War is not peace.
Peace is not war.
War is war.
War kills, maims and destroys.
It will neither solve the challenges of Syria, nor save the lives of the refugees our state rejects. Violence cannot stop violence, as hate cannot stop hate. If we wish to address the violence in our world, we must look to those who benefit from violence in our world. Global arms. Industries of extraction. Multinational finance. This triple incentive toward war, is furthered by an economy rooted in exploitation, and a power structure rooted in subjugation.
There are inherit rights within life itself. The rights of human beings are simply an extension of the earths capacity to grow and sustain life. Of life's capacity to grow and sustain, regardless of regime or power structure. Our rights are the result of a freedom so vast, it lies beyond doctrine or proclamation. There is freedom in the fungi, and freedom in the worm. Freedom in the birds who fly, and the rivers who flow. There is freedom in life itself, and our laws are clumsy in their attempts at imitation. We may use the language of liberty, but until we protect creation, we will not truly know it.
Our wars of regime change have not worked. Not in Congo in the sixties, and and not in Libya in the new millennium. Haiti, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Central African Republic, Iran, Honduras; the list is long. In each of these countries, our government has perpetuated a violent regime change. In each of these countries, the consequences have been more violence. More death. More destruction.
These wars have winners. And they are never the people, native to that land. The colonial project has continued unabated for five centuries, conquering the vast majority of the planet, and ensnaring us in a global economy built by arms, extraction and debt. Powered by a myth of white supremacy, this homicidal system has brought every living system on Earth, into a state of death and decline.
This President, and his violence, should be opposed with all our might. It is a fight worth fighting, as is every opportunity to stop bloodshed. But at the end of that battle, when he walks out of the Oval Office with his head hung low in disgrace, we will know that our work has truly just begun. For the machinations of war began long before his particular breed of deception - and they will continue long after he has been disposed. Those machines are powered by our very lives. They will not cease without our movements moving in profoundly new directions.
The colonial project will come to an end. And the rights of life, will come to life. The question is one of when, and how. Just as our neighbors are not here for our exploitation, the same is true of the earth. For those who have always been here, the word property, can be as repulsive as the word ni**er. As we drop bombs and build dams. Arrest fathers, and murder sisters. Mine uranium and dump its waste. Place our neighbors in camps, and our youth in prisons. Fill the streams with poison, and our water with lead. Buy the disease, and own the prescription.
Buy the bombs, and own the war.
Buy the land, and own the people.
Buy the water, and own our future.
I don't have answers to the war in Syria. I won't pretend to know the best way to defeat ISIS, or to stop Assad from continuing his crimes against humanity. But it's clear that the borders drawn during the genocides of European colonialism, are imploding. These borders, drawn by men who believed in the inherit righteousness of their expansion, were built to divide and conquer. Place the minority in charge of the majority, sell them arms to ensure they rule ruthlessly, and perpetuate a nation state hierarchy - creating more land, more resources and more people, for perpetual exploitation.
It is time to begin creating new ways, to organize this land we call earth. There is a profound outrage in being forced, by threat of violence, to fund our global violence. Whether against our neighbors on the streets, our relatives in reservations, or our cousins across the Atlantic; this violence will not make our children safer, and it will not restore health to the planet. It will not diffuse a deadly situation - it will simply create more death. It will not show our strength, it will simply show how little we have learned. It will not prove our capacity for leadership, it will simply show us for who we are. A colonial people. Still unwilling to face the devastating consequences of our continued expansion.
When I came home tonight, I looked into the eyes of a woman I have fallen in love with. In those eyes, I saw the pain of the world. For her students in east LA, afraid to be deported. For our friends in the Dakotas, who continue to be threatened, harassed, arrested and worse. And for the Syrian families we will never know. The children and the elders. The mothers and their sons. Daughters and their fathers. Pray for them y'all. May God forgive us, and may we forgive ourselves. For if there is one truth, in the many histories of humanity, it is this; All life has value, and death is never without consequence.
Here's to a world for our grandchildren, free and and at peace. Let us focus the fullness of our spirit, toward that distant dream.
Love y'all,
Sean