on “a petty piece of property.” We are shareholders of a
much greater assemblage. We are members of the human race, each having
laid claim to the one and same God. As such we must not allow ourselves
to be constrained by the laws of our own land. The only law grand enough
to guide the actions of man is that which serves the best interests
of the human race.
One day we will each be held
accountable for the degree to which we upheld the laws of peace, love,
and justice. There will be no exceptions. Sooner or later (in this life
or the next) there will be a “day of reckoning,” a time
in which each, and everyone, of us will be held responsible for our
actions. No one (not even a citizen of the United States ) will be allowed
to escape judgment simply because we, for whatever reason, assumed that
we were supposed to have followed orders, that we had an arbitrarily-defined,
patriotically-determined duty to obey the laws of our land. The Nazis
learned this the hard way. The people of Germany should have known better
than to have followed in the footsteps of a mad man. Surely we, as a
people, have learned from the horrors of an earlier age. Consequently,
we, as citizens, have, what I believe to be, an existential (no doubt
a moral) imperative to tell our president that we will not follow him
down the path of war, that we, as parents, will not allow him to use
our sons (and daughters) as cannon-foddered-pawns in an utterly insane
attempt to take over the world!
Once I was asked if I had
any ideas concerning how to resolve the problem of war. I responded
by saying, "Of course I do……. all war will end when
young people tell their leaders that they will no longer go to war,
that they will no longer continue to kill, that if war is to continue
it must be fought by those who make the decisions to go to war!
As such, it is essential
that we exhibit the courage to follow the inner call of our conscience,
the higher calling of God. Anything less than this will destroy the
fabric of a nation, desecrate the human spirit, and lead to perdition.
So, if called upon, that is, if you, as a young adult, are one day compelled
to go to war for your country, ask yourself this rather simple question:
“Would it be in my best interests to comply (to essentially go
along) with orders to kill my fellowman, all of such, of course, in
the name of a coin-engraved, cookie-cutter, American-sized God, or might
it be more noble for me, as a man, to choose to become an ambassador
for peace, love, and justice, an individual who has chosen to say yes
to life and no to war, one who has taken a firm stance against the God-awful
madness of war?"
Then one day when you, as
I, have reached the final days of your life, you will “be assigned”
the inevitable task of trying to figure out if you in fact lived a good
and decent life, if you, as an individual, had the courage to follow
your conscience. And if such is found to be the case, you will spend
the final days of your life basking in the glory of a man who knew how
to live his life. But if, in looking back upon your life, you find a
man who chose to go along with the crowd, one who did what he was told
to do by others, one who no doubt sold his soul to that of the highest
bidder, you will find a “man of tears,” an individual condemned
to living the last of his days in a self-imposed prison of shame, an
internment reserved for those who knew not how to live their lives.
As an old man then, one who
was given the opportunity to be your father, my advice to you is to
do the right thing; always, without exception, follow your conscience.
Do that which will enable you to stand tall as a man of honor, a man
of true integrity, one who will have chosen life as opposed to death,
one who will have committed himself to the nobility of peace rather
than the hate-filled horrors of war, one who will be proud of who he
has chosen to become as a human being, an old man who will not be afraid
to look at himself in the mirror and say “Yes Lord, take me, for
I have lived a good and decent life, and I am not afraid to die.”
Doug Soderstrom, Ph.D.
Psychologist
July 10, 2007
[email protected]
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