Single Payer System for Maine: www.maineallcare.org

Tuesday, May 3, 2011, four of us from Aroostook County, traveled to Augusta to attend the hearing on a bill to provide a single-payer health-care system for Maine.  It was one of the most gratifying experiences of my recent political activity.  Many people showed up to testify in support of the bill, LD 1397, and the opposition disappeared from the room as it came time for their testimony.    One lone opponent who appeared to be an insurance lobbyist showed up after testimony closed and asked to be permitted to speak.  He did, and that proved to be a fitting closure to the testimony because he did not address any of the specifics of the bill, and all he did say served to convince us that he had not read it.  Much of the testimony focused on a variety of problems the bill could resolve, including creating a more friendly business environmnet for Maine and providing a more level competitive playing field for Maine workers in the global market.  Following is testimony two of us gave on Tuesday.  It addresses some of the personal stresses faced by individuals trying to get affordable health care insurance that the single-payer bill would help to alleviate. 

Testimony in favor of LD 1397

An Act To Establish a Single-payor Health Care System To Be Effective in 2017

by Alice Bolstridge 

I am a retired teacher with a Maine State Retirement pension.  When I signed up for Medicare in 2003, the only additional coverage I could get for which the MSR System would pay their share was Aetna, the company providing my health insurance at the time of retirement.  I started paying about $350 a month from my own pocket, and the premium went up every year.  At some point I needed surgery and was hospitalized for several days.  When the bills started coming in, I discovered that I did not have the supplement plan I thought I had, but a catastrophic insurance plan that also provided some coverage for prescription drugs which I didn’t need.  Aetna did not pay any of the co-pay expenses for the surgery and hospital stay.  By this time my premium was up to about $450 a month.  With the state’s share, my insurance was costing over $700 a month.  Not only was I getting ripped off, the state was, too.  As a taxpayer, I was cheated twice to pay for Aetna profits.  The whole experience was a nightmare with trying to figure out if I should blame the insurance company or the providers who kept harassing me with bills. 

When the collection agency threatened me, I paid the bill to get some peace of mind, but my trust in some of the health care providers involved in that has never recovered.  I don’t intend to recover trust in for-profit insurance.  It is foolish for any of us to trust our health to companies whose only motive is profit.  And it is foolish to trust providers who are encouraged by the way they are paid to compromise quality of care and to waste money for unnecessary procedures.  I dropped Aetna coverage and picked up an Advantage plan.  I don’t trust them either.   They start you out cheap and then increase the premiums by 100 percent or more every year.  The first one stopped offering the product I had after about 2 years.  The one I have now started out with a payment of $0 per month and increased the premium to $50 per month the first year.  I don’t even know how to calculate that percentage.  These companies are getting subsidized by the federal government; we are cheated again.

When I first began my experience with a non-profit Blue Cross/ Blue Shield decades ago, our insurance life was simple and worry-free.  Faced with a life-threatening illness of one child that went on for several years and involved several hospital stays, we all—the patient, his family, and the providers—could focus on the medical problems of the illness, not on what we would have to sacrifice to pay for the treatment.   We need a payment system that returns us to that simplicity, effectiveness, and trust. 

This bill is especially important in view of the Health Care bill, LD 1333, that was already voted out of committee as ought to pass and is especially bad for seniors, rural areas, cancer patients, and people with other preexisting conditions.  Mainers, support LD 1397, and get for-profit insurance companies out of the health care business.

by Shelly Mountain.

I am here to support single-payer. I live in Mapleton with my husband and two sons. We are small business owners which means that we have an individual insurance plan. Until just a month ago we were paying Anthem $516 a month for a policy with a $15,000 deductible. It covered absolutely nothing before that $15,000 deductible. We were paying $6200 a year and still responsible for all of our medical expenses, which usually works out to at least that same amount in a year. I have stopped going to the doctor myself for any reason. I have strong family histories of both breast and colon cancer
but I do not get mammograms or colonoscopies because I can’t afford them. My understanding is that the Affordable Care Act now requires those things to be covered through insurance but Anthem never told me that and since my policy was grandfathered into the old system they were not required to cover those
things under that policy. The only way I found out about it was when I testified in March against their proposed rate increases. It is common practice at Anthem to keep policy holders in the dark about anything that would benefit the policy holder.

