A Treatise on our Love Affair With Hate
Disclaimer on Honor
This treatise in no way seeks to degrade the honor of the men and women in military communities around the world, who serve with integrity and commitment. It is, instead, an exploration of a culture that venerates sacrifice, particularly the sacrifice of its young to the gods of war.
Introduction
Those who believe in enemies will always find them.
The current state of affairs with the world is a magnification of what is going on inside of us. The Spirit of humanity is alive and well within each of us, however sidelined it feels now. Recent events, specifically the rise of populist politicians and their agendas, have spotlighted the fact that things are not as they must be, aligned as they must be, to enact a peaceful outcome.
The Tragic Legacy of a Warrior Culture
The tragedies inherent in a warrior culture are ultimately visited upon the culture’s own children. Raised with a fear of the enemy and an emphasis on defending property with weapons meant to kill, children are offered war games for Entertainment and often left socially isolated as adults focus on their own survival in a world that rewards aggression, external power, and greed. Then, when the virtual game becomes reality and the gamer’s screen morphs into a theater of destruction, society cheers as they face the soul-wrenching act of taking a human life.
The Irreversible Impact of Violence
Once a person has experienced such violence, there is no undoing it; the act changes them irreversibly. It’s heartbreakingly obvious that too many service men and women struggle with self-destructive tendencies, unable to relate to civilians who have not undergone similar conditioning and similar experiences. The sense of loss, isolation, and pain they experience speaks to a collective denial of the cultural systems that have created their suffering.
A Culture of Sacrifice and Its Aftermath
As a society, we don’t know how to support these hurting individuals. Instead, we turn to medication or groups of like-minded people to help them process their pain, all while failing to address the tragic belief system that created it – where sacrifice and death is given the highest of honors.
When love is the prime directive, sacrifice becomes unnecessary. Sacrifice, however, is taught within the culture’s religion and instilled from a young age, creating a pervasive misunderstanding of love. True love involves no sacrifice; yet, the belief in sacrifice creates a chasm into which our innocents fall.
Sacrifice as the Downfall of Humanity
The concept of sacrifice illustrates humanity’s primitive nature and heralds humankind’s descent into war. A peaceful world image has no place amidst this scene of carnage. The old guard, enforcing the ways of the past, perpetuates the follies of past generations, preparing their offspring to uphold a dream of death as the pathway to peace. This is the contradiction we observe on the global stage—a contradiction that allows the rise of tyrannical leaders who presume to know what is best while unable to govern themselves without addressing the tyranny within.
The Commitment to True Peace
It is not enough to merely stand for peace when faced with tyranny; we must be willing to act upon this commitment as a culture and as a nation. However, here is where the challenge begins – a new style of gauntlet is created, one that is embedded with maze of confusions, twists, turns, and dead ends.
Acting for peace means renouncing violent intent as a means of enforcing it.
The Paradox of Violent Peace
Our confused perspective on peace has created a dangerous paradox, allowing those who believe in enemies to exploit this contradiction. Tactical maneuvers are used to dominate, seize power, and control the populace, turning our own destructive tendencies against us.
Tyranny Thrives in Complicit Cultures
Tyrants can only flourish within a culture that supports them. Recognizing this truth is the starting point in dismantling the shadow operations that allow tyranny to take root.
The Illusion of Peace
Peace is the elusive ideal all humans would say they desire, but it has become obvious that this is not the case. Not at this time.
True Peace is Universal
To embody peace, it must be universal; it cannot be selective or conditional. Desiring peace only within your own world, while the rest of the world remains in conflict, is not a true desire for peace. Instead, it perpetuates conditions of privilege and separation, reinforcing divisions that allow suffering elsewhere to continue.
Seeking peace solely for oneself or one’s own nation without regard for others recreates a system that values safety and harmony for some while tolerating turmoil for others. True peace calls for an end to suffering, fear, and conflict for all people, regardless of boundaries or affiliations.
To genuinely desire peace means working to ensure that everyone can experience it, acknowledging that no one can be truly free or at peace while others remain in strife. Universal peace demands a collective commitment, transcending personal, cultural, or national interests to embrace the interconnected well-being of all humanity.
If you speak of peace but, in the end, are willing to use violence to enforce it, face it. You are patient, not peaceful.
Consider that the greatest armies often waited outside the gates for those inside to deplete their resources, lose hope, and be desperate enough to open the gates, so they could easily take the inhabitant’s space by force. This still holds true today. The tactics of negotiation often hold that same intention.
