[Peace-discuss] When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?

[Jenifer Cartwright]

John,
What you say is true if it's true that the best predictor of the future is the past... But saying that a thing will be true because it has always been true also invites complacency... and it overlooks that there HAS been progress in how wars can be prevented, how they are supposed to be fought, what's permissable re treatment of prisoners, how governments are supposed to function... with consequences for breaches. No, not a perfect system, of course, and yes, there are violations... but it's a start. The real danger -- hope? -- is that the way wars CAN be fought will be so horrific that major wars will be bro't to a halt, OR -- the main fear -- that humankind will blow itself off the planet (yes, even before it destroys the planet, or what's left of it at that point).
Have a good day... and let's all do what we can to keep things moving forward.
 --Jenifer 

--- On Sat, 8/22/09, John W. <jbw292002 at gmail.com> wrote:


From: John W. <jbw292002 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?
To: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
Cc: "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Date: Saturday, August 22, 2009, 2:16 AM




On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 5:15 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:


"... the Counter-Culture hung up the Out of Business sign sometime in the
Nineties, finished off by identity politics and general self-satisfaction...."

--<http://www.counterpunch.org/>

Commenting weekly in those days on "the news of the week and its coverage by the media" on News from Neptune as I was, I'd say that Alex Cockburn has this about right.
I haven't read Cockburn's article; his essays are invariably too long for my limited attention span.  But I submit that in the so-called "counter-culture" essentially BECAME the culture.  In some ways our generation, that of the 60s, was absorbed into the existing culture; in certain ways it profoundly changed the culture; and in yet other ways the culture recoiled in horror and moved in the opposite direction.   But isn't that simply the way of the world?  Thesis ---> antithesis ---> synthesis , for good or ill?

What we need now, I guess, is a NEW counter-culture.  The closest thing I've seen to that in this country is the development of the independent media movement starting in the late 1990s.  Last I looked, the U-C Independent Media Center was still very much alive and well.  But of course the new counter-culture needs to affect more than just the media, important as that is.

I further submit, though, that as long as human beings populate the planet and compete for finite resources, there will ALWAYS be war.  I dare to imagine that American culture could change to allow for universal health care if the political and public will was there.   We could inject a bit of "socialism" into our "free-market capitalism" without demonstrable ill effects.  But human nature does not change, and war will be with us always.

J.W.

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