My 12 year old son was involved in a snowmobile accident this past winter and complained of severe pain from what he believed was a broken a rib. I hesitated about taking him to the ER. I knew an ER visit would be very expensive and that it would probably involve an expensive X-ray. I wondered, “Can they even do anything for a broken rib?” I ended up going because he was complaining about pain when he breathed. The winter before that I waited 3 days when he had a severe sore throat and fever before I finally took him in to find out he had strep throat and double ear infection. Untreated strep can be very dangerous.
I pay Anthem $6200 a year and I still struggle with whether I can afford a strep test on my son. I pay Anthem $6200 a year and still I have bill collectors calling and harassing me for payment of medical bills. I pay Anthem $6200 a year that I receive no benefit from. Where does all that money go?  Last year Anthem’s treasurer, R. David Kreschmer, had a compensation package that totaled almost $2.4 million. Last year the CEO of Anthem’s parent company, Wellpoint, was paid $13.1 million. Last year Anthem contributed money to political campaigns, including Governor LePage’s transition. They use my money to affect legislation that will add to their profits but exacerbate my ability to be a responsible parent. I have been financing my own worsening healthcare situation.

This shameful condition will continue to worsen as long as health care remains an industry motivated only by profits. The insurance companies have made it obvious that they are unwilling to contain their costs. They have made it clear that they value high executive pay and profit above the health care of their subscribers. Insurance is the only business that exists by charging increasingly excessive prices while providing absolutely no service. Insurance was originally developed as a means for many people to pool resources that could be used to help community members when they incurred costs that no one of them could afford individually. It is no longer that. It has become something in itself that fewer and fewer people can afford. We need to return it to its roots. A single payer system would provide a more reasonable and just pricing structure. Fewer administrative costs would mean that more money would actually be spent on citizen’s health care needs. Insurance companies and the executives who run
them would stop profiting off the suffering of Maine citizens.

Cheapest Pleasures

That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

Henry David Thoreau

By way of metaphorical usage, cheap has acquired connotations of seedy, disreputable, worthless, but Thoreau meant it literally to refer to the minor cost of spiritual riches attained from a frugal life.  One example is the cheap pleasure of imagining owning a house with some property as opposed to actually owning it:

An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, woodlot, and a pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things when he can afford to let alone. 

Tolstoy also has a short fable, “How much Land does a Man Need?” about a man with just enough land to supply his basic needs who seeks more.   Every acquisition of new property increases his hunger for more until, eventually, he sacrifices everything and literally runs himself to death seeking more land. 

In spite of proclaimed values in agreement with Thoreau and Tolstoy about simplicity and frugality, I find myself in old age often distressed about how to manage bookkeeping and maintenance of property and possessions.   I have way too much stuff.  Shelves and shelves and shelves house close to a thousand books.   They take up living space, perpetually need dusting, and the only reason I don’t own more is that I give so many away to make room for more.   Surrounding my work desk and leaving only narrow aisles to get to books, filing cabinets bulge with over forty years of accumulated drafts of writing projects and paperwork from managing real estate, personal accounts, and investments.  To simplify my life, I sold a big old house I owned and invested the money, which earns some interest, which I must manage, capital—ugh.  And then I bought another house bigger than I need.  So I now have, again, gardening and snow-removal machines and paraphernalia, an over supplied kitchen, and stuffed closets.  All of this always needs organizing which, like dusting, never gets completed.  Vanity, all vanity.  Just the sheer number of possessions and money complicates my life and interferes with the pursuit of the cheapest pleasures I believe to be the best.  Pleasures like observation, contemplation, and creative social activity.

With all of this, by today’s standards, the entire value of my possessions does not qualify me as above lower middle-class in the prevailing view of American-dream aspirations.  Except for the aspirations of our Maine Governor who asserts that his proposed budget puts anyone with an annual income above 19,000 + a few dollars in the rich income-tax bracket and thus the beneficiary of a tax cut amounting to about 6-10 dollars.   Still, relative to the poverty in the world, I am too rich.  

My country is too rich, too greedy, spends too much money on trivial luxuries.  Multi-car garages house air- polluting vehicles at private homes.  Multi-billion dollar industries finance sports teams, junk movies, junk TV shows, junk news as entertainment, and junk internet products for addicted spectators who require ever increasing and costly fixes of escape from the cheap pleasures of stimulating and socially valuable work, conversation, and activity.  Huge shopping malls, both mini and maxi, provide an endless stream of useless consumer paraphernalia.  Garish advertising litters the landscape and the mind and extinguishes cheap pleasures of natural and artistic beauty.  Multi-billion-dollar profits of corporations feed a lust for ever-more power that money buys.  Adding insult to injury, our government practices spending priorities that encourages all of this—when facing a national crisis, President Bush said, “Go to Disneyland.”  Spend money.  Have a good time.   The energy it takes to fuel all these trivial pursuits pollutes and degrades the earth that could with the right values and priorities supply all of our most basic needs and all of our cheapest, most satisfying pleasures.  

