Celebrating...

Memorial Day, 2020

“Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing something is amiss and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step on the journey is made by following heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over veils of ignorance.”
Henri Bergson

          Bergson was a French philosopher who lived from the middle of the 19^th century, until the middle of the 20^th. He authored many books and regarded intuition a stronger means of knowing about the world than reasoning. Some folks are born with a ferocious intuition, which he refers to as “spiritual immune systems” that tortures them when they see something wrong and know it’s wrong, but do it anyway because everyone else is doing it. “It’s trending,” as we say today.

          Intuition is “listening to your gut”—knowing in your body-mind that a mistake is being made but having a strong need to belong to the crowd of people who do not have (or choose to ignore) that spiritual immune system. I feel this way about many things—war being one of them. This is Memorial Day in the US. A day when we remember and honor our fallen military—all who have died in wars fought by this country. It is a conflicting thing for me. I do honor their service to our country, while still holding aside this deep desire for no more to die. War, at least for me, is inherently immoral unless it is done for the good of others. World War II was one of the so called “good” wars. We were late getting into it, but we were there when the death camps were liberated, and we helped our European brothers and sisters rebuild their countries afterward. We responded to the attacks on our fleet in the Pacific because we had to, and we “won” both fronts. That is all true, but it’s also true that no one actually wins wars. We just kill our children and the children of other people. Tens of thousands of young people die in order for us to claim victory.

          So Memorial Day is fraught with conflicting emotions for me. I want people to do what Bergson suggests in the quote above—awaken and begin following their hearts instead of the crowd. I also wish we had holidays to honor the other deaths of our people—our native people, who died by the hundreds on the trail of tears and in this pandemic; African-Americans, who died at the hands of slave drivers, lynch mobs, and Covid-19; our policemen and firefighters and healthcare workers, who die in the line of duty every day. I don’t value one life, or one death, over another and would like to see us mourn the 100,000 who’ve died in the last three months just as much as we do our warriors in the military.

          I hope you are celebrating this Memorial Day, though I don’t know why we “celebrate” death by war. Even so, we could all use a good celebration. And while you celebrate, please be considerate of the guidelines from the CDC for social distancing and wearing masks. We’ve had entirely too much death here to ever be cavalier about it.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane