For the Beauty ...

When Jonathen Caine first came to live at Oak Grove the adjacent town of Standing Rock had two stores in it that sold beer. What more could a person want? The whole world looked more beautiful to Jonathen when he was drinking.
One day Jonathen carried a twelve pack of beer through a motor pool filled with tractor trailers. Their opened backs looked like giant portals to another universe. A large factory that made dog food stood stolidly on the other side of the motor pool, rising like an edifice of an interstellar civilization. The sun shone brilliantly through the chilly air. On the other side of the motor pool oak trees grew thickly up the side of a small mountain. Shards of ice fluttered down like sparkling diamonds as the sun broke their grip on the trees.
When he first came to Oak Grove, Jonathen drank almost every night. He and his drinking buddies would come back from the woods nice and toasted, and staff would not give the young men their medications because they were dangerous to mix with alcohol. Jonathen was the physically weakest he had ever been during the time he was drinking, but it was also the time he felt the most like he had a home. He loved hanging out by the railroad tracks drinking beer. It might make him die young, but that would be less time that he spent on the taxpayer's dime.
One of the two cats who lived at the residential care facility had a litter of kittens, transfixing Jonathen's attention. He could not resist them. There were two dogs they had to watch so they would not kill the little furry kittens. Jonathen remembered when he was mowing the lawn last summer. He looked down and saw a giant earthworm stretching and straining with all its might to not get run over by the mower, and Jonathen realized this creature valued its own life every bit as much as he valued his. That creature's life was a whole universe to itself, as it was for every living being. Jonathen also realized that the worm would be a fat prize for a robin, and the robin would be a fat prize for any cat; nevertheless, there was something so beautiful about life; something so striking about awareness, if you could get past the bloodshed of it all. Jonathen's mind went back to a distant memory.