The more we spend in pursuit of mind- and spirit-deadening pleasures of escape, greed, and power, the more we resort to war to protect and keep our American way of life, nearly perpetual war since the founding of our nation.  In my lifetime, WW II, the Cold War that took in the hot sites of Korea and Viet Nam, Wars in the Near East—Iraq, Afghanistan, now Libya, and our interminable military support for Israel and all over the rest of the world.  War, with all the expense of its production and repair of collateral damage, is the costliest luxury.  And there is no appetite by either of the major political parties to even reduce war, let alone eliminate it, as a way to resolve international conflicts.   The spending-cut deal for 2011 negotiated by Boehner, Reid, and Obama does not touch military spending, over half the total budget.  Seeing how often the right thing to do gets compromised, I’m deferring judgment about Obama’s promises to cut military spending in the future. 

There are known solutions to these problems if we can collectively find the will to apply them.  Likely the best place to start is to reduce the obscene gap between rich and poor that grows and grows.  In “Equality is Better—for Everyone,”  Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett use comparison studies between the more income-equal nations like Japan and the Nordic countries and the less equal ones like the U.S., Britain, and Portugal to show that “inequality is socially corrosive” for everyone, not just the poor.  In countries where the gap between the rich and the poor is smaller,

the statistics show that community life is stronger and levels of trust are higher.  There is also less violence, including lower homicide rates; physical and mental health tends to be better and life expectancy is higher . . . . prison populations are smaller, teenage birth rates are lower, educational scores tend to be higher, there is less obesity and more social mobility.

. . . . . . . . . .

Even the well-off do better in more equal countries . . . . live longer and enjoy better health . . . . Everyone enjoys the benefits of living in a more trusting, less violent society. . . . More equal countries give more in foreign aid and score better on the Global Peace Index.  They recycle a higher proportion of their waste and think it more important to abide by international environmental agreements. 

In contrast,

mental illness is three times more common in more unequal countries [U. S. is the most unequal in the world] than in the most equal, obesity rates are twice as high, rates of imprisonment eight times higher, and teenage births increase tenfold.  (People First Economics)

Individually, we would be healthier by getting out of the car more often and enjoying the cheap pleasures of walking, running, or biking (and the earth would thrive better, too).  We would be happier as well as healthier if we channeled our hunger for power into gaining control over expensive entertainment appetites that are never satisfied.  Collectively, we would improve the mental health of ourselves and our culture by taxing obscene riches of the entertainment industries and applying the revenue to full funding of PBS and to high quality education and health care for all.  We could provide for the earth’s health and welfare by requiring all polluting enterprises to pay for cleaning up the messes they produce and then to stop polluting.  We could substantially reduce the national debt by requiring corporations with huge profits and financial institutions that are too big to fail to pay their fair share.  See Bernie Sanders’ list of the top ten freeloading corporations who not only don’t pay taxes but get subsidies, refunds and bailouts from the rest of us who do:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/business/economy/24econ.html. We could further reduce the debt and would all be physically, mentally, and spiritually healthier with individual and collective commitments to put costly violence and war behind us as outmoded solutions, and to leave the world a cheaper, more peaceful place than we find it. 

Peace Rally, Bangor, Maine

April 9, 2011

http://www.peacectr.org/

Alice, Mike, Steve

from the Peace and Justice Center of Aroostook

which meets every Sunday at noon since the invasion of Iraq in 2003

to walk for peace across the Aroostook River Bridge. 

JOIN US WHEREVER YOU ARE!



Study Peace

March marks the 8^th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and we have not completed that war.  In October, we will have 10 years at war in Afghanistan, and we have yet to begin the draw down of combat operations there.  The total cost of these wars is above $1.16 trillion and counting, over $700 million a day by conservative estimates. It is millions more if considering all the associated costs of maintaining the military industrial complex and repairing the damage caused by war.  Leaving aside for a moment the social and moral costs of war, can we afford this kind of expense when we have such looming unsolved economic problems here?  

Consider health care so costly that many of our citizens can’t afford it even with the Affordable Health Care Act that is under threat, state budgets in so much trouble they are threatening massive layoffs and cuts in essential social services and infrastructure to avoid bankruptcy, a national debt that exceeds $14 trillion, rampant and uncontrolled greed in our financial institutions that caused a massive recession and that show no signs I have seen of reforming or being reformed, an environment increasingly at risk, increased taxes on the lower middle-class while taxes are cut for the most wealthy.   No, we can’t afford the mounting costs of resorting to war to resolve our security problems and international disputes. 

And now--war in Libya!?!

