Why an International War Folly Day 8/8?

After some inner angst during yet another war glorification holiday I’ve decided to start a new one, International War Folly Day, August 8. Eight/eight is easy to remember, it is the number of new beginnings and it visually represents the folly of war.

Yes I’m on my sick bed (awaiting a lung transplant) and who knows, I may not live to see August 8 but what better thing to devote my energies toward?! If Columbus Day can get bumped for Indigenous Peoples Day, maybe there is room amidst Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Armed Forces Day, and the dozens of others for a day were we slow it all down and take a hard look at what is really going on.

So far I’ve started a Facebook page and registered it officially as a national and international holiday. Next I’ll figure out how to broadcast it far and wide and garnish international support. I need any and all help. This is NOT just another peace or pacifism day, this is a day when we insist on the truth for our soldiers by highlighting the farce and fiasco that is modern perpetual war; the real human cost, the unaccountable war spending (so little of which is truly for any sort of national defense), the delusion that these military actions result in a world with fewer bad guys or that have much if anything at all to do with preserving freedom, the insanity of bombing and building a country back up, exposing the financiers of war, the political hawks, the oligarchy and war games, the war industry and defense contracts – and so much more.

Especially after Afghanistan, can we all agree it is okay to ask of the powers that be: Is this present skirmish worth the life of my son or daughter? We do our soldiers no service when we go along with almost a hypnotic and blind (support) patriotism every time the war frenzy starts up again. Please share this far and wide.

My thoughts on suicidal thoughts

Suicide ideation is real. Ecclesiastes says there is a time for everything. There is a time to remove the guns from the house, and probably the ropes and extension cords too.

Many great people in history battled it. I’ve given it thought, strongly at age 18, but at different points as well. I can be hard on myself. I get self-loathing; worse than Chris Farley (on Saturday Nite Live) hitting himself in the head when he says something stupid. My grandmother’s brother Thomas had terminal cancer and shot himself. I hit a dark place when Mayo Clinic rejected me for transplant last winter and COVID and the grim reaper were chasing me around. Fleeting thoughts of not letting the suffering get too bad. I watched my mom suffocate to death. My faith and my family are more than enough to jolt me out of despair. I was grandpa-less growing up and I don’t want that my for grandkids. And I don’t want my kids to go as long as I have without a dad to call. And Kristen needs me and hurting her is unthinkable and selfish.

Also it has helped me in how I have come to a fixed conviction that death is only and always the domain of God. It is his alone to give or take away. Our society has lost that and demonic spirits of death are everywhere about. The rash of suicides on Indian reservations, I’ve seen up close…. these are spirits of death that don’t go away with more funding for social programs. Spirits are dealt with spiritually. Counseling, meds and hospitalization have an important place in curbing mental illness, which suicide is— I’m saying demons exploit our frailties and our weakest points—- and wear down the mind, as the Bible says.

As a police chaplain I was on the scene of many grim suicides. The pain the person was feeling isn’t extinguished, it explodes and inundates everyone around them, exponentially. Better to share frequently before it kills you and sets off an a-bomb in the lap of everyone you love. God gave us each other for just these moments.

Talking to others is vital. Let people in on your inner life. Please. Also, there is a spirit of death we need to bind and cast out and loose the light of life back in. Demons are behind every temptation to self-harm, and they are the lying voices in your head. Let other people speak truth and life back into you.

Tolstoy went through some dark spells during a time of existential crisis and had the guns hidden, the ropes taken away and the belts in his room removed. Tolstoy wrote this about that time:

“My question — that which at the age of 50 brought me to the verge of suicide — was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was: ‘What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?’ Differently expressed, the question is: ‘Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?’ It can also be expressed thus: ‘Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?’”

My Confession, Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy saw that peasants were happy simply doing God’s Will which he came to discover was best expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, loving God and loving others. Life became fulfilling, and blessed (though never pain or problem-free). He lived 32 more years and died naturally after catching pneumonia on a cold train in the winter.