A Crossroads
In North America, we reached a crossroads eight years ago, a place where we and those with whom we identify as like us were faced with a choice. It was the time to zig or zag…to choose a peaceful outcome, or to continue on a familiar highway, full speed ahead, hurtling towards a target, armed by what you believe and accept to be the only acceptable outcome.
As a result, while some are celebrating moving closer to the bullseye of this target, many are in distress about it, as they have been shown a subversive side of themselves that they have worked, and prayed, desperately hard to deny.
The Enemy Within
In Truth, the enemy is at the gate and has been since time immemorial. In Truth, the enemy is also within…having infiltrated and invaded under the cloak of darkness.
What is it you have been conditioned to accept, encouraged to practice, taught to fear? You need to look no further.
In Truth, you have heard the song of peace. True peace, but you have chosen to ignore it. Look around you. You believe you have chosen rightly but the consequences of this choice have proven otherwise.
Embrace this other Wisdom to understand it. Without acknowledgment of this as fact, by further resistance, delivering a power surge of despair into the collective grid, you will, essentially, be contributing to the current atmosphere of war, not peace.
Yearning vs. Peace
You cannot yearn for peace and receive it. Yearning is the acknowledgment that it isn’t here. Can you acknowledge this as a fact?
With every, No, No, No, this can’t be happening! you acknowledge that it is happening and are energizing it further.
It’s time to understand the deeper cause of this inner turmoil…the chaotic energy that defies all attempts at reconciiation. Where you, as an ensemble on the big stage, find yourself.
The Folly of Denial
Denial is a trap—a way to convince oneself of being more spiritual, enlightened, or “above” the reality unfolding around us. By pretending that you are already elevated beyond earthly struggles, you avoid looking deeply into your own shadows, refusing to confront what is genuinely there. This denial feeds a fantasy: that salvation will come from an external force—a god, a guide, a power outside of oneself—while in real life, there remains a pervasive fear of the “other.”
In this illusion, deliverance is made in one’s own likeness: a god who understands you, who aligns with your values and worldview, and who, reassuringly, takes your side. Each side believes this to be true. This is a profound folly, an epidemic of self-deception on a global scale that contributes to the sickness of our planet. Each faction, each belief system, clings to the idea that they are the chosen ones, that they must defend their beliefs righteously, often violently, because there are sides to take and defend.
Yet, the truth is that you don’t know it all. You don’t even know where to look to find answers. Admitting this is the first step—a step away from the fantasy of entitlement and the comforting illusion that we are somehow inherently right. This perspective, rooted in privilege, personality, and bloodshed, permeates everyday actions. We conduct our lives bathed in this fantasy, unaware that it is slowly eroding the fabric of humanity.
Denial of our shared vulnerabilities and humanity creates a divide, a dangerous illusion that fractures connection, insight, and the ability to truly understand, hear, or embrace one another. Admitting that we don’t have all the answers opens the door to true humility and learning. This denial is more than a personal failing; it is a collective self-deception with devastating consequences for the world.
Celebration of Violence
Your nation was born of war. You celebrate the nobility of violence, you romanticize it, and by doing so, you announce and energize what you love…
Yes, you love what you profess to hate. This has become your highest honor, to train honorable men and women to choose to embody the energy that excites that aspect of humanity, its warrior nature, and to act upon it with extreme prejudice.
The Reality of a Warrior Nation
Many of you have become deeply saddened and confused by the fact that a warrior nation must be at war to be a warrior nation. You feel Depression when you observe the state of your world…when you see yourself in such circumstances, but many of you will, once again, offer it only resistance.
This is how a collective destroys itself from the inside out. Consider that to act in anger, you must be angry. To act in greed, you must have greed within you. To be an uncompromising person, you must believe, with all your might, that you are right.
The Creation of Enemies
Those who believe in enemies will always find them. In this way, you are always right. In this way, you will always create more. In this way, you are demonstrating that you may declare a peaceful intent, and shout it from the rooftops, but deny the obvious fact that you really don’t know peace, as you mourn your dead. And declare that you will avenge them. And declare that it can’t continue happening…that never again can this be the case.
What is the never again of which you speak? That never again will you be that innocent? A victim? Defeated? As your war machine gathers might and speed, as you mobilize for further destruction, can you see that this is how it is, in your world?
Can you mourn this, and put it to rest, instead?
The Path to True Peace
If a person or people truly wishes to end violence they must make peace. They must be uncompromising in its pursuit…and uphold this as their prime directive.
Peaceful intention is the result of a mind that knows peace and only peace. One that understands this as truth deeply knows who they are and who they choose to be, and rejects the mechanics of war as an artifact from a warrior past.
Yes, you can now identify the rise of tyranny, but if you aren’t willing to examine your part in its rise, and be willing to address the mess within your homes and schools and societies, your religious and secular cultures, you will experience it again and again. And never understand why.