We study and learn the practice of war.  We pour our best resources into improving our military capability.  Imagine what would happen if we began to draw down our commitment to war and turned those abilities and resources to learning and practicing peaceful conflict resolution.  For that we need moral commitment from citizens and institutions together.  A better, more peaceful world will not happen only by individuals just improving themselves, though that is a good and necessary thing to do.  But then, like Buddha, or Christ, or Mohammed, the individual needs to take some responsibility for improving the world. 

©Alice Bolstridge, 2011. 

A pre-Libya version of this post was published as a Letter to the Editor

in The Star Herald, Presque Isle, Maine, 2-16-2011.

Stigma

            The American Heritage Dictionary says an archaic meaning of stigma is “a mark burned into the skin of a criminal or slave; brand;” the term has evolved to connote attitudes of disgrace or disrespect toward social abnormalities and “inferiors.”  However, the plural stigmata carries very different connotations of religious honor and high esteem: “Marks or sores corresponding to and resembling the crucifixion wounds of Jesus, sometimes occurring in religious ecstasy or hysteria.” 

            St. Francis of Assisi received stigmata, and the church canonized him as well as other bearers of stigmata.  Hysteria suggests the disrespect with which our modern culture generally views such phenomena, the beliefs that have surrounded them in the past, and the stigma that has always been and continues to be attached to mental illnesses: “abnormalities” of thinking, feeling, and behaving that “normals” shy away from, ridicule, or punish.  One constant in the evolution of the term, is that the bearer of stigmata—criminal, slave, or saint—suffers. 

            I was five years old, my first year in a small rural school, when an early memory of feeling stigmatized was formed.  It was in the spring of the year before a town meeting, likely part of a Social Studies lesson.  I can still see vividly that setting:  gray-haired teacher sitting in a chair, half-glasses perched on her nose,  children clustered around, most sitting at their desks, a few like me standing close to her, looking at the annual town report from which she read the list of town poor.  Our family’s name was first on the list. 

            I remember nothing else about the occasion except the shame I felt so promptly and profoundly that it must have been conditioned by earlier economically shameful events that I have no conscious memory of.  I knew that poverty so great as to get your name listed in a public report was a disgrace.

            The mark that left has never left me.  Regardless of whatever success or failure or financial security I attain, I suffer, at times, a sense that I am suffocating at the bottom of whatever social heap I find myself, that I am trying to squirm my way up—ambition—into what I imagine is the fresh air at the top, or squirm my way out—isolation—and escape the confines of the heap entirely.  Though I often force myself to act on the former rather than the latter urges, I mostly want to do the latter whenever I feel that flush of shame at some seemingly inconsequential slight.  Family born into, school, family created, work, community, nation, world— all are social heaps, and the larger the heap I imagine the greater the suffocation feelings, at times. 

We carry many stigmata imposed by culture:  shames about gender, sexual orientation, and other preferred sexual behaviors; shames about race,  ethnicity, religion;  shames about a variety of disabilities considered abnormal.  Some of my most troubling shames concern events associated with mental illnesses in my family and the stigma that surrounds them.    Over the more than three decades since my son was diagnosed with schizophrenia, I have worked very hard at refusing to allow social image to govern my feelings and actions with him.  Still, I am often too embarrassed to appear in some public places with him when he is most acutely suffering symptoms—poor hygiene, gesturing to his voices, laughing loudly at “jokes God tells.”  In allowing my behavior to be controlled by shame, I not only bear stigma, I support it and pass it on.  That adds to my shame, and it breaks my heart.  

Normalcy is a social construct; it requires early and sustained training.  We all mostly grow up and mostly learn to suppress and repress, to manage our image, to pretend we are fine all the time. We do this so successfully that we lose touch with our most basic desires, and the stigmata do not show much in what the world sees.  We lose our selves. We become normal and stigmatize the abnormal. This makes all of life tragic.  But those afflicted with a chronic and disabling mental illness are, by definition, unable to conform; and they are routinely stigmatized for their poverty as well as for behavior.   They squirm their way to the outer edges of the heap where they are ignored, harassed, or abused.  They suffer more from stigma than from the economic, mental, or emotional effects of their condition.  They isolate, neglect self-care, and retreat more and more into beliefs that are at odds with social norms.  Their most important and intimate relationships are wounded by stigma effects in ways that are never fully healed.

