The War on Everything
During the fourteenth century bubonic plague struck with devastating results. Called the Black Death, it would wipe out half of the population of Europe and much of Asia before it ran its course. Yet, terrible though it was, it left as many survivors as dead. The plague would creep through a town, taking some from this family and others from that, while typically leaving one person behind for every one that died. Among the living were often those who, of necessity, took care of and thus came in regular contact with the sick-doctors, servants, priests, and nuns, as well as those who would cart the dead off to dispose of and bury. While living in the midst of a horrible pandemic and coming into constant exposure to the infectious bacterium that caused the Black Death, some individuals not only stayed free of the disease, they lived on in fair health.
Since the fourteenth century, we have learned a lot about bubonic plague. We fully understand the bug that causes it: what it looks like, how it lives, how it travels, how it affects the human body, and how to kill it, which we have proven successful at doing. Yet we know little about those who survived the Black Death and how and why they lived on. Indeed, we have barely even considered them. While we have conscientiously studied the half of Europe that died we have blithely ignored the half that survived.
Doctors now say, "The survivors just had greater resistance; they had natural immunity." But what does that mean? Was it God's will? Were they born with it? Were they just lucky? Or could it have been something in their diet, or their manner of thinking, or the way they processed their emotions, or how they prayed, or perhaps some combination of any or all of these factors? More importantly, as we come to better understand the survivor's experience, can we successfully transfer it to others?
In fundamental ways, Western medical science over the past few hundred years has assiduously avoided addressing these questions. We have enthusiastically dissected the dead while showing little interest in the living. We have stayed away from questions of individual immunity and natural healing while focusing our intellectual energies and research on defeating specific disease symptoms, battle by battle, with an increasingly complex array of medical weaponry. Rather than a peaceful investigation into the nature of wellness—How do some people manage to stay healthy without resorting to doctors or medicines?—we have chosen to wage war on the real and imagined agents of disease.
Borne out of dominist culture, this wage-war approach to medicine reaches its zenith in modern America, as exemplified by the War on Cancer. Since Richard Nixon declared the war in 1971, American medicine has fought an all-out crusade against a single disease, spending some $100 billion on research and more than a trillion on treatment. Yet, 1.2 million Americans receive new cancer diagnoses each year and 1500 die from cancer every day. A huge anticancer apparatus has been funded and erected-universities and teaching hospitals, research centers, biomedical laboratories and startup companies, much of the pharmaceutical industry, several major charities-all geared to the continuing search for a cancer cure, year after year, one breakthrough treatment after another, even as new cancer rates remain steady. After more than thirty years on this painfully expensive quest, we still have little understanding of why cancer arises in one person but not another, or of why some people die from it while others live on. We have, however, waged one hell of a war.
Waging war requires weapons, the more lethal the better, and all weapons inflict collateral damages as a matter of course. The two primary weapons in the War on Cancer—radiation and chemotherapy—attack cancer cells with military zeal, but produce terrible side effects and unintended consequences, sometimes worse than cancer itself. Both radiation and chemotherapy have especially toxic effects on the human immune system; such "remedies" undermine the very capacities for self-healing that patients most need. While the latest advances in cancer treatment strive for "magic bullets" that target only cancer cells, mostly sparing healthy tissue, even the best of these treatments fail to alter the systemic conditions that trigger cancerous growths in the first place.
Waging war also requires a one-minded obedience to the commanding ideology. Paradigm-challenging theories get brushed aside and dissenting opinions face active suppression. Throughout the War on Cancer, medical authorities have abused the powers of state and federal law enforcement to squelch innumerable alternative therapies. Serious doctors and medical researchers, often supported by a host of grateful patients, have been dismissed as quacks, jailed as charlatans, and driven out of the country as dangerous felons. Though cancer-war authorities early on saw the wisdom of reducing tobacco use—its single-most life-saving "battle" to date—it was decades slower in accepting that diet might play a role in the genesis of the disease. To this day, the medical establishment seems reluctant to acknowledge or even investigate the likely link between cancer and the rise of the petrochemical and nuclear industries in America. And even when, as we have seen since the mid-90s, the cancer warriors begrudgingly admit the effectiveness of some low-cost alternative therapies—especially diet and stress-reduction—it does nothing to stem the flow of dollars into the search for, production, and use of more exotic weapons.