Their family was at their grandfather's house on his farm in the Oklahoma countryside. Their aunt, uncle, and cousins on his mother's side were there too. Their grandfather had built his house himself, piling stone on stone to make a comfortable habitation. He had retired from teaching school and had settled down to farm his thirty head of cattle on his land. He had one great big prize bull. He had built up his herd over the years, and though his cattle were not registered, they were pretty close to being prize Herford. Every morning the beasts would stolidly make their way to his barn. He always had a few steers on their way to slaughter. A couple of scruffy hound dogs would follow along, and all the cats would gather furtively for their morning breakfast. They were as wild as cats could be towards every human being except Jonathen's grandfather. He had a slow and easy confidence with animals.
As they had pulled up to their grandfather's house their relatives spilled out the front door exchanging greetings and hugs - Uncle Greg, Aunt Becky, his cousin Lori, and Jonathen's cousin Roger. Jonathen wondered if his cousin Roger had brought any weed with him. When Roger asked Jonathen to go hunting the next day Jonathen's hopes were gratified. Roger was a good sized boy, but he valued his intellect more than his muscles. He chose to intimidate people with his mind. His muscles probably would have worked better. Jonathen was willing to let other people direct him so that he could allow his mind to wander. This was about the time Columbian weed first started to reach Oklahoma. It was quite a bit more potent than the Mexican weed they had been getting. They loaded their shotguns, stuck some shells in their pockets, and set off across their grandfather's land. It was a warm Spring day, where the weather was perfect but no mosquitos had come out yet. They walked past the stock pond and out to the far pasture. They entered a grove of trees thinking maybe they could get some crows, but there was nothing there. There were green buds on the limbs of all the trees.
"I thought we might get a rabbit, a squirrel, or a few crows, but there is no sign of that. Let's sit down and smoke some of this excellent weed. It's so much better than the shit we have been getting," Roger commented.
"You're right. This is a bore. You say this weed is from Columbia?" Jonathen asked.
"Straight from the Amazon Rain Forest. It will change your perspective," Roger answered.
Roger pulled a plastic baggy filled with light green buds out of his pocket, loaded the buds into his pipe, and fired up the bowl. He inhaled the smoke deeply, and then handed the pipe to Jonathen. He drew on the pipe in turn, inhaling as much of the sweet smoke his lungs could hold.
"Damn! One hit, and I'm already buzzing," Jonathen exclaimed.
"Wait until you've had a few more. This stuff will knock your socks off," Roger responded.
In a few minutes Jonathen had his arms folded across his chest, and he was rocking back and forth.
"Do you think you and I could live off the land? I've always wondered about that," Jonathen asked.
"No. We have been weakened by modernity. We could not possibly live off the land," Roger responded.
"I don't know. If we were willing to eat bugs and stuff we might survive," Jonathen stated.
"How long do you think we could last doing that? A lot of bugs are poisonous. We couldn't digest very much of them. How do you think it would feel to shit out a beetle's exoskeleton?" Roger asked.
"You're right. We couldn't make it doing that, but maybe if we had grown up with all the lore about nature we could," Jonathen responded.
"Yes, but that didn't happen. We both would be helpless if we were stuck out in the woods," Roger stated.
"I'm helpless right now. You were right when you said this weed would knock my socks off. I don't think I have ever been this stoned. Hey man, I want to live like a cave man. I want to live in a cave and eat bugs to stay alive. Where is a bug? I will show you ... " Jonathen blurted.
"Don't go eating any bugs! I don't want to have to carry you puking and shitting back to Grandfather's house," Roger reacted.
"Aw, come on. I wanna eat a bug," Jonathen said.
"We're going back to Grandad's house. You've had too much smoke. Let me see your gun," Roger stated.
"Yow! Where is my gun? I know I put it somewhere," Jonathen replied.
"It's right beside you! Here, let me see it," Roger directed.
"You're going to take the bullets out of my gun? What if a bear comes after me?" Jonathen asked.
"There are no bears anywhere near here," Roger answered.
Jonathen's cousin picked up Jonathen's shotgun, switched the latch holding both barrels in place and took two twelve gauge shotgun shells out.
"Let me have the shells in your pocket, and you can have your gun back," Roger told Jonathen.
Jonathen did what he was told.
The two boys trudged back towards the house, carefully stepping over the barbed wire fences. Then both boys looked ahead and saw a giant flock of birds not much bigger than sparrows, all flying in close proximity to each other, keeping the same distance from each other. The whole flock moved like a single creature with a will of its own. It rose and fell like a phantom. There must have been three-hundred birds in that flock. They flew like grace personified.
"Hey, look at that! We've found something to shoot!" Roger exclaimed.
Jonathen grabbed his shotgun and took off running for the birds, giggling as he ran.
"Jonathen, wait! You don't have ... "
Jonathen kept running towards the flock of birds, and all of the creatures rose majestically in the air and flew away. Jonathen had green, "beggars' lice" wrapped around his ankles from where he ran through the weeds. He quit running and tried to catch his breath. Roger jogged up to his cousin.
"Jonathen, wait! You don't have any shells in your gun, and that flock of birds has settled on the other side of the pond. We have the cover of the bank between them and us. Here are a couple of shells, number eight bird shot. Load your gun," Roger told his cousin.
Jonathen did what his cousin told him to do, and both boys stealthily crept up to the embankment.
"Okay. I am going to count to three, and then we are going to start blasting," Roger told Jonathen. "One, two, three ... "
Both boys scrambled up the embankment and fired five rounds of birdshot into the flock. Part of the flock lifted up to fly away, but a good number of the birds fell back to the ground, screaming loudly in panic and pain. Jonathen and Roger looked at each other, unsure of what they had done. They realized the birds were experiencing extreme trauma, and they had caused it.
"We should not have done this," Roger told Jonathen mournfully. The birds' screams were frightening.
Jonathen slowly nodded his head. The birds were squawking in horror when the two boys reached them, and the two boys began to understand the pain they had inflicted, and what a shocking and senseless act of violence they had just committed. They began to kill the birds with the butt of their shotguns, like they were stamping out little blazes of fire, although it was tiny blazes of life they were extinguishing. There was no other way to alleviate the pain and horror the birds were experiencing. There were too many stricken birds for Jonathen and Roger to kill. Roger looked at Jonathen and asked "How could we have done this?" There were droplets of blood on the ground, and the boys knew they had inflicted the worst trauma possible on these birds. If only there was some way to stop it. The screaming brought home to Roger and Jonathen what unclean spirits they had.