The persistent stigmatization of the poor and the mentally ill costs the whole society.  It costs money, a lot of money, for life-long care of these disabled many of whom, but for the effects of stigma, could be taxpayers.  And it costs in feelings of despair and powerlessness of them, their families, and all who would like to care for them.  It costs the world in the dreams of power through violence that it spawns and that some like Jared Lee Laughner act out.  When normals will react violently in protest against dehumanizing and disrespectful treatment, is it any wonder that some of the mentally ill will do the same and become the highly visible ones in the media—criminals, chronic drug addicts, sex offenders, serial killers, child or parent killers? 

The wonder is that, statistically, people with mental illness are not more violent than the “normal” population.  However, the statistics only consider criminal violence.  If socially sanctioned violence is considered—war; abusive treatment in asylums, jails, and prisons including capital punishment; institutionally hidden and thus socially sanctioned sexual assault; political assassination—socially normal people with power to exercise are far more dangerous than the stigmatized mentally ill. 

Surely these costs are known to all who think seriously about this issue, and yet stigma is still the primal glue of social cohesion.  Paradoxically, it affects behavior in ways that keep the glue cracking.   Slaves, ethnic and religious minorities, women, homosexuals, the jobless—all publicly revolt against cultural norms at great personal and social costs.  History provides a record of social infrastructures continuously coming unglued by such revolts. 

Families feud and break up.  Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies show the disastrous effects:  Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear are all ashamed and enraged by suspected betrayal of family-loyalty expectations.  Churches splinter, and nations war and fracture.  Fundamentalists of all faiths often torture nonconformists.  Wars all over the Middle East and the West continue an ancient family feud among the descendents of Abraham—Jews, Christians, Muslims—about revolting from approved ways.  Hitler and his Nazi followers, ashamed and enraged at suspected impurities, exterminated them as fast as they could.  That war divided nations all over Europe and the Middle East.  The painful hangovers continue with revolutionary protests now occurring all over the Middle East.

But surely we are making progress as a species with these social ills, aren’t we?  Women, homosexuals, blacks, and other racial and ethnic minorities, for instance, in this country are no longer routinely stigmatized institutionally by our laws.  At least not as much and not as overtly?   We have a black president.  And consciousness raising has turned the tables by stigmatizing insulting and disrespectful behavior and language directed at certain classes so that at least some groups of people enjoy some respite from the most overt ridicule and abuse that was normal practice only 60 years ago.  Things are slowly getting better, aren’t they?  Shouldn’t we be patient with the slow pace of social evolution? 

We ought to rest uneasily on any progress laurels, for there are compelling reasons to retain moral vigilance.  The numbers in the largest and costliest classes of people—the destitute poor, the mentally disabled, the criminal population—are not declining; they are increasing.  Who constitutes the largest numbers among the poor?  Women, children, racial and ethnic minorities, the mentally ill.   Who constitutes the largest numbers among the criminal population?  Men, minorities, the mentally ill.  That covers a lot of human territory. 

I seem to be on a tirade here, cursing the darkness of human suffering.  I hoped, as I always do, that this post would light at least one candle of understanding that could illuminate a direction at least, if not a genuine path, toward change in the way we socialize our children, and in the way we treat our unsocialized.  Perhaps the next post, or the next book, or . . .

Here, a very early memory, among my earliest:  A consequence of being poor and on welfare is that the state nurse visited us regularly when I was very small.  She pronounced my outie navel a rupture and taped a coin or button on it every time she came.  As soon as I could get away, I ripped it off.  If it was a whole quarter, I rushed to the village store and bought a Peppermint Patty and Orange Crush—ecstasy.  I never wore that cure.  My navel remained abnormal until I gave birth the first time whereupon it became normal on its own.  It has remained so to this day, except for later months of other pregnancies at which time it is normal to have an outie.  I enjoy this memory.  I see it as a time when I acted naturally instead of normally, when I simply tore away the patch on my abnormality and let it protrude. 

The suffering of stigma comes from the terrible tensions between social requirements and natural impulses as Sigmund Freud so eloquently explains in Civilization and its Discontents.  I yearn to put myself and my world in harmony with nature by doing something as simple as tearing away the patchwork.  Simple but not easy.  What is difficult is the willingness to change ourselves, to tear away our own prejudices without waiting for applause from the crowd, and then to pass on our experience whenever and wherever we can.  Thus we might, one by one, become a crowd and transform the world.

Comments Problems on This Site

I thought I had fixed the problem with comments not showing on this site, but they are still not showing up.  This morning I was reading through a copy of "The Liberal Drift of History" that I had copied off the site and pasted into a Word document.  At the end, I found 2 wonderful comments.  Amazing to me that I can copy and paste them when they don't show up on the site, and the Comments manager keeps informing me there are 0 commments.  I will keep trying to fix the problem.

