"...followed by a brisk mauling."

The only thing worse than Netflix splitting into two separate companies is poverty, war, rape, abuse, and every single real crisis in the world.

I do not understand. I can not empathize. I can not know. This is a failing on my part. Not yours. I can not get myself, the person who is me, to understand.

But you are failing as well. Every moment of the day when you pledge war in Allah’s name. Every second that you spend planning pre-emptive counter strikes. With each last breath as you let go of the the trigger.

And this is failure of the utmost kind.

Truly, if you are Muslim, there is one thing you must do. One thing above all else must you do in order to call yourself Muslim. And that is this:

You must believe that there is no god but Allah, and that Muhammad is his prophet.

And if you believe this, you must believe also, in this, all of our teachings tell us this is truth, as does the whole of our experience, if we look at the world from the place that is Islam:

As Allah is all knowing, all present, so too is Allah all powerful. And with this power, Allah created. Allah created all.

And if you believe this, then you must understand also this, because it is not only part of the truth of Islam, but also rational, logical, and a natural progression of this path of thought:

All that exists was at one point in time created. And all that was created came into being through Allah’s will.

This is a natural progression of the order of things, if you begin from a place where you know Allah, by any face or name. And so if you follow this progression, you come to this next point:

Everything we taste, touch, see, smell, feel, and know—everything that was, is, and ever will be—all of this was created, and since it was created, it was created through Allah’s will.

And all that is destroyed, all that ceases to be, all that decays and rots and breaks and dies, all of that, too, was at one point in time created by Allah.

And this, then, leads to the last point on this path:

All that we destroy, all that we devastate and decimate and kill, all of that, too, was created by Allah, through Allah’s divine Will.

And you would dare, with the knowledge of all this built into the very fiber of your being, the essence of your spirit—you would destroy forever that which Allah has created.

And you would do this in Allah’s name.

All those who feel the raging depths of fury know that deep within lies the capacity for violence, for great violence, for a thundering sweeping hatred for all that exists. This capacity lies in all of us, for we were blessed with sentience and with the ability to do all we can by our own will. We, by Allah, we were blessed with Choice. And some of us, we are more able to see that Choice than others. And this too, Allah has willed, he has willed Variance. But all of us, within, we know there is Choice.

And you choose violence.

You choose violence, to destroy what Allah has willed, and you say you do so in Allah’s name.

And you are wrong.

And those of us who sit idly by, and those of us who Choose to ignore, and those of us who feel disgust at the very thought of this violence but Choose to speak out against it only in our own minds—we, all of us who do these things, who Choose Ignorance or Comfort or Silence—we are all of us wrong, too.

I’ve been listening to “Goodnight Saigon” a lot this week. There’s something about that song that reaches straight past evocative—hits something deeper, something infinitely stronger and sadder and much more permanent than even the scars of our own petty wars.

It’s fairly clear that Bert Jacobs was touched indelibly by Vietnam; in many very real ways, the war changed his life—and changed him, too, even though he never left the US.

I remember him telling us a week or so ago about this program they had at UMF during the war, where soldiers would step on a plane to leave Asia on Friday night, and by Sunday morning they’d be in Farmington, ready to start school Monday. I remember him saying how strange it was.

I worked here, with the veterans, then. No one wanted them here, mostly. There were a few of us, of course. But mostly people didn’t want them here. I mean, we’re talking soldiers fresh from the front. They had their guns with them, many of them, in their footlockers. And the girls—I imagine it must have been very hard being a female student here at that time. I mean, you’ve got these guys who have killed, been trained to kill. They’d kill you if you looked at them wrong, because that’s what they been taught. Their eyes—we called them “wild” eyes. Crazy. It was… it was a wild time here then.

But it was something. It was something, and for many of them that was the only positive thing that ever came out of this, was getting an education. Because America’s never really cared about our veterans. We really never have, we’ve never cared and never treated them well, with the possible exception of WWII. We’ve never cared about the ones who were injured or died, or about the ones who came back whole. Which is a stupid way to talk about them.

Because no matter what happens, the person someone is when they leave for war, that person dies. The body might come back, but that person has changed, in a way that we can’t begin to understand and imagine.

Remember that. Remember that about the people you know who’ve gone off to Afghanistan or Iraq.

A man was gunned down by police in Maine earlier last week after apparently pulling a gun near his local VA center. Neighbors said he was a good man, a veteran the US should have been proud of—but the lack of sufficient care he received for his cancer diagnosis through the VA had apparently caused him so much despair that he’d acted that much out of character.

At least ten people I know have either been deployed or will be in the future—to fight, to kill, and to die.

And none of them will come back. None of them have. No one goes through something like that without being changed.

I’m a pacifist. I want to live—and try very hard to live—in a world where violence isn’t even thought of as an option. But I think we should do something. I think there has to be a way. There has to be a way to actually keep the promises we’ve made to our veterans. Education ought to be the first step. If we can open up our colleges to them, then we’re opening up the possibilities of a better world.