Above all, waging war demands the silencing of peaceful voices and a rigid avoidance of viable peace plans. In the War on Cancer this has meant paying no heed to the countless well-documented cases of people who have recovered from cancer through alternative means. One would think that a single such story, let alone thousands, would propel researchers into fervent study. One could imagine cancer detectives excitedly seeking out a few hundred of these "once cancerous, now healthy" people to test their blood and examine their immune systems and to earnestly dissect their histories of recovery. One might even dream of a worldwide database filled with documented stories of cancer recoveries, and at every new cancer diagnosis the patient could be told, "Here's several people just like you, who suffered just as you do now, and they fully healed, and here's how they did it." But no, cancer warriors simply ignore these living bodies of potent evidence, while steadfastly denying the possibility of any better way than continuing down their battle-worn path.
The mere suggestion of a peaceful solution can cause violent paroxysms for those committed to war.
As he retired from office, Dwight Eisenhower imparted a scary warning about the "military-industrial complex": an insidious merging of America's security apparatus with private and corporate profiteers that gobbles up vast national resources while spewing waste and destruction in its wake. The War on Cancer marked the rise of a similar danger—the medical-industrial complex—that likewise grabs a huge chunk of the public treasury while providing a too often unhealthy medical product. These mammoth conglomerates share a number of traits: they redirect huge portions of public tax dollars into the private pockets of the corporate overclass; as major sponsors of politicians, they achieve oligarchic influence over key social issues; through the shear size of their businesses and bureaucracies and the millions of jobs they represent, they become too important to question, too big to fail, too Byzantine to investigate, and too entrenched to change; they attack mere symptoms of problems, while exacerbating root causes; and through their dominist determination to solve all problems by waging war they inflict inevitable terrors, great and small, on an already war-torn world.
Now the wage-war mentality has turned its steely attention to the problem of international terrorism. Though slow coming into form, the security-industrial-complex promises to become the mother of all wage-war conglomerates, as it subsumes the US military, all local, state, and federal law enforcement, the judiciary, the Customs Service, the Coast Guard, several intelligence agencies, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and with the blessings of both political parties places it all under the auspices of a single bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security.
Collateral damages litter the landscape, with civil liberties shoved through the shredder and secret prisons filling with uncharged and unrepresented suspects and government surveillance schemes working overtime and international relations with enemies and allies dangerously strained and non-war domestic programs facing deep cuts in essential funding. At the helm of this battleship of state, we have a gang of cynics who understand too well that as long as they can keep the war-think going, it will secure them wealth and political power. They constantly warn of a war with no end and issue regular security alerts to hold the whole nation in a fear-stoked state of my-country-whatever patriotism. In the end, all of their warring on terrorists and terror bombing of third-world nations will only increase recruitment for the cause of anti-American terrorism.
Nowhere in the gargantuan security-industrial-complex will we find a Peace Department, nor any think-tank scholars working out the details of nonviolent conflict resolution, nor position papers on achieving peace without excessive force, nor speeches stressing the need for unhurried negotiations, for making tough compromises, for talking sensitive issues through to consensus. The logic of war-think acts to eradicate make-peace thinking before it reaches the hearts and minds of too many people.
If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. For the war-minded and -mongering, conflicts invariably lead to escalating aggression and the eventual domination of one side by the other. Peace runs absolutely counter to such thinking and threatens the war. Whatever the presumed purpose of a particular war, it always begins as a war on the mere thought of peace and ultimately becomes a war on everything.