In the meantime, to all of you who have tried to post comments and gotten no response, I will also be working on copying and pasting and READING.  This post will likely be continued as I go through that process.  Thank you so much. 

Is Peace Probable?

I conclude from exploring the question “Is Peace Possible?” 1 & 2 in January posts, and in observations of many people around me who live most of their lives without trying to solve problems with violence or force, that peace is clearly possible.  Yet, I am still haunted by vexing questions.  An old billboard on a side street on the other side of town says in stark white on a background of black, War is over if you want it.  Why do we choose war?  Why don’t we, individually and collectively, want peace enough to make it happen?

Decision makers cite a variety of reasons to choose war.  Force is necessary, they say, to create or keep the peace, to maintain law and order, to bring justice to the oppressed and afflicted, to defend ourselves when attacked, to combat thugs, ruthless dictators, and other evil-doers who attack our allies or other noncombatants.   Such justifications have been developed and codified by just-war theory that goes back, as outlined by Paul Christopher in The Ethics of War and Peace, as early as 600 BC in China and extended around the ancient world. 

I think it goes back much further, at least to the epic Gilgamesh.  Gilgamesh was an actual historical king in the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk, near the present-day Baghdad, Iraq around 2700 BC.  In the epic, he is also a great warrior and a terrorist who brutalizes his own subjects and soldiers as well as battlefield enemies.  He rapes and pillages with impunity, without conscience.   Enkidu, a wild man raised by animals and civilized by the temple prostitute, hears about the atrocities of Gilgamesh and vows to challenge him.  He finds Gilgamesh and fights him.  Gilgamesh wins the fight, but they form an enduring friendship.  In a series of adventures together, Enkidu tames and humanizes Gilgamesh’s ferocity and inspires the development of his conscience. 

The early record of just-war thinking indicates that war was already well established and that its horrors were even then concerning reformers, likely even before writing was invented to record it.  The theory attempts to prescribe rules for deciding to go to war and for waging it in a way that should make it more humane. It has evolved through the centuries to incorporate different applications for proliferating religious and political ideologies.  And it has attempted to move decision makers from using subjective and personal criteria for choosing war such as honor and glory in Gilgamesh and divine retribution in the Old Testament to supposedly more objective ones in our modern age. Thus four major criteria for humanitarian intervention are proposed by Christopher:  1.  “There Must Be a Just Cause.”  2.  “The Political Objective [Must] Be Publicly Declared by Lawful Authority in Advance.”  3.  “Humanitarian Intervention Must Be a Last Resort.”   4.  “The Costs Must be Proportional to the Expected Objectives.” 

For criteria to be objective, it must be capable of being applied in any situation at any time.  Consider the decision to go to war in Iraq.  The publicly declared assertion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which constituted a direct threat to the security of the United States was the just-cause rationale.  Accompanying that assertion, a rumor was circulated and believed widely that Hussein’s regime was linked with AlQueda and thus responsible for the 911 attack.  In addition, humanitarian intervention supported the just-cause argument for war because Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction on his own people and they were in need of liberation.  There was disagreement about how much of a last resort it was, the United Nations arguing that their interventions needed more time to work and the U. S. with its allies arguing that Hussein had been given too long already to mend his ways.  From this perspective, it looks like the costs and proportionality did not figure much in the public debate about the issue at the time of the decision, but aside from this, these reasons look like they fit Christopher’s criteria for just-war, humanitarian intervention. 

However, the WMDs were never found.  It turned out that Hussein had no links to AlQueda.   The people of Iraq were clearly in need of liberation from Hussein’s tyranny.  But in terms of their suffering, the costs of the war to the Iraqi people would at this point seem to be out of proportion to the benefits they have so far gained. For decision makers, all wars are just wars, with or without reference to any particular just-war theorist.  Both the Israelis and the Palestinians make a just claim to the disputed areas of their lands.  Both the totalitarian Taliban and the U. S. make a just claim to absolutist moral authority, the Taliban to divine authority and the U. S. to humanitarian ideals of democracy and human rights. 

In all its time of development, just-war theory has not made war more preventable, nor more humane.  Instead, it appears to provide a tool-box for justifying war that can rationalize, with the aid of lies, secrets, and rumors, unjust causes.  It has helped to make war the preferred choice in the face of inevitable and seemingly irresolvable conflict driven by differences.  It is much easier and more comfortable to do what we collectively know, can justify, and have practiced and prepared for throughout so much of our history that it feels natural.  It thus is one reason I’m persuaded peace is not probable.  

Another reason peace is likely more improbable now than before WWW II is the growth of the “military industrial complex” in the U. S. that President Eisenhower warned about.  Just-war excuses are used to justify this growth that demands war to sustain the complex and that has led to our military involvement all over the world.  That involvement is responsible for what some are aptly calling an empire.  In searching President Obama’s State of the Union Address, I found only one mention of peace: “This [policies toward Iran and North Korea] is just a part of how we are shaping a world that favors peace and prosperity.”  The linking of peace and prosperity with the sense of empire building (“shaping a world”) is very disappointing, to put it mildly.   Obama is the best choice we have, or had, and he is compromising on the most important liberal values for peace (See http://uppitynegronetwork.com/2011/01/27/we-do-big-things-celebrating-obama-as-head-of-empire-redux/#comment-3720.)  Such compromises do not resolve conflicts; they keep them alive.

All through this current national debate on what to do about the deplorable deficit, only the liberal left pays any attention to military costs.  So little major media attention goes to it that it appears to the public our military budget is justified as protection for our safety, our liberty, our democracy, our pocket books and the American way of life.  A military way of life is so well established and is so deeply embedded in our economy and politics that it will require a major reformation of national priorities and institutions to uproot it, and it is a major barrier to peace. 

A third reason peace is improbable is that what we get from war, with the help of just-war theory and the military industrial complex, is individually and collectively more immediately and intensely satisfying or pleasurable than the work of building peace, a fix of adrenaline excitement from patriotic or religious fervor, from anticipation of profit or power, or from other complex primal feelings. 

I remember intense feelings of the few times in my life I have resorted to violence, slapping the face of someone who insulted me.  Those times were decades ago, but I still remember vividly the power thrill of the spontaneous and unthinking rage and reaction.  The thrill was momentary, followed immediately in its wake by the flood of guilty conscience and a frantic rush to justify the violation of my own values for peaceful resolution of conflict.  

Like the emotions of the drug addict, the buzz of violent reaction can be irresistible, can drown out moral will, can even drown out the will to live.  In War and Peace, Tolstoy dramatizes some of these feelings of what he calls in the epilogue “the spirit of the army.”  In Regeneration Trilogy, Pat Barker explores such feelings in characters fighting in WW I.  Commander of a platoon of combat soldiers, Lieutenant Billy Pryor is being treated for shell shock.  When pressed for weeks by his psychiatrist to explain his feelings in combat, Billy finally says, “It’s sexy.”  He is eager to go back to battle. 

Billy means literally sexy, i.e. accompanied by physiological sexual arousal.  The sexual context of Barker’s trilogy and the pervasive practice of rape in time of war supports that he is being literal, not just metaphorical.  I don’t believe the contemporary common assertion, “Rape is not about sex.”  I do believe the follow-up assertion, “It is about power.”  Rape is about sex and power.  Though just-war theory would have “lust for battle” as well as rape condemned as motives, war, both the decision and the action are fed by complex personal emotions that largely go unacknowledged, at least in part because just war theory condemns such motives.  In our media culture saturated with sexuality, it paradoxically almost seems like a taboo, especially in relation to war and just-war theory, to discuss seriously the role of such motivating feelings in war and other forms of violence except to condemn them, which means we don’t understand them. 

With Billy’s pronouncement, Barker makes it explicit that there is a link.  In War and Peace, Victorian Tolstoy implies with the happy marriage of Pierre and Natasha that the answer to creating a lasting peace is to create domestic bliss in the home.   In this case, the benevolent despot Pierre as head of the household implies the link with power which leaves me unsatisfied with that part of Tolstoy’s solution.  Enkidu, the wild man, is civilized by sex with a woman.  Gilgamesh’s ferocious violence is pacified by the love of Enkidu. 

From studying in literature this relationship among sex, power, and violence for some time, I conclude that cultural attitudes toward sexuality and the relationship between sexual partners plays an important role, however unconscious, in motivating war and preventing peace.  Yet, I still do not understand it in a satisfying way.  I read American Taliban:  How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right, hoping to get some fresh insight.  The book is a persuasive rant about how the American right so much resembles the Taliban in its attitudes and actions.  Markos Moulitsas is preaching to a member of the choir in me, and he convinces me that the parallels he describes are accurate, so I enjoy reading it.  But I hoped for more insight into the dynamics of how personal motivations—sex, power, greed, etc.—apparently feed into and are fed by institutional and cultural violence in a feedback loop that makes peace very difficult and thus improbable to achieve without some dramatic rupture of the cycle.