Jonathen became very philosophical about violence. It was the scourge of humanity and the scourge of the world. But he prided himself on his objectivity. He was skeptical that humanity could ever overcome its violent nature. Jonathen could think of six times in the twentieth century off the top of his head that a million or more people were killed for no reason. The Turks killed a million Armenians. The Nazis killed many millions in their concentration camps. Joseph Stalin killed many millions of Russians. The Japanese killed many millions in their rampage through the Orient. The Chinese killed a million Tibetans. And Pol Pot killed a million Cambodians. The cards are stacked against us. Violence is so much a part of nature. If this was part of God's punishment for eating from the tree of knowledge the punishment was too great. The violence of humanity is especially dangerous because humanity could destroy all life on the planet. It was the greatest irony that the man who discovered the atomic bomb was a committed pacificist. Albert Einstein was willing to make an exception in his pacifism in the case of Hitler, but it was his intention that the bomb be used only once and then put away, never to be used again. In 1978 the United States had 25,000 nuclear warheads, and Russia had 30,000. I recall the scientist Paul Sagan saying on tv that if we used just five percent of these nuclear bombs it would destroy all life on earth. It is ironic that what created the conditions for a mutual reduction of nuclear weapons was a strong military response by the West, led by the Reagan military budget increase. Peace through strength.
But nuclear weapons are not the only scourge of humanity. Long range heavy bombers are too. In World War II the allies would send hundreds, sometimes over a thousand, heavy bombers at the German and Japanese cities, setting them on fire with incendiary bombs. (Incendiary bombs caused more damage for their size and weight than high explosive bombs caused. That's why they used more incendiary bombs than high explosive bombs. A harrowing fact.) In the European theater the British unabashedly targeted the civilian population in their night time bombing, setting their major cities aglow in the darkness. The Americans tried to hit industrial targets with daylight bombing, but our bombing was so inaccurate that we might as well have been carpet bombing the civilian population. We knew we were going to kill innocent women and children in this bombing, but it was necessary to win the war. There are usually conflicting accounts of the casualties in these situations. The figure I have been getting the most for the death toll of the bombing in Europe is 600,000 dead, though I did come across one account that said there were 300,000 Germans killed in the bombing. Some people have said that we killed a million Japanese in our fire bombing campaign in the Orient, though I did find a source that said we killed 200,000 Japanese in that bombing campaign. No one disputes that we killed 100,000 Japanese in our firebombing of Tokyo. We had just come out with the B29 heavy bomber, and it could carry heavier bomb loads farther than our B17's and B24's. On March 9th 1945 we sent 339 B29's at Tokyo, and they left 100,000 dead behind them. The atomic bomb was a dreadful weapon because a single bomber could do the work of hundreds of bombers. When they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima it instantaneously vaporized 80,000 people. Then there were the deaths from radiation sickness. We probably could have won the war without dropping the atomic bomb, but we would have had to continue our bombing with massive numbers of heavy bombers. A lot of the Japanese war industry was interspersed among the civilian districts, making it impossible to take out the war industry without taking out a lot of civilians.
Then there was the greatest bombing campaign ever known, in Vietnam, courtesy of us Americans. Our bombing campaign got out of control in that conflict. We had rationalized much heavy bombing in World War II, when it was necessary, but when we started to rationalize our bombing campaign in Vietnam it took our destructiveness to another level. We dropped thousands of tons of bombs in World War II. In Vietnam we dropped millions of tons of bombs. We loaded up our B52's, and we bombed Southeast Asia from end to end. Estimates of the dead vary widely. I recall reading in a popular news magazine that then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said that in 1967 he realized we had gotten away from our original strategy for winning the war, and we had no strategy to replace it, but he decided we should stick it out in Vietnam anyway to demonstrate to the Russians that we were psycho enough to use nuclear weapons if Russia invaded Western Europe. (The article did not use the words "psycho enough". It said he wanted to demonstrate that we "had the resolve" to use nuclear weapons if the Russians invaded Western Europe.)
There is some question in some corners of the world as to the morality of bombing the major cities of Germany and Japan with incendiary bombs, but it was necessary to win the war. Both Germany and Japan had killed many millions of innocent civilian people during the war. We had to win that war. The consequences of losing it were too dreadful. Germany killed six million Jews and six million of other groups seen as "undesirable". They also killed 20 million Russians, with fifty percent of the dead being civilians. It is estimated that Japan killed ten million people in their rampage through the Orient, but we will never know the exact number. In the Chinese city of Nanking alone they killed over a hundred times as many people as they killed at Pearl Harbor.
The human race is like a baby playing with loaded guns. We have the ability to cause enormous destruction and great suffering. How we got into this situation is unfathomable. Maybe it is our punishment for eating from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Maybe God knew that if humanity was given the gift of knowledge we would reach the point where we could make nuclear weapons. When the possibility of splitting the atom became known the scientists who were privy to this information contacted the leaders of the Free World and let them know about the potential of the bomb. There was a race among the major world powers, including Germany and Japan, to build the atomic bomb first. The U.S. won.

For all its violence, the earth is astonishingly beautiful. Every square inch of it is a feast for the eyes. Surely humanity has enough problems without creating the wars and bloodshed that cause us such misery. We must transcend the violence that is in us. We must become the caretakers, not the destroyers, of our planet. We must fight to keep every person alive, and keep every life happy. If we only spent a small portion of what we spend on war on treating and healing the sick we could save so many people from disease and starvation and prevent so many problems.

I'd like to close this story with the cryptic words of Victor Frankl, a man who survived the horrors of Auschwitz: "Since Auschwitz we know what humanity is capable of. Since Hiroshima we know what is at stake."