The Exhaustion of Vigilance
The hypervigilance you feel is exhausting you. A human being cannot live in a state of high alert for years, decades, and centuries without the consequences of that state of being. Threat detection, coupled with helplessness and lack of hope, creates sickness upon sickness – illness of the mind and body that forces you, in a violent manner, farther from the Spirit of humanity.
Love Affair?
A nation at war within itself demands a commander-in-chief who is willing to enforce the terms of its engagement. A nation at war with another nation makes war, not love, against the world. It cannot be otherwise. What is within must be without…be it fear, or love.
What stories do you need to tell?
Recognizing Fear
If you are fearful, you are living the consequences of fear.
If you hate others, any others, you are living the consequences of fear.
If you stand alone against the world – insolent and ignorant of the plight of those you call my enemy, you are living the consequences of fear.
If you hate those who hate, you are hateful, not loving.
The Haunting Melody of Taps: Facing the Music
Facing the music means coming to terms with the reality that the tune we have chosen to play is Taps. Played at military funerals and memorials, Taps carries a profound weight, resonating with solemnity, loss, and the dignity of service. Its hauntingly simple melody honors those who have sacrificed, yet it also symbolizes a cycle of sorrow—a reminder of lives lost to violence and conflict. Over generations, it has become a sacred tradition, encapsulating remembrance and sacrifice, stirring a collective reverence while underscoring the tragic cost of conflict.
Curiously, it harmonizes all too well with your national anthems. This juxtaposition hints at a paradox: the national pride symbolized by the anthem resonates with a culture entwined in sacrifice and militaristic values. The recurring echoes of Taps remind us of a continual choice to honor those lost through a cycle of conflict rather than pursuing a legacy of enduring peace.
This is the music we must face and confront—redefining what we choose to honor and seeking a harmony that no longer calls for a melody of loss.
The Path Forward
To supersede your history you must drop it, not drag it with you, like a warrior carrying their rucksack. Dragging it with you is what a burden feels like. That is what war stories feel like. You cannot love history without buying into the wars that generated them, because nations were born from a warrior past, from conflict.
That it happened may be fact, but the fact is that humans enjoy a dramatic tale more than they appreciate the truth…the price of retelling these stories leads to their perversion, the skew being awarded to the victorious.
The first step is to understand that you are afraid.
The second is to admit that you love war, and have, until now, refused to move beyond it. You know it because there are others in your world that you love to hate.
The third…to admit your complicity in teaching war stories.
And fourth…to revise the story without anger. Without resistance. Without prejudice. To undo the conditions that have led us here.
It’s a titanic order to fill, but one that humanity is uniquely equipped to realize.
It’s always the perfect time to begin, or to begin again. Take a look into the eyes of a child, eyes uncorrupted by any experience of hate…no memories of taking lives and counting coup. The children of our world, those innocents who have so much to teach us combative, conflicted, and confused warriors on the battlefields of life, need the peace that transcends all current understanding.
Let’s sing a new song…one in which all voices can harmonize.
Sweet Angel of Peace
It’s been long since you’ve gone and I’m here all alone
I look to the sky and the stars in my eyes
Give me comfort
I miss you today and forever
No words can describe it and this too shall pass
But whatever the way, whatever the day
I miss you…I miss you
Sweet Angel of Peace, O’ sweet Angel
You’re so easy to find but you’re so hard to keep
Sweet Angel, O’ sweet Angel
Sweet Angel, my Love
Fly me to where you are let me be by your side
Carry my love make it soft make it wide
And forever
Share with me now just a touch of that joy
That I know that you share with the love of us all
Have the star that I see shine for you and for me
Bring it home, bring it home
Sweet Angel of Peace, O’ sweet Angel
You’re so easy to find but you’re so hard to keep
Sweet Angel, O’ sweet Angel
My Angel, my Grace
When I look to the stars so small do I seem
I struggle and bend down here on the ground
I am orphan
Let the words that I sing be my memory of wings
And the loving embrace I feel while in your grace
On this cold winter’s day when I’m so far away
Keep me warm, keep me warm
Sweet Angel of Peace, O’ sweet Angel
You’re so easy to find but you’re so hard to keep
Sweet Angel, O’ sweet Angel
This is my prayer, when I’m so far away
I need you today…Â
Sweet Angel of Peace, O’ sweet Angel
You’re so easy to find but you’re so hard to keep
Sweet Angel, O’ sweet Angel
The choice to walk creates the path ahead…
What do you choose?
Originally Published on https://akasha111blog.wordpress.com/
