letter back at a petition for prayer in the schools

[jimboloco]

When I first got to Vietnam, I went out to this town next to the Base at Cam Ranh with some guys from the squadron. We had some money for three schools. The first thing I remember seeing was a church with a swastica at the steeple. I'm thinking, Nazis? They said it was a Buddhist symbol.

We went to three schools, a Buddhist, a public, and a Catholic.
The Buddhist one I remember well. We went into a compound all in bamboo. The fence was this small 1 room building, woven bamboo. There was a long table and chairs and a single book. We sat down. This tall young monk came in, carrying a large pitcher of lemonaide and some glasses.

This guy was alien to us. He was shaved bald, had high cheekbones, slanted eyes, a yellow ochre robe, and long curved fingernails. He kept his hands in a prayerful manner, nails and fingers extended overlapping. We were all gawking, mouths agape. There was a closeby artillery gun shooting, the Korean Army shooting off at the mountain. The building shook everything shook, the lemonaide was shaking too. This monk looked like a Jedi. His face was calm, yet poised, with a certain tension underlying it all, yet a sensation of radiance surrounded him. I was at the other end of the table. I walked up to him, bowed, and met his eyes for a second. Why, I cannot say. I wanted to overcome the awkwardness and tell him by body language and my behavior that I thought he was OK and I wanted to say so. I guess.
The book laying there was a hardback small yellow book, with a map of Vietnam on it, the entire Vietnam, and Vietnamese words. The monk said to me "Parlez-vous le Français ? " I said "¿Español?" Then he said to me, in French, " géographie de Viêtnam." I nodded, and some kind of understanding passed between us. Then the guys wanted to go, the money haven been presented. They piled out fast and loaded into the truck. We all had either pistols or M-16's. I stopped at the gate, turned around, and saw the monk standing there in the blazing sunlight. We bowed. They guys were yelling, waving at me to go. Later one of the guys said they were afraid they had lost me to the Buddhists!

A few months later, before I had upgraded to AC, we had flown into Fire Base Snuffy, Djamap, an artillery base on the Cambodian border about 100 miles north north-east of Saigon. It was noteable because it had a double artillery compound with guns at the north and south ends, They had to hold fire on the south gun and we'd land to the north, later they'd again hold the south gun and we'd take off to the south. Anyhow, I was standing around outside the plane at the base while they were offloading the darned big bullets, artillery shells, and I saw this red bearded little dude sitting on a pile of dirt. He waved me over. He was in fatigues. I saw a black Star of David on his chest. He was a Jewish chaplain. He asked me, "What's your name?" I said, "Jim." and then I lost sense of time and place, and realised as an outsider to that place, I was bored with it all. It was not a great adventure. The base in the jungle at the edge of a great expanse of defoliation and wasteland was beyond my comprehension. It made no sense to me. Then I came to, looked at the chaplain and small chatted. Then we split.

When I was at the end of my tour, my rating officer, a captain gave me a ten on a scale of ten. And he told me, "I'm a Christian and I want to be a general, and in order to become a general, I have to fly a plane with weapons." So he volunteered to fly B-52 bombers.

A year later, my next rating was a one on a scale of ten and my rating officer, a major in my assigned squadron of tankers, wrote "the leutenant is concentrating so much on disruption that his military duties are lacking." I was going to some Quaker meetings then. I was protesting the ongoing bombing, the war.

Now, some 30 plus years later, I look back and wonder about my initial conditioning, how I was inducted into a structured, view of reality.

I am somewhat puzzled about what is meant by allowing prayers in schools. Yet I suspect that it is really an attempt to impose conservative orthodoxy upon an unwilling public. Much like the indoctrination of subservience to the all powerful commander in cheif, the entrenched political beauracracy, the reinforced endowment of the wealthy via the military industrial complex, the real ideology at work, without compassion for the less fortunate, the different, the non-conforming,or the unwilling.

So it is the organised predominating prayer that I am against. Making time for prayers, quiet time is all well and good, and prayer groups can form as a voluntary practice within that scope of set aside time, but to ask for legally sanctioned state school time for dominant culture straight orthodox Christanity to be broadcast either over loud speakers, intercom, or at the behest of the teacher in class, or at student assemblies is not right. We are a multi-cultural society. Some prayerful messages are allowable, but not to the exclusion of other religious traditions. They should be inclusive and sensitive utterances, appealing to the universal.

Yet the narrow minded orthodoxies will bring about increasing diviseveness and conflict, the revelatory rapture fantasy land of the apocolypse. May the Force be with us, shining through the blunted vision of our pre-conditioned small selves, that we might mind the light.

[tinkerjack]

synchronicity or coincidence? I won't say more until I can polish a reply that reads as good as yours. Just this Edward Bernaise had lots of talks with his uncle Sig Freud. He was a master at manipulating the masses through their unconsious desires. Desire is suffering.

[jimboloco]

Jim,

I applaud you for the clarity of thoughts and the eloquence with which you put them into words. I also agree completely with what you say. Over the last 4 years of dating, I have had to deal with religious beliefs as much as anything else in a relationship. People are certainly close minded if you don't see it their way. I just can't understand why they all feel the need to impose their ways on others. I think religion is a personal relationship between your beliefs and you and sharing it is fine but forcing it is exactly as you stated. It diminishes the world of cultural variety and destroys the diversity of ancient ways. As one political activist said, "We should all just fuck like rabbits and create a world of people a nice shade of brown". That could apply to religion as well. Gosh, what would we fight about then? People think they would like us all to be alike without realizing what a miserable existence it would actually be. I am currently dating 2 African women, one from Nigeria, a predominately Arabic based society, the other from Zimbabwe. I have only had one date with the latter and don't yet know much about her. The Nigerian is Muslim. I suspect, just from comments made that the other is Christian but will not hold that as truth yet. The Nigerian was a little reluctant to tell me her religion at first, probably because she assumed I was Christian and Muslims don't believe Jesus is the son of God. I have found that black people from all walks of life tend to be more committed to religion than white folks. That may only be my small sampling so far though. Blacks seem to have more religious passion than whites. Personally, I believe Darwin's theory. I don't believe in god's or monsters. Only life is heaven or hell and we are not always in control of either. It is, even with vast and varied outside influence, what we make it. We have but one chance to revel in this most incredible gift of nature, that of all living creatures throughout the universe. Apocolypse may come but there will be no winners, no reckoning, no answers. Hopefully enlightenment to the few remaining survivors to live and let live. The human brain at this stage of development is still in its infancy and it knows not what chaos it creates. It is that of a child saying "me, me, me" and "they got more than I did". I am part of it. I strive only to keep an open mind with the years of societal conditioning constantly knocking at my door. Pray if you like. Pray for you and me. Invite me to pray beside you. Maybe we will pray to the different Gods that we created in the likeness of ourselves. It is bigger than all of this. It is beyond our stifled comprehension. I love life. AMEN! (had to get back to work!)


Your brother, John