A final, for this post, vexing question and barrier to peace is this:  Short of war or other means of violent force, what are we to do in the face of a Hitler, an Osama bin Laden, a Saddam Hussein, ruthless leaders who will murder, torture, enslave, rape, or commit any other atrocity to any number of people to accomplish their purposes?   The response of Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and the Egyptian people of taking to the streets in mass protest seems to be the only effective answer we have, but Bin Laden is no Mubarack.  And while waiting for a less ruthless leader or other conditions to be right for mass protest to be effective, innocent noncombatants continue to suffer consequences of such leaders that affect the economy, the political stability, the personal lives and mental health of millions for generations and continue to feed the forces that rush to war.  

Peace in our time is improbable because of all of these complex reasons:  justifications we know and trust from a long and pervasive history fueled by feelings of satisfaction, pleasure, and intensity we crave in our every day lives that obscure the personal and unconscious motivations for war. Peaceful conflict resolution is hard work, it is not widely taught, and its rewards are delayed gratification with, apparently, nowhere near the intense excitement that violent conflict provides.  I myself, lifelong pacifist, kept falling asleep recently reading The Eight Essential Steps to Conflict Resolution.  I kept telling myself that it was because of the textbook style.  And it was partly that, but it was also and more because the examples described of the process and results of conflict resolution are not exciting in the way the drama of war is in the fiction of Tolstoy, Barker, Shakespeare, and numerous others.

Still, I continue to hope for increasing probability of peace.  Is it simply by faith that I maintain hope?  No, I have rational reasons, too.

Perhaps, the best hope of just-war theory is its failure either to prevent war or to make it more humane.  For, as the theory becomes more convoluted, logically complicated, supposedly objective and remote from the emotional base of personal life, it fails to justify war at all.  

The pace, strength and power of technological advancement, so much of it initiated and developed by the military industrial complex, paradoxically makes it harder to keep the secrets that support the choice to make war.  Whistle blowers such as Wiki Leaks increasingly expose the underpinnings of vengence, hipocrisy, greed, rationalizing, lies, and fear mongering that motivate decisions to go to war. 

The increasing proliferation of documentary films like Why we Fight also help to expose the secret unethical underpinnings of war.  In this film, the story of a Viet Nam vet’s grief about losing his son in the 911 attack on the World Trade Center is woven throughout the film.   It is a poignant reminder of the personal complicity of individual citizens in the decision to go to war.  He believed, along with most of the rest of the population, that Iraq was directly implicated in his son’s death, and he was a fervent supporter of the decision to attack.  His desire for vengeance (frequently called justice, and the distinction is often fuzzy) compelled him to request his son’s name be written on one of the first bombs to strike Baghdad.  He felt great satisfaction that his request was granted.  And then, as more information was gradually leaked that there was no link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, that the Iraq regime was not responsible for the bombings, he felt a betrayal that completely wiped out his sense of satisfaction and left him with his grief amplified by the loss of faith in his country and in its ability to make wise decisions.    

This story dramatizes important links between personal life and cultural institutions that suggests another reason for me to hope that peace will become more probable as we come to understand these links better.  The Web of Violence, eds. Jennifer Turpin and Lester R. Kurtz, did keep me awake and alert in spite of its textbook style.  This collection of essays focuses on linkages between the psychology of the subjective individual and the collective society, on the necessity to consider these linkages in understanding the causes of war, and on the things that can be done to create lasting peace: 

Cycles of violence cannot be solved either by transforming individuals on a case by case basis or by imposing nonviolent dictums from above but through a complex process of cultural and individual transformation. [. . .]  Historic cultural changes, however, do not take place without the courageous action of individuals who contradict existing cultural frames.    

Peaceful movements and leaders of my own lifetime have increased in numbers and strength.  The first formal academic programs in peace studies only began in the mid 20^th century.  Since then peace-studies programs at institutions and universities have proliferated:  “The existence of 200 peace studies programs on college campuses in North America and Western Europe provides powerful testimony for the desire of human beings to avoid Armageddon by studying peaceful ways to resolve conflicts”  (http://www.gmu.edu/programs/icar/ijps/vol3_1/Harris.htm).  More and more people speak about peace, study it, write about it, and join with others in actions to protest war and to promote peace.   

Because of these reasons and because I have the human ability to imagine, I have a vision of masses of people all over the world who come to desire peace so much that they take to the streets as we witnessed the people of Egypt do these last few weeks.    I have a vision of a war-free future, one in which peaceful conflict resolution and problem solving will replace war to resolve disagreements;  forgiveness and compassion will replace vengeance and hate in dealing with oppressors, tyrants, and greedy grabbers.  As the world becomes a kinder, gentler place to live, it will breed fewer and fewer Hitlers or Bin Ladens.  And those it does breed will have fewer and fewer followers and thus less and less strength.   War is over if and when enough of us want it and join in the chorus of voices